Bypass Gemini (26 page)

Above, the wrecker was near enough for the apocalyptic hum of its engines to rattle the windows of the bus. Considering the fact that the ship was still a half mile up, that spoke volumes of the raw power of the vessel. Now that it was out of the debris field, the shields dropped and a ship exited the hangar. It didn’t take long for Lex to recognize it, and thus become aware of just how screwed he was. The smaller ship, looking like a flea falling off of a wooly mammoth, was a DAR, but not just any DAR. It was the same ship that had shot him down two weeks ago. It was Agent Fisk. The vehicle drifted down to a few feet above the ground, its nose just a few yards from the bus and Karter. Solby, intrigued by the new visitor, leaped from his shoulder and began to yip and prance about.

“
Attention. You are harboring a known fugitive,” echoed the agent’s voice from his ship’s public address system.

“
Harboring my ass! He’s right there! I’m not harboring anybody. You, however, are trespassing on my land. So take your fugitive and get out.”

“
Trevor Alexander was carrying sensitive information.”

“
If you say so.”

“
You will be remanded to custody until it can be determined whether you were given said information.”

“
Nope, sorry. Look, I did your job for you. Your fugitive is locked in that bus. Realistically, I should be asking for some sort of reward, but because I’m a nice guy, I’ll let you take him for free, and I won’t even press charges for the damages you did to my moat on the way in. But that is the extent of the transaction,” Karter said, turning and walking toward the lab entrance.

“
Halt, or I will be forced to use force,” Fisk warned.

“
You’re in a ship, moron,” Karter said, turning around, “There’s nothing you could possibly use on me that wouldn’t potentially kill me, and you can’t afford to kill me, because you’re not sure where the info is or if I’ve done something with it.”

He continued walking toward the lab.

“
This is your last warning.”

Karter responded with a raised middle finger, not even bothering to turn back to Fisk to deliver it. The mad scientist must have been extremely confident in his interpretation of the facts, because he didn’t so much as flinch as a nasty sounding weapon started to charge. He didn’t even flinch when it fired into the ground, raining down shattered fragments of stone and spattering the bus with flecks of molten rock. No, it wasn’t a sound that stopped Karter. It was a sudden silence.

He turned, his face emotionless and cold. His eyes turned to a crater blasted out by the DAR’s plasma cannon. There, at the edge of it, a smoldering tuft of black and white fur drifted slowly to the frosty ground. Karter stood statue still, eyes locked on the clump of hair. His cheek twitched slightly.

“
You WILL take me seriously,” Fisk growled.

“
Ma,” Karter uttered, eyes never leaving the patch of fur, “It appears that a rather large piece of junk has made it through the moat. Take care of it.”

“
Acknowledged,” the computer replied.

The agent began to bark another command, and there was the distinct sound of weapons charging, but an instant later both were wiped out by a network of intense beams of light converging on the ship. Every single roof-mounted laser had targeted him, firing in unison and tracing lines along the hull of the ship, leaving trails of molten metal behind. A force field flicked into existence a moment later, but it only managed to hold off the lasers long enough for the ship to fire up its engines and try to escape. When the shield collapsed, the lasers sliced into one of the engines, sending the ship spiraling off course. It arced up over the roof of the lab and corkscrewed to the ground somewhere behind with a sound of screeching metal.

“
Come on,” Karter said, disengaging the lock and letting Lex out of the bus.

“
Thanks for coming to your senses and doing the right thing,” Lex said, shaking his hand.

“
Shut up. We’ve got a job to do.”

“
What do you mean? You took him out, and there’s no one on the wrecker. We’re safe, right?”

“
Seems to me that Agent Fisk was a pro. If he’s anything like me - and judging from the fact he wanted you dead, he’s a lot like me – then he would have put a dead man switch on that sucker hanging over our heads in the event he was taken out of commission. Any second now it is going to wake up and do something unpleasant.”

