Bypass Gemini

by Joseph R. Lallo

  Chapter 12

  After the customary three random jumps to make sure he wasn’t being 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 were looking hopeless, his tendency was to revert to what he knew 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'd killed the last person who had it.

  He probably hadn’t helped matters with his highly conspicuous escape just now, but . . . the last person who'd had the case was dead. When death was already the consequence, the thought of “making it worse” seemed 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’s 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. Bit by bit, he sliced through 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 would have been tremendously helpful if he were a stellar cartographer, but utterly incomprehensible since he was anything but. The information about each star was incredibly technical. Just about the only portion of it that had any sort of meaning to Lex were 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 carried with it a few other consequences.

  Some planets were named after ancient gods--or, at least, the star they orbited and a number. Operlo had gotten 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 didn’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 a
ny 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° 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 briefcase, 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 had 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 tank top.

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

  “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 were 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.

  Forty-five scorching minutes later, he stepped into the mercifully climate-controlled office complex. His skin felt positively crispy, and his boots were making an unpleasant squish with each step, thanks to the half-gallon of sweat he could feel pooling around his toes. The young Indian woman at the desk watched him warily as he stalked into the center of the room, spotted a water cooler, and practically ran to it.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she asked in a professional tone.

  “One minute,” Lex said, dropping to his knees and running the water over his head.

  When he felt as though the temperature of his scalp was no longer in the boiling range, he stood and looked to the receptionist. She was in fairly traditional business attire, though there were a few aspects of it that were a little bit outside the norm. The gray business dress hugged her curves much better than he imagined was acceptable for an office environment, and the curves were quite pleasing indeed. She had her jet-black hair pulled back in a tight bun, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses were perched on her pert little nose, a gold chain dangling from each earpiece and disappearing behind her neck.

  The receptionist’s face was nothing short of gorgeous, and held in a practiced look of professional detachment. Her dark skin and flawless features, combined with the business suit, gave her the look of an exotic goddess who had just received her MBA.

  Running a hand through his soaking wet hair and wishing he’d noticed he was dealing with a beautiful woman before he’d made a fool of himself, Lex tried to scrape together the shreds of his dignity.

  “I’m here to talk to, uh, shipping accounts,” he said, pulling the now disturbingly moist manifest from the pocket of his fight suit.

  She took the document, not for a moment betraying a hint of disgust about handling a piece of paper that had been marinating in Lex’s juices for the better part of an hour. A few gestures on her datapad--the larger, less portable cousin to the slidepad--managed to prompt the first change in expression since his arrival, as her eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch. A final gesture brought the chirp of an intercom system.

  “Mr. Hendricks to reception. Escort to waiting room six,” she said. Turning to address Lex, she added, “Mr. Hendricks will be with you shortly. He will show you to our waiting room while we consult the proper files.”

  “Sounds good,” Lex said, reaching for the manifest.

  “Mr. Hendricks will be needing this. I’ll just hand it to him when he arrives,” she said, placing the seasoned sheet of paper into a manila envelope. “May I have your name for our visitors record, please?”

  Lex froze.

  “What do you need my name for?”

  “For our visitors record,” she repeated.

  “Oh, right. That makes sense. Uh, you can call me, uh,” Lex stuttered. It suddenly struck him that by now his name might have found its way to some watch lists, and perhaps he should have prepared an alias of some kind during the several days he’d spent coming here.

  “You can record him when he exits, Miss Misra,” said a rail-thin man as he entered.

  His hair was black, and his face and accent were both vaguely European. He was wearing an immaculate white shirt with a black tie. Black suspenders held up a pair of high-quality dress slacks, and his shoes were polished to a high gloss. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing forearms so wiry they looked like they had been braided together out of rawhide. The man’s face was long, car
efully shaved, and showed a handful of noticeable scars. Topping it all off was a pair of gray eyes that stared so intensely, Lex was fairly sure he could burn a hole through a cinder block. He couldn’t have radiated “ex-military” more clearly if he was wearing combat fatigues.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Hendricks,” said the receptionist, handing the folder over.

  “This way, sir,” Hendricks said.

  Without waiting, the surly man walked crisply back the way he'd come. Lex sloshed after him. Automatic doors opened and closed a handful of times as they wound their way through half a dozen different hallways, working deeper and deeper into the office complex. As they progressed, the sterile look of scattered cubicles became less frequent, replaced instead with downright antiseptic white concrete walls.

  “Kind of a long way in for a waiting room,” Lex said, his voice echoing in the empty hall.

  “We don’t get many visitors,” Hendricks said.

  “Then why do you need six waiting rooms?” Lex asked.

  The question hung in the air for a few moments before they came to a door. Hendricks waved a slidepad over a sensor and the door hissed open.

  “Wait inside. Accounting will be with you shortly,” Hendricks said.

  Lex glanced into the room.

  “That’s waiting room six?”

  Hendricks nodded.

  “I don’t think I want to wait in waiting room six. There aren’t any magazines. Or potted plants. Or net terminals. Or windows. Or witnesses,” Lex said.

  In fact, there was nothing but a pair of wooden chairs, a metal table, and a surveillance camera in each corner. No doubt people did a lot of waiting in a room like that, but he didn’t want to think about what they were waiting for.

  “You know what? I’ll just go.”

  “Step. Inside,” Hendricks replied, slowly and deliberately.

  He didn’t say it in an overtly threatening way, but something in his posture suggested that right now, inside was the safer place to be. Lex entered the room and took the seat on the opposite side of the table facing the door.

  “Accounting will be with you momentarily,” he said, bleeping the door shut.

