Vigilante Read Online Free PDF Page B

do.
    “Enough of this,” Nolan said, tired of hearing the president praise him. Big talk seemed to be the one thing his old friend was good for these days. “Turn it off.”
    He turned and left Branford alone in the Cube, unconcerned about whether the general did as he asked. Arjay looked up from his work space and motioned for Nolan to join him. He wore an apparatus on his head that had two extending goggles in front of his eyes.
    Without a word, Arjay pointed at the steel table in front of him. Nolan saw nothing but an empty tabletop.
    “What?” he said, louder than necessary due to Arjay’s earphones.
    Arjay pulled the cords out of his ears and smiled. “Just there. On the surface.”
    “I don’t see anything, Arjay,” Nolan replied, his patience nonexistent. He wanted Arjay to complete his work so he could get out there on the streets and do what he was born to do. Every time he thought about having to wait around for another month, it made his skin itch on the inside until it was hard to stand still.
    But Arjay was still smiling. He removed the goggles from his head and held them out.
    Nolan dutifully placed the bizarre hat on his head and pulled the goggles down in front of his eyes. He was immediately disoriented, as his suspicion had been that they were night-vision or ultraviolet specs of some kind. Instead, they appeared to be ultra-high-resolution scopes that focused automatically on whatever was in front of them. It was nauseating looking at the world this way, so in an attempt to get the experience over with, he zeroed in on the steel tabletop.
    Now he could see an intricate latticework of hexagonal lines, like a honeycomb that had only one paper-thin layer. He was stunned to find that something had been on the table after all.
    “What is it? Is it invisible?”
    “Not as such, no,” said Arjay. “It’s called graphene. A form of carbon discovered only a short time back. Graphene is rare, expensive in any large quantity, and must be crafted by hand. It is a time-consuming process. It is also the strongest substance known to this world—harder even than diamond, but at a minuscule fraction of the size. In its purest form, it is two-dimensional, the width of a single atom, if you can imagine—”
    “Okay,” Nolan interrupted. “So it’s all that. Why am I looking at it?”
    “Very soon it will save your life,” Arjay replied. “Once I am done layering it several dozen times, I will apply it in a way that none have ever tried. I intend to weave it into the fabric of your combat fatigues.”
    Nolan removed the goggles and considered Arjay’s words. “Are you saying this stuff that I can’t even see with my own eyes—this is bulletproof?”
    Arjay locked eyes on him knowingly. “It will stop more than bullets. Not that I would see you try it.”
    Nolan’s eyebrows flew upward. “It’s impenetrable?”
    Arjay wagged his head side to side. “It is flexible enough to absorb some impact, but not all. It simply will not break, unless subjected to something more powerful than standard melee weapons or gunfire. High-velocity sniper fire, for example. But for hand-to-hand work, it is superior to Kevlar in every way, easily preventing penetration by point-blank gunfire or bladed weapons.”
    Nolan looked down at the table again. He couldn’t believe it. He knew Arjay was good, but this was beyond cutting edge. He vaguely remembered hearing the term “graphene” a good while back as some kind of experimental material that might be usable and abundant ten or twenty years in the future. The fact that Arjay had managed to manufacture the stuff here and now was nothing short of miraculous.
    “This is . . . it’s unbelievable. I can’t begin to thank you,” he said.
    Arjay held his eyes locked on Nolan. “There is a drawback.”
    “There always is,” said Nolan, his enthusiasm for Arjay’s work in no way diminished.
    “We haven’t the means to manufacture graphene easily. I have