Bypass Gemini (17 page)

Tessera V was, in some ways, a lot like Golana. It was a major transit and shipping hub. Unlike Golana, it was also much, much more. The average climate was famously gorgeous. So much so that most corporations kept a campus there for employee retreats. There were also no less than three highly prestigious colleges. Perhaps the most famous and respected opera house for half a galaxy made its home there. Famous beaches, iconic national parks, and all manner of vacation destinations dotted the landscape. In short, it was a center of commerce, culture, and tourism. And since that sort of place attracts an awful lot of the criminal element, there was a considerable legal presence as well.

It was that last part that he needed to deal with at the moment. The sheer amount of traffic in and out of the average planet meant that a fair amount of ships were allowed to slip through without notice. Such was not the case at Tessera V. The entry process involved the exchange of codes, verification of credentials, and if they didn’t like what they heard, a thorough ship search. Figuring out how to get through the arrival processing at planets like this was one of the hardest parts of being a freelancer, and techniques that worked were guarded jealously. Lex had come up with a procedure that usually worked, but he hated to do it. It was one of the more overtly illegal parts of his job, and if he were to get caught it would cost him a fortune in fines. However, since there wasn’t much a choice at the moment, he would have to give it a shot. He dug out the DAR transponder and fired it up, then hailed the arrivals center.

“
Tessera V, northern hemisphere arrivals, please transmit landing auth code,” the voice of a young woman said with all of the enthusiasm she could be expected to muster for a phrase she’d had to say several hundred times that day.

“
I’ve got an equipment malfunction. Request vocal code submission,” Lex said.

“
Yes, sir,” she replied, murder in her tone, “Please provide the final sixty-four digit code following the-”

“
Um, you want to try that again?” he warned.

“
Please provide the sixty-four digit-”

“
One more time, please. How many digits?”

“
Six. Four.”

“
What, may I ask, happened to the other four hundred and forty-eight digits you were supposed to be asking for?”

“…
Oh no...”

“
It looks like I’m going to need you to provide your employee number,” Lex said with a heavy sigh.

“
Goddamn it,” she fumed.

The full landing authorization code was a five hundred and twelve digit hexadecimal monster, a mess of letters and numbers that took forever to read out correctly. Worse, once it was read, it was to be read back for confirmation. Absolutely everyone who worked the arrivals desk for more than a few days figured out that all but the last sixty-four digits were identical for every ship in a given day, so they only asked for the unique portion. It was a simple, obvious time saving measure, and without doing it, the queue of people awaiting permission to land would quickly get hours long if even a single person requested to enter their code manually. Like most simple, obvious time saving measures, though, it was utterly against protocol, and thus the only person who would actually object to the short version would be an auditor.

“
Hey, listen, this is no picnic for me, either,” he said, “Loads of paperwork.”

“
You guys are flying DARs now? I thought surprise audits were always on cargo vessels.”

“
It wouldn’t be a surprise if we did what you expected. What’s the time?”

“
Twenty-two fifty-three, galactic, seventeen twenty-eight global.”

“
That late? … Look, I’ve got seven minutes to get my reports turned in, and that’s pretty much not going to happen if I have to write you up, so let’s just say this never happened, okay?”

“
Ohthankgod,” she said in relieved burst, “So, uh, you wanna give me your auth code?”

“
I could, but it would be invalid. That’s how these things go, remember. Then they’d have to pull the log of the call, and we’d both get in trouble.”

“
Oh, yeah. That’s right. I’ll do a whisper pass, then?”

Since no system designer can possibly anticipate every eventuality, there is always a way to just force a ship through without authorization or logging. Generally it was intended for diplomatic or military vessels, but it was available at the behest of the operator to correct problems that don’t present a security threat.

“
That’ll do.”

“
Roger. Clearance applied to your transponder code for twenty-four hours. Thanks for being cool about this.”

“
Don’t worry about it. Just don’t get used to it. They pay us to NOT be cool.”

