by Joseph Lallo
He brought down the DAR in the shipyard which, despite the fact there didn’t seem to be any workers about, seemed to be a fairly popular destination. Virtually all of the dusty, concrete landing pads were occupied by ships that looked a little too new and a little too expensive to be parked at a sun-bleached construction site. An automated system latched various mooring lines in place, but for the moment, Lex wasn’t interested in going anywhere. The sun beating down on a dusty landscape covered in scrub grass and twiggy trees was blinding. Already he could see the wavy shimmer of rising heat coming off of the fuselage. The external thermometer read 153 degrees Fahrenheit. All he had to wear was his flight suit, which he was wearing now, and that cheap outfit he’d picked up in Lon Djinn. Neither was really appropriate for a desert. That was the trouble with globe hopping. You never seemed to have an appropriate wardrobe.
After a few minutes, a hover cart with a sad little canopy started to kick up dust as it approached. Aside from establishing that he had run out of time to stall getting out of the air conditioning, this reminded Lex of a key aspect to his visit that he’d forgotten to work out: The actual reason for the visit. He knew why he was there, but whoever was going to knock on the window in a few seconds was going to need to know, and he couldn’t very well say, “Someone is trying to kill me, and I think someone here might know why.” As a pair of yard workers who looked like glazed hams wrapped in burlap hauled themselves out of the cart, Lex dug one of the manifests out of the brief case, stowed it, and popped the cockpit hatch.
The heat hit him like