Authors: Joseph Lallo
Lex took the ship in close, just outside the fringe of the junk cloud, and let himself drift along for a while, dumping heat from his engines and deciding what course would get him back on track the fastest. While he did, he flipped the slidepad back on to pull in his messages and net content. It finished almost immediately. Evidently the junkyard had a much better network connection than the diner. Go figure. He was still reviewing the list of news and messages when the computer blipped to let him know that another ship had entered the system. Probably one of the haulers with another load... Though it was awfully small for a hauler. In fact, it was just about the same size as-
“
This is your second warning, Mr. Alexander,” the voice of Agent Fisk droned.
“
What the- How the- How did you find me?!”
As an answer, the Agent’s face flicked onto the com screen. Video messages had to be authorized, but considering the fact that this guy had managed to find Lex with the whole universe to hide in, cracking some minor security didn’t seem terribly impressive. The face that stared back at him was an intimidating one. He was built thick and muscular, dirty blond hair sheared into a military cut, the first few strands of gray beginning to thread through it. He had severe brown eyes, the kind you’d expect to see lining up the sights of a rifle in a firing squad. He wasn’t smiling.
“
I am a VectorCorp Agent. You are using VectorCorp Communications equipment and infrastructure. We know who you are. We know where you are. Always.”
Lex looked at the little orange and white VC logo on his com system and palmed his face. It wasn’t that he’d had a choice. There literally wasn’t another company that would provide communication service where he needed it. It was just that he was stupid and cocky enough to flip his data connection back on so soon after a run in. Officially, they didn’t monitor and track individuals via their transmissions, but officially they didn’t fire plasma and missiles at people they didn’t have any proof against either. Deep space was great at keeping things off the record.
“
Third and final warning. Surrender your illegal package and be escorted to the nearest criminal processing facility to be fined and sentenced.”
“
Well, I guess I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
The smart thing to do would be to give up and follow orders. True, he was not technically, at the moment, breaking the law. In the few minutes at the beginning of his flight when he was in VC controlled space he was, and in the final few minutes when he entered it again, he would be, but right now he was in the clear. They had no proof of the brief moments of criminality. Thus if he DID get away, though he would look suspicious as hell, there would be no legal action that could be levied against him. He considered his next course of action. The consequences of giving in right now would be a fine that would bankrupt him, a probable permanent suspension of his interstellar flight license and thus livelihood, and a black mark on his record. The consequences of trying to get away and failing were either a bigger fine and jail time, or else a fatal crash. Lex popped a fresh stick of gum in his mouth, cranked the engines back up, and dipped down into the cloud of debris.
Like he said, he didn’t really have a choice.
It quickly became clear that navigating the mess of wreckage and trash was nothing like the Briar Patch a few minutes ago. There was literally no way to avoid hitting at least some of the smaller stuff. His weak shields were constantly glittering with their own little fireworks display as he jostled his way through clouds of gravel-sized junk. It was like flying through a hail storm, only the hail stones are made out of high density tungsten and moving at orbital speeds. Larger slabs ground against each other ahead of him, rebounding just enough for him to slip through.
If he’d had the brainpower to spare, right about now Lex would have been doubting the wisdom of entering this death cloud rather than just taking his sentence like a man. As it was, every spare cycle of his brain was busy plotting the trajectories of half a dozen hunks wreckage, trying to figure out if the gap between them would be big enough to squeeze through by the time he reached it. Normally this was the sort of thing a flight computer would do for him. Unfortunately they were designed to KEEP you out of situations like this, not GET you out of them. Thus, his very expensive, top-of-the-line nav system had decided the best course of action was to flash a seizure-inducing array of warning lights and blare out an annoying siren right when he most needed to concentrate.
