Unstable Prototypes (46 page)

"Yep. Is that a regular for her?"

"That's her 'burning the midnight oil' meal.
I'll bring it up, then I'm calling it a night. I intend to use all
of my masculine wiles to convince her to call it a night as well,
so knock before you try coming in."

"Do masculine wiles even exist?"

"I guess we'll find out in a minute."

"Well good luck to you. Success for you means
a few hours sleep for me. You coming to the keynote tomorrow?"

"Yeah, but then I'm heading out."

"Alright, see you tomorrow, Mr.
Alexander."

Lex cleared enough of the dangerous beverage
ornaments out of the way to finish his drink, then stumbled over to
the catering area to place an order. It turned out that they didn't
have mac and cheese. They did, however, have 'Fresh made genuine
Dakota durum pasta, prepared casserole-style in an extravagant aged
Tillamook cream sauce and topped with sage and crumbled brioche." A
bit of effort managed to track down a grilled cheese sandwich,
which was masquerading under the alias 'Tillamook panini.' As a
to-go platter was assembled, Lex made a mental note to find these
Tillamook people and demand that they tell him what they did with
all of the other cheeses. Getting the over-dignified comfort food
to Michella's room while heavily under the influence of his
under-dignified cocktails proved difficult, but before long he was
finagling his slidepad out of his pocket and bleeping the door
open.

"Room service," he said.

Michella looked up. The hours of arguing,
scraping, digging, researching, and bargaining were showing all
over her face. A few stray locks of auburn hair had escaped her
ponytail and were dangling in front of her face, her glasses were
in danger of slipping off the end of her nose, and all around her
was an explosion of hand written notes on torn out notebook
pages.

"Trev," she said, brushing the hair out of
her eyes and removing her glasses to give the lenses a polish with
the hem of her shirt. "What happened to Jon?"

"He managed to chew through his own ankle and
make a break for the border," Lex said, placing down the tray and
removing the lid. As Michella grabbed the chocolate and coffee
concoction and eagerly breathed in its aroma, Lex grabbed the
cheese sandwich and took a bite, adding through a mouthful of
gourmet ingredients, "You make any progress?"

"Some, but I hit a wall. I really hate
working the military for information. Even the janitors have had
security training."

"How far did you get?"

"Far enough to know this Garotte guy is the
real deal. I've dug up at least six different names he's used, and
I'm pretty sure none of them are his real name. He's... He's not
the kind of person you want to be dealing with, Trev."

"A bad guy?"

"A guy that usually shows up right before
something terrible happens. There are eighteen global governments
who swear he doesn't exist, and a dozen more who really
wish
he didn't exist, and at least four who are actively trying to make
sure he doesn't exist for much longer."

"Great. So it may not have been a good idea
to give him a hand."

"I'm not so sure. Most of the people I talked
to who really want him dead seem to be from the remnants of some
pretty nasty governments and corporations and such. I don't know,
though. At this point my mind is mush," she explained, sipping her
drink and scooping up some of the mac and cheese.

"Any chance you'll be getting sleep any time
soon?"

She shook her head.

"What if I ask nicely?"

"Loads to do still."

"What if I use logic?"

"Like?"

"Like you're giving a big speech tomorrow,
and you get ugly circles under your eyes when you don't sleep."

She scowled at him.

"I would like to point out at this time that
I've had some cocktails and may not be my usual discrete self."

"Keep it up and your usual discrete self is
going to wake up on the couch tomorrow."

"Hey. Back home I sleep on the couch every
night, so you'll have to try harder than that."

She sighed. "Once the espresso wears off,
straight to bed, I promise."

"You better. And out of curiosity, is any of
this digging going to put a bulls eye on your back?"

"Have your escapades put one on yours?"

"I don't
think
so..." Lex said with
more than a little uncertainty in his voice.

"Well then neither do I."

Lex dropped down on the couch. "I'm starting
to think that if you combined all of the common sense and rational
thought between the two of us, there might be enough for
one
sane person."

