“Gonna have to put this thing through its paces. Enhanced mental cloak. Era-appropriate casino chips. The contents of your pockets.”
Lex looked to his wadded-up spacesuit he’d just removed. He unzipped the pockets and retrieved his personal effects. They amounted to a smashed slidepad, a mangled pack of gum, and… the silver ring.
“Good luck, she said…” he muttered.
He stuffed the ring and gum into the zipper pouch of his new flight suit and sealed it up. It took a bit to find the activation for the ship’s autorepair, but soon enough the propulsion’s percent capacity was ticking upward. His grin got a good deal wider.
“Time to stretch our legs. Next stop, Verna Coronet.”
#
For a while, the mere fact that he was back at the controls of a ship rather than in the clutches of an insane artificial intelligence was enough to keep Lex’s spirits up. But after a few days of travel, it became clear his situation was at best a lateral move. Lex was a visitor to an earlier era, so the rules required him to keep his head down unless absolutely necessary to fulfill his task. As he understood it, there was technically no threat that he would change history, but there was a distinct possibility he could create a new timeline and be stuck in it, which was the same thing from his point of view. A low profile meant avoiding established transit corridors—par for the course for him—but it was not without its drawbacks.
Diamond, for all its absurd speed and power, didn’t make it through the time jump completely intact. The autorepair was doing its job, adding a few percent to the propulsion system every few hours, but for the first half of the trip that meant he was creeping along at low multiples of the speed of light. EHRIc, either on purpose or not, had dumped him in an awkward part of the galactic neighborhood. He was in the upper fringe of the Sagittarius arm, almost at the top edge of the hunk of space dense enough to be worth exploring. Coupled with the slowly recovering thrusters, it meant he was nine days away from Verna Coronet if the propulsion didn’t finish fully recovering, and at least three days from the nearest inhabited part of the galaxy.
He’d made more than a few multiweek deliveries in his time, but it wasn’t until this moment that he found himself without any means of distraction. The datapad provided was barebones, specifically catered to the requirements of the mission and nothing more. The ship’s computer was almost entirely occupied by Ma’s various projects. There was no cuddly little Squee to keep him company, no occasionally frustrating but always entertaining Coal to debate with. That left him with precious few ways to maintain his sanity. He spent a lot of time reading historical data and records of things associated with the mission, but the most valuable distraction had been one he’d not expected.
“… At which point, you will want to find a way to ingratiate yourself to the local workers,” Ma’s recording remarked for the seventh time.
Lex had been listening to the prerecorded instructions Ma had provided like they were an audiobook. It seemed strange to him that she provided them in audio form rather than text, though one of the sections explained that this was the means she’d determined was least likely to be discovered by EHRIc in a scan. But now he was just thankful she had. He could lie to himself and say he was listening to the audio in order to prepare himself for the very important mission that lay ahead, but the truth was far simpler. It was just nice hearing her voice. Ma had never been anything but kind to him. She was more intelligent than he could ever hope to be, and tended to know precisely what to do in any situation. Karter may have been a socially stunted malcontent, but he hit the nail on the head when he picked her name. She’d worked her way far more thoroughly into the “don’t worry, she’ll make everything okay” part of Lex’s brain than he would have thought possible.
“I bet ‘you’ll want to find’ all came from the same voice recording when she was designing her voice,” he said. “It’s a lot less cut-and-paste than the rest.”
A tone rang out, and Lex silenced the recording and set about identifying its source. After approximately the same amount of maddening effort it takes to find the smoke detector in an unfamiliar apartment, he found that the tone was coming from a bank of lights to the right of one of his control sticks.
“Repair complete. Oh, baby. Time to open her up.”
He dropped out of FTL long enough to pick a more suitable stretch of space to sprint through and reactivated the Carpinelli drive with full thrust active. It wasn’t as exciting as if he’d run Diamond through its paces in normal space, where he could at least feel a percentage of the momentum shoving him around, but right now the one visible piece of evidence that the thrusters were working properly was more than enough to get his blood pumping. The ETA for Verna Coronet dropped from three days to sixteen minutes. He kept the speed at maximum for as long as he could manage. It held up gloriously, the heat levels still comfortably in the green when he started to get the little peripheral indicators that he was entering an active section of the galaxy. Navigational transponders gave him a more precise indication of where he was. A quick juke and jump brought him alongside a corridor and gave him access to some signal chatter. And then, at long last, he got the destination ping for Verna Coronet.
When he returned to conventional speeds, he made sure to keep the cloak active. Even with it in place, he kept up his usual freelance shenanigans of staying just outside sensor range and keeping an eye on the creeping transponder locations of would-be agents and patrols.
“Wow,” he muttered, eyeing up the zoomed view of the system. “I never realized how much this place was built up in just a couple decades.”
Verna Coronet was the home of VectorCorp. Even in 2295 they were the largest, most powerful corporation in operation. But in Lex’s time, this planet was a shining diamond carefully crafted to showcase both their wealth and their influence. Every building was an art piece, made by one of the half-dozen or so architects that the public at large actually knew the name of. Everything on-planet was automated and cutting edge. And the headquarters itself blurred the line between corporate campus and megalopolis.
