Bypass Gemini (34 page)

A glance in his rear viewer assured him that the ships had wrangled themselves into a staggered line behind him, each trying with varying degrees of success to simultaneously get close to Lex and keep away from each other. While his ship was blacking out communications, though, it was virtually impossible. The thin metallic passageways that made up the space station whipped by with horrifying speed. With each one, Lex found himself both fearing and praying for one of his followers to smash into it. The goal here was to KEEP people from getting killed, after all. Was it acceptable if a few security guards and a few port workers got killed in the process of saving hundreds of thousands of other people? What was the moral balance? Lex probably wasn’t qualified to answer that question even when he had his full mind available to consider the issue. As SOB clipped a transmission array, knocking it loose to be dashed apart by the growing trail of pursuing ships, it became clear that philosophical debate should probably wait until he wasn’t running for his life.

The first wisps of atmosphere were beginning to whistle across this ship’s surface now. Wisely, the port of entry was geostationary over roughly the center of the largest of Verna Coronet’s oceans. The idea was that, if something went wrong, there probably wouldn’t be a city at the point of impact. This also meant that those ships behind him could open fire without worrying about hitting a skyscraper full of white collared executives. Sensors screamed warnings as Lex took evasive action. He twisted, bobbed, and twitched the ship, looping around volleys of plasma bolts and trying to aim roughly for the mainland.

It wasn’t just a matter of speed. In the atmosphere, wind resistance was already starting to heat up the hull of his ship, regardless of his shields. He couldn’t afford to push it any harder, and the well funded VC security force was equipped with ships that could easily match his current speed. This was going to be pure evasion, and it was only going to get more difficult, because the space station was out of range of his jamming, which meant that word was now reaching every available ship and hovercar to head to his position and take him down. The air was thick with hissing plasma shots, ships all carefully clustering on one side to be sure that they wouldn’t catch friendlies in the crossfire. Bolts splashed against his shield, but Lex kept on target, making each dodge and sweep take him closer to the continent with the HQ.

More ships arrived, and formations and flanking maneuvers began to form regardless of the lack of communication. These guys were good, the best training money could buy. If he let them stay on him for much longer, no amount of fancy flying would get him out of this alive. Time to pull another ace out of his sleeve. He dipped down, sweeping into the thicker atmosphere. His hull started to glow with air friction, but he continued to push the limits of his ship, slowing only as much as necessary to keep from collapsing his shield entirely. The ships began to cluster behind him, opening fire freely now with only open water below. Shield integrity warnings blared at him. His protective force field was in the single digits and ticking steadily down as it was pelted with air molecules at supersonic speed. Finally the pursuit ships were gathered into a tiny slice of the sky, directly behind him, and near enough to make dodging their weapons fire nearly impossible. Now was the time.

He punched the button for the heat dumper, activating one of Karter’s other countermeasures, an EMP burst, targeted to the rear. The electronics systems of the pursuit vessels lit up like a dozen slot machines, rogue electrons suddenly confusing signals and corrupting data streams. Controls were useless, along with weapons, communications, engine electronics, and basically anything else that used complex computations. Without continued thrust they quickly slowed to terminal velocity as gravity took over as the driving force. Lex pulled up and hissed along the surface of the ocean, scooping out a deep furrow in the water below and leaving an epic wake behind. The ships behind struck the water one by one, like a handful of gravel hurled into a well. Mechanical safety systems worked their magic with air bags, magnetic fields, impact foam, and all of the other hocus-pocus that engineers had managed to come up with to keep the human brain from becoming scrambled eggs during a high speed impact even when the computers were on the fritz. Water hissed to steam in contact with the hulls, men slowly came to their senses and tried to make sense of what had happened. When all was said and done, the nearly three dozen ships on Lex’s tail had been reduced to three stragglers that were too far away to get the full brunt of the EMP.

They began to close in on their target. The shore was in sight now. Time was running out for them, so desperate measures were called for. The more vicious weapons began to come online. Missiles dropped into launch tubes, the heat signal of the invading ship identified and locked, and they were launched. Lex looked at a string of threatening white dots with rapidly decreasing range indicators as they closed in. A waggle of his stick and pivot of the ship shoved his shields momentarily below the surface of the sea, heaving a wall of water up behind him. The delicate warheads smacked into the water at many multiples of the speed of sound and detonated, but no sooner had they been dealt with than a new cluster were on their way, and there simply wasn’t enough shield left to do a repeat performance.

