Chapter 3
Lex stumbled up to the door of his apartment building. After putting the limo back in the livery garage, he had decided do some celebrating. He’d cashed in his tip at the biggest casino in town, except for one chip. After the day he’d had, a little fun was in order. He’d left his tux on (if he was going to celebrate, he might as well do it in style) and hit the blackjack table. Lex was by no means a professional gambler, or even a talented amateur, but he could make his money last long enough to get his fill of complimentary food and drinks. By the time he’d decided he’d had enough, his fifty thousand credit chip had turned into a pair of thousand credit chips, a belly full of shrimp cocktail, and about three rum and Cokes too many. Following a return bike ride filled with the kind of slow caution only alcohol can inspire, he was at his door.
With the bike powered down on one shoulder, he fumbled for his slidepad and swiped it past the door panel. The only result was a disappointing beep. He tried a few more times with similar results before he was able to force aside enough of the haze of inebriation to notice the message on the screen to go along with the sad little noise. It was not good. It was so not good, in fact, that he decided it must be wrong. He pulled up the building directory on the panel, slurred his landlady’s name, and a few minutes later was greeted by a less-than-charming voice.
“What the hell do you want?” came the voice of an aging and irritable woman.
The video on the screen was illuminated only by the light of her display, giving her face the grainy, washed out look that was so popular in the sort of videos that made the careers of porn stars and ruined the reputations of movie starlets. Picturing his landlady in such a performance nearly brought back some of the shrimp cocktail.
“Hi, Mrs. Dunne. There’s something wrong with the panel.”
“Do you know what time it is!?”
“Uh, no, actually,” he said, checking his pad. He grimaced. 11:10. “Sorry about that. Uh, about the panel though. It says I’m evicted.”
“That’s because you are evicted, Alexander.”
“Wh-what? But it’s, like,” he sputtered, checking the date on his pad, “the eighteenth. Rent is only three days late!”
“This month’s rent is. I’m still waiting for the last three months!”
“I paid April! Mostly.”
“Get off my property, Alexander,” she said, reaching for the screen.
“Wait, wait, wait!” he said, quickly tapping through a few directories and shortcuts on the pad before pressing his thumb to it, dumping the contents of his bank account into hers. “There!”
She grumbled and brought up something on the side of her screen.
“You’re still half a month shy.”
“At least let me in to get changed!”
“Oh, no. You’ll go in, grab your stuff, and I’m out half a month’s rent. The door stays locked until we’re square. I’ll consider the crap in your apartment collateral.”
The transmission cut off, and any further attempts to reach her dumped directly to a video away message, one she’d recorded two months earlier when her cat was sick that she’d never bothered to update. Finally, he gave up and flipped his bike on so he’d have a place to sit.
“Okay, Lex. You’re homeless, you’re drunk, you’re broke, and you’re wearing a tuxedo,” he assessed. “You’ve had better days.”
He considered his options, but the potent mixture of alcohol, sugar, and seafood was gumming up the works. Eventually, he settled on the same choice a thousand other drunk, lonely men had made before him.
He decided to call his ex.
For the first time in longer than he cared to consider, he had to dig deeper into his contacts than his favorites list, which was currently dominated by take-out restaurants. Eventually he found Michella. Next to her name, a short sequence of video clips silently rolled by. He watched them for a minute. Half of them were of her angrily telling him to shut the camera off. There were a few of her in her racetrack outfit. She'd wanted to be as close to the track as possible, so they'd made her an honorary member of the pit crew, complete with ad-strewn jumpsuit. The last one was her signature wink and blown kiss. Finally, he tapped her name. The wireless flipped on, causing the missed messages count to skyrocket, and a moment later the words “Establishing Connection” began to pulsate across the screen.
Lex held out the pad, raked his fingers through his hair, and tried to straighten his bow tie. He was still working at it when the feed connected.
“Trevor,” she said.
For a single word, she managed to deliver it with an impressive depth of meaning. There was a hint of disappointment, a heap of irritation, and just the tiniest speck of reminiscence.
