Bypass Gemini (10 page)

A half second before he removed the helmet, he heard a familiar scream of ailing machinery. An instant later the out-of-control wreck of his ship came crashing to the ground a mile away. It skipped and skimmed toward him along the loose slope like a stone on a stream. Each time it touched down, a cascade of stones was slung aside. The old girl managed to get aloft one last time before the final active engine disconnected entirely, slicing into the sky like a javelin and dropping the rest of Betsy down into a cartwheel. Rocky ground crunched beneath the wrecked ship as its roll took it directly at Lex. He spat a series of curses and gathered enough of his wits to make a mad lunge aside. The ship’s momentum finally gave out, creaking it lazily up into a nose stand before pivoting and rocking to a rest on its belly. When the dust settled, Betsy had managed to come within five feet of turning her former pilot into a leaky bag of broken bones and flattened organs.

Between the pain and the amount of rattling his brain had done, Lex decided it would be prudent to sit still for a few minutes. He propped himself up against the wreck of a ship and let the specifics of his surroundings seep in. First off, it was cold. Very cold. Nothing life threatening, but every surface that hadn’t been churned up by his crash was covered in a thin layer of frost. The flight suit was fairly well insulated, but the ripped section was letting the cold at the puncture in his leg, which wasn’t terribly pleasant. As far as he could tell, it was daytime, too. The temperature might get dangerous when the sun went down.

That was the second thing that struck him. The sky was gray. Not the hazy, cloudy gray that you might see before a bad storm. There wasn’t more than one or two clouds in sight. It was the sky itself that was gray. The color was very slightly granular, like hazy static viewed at a great distance. Here and there the sky twinkled and flashed. It took him better than a minute to realize that he was looking at that debris field from the other side. Vast clouds of metal blocked most of the sun’s light, and the shinier pieces reflected the odd rays downward as they turned in orbit. No wonder it was so cold, most of the light wasn’t making it to the surface.

The ground around him looked like a war zone. Deep gashes marked the landscape in thousands of places. Every few hundred feet there was another, giving the surrounding plain the look of a poorly made golf ball. Most of the divots were fairly shallow, maybe a dozen or more feet across, but some looked like they were a quarter mile or larger. A lot of them still had a very jagged, fresh look. Whatever was pummeling the surface of the planet didn’t seem like it ever took much of a break... probably he should get mobile before the next impact.

He pulled out a roll of duct tape from its pouch in his flight suit and started binding up his injured leg. It may seem odd, but there was absolutely nothing more crucial in a space emergency than duct tape. Spare oxygen, emergency food, and weapons all came in handy, but if your suit springs a pinhole leak in a vacuum, all of the freeze dried ice cream in the world won’t save you. As current circumstances proved, it made a decent field bandage in a pinch, too. With the hole in his leg sealed up, more or less, he decided to give it a test drive.

Standing on it hurt like hell, and walking hurt worse, but neither was so bad that it could distract him from the final noteworthy aspect of the crash site. In the distance was a dust cloud tracing its way along the ground, and it was moving quickly toward him. In less than a minute it was close enough for him to make out the vehicle kicking it up, but he continued to blink and shake his head in attempts to focus more clearly on it for far longer. He popped the helmet off, letting the cold hit him like a slap in the face, in hopes that it would sharpen his senses somewhat. The icy air had a hell of a bite, and the sort of industrial stench that lingered around factories, but it didn’t help much. What his eyes were telling him he saw didn’t agree with what his admittedly mistreated brain suggested was likely. Finally, it was close enough that it couldn’t be denied. It was a school bus, one of the earlier hover models that couldn’t get more than a few feet off of the ground. It pulled up to him, came to a stop, and settled down onto rubber supports.

“
Uh... I must have hit my head MUCH harder than I thought,” he muttered.

The thing had seen better days. A faded yellow paint job bore black letters that read “Ruane Girls Academy.” One headlight was completely missing, and the second looked like it had been replaced with one from a much larger vehicle. A flashing red stop sign flipped out from the side and the doors creaked open. A few seconds later the PA system crackled to life with a familiar voice.