Once the com clicked off and the landing light went green, Lex fairly collapsed back into his chair. He was not a conman, and pulling a stunt like that was well outside his comfort zone. Sure, he had nerves of steel when it came to coaxing insane maneuvers out of vehicles of every description, but when it came to this sort of thing he could practically FEEL the ulcer forming. One of these days he was going to have to just try to outrun the patrols like they used to in the old days.

After dropping down into the high atmosphere, he scooted his ship to the appropriate continent, as specified by the delivery instructions. It was a long, narrow strip of land off the coast of the main continent, running from the polar region to a bit past the equator. The whole island was almost perfectly straight, and currently was experiencing night. From high in the atmosphere it looked like a dotted line of glowing clusters, several hundred cities lined up one after the other along a high speed railway that ran the length of the island. The sliver of a continent was called Makou and if it was a distasteful necessity, it was done there. Waste processing, prisons, power generation, industry, and anything else that looked bad or smelled bad got relegated to Makou, which seemed to exist specifically so that the rest of the planet could be beautiful. Lon Djinn was a region of cities along the northern third of Makou that was composed almost entirely of administrative offices and warehouses. The package was to be delivered to, and thus the other half of his payment was to be collected from, a locker in a transit hub at the very center of Lon Djinn. Lex managed to find a shipyard that would accept chips as payment for docking his ship and tried to figure out where he was headed.

As the names would suggest, there was a fairly strong Asian influence to the area - though he’d been told that most of the names had been selected because they sounded Asian, rather than actually being of Asian origin. Tessera V started off many years ago as a US/Chinese joint colony, and even though it had since become home to every race and creed, the nature of society meant that neighborhoods tended to take on a certain flavor over time. In this case, almost all of the signage was in Mandarin (or Cantonese, he never could tell the difference), and the cuisine tended to come with optional chopsticks. After subsisting on food from a tube for the last few days, Lex took a moment to pick something at random off of a menu he didn’t understand. A few minutes later he was rewarded with some sort of spicy noodles and dumplings stuffed with meat that was as delicious as it was unidentifiable. A trip to a second-hand store for a dirt cheap change of clothes and a duffel bag, and he was on his way to the train station.

To call Lon Djinn crowded would be akin to calling the ocean moist. There were so many people that the traditional shoulder-to-shoulder sidewalks and perpetually clogged streets were simply not enough. Not only did hovercars mean that the airspace over the main road was at least as congested as the surface, but a series of elevated walkways along the outside walls of the towering buildings, so called skywalks, gave the whole city the look of a shopping mall. One would think that spending any time at all as a courier would have led Lex to some level of tourism prowess, but language and pedestrian navigation skills eluded him. With the help of a translation program in his slidepad, Lex managed to coax enough information from the busy people on the streets and the new age hieroglyphics scattered among the signs to find the rail station.

Almost instantly, Lex could feel that something was off. He’d made his way down to one of the lower levels, to the commuter lockers so that he could drop off the case and collect his fee. Locker areas tended to share some features regardless of their location. One was the distinctive odor that develops in areas where travelers keep their things. That was present in abundance. Another was homeless people. Between the roof overhead, the lack of business hours, the cheap storage, and the high traffic, transit locker rooms ended up as last chance motels for the financially disadvantaged. But right now there wasn’t a beggar in sight. That meant that either Lon Djinn had experienced a socioeconomic epiphany and solved the homeless problem once and for all, or something had scared them away. Bums were the canary in the coalmine when it came to law enforcement. It didn’t take long to spot the three plainclothes agents. Being observant and inconspicuous at the same time is a tough trick, and these guys hadn’t quite mastered it. No points for guessing which locker they were keeping a close eye on.

Lex kept walking, passing through the locker room and hoping that it he wasn’t obviously avoiding eye contact with the cops. He stopped at a snack machine so that it wouldn’t look as though he was passing through for no reason. A wave of his slidepad netted him a candy bar with a picture of a crab on the wrapper, which he dearly hoped was a mascot and not an ingredient. From there he took a few twisty turns and ducked into the most fragrant bathroom he’d ever been brave enough to step into.

