Bypass Gemini (5 page)

At precisely 12:01 an anxious looking young woman started to make her way up the path from the entrance. He stepped into the circle of light below a lamppost, waved a gloved hand to get her attention, then stepped back into the shadows. She was like something out of a film noir classic: Long white coat, matching wide brimmed hat, conspicuous brushed metal case about the size of thin stack of file folders. It was difficult to tell exactly what she looked like, the informant outfit doing an excellent job of masking her features, but she was tall and slender. The nervous energy showed in her walk, brisk and stiff. She arrived, carefully avoiding the light and joining Lex in the shadows.

“
You are the, ah, the courier?” she asked anxiously.

She had a plain face and mousy brown hair pulled back. Up close he could see that she was perhaps an inch taller than him and rail thin. There was something about her that made it seem like she ought to be wearing glasses but wasn’t. Her voice was shaky but precise, wringing every ounce of pronunciation out of the word ‘courier.’ Everything about her screamed ‘academic,’ as though she were a professor or librarian at a masquerade party. This clearly wasn’t something that she was comfortable doing, but she was trying her very best to play the role. She cast a wary glance up and down his wardrobe.

Lex straightened his tie. “I had a prior engagement. This is the package, I presume?”

“
Yes, yes. I need this delivered, but before I agree to give it to you I need your assurances on a number of points.”

“
I’ll endeavor to oblige.”

“
It is beyond important that this be delivered with the utmost of discretion. No one should know that you have it or where it is going. You should not look at the package’s contents, and above all else no aspect of this delivery should be made known to VectorCorp. I cannot stress this point enough.”

“
That’s not an uncommon request. It is something of a specialty, in fact.”

“
Yes, I know. I did a lot of research before settling on your services. You were the only freelancer on the planet with no formal citations. I wasn’t even sure if you were legitimate at first.”

“
Oh, I’m the real thing.”

That Lex most certainly was. Once his indiscretions had closed off racing as an outlet for his talents, there were precious few jobs to feed his need for a challenge. The military was always looking for a few good pilots, but once they had them they didn’t do anything but show off at the airshows. The space-based combat was fought almost entirely with automated drones these days. Conflicts could rage for years without a single loss of human life. Usually the victory went to whoever had the best production line and the best AI. Transport Captains spent most of their time babysitting autopilot, too. That really only left him with the choice of freelance courier, the sort of person who carries things that for one reason or another the client doesn’t want to put into the hands of one of the big three transport companies.

“
I can do the job for you, Miss...”

“
No names.”

“
Alright, Miss No Name. I can do the job, but I should warn you that I’m not a fan of transporting illegal stuff. Drugs, corporate espionage. I need to know that’s not what’s in this package.”

While it was true that he preferred not to deal in such things, he’d made the statement primarily out of liability concerns. On the off chance this was a sting, or he was in some way being monitored, it would be handy to have it made clear that he at least had been told that it was on the up and up.

“
No, no, nothing like that. Just something... private. I need the package delivered to a locker in the Lon Djinn region of Makou, Tessera V.”

“
That’s a fair distance away. Any time table?”

“
As soon as possible, but don’t sacrifice secrecy for speed. When can you have it there?”

Lex ran a few calculations in his head, plotting out the route, figuring the maximum time and adding a reasonable buffer.

“
To keep myself out of VectorCorp’s patrol space the whole way? Eight days.”

She chewed her lip for a moment. The time worried her. And not just the time. She was practically trembling, the case and purse clutched tightly in her hands. This was something serious, something that had her on edge. It was clear that the cloak and dagger stuff wasn’t just for show to her. She really thought it was necessary.

“
I might be able to squeeze a bit more speed out of the old ship if I tune it a bit first. I could do it in six,” Lex offered.

There goes that buffer. Clearly he’d made an impression, though. A whisper of tension was relieved, and she allowed herself a shaky sigh.

“
As long as you are sure you can make it there.”

“
I assure you,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder, “Your package will be delivered safely and secretly. You don’t have to worry about it. I don’t fail at this sort of thing. Now, as for the fee.”

This was always the trickiest part. Some people wanted a private courier because they could not afford VectorCorp. Clearly this woman was interested in the privacy angle. That meant he could charge a premium. He had to select a price that would cover his expenses with enough headroom to at least get him back into his apartment and cover the bills until his next legitimate paycheck, but not so much that it would scare her away. A number formed in his head.

“
I can give you 1.5 million credits. The first half million right now and the remainder will be provided by the recipient upon delivery,” she said quickly.

“
That will do.”

Her offer was at least triple what he normally charged for a high security job like this, and more than double what he’d been thinking of asking. It was all he could do to keep the smile off of his face.

“
Excellent. Here is the package,” she said, handing him the case and fishing out a large envelope bulging at the bottom, “This is your first payment. The full delivery details are inside. Please, hurry.”

She lingered for a moment, looking for the life of her like she’d just handed over her first born. Lex marched away, leaving his bike where it was. His client seemed skittish enough as it was. The visual of him taking off on the same sort of vehicle a pizza boy might use would probably make her think twice about her decision to trust him. When she decided to move, she moved quickly, looking furtively in either direction before disappearing out of a different door than she’d entered. After a long enough delay to be sure she wasn’t watching, he pulled down his bike and piloted out over the city.

If he was going to make it to Tessera V in six days without drawing too much attention he was going to have to leave pretty much immediately, but that was fine with him. May as well let the landlady stew a few days. Paying her off right when she asked might make her think he’d been holding out on her. Besides, a few days plotting out routes and listening to engines purr would be a chance to settle his nerves and get away from his troubles for a while. A trip like this was long overdue.