“
On the off chance that there is something alive at the crash site, I suggest you climb inside,” said the same voice that had been cursing at him before the crash.

“
Listen, I don’t know who you are, but-”

The voice cut him off. “If you are looking for motivation, take a look at all of those craters. Then look up. That mess you came crashing through is none too stable on a good day. There are about two dozen impacts per minute, so if you haven’t seen one, that means you’re overdue. The chances of you getting hit are pretty low, but one of those hunks poking a hole in the planet tends to make the area inhospitable. Also, if you’re outdoors come night time, I hope you brought a parka, since last night it hit negative forty.”

“
Uh... okay. But how do I know-”

“
If you are dead, I’m going to salvage that ship, assuming there’s any of it left. Hell, if you’re alive I’m going to salvage it, too.”

“
Hey, that’s MY ship you’re talking about, you-”

“
Also, in case you haven’t figured it out, this is a recording. This is the only chance you’re gonna get to partake of my hospitality, so I suggest you step aboard. Doors close in five... four... three... two...”

Lex hopped inside just as the doors closed. Regardless of who this guy was, or where this bus was headed, it couldn’t possibly make his situation worse than it was now... Could it?

The inside of the bus was as typical as the outside. Row after row of uncomfortable seats, windows that could barely open, and upholstery the color of mulch and chewed gum. The only significant difference was the lack of a driver in the driver’s seat. Automated cars weren’t outside the norm, these days, but they still stuck a driver in the school buses to supervise things. This one was puttering along all by its lonesome. He stacked the two cases he’d rescued on the seat beside him, elevated his injured leg, and leaned back to watch the scenery. As he did, he raised an eyebrow. Evidently there was one other difference between this bus and the standard one. The speed.

It may have looked like an old jalopy on its last legs, but the scenery was zipping by like he was in a top of the line speedster. The ride should have been a nightmare of bumps and jostles, too. The old hover buses weren’t meant for off-roading, so they stayed pretty tightly coupled to the ground. With road surface that looked like the global pothole preserve, his teeth should have rattled loose by now. That meant someone had stuck an inertial inhibitor in this sucker, too. Lex had half a mind to take control of it to see how well it handled, but when he craned his neck to check out the driver’s seat, he found that there were no controls to speak of. Just as well. He wasn’t one hundred percent recovered, brain-wise. Getting behind the controls of an unfamiliar piece of equipment wasn’t a great idea.

Instead, he just watched the landscape go by. In almost every direction there was nothing but more meteor-battered landscape. A bright red or white streak would drift down from time to time, kicking up a huge dust plume. Ahead of the bus, though, a cluster of three low complexes was approaching over the horizon. The craters were steadily increasing in density as they got closer, until finally, about two miles away, they stopped completely. A perfect ring of flawless gravel surrounded the buildings, which were clearly the destination.

There wasn’t anything remarkable about them. They had the minimalist, boxy sort of architecture that industry and the military tended to favor. Simple, quick to build, easy to maintain. They were identical, about a dozen stories tall, maybe a few city blocks wide, and about a quarter mile long. They were arranged in a radial pattern around a massive circular landing pad, easily a half mile in diameter. Lining the roof of each building was the customary array of antennae and satellite dishes, along with a few rows of some sort of long, thin, articulated cylinder. They looked like telescopes, but it didn’t make sense that there would be so many, and that they would be so big. While he pondered them, three suddenly repositioned, pointing at the same point, somewhere high in the sky. Then there was a flair of light, just for an instant, leading from the end each cylinder off into the sky. They were lasers, the light had been caused by the beams vaporizing whatever dust had been floating in their way.

So his host was the sort of person who kept a battery of lasers and fired them randomly in the air. That wasn’t a good sign.

The bus slowed to a stop in front of the doorway of one of the three buildings. The door was in the center of the wall that faced the landing pad, and beside it the word “Lab” had been crudely spray-painted. The doors opened, letting in the icy air.