“Hi, Mitch . . . ella,” he stumbled. He remembered just a moment too late that she hated the nickname Mitch. (It sounded too much like something else.) He’d taken to using it to playfully annoy her. Now probably wasn’t the time for that. “Been a while. I, uh, I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
There was no need to ask. He clearly hadn’t. From the angle of things, she’d answered at her workstation. She was wearing the glasses she wore in private, since she was too skittish for corrective surgery, and an old, beat-up T-shirt. On the desk beside her was a cup, no doubt filled with hot chocolate. The image brought memories surging back. How many times had he seen her like that in the evenings after class at college? The only thing missing was himself in the background, quizzing her on her broadcasting notes or wasting the night on a racing game. The visions washed over him as he stared at her face. Even without makeup, even as she would never dare be seen in public, she was magnificent.
“No, no. Working late. Actually, I was about to call you.”
“You . . . you were? That’s cool. Me, too.”
After more than a year and a half without more than an exchanged nod at the odd party or yesterday’s group message, it should have struck him as unlikely. His drunken mind wasn’t quite so skeptical.
“Yeah. You remember what I was doing today?”
His face screwed up as he rummaged through his booze addled memory.
“The . . . uh . . . The news thing! At the starport!” he declared triumphantly.
“Right, right. Well, I was going through some of the B-roll we shot, and you’ll never guess who I saw.”
“Who?”
“You.”
She made some motion off-screen and the corner of the slidepad showed video from the starport earlier that day. The camera was actually pointed at some business bigwig or something, but as she fiddled with the controls, the video zoomed over his right shoulder and there he was, in his tux, right next to the limo.
“Wow. Look at that. Am I gonna be in the broadcast?”
She sighed heavily.
“Who’s that man with you, Trev?” she asked flatly.
“Uh, that’s . . . Oh . . .”
More memories came flooding back. Not good ones. Michella had stood by him when he started slipping into debt. She’d even stood by him when he was found out for throwing the race. The last straw had been when she found out why. Everything else she could put aside, but the moment she heard that mobsters were involved, she'd exploded. And now there he was, the frame frozen in the corner of the screen showing him with--
“Nicholas ‘Nicky the Diamond’ Patel!” she hissed.
“It’s Diamond Nick, actually,” he blurted stupidly.
“Oh, well, excuse me. I’m not one of his lackeys.”
“Hey, hey. It isn’t like that. He hired the limo. He was just a client.”
“Oh, yeah, then what’s this?”
The video flipped forward a few more frames, to the point where the tip was delivered. She then zoomed in on the exchange, blowing up the video enough to clearly make out all six chips, and even read the denomination on the top one. Damn high-resolution cameras.
“It wasn’t . . . I didn’t do anything illegal for him. Well . . . not mobster illegal. I just got him to the s
tarport quick. That’s it!”
“That is it, Trevor. I . . . I’d been keeping an eye on you, you know. It looked like I might have been wrong. I wanted to be wrong, you know? The limo thing. The delivery boy thing on the side. Decent, legitimate work. I thought you’d changed.” She faltered, the tears showing in her voice before they showed in her eyes. “Goodbye, Trevor. Don’t call me again.”
The transmission cut off. He tried to reconnect, but all he got in reply was a friendly voice cheerfully informing him that “calls to this account have been blocked by request.” He flipped wireless off again out of reflex, shoved the pad into his pocket, and left his hand there. Unless he was mistaken, Michella had just managed to break up with him again without them ever having gotten back together. There ought to be some kind of law against that.
“Okay. To recap, then. I am homeless, drunk, in a tuxedo, and my ex-girlfriend, who has been spying on me, apparently, thinks I’m in with the mob again. And she knows I’m a delivery boy . . . I wonder how much drunker I can get.”
He rummaged around and pulled out the two measly chips. Now that he’d emptied out his account trying to pay his back rent, it was all he had.
“That’s not gonna do it. I gotta . . . I gotta . . .” Lex muttered before shaking vigorously to attempt to stop his head from spinning. He only succeeded in increasing the rpm.
