Bypass Gemini (19 page)

They took a few pot shots with “plasma flak” charges, short range rockets that scattered white hot specks of energy that would stall his electrical system if he hit too much of it, but that fizzled out after a few seconds, leaving nothing behind to cause collateral damage. Think “spike strip in space.” He managed to steer clear of both. By the time they were ready to line him up for a fourth attempt, though, the checkpoint was in sight and the weapons disengaged. In seconds, Lex was weaving though the ships at the checkpoint, the Interceptors whisking along the outside edge of the line. He steered with one hand and fumbled for the transponder with the other. An idea had come to mind, but the timing was going to be awfully tight.

He was getting close to the end of the line now. The innocent bystanders were getting fewer and further between and the Interceptors were getting closer. A massive freight hauler was just coming in. Once they were past it, it was nothing but open space, and anything was fair game. Lex managed to flip the trash ejector open, cram the DAR transponder into it, and seal it shut. Just a few more seconds before those guys on his tail would be willing to warm up their guns again. He prepared the field generator for the FTL jump. With a tight double tap of his maneuvering rockets he managed to put the hauler between himself and the Interceptors. The very instant the system gave him the go ahead, he tapped the trash eject, sending the external transponder through a series of narrow airlocks and out into open space. A half second later he punched the FTL button. When the Interceptors made it past the hauler, their sensors told them that Lex was heading along at roughly the same speed as he had been. Their eyes told them he had vanished. Presumably they eventually caught up with the ejected transponder, but by then he was long, long gone.

After the customary three random jumps to make sure he wasn’t followed, then a dozen more for the sake of paranoia, Lex took a deep breath and tried to gather his wits. In hindsight, it was an act of pure optimism to imagine he could have dropped off the case and been done with it, but when things are looking hopeless, the tendency is to revert to what you know best. Now, with that long shot put firmly to rest, he had nothing left but to face facts. They knew who he was, they wanted the case, and they killed the last person who had it. He probably hadn’t helped matters with his highly conspicuous escape just now, but once again, the last person who had the case was dead. When death is already the consequence, the thought of “making it worse” seems a little ridiculous. So the question wasn’t “What is the worst that can happen?” The question was “What am I going to do about it?”

There was no doubt it was VectorCorp that was after him, but even THEY couldn’t be everywhere at once, and judging from the fact that they’d let the relatively inept local police make a grab for him, they didn’t feel comfortable throwing their weight around in public. Not yet, at least. That meant that, whatever the reason was that they wanted him, it was something they didn’t want played out in broad daylight. Which raised another issue. He didn’t even know what it was that had driven them to such lengths. Lex’s eyes turned to the duffel.

Ever since he had learned of Ms. Jones’ death, he’d tried to avoid even looking at the silver case, as though her fate was somehow contagious, and could be avoided by minimizing exposure. At this point, though, he was already in over his head. Digging his grave any deeper hardly made a difference. The least he could do was find out what he was dealing with. One by one he peeled off the strips of duct tape that were holding the battered suitcase shut, revealing the single feeble and damaged lock that hadn’t completely failed. Two good shots with the heel of his hand dislodged the twisted clip, and the case slowly squeaked open.

Lex wasn’t sure what he had been expecting to find. Half of the time, exchanges like this ended up being blackmail articles; soiled underwear, compromising photos on a data drive, things like that. Judging from the amount of resources being dumped into the retrieval of this particular delivery, it was likely a good deal more substantial. A part of him had been hoping for something exciting, like vials of biological agents or perhaps the launch codes of some globe shattering weapon. What he found instead, to say the least, defied expectations.

It was a short stack of pages, hard copy printouts with some handwritten notes. They were gathered into two bundles. The first was a thick packet, cluttered with charts and dense scientific language. Lex didn’t understand half of what the pages said, but he recognized enough buzzwords and symbols to know that it had to do with stars, a stellar survey or the like. There were a few hundred stars detailed in total. Most of them had the sort of alphanumeric gibberish for a name that was tremendously helpful if you were a stellar cartographer and utterly incomprehensible if you were anything else. The information about each star was incredibly technical. Just about the only portion of it that had any sort of meaning to Lex was the location coordinates. The rest had to do with precise mass, magnetosphere fluctuation cycles, etc.

