Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

strange realities.
    The back of his neck twinged. Mata Hari was reminding him it was time to get under way and leave Hagonar. With a sigh, Matt reached back, grabbed the multi-pin coax cable, and plugged it into the receptor implanted in the back of his neck. At cervical vertebrae one level.
    Ship could have plugged in using a servo. But for him to take the cable and plug in, using his own muscle power . . . well, symbolism wasn’t limited to organic lifeforms.
    Matt focused, accepting electronic and lightspeed photonic input.
    The dam burst as once more he entered ocean-time . Oceans filled him, oceans of machine-fed data filled his mind’s-eye.
    The silvery tube of the ship’s flexhull shivered in space, its shapechanging ability a thing unknown to human or Anarchate shipbuilders. His back itched as directed energy weapon domes popped out onto the hull. His biceps fed power to the ship’s two antimatter cannons, which lay alongside the main hull like pontoons on an outrigger sailboat. He clenched tight his jaw muscles, bringing on-line the deuterium-lithium six fusion drive for system departure. Ears listened to tachyonic comlinks, synthetic aperture and phased array radars. His eyes “saw” infrared, ultraviolet, gamma ray, and radioactives, painting for him a non-human picture of Riemannian space. Matt sniffed. Nose smelled through subtle sensors, devices that could detect biological spores drifting through space upon ancient stellar winds. Inside his chest, his heart beat. Oh, how it beat! It beat in sync with the Alcubierre Drive that could move him and Mata Hari from one star to another in days, once they moved away from the local system’s planets.
    Matt’s hands trembled against their pads. Airlocks, servos, and backup fusion power plants scattered all over Mata Hari cycled on-line. As for his fingers . . . each fingertip linked one-to-one with the ten major weapons systems of Mata Hari. He controlled the life or death of a planet with barely a touch. As for feet . . . they usually get you from one place to another. Not his. They felt the artificial gravity loads throughout the thousand and one rooms of a two kilometer-long starship. And last, but not least, was his groin. He grinned, guessing what Eliana might think. In truth, his groin analogued to the ship’s autonomic defense systems, the systems controlling overload power, the systems that in the end would mean the difference between survival and death.
    And directing the cone instrumentalities were his eyelids—when he blinked. Blink-control keyed in the electro-optical sensors, as with his suit’s Eyes-Up display. But eyelids worked at a slow macro level, when milliseconds didn’t matter. On a finer-scale, his brain wave patterns ordered everything—through PET. Mata Hari used a positron emission tomography unit, with subcutaneous SQUIDs embedded in his scalp, to let him communicate directly with Mata Hari ’s own gallium-arsenide, chip-based mind. Matt’s mind-images moved only at the speed of electrochemical stimulation of nerve fibers—at least until they got past the coax connector. Then the cable’s optical fibers offered true lightspeed communion with something unknown to most humans. Yet feared by many, like Eliana.
    Instinct allied to emotion allied to analytical thought. Matt was a true cyborg . . . and it was time to go to work.
    “Ready for ignition?” he queried mentally, a secondary thought switching on the forward holosphere for Eliana’s benefit.
    “Ready for system departure,” Mata Hari said, using again her warm, feminine voice.
    “Depart,” he vocalized, clenching his jaw. Two kilometers from the Bridge, deut-li fusion thrusters backed them away from Hagonar Station. Why had she spoken to him? Mata Hari could easily feed ship status directly to his mind over the PET relay. Why were some AIs as emotional as organics?
    “Understood,” Mata Hari said loudly. “Do you wish traffic clearance and