Bypass Gemini (7 page)

Seven hours, forty winks, and twelve thousand colored bricks later, the view outside the window made the slide back toward red and into visibility. It wasn’t the destination. That would be the better part of a week and a few dozen jumps away. This was just the interstellar equivalent of a strip mall, close enough to a VectorCorp route that even a damaged ship could limp to it from there, but far enough that there was no chance of being forced to pay licensing fees. Lex liked to make at least one or two stops in a place like this along the way. They had real bathrooms and real food. The same could not be said of his ship, which made do with... substitutes.

The bathroom was replaced with a bedpan sized contraption officially called a waste reprocessor, but more familiarly dubbed a turd burner. It converted human byproduct into a chemically pure compound that could be dropped off for processing into explosives or fertilizer or some such. More importantly, it didn’t stink and took up less space. Food came in the form of whatever preservative-ridden, vitamin-fortified, partially hydrogenated, high calorie snack was on sale when you ran out last time. Currently it was something that claimed to be pepperoni protein bars and tasted vaguely like spicy sawdust. It wasn’t difficult to understand why food cooked on a griddle and a bathroom with actual toilets would be nice before a week of travel.

Like most small space stations, this place was shaped like a massive wagon wheel, spinning fast enough to give the approximation of gravity. Lex hailed the landing coordinator and negotiated a spot in one of the docking ports along the inside rim. All he had to do was get in the same ballpark as the dock and tractor beams did the rest of the work. In no time the hiss of artificial atmosphere let him know that it was safe to open the hatch and head inside.

There – along with a couple of convenience stores, hardware stores, and repair shops - was a greasy spoon. That would do just fine. He took a seat and waved over the waitress behind the counter. She had the sort of dead eyed gaze that made it clear that she wasn’t the talkative type, so he pointed out the three egg special on the menu.

“
Over easy,” he said.

The eggs were in front of him quickly enough to make him wonder if they were someone else’s order, but that suited him fine. While he shoveled them down, Lex decided to take advantage of the high bandwidth data connection advertized on the menu to pull down some messages and entertainment for the trip. He activated his slidepad’s wireless, loaded up his download queue, and slipped it into his pocket to wait for it to finish. Five minutes later, barely six gigs of data had been pulled down.

“
High bandwidth my ass,” Lex muttered, mopping up the remains of his eggs with the remains of his toast, “Hey, you guys take chips, right?”

The surly woman behind the counter shook her head slowly and continued scraping at the griddle.

“
I see. Then we’ve got a little problem, because that’s all I’ve got,” he said.

She thrust a finger toward the opposite side of the establishment, where another patron was just finishing up with a video poker machine. If casino chips were the new cash, poker kiosks were the new ATMs. He sat down and plunked a few of the tokens he’d been paid as advance into the machine. All he really needed to do was cash out his winnings into his bank account, but he always played a few hands, just on the off chance that a flush would make breakfast free.

His slidepad chirped just as he’d failed to get jacks or better for the third straight time. He dug it out with one hand while pulling up the cash-out menu with the other. Once the credits were in his account, he looked at the notification bar. It was mostly increasingly angry bill collectors, but one message was from someone with the screen name NixMix66Six. He tapped it, expecting spam.

“
Trevor, Get back to me.”

It was a voice only message, but the voice was vaguely familiar and conjured a fairly specific image. It was the clipped, nasally voice of a woman who thought a lot more of herself than anyone else did. Normally Lex didn’t want to deal with those types. His agent had been one. His lawyer had been one. Neither had served him particularly well when the going got rough. But she’d called him Trevor. People who wanted money or to put him in jail called him Mr. Alexander. Most everyone else called him Lex or T-Lex. The only people who called him by his first name were those who knew him through family or Michella.

“
Six eighty-five,” said the lady behind the counter, as he walked past.

“
Hey, so you can speak,” Lex quipped, sweeping his pad over the paypad built into the counter, “We’ll call it an even thousand. Remember me next time, will you?”