“Okay. Okay. I need money. And I should probably try to straighten things out with Mitch. Thank god she didn’t find out about the other thing . . .”
It took a moment for the realization to push its way through the fog of rum.
“The other thing!”
He sifted through his pockets until he found the note Marv had handed him, which, thankfully, had come along with the rest of the contents of his pockets when he’d made the hasty change. After a moment to coax his eyes into focus, he read the message out loud.
“Dear Sir. Very important package. Must be delivered. Will meet in Twilight Park, Upper West Downing Street. Will discuss details. Price no object. 12:01 September 19th.”
He looked at his slidepad again. That gave him a little more than a half an hour to sober up and get to the meeting place. West Downing wasn’t too far away. It wasn’t impossible. He climbed unsteadily onto the delivery bike and set off. First step: sobering up.
Science had a nasty habit of solving the little problems first. Cancer hadn’t quite been cured yet. Poverty and hunger still lingered in the usual places. Crime clearly still existed. There might have been a long way to go on the important stuff, but the hangover was damn sure a thing of the past. Lex could stop at any corner store and find three name-brand pills and a half-dozen generics that would metabolize all of the alcohol in the bloodstream, bind up and neutralize all of the toxins, and leave him feeling like a new man inside of five minutes. He’d even pass a breathalyzer test, though cops had stopped using them a while back in favor of an on-site tox screen that wasn’t so easily fooled.
Lex managed to find a bodega that was willing to hand him a bottle of the number one brand, Sobrietin (no sense taking chances), along with a bottle of water and a comb for one of his chips. Once it kicked in enough for his usual level of ridership to be something less than suicide, he set off for the rendezvous.
He touched down in Twilight Park with a few minutes to spare. It was a fairly nice park, with expertly mowed grass, neat rows of trees, quaint benches, and a playground. All in all, it was nothing remarkable, except that it was two hundred stories off the ground, situated on a terrace of a three-hundred story residential building. They called it Twilight Park because the combination of nearby buildings and overhanging balconies meant that it only got direct sun just as the day was coming to an end. Lex picked an out of the way spot that would give him a decent view of anyone who came and left the park, and took a moment to straighten himself up. He combed his hair, stowed his bike at a nearby lamppost, and retied his bow tie. If he was going to be wearing a tux for this, he might as well look like it had been on purpose.
At precisely 12:01, an anxious-looking young woman started to make her way up the path from the entrance. He stepped into the circle of light below a lamppost, waved a gloved hand to get her attention, then stepped back into the shadows. She was like something out of a film noir classic: long white coat, matching wide brimmed hat, conspicuous brushed metal case about the size of thin stack of file folders. It was difficult to tell exactly what she looked like--the informant outfit doing an excellent job of masking her features--but she was tall and slender. The nervous energy showed in her walk, brisk and stiff. She arrived, carefully avoiding the light, and joined Lex in the shadows.
“You are the, ah, the courier?” she asked anxiously.
She had a plain face and mousy brown hair pulled back. Up close, he could see that she was perhaps an inch taller than him, and rail-thin. There was something about her that made it seem like she ought to be wearing glasses, but wasn’t. Her voice was shaky but precise, wringing every ounce of pronunciation out of the word “courier.” Everything about her screamed “academic,” as though she were a professor or librarian at a masquerade party. This clearly wasn’t something that she was comfortable doing, but she was trying her very best to play the role. She cast a wary glance up and down his wardrobe.
Lex straightened his tie. “I had a prior engagement. This is the package, I presume?”
“Yes, yes. I need this delivered, but before I agree to give it to you, I need your assurances on a number of points.”
“I’ll endeavor to oblige.”
“It is beyond important that this be delivered with the utmost of discretion. No one should know that you have it or where it is going. You should not look at the package’s contents--and, above all else, no aspect of this delivery should be made known to VectorCorp. I cannot stress this point enough.”
“That’s not an uncommon request. It is something of a specialty, in fact.”
