Authors: Joseph Lallo
“
Congratulations,” Trent raved, insanity in his eyes, “You won the battle, I suppose. That broadcast is out. Nothing I can do about it. I could cut it off, but every nearby planet is getting it as we speak. A sudden cut or communication blackout would only make it seem more deliberate. But mass media is medium priority on our transmission lines, standard FTL forwarding schedule. It won’t get to Operlo or ADC-29R45 for at least three minutes. Security protocol is maximum priority. Near zero delay.”
He traced a gesture on his pad and the screens in the office changed to a status screen. One by one, lines completed.
Array Activation command transmission... Successful.
“
No!” cried Lex.
“
Yes, courier. Command sent. Non-retrievable. There is nothing that you or anyone else can do. I may go down. My company may get a black eye, but you can’t. Stop. Progress.”
ADC-29R45 Array Activation... Successful.
Operlo Array Activation... Pending.
All eyes remained locked on the final word, blinking slowly, text written in yellow. The fate of two stars and all of the life they supported hung upon one little yellow word. An insane smile stretched Trent’s face. A look of horror grasped Lex. Finally, the word blinked away one last time, and the line updated.
Operlo Array Activation... Refused.
“
What!?” he cried, clawing at his slidepad.
A security line was opened to Operlo, where it was answered by a familiar voice.
“
Patel Construction. Miss Misra speaking,” she said professionally.
“
You have received a command to activate Project Gemini. Activate it now,” he hissed.
“
Oh, I’m sorry Mr. Trent. We are regrettably going to have to delay that request for approximately one hour. You see, we weren’t anticipating the activation notice for several days, and we recently have been given cause to believe there may be a safety issue.”
“
You listen to me. You will activate that array NOW, or any contracts you have made with VC are void! Do you understand me!?”
“
Mr. Trent, I’m sure you know that a contract is a rather binding document. Even asking me to activate ahead of schedule was intended to be a negotiated alteration. We are willing to forgo that formality, but safety must come first. We managed to complete the full array ahead of schedule, as requested. An hour of time should be of little concern. Please call back at that time.”
Trent turned to Lex, now struggling madly with his whole body, a guard’s hand over his mouth.
“
You! You did this somehow! Kill him!” Trent ordered.
Before he could finish the command, Lex clenched his fist and struggled against one of his captors with all of his might. That would usually have had little effect on the massive guard who was restraining him. Then again, Lex wasn’t usually wearing a pair of Karter’s gloves. He’d activated them just before the guards had grabbed him, and their struggles to drag him out of his hiding place had managed to give them plenty of charge. His right fist continued forward, pivoting his body into an awkward, thrusting pirouette. The sudden and intense surge of motion nearly ripped his arm out of its socket, but managed to shake both of the men restraining him. One was launched against a wall, his weapons clattering to the ground. The other was sent flying toward Trent and the other guards, colliding and sending the entire group crumbling into a pile, save for a pair who managed to dive aside.
Now would have been an excellent time to escape, but unfortunately the incomplete prototype needed to recharge. Any attempts to deactivate it produced an error tone, and the now rigid cloth would not release his hand. If Lex survived this, he was going to have to remember to tell Karter to fix that. He was left struggling with a hand that moved slowly though the air despite his best effort, as though he was dragging an invisible dumpster. The two guards who had escaped their ballistic colleague were getting to their feet, guns having slid to an unknown corner of the room. Lex scrambled his feet against the floor, reaching for the stun rod of the fallen agent. The slowly charging glove slid through the air a bit faster, his other hand’s grasping fingers creeping closer to the rod. Finally he snatched it from the ground and swung wildly, connecting with the knee of the first guard. He convulsed briefly and fell to the ground. Lex swung around, as though his immobilized hand was clutching a pole, and delivered a jolt to the second guard, prompting the same response.
The glove finished charging enough to be movable a moment later, and he surveyed his options. He probably couldn’t take out all four of the remaining guards, and even if he could, the doors were all locked and the finger was destroyed. Michella had said that authorities had been contacted, but even assuming the local law enforcement wasn’t under the thumb of VC, which was a long shot, Trent was obviously insane enough for a stand off, and they were on the seventieth floor of a veritable fortress. A breath of wind rushed in behind him. He turned.
