Bypass Gemini (15 page)

“
It is a psychological thing.”

A moment later there was a faint beep, “Deactivated.” The voice came from the hall outside the door.

The pilot finally took care of some very pressing business. He heard the cameras blip back on while he was washing his hands.

“
Ma?”

“
Yes?” replied the voice, now clearly from the nearest speaker again.

“
Well, first off, should I be calling you Ma? It seems kind of personal.”

“
That is my designation.”

“
Okay then. Would you please show me the way back to my stuff? And maybe lead me someplace where I can catch a few hours of sleep.”

“
Follow the red lights upon leaving the bathroom.”

A refreshingly short walk and an elevator ride later, Lex found himself on a floor that looked like just about any army barracks he’d ever seen. It was broken up into a handful of long rooms, each lined with a row of double bunks along each wall. On the opposite side of the room was a bank of lockers and a doorway leading to a white tiled room. Every bed was made and immaculate, and none of them looked as though they had been used recently, if ever. He opened his mouth to ask where he could find his things, but before he could make a sound, the packages and his helmet were carted in by a pair of the same robot grippers that had delivered Karter’s arm.

“
Bathroom and shower facilities are at the far end of the room. Jumpsuits are available in the lockers.”

“
Thanks, Ma.”

“
Processing... You are welcome, Mr. Alexander.”

The lockers were unlocked, and it only took a little bit of digging to find an outfit that was roughly the right size. In his search, Lex also found a towel and some toiletries. He stripped out of his blood soaked and more than a little rank flight suit and cranked up one of the showers. The result wasn’t what he was used to. His own apartment had what could charitably be called a shower, but the pressure and temperature made it more seem like the wall was peeing on him. Hygiene on the ship came in the form of a periodic rubdown with glorified moist towelettes. In comparison, the facilities here were like a piping hot pressure washer. The almost scalding water hammering on his muscles released knots that had been there for weeks.

Nearly half an hour under the hot spray finally left Lex feeling halfway human again. Granted, wearing a second-hand jumpsuit commando style wasn’t how he’d planned on spending the night, but you win some, you lose some. By rights, he probably should have been trying to find some way to get back to the task of delivering his package, but getting shot down and torn up had done a number on his body. The inevitable crash after all of that adrenaline was making a bed that didn’t serve double duty as a pilot’s chair sound awfully good.

Within seconds of plopping down on the nearest bed, he was dead to the world. Unfortunately, his nap was hardly a pleasant one. It turns out having your ship blown out of orbit and sent crashing to a barren planet’s surface is the sort of thing that sticks with you. He jerked awake at the moment of impact for a third time before he decided a distraction was in order.

Lex wandered over to the spot on the floor near the shower where he’d left the jumbled mess of his flight suit. He’d had his slidepad in his pocket, but hopefully it hadn’t been too badly damaged during the fall. The suit wasn’t where he left it. Instead, it was neatly laid out on a nearby bed. The blood stains were conspicuously absent, and the slashed leg had only a faint line of fine stitches and sealant to suggest it had ever been damaged at all. The contents of his many pockets were arranged with care beside it, including casino chips in neat piles, a fresh roll of duct tape, and an unopened pack of gum. The helmet was there, the damaged visor replaced and polished. He picked up his slidepad, to find it whole and functional. The battery had even been charged.

“
Um... Ma?”

“
Yes, Mr. Alexander?”

“
Did you do this?”

“
Yes, Mr. Alexander.”

“
Thank you.”

“
You are very welcome. I thought you’d intended to sleep.”

“
Can’t. Bad dreams.”

“
I can offer you a sedative if you like. We have a full chemical synthesis facility, and I keep a ready supply of many potent narcotic, anti-psychotic, and analgesic compounds.”

“
No, thank you,” he said, taking careful note of the presence of anti-psychotics on the short list, “Why are you being so nice all of a sudden?”

“
Because you apologized, and you thanked me. Neither Karter nor any of his rare guests have ever done that. I appreciate a gentleman.”

“
Wow. Thanks. That’s... kind of a quick turnaround.”

“
As an artificial intelligence, I am capable of assessing and altering my disposition and the resultant attitudes quite rapidly.”

“
Like mood swings?”

“
That is an adequately similar human emotional phenomenon.”

“
I will try to stay on your good side, then.”

“
That is advisable. If you have any more requests, do not hesitate to ask.”

Lex poked at his slidepad for a bit. It was more responsive, too. Improvements aside, though, the data connection was down, and it wouldn’t come back up.

“
Um, actually, before you go-” he said quickly.

“
I am everywhere, always. I do not go anywhere,” she replied.

“
Oh, right. Not to be a pest, but I can’t seem to connect to the net.”

“
I am afraid the debris field makes stable connectivity to the network impossible with small scale devices. Once a week a local cache of data resources that Karter considers relevant is pulled down. The next differential replication is scheduled immediately following the remapping of the field. If you have a request for additional information, I can add it to the data list.”

“
What sort of stuff do you have on the local cache?”

“
Approximately 1% engineering periodicals, 1% general reference material, 1% contact information directories, 2% multimedia entertainment and news feeds, and 95% pornographic materials of the following subcategories-”

“
That’s fine!” he said quickly, not terribly interested in what sort of tastes Karter might have in that area, “Thanks. I should have figured. I’ll just look at what I pulled down before I came through.”

He pulled up the saved data and started to chew through it. Most of it was the usual stuff. Cantrell was issuing a new model of pleasure cruiser. Half a dozen messages offering him vast wealth and/or massive genitals in exchange for his bank account info. He was about to shut the slidepad off and try to find something else to do when he saw that there was a news alert saved. He tapped the file and a pert young anchorwoman all the way back on Earth began to work her way through her “solemn” routine.