“Yes, I know. I did a lot of research before settling on your services. You were the only freelancer on the planet with no formal citations. I wasn’t even sure if you were legitimate at first.”
“Oh, I’m the real thing.”
That Lex most certainly was. Once his indiscretions had closed off racing as an outlet for his talents, there were precious few jobs to feed his need for a challenge. The military was always looking for a few good pilots, but once they had them they didn’t do anything but show off at the airshows. The space-based combat was fought almost entirely with automated drones these days. Conflicts could rage for years without the loss of a single human life. Usually the victory went to whoever had the best production line and the best AI. Transport captains spent most of their time babysitting autopilot, too. That really only left him with the choice of freelance courier, the sort of person who carries things that for one reason or another the client doesn’t want to put into the hands of one of the big three transport companies.
“I can do the job for you, Miss . . .”
“No names.”
“All right, Miss No Name. I can do the job, but I should warn you that I’m not a fan of transporting illegal stuff. Drugs, corporate espionage. I need to know that’s not what’s in this package.”
While it was true that he preferred not to deal in such things, he’d made the statement primarily out of liability concerns. On the off chance this was a sting, or he was in some way being monitored, it would be handy to have it made clear that he at least had been told that it was on the up and up.
“No, no, nothing like that. Just something . . . private. I need the package delivered to a locker in the Lon Djinn region of Makou, Tessera V.”
“That’s a fair distance away. Any time table?”
“As soon as possible, but don’t sacrifice secrecy for speed. When can you have it there?”
Lex ran a few calculations in his head, plotting out the route, figuring the maximum time and adding a reasonable buffer.
“To keep myself out of VectorCorp’s patro
l space the whole way? Eight days.”
She chewed her lip for a moment. The time worried her. And not just the time. She was practically trembling, the case and purse clutched tightly in her hands. This was something serious, something that had her on edge. It was clear that the cloak and dagger stuff wasn’t just for show to her. She really thought it was necessary.
“I might be able to squeeze a bit more speed out of the old ship if I tune it a bit first. I could do it in six,” Lex offered.
There went that buffer. Clearly he’d made an impression, though. A whisper of tension was relieved, and she allowed herself a shaky sigh.
“As long as you are sure you can make it there.”
“I assure you,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder, “your package will be delivered safely and secretly. You don’t have to worry about it. I don’t fail at this sort of thing. Now, as for the fee.”
This was always the trickiest part. Some people wanted a private courier because they could not afford VectorCorp. Clearly this woman was interested in the privacy angle. That meant he could charge a premium. He had to select a price that would cover his expenses with enough headroom to at least get him back into his apartment and cover the bills until his next legitimate paycheck, but not so much that it would scare her away. A number formed in his head.
“I can give you 1.5 million credits. The first half-million right now and the remainder will be provided by the recipient upon delivery,” she said quickly.
“That will do.”
Her offer was at least triple what he normally charged for a high security job like this, and more than double what he’d been thinking of asking. It was all he could do to keep the smile off of his face.
“Excellent. Here is the package,” she said, handing him the case and fishing out a large envelope bulging at the bottom. “This is your first payment. The full delivery details are inside. Please, hurry.”
She lingered for a moment, looking for the life of her like she’d just handed over her first-born. Lex marched away, leaving his bike where it was. His client seemed skittish enough as it was. The visual of him taking off on the same sort of vehicle a pizza boy might use would probably make her think twice about her decision to trust him.
When she decided to move, she moved quickly, looking furtively in both directions before disappearing out of a different door than she’d entered. After a long enough delay, to be sure she wasn’t watching, he pulled down his bike and piloted out over the city.
If he was going to make it to Tessera V in six days without drawing too much attention, he was going to have to leave pretty much immediately, but that was fine with him. Might as well let the landlady stew a few days. Paying her off right when she asked might make her think he’d been holding out on her. Besides, a few days plotting out routes and listening to engines purr would be a chance to settle his nerves and get away from his troubles for a while. A trip like this was long overdue.
Bypass Gemini Page 4