It was a good policy to make yourself known as a big tipper in places like this. You never knew when it would come in handy. He made the customary trip to the restroom, which turned out to be filthy enough to make the turd burner downright attractive by comparison. From there he made his way to the docking bay. He tossed the attendant some money for fuel and climbed back inside. The message from NixMix had come in only twenty minutes before he’d arrived. It was probably a safe bet he could get her if he tried. After a few moments of considering it, he shrugged and pulled up the contact info. The connection negotiated for a few seconds, and he was connected. This time it was a video feed that answered.

She was a woman in her late twenties, hair streaked with hot pink highlights. A stud graced one nostril, and a handful of rings perforated one ear. Her clothes ran the gamut from black leather to pink vinyl to white latex, along with virtually any other material but cloth. It was all layered over each other in haphazard flaps and pleats and held on with too many buckles and zippers. The overall effect was hideous and unusual, standard uniform of the pathological non-conformist. She was slightly overweight and, from the looks of it, very pissed.

“
Oh, you,” Lex said flatly.

Evidently NixMix66Six was Michella’s older sister Nicole. In most families it was the youngest or the middle child that was the rebel. In the Modane clan, it was the oldest. Nicole was the kind of person who spent most of a given conversation trying to convince you why your every action was the result of brainwashing by a few dozen different sinister Powers That Be and Corporate Manipulators that wanted to tell you how to live your life. The rest of the conversation consisted of her telling you how to live your life. She’d always hated Lex, and the day Michella had dumped him was the happiest day of her life.

“
That’s right, me, you little sh-”

“
Thanks so much for calling, Nicole. Do keep in touch,” he said, reaching to end the call.

“
No, wait, it’s about Michella!”

“…
Okay, what?”

“
She told me you were working with organized crime again. Is that true?”

Lex sighed angrily, “Not that you’ll believe me, but no. Like I told her yesterday, I gave Nick Patel a ride and he gave me a massive tip. That’s it. Why the hell would YOU call and ask that?”

Now it was her turn to sigh.

“
Have you been out with anyone since her?”

“
I’ve had a fling or two.”

It was exactly two, but she didn’t need to know that.

“
She’s been with eleven. Most of them don’t get past the second date.”

“
Well, she’s winning, then, isn’t she?”

“
It is because of you, you asshole. She isn’t over you.”

“
Well she could have fooled me, Nicole. The only time she spoke to me in the last two months was to dump me again.”

“
You hurt her pretty bad, Trevor. She loved you. After you got mixed up with the mob it tore her up, but it didn’t change anything. You should hear her whenever she visits. Last week she was talking about how you had this really down to earth job and how you were working another one on the side. She was thinking of getting back together.”

“
She’d said something about keeping track of me. How much does she actually know?”

“
Plenty. She’s been watching you pretty close.”

“…
That’s creepy.”

“
Then that mobster thing happened and she came crying on my shoulder. I had to see if you were really that big of an idiot.”

“
Well I’m not. And what’s the big deal anyway?”

“
Have you ever heard of Carlito Rodrigo?”

“
No, who was that? Lucky boyfriend number seven?”

“
Look him up, asshole.”

With that, she closed the connection.

“
The whole effing family is out of their minds!” Trevor muttered through clenched teeth. He took out his frustration on the control panel, hammering the buttons to disengage and set the course for his next sprint.

Frustration and concentration don’t mix very well. A man who gets angry tends to forget things he would never forget otherwise. The bad news was that getting a ship set for an FTL sprint wasn’t the sort of thing you could afford to forget to do correctly. The good news was that there were all sorts of safeguards in place to prevent you from forgetting to do something you are supposed to do, so Lex didn’t manage to get himself killed. Unfortunately there isn’t anything to remind you to do things you aren’t supposed to do.

