Bypass Gemini (2 page)

“
Heh, probably,” Lex said as he walked away.

“
Wait, speaking of that ‘other thing.’ Someone left this for you.”

Marv held up a hand written 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 you, a helmet, and a few pounds of aluminum strapped to enough thrust to propel you into orbit. You 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.

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 that 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 some time 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 live stream for the GolanaNet Financial NewsFeed tomorrow at 3PM before I hop on the transport and cover my first ever off-planet news tour, culminating in 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, and at twenty-two had managed to land a job as a financial reporter for the 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. He and she had a rather final falling out after the... incident, but apparently he was still on her contact list. It may 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.

Lex checked himself over before dropping the limo down in front of the hotel to wait for his passenger. He’d woken up a bit late and had only had time to shower, shove everything from the cargo pants into the tuxedo pants, and pick up the car. Time hadn’t changed the limousine much, other than switching it from a wheeled vehicle to a hovercar. Hell, this one even had little vestigial swoops where the fenders would have been if it had still been equipped with wheels. It was mostly just a very big, very black version of what everyone else was driving, with cushier seats and bar. It wasn’t one of the stretched monsters, partially because Lex felt like they were needlessly showy, but mostly because Lex couldn’t afford one. The limo was one of the last big purchases he’d made before the bottom fell out of his previous career. He’d expected to be driven around town in it. Now he was doing the driving. As an owner operator, though, he got to keep a much bigger slice of the fee. It just meant he had to wear his own tux, too. You take the good with the bad.

He pulled down the console to look up his fare. The kind of mid-level big spenders that tended to hire him liked it when you knew something about them. It made them feel a little more famous, and that meant a much nicer tip.

“
Nicholas Patel,” Lex said to the computer.

There were thirty-five pages of results. Super. He poked around the first few. One was an investment banker. One was some sort of entrepreneur. One ran a small contracting firm on a planet in a star system in the middle of nowhere. That one had a disturbingly large stack of news stories linked to him. They all said roughly the same thing, various media euphemisms for crime lord, and the catchy nickname “Diamond Nick.”

“
Diamond Nick. How come it’s the criminals who get all of the good nicknames?” he muttered to himself, as a moving wall outside caught his attention.

When he turned to get a closer look, he realized that what had appeared to be a wall was in reality two very, VERY large men. They had the sort of build you would expect a paleontologist to be pulling out of the ground, about three hundred pounds of muscle with another fifty or so of flab for good measure. The word thug fit so well he wouldn’t have been surprised if it was one of their names. Lex scrambled to get out of the car and get the door, but a ham-sized fist grabbed the door handle and pulled it open to allow a slick, swarthy man to enter.

“
Diamond Nick, I presume,” Lex remarked.

“
Heh, word gets around,” Patel said with a grin, “Starport, please. Quickly.”

Nick was a difficult man to place at first blush. He straddled a few categories. As a crime boss, he looked the part, with a suit that probably cost more than the limo and hair styled to the point of being a fire hazard. His face was typically Indian, as his name would suggest, but his voice was completely unflavored by accent. That isn’t to say that he had an American or English or some other regional accent. He had no accent at all, the sort of diction you usually hear in newscasters and documentary narrators.

His men squeezed through the door and took a seat on either side of him, filling the spacious vehicle almost to capacity.

“
Sure thing,” Lex said, easing the limo up.

Above them a lane of traffic moved briskly along in a cordoned off strip of the sky. Lex rounded the top of the strip and merged in from the top.

“
So, what brings you to Preston City?” he asked.

“
I stopped off on this little transit hub of a planet to talk to some folks about a deal I’m looking to close. Turns out you’ve got more than just a starport. You’ve got some damn good stellar analysts. Helped me make sure I wasn’t being taken to the cleaners.”

Now that he’d spoken a few more sentences, there was a hint of slurring and informality to his speech that implied he’d been doing some imbibing that morning.

“
Sounds like you might have been doing some celebrating. I guess this deal of yours was pretty big?”

“
The god damned biggest deal of the god damned century.”

“
Nice. What kind of deal are we talking about?”

“
Business.”

“
Any specific business, or the ‘mind your own’ variety?”

“
Smart man. Say, don’t I know you?” Patel asked, stretching to look at his chauffeur in the rear view mirror.

“
I seriously doubt that.”

“
No, no. I never forget a voice. Dean, where do I know this man?”

One of the neanderthals shrugged. On a man that size it was a veritable geological event. Patel snapped his fingers.

“
I know it! Do me a favor. Say, ‘I regret my actions at the Tremor Intersystem Grand Prix’ or something to that effect.”

Lex shot the man a sharp look. Patel grinned.

“
I was right. You’re that disgraced racer, T-Lex.”

“
Congratulations,” Lex said bitterly, “It’s just Lex now, by the way.”

“
My boy, I should buy you a drink. I made a killing off of that race.”

“
You did?”

“
Naturally. The fellow who paid you to fix it was an associate of mine. He told me to put money down on number 55. I tell you it was a veritable work of art the way you worked that race. Anyone can simply not win, but to coax another racer, a specific one, into first? Genius!”

For some, it is the birth of their first child. For others it is the loss of a loved one. One day everyone will have that burning hot memory that splits life into before and after. For Lex, it had been two years ago. He’d been on a meteoric rise in the racing circuit. Hovercars, or hoversleds as they tended to be called in competition, were easily as fast as a fighter jet and, when their hover pods were close to the ground, nearly as nimble as a dune buggy. It made for an exciting and therefore profitable sport, and Lex was on the fast track to being one of its superstars. A life of fame and glory seemed like a foregone conclusion, so he decided to get a head start on the high life. Unfortunately, his tastes outpaced his career, and before long he was neck deep in debt with the wrong sort of people. The Tremor Intersystem Grand Prix looked like it was going to be his way out. If he won it, the prize money would kill easily half of his debts, and the endorsements would take care of the rest. The lowlifes he’d borrowed from must have realized that he was about to get out from under their thumb and moved up the payment schedule. When Lex couldn’t keep up, they offered a deal. The race’s long shot was some nobody driver in the number fifty-five sled. Very long odds. If that man were to win, they would consider things square. He’d pulled it off, but the racing commission smelled something foul. Eventually they proved what he’d done and booted him from sled racing. After that, no legitimate racing promotion would have him. Too much like letting a jewel thief work at your jewelry store. And going underground? He wasn’t stupid enough to try that. Careers tended to end swiftly and suddenly in those places.

“
That’s a part of my life I don’t like to reflect on,” muttered Lex.