"We're just committed, that's all."

"Either that or we should
be
committed."

Lex had planned to stay up until Michella
turned in, but a belly full of booze and grilled cheese decided
sleep was a better idea. A wake-up call got them both out of bed,
him with a vicious hangover, her with about two hours sleep, and
each with less than an hour to get ready and get to the keynote.
The haze of sleep and residual inebriation blended the first few
hours of the day into one big blurry blob of activity. He was
reasonably sure that he'd attended and enjoyed the keynote. There
might have been some sort of mixer afterward where he shook a few
hundred more hands and smiled a lot, too. The only thing that
really stuck in his mind was returning to the hotel, gathering up
his things, and saying his goodbyes to Jon and Michella as they got
ready for their flight. Things didn't start to clear for good until
he managed to get his hands on some Sobrietin, a hangover cure that
he vowed never again to be caught without.

"I trust you enjoyed your stay in Rackton,
and be sure to visit again," said the gate agent at the shipyard,
mechanically.

Lex considered asking if the chipper young
agent was aware that there had been a terrorist attack the previous
day, and if perhaps the standard script might not be appropriate on
a day like this, but he decided to just nod and step onto the lift
that would sweep him at dizzying speed to his ship's storage bay.
The electric motors hummed to life and zipped him along the rails
as a dozen ships whisked by, gradually slowing as he approached the
SOB's temporary home. As it aligned with the platform, he found
that the lights in the bay were already lit, and that a uniformed
maintenance man in gloves and a dust mask was just stepping out
from under his ship.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?" Lex
asked.

"Rackton Transit Authority. Security sweep,"
said the man tersely.

"Why?"

"Rackton police special mandate. Security
sweeps on all ships with recent off-world activity. You're
clean."

"Oh. Good to see someone is acknowledging
that there was a terrorist attack yesterday. Seems like the whole
city is trying to ignore that it even happened."

The maintenance man made a vague grunt of
agreement as he limped onto the platform and left without further
comment. Lex watched the platform leave, trying to shake a nasty
feeling of suspicion. To satisfy his inner paranoid delusional, he
gave the ship a thorough looking-over before finally climbing into
the cockpit. He performed the well-practiced contortionist act of
putting on a flight suit while in the cramped confines of the ship,
then submitted the ship to the automated takeoff queue. Because old
habits die hard, worked his way through the standard takeoff
checklist manually.

"Engine Power-up Self Test, Successful.
Deflector Array Diagnostic, Successful. … Spend some quiet time
alone with Mitch … Failed. Star Chart Pre-Calibration, Successful.
Figure out how this stupid relationship is supposed to work …
Pending."

To their credit, Rackton and Tessera had
managed to get the backup automation node up and running already,
the previous day's attack having utterly destroyed the primary
node. Any other planet that had suffered an attack like the one
that this one had would have still been working out how to get the
ground traffic flowing again, let alone handling the departure of
starships. The city planners and engineers in charge here had
managed to get things functional to the point that there was barely
a delay. In less than an hour his ship was in the final automated
departure steps, counting the seconds until the control of the ship
was handed back to him. Lex fidgeted in his seat like a puppy
waiting for someone to open the door to the backyard. Finally the
autopilot light clicked off and he pounced on the controls.

"About time!" he grumbled, taking the
controls and guiding the ship toward the nearest VectorCorp route.
"Okay, now to do a few on-the-books jumps, just in case the Rackton
cops are feeling skittish, then fly around until I stop feeling
stir crazy."

He fell into line with the other ships,
handling the maneuvering himself, for no reason other than because
no one was telling him he couldn't, and jumped to FTL. At each
transfer station he took the least popular route until his sensors
told him that there were only a few ships nearby, then quietly
dropped off of the beaten path and decided to blaze himself a new
trail. After scouting out a stretch of space he felt probably
wouldn't kill him, he jumped to FTL again.