“
Tragedy struck the planet Golana today, as a small commuter shuttle succumbed to pilot error while on a routine trip. The transit hub oversees thousands of passenger and cargo flights per hour, and this is the first such accident in more than five years. Links below lead to the profile pages of the twenty-seven passengers and crew who lost their lives in the event.”

She went on to fill in details that they couldn’t possibly know about the pilot that made him out to be solely responsible for the crash. That was always the way. When in doubt, throw the pilot under the bus. Lex pulled up the list of victims and began to scroll through it. There were over a billion people on his planet, and a few dozen times that used the transport lanes around it every year, so the likelihood of him recognizing a face or name was pretty slim. Regardless, it was a big galaxy, and when something happens as nearby as your home planet, you take a look.

It was for that reason alone that he found himself looking at the face of a woman named Sarah Jones. She was thin, with unremarkable features and mouse-brown hair... And he’d seen her before. She hadn’t said her name, but there was no mistaking it. This was the very woman who had handed him the package. His heart started beating faster as he tapped his way back to the main article and searched the transcript.

“…
after investigators were able to contact VectorCorp, owners of the shuttle, for comments regarding the disaster …”

VectorCorp. Granted, it wasn’t a long shot that VectorCorp would have been the owners. They probably owned half of the ships that used those lanes. But in the time he’d been running packages, he’d only had two people even threaten to pull the trigger on him. Now he’d been shot down carrying a package sent by a woman who had been killed in the crash of one of their shuttles just hours before? It COULD be a coincidence... but it could be the package.

He looked to the silver case on the floor beside his bed. Unlike the package Blake had given him, which was somehow mostly intact, the special delivery had taken a hell of a wallop when he slid down the cliff side. One of the locks was a mess of broken metal, and the other was hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It would probably pop open if he looked at it wrong. Taking a peek inside would be easy enough. He walked slowly over to it, leaned down, extended his hand...

“
No,” he said, slapping it down and forcing the lid tight.

“
Were you addressing me, Mr. Alexander?” asked Ma.

“
No. Thank you. Where is Karter?” he asked, starting his fresh roll of tape and wrapping a few layers around the damaged case.

“
He has just unleashed a short sequence of profanities in his workshop before ordering me to prepare an array of replacement struts and some burn ointment. I suspect he will be taking a break until fabrication is complete. Did you want me to repair the metal case? I presumed it was one of the packages you were delivering, and thus should not have been touched.”

“
Uh, no, no. Can you lead me to Karter, please? I need to talk to him,” Lex said, gathering up his things.

“
Certainly, follow the red lights.”

The pilot managed to catch up to his unusual host as he was headed down the main corridor toward the exit.

“
Karter!” he called, hustling after him with arms loaded down, “I need to talk to you!”

“
Are you still here?” Karter said as he pulled on a coat and adjusted a fresh bandage on his non-prosthetic wrist.

“
Yes I’m still here! That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I need to get the hell off of this planet and get rid of this package.”

“
It can wait.”

With a whistle, Karter summoned his pet and headed for the door.

“
No, Karter, it can’t. This is my reputation we’re talking about. Plus, I’m pretty sure that VectorCorp has a problem with the contents of the package.”

“
And you want to toss the hot potato before the music stops.”

“
And collect the rest of my money, if I can.”

Karter silently considered for a moment.

“
Fine,” he said, continuing toward the door, “If it will shut you up and get you out of my face for a few days, I’ll toss you a loaner. Solby needs to drop a deuce, so we’ll swing by the hangar and see what I’m willing to part with. Ma! Open the front door and pull the bus around.”

“
Opening. Please remember to prepare yourself for local gravitational intensity, and move swiftly to the bus. Ambient temperature is approaching danger levels,” the voice replied.

A sudden change in gravity is a tricky thing to prepare for. Stepping out of the facility and its accompanying artificial gravity felt vaguely like climbing a staircase that has one step fewer than you’d expected. The human brain has been trained to cope with things like a sudden shift to zero g, like stepping off a cliff, or the gradual slide up and down in acceleration that you get in an old fashioned elevator. Moving suddenly from normal gravity to just a bit more than half of that locks the brain into the “Oh my God, the ground is falling out from underneath me!” mindset for a good thirty seconds. Even when you know it is coming, you find yourself taking ridiculous exaggerated steps and trying to get your stomach back down where it belongs. Or at least, that’s what happens when you haven’t been doing it day in and day out for who knows how long, apparently, because both Karter and his adorable little fur ball made the dismount flawlessly.

Once Lex had gotten a grip on the new physics and recovered from the slap in the face that the sudden cold had given him, he caught up to the others. Karter was crunching across the gravel with his hands in his pockets, head down against a stiff wind and heading toward the school bus. Solby did his business, finishing off the whole process by making a half-hearted effort to kick some dirt over the evidence. He then commenced prancing about, taking full advantage of the reduced gravity to turn his already prodigious leaps into something just slightly absurd. Once Karter and Lex had climbed into the bus, a quick pat on the leg brought the little creature bounding through the door.

“
Ma! Clean up!” Karter called out before he shut the door.

Almost instantly there was a flare of light and the mess left behind vanished in a burst of smoke and flames. Lex leaned against the window just in time to see one of the roof mounted lasers shift back toward the sky

“
You vaporize dog doo with lasers?!” Lex scoffed.

“
Give a man access to a turd and a laser and there can be but one outcome.”

They set off toward the opposite side of the compound at a leisurely pace. Solby took the opportunity to assault Lex, diving onto his lap, flicking its little tongue over his face, and rolling onto its back to beg a belly rub. Lex ruffled its incredibly soft fur and scratched at its neck for a few seconds, to sounds of general delight.