Things only got worse the lower he went. The wreckage got bigger and more plentiful and the swarms of nuts and bolts got denser. The shields were now shimmering with a pretty much constant and uniform glow. He’d never seen them do that before. A moment later the glow abruptly stopped as the shield generator finally overloaded. Now the flash and sparkle of deflected debris was replaced with the slung-gravel clatter of metal on metal, little nicks and gauges appearing each place a fragment struck his ship. He should have been terrified, and a large part of him was. Another part, one tucked deep underneath the sea of adrenaline and panic in his mind, was reveling in the thrill of it. Steadily the noise of the alarms and the flash of the lights started to fade into the background. Navigation slipped from his conscious mind to his reflexes. He found himself in a groove, a zen-like union of man and machine that he hadn’t felt since his final days on the race track. He nudged himself deeper and deeper into the debris field, drawing closer to the atmosphere and its clear sky below. Amid the clatter and crash of detritus against his hull, there was a voice warning him to pull out, but he ignored it. There was nothing in the universe but himself, his ship, and the challenge ahead.
Actually, there was one more thing. A maniac VectorCorp agent firing plasma bolts at him from the safety of high orbit.
That took him back to the start of the crash. It was either 58 seconds or 97 minutes since then, depending on your frame of reference. He’d watched a pair of additional plasma bolts drift by outside the ship. At normal speed they were just brilliant points of light that you tried desperately to avoid. From his current point of view they were fluffy purple-pink clouds that just happened to convert anything they touched into a cloud of vapor. None of them came close to hitting him before scattering against an orbiting lump of metal. That was nice, since the only thing his safety system would do was slow it down, and chances are that something that would melt his face off at a thousand miles per hour would still melt it off at ten.
The debris was behind him now. That was the good news. The bad news was that there were only a few seconds of timeshift left, and a hell of a lot of free fall. As the last hundredths of a second started to tick down, he made sure that everything he was going to need after the crash was strapped to his person. He clicked the seat harness off so that he could move around more freely, and went to work. The metal briefcase was the first to be locked down. If it had cost him his ship, he was damn sure going to get it there. It was a matter of pride now. The only other thing inside the bounds of the emergency shield was the box he’d picked up from Blake’s. He couldn’t quite remember what was in it, but he might as well bring it along.
He’d only just gotten it strapped on when time came charging back with a vengeance. It had been difficult to tell in slow-mo, but the ship had gotten itself into a pretty vicious spin. That presented a number of problems. First and foremost, he couldn’t safely eject while it was spinning like that. There was a second consequence too, which he hadn’t anticipated. The inertial dampener must have been hit at some point, because when time came back, it brought centripetal force with it. The rotation threw him out of his seat and pinned him painfully against the force field for a moment or two before he hauled himself back into the seat. He buckled himself back into the harness and made a mental note to never, ever unbuckle it during a flight again. He then pulled up the auxiliary controls and gave them a try. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of functionality left in old Betsy. There might be one engine left that was still running and had controls intact. One or two of the maneuvering thrusters was still working, too. That would have to be enough.
A little of trial and error and an awful lot of finesse took the ship out of its death spin. The ground wasn’t as close as he’d expected. Gravity must have been a little weak here. A little more fighting got the ship oriented generally upright, and the time came to say his goodbyes.
“
Well, girl. We had some good times, but this is where we part ways,” he yelled over the rush of wind and rattle of broken machinery, patting the arm of the chair one last time before hammering the eject button.
Nothing happened.
He hammered the button a few more times, because that’s what you do when technology fails you. It had roughly the same result it always did. That is to say, none at all.
“
Come on, babe. It’s time to let go,” he said nervously.
There was a groan of jammed clamps, then more nothing. The ground was getting a lot closer now. With very few options, and zero time to come up with anything intelligent, Lex was forced to desperate measures. He unbuckled again, reached behind the seat to snag his Extra Vehicular Activity pack, strapped it on, and grabbed onto the broken frame of his view window. Getting through the mangled mess of broken glass and twisted metal would have been tricky in any situation. Doing it with two bulky cases and a backpack, all while plummeting in a barely controlled nosedive added an extra challenge. One final heave tore him free and instantly he was caught by the wind and torn from the roof of his ship. Shaking fingers found their way to the panel of his EVA pack, and he activated its jets.