“
End of the line. I was in the lab when I recorded this. I’m probably still there now. Busy. Just follow the green lights, but don’t bug me unless I’m done,” the recorded voice buzzed across the PA speakers.

Lex grabbed his things and limped down the steps of the bus. Once he was out, the door snapped shut and the bizarre vehicle whisked off toward one of the other buildings. The injured pilot eyed “Lab” warily. He wasn’t terribly confident in the wisdom of entering a strange building on a strange planet after a surreal trip, but the alternative was sitting outside until the cold became lethal. He shrugged and stepped up to the door.

“
Greetings, unknown person. You are new to this facility, please answer a few short questions before entry,” said a female voice, or rather, several of them.

The speaker next to the door was clearly part of an automated system, but it had the characteristic screwed-up inflection and awkward pauses of a message assembled by slicing the words out of other messages. It sounded like the words had been sampled from announcements from at least three different people, all women.

“
Please state your name.”

“
Uh... Lex.”

“
It sounded like you said... Alex... Is that right?”

“
No. Alexander. Trevor Alexander.”

“
It sounded like you said... AlexanderTrevorAlexander,” it droned, pronouncing the full name as one word and without pauses. The name was spoken in a fourth, clearly synthetic attempt at a female voice, “Is that right?”

“
No. Trevor Alexander,” he groaned through clenched teeth.

“
It sounded like you said... Trevor Alexander... Is that-”

“
Yes.”

“
Thank you, now please-”

“
Listen, can I talk to a real person? Or at least a better computer?”

“
Processing. I’m sorry, but the real person is busy doing very important things. And insulting the computer is not going to win you any friends,” the voices said, somehow managing to sound petulant despite the comment being assembled from unrelated ones.

“
Uh...”

The doors of the lab slid open and a green stripe illuminated along the wall of the hallway within.

“
Please follow the green lights to workshop F. And you are officially on my S-list, Mr. Alexander.”

Lex stood at the door, opening and closing his mouth as he tried to put his confusion to words. Finally, he shrugged.

“
Why would things start making sense now?” he muttered.

After a single step past the threshold, it felt as though someone had dropped a load of sandbags on top of him. He staggered and leaned heavily on the wall to keep his injured leg from collapsing. A second later the doors hissed shut behind him and nozzles doused him liberally with a fluid that stung viciously, but evaporated almost instantly. The shock and awe of the assault left him dazed for a moment.

“
Please brace yourself for artificial gravity and decontamination. Thank you,” the computer said.

After he straightened up and shook away the notion that the computer had done that on purpose, he looked over the entryway. The inside of the building was as institutional as the outside, and extremely old. The lighting was provided by overhead hanging banks of bulbs, and it was the sickly yellow of fluorescent instead of the cool blue of LED. The floor was some sort of rugged plastic material, scuffed and marred with use and faded with age. Walls, ceiling, and floor were all one shade or another of neutral blue. Identical metal doors and large, reinforced glass view windows lined the walls on either side. The rooms were all filled with various tools and disassembled machinery on work tables, but there was no sign of people in any of them. In fact, there was no sign of people, period. No one walked the halls. There was no sound of conversation. Nothing but his own footsteps, the echoing growl of power tools somewhere further down the hall, and a pulsing green strip that traced along the tops of the doorways. It led to a workshop near a bank of industrial elevators. Inside was the source of the noise.

Splayed out on the work table inside was a carefully arranged layout of parts and tools. A hydraulic jack held what was certainly a piece of an engine, but Lex couldn’t quite identify it. Whatever it was, there were lots of pipes, lots of tubes, and it appeared to be running, as the whole jack was humming and vibrating along with it. Working on the mystery component was a man in blue coveralls. He was focused intently on his task, his back to the door, and if he had noticed Lex’s arrival, he hadn’t acknowledged it. When Lex approached the door, it hissed open. He still didn’t turn, reaching awkwardly across the table instead.