“
Oh, come ON!” he muttered.

Missing were the standard “sit-down” toilets that nature had intended. In their place were the porcelain holes in the floor that Lex was fairly certain existed exclusively to mock tourists. The last few patrons evidently hadn’t been up to the sharpshooting challenge, either. There was, however, a handicapped stall. He dove inside and locked the door.

“
Okay, okay. This is bad,” Lex muttered as near to silently as he could, “This is bad. Can’t deliver the case, can’t get my money. Don’t panic. They might not know who I am. I’ll just ditch the delivery, get the hell out of dodge, and then... what? Lie low for the rest of my life? I don’t even know what they’re after... But I’m gonna find out!”

He dug into his duffel bag and pulled out the box Blake had been holding for him. It had taken a lot of research and a couple of weeks of sifting auction sites, but he’d finally managed to score an all frequencies decrypting receiver. If the sales pitch could be believed, this baby could sniff the airwaves and decode all conventional police and security bands, and since it was receive-only, it was undetectable. Lex had hoped to test it under less extreme circumstances, but if those cops were talking about him, he needed to know.

The box had been the size of a lunchbox, but once he’d torn apart the packaging he was left with something that looked like a pack of cigarettes with a low resolution screen on the side and an old fashioned wired earpiece along with a haystack of assorted adapter wires. He powered it up, and it revealed a readout of all of the relevant radio signals. A few security bands, a few corporate ones, and one law enforcement. He slipped the earpiece into place, selected the police band, and... was struck with a flood rapidfire mandarin.

“
Son of a-”

He sorted through the tangle of wires until he found one that fit his slidepad and activated the translation program. Once it started to spit out English, he put the device to his ear.

“
... transport hub in the vicinity of Long Genius all the staff. We’ve got the news that a suspect has been at a lower level vending machines, locker room C1 area using a looked at account. Being the lookout for the more than average height white man of suspicion. Image to follow.”

He stared blankly for a moment.

“
Stupid cheap translator app! Uh... okay. A looked at account... a watched account. VC must be watching my bank account activity... Vending machines... Oh my god.”

Lex reached into his pocket and pulled out the crab bar. He’d bought it with the slidepad, which meant not only did they know he was here, they knew he was trying to drop off the package, since he was right by the drop site. Which meant they knew he still HAD the package. This was bad. This was very bad. He grabbed his duffel, strapped it to his back, and rushed out of the bathroom. All the while he kept the slidepad held to his ear as though he were in a conversation. It still spat nothing but mangled Chinese-to-English translations in low quality text-to-speech, but it was better than nothing.

“
Take it easy, take it easy,” he muttered out loud, “Don’t run. They’ll know you’re onto them if you run. You’ll look suspicious. Move slow, look calm. Once you are out in this crowded mess of a city, you’ll be able to lose them. Just try to make it out one of the lower exits.”

“
Image likeness having been received. Make obstructed the exits of lower level,” squawked the computerized approximation of the police dispatcher.

“
Okay, then, upper exits,” he corrected.

The now fugitive pilot’s attempts at subtlety weren’t achieving a very high degree of success. Perhaps it was because he was sweating bullets. More likely it was because he was a foot taller than almost everyone around him and had a cheap duffel bag hung awkwardly behind him while he yammered to himself in a foreign language. Chances are the police would have been keeping a close eye on him even if he didn’t perfectly fit the description of a suspect. Even now, cops uniformed and not were beginning to sift their way through the churning station-goers toward him. The slidepad was switched to speaker and shoved in his pocket as he weighed his options. It didn’t take very long, because it wasn’t a very long list. When he tried to turn down a slightly less crowded hall, one of the cops shouted. He didn’t understand the order, but that hardly mattered. All it meant was that it was time for him to drop the inconspicuous act and default to what he did best. Escape.