“
I can’t believe I’m about to do this again...” he moaned, dashing into the conference room and, before he could think long enough to talk himself out of it, hurling himself out the window.
The plan, what little of it there was, had been to dive into the bay. As the wind whipped past him on the way down, some key flaws began to reveal themselves. First, it struck him that a seventy story drop into the water might not be survivable. Second, that possibility may at this point be moot. Parts of the complex, it was previously stated, were directly overhanging the bay. This, it turns out, wasn’t quite one of those sections. There was a short outcrop of land, about a dozen feet, that looked like it was about to become his final destination.
While his brain queued up the customary “life flashing before the eyes,” an idea came to him. Again he cocked his fist, and again he punched at nothing, this time up and away. The device dumped its freshly recharged kinetic capacitors into an upward motion that canceled out a good deal of his downward momentum. As viewed from the outside, it would have looked like a perfect Shoryuken, except for all of the screaming and popping of joints. When it was through, the emptied capacitors slowed his fall to a drifting crawl as they hungrily drank in his inertia. For a few moments he was drifting slowly toward the ground with one fist raised, like a cartoon character holding a balloon.
The fall and dragon punch had taken him about half of the way down, and nearly over the water, but he was already accelerating again. Lex considered a repeat performance, but his very nearly dislocated right arm decided that it was time to give the left a try. He waited until he was in free fall again; the thought of what would happen to him if he fired off a punch with his left hand before his right was ready to move at full speed again was almost as scary as the thought of hitting the ground. When the time seemed right, he hurled a left hook that yanked him a good thirty feet toward the ocean, then slowed to a steady downward drift as it recharged, his body dangling below. He splashed down shortly after the gloves fully recharged... and immediately realized a final flaw in his plan, in the form of the ten kilo pack strapped very securely to his back.
He fumbled with the straps, but between the gloves, the murky water, and the hand-shaking adrenaline levels, he couldn’t manage the buckles. Finally he managed to snag the tag of a safety feature of most modern flight suits that pilots tended to scoff at, right up until they are forced to make a water landing. A quick tug inflated a pair of panels along the upper chest of his suit, dragging him back to the surface to take a much needed sputtering breath. The life vest patches were squeezed under the straps for the pack, crushing at shoulders that were already starting to swell after their sudden introduction to technologically enhanced martial arts. He managed to awkwardly snag his slidepad, which was fortunately waterproof (more or less) and punched in a few commands. He was evidently outside the wireless jamming window, because the transmission went through. A few minutes later, just as the people within the tower were beginning to gather at the windows to confirm that someone had indeed just gone past the window downwards, his ride arrived. Rising from below him, like some sort of sea turtle from the days of legend, came Son of Betsy. He popped the hatch, plopped wetly into the seat, and took it skyward. He pulled an emergency hammer from the compartment within the cockpit and punctured the floatation patches, strapped himself into the chair, and breathed a sigh of relief. The breath hadn’t even finished leaving his lungs when the ship’s sensors alerted him to approaching security vessels. He gritted his teeth.
“
Sorry boys. I’m through playing,” he growled.
Pointing his ship straight up, he pushed the thrusters to the maximum speed he could manage without completely incinerating the hull. The ships fell into pursuit, unable to do anything but match speed and fire their weapons. He drifted smoothly left and right, up and down, evading the ordinance like they were hardly a concern. As their altitude increased, he slowly ticked the power level up, gaining speed. The more daring of the pursuit ships followed his lead. SOB’s nose was incandescent now, fire dancing around the shock front ahead of his shield, but he didn’t slow. His face was a mask of determination. He was going home, and his ship was going to hold together, because he was Trevor Alexander, and flying fast, steady, and true was what he did. That was all there was to it.
