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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 S.O.B. 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 was possible. Lex thought it was more symbolic of the stupid things rich people would do to get media attention.
As he got closer to the shore, the quality of the secondhand 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.
Bypass Gemini Page 31