Chapter 1
“What’ll it be today, T?” asked the cook.
He was more or less the stereotypical short order cook: greasy whitish apron, greasy grayish hair, greasy blackish cookie-duster mustache, and a potbelly from too much of his own greasy merchandise. The name on the apron said Mel, though it was anyone’s guess why, since his name was Marv. He’d run “Starvin’ Marvin’s Curb Counter” for about as long as anyone could remember. It was almost literally a hole in the wall, just a couple of stools and a counter carved into the side of a shopping center. It was also the only place anywhere close that took something besides credits as payment. The food wasn’t bad either.
“The usual, Marv. And call me Lex, would you?” said Lex.
Trevor Alexander was one of those people who could never get a decent nickname to stick. T, TL, Trev, Alexander--he’d tried them all, but either he didn’t like them or other people didn’t. Unfortunately, a brief and notable flirtation with celebrity a few years back had stuck him with “T-Lex,” a name so awful it could only have been conceived by the sports press. After trying and failing to shake it, he’d decided to split the difference and shorten it. Results had been mixed.
“Bowl of chili, no spoon, and a bag of chips, coming up,” Marv said.
“And hack me off a slice of that coffee while you’re at it. It’s been a long night.”
Lex looked in the mirror set into the side of the counter. His short brown hair was a mess, and his eyes, also brown, were bloodshot from too little sleep and too much of Marv’s coffee. He was also still wearing his courier gear: a red T-shirt covered with his corporate logo, a messenger bag plastered with the same, and cargo pants that, while functional, weren’t terribly fashionable. A few hours of sleep and a minute or two with a comb would probably earn him the description “handsome,” or at least “rugged,” but at the moment he was trending more toward “train wreck.” Working three jobs will do that to you. It was also probably why, even though he’d been subsisting on a steady diet of foods that congealed if he didn’t eat them quickly enough, he still qualified as gangly.
His main job was as a hand courier. He made his way from business to business for same-day deliveries and such. It involved a lot of running around, and the violation of most traffic laws. His second job was as a chauffeur, though there hadn’t been much business on that end lately. Planet Golana was basically nothing but a big shipping hub. There were loads of big businesses, and thus loads and loads of white collars floating around, but most of them had their own private drivers, so that left Lex carting around out-of-towners and the slice of the economic spectrum that was too rich to be seen in a cab, but not rich enough to have their own limo. It wasn’t a big market.
As for the third job? Well . . . the less said about that, the better.
A bowl of chili, a bag of corn chips, and a plastic cup of coffee that might or might not have been in the pot for the past week were set before him. He opened the chips and used them to systematically shovel the contents of the bowl into his mouth. It wasn’t so much eating as refueling, a procedure so practiced and mechanical that he tended to use it as a time to organize his plans for the rest of the day. With his free hand, he fumbled around in his pocket, one by one dropping onto the table the various items he'd accumulated over the course of the day. Energy bar wrappers, a pack of gum, a lighter, his tool chain. Finally, he found what he was looking for.
A thin, plastic rectangle, roughly the size of a credit card, clattered down onto the countertop. It was transparent, save for a short metallic tab along one of the short edges. It was a slidepad, a device that had become so prevalent, people were practically assigned one at birth. The little pad served the purpose of a cell phone, PDA, day planner, key chain, voice recorder, wallet, game system, media player, and virtually anything else one might need in the day. He slid his finger across the screen, causing it to flicker to life. The display area extended beyond the confines of the plastic--thanks to “patented HoloEdge technology” according to the ubiquitous commercials. It baffled him that they still advertised the damn thing. It was like advertising oxygen.
After navigating some menus and tapping off a dozen or so bill reminders, he got to his depressingly empty schedule. Nothing. No dates, no parties, no jobs. A whole weekend with no work or play. The lack of work was the real problem. There were at least a dozen people and companies he owed money to, though fortunately none of them were the sort who would break his knees if he fell behind. Such had not always been the case. Again, the less said, the better. He refilled his pockets and moved to stow the slidepad as well, but Marv interrupted him by loudly clearing his throat.
“As long as you got it out, hows about you pay your tab?” he suggested, his own oil-glazed pad already in hand.
Lex sighed.
“All right. Brace yourself, though, I have to turn the wireless on,” he said.
He navigated through the menus and switched on the data connection. A half-second later and the pad was vibrating, flashing, and chiming its way through all of the missed calls, messages, and urgent notifications he’d managed to avoid that day.
“Why don’t you just leave it on, T?”
“Listen, I carry packages at unsafe speeds, I ferry celebrities around . . . and the other thing. Unwanted distractions are a no-no,” he muttered. “How much do I owe you?”
“12,800 credits.”
“What!?”
“Maybe you should pay more than once a month.”
Lex looked at the balance in his account with a grimace. Finally, he shrugged.
“Well, paying rent is overrated anyway, right?”
He waved his pad over Marv’s. Both devices flashed “Secure transaction” and scanned the fingers for authentication purposes before transferring credits directly from one bank account to the other.
“Sure is nice having you pay the regular way instead of stacks of chips like usual,” Marv said.
“Yeah, well don’t get too used to it. I need that money for the ninety-eight percent of the people I owe that don’t even take chips. See you next week, Marv.”
“You mean tomorrow, right?”
“Heh, probably,” Lex said, preparing to walk away.
“Wait--speaking of that ‘other thing.’ Someone left this for you.”
Marv held up a handwritten note. Lex snatched it and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Real subtle, Marv.”