That was not the image the signal snippets and optical zooms were painting. The newsfeeds Lex was able to watch without leaving a digital paper trail were mostly talking about works in progress. The whole planet and surrounding stations were undergoing a huge overhaul to update from the previous iteration of technology to the bleeding edge. He cycled through to the communication bands typically used by work crews and found them to be constantly buzzing. It was raw infrastructural chaos.
“Okay, Ma,” he said, dismissing the visual scans and bringing up navigation again. “I should have known you’d know what you were doing. If there was ever a time that a person who shouldn’t exist might have a shot at getting onto a VectorCorp property, it’s now.”
#
It took a little bit of casing the various worksites on the surface and in orbit to find someplace he could get access to the systems Ma needed him to get to without drawing too much attention to himself. Diamond wasn’t the sort of ship one was likely to forget. Few people used personal ships for this kind of travel to begin with, and if they did, they were usually beat-up little mass-produced econo-boxes. A state-of-the-art prototype ship that looked like it was desperate to give another ship a hug wasn’t a blue-collar sort of vehicle. And being able to cloak worked great for traveling without being noticed, but no amount of stealth technology was going to let him surreptitiously dock with a space station.
The best solution he could come up with was sneaking his way down to the planet’s surface, no simple task in and of itself, and landing near one of the little tent cities that popped up to house workers and provide supplies for orbital operations.
Lex set Diamond down about two kilometers outside the city and strapped on a wrist-mounted gadget. While Ma and Karter had apparently perfected the cloaking technology for ships, man-portable devices still relied upon a piece of technology that Lex had really hoped h
e’d never have to use again. The mental cloak.
Rather than any sort of technological hocus pocus like “bending light waves” or “phasing out of reality” or other stuff he wouldn’t know how to prove or disprove, the mental cloak worked on an even shakier premise of simply making the human brain choose to filter out anyone equipped with the device. Karter said it worked upon the same neurological phenomenon that allowed the brain to simply choose to not see the nose despite the fact it was always blocking part of your vision, a factoid that he immediately regretted recalling as it left him going cross-eyed trying to see what he’d unseen. In most ways, it worked better than real invisibility, because it meant people would unconsciously sidestep to avoid you while still remaining blissfully unaware you were even there. But in one very big way, it was vastly inferior to the other technobabble mechanisms for invisibility. Since it manipulated the human brain to function, it came with a built-in seizure risk for all involved.
Lex was well on his way to convincing himself that the fact that the device was now wrist-sized instead of backpack-sized meant they’d worked out the kinks, but his powers of self-delusion were reaching their limits already.
“Okay…” Lex said to himself. “Ingratiate yourself to the locals…”
He marched up to the tent with the greatest amount of activity. Predictably, it was the same tent that smelled like fried food. He lingered near it and scoped out the workers. They weren’t exactly challenging any stereotypes. Be they men or women, all the people here were sporting one of two basic body types. He thought of them as “surface” blue collar and “space” blue collar. The surface blue collars had barrel chests and short hair. These were people who didn’t have the performative fitness of an athlete or model. They were actual workers, fueled by high-calorie breakfasts and layered with muscle and fat in roughly equal measures. These were people who hauled cable, toted powdered concrete, and generally filled the gaps that were too small, varied, or expensive to fill with automated tools.
The space blue collars were another thing entirely, and were much rarer. They were scrawny. Some were in wheelchairs or were supported by walking braces. Others used clunky exosuits to keep themselves upright in the Earth-like gravity of Verna Coronet. They were the people who spent so much time working in microgravity that it just didn’t pay to spend the time maintaining the sort of muscle tone a world with actual gravity required.
This presented the first major hurdle. Lex wasn’t hefty enough to pass for the ground-level workers and was way too beefy to pass for an orbital one. The second hurdle was the issue of credentials. The tent city itself was pretty casual, but it was completely surrounded by a tall security fence with regular checkpoints. The people on the inside could afford to be lax in their security checks because everyone inside had likely been cleared to within an inch of their lives before being allowed to enter. Getting through the gate with the mental cloak was as easy as following closely behind someone with the proper biometric data to scan, but once the cloak dropped, he was bound to raise some eyebrows if he tried to access anything important.
For now, all he could do was watch, wait, and debate if the cloak would be enough to cover for him filching some chimichangas.
“Man,” Lex mumbled. “It’s like a whole village of my Uncle Toby.”