“
Wait, what’s going to hap-”

The rest of the sentence was lost in a rush of sound as the whole of the complex was bathed in red light. The ground shook and a deafening roar split the air as a ring of weapon mounts around the rim of the wrecker decided to show Karter what REAL lasers look like. Beams of coherent light five feet around marched steadily across the landing ground, slowly working toward each other. Rather than succumbing to the moth-like urge to stare into the source of the light, Lex instead ran desperately toward the lab entrance. It slid open and he and Karter rushed inside. The doors stopped halfway, but Karter pulled open an access panel and cranked them shut.

Even with the doors closed the sound was too loud to speak over. The lights in the lab were flickering weakly, emergency indicators over stairwells and exits blinking on. For thirty seconds, both men simply stood and endured the quaking earth. Then, as quickly as it came, the sound and shaking dropped away.

“
Ma! Damage report!” Karter ordered, marching down the hallway with purpose.

“
Partial collapse in the arm-arm-arm-ory-ry. Primary Power coup-up-uplings severed. Wide-ide-ide spread power fluctuation-tion-tion-tions. Affected Systems: Light-ighting, Environmentals, Gravit-vit-vitation, Securit-rit-rity. Attempting to restore power by re-re-re-re-re-re-...routing through secondary,” the computer reported, voice files stuttering at random, “Also, I appear-pear to be malfunct-unct-unctioning-ning. How very distressing. Initiating self-diagnosis-nosis-sis-sis.”

“
That doesn’t sound good,” Lex said anxiously.

“
Data bussssssssss corruption found. Reboot recommended.”

“
Not yet, I need you awake for now. That thing is going to shoot at us in about eight minutes,” Karter said, hurrying down the hall.

“
You mean shoot at us again, right?” Lex said, keeping pace.

“
No, that was just the targeting laser.”

Lex stopped.

“
What...”

“
It painted a cross hair on the complex. The actual weapon is going to be a little more exciting when it goes off. We should probably try to stop it before then, because we won’t be around afterward.”

“
Well... well can’t Ma just shoot it down with the lasers?”

“
Those are for pushing debris around and zapping turds. Any half decent shield will shrug them off. If we hadn’t sucker punched Fisk, they probably would have had trouble with him.”

“
Approximately half of our lasers have been damaged-aged-aged or destroy-troyed in the targeting las-las-las-las-las-as-as-as-sssssssssss... speech module malfunction, activating alternate speech modules.”

“
Yes, fine, we get the point!” Karter snapped.

Suddenly an explosion rocked the building.

“
What NOW!” Karter growled.

“
A
viones de ataque han sido desplegados,”
the computer alerted.

“
What?!” Lex moaned.

“
Attack drones. Lex, I’m going to need you to get out there and try to deal with them. Aren’t you glad I rigged up some sneaky weaponry on your ship?”

“
Me? Get out there? What are you going to be doing?”

“
Trying to scrape together a weapon to take out that wrecker before it knocks the planet out of orbit.”

“
You mean you have all of this crazy crap and you don’t have any weapons?!”

“
I’ve got enough weapons to overthrow a world government, but they are all over in the armory, which is the first thing they went after.”

“
So you put ALL of your weapons in the same place!?”

“
Knowing what you know about me, do you think it would be wise to have weapons readily available?”

“…
No, I guess not.”

“
Right, so get down to the hangar, and quit wasting my time!”

Lex ran toward the elevator, but considering the fact the lights had yet to be restored, it seemed like too much of a gamble to trust it. Instead, he threw open the doors to the staircase and bounded down them, skipping as many steps and hopping as many banisters as possible. About half way down, the lights finally stopped flickering.

“
P
arcial de energía restaurada.”
 

“
I don’t speak Spanish!” Lex exclaimed breathlessly.

“
T
eilweise Power restauriert.”
 

“
I don’t even know what language that is!”

“
D
eutsch. Sie sollten sich überlegen Erlernen weiterer Sprachen.”
 