The shore was close now, close enough for seagoing traffic to start flashing by. Huge tankers, little pleasure crafts, and a cruise ship or two came and went. Lives were in danger now. Innocent lives. Lex held his breath and gave the controls a shove. There was a flash of light, and a sound like a meteor tearing into the surface of the planet.

From behind, the three remaining ships watched as the missiles unleashed their payload amid a veritable geyser of water. When the surface settled, there was no sign of the ship they’d been after.

“
Report! Report! Is the target eliminated?” a voice over the radio demanded.

“
Weapon impact detected. Unable to confirm positive kill,” came a reply, “Ship struck the ocean surface.”

“
Perform sensor sweep.”

“
Sensor sweep in process. Results inconclusive. We aren’t getting anything sir, positive or negative. The water could be masking the signature.”

“
Continue with the deep scan. Get rescue vessels over to pick up the other ships. Full medical complement.” With the crucial points covered, the mechanical following of protocol dropped away and the human reactions began to flow, “Who the hell is this guy? I’ve never seen anyone fly like that.”

“
With any luck, he’s a corpse.”

“
We’ve got to get a planet-wide high alert. If that guy is a terrorist and he’s not dead, everyone is going to need their eyes open.”

“
Agreed, but we’re going to need to do this silently. As far as any of those press vultures are concerned, there was a minor disturbance in orbit, and the culprit has been handled. Now let’s-”

Click.

Lex turned off his receiver. The sunlight was filtering weakly through the waves and painting the interior of the cockpit with marbled veins of light. An indicator on his screen informed him that silent running had been successfully activated. The internal heat shunts were masking his heat signature. His journey from supersonic speed to a few miles per hour hadn’t been without consequence. The screen was warning of complete primary and secondary shield failure. That was enlightening, because he didn’t know that he HAD a secondary shield. Two of the three anti-grav modules on the belly of the ship were no longer responding. Half a dozen subsystems were requesting a restart, and one of his fore lights was out. The hull integrity was one hundred percent, however, and thanks to the inertial dampener, his skeleton hadn’t been turned to powder.

Keeping the ship in low power to extend the “sensor invisible” status for as long as possible, he guided the SOB along below the waves, heading toward the mainland. The one thing he had going for him was that the press conference was being held at their central offices, which were overlooking the ocean. As a matter of fact, the offices were notorious for actually overhanging the bay in certain places. The company line was something about it being symbolic of their commitment to stretch the boundaries of what is possible. Lex thought it was more symbolic of the stupid things rich people will do to get media attention.

As he got closer to the shore, the quality of the second hand spy satellite sensor suite became apparent. Everything even remotely related to information gathering and exchange was showing up in sweeps. Slidepads, datapads, cameras, wireless access points, traffic lights, even old fashioned networked printers. He had to pick a spot to surface his ship and try to enter the VectorCorp complex, but he couldn’t risk doing it somewhere where they would pick up on him. If he was going to have a chance of getting in, let alone getting back out, he was going to need most of the security attention to be focused on the spot off shore where they thought he’d been taken down. The miles and minutes ticked by as he searched for a quiet stretch of beach. When he found one, the VC tower was a barely visible, gleaming point on the horizon, and according to the clock, he had something like thirty-five minutes to get there before the big cheese got on the microphone. And he had to do it unseen. In a crowded city. During a convention. Or hundreds of thousands of people would die.

No pressure.

The streets were crowded with both foot traffic and street traffic. It wasn’t like Lon Djinn, where the city was used to that sort of thing and had adapted. This was clearly the rare and ill prepared for uptick in population that conventions invariably brought to an area. Verna Coronet was very earth-like. Across its five continents, every climate was represented, and the VC tower stood on the east coast, just a bit above the equator. The place was practically a vacation resort, with cool sea breeze blowing over a lush, green environment with palm trees imported from California and trendy restaurants and boutiques, also imported from California, lining every street. People were mostly hustling to make it to the tower to witness the VC CEO explain that his company, sure enough, still had more money than God, and such would remain the case for the foreseeable future. Sifting among the legion of designer labels and spray tans was a curious sight; an unshaven man in a flight suit, all of its pockets bulging, and a dull gray bundle strapped to his back. His face was smudged with irregular shaped black splotches, like a football player’s warpaint if it had been applied on a roller coaster. He wore bizarre mitts on his hands, thick blue gloves. Despite the fact that he stuck out like a sore thumb, Lex didn’t garner a second glance from anyone. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even get a first glance.

