Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) Read Online Free PDF

summary?”
    “Affirmed,” he said firmly. He could play this game. Whatever it was. “Report on local traffic.”
    “Reporting. Of the dozen nearby starships, all but two remain docked at Hagonar Station,” Mata Hari said, her voice a windchime that caressed like a breeze. “Four new starships are approaching across system, from the direction of the B9 main sequence star. Distance—about 140 AU. Nearby, two ships share our outsystem vector. One of them is an Agonon-Thet starliner. The other is a freighter sponsored by Mu Pegasi that is approaching us from the rear.”
    “I see it.” The NavTactical icons flashed in the holosphere, a purple, red and green tracery of vectors, dots and shapes representing ships and gravity fields, all washed by blue waves. The waves represented the shifting electromagnetic and gravitomagnetic fields of a double-star system, where seven planets orbited the nearby G0 yellow star. He also saw Eliana, though she sat to his rear—thanks to an Interlock Pit filled with display screens that showed every part of the Spine hallway and the rooms lying along it. He saw everything . . . except for the Restricted Rooms in Mata Hari ’s deep interior, he thought sourly, rooms that were barred to him. Those parts were “hostile to organic lifeforms”—or so Mata Hari stubbornly insisted. Were they really? Every time he’d asked, she’d dodged the question, her tone sounding embarrassed.
    “Is the vector for Sigma Puppis laid in?” Matt asked, glad for the pretense he controlled anything aboard a self-aware Dreadnaught-class starship.
    “Of course,” Mata Hari said, her voice inflection descending. “Your guest . . . is she attractive to you?”
    God. What a thing to say out loud. “None of your business, Mata Hari.”
    A Pit screen showed Eliana, fashionably dressed in a blue jumpsuit and partially cocooned by the clamshells of the accel-couch. She seemed preoccupied with staring at a sidewall display of the local star systems lying within a four hundred light year cube. Their target—Sigma Puppis—pulsed brightly on it, a double star beacon 194 light years from Sol.
    “Why is it none of my business?” asked Mata Hari.
    Eliana smiled wanly, not looking his way.
    He swore mentally. “Do you understand the concept of privacy?”
    Pause. “Oh. You mean that organic temporal displacement habit of pretending one entity is actually alone in a universe filled with pulsating and penetrative energy fields?”
    “The very same.”
    “Understood.” A longer pause. “But why pretend to unreality?”
    Matt sighed. “Mata Hari, you are familiar with the AI self-check routine called System Check-out. Right?”
    “Correct.”
    “Humans do it too. So do aliens. We need to separate from reality, now and then. By sleep. By intense thought. Or by privacy.”
    “So?”
    “So shut up and give me some privacy!”
    Eliana muffled a laugh.
    Mata Hari shut up. Only the whisper of circulating air currents disturbed his concentration as Matt monitored their outsystem departure. He had little to do. But human instincts, allied to computer senses, often yielded a hybrid mix that worked well. At least for symbionts like him and Mata Hari.
    The Agonon-Thet starliner drew away from them. The freighter behind them came within ten thousand klicks of their position, somewhat higher above the ecliptic plane than Mata Hari. He and the ship moved out on the deut-li fusion drive, slowly working up to one-half lightspeed, reaching for the heliopause. It was a boring wait, but necessary. It wasn’t considerate to activate the Alcubierre Drive this close to a double-star system—gravity wave perturbations could disturb planetary orbits. And the miniature universe created by an Alcubierre Drive usually had Rules that conflicted with Riemannian space. So most of the time you waited until you were past the heliopause, a matter of several hours transit time. Mata Hari ’s deut-li thrusters bellowed far behind,