"Okay, should be about two hours, and I'll
come out here," he said vaguely to himself, "That array looks like
a good place to shake anybody that might follow me... Like that
guy."

He looked down at the monitor, where there
was a single, steady blip on his gravitational sensor. As the only
long range sensor that worked at FTL, it tended to get his full
attention when it made noise at a time like this.

"Exact same speed, exact same course, and
much bigger than me," he said. "So there are two possibilities
here. This is a freelancer with a heavy load trying to steal a safe
route, or this is somebody trying to arrest and/or kill me. I can't
imagine which one it is."

Slowly, Lex dialed up the speed. A happy
consequence of the way that scientists had found to sidestep the
peskier aspects of the laws of physics was that one set of
equipment did all of the work for Faster Than Light travel and
conventional speed travel. That meant that the SOB, which had an
engine overpowered enough to outrun just about any other ship at
sub-light speed, would have the same advantage on the other side of
the light barrier. He had been running at 80%, which was usually
enough to leave pursuit craft in the dust while not putting too
much stress on the engine. As the engine power ticked up past 90%,
the ship behind him started to drop away.

"Okay... well, that'll buy me a few minutes
once I show up," Lex said.

He pushed it to 100%, the maximum safe
rating, and the blip on the sensor screen fell further back. Just
for the extra breathing room, he pushed further, inching his
equipment past the red line. By the time he hit 110%, the dot
finally dropped out of range, but it was time to slow down again.
Not because he was afraid his engine would blow, but because if he
cranked it up any further he'd hit the end of his carefully
selected FTL run before he could slow down.

His eyes turned to his destination. Like any
good freelancer, once he left the official path, he made sure that
each stop was a decent place to hide or lose a tail. It was not
unheard of that a diligent or observant patrol would catch him on
their sensors and follow him to deliver a stern talking to and a
hefty fine, so it paid to take precautions. Right now he was headed
toward a communication relay cluster. It was a tight little clump
of remote satellites that received and distributed the fancy FTL
communication signals that had been rigged up to ensure that emails
warning of minor transit delays didn't end up arriving decades
after the ships did. As hiding spots went, this seemed like a bad
choice. Relay stations were both expensive and essential, which
translated to great security. The instant he even got close, all
sorts of really angry alarms would start sounding, and within
minutes there would be patrols and repair crews on hand to take
care of the intruders and whatever damage they might have done. One
would think that this was exactly the opposite of what Lex would
want, except for two things. First, law and traffic enforcement
patrols had to fill out a
load
of paperwork if they violated
the safety perimeter of a relay station, and pirates and other
freelancers were just as eager to avoid being noticed as Lex was,
so just about anyone who might tail him would think twice about
following him into the array. He crossed his fingers and hoped that
whoever was chasing him fell into one of those categories. On the
more than likely chance that he wasn't so lucky, he pulled out the
all-important stick of chewing gum and loaded it into his
mouth.

The ship slid quickly down to speeds that
Einstein would have approved of, allowing the majority of his
sensors to switch back on and immediately inform him in no
uncertain terms that he was in big trouble. Ahead of him was what
looked like an extremely spread out parking lot, ship-sized
clusters of receiver dishes and transmitter antennas laid out in a
grid to form what Lex had once heard called a phased array,
whatever that was. Scattered around the area were similar arrays
angled vaguely at important star systems, broadcasting to anything
near enough to get it in a few minutes and engaging in
sophisticated quantum trickery to get data to other similar arrays
for everything else. A lengthy and extremely detailed warning
message was being transmitted by the array informing him of
ordinances and policies he was violating, but he ignored it and
zipped in among the satellites. Once he was nestled beside one, he
dialed down the power and switched the ship into silent running
mode. It was yet another of the niceties that Karter had installed,
though in this case it was one he actually asked for. With the
right settings, the SOB was invisible to almost any sensor but
visual, and the relay satellite would hide him from prying
eyes.