The second packet was a handful of shipping manifests with various components circled. The manifests themselves were pretty standard, the full contents of one of the massive cargo haulers that made the rounds throughout the galaxy. The indicated shipments didn’t seem to have an awful lot in common. They ranged from mundane stuff, like reels of copper wire and fiber bundles, to slightly more niche items, like superconductive coils, and a few hundred tons of other miscellaneous equipment. They shipped from easily a hundred different companies, on behalf of a hundred different companies. The one thing many of them shared, though, was a destination. A planet called Operlo. The name rang a bell for some reason. More than a few were addressed directly to a construction company there.

“
This is it?” he ranted, “This is reason enough to murder people? Fifty pages of order tracking and star measurements?!”

He riffled through the pages a second time, just to make sure he hadn’t missed something worthwhile, like a murder confession from the CEO of VectorCorp or maybe some sort of fiendish plan for galactic conquest. Nothing but statistics and ship manifests. This wasn’t just disappointing, it was devastating. If the case had held something of actual value, he would have had options. He could have held it for ransom, or used it as a bargaining chip. To do that, though, he would need to know who would have wanted it, and he couldn’t imagine anyone in a position to help him out of this mess caring in the least about this worthless mound of paper. All he’d managed to learn by opening the case was a pair of vague likelihoods. First, it was sensitive data. That was pretty much the only reason to print something out these days. Delivering it as hard copy meant that it was impossible for network filters and sniffers to pick up on the data. The other hint was the address of the construction company. Since it was the only semblance of a lead he had, Lex punched in the coordinates, plotted out a course, and jumped to FTL.

He managed to reach Operlo fairly quickly, but not because it was nearby. Operlo wasn’t near anything. That was exactly why it was so quick. In crowded areas, space was crisscrossed with VectorCorp routes which, as a freelancer, Lex had to avoid. Trying to keep clear of patrols around high traffic areas meant doing an awful lot of speeding up and slowing down, which translated to wasted time and energy, and rarely reaching maximum acceleration. Operlo had one lonely lane heading to and from it, which meant that even freelancers had a straight shot, all sprint and no juke. Of course, isolation carries with it a few other consequences.

Some planets are named after ancient gods, or at least the star they orbit and a number. Operlo got its name because the mining consortium that owned it auctioned off the naming rights to a chemical company, who named it after their new floor polish, then promptly went out of business. There wasn’t an ounce of romance or prestige in its history. The mines didn’t even produce anything particularly exotic; mostly just iron, zinc, and tin. For a long time, the only people who lived there were the miners and a few associated industries, and the only people who visited were the cargo haulers. It was an isolated crevice, far away from anything resembling law enforcement. Basically it was the planetary equivalent of a dark alley. It was thus inevitable that it would attract a certain type of person. Operlo wasn’t a vacation spot. It was a place to come if you didn’t want to be bothered. As such, there wasn’t a fancy check-in post monitoring traffic. Likely there had been some attempts, but these days about forty percent of the population was in some way associated with organized crime. That doesn’t create an environment conducive to administrative oversight.

Unlike Tessera, Operlo wasn’t exactly filled to the brim with bustling industry and vast urban centers. The planet was practically deserted, and for that matter, practically a desert. A bit larger than the planet Earth, it had a population in the millions, scattered mostly along two liveable belts near each of the poles. The rest of the planet had surface temperatures that weren’t quite high enough to make human life impossible, but they did make it miserable. All of that sun made for cheap, plentiful solar power, though. The construction company’s headquarters and shipping hub was located about three hundred miles north of a cluster of solar collectors, right at the Southern Fringe of the Northern Habitable Zone. As an illustration of the general lack of personality on the part of the city planners during Operlo’s development, those weren’t geological terms, they were the actual names on the map. The full address of the receiving building was “685 East 45.5554 Longitude Drive, Southern Fringe, NHZ.” Not a community of poets.