Jet packs were a fairly common thing these days. Engineers had not yet had any luck making them particularly safe, but they were cheap, fast, and exciting. In a way, they were the next logical evolution of motorcycles, and thus popular with thrill seekers. There were models that were capable of hours of flight time, the maneuverability of a bird of prey, and more than enough speed to give you windburn. This wasn’t one of those. The jets on his back were the kind intended to move you around during a space walk. At full blast they had about as much thrust as a couple of garden hoses. Had his ship been disabled in space, like 99% of freelancer ships are, this little baby would have been perfect. In an atmosphere, with a planet pulling him down, it was next to useless. All he could do was keep the nozzles pointed down and blazing, and hope that their push and the planet’s weak gravity would be enough to make the fall survivable.
Wind whistled past his helmet as he fell. The landscape drew closer and closer. As it did, he scanned madly for something that would break his fall. There was nothing. The surface of the planet was an endless gray moonscape, pockmarked with craters and scattered mounds of wreckage and slag. No convenient mound of cardboard boxes. No building with nice flimsy awnings. Hell, even though wispy clouds high up the sky suggested there must be rain at least occasionally, none of it had seen fit to accumulate into so much as a pond. The jet pack was slowing him down, but not quickly, and not nearly enough. If he didn’t come up with an idea soon, he was going to splash when he hit whether it was in water or not.
Nearby, a wrenching metallic screech erupted as the mooring of one of Betsy’s engines tore loose and she went into a series of screaming loops. At least he knew that abandoning ship had been the right decision. He watched the trusty vessel draw pale blue spirals in the air above him for a moment before tearing his eyes away from the sight to try again to find something that might slow his landing. There was a jagged peak below that dropped off into a steep slope. With no better options available, and time just about up, Lex guided himself toward it. Jets worked a lot better if they had something to push off of. If he could match his descent to the slope, the additional lift might take him down to some velocity not likely to leave a crater.
The peak shot up beside him, and where there had only been icy sky there was now a sheer wall of stone, blurred by speed. Gradually he nudged himself closer to the wall, then turned his jets toward it. The exhaust washed against it and he felt his speed decrease, but he also was launched away from the wall. Again the nozzles adjusted, again he edged up to it, and again he lost speed and was hurled away. Lex managed to bob back and forth, slowing his fall each time, and it was starting to look like this might actually work. It probably would have, too, if the slope had remained steady for another three or four minutes of fall. Instead, it turned just a bit gentler and he misjudged a return, bashing against the wall and damaging the jet pack.
A moderately controlled decent turned into a sliding, rolling tumble down a mountain of gravel and debris. The flight suit he wore was a lot of things. It was made of high strength synthetic fabric that was air tight, water tight, flame resistant, and acid resistant. It was not, however, padded. Even in slightly reduced gravity and his reduced speed, the fall hurt. A lot. By the time he slid to a stop on a pile of sharp rocks, he looked like... well, like he had fallen down a mountain. He waited a few minutes until it no longer felt like he had been riding in a cement mixer for the last two weeks, then assessed his situation.
The trip down the mountain had left him about half way up a sloping mound of rocks at the base of the sheer wall, which for some reason he managed to remember was called scree. Evidently the fall had knocked some of his high school geology loose. At the base of the scree was a long, wide plain with scattered dips and dents, craters of various ages and sizes. Now that he knew where he was, in a general sense at least, he checked himself over. It didn’t feel like there were any broken bones, amazingly. One particularly sharp stone had managed to puncture his suit and dig into his thigh. It was a nasty sight, but not too deep. His helmet had absorbed more than one potential concussion, and the clear visor was a spiderweb of cracks. Before he removed it, though, he had the presence of mind to check the environmental readout on his forearm. The gravity was 0.6g, the pressure was 0.9 atmospheres, and the atmospheric gas mixture was a little high on the methane and carbon dioxide, but breathable. Good enough.