Bypass Gemini (27 page)

“
Einen Moment,”
Ma replied.

The lights flickered one last time.

“
Volle Kraft wiederhergestellt. Jetzt versucht die Schwerkraft und den Umweltschutz wiederherzustellen.”

“
Full power, excellent. Skip the gravity and enviromentals for now. Whatever lasers are still working, get them to work helping out Lex. I’m going to need cover in a minute.”

“
Ja, Herr Dee.”

“
And work on getting English back online, would you? German makes you sound creepy.”

“
Säuberung Audio-Puffer. Bitte warten Sie
,” she said.

There was a sudden, intense screech from the speakers.

“
Audio buffalo purgatory completely. Primary language modular restoration.”

“
Still not quite right, Ma,” he said, “Do me a favor and get the big door open.”

“
Negative. Power fluctuating have causeway security clearance issues.”

“
Then shut down security for now, I need that door open.”

“
Are you surefire?”

“
Yes, and open all doors and hatches to the roof. And get me an express lift ready to take me there.”

“
Yes sirius.”

Outside, the longer Lex tangled with the drones, the tighter their formations became, and the less room for error he had. He’d only managed to take out ten of them before the shield was taking hits as quickly as it was recharging. The new and improved ship might be faster and more powerful, but it was also a huge target, and the drones were like wasps, packing more of a punch than they had any right to. Without the need for a pilot, they were basically just engines, guns, and shields. That made for a very light, very elusive target. If he didn’t make some progress soon, he was going to be left with no options but to make a mad dash and hope he could out run them.

As a cluster of the ships were aligning for an attack, a sequence of laser blasts from the roof scattered them. Sure enough, the lasers weren’t enough to do any serious damage, but they managed to cause the drones to prioritize, and in the brief confusion, he shot a handful of them down and darted out through an opening.

“
How’s the ship holding up?” Karter asked, over the com system.

“
Little busy,” Lex replied.

“
I bet. Listen. In a second, I’m going to be up on the roof. Do me a favor, and don’t let anyone shoot me. I’m going to have something volatile, and I’d like to avoid having my face blown off.”

“
I’ll do my best, but my hands are kind of full.”

“
Well your best better be good enough, because we’ve got about a minute twenty, give or take, before that ship lets loose with a shot that could probably cut a moon in half.”

“
No pressure or anything.”

“
Most office the lasers have been damages, butter I williams do what I cannon to scatter the focus of the drones,” said Ma.

“
Okay... thanks,” Lex said, trying to ignore the fact that a malfunctioning AI that couldn’t even speak properly would be firing lasers in his general direction.

A hatch flipped open on the roof, and up rose a forklift with a familiar device balanced precariously on its tines. It was the concoction he’d referred to as the magic mirror, and from the looks of it, he hadn’t been gentle with it during its removal. The ship above had been slowly maneuvering, turning on end and orienting the gaping mouth of its cannon at the surface of the planet. Karter, at the controls of the forklift, eyed it up and angled the hulking device as accurately as he could. He then threw down an old fashioned manual jack under the edge before lowering the rig to the ground.

Drones roared overhead as he crouched and put his mechanical arm to work, jacking up the end of the device until it was roughly pointing at the wrecker. He then pulled out a bundle of cables and ran to the base of a handful of broken roof lasers, hooking up to their power supplies and jacking into the crudely aimed device.

“
Okay, step one, deactivate safety devices,” he said, pulling out a hammer and smashing a small control box on the side. “Done. Now, let’s see how dangerous I can make this thing.”

Power started to flow into the device as he flipped switches and turned knobs. The current was enough to make the cables shudder and smolder. Slowly the menacing black dot began to form. Bolts of energy were peppering the roof, but the combined efforts of Lex and Ma managed to draw most of the fire. That was fortunate, since Karter was paying absolutely no mind to the chaos going on around him. His eyes were fixed resolutely on the growing back dot, an unsettling grin on his face. It wasn’t until the ship above started to produce a pulsating thump that he tore his eyes away.

“
Let’s see how that shield handles a singularity!” He announced, hammering a button on the controls.

With a crackle of energy, the refrigerator sized hunk of machinery fired the barely visible speck of black. The force of the recoil drove the rest of the machine halfway into the roof like a tent peg and launched the forklift off the edge of the roof. Almost immediately the tiny dot was invisible, but Karter closed his natural eye and focused his electronic one, tracking the trajectory.

“
Come on, come on!” Karter growled, “How’s containment, Ma?”

“
Containment holding. Guidance fieldglass holding.”

The super-dense projectile shuddered through the air under the influence of the machine’s fields, growing slightly as it went. When it struck the shield, it passed through without slowing, the marble-sized collision managing to light up and collapse half of the deflector array. The armor plating wasn’t much of a match for it either, a perfectly circular bite being taken out of it as the singularity passed through like a stone tossed into a pond. Presumably it continued to pass through the various systems and mechanisms of the Asteroid wrecker unimpeded until it struck the tube of the main weapon.

“
Disabling containment!” Karter announced, reaching down and yanking a cord.

There was a brief flash, then a clap as the black hole collapsed, unleashing a wave of energy that tore easily through the weapon, rupturing it and sending a string of explosions running through the hull.

“
Yes! YES!” Karter said, slapping the machine, “Oh, I am SO making a black hole mortar now.”

“
Did you do it!?” Lex asked, his voice transmitting out of a communicator in Lex’s arm.

“
Hell yeah I did!”

“
Then why are all of these drones still trying to kill us!?”

Karter looked up, seeming to notice for the first time that twenty or so robotic fighters were continuing to swarm and bombard the area.

