Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) by T. Jackson King Read Free Book Online

dead black rectangle, soaking up infrared. Below it gleamed a small aquarium, filled with puffer-fish from the planetary sea of his last Job. The fish emitted their own infrared, but at a wavelength far below his own, and cold water is an efficient heatsink. Criss-crossing the room, like a 3D spiderweb, pulsed the coherent lightbeams of Mata Hari. Emitted by low power diode lasers, the lightbeams touched him from any direction and even followed him into the bathroom, the hot tub, or under the virtual reality helmet and chair resting in one corner of the room. With her optical neurolinking, Mata Hari would never leave him, never abandon him, and never give up on him.
    Some people might think of an insect caught in a spider’s web and pity the poor unknowing creature. Matt saw things differently. He saw himself expanded. He saw himself as the organic-inorganic Interface he really was. Neither solely machine, nor just a simple organic. And even without Mata Hari, without Suit, there remained his body—his deadly body. Filled with antiviral biounits that protected him from eyes to toes, a cardiovascular bioupgrade for a High Threat environment, an extra kidney that recycled his urine, nylon-wrapped muscles and titanium-plated bones that gave him the strength of ten Heracles, and possessing fingertip lasers powered by a fuel-cell welded to one hip bone, he was a true cyborg. As such, he was used to blink-thought control over his instrumentalities.
    Matt called up a vision of Alcubierre Space-Time in his mind’s-eye, then code-blinked. He wished to contemplate the endlessness of Chaos.
    Mata Hari projected a different image into his room. This holosphere showed the end of the Spine hallway and the palm-locked door leading to Eliana’s stateroom. In a blink he was inside her room, staring down from a ceiling point-of-view at the crossbreed woman as she slept on her bed platform. She lay naked atop the sheets. The sprawl of her limbs both hid and revealed, tempting him to linger.
    But he valued privacy and was not a voyeur. “ Mata Hari—what the hell are you doing?”
    “Protecting you,” she said tensely, her voice coming from a side wall acoustic membrane.
    “From what?”
    “Watch.”
    With his room still dark, Matt watched, feeling impatient and irritated. “Well?”
    “Observe.” The wide-screen view of Eliana, lying face down, narrowed suddenly. It zoomed in to focus on her right ear.
    Eliana stirred, shifting her head to one side. Her delicate nose and finely sculptured cheekbones glowed with infrared warmth, framed by the cooler surface of synthsilk covering the bed platform. At one side of the holosphere scrolled green light datastreams, depicting in agonizing detail her carbon dioxide exhalations, her REM eye movements, double heartbeat systolic and diastolic pressures as revealed by a diode laser focused on her carotid artery, skin saltiness, moisture evapotranspiration from her skin, and scores of other biophysical details. On the holosphere’s other side scrolled red-light Threat assessments.
    “What is it?”
    “Watch!” insisted Mata Hari .
    From out of the dark depths of Eliana’s ear came something.
    Something sinister.
    About the size of a pea, it floated upward, then expanded rapidly to the size of an eyeball. Then it became a fist-sized globe that bobbled on the room’s air currents.
    Matt trembled. He’d allowed a bioweapon carrier on-board Mata Hari. “What the fuck is it?”
    “Scanning. Passively. Be patient,” Mata Hari said tartly.
    Patience! Matt stood up, able only to pace in front of the red and green glowing holosphere, his mind churning over Options for weapons, then discarding them, aware that such bioweapons often spored when under attack. A lot of good his weaponry wall would do him now.
    At least Mata Hari had had the good sense to scan passively the free-floating intruder. An active Doppler pulse or laser ranging beam could easily be the trigger needed to set off the