The most costly part of space travel, in the old days, had been the takeoff. Escaping a planet’s gravity well took a huge amount of energy, and it all had to be done under conventional propulsion. Ways had been found to do an end run around the laws of physics in terms of exceeding light speed without needing the energy of an exploding star to pull it off, but those methods were dangerous to do inside a star system, and more or less impossible in an atmosphere. An early and still popular method to ease the energy cost of this first step in space-faring was the invention of the space elevator. It wasn’t anything special, just a very long tether hooked up to a space station in low orbit, but it let you load-lift and haul material into space without pesky concerns about thrust and escape velocity.

Lex puttered to a stop at one of the four service tethers at Golana Interstellar. They were skinny things compared to the mighty commuter and cargo tethers, but they let the maintenance crew ferry parts and personnel to the station without interrupting scheduled trams. He shouldered his bike and pressed a thumb to the scanner. It gave a satisfying bleep and the security door swished open. Back in his racing days, Lex had done a fair amount of performance tuning on his ships, cars, and sleds. He wasn’t the best mechanic around, but he knew his way around an engine, so Blake registered him as a part timer at his garage for those times when things were getting a little backed up and he needed the extra help. One of the added benefits was free, ‘round the clock access to ‘The Upstairs,’ Golana Interstellar’s orbital section.

“
Hey, Denny. Mention the tux and I’ll slap you,” Lex said with a nod to the teenager working the security desk.

“
Hi, Mr. Alexander. Reason for tram usage?” he squeaked.

“
I need to shuttle some ships around for Blake. I’ll be taking one off planet, so it’s going to be a multi-day thing.”

“
Sure thing.”

A few minutes later a tram the size of a shipping container came zipping up from below the loading deck. Maintenance tethers were in pairs, one up and one down. It helped keep the traffic flowing when a schedule wasn’t possible. The gate released a pressurized hiss as it disengaged and he stepped inside. It was a no frills vehicle, little more than a super-sized elevator with a row of seats along one wall, and a matching one upside-down above them. A few more minutes passed while they waited to see if anyone else was going to be burning the midnight oil, then the doors closed and sealed. A control panel on the door worked its way through a sequence of safety checks. Air pressure: Nominal. Tether Integrity: Nominal. Power Integrity: Nominal. Inertial Inhibitor: Active. A pair of heavy duty electric motors whined with effort and the tram began to accelerate upwards.

If he was a first-timer, he would have been awed by the speed of it. The various floors of the maintenance building shot by in a blur of stone and metal, and then the ground was dropping away as though gravity had decided to reverse and he was now falling upward. The acceleration should have been enough to pin him painfully to the floor, but the very same thing that made the limo stunt survivable was at work here as well, doing the job it was actually invented to do. Through the sort of complex quantum physics that a science geek would spend three hours gushing over and the average person would write off as magic, a field generator inside the tram canceled out the excess acceleration, keeping the ride at a rock steady 1g. Without it, the whole ride would either be much slower, much less comfortable, or likely a combination of the two.

About a third of the way through the trip the motors approached their top speed and the acceleration started to drop, the gravity going along with it. Lex grabbed one of the hand rails scattered liberally along the walls and pivoted himself upside-down with a yawn. Artificial gravity was possible, but it was a much larger and more expensive process, so the elevator and most small ships did without. A warning light began to blink on a panel, and the readout listing motor status switched from ‘Powered’ to ‘Regenerative Breaking.’ The gravity came back, though this time on the ceiling, and he took a seat on one of the chairs that seemed so out of place at the beginning of the trip. Barely three minutes after he’d left the surface, the gravity drifted away again and the tram clicked into the docking section of The Upstairs.

“
Hey! T-Lex!” said the orbiting counterpart of the squeaky teen.

“
Just Lex, thanks. Heading to Blake’s. Ignore the tux.”

“
You said it, T-Man!”

Lex grumbled. There were a lot of people up here that he’d had semi-professional ties with back when he was a C-List celebrity, so it still came as a thrill to them when he showed up. They were having an even harder time adjusting to his fall from grace than he’d had. For the first few dozen visits it had been like having salt in an open wound to hear them ask what starlets he’d been partying with, but now it was just background noise. If zero-g and working in orbit could become humdrum, what chance did a few behind the times security guards have?

A few quick lift rides and a few minutes drifting down zero-g hallways led Lex to the employee entrance at Blake’s. The civilian sections of The Upstairs were situated at the outer rim of long, rotating rings that provided the sensation of gravity. The service tunnels and other nuts and bolts sections were stuck wherever they were needed, and thus ranged from almost normal gravity to microgravity. Blake’s was one of the places with no gravity at all, and it served his purposes just fine. Between moving heavy equipment around and having to interact with naked space so often, zero-g was more of a convenience than an annoyance.

“
Hey, Lex!” Blake said, tapping at a pad tethered to his wrist as various jump-suited employees drifted about their daily tasks around him, “Fresh from the chauffeur job?”

“
Not exactly fresh, but yeah. You said you needed me to get Betsy out of here for a few days, right?”

“
Yeah, just for a few days. The ships are already coming in. I guarantee I’ll need the dock.”

“
No problem. I have to take a trip around the corner anyway. You had that delivery for me?”

“
It is in the storage locker outside your airlock.”

“
Thanks loads, man. I just got a decent payoff. You sure you don’t want any money for this?”

“
Just make sure you get your ass up here if I get someone looking for race tuning. No one I’ve got does it half as good as you.”

“
That’s because you’re too busy taking instrument readings to actually listen to the engines, Blake. Listen to what she says, she’ll tell you what she wants.”

“
Whatever, Lex.”