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Seven hours, forty winks, and twelve thousand colored bricks later, the view outside the window made the slide back toward red and into visibility. It wasn’t the destination. That would be the better part of a week and a few dozen jumps away. This was just the interstellar equivalent of a strip mall, close enough to a VectorCorp route that even a damaged ship could limp to it from there, but far enough that there was no chance of being forced to pay licensing fees. Lex liked to make at least one or two stops in a place like this along the way. They had real bathrooms and real food. The same could not be said of his ship, which made do with . . . substitutes.
The bathroom was replaced with a bedpan-sized contraption officially called a waste reprocessor, but more familiarly dubbed a turd burner. It converted human byproduct into a chemically pure compound that could be dropped off for processing into explosives or fertilizer or some such. More importantly, it didn’t stink and took up less space. Food came in the form of whatever preservative-ridden, vitamin-fortified, partially-hydrogenated, high-calorie snack was on sale when he ran out last time. Currently it was something that claimed to be pepperoni protein bars and tasted vaguely like spicy sawdust. Lex didn't think it was difficult to understand why food cooked on a griddle and a bathroom with actual toilets would be nice before a week of travel.
Like most small space stations, this place was shaped like a massive wagon wheel, spinning fast enough to give the approximation of gravity. Lex hailed the landing coordinator and negotiated a spot in one of the docking ports along the inside rim. All he had to do was get in the same ballpark as the dock and tractor beams did the rest of the work. In no time, the hiss of artificial atmosphere let him know that it was safe to open the hatch and head inside.
There was--along with a couple of convenience stores, hardware stores, and repair shops--a greasy spoon. That would do just fine. He took a seat and waved over the waitress behind the counter. She had the sort of dead-eyed gaze that made it clear that she wasn’t the talkative type, so he pointed out the three-egg special on the menu.
“Over easy,” he said.
The eggs were in front of him quickly enough to make him wonder if they were someone else’s order, but that suited him fine. While he shoveled them down, Lex decided to take advantage of the high-bandwidth data connection advertised on the menu to pull down some messages and entertainment for the trip. He activated his slidepad’s wireless, loaded up his download queue, and slipped it into his pocket to wait for it to finish. Five minutes later, barely six gigs of data had been pulled down.
“High-bandwidth my ass,” Lex muttered, mopping up the remains of his eggs with the remains of his toast. “Hey, you guys take chips, right?”
The surly woman behind the counter shook her head slowly and continued scraping at the griddle.
“I see. Then we’ve got a little problem, because that’s all I’ve got,” he said.
She thrust a finger toward the opposite side of the establishment, where another patron was just finishing up with a video poker machine. If casino chips were the new cash, poker kiosks were the new ATMs. He sat down and plunked a few of the tokens he’d been paid as advance into the machine. All he really needed to do was cash out his winnings into his bank account, but he always played a few hands, just on the off chance that a flush would make breakfast free.
His slidepad chirped just as he’d failed to get jacks or better for the third straight time. He dug it out with one hand while pulling up the cash-out menu with the other. Once the credits were in his account, he looked at the notification bar. It was mostly increasingly angry bill collectors, but one message was from someone with the screen name NixMix66Six. He tapped it, expecting spam.
“Trevor, get back to me.”
It was a voice-only message, but the voice was vaguely familiar and conjured a fairly specific image. It was the clipped, nasally voice of a woman who thought a lot more of herself than anyone else did. Normally, Lex didn’t want to deal with those types. His agent had been one. His lawyer had been one. Neither had served him particularly well when the going got rough. But she’d called him Trevor. People who wanted money or to put him in jail called him Mr. Alexander. Most everyone else called him Lex or T-Lex. The only people who called him by his first name were those who knew him through family or Michella.
“Six eighty-five,” said the lady behind the counter, as he walked past.
“Hey, so you can speak,” Lex quipped, sweeping his pad over the paypad built into the counter, “We’ll call it an even thousand. Remember me next time, will you?”
Lex had a policy to make himself known as a big tipper in places like this. He knew it might eventually come in handy.