“
Good question. Ma, how’s the wrecker look?”

“
41% hull integral. Running on secondary powerhouse. I am detecting missile modular activation.”

Karter growled.

“
Fine. They want to play it that way? I’m fresh out of black holes, but they’re fresh out of shields,” he said, kicking the ring from the front of the hopelessly lodged magic mirror, revealing the four particle beams, “So these suckers ought to make a dent.”

He leaned down and threw a switch on the mercifully still accessible, and still functional, control panel. All four massive weapons fired, producing a continuous beam that struck the wrecker viciously. After a few seconds, the beams burst out the other side of the ship, armor plating running like melted wax. There was no way to aim, but he didn’t have to. The automated ship was attempting to get out of the way of the beam, and in doing so only managed to drag its trail of destruction across the surface.

“
Caution, particular beam heathen levels approaching danger threshold.”

“
Just a little bit longer,” Karter said, mesmerized by the beam’s effect.

After a few seconds, the path of the beam crossed the main power for one of the engines, causing it to sputter and fail. The whole ship pitched to the side and rotated, allowing the beam to trace a neat spiral across its surface before two more engines gave out. The monster finally dropped out of the sky, missing the half collapsed armory by barely a hundred meters and shaking the entire complex with earthquake force.

“
That’s what you get! THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!” Karter crowed, stabbing his finger viciously at the downed vehicle.

“
Heathen levels criticism!”

“
Oh, right!” he said, kicking the switch open and shutting down the beams.

Without the main computer to guide them, the drones suddenly lacked the organization they’d shown before. They worked well when guided, and were capable of organizing themselves autonomously, but the transition from one to the other evidently involved an awful lot of aimless milling about, which made for easy targets. By the time they’d gotten back into an effective formation, there weren’t nearly enough to put up much of a struggle.

Lex pulled into the Lab hangar and landed the ship. Once he stepped out, he walked a wide circle around it. Despite the extended dog fight, some combination of his reflexes and the no doubt overpowered shield Karter had installed had kept his ship almost perfectly untouched. An embarrassingly large chunk of his mind had been preoccupied with keeping his ship safe not because he was inside of it and he would probably die if he didn’t, but because he JUST got it fixed and it looked GORGEOUS.

“
Not a scratch on it...” he said, in disbelief.

“
Excellence flightiness, Mr. Alexander,” Ma said.

“
Nice shooting, Ma!” he exclaimed, “That was nuts out there! And we did it! Oh, man, if you had a body, I would kiss you right on the lips!”

“
I appreciate the sentimentality,” she said.

“
Where is Karter? I need to high five someone before my head explodes!”

“
Mr. Dee is attempting to access a lowered level Labrador in accessibility section five to restoration an importance component to functionality. Many doorways and lifts are malfunctioning. I will lead you to him shortly. I mustard reboot systems affected byway the data corruption, including myself.”

“
You gonna be okay?”

“
Yes. Do note worries. I william be back to fully functionality in six minutes. Systems will become coming backward online in orders of priorities. I am lasting.”

“…
Okay. I’ll talk to you then.”

There was a crackle and beep on the loudspeaker as Ma finally dropped away to straighten herself out. Lex, with nothing else to do, decided it would be nice to get some food in his stomach. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find that cafeteria. He’d been there before. As he headed off toward the stairs, he thought he heard a door shut at the other end of the hangar.

“
Karter? That you?” he asked.

The only reply was his echo. Lex shrugged and pushed open the door to the stairwell.

Karter was several floors down, heading further. The facilities were dug deep into the planet, more than twice as deep underground as they were tall above it. Some shafts and vaults ran much, much further. The more important, more fragile things tended to be found in these areas in order to protect them from surface threats. After the collapse of the Asteroid Wrecker, half of the elevators were out of operation, and power was spotty, so the inventor was reduced to using the stairs.

“
Stairs,” he muttered to himself, “What am I, a caveman? This is f-”

He was interrupted by a siren and spinning red warning light.

“
Ma! What’s that all about?” he complained.

There was no reply.

“
Oh, right. The reboot. Security came up pretty quick.”

He entered some commands into an unseen control panel evidently installed on his false arm and brought up a Heads Up Display in his eye. It listed the status of various systems, then printed an alert.

“
Intruder alert. That’s probably Lex. Pain in the... two intruders?”

He began to cycle through available cameras. He quickly found Lex milling about in the upper levels, evidently having trouble finding his way through the building. None of the other cameras seemed to be turning up anything. Quite a few of the them were nonfunctional after the attack... but there were seven nonfunctional cameras in a row along an access corridor right above him. And now there were eight. He switched quickly to the next in the sequence and caught a distant view of a man in military dress raising a gun and firing it before that camera blacked out too.

“
Damn it!” Karter growled, hurrying down the stairs.

He quickly issued the commands to lock down all of the doors between himself and the intruder, then opened a com channel.

“
Lex!” he barked.

“
Karter? Hey, great job on the-” the pilot began, his voice echoing over the microphone of the intercom.

“
Shut up! I think your friend didn’t die in his crash, and he’s coming this way. Get your ass down here and help me.”

“
Fisk isn’t dead?! Where are you?”

“
Access Section Five. It’s on the north side of-”

There was a blast overhead as Fisk blew open the door to the stairwell. Before Karter could give any more direction, the Agent leaned over the railing and opened fire down the shaft. From the sound of it, it was a plasma rifle. Military issue, firing the vicious little beast looked and sounded like a rapid fire roman candle, a dotted stream of orange bolts hissing through the air and turning bits of catwalk into slag. Karter wisely decided that any further energy should be dedicated to getting himself as far from that weapon as possible.