He brought down the DAR in the shipyard which, despite the fact there didn’t seem to be any workers about, seemed to be a fairly popular destination. Virtually all of the dusty, concrete landing pads were occupied by ships that looked a little too new and a little too expensive to be parked at a sun-bleached construction site. An automated system latched various mooring lines in place, but for the moment, Lex wasn’t interested in going anywhere. The sun beating down on a dusty landscape covered in scrub grass and twiggy trees was blinding. Already he could see the wavy shimmer of rising heat coming off of the fuselage. The external thermometer read 153 degrees Fahrenheit. All he had to wear was his flight suit, which he was wearing now, and that cheap outfit he’d picked up in Lon Djinn. Neither was really appropriate for a desert. That was the trouble with globe hopping. You never seemed to have an appropriate wardrobe.

After a few minutes, a hover cart with a sad little canopy started to kick up dust as it approached. Aside from establishing that he had run out of time to stall getting out of the air conditioning, this reminded Lex of a key aspect to his visit that he’d forgotten to work out: The actual reason for the visit. He knew why he was there, but whoever was going to knock on the window in a few seconds was going to need to know, and he couldn’t very well say, “Someone is trying to kill me, and I think someone here might know why.” As a pair of yard workers who looked like glazed hams wrapped in burlap hauled themselves out of the cart, Lex dug one of the manifests out of the brief case, stowed it, and popped the cockpit hatch.

The heat hit him like a balled up fist, and the two workers looked like they were eager to do the same. Being forced to venture out into sauna heat has a way of souring one’s attitude toward the parties responsible. The larger of the two, a gentleman with a name tag reading “Hoss” stepped up to Lex. He was wearing khaki shorts and a matching shirt. The shirt was open a few more buttons than was really socially acceptable, revealing a white undershirt with a horrifying yellow stain. The entire ensemble was sweated through, and with the addition of mirrored sunglasses, appeared to be a uniform, since his unhappy partner, “GreenMeat,” was dressed precisely the same, right down to the yellowed wife beater.

“
State your business,” Hoss said in a voice far too young and squeaky to belong to someone on the unhappy side of 350 lbs.

“
Yeah, my bosses sent me out here about some... Converters or inverters or whatever?” Lex said, squinting at the manifest in his hand, “Some electronics delivery from a while back. I’m supposed to talk to a clerk or something.”

The worker snatched the sheet, looked it over, then handed it off to his second in command.

“
Call it in,” he said.

GreenMeat pressed a finger to his ear and muttered a few numbers off of the sheet. Then the three of them stood waiting and sweating. In Lex’s case, the sweat was motivated as much by his generalized anxiety about the whole situation as it was by the heat. Finally, second banana piped up.

“
That’s one of those big projects. They say he has to talk to that second tier number cruncher in the west end,” GreenMeat said.

“
Heh! Aren’t they getting audited? Security or something? Man, do I love when the pencil jockeys screw the pooch!” Hoss said gleefully, “Okay, you see that complex w-a-a-a-a-ay on the other side of the shipyard?”

Lex squinted until he could just make out a dark patch of wavy desert heat between the rows of ships and hovercars.

“
Yeah, I think so,” he said, not entirely convinced it wasn’t a mirage.

“
Go in there, show the hardass at the desk the manifest, and ask for shipping accounts,” Hoss instructed, wedging himself alongside GreenMeat in the glorified golf cart.

“
That’s like two miles away, and there aren’t any closer parking spots. Could you give me a lift?” Lex asked.

“
Yep,” replied Hoss.

He then promptly rode the cart away in the wrong direction, laughing a greasy little laugh.

“…
Asshole,” Lex muttered.

Briefly he considered piloting the ship over to the building and just touching it down someplace closer, docking bay or no, but he quickly decided against it. It was extremely illegal, but something told him it wasn’t the police he was going to have to worry about here, and chances are that the sort of vigilante justice that would be levied upon the borrowed ship would be much worse than a fine anyway. He was just going to have to walk. After cramming everything he could fit into his flight suit’s pockets in hopes of guaranteeing he wouldn’t forget something and have to come back for it, he tied the shirt from his Lon Djinn ensemble around his head and set off.