He made the customary trip to the restroom, which turned out to be filthy enough to make the turd burner downright attractive by comparison. From there, he made his way to the docking bay. He tossed the attendant some money for fuel and climbed back inside. The message from NixMix had come in only twenty minutes before he’d arrived. It was probably a safe bet he could get her if he tried. After a few moments of considering it, he shrugged and pulled up the contact info. The connection negotiated for a few seconds, and he was connected. This time it was a video feed that answered.
She was a woman in her late twenties, hair streaked with hot pink highlights. A stud graced one nostril, and a handful of rings perforated one ear. Her clothes ran the gamut from black leather to pink vinyl to white latex, along with virtually every other material but cloth. It was all layered over each other in haphazard flaps and pleats and held on with too many buckles and zippers. The overall effect was hideous and unusual, standard uniform of the pathological non-conformist. She was slightly overweight and, from the looks of it, very pissed.
“Oh, you,” Lex said flatly.
Evidently NixMix66Six was Michella’s older sister Nicole. In most families, it was the youngest or the middle child that was the rebel. In the Modane clan, it was the oldest. Nicole was the kind of person who spent most of a given conversation trying to convince her partner why their every action was the result of brainwashing by a few dozen different sinister Powers That Be and Corporate Manipulators that wanted to tell everyone how to live your lives. The rest of the conversation consisted of her telling the other person how to live their life. She’d always hated Lex, and the day Michella had dumped him was the happiest day of her life.
“That’s right, me, you little sh--”
“Thanks so much for calling, Nicole. Do keep in touch,” he said, reaching to end the call.
“No, wait, it’s about Michella!”
“Okay, what?”
“She told me you were working with organized crime again. Is that true?”
Lex sighed angrily. “Not that you’ll believe me, but no. Like I told her yesterday, I gave Nick Patel a ride and he gave me a massive tip. That’s it. Why the hell would you call and ask that?”
Now it was her turn to sigh.
“Have you been out with anyone since her?”
“I’ve had a fling or two.”
It was exactly two, but she didn’t need to know that.
“She’s been with eleven. Most of them don’t get past the second date.”
“Well, she’s winning, then, isn’t she?”
“It is because of you, you asshole. She isn’t over you.”
“Well, she could have fooled me, Nicole. The only time she spoke to me in the last two months was to dump me again.”
“You hurt her pretty bad, Trevor. She loved you. After you got mixed up with the mob, it tore her up, but it didn’t change anything. You should hear her whenever she visits. Last week, she was talking about how you had this really down-to-earth job and how you were working another one on the side. She was thinking of getting back together.”
“She’d said something about keeping track of me. How much does she actually know?”
“Plenty. She’s been watching you pretty close.”
“That’s creepy.”<
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“Then that mobster thing happened and she came crying on my shoulder. I had to see if you were really that big of an idiot.”
“Well, I’m not. And what’s the big deal anyway?”
“Have you ever heard of Carlito Rodrigo?”
“No, who was that? Lucky boyfriend number seven?”
“Look him up, asshole.”
With that, she closed the connection.
“The whole effing family is out of their minds!” Lex muttered through clenched teeth. He took out his frustration on the control panel, hammering the buttons to disengage, and set the course for his next sprint.
Frustration and concentration didn’t mix very well. A man who got angry tended to forget things he would never forget otherwise. The bad news was that getting a ship set for an FTL sprint wasn’t the sort of thing anyone could afford to forget to do correctly. The good news was that there were all sorts of safeguards in place to prevent someone from forgetting to do something they were supposed to do, so Lex didn’t manage to get himself killed. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything to remind him to do things he wasn’t supposed to do.
Every ship was required, by law, to have a transponder broadcasting a unique identifier. It gave rescue crews something to home in on if the ship ended up adrift and radio-silent. It also gave the authorities something to track. Thus it was a handy thing to turn off if a ship was going to be doing something of questionable legality. But with no useful reminders, and an awful lot on his mind, Lex forgot to reach under the dash and do the magic knock that would switch it off.
And so Lex streaked off into the black depths of space, his transponder blaring his location out loud and clear.
Bypass Gemini Page 7