Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) by T. Jackson King Page A

fellows commanded multiple fleets. That was it! If they could respond quickly enough with a small fleet of battleglobes , they could surround this alien starship and fire enough beams until one antimatter beam slithered through its overlapping Alcubierre space-time shields. It was a gamble, of course. But better to lose the lives of others than his own life!
     
     
    Matt sat in the Interlock Pit of an alien starship like an olive in a martini glass, naked as the day he’d been born. The recent discussion with Eliana and Suzanne had been unsettling. It was clear he and George could no longer treat the two women as beloved “subjects” to be protected from all harm. Now, they insisted on going into harm ’s way! Although each would have the aid of a T’Chak self-aware computer mind in a two-kilometer long Dreadnought-class starship. A starship capable of changing its outer body shape from a central tube with two outrigger pontoons, to a dragon-like shape that resembled BattleMind to an unnerving degree. But could they feel comfortable doing what he did now?
    His bare skin soaked in thousands of lightbeam inputs that talked to his skin, inputs that came from the control devices that lined the cone-shaped Interlock Pit. Light moved so much faster than electrons-down-a- nerve, and the beams caressed every inch of his body. Touching here. Touching there. Whispering. Cajoling. Making direct contact with electrochemical receptors, firing down nerve fiber pathways, filling him with, with . . . .
    Ecstasy could not begin to match it.
    He’d called it ocean-time the first time he’d gone on-line with the feminine Mata Hari mind persona. She had first appeared as the mind image of a late Victorian-dressed, amber-skinned young woman with long black hair piled atop her head. And the AI had no special phrase for what she and Matt did—lightspeed neurolinking was simply how she thought, lived, felt and ran the mech-tech construct called a starship. In-link with Mata Hari was more than the out loud talking used by organic beings. It felt like a continuous electrocution, but one which did not burn him out. Together they were the symbiosis ::, a group entity that could think, move and act faster than any organic lifeform. It was also an exhausting experience that he did not now repeat.
    Then again, Eliana had had her first experience of ocean-time when she piggy-back rode on the red cloud mind of Mata Hari as his AI partner had lightspeed linked into his mind. Mata Hari had appeared during the worst of his mind-to-mind encounter with Eternal Love of the Lacunae Mindworks. Perhaps her buffering had saved his sanity. But by being there, Eliana had experienced lightspeed thinking and the exhaustion it always brought him. She had been exposed to his deep memories even more than through the memory crystal record he had shared with her that showed his family when it had been whole, before the genome slavers captured his Mom, Dad and four sisters. What did she think of the hard knocks schooling he’d undergone as a stevedore on a freighter, then later a Protector for rich alien Owners?
    He shrugged mentally, turning his attention to the forward holoscreen that depicted the deep black space of Lacunae’s outer star system. They and their convoy of interlinked T’Chak starships were heading for the heliopause of this system. That was the normal place at which a starship would appear from FTL Translation, or enter Translation on a trip to elsewhere, with the least chance of gravity tides harming local planets or intersecting an asteroid.
    “Hello Matthew,” said the mindvoice of Mata Hari, the AI who ‘loved’ him in a way different from the organic love of Eliana. “Are you feeling more settled? Did the sleep refresh you? And—”
    “You conspirator, you!”
    The Spy image of Mata Hari in his mind changed instantly from the Victorian dress of the World War I French spy to a naked Barbarian Queen dressed solely in