He nervously twitched a knob on his backpack. Karter had managed to “ruggedize” the mental cloak, meaning that he’d given it a somewhat sturdier covering than its duct tape cocoon. He’d also thrown out an awful lot of amplification and power apparatus, knocking its range down to about two hundred meters and its weight down to about ten kilos. This, he claimed, would “probably” prevent it from causing seizures. The threat of sudden debilitating brain ailments managed to be the last thing on Lex’s mind, though. Mostly he felt naked. The face paint was to foil facial detection and identification, and it seemed to be working. On the other hand, he was trusting a piece of machinery that was currently undergoing its first actual test, and operated on principles that he would have sworn were just made up, to keep him from being seen in broad daylight on a crowded street. He felt like the emperor wearing his fancy new clothes. Yet, astoundingly, it was working.

It wasn’t like he was invisible. It was better. If he’d been invisible, he’d have had to worry about people constantly running into him. With this piece of technological witchcraft, people were actually stepping out of his way, making room for him as he jogged by. A half hour of moving unnoticed through the crowded streets had taken him to the outskirts of the VectorCorp Tower Plaza, but simply being ignored wasn’t going to help him any more. The courtyard was utterly packed, shoulder to shoulder with nowhere to move. Most attendees were men in suits or women in business wear, gathered to witness a speech by their glorious leader. These people worked eighty hour weeks for this man, but squinting at a podium several hundred feet away on the steps of the building, or on one of the pair of massive screens set up along the side of the tower, was likely the closest they would ever come to actually meeting him. By rights, the VectorCorp CEO should have been the most famous person in the galaxy, but this was one of those occasions where specific names just didn’t matter anymore. VectorCorp was a force. You cared about as much about the man in charge as you cared about the name of the engineer operating the train you were riding, or in the case of Lex, of the train that was about to hit you. A parade of silver-haired men, or women who paid a small fortune to avoid being silver-haired, had held the post over the years, like different actors reprising the same role on a soap opera.

The rest of the crowd was made up of broadcasters of every type: Bloggers, Vloggers, business media, generic news, local, regional, galactic. It didn’t matter what language you spoke or where you lived, over the next week, you were not going to be able to avoid seeing clips of this speech. It would be nice to think that all he had to do was de-cloak in the middle of the crowd and scream that VectorCorp was plotting to kill thousands of people, but that sort of thing happened every year or so, and press laughed it off as a harmless lunatic’s rantings. Lex had, too. Now he wasn’t so sure. But what he DID know was that he needed a better way, or at least better evidence, and that meant getting inside.

Between the promise of hearing their elusive boss speak and the promise of coverage of the hottest news event of the year so far, the crowd wasn’t budging an inch. Having people not notice you when you were scooting by them was one thing. Shoving people aside would probably override any sort of pseudo-magical powers his backpack had. It was just as well. He hadn’t expected to be able to walk through the front door anyway. He scanned the area, looking for a way in. The courtyard was definitely out, so he began to work his way around the fenced off speech area, looking for a door or window that wasn’t actively being guarded. He’d just spotted an access door in a low wall around the yard, just forward of where it connected to the building, when he saw a contingent of security guards walking with purpose toward him. They were sweeping the area with their eyes, talking conspicuously into headsets. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on. Someone manning the security monitors had spotted a suspicious idiot with face paint on near the cameras, and they’d been sent to intercept. Once they got close, though, the mental cloak kicked in and they couldn’t spot anything that even remotely resembled what they were looking for. He held his breath and tried to think inconspicuous thoughts. They looked with increasing accuracy toward him, and in some cases directly at him, but only appeared more agitated. Lex sidled along the wall, near enough to hear the argument.