Sticking to the side of a nearby light pole was his delivery bike. It had the same handlebars and uncomfortable seat of its two-wheeled ancestor, but in place of wheels were small, circular discs, about the size and shape of a catcher’s mitt, facing the ground. Two were in back, on the outside corners of a metal mesh cargo basket the size and shape of a shopping cart, and one was in the front, extending forward a foot or so below the bars. Technically, that should make it a trike, but bike sounded cooler, so Lex stuck with that. In days gone by, there would have been a chain keeping people from walking away with it. Now it was held to the nearest immovable metal object with a magnetic clamp. With a wave of his slidepad, it dropped to the ground. He climbed on and puttered off.
His neighborhood was a quarter of the way across town, which didn’t sound like a long way until one realized that in the era of skyways and mag-lev trains, towns tended to sprawl across several hundred miles. Particularly this place, Preston City. Just about anyone who came to Golana or left it did so from Preston. Thus, for most people, getting home on a bike would be a multi-hour ordeal. Bikes were meant for short range, low-altitude trips. Sure, they could go just as high and just as fast as standard hovercars, thanks to the lower weight offsetting the lower power, but they offered nothing in the way of safety features. It was a body, a helmet, and a few pounds of aluminum strapped to enough thrust to propel the rider into orbit. Someone would have to be a lunatic to take such a thing toe to toe with full-sized cars. Either that, or very, very good.
Lex strapped on his helmet and set off.
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br /> Twenty-eight minutes, sixty-two miles, and one stern reprimand from the police later, he was walking into his apartment, such as it was. One room, about the size and shape of a jail cell, was his combination bedroom/living room. It had a futon on one wall, a large flatscreen on the other wall, and presumably a coffee table, though that was largely speculation until he got around to cleaning off the mound of take-out boxes.
A door on the far end of the room led to the counter with a sink, oven, and dishwasher that could charitably be called a kitchenette, and from there one could reach his bathroom. It would be nice to suggest that this was a typical apartment, but, unfortunately, it was only bachelors and the chronically cash-strapped who called places like this home. Lex was currently both.
He docked his slidepad, linking it to the wall display so that he could work through the missed messages on the big screen. The first six video and audio messages all focused on either increasing the size of various parts of his anatomy or hooking him up with women who already had ludicrous anatomies. He was definitely going to have to update that spam filter. He deleted them and moved on. Next was a message from Blake, his buddy at Golana Interstellar, the starport that was more or less the reason for the whole planet.
“Hey, T-man. Listen, there’s a convention coming up before that big state of the company thing VectorCorp has planned, so I’m going to need you to, uh . . . move your . . . stuff. Oh, and I got this box here. I think it is the . . . special . . . thing. For your stuff. Get back to me.”
Blake was a friend from back in the good old days. He ran a stardock, the space-faring equivalent of a parking garage, and let Lex keep a certain vehicle there, off the books. The only catch was that he had to get it out of there on short notice if something was likely to fill his place up to capacity, which happened every now and then. The nature of the vehicle in question made Blake a shade skittish about discussing it. The package wasn’t terribly legitimate either. He’d have to take care of that sometime tomorrow.
Next was . . . uh-oh, a Detective Barsky.
“Mr. Alexander. I’ve got a message here from a VectorCorp security officer who says he’s been seeing an awful lot of unlicensed, unscheduled traffic on VectorCorp proprietary routes. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that it is dangerous and unlawful to--”
Deleted. Lex got a message like that one about once a month. The police had nothing on him, but he’d had more than a few run-ins with them in the last few years, so they liked to let him know they had their eyes on him.
Next was a group message from Michella Modane.
“Hi, everybody on my contact list. I just want to remind you that I’ll be broadcasting a livestream for the GolanaNet Financial NewsFeed tomorrow at three PM before I hop on the transport and cover my first ever off-planet news tour, culminating with the VectorCorp state of the company address in a few weeks! So make sure you check it out, I need every hit I can get! Thanks!”
He paused the video just as Michella blew a kiss. Another face from the good old days. Michella had been a friend since grade school, and a girlfriend off and on for most of that time. Since she was sixteen, she had wanted to be an investigative reporter; at twenty-two, she had managed to land a job as a financial reporter for a local news agency. It was no surprise when they decided to put her in front of the camera. She had gorgeous auburn hair that gathered on her shoulders like imported chocolate. Her striking blue eyes and radiant smile gleamed with confidence and integrity. A scattering of freckles made her seem almost approachable, while her curves made Lex glad he’d splurged on the full-definition flatscreen. They'd had a rather final falling out after the . . . incident, but apparently he was still on her contact list. It might only put him on par with her plumber and half of their graduating class, but that still put him head and shoulders above the rest of the galaxy--so, as far as he was concerned, there was still hope. He saved the message and moved on.
A handful of debt collectors, ranging from first notice to third notice, but, pleasantly, no final notices, came next. His dispatcher at the livery firm finished off the inbox with an appointment for 2:45 PM tomorrow.
Lex flicked through to the list of videos he had queued up and started sorting through. He was a few weeks behind on most of them, so he picked one at random. A half-second of load bar later and he was watching the intro to a halfway decent sitcom. It had the not-quite-right look of a show recorded in 3D but viewed in 2D. Technically, his viewer could handle holograms, but with a screen as big as his in a room as small as his, half of the action would be going on behind his head, so he left it 2D. On the plus side, it did give everything a charmingly retro feel. He didn’t make it halfway through the episode before it became apparent that Marv’s coffee was no longer sufficient for his caffeine needs. He kicked a stack of pizza boxes off of the edge of the futon, laid down, and collapsed.
Bypass Gemini Page 2