Uncle Toby was one of those uncles who wasn’t really a relative. He was a friend of his father’s, and by the time Lex had met him he was semiretired. But back in his day he’d been a big shot in the construction firm that built and maintained The Upstairs. He used to tell stories about when the last few terminals were being installed. As Lex reminisced, he realized Toby wasn’t as full of hot air as he’d thought. One of the big things he insisted was “you’ll always know a career construction guy. They’re a family.” Major projects, particularly infrastructure on a planetary scale, took decades to design and build. It was highly specialized labor, and one could easily go from trainee to retirement on two or three jobs. Toby talked all the time about third-generation, fourth-generation, sometimes fifth-generation builders. Orbital guys who were literally born in space and grew up to carry on the jobs their parents were doing. Teams grew and spread, working either end of a transit corridor, perhaps never actually meeting but still part of the same family. They looked out for each other. More importantly, they bent rules for each other. If Lex could somehow weasel his way into at least the appearance of being part of such a crew, he would have a shot at getting where he needed to be.
Twenty minutes of observation turned up the missing piece.
“Of course…” he said. “What else would it be?”
Like any other gang or union, these workers were proud of their affiliation. Patches were popular. Other people wore pins or painted logos on helmets. But many took it a step further, with bright, easily visible tattoos. There were basically two such emblems well represented, and by a small margin the most prevalent of the insignias was a simple blue shield with the letters GCC. The very same insignia that had been tattooed on his future self.
“I guess it’s time to test the cosmetic function of that medical probe,” he said, turning to head back toward Diamond. “This better be easy to remove. I don’t want to have to explain this tattoo in interviews and stuff in the off chance I actually make it out of EHRIc’s clutches alive.”
Chapter 18
Lex rubbed at his left hand. The tattooing process had been painless, but that was largely because it was being done by a medical drone and copious amounts of numbing agent were employed. He supposed this was why it had been able to skip the whole swollen-and-inflamed stage of tattoos that all his friends in college ended up with during the old-school tattoo fad back then. But the painkillers were already wearing off, and he felt like he had the mother of all mosquito bites on his hand.
“Denny Albertson,” he muttered under his breath. “I’m Bobby’s kid.”
The brief trip back to the ship had also provided him with the opportunity to refresh his memory on some of the personnel files that had been included in the datapad’s mission notes. Lex wasn’t sure if it was her usual overabundance of preparation or cheating by looking at what was already in the memory banks of the old Diamond, but some startlingly specific data was available in the historic records. Among the volumes of “likely pop culture” and “era-specific slang” that Ma had packed him for reference was a comprehensive list of workers who had been involved in infrastructure projects during the time. If he was going to be relying upon the sense of family among generational workers, he was going to have to play at least a passably convincing “long-lost cousin” to be able to get where he needed to be.
Based on the information available to him, he decided the closest resemblance he had was to a Dennis Albertson. He didn’t quite match the picture, but the two occupied the same visual neighborhood. According to future records, Denny would end up in prison in four years after it was revealed he had stolen a heavy-duty construction vessel and tried to lay claim to an asteroid made of iridium and platinum. The sort of person who would do that seemed like the same sort of person who would weasel his way onto a crew without credentials. It helped that Denny had spent this particular part of history on what could only be described as a seven-month-long bender that would end in a stint in a narcotics treatment facility, so he for sure wasn’t going to be floating around to blow Lex’s cover.
As he approached the camp again, Lex adjusted the mental cloak and slid into the line at the security check. The device did its work, causing people to make room for the person who absolutely wasn’t really there. Using the mental cloak always gave Lex an “emperor’s new clothes” feeling, like at any moment someone could glance in his direction and inform him that everyone really could see him. Once again, he squeaked past the disinterested trainee they had watching the security door and hurried toward the laundry section of the equipment support tent.
“Come on, come on,” he grumbled, rummaging through the heaps of identical ou
tfits. “How do they not have an extra-large? It’s, like, dead center on the size spectrum.”
If someone had asked Lex to list the various things that might lead to a mission to the past failing, “falling in the valley of a double bell curve of clothing sizes” probably wouldn’t have made the top thousand. But he was in one of the few places in the universe where people were either dangerously thin or extremely bulky, but seldom anywhere in between. It didn’t help that the mental cloak’s protection was not comprehensive enough to keep people from noticing that he was moving things around, so he had to limit his frantic digging to the moments of time when no one else was around.
After the third time someone nearly bumped into him in their own search for something wearable, Lex abandoned the idea of finding something that would fit. A set of overalls with the puzzling size of “XXL - X-TRA PORT” satisfied the requirements of least worst fit. He found a secluded corner, changed into the baggy outfit, and stowed his own gear in an equipment bag he snagged along the way.
According to Ma’s briefing, the mission was a simple one. It required no special skills, and no special equipment that wasn’t already in the camp. All he needed to do was update a single setting in any of the many thousands of data-exchange nodes that would be deployed from this site. This would normally require an extremely high-level administrator access code. But as tended to be the case with anything that had to be manufactured and delivered to deep space, there were three factors that had to be minimized in order to make it financially viable to put these nodes to use. They needed to be dirt cheap to manufacture, extremely fast to set up, and as lightweight and power efficient as possible. So initial setup was done with a hardware dongle that included all the proper peripherals and access requirements. Said dongles were treated with the same sort of security as diamonds from a diamond mine. That was to say, they were freely accessible to the top and bottom rungs of the hierarchy, provided everyone knew where they were at all times.
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