As they got into deep space, he continued to dial up the speed, pushing the engines up to one hundred percent, then further. One ten. One twenty. One fifty. One seventy. The points on his sensors slowly dropped away, unwilling or unable to keep up with him. When the coast was clear, he plotted a course and switched to FTL, not slowing to let the engine cool until he was halfway to his first destination. SOB didn’t seem to mind.
“
What’ll it be, T?” asked the cook.
“
The usual, Marv, and call me Lex, would you?”
“
You look like hell.”
“
I’ve been hanging out there for the last couple of weeks.”
“
Smells like it.”
Lex had taken his time coming back to Golana. It wasn’t that he wasn’t eager to come back. It is just that spending a month terrified that someone is chasing you had a way of making you hesitant to lead them to places you are fond of. So instead he had been puttering around in his ship, flying in random loops and jukes until the MTE rations Ma had given him ran out. He left his slidepad off, watched his back constantly, and generally lived as though the government, a corporate syndicate, or the mob were after him, mostly because they probably were. Eventually, though, he decided that if they were going to find him, they might as well get it over with. There is only so long that a human being can stand washing with moist towelettes or in the no-tell motels of the cosmos.
A bowl of chili and a bag of corn chips were placed before him, and he shoveled them down with more enthusiasm than any meal he’d eaten in a long time.
“
You gonna pay me? Or is this the beginning of a new tab?” Marv asked.
“
Here,” he said, tossing the last chip of his advance on the table, “Keep it. You know something, Marv?”
“
I know lots of things, T.”
“
It is good to be alive,” Lex said, ignoring the quip and the stubborn refusal to adapt to his new nickname, “I’m heading home now, Marv.”
“
I don’t see your bike anywhere.”
“
I figure I’ll walk. I’m through flying for a few days.”
“
Got some messages for you here.”
“
Hang onto them. If I come back tomorrow, I’ll worry about them then.”
With that, he headed off for home. It was a long way, over sixty miles. Longer than he could realistically walk, but he spent as much of the time on foot as he could. He flipped the slidepad wireless on and began to sort though the messages he’d been too scared to look at before. Spam and the like were trashed. He had seventeen angry messages from his landlady, but hadn’t gotten one for the last three days. His boss at the livery garage left a sequence of messages in which he fired him and rehired him at least three times. He always was the most requested driver over there. The courier boss wasn’t quite so fickle, and had only gone so far as to warn that he was supposed to request sabbaticals, not just take them. Detective Barsky had left a few more vague warnings, threats that seemed almost quaint in comparison to what he’d been having to deal with.
Karter had sent him a pile of feedback forms to fill out regarding the performance of the various gadgets, a task which he managed to do while riding a mag-lev train until they kicked him off for not having a ticket. Ma had sent him a separate message with contact information. She was new to the idea of casual conversation, it seemed, since she’d included a numbered list of possible topics of discussion for him to choose. Evidently multiple choice was the AI equivalent of small talk. He sorted through the remaining messages, the sort of random debris that accumulates in your inbox that isn’t interesting enough to read but too useful to trash. Lots of things from lots of people. Nothing from Michella.
Next he poured through the news, half expecting to see his face and name plastered all over everything. Instead, he was practically absent. Here and there was a mention of “rumors of a masked stranger” or “an attempted suicide from the VC tower,” but little else. Not even a blurry picture of him wearing his fancy balaclava. There was plenty to read, watch, and hear in reference to his antics, though. William Trent was currently in custody, pending an investigation into his involvement and actions regarding the “Weaponized Wormhole” as the press had taken to calling it. Lex had managed to deliver the stolen file to Michella via a random computer terminal in a library on a planet he’d never been to before and never intended to go again. She’d put it to good use, picking names and places, finding people to interview. She spoke to residents of Operlo and ADC. Her name was everywhere, and her investigative skills told more of the story than the criminal investigation probably would ever have turned up. It had gotten her much praise, and caught the eye of some of the more prestigious journals and broadcast outlets. Police and press alike had asked where she’d gotten her information, but she only ever cited a “trusted source who wisely wishes to remain anonymous.” Finally he’d reached his door.