Every ship is required, by law, to have a transponder broadcasting a unique identifier. It gave rescue crews something to home in on if you ended up adrift and radio silent. It also gave the authorities something to track. Thus it was a handy thing to turn off if you were going to be doing something of questionable legality. But with no useful reminders, and an awful lot on his mind, he forgot to reach under the dash and do the magic knock that would switch it off. And so Lex streaked off into the black depths of space, his transponder blaring his location out, loud and clear.

The sprint was supposed to be a 9 hour stretch, so Lex had set his alarm and decided to catch up on his sleep. Just under 8 hours later, a loud beeping noise jarred him awake. It wasn’t the alarm. At least, not the one he’d set. Most of the things sensors rely upon are far too slow to do any good when a ship is moving faster than the speed of light. Gravity was on the short list of things that weren’t. It wasn’t that it was fast. It is just that it is always there, tugging and pulling at everything else in the universe. The gravity sensor was used in FTL to let you know when something moving about the same speed as you was getting too close. Handy for ships in established routes to keep from bumping into each other. It shouldn’t ever make a peep during a sprint. As such, when it started blaring, it had his attention.

“
What the hell?” he said, groggily brushing the sawdust wrappers off the console.

He fiddled with some settings just to be sure, but there it was, a dot on the navigation overlay with an approximate distance and an approximate mass. It was a ship, it was behind him, and it was getting closer.

There were only two things it could mean. It could be another freelancer. It wasn’t. No freelancer stupid enough to stay on someone else’s tail that closely would live very long. That only left the far less pleasant possibility that someone was purposely following him, and that meant The Law. Probably a VectorCorp security patrol, but there was no way they could have found him. He took precautions. The only way that he could have been followed is if he’d managed to come close enough to a couple of their marker pylons for them to plot a speed and heading from his transponder code, but for that the transponder would have to be active, and there was no way he was stupid enough to...

“
Son of a bitch...”

He rapped on the dash and the transponder light winked off.

“
Okay... okay,” he muttered to himself, “Should have done the curved sprint this time. That would have shaken this guy. Too late for that. No big deal, no big deal. forty-five minutes to the next stop. He can’t do squat to me until then. Then I just bob and weave, standard juke, then do a curved sprint to a secondary stop, and that’s that. Piece of cake.”

He began to sift through the nav computer. A curved run at FTL speeds was generally ill advised. There was no real reason for it when you could just as easily and much more safely do two straight ones. A decent turning radius at that speed would practically be measured in parsecs, and plotting a course was immeasurably trickier. The one upshot was that a calculated trajectory like the one this guy must have followed would pretty quickly be millions of miles off course. That meant that if he could lose him just for the few seconds preceding the jump, he’d be home free.

His eyes flew over the stellar maps. If he’d known he was going to be pulling a turn, he would have chosen a different starting point. The area was fairly thick with VectorCorp trade routes, and of the places he could squeak through, most didn’t lead to anything that would be even remotely effective for evasion if he was followed. Eventually he dug up a route that might work, and plugged it into the computer. There were three minutes left before he would drop out of FTL and try to shake the pursuer. Nothing to do but wait and try to piece together what information he had.

The ship on his tail was lighter than his, and faster. That was difficult to achieve. It wasn’t like you could make a space ship more aerodynamic to give it some extra speed in space. In the absence of an atmosphere a brick flew just as well as a dart. The only things that mattered were power, mass, and cooling. Betsy had a power to mass ratio that was off the charts, and the sheer size of the engines allowed for pretty decent heat dissipation, too. That meant his adversary had the money to invest in a more efficient set of equipment, which pretty much confirmed it was corporate security.

Knowing that, there were only three ships that he could be flying, and the weight class narrowed it down to one. This guy was flying a Delta Astro-Recon, a DAR, and probably a military edition at that. Light, fast, maneuverable. He dug unto the pouch of his flight suit, pulled out a stick of gum, and popped it into his mouth. The final seconds ticked down, the beginnings of color already starting to shift down into visibility in his view window. A grin came to Lex’s face. This was going to be fun.