The monolingual pilot ignored the statement and kicked open the doors to the repair bay, throwing open the hatch and climbing into the cockpit of his repaired ship.

“
Öffnung Hangartore kaufen. Viel Glück, Herr Alexander.”
 

“
Whatever you say, Ma.”

The instant Lex was in the seat – which was the same fancy model that had been in the DAR, he would have to thank Karter for that – he felt the panic start to subside. He was still scared out of his mind, but this was a ship. This was HIS ship. It was the one thing he was good at, the one thing that he didn’t have to think about. His fingers found their way to the appropriate switches, powering up systems, adjusting straps. Tweaking, tapping, testing. When the systems were ready, he juiced the throttle.

Karter did good work. The acceleration was astounding, multiples of what old Betsy had. He put some distance between himself and the swarming drones and pulled a hard turn. The ship was as nimble as it was fast. It left his old one in the dust. And yet... Perhaps it was because he’d reused some components, or perhaps it was some engineering mojo that he would never understand, but somehow this ship FELT like Betsy. It was something in the rattle of the engine, in the hum of the electronics. The body of Betsy was dead and gone, but the soul was still kicking.

A moment of thought dredged up the procedure necessary to get his “gun” functional. When he held down the release and flipped on auto-lock, all of the little moving dots on his ship’s sensors were suddenly updated with ranges and estimated hull integrities. He popped a stick of gum in his mouth, wrapped his hands around the controls, and grinned.

“
Let’s do this.”

Lex led his new ship into battle, its new and improved shield kicking on automatically. A quiet voice in his head felt it was necessary to point out that he’d never once been in a dog fight, nor had he done any training. He silenced it. Flying a ship was all about getting it to go where you want to go and do what you want it to do, and he’d always been able to do that. Besides, he’d had to avoid being shot before. The only difference this time was that he could pull a trigger every now and then. A lifetime of video games had gotten him ready for that.

The drones were everywhere. His computer claimed that there were forty, and he was in no mood to count them personally. The things looked less like spacecraft and more like some sort of mechanical insects, thrusters, sensor nodes, and weapons fused into a spindly, gangly mass. As soon as he was nearby, they stopped assaulting the lab and started targeting him. The in-ship safety systems started their usual litany of warnings, but he tuned them out. After a quick glance at the new options present on the tractor beam menu, he quickly selected “Auto Target: Best Target” and “Auto Fire: Enabled” from the appropriate menus and picked a drone.

Despite the substantial upgrade he’d gotten in terms of hardware, the drones were far more agile. It took all of the reaction time and steering nuance he could muster to get behind one, and by the time he did, three more were heaving shots at him from all sides. He kept at it, sweeping close to the buildings to clear away swarms and nudging his ship out of line of fire until finally the modified tractor beam did its thing. The sound was like an angry jackhammer, flipping alternately between attract and repel at a devastating frequency. In a few seconds the shield of the targeted drone suddenly failed, and a moment later the craft literally rattled to pieces.

“
Yeah!” he cheered, but his celebration was cut short when a pair of plasma bolts slapped against his shield, knocking it down to 75%. If he was going to survive this, he was going to have to be VERY careful.

A trio of ships swept down in front of him, but he cranked up the speed and twisted the ship’s belly toward them. The beefy shield and extra mass of his vehicle tore through them like tissue paper. From above there was a volley of shots, but he angled the ship between them, then opened fire on his opponents, taking one of the ships out and clipping another before having to dodge another salvo from above. Racing and freelancing instincts slowly began to find their niches. Reflexes honed to take advantage of passing opportunities started to adapt to firing opportunities. Skills used to identify safe paths through asteroid clusters found use in zipping through ship attack formations. Everything was falling into place. The question was, would it be enough?

Inside the lab, Karter was moving as quickly as his piecemeal body would allow, fetching reels of cable, connectors, and jacks.

“
Ma, how are we looking on power?” He asked, glancing at a watch.