  For several minutes, Lex sat, quietly assessing his life. His finely-tuned instincts, which he seemed to have made it a nasty habit to ignore, were telling him to make a break for it. His common sense chimed in a moment later to point out that, ignoring the security glass, security cameras, and labyrinthine halls, the chances were very good that a two mile sprint in 150° heat would do a lot more damage than whatever these people might have in mind . . . probably. So he waited and tried to plan out what he was going to do.

  The wait lasted long enough for the sweaty flight suit to dry into a greasy, uncomfortable mass of synthetic fabric. Finally, the door hissed open without even a hint of approaching footsteps. The room was soundproofed. That wasn’t a good sign. Through the door stepped a large-ish woman in frumpy business casual. She had a nervous look on her face, which was no doubt largely due to the fact that whoever had sent her had felt she needed two meaty escorts, both men, both the sort who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a natural history exhibit.

  “Yes, hello, Mister . . .” she said, tucking a datapad under one arm and extending the other for a shake.

  Lex briefly considered giving her an alias, but it was pointless. Any system with a camera and a decent network connection would be able to face-match him in thirty seconds anyway.

  “Trevor Alexander,” he said with defeat. “Call me Lex.”

  “Lex. Okay. I’m Ms Morris. I’m a supply and stock manager. I understand you have a problem with our inventory?”

  “Yeah. I was asked by my superiors, who know that I’m here and will be expecting a report,” he said, eying a camera, “to follow up on some items they had delivered.”

  “May I ask who your employers are, and what they suspect may be the problem?”

  Lex closed his eyes and tried to remember what had been on the sheet he’d handed over.

  “That would be the . . . Triptech Dynamics. And they had a batch of . . . rectifiers they were worried about. Something about too many of them being delivered.”

  “Triptech Industries, you mean? And inverters?”

  “Probably. Listen, I’m an independent agent. They send me around to do this so they don’t have to. I’ve got like forty clients,” he said, tapping his foot nervously.

  Ms Morris tapped at her pad.

  “Here we are. The shipment of inverters you’ve got circled on your manifest here was accepted on February 26th. Three dozen high efficiency, low resonance inverter assemblies. That is the proper amount, I believe,” she said, flipping the pad in his direction.

  He glanced down at it.

  “Yeah, so it says, but I need to see them. You know. Count them.”

  “The shipment was signed off by both parties. I assure you, there was no mistake.”

  “Well, that’s all well and good, but I still have to look at them. The bosses said that the shipment you got might have had some defective units.”

  “I was unaware of any recall being issued.”

  “Yeah, there wasn’t. It was a very small batch. Just a dozen or so. I just need to take a look at the ones we delivered.”

  “Well, I think you’ll find that the serial numbers are included in the receipt. You can just check that against your recall list.”

  “No, no, I can’t, because there is a secondary run number on the inside of the casing. That’s the one I need.”

  Ms Morris eyed the pad before her, flustered.

  “Sir, I’m afraid that is impossible. That shipment was months ago. Most of the inverter assemblies have already left storage for installation.”

  “Well, then I’d say it is pretty darn important you let me go to the site and make sure they aren’t going to overload, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Why didn’t you just wait and include this in the final pre-activation security audit of the Gemini Project tomorrow?” she asked.

  “That will be all, Ms Morris,” squawked the intercom.

  She quickly stood and left the room. The meaty cohorts remained. A moment later, Mr. Hendricks returned.

  “Richard, Howard. Empty Mr. Alexander’s pockets, please.”

  “Whoa, hey, hey! That’s an invasion of privacy!” Lex said, standing up fast enough to fling the chair behind him.

  Before he could take another step back, one of the neanderthal attendants grabbed his wrist and wrenched it up along the small of his back until his shoulder made an unpleasant noise, then shoved him forward, smacking his face against the table with a sound like raw chicken hitting the butcher’s counter.

  “No, Mr. Alexander. I’m afraid it is you who is invading privacy, and we are paid quite well to see that the affairs of our clients remain secure,” said Hendricks.

  One by one, the pockets of Lex’s flight suit were emptied onto the table. This ended up taking quite a while, thanks to the sheer number of pockets and the fact that he had crammed everything he owned into them before leaving the ship. By the time they were finished and released his arm, there was a mound of food wrappers, scattered poker chips, his slidepad, and various other personal debris.

  “Who do you work for?” Hendricks said, taking a seat and beginning to sort through the pile.

  “I’m not working for anyone. You are reading way too deep into this.”

  “You know that someone matching your description is wanted by most civilian law enforcement agencies due to an intellectual property theft charge by VectorCorp, I presume.”

  “Intellectual property theft? That’s what they’re after me for?”

  “Yes. And now you’ve come here attempting to gain access to our inventory and construction sites for the Gemini Project, and you claim we are reading too deeply into it?”

  “Look, I don’t even know what the Gemini Project is!”

  Hendricks investigated the crab candy bar with a raised eyebrow before unearthing
a small piece of card stock.

  “And you won’t find out, because . . .”

  He stopped short, inspecting the card closely and casting a doubtful glance at Lex. Finally he snapped his fingers and motioned for the henchmen to leave the room. He followed them, locking Lex in his painful gaze for a moment before shutting the door.

  “O-kay, then,” Lex remarked, rubbing his manhandled shoulder.

  He returned the crab candy and slidepad to his pocket, along with anything else he felt like hanging onto, then swept the wrappers and garbage onto the floor as an act of protest. They might break his thumbs or whatever it was that shady criminal syndicates did, but they were damn well going to clean up his peanut butter wrappers, too.

  Another few minutes passed before the door opened again. When it did, it revealed a man with a polo shirt, dress slacks, and a billion-dollar smile.

  “Mr. Alexander!” said Diamond Nick, like a man welcoming a friend from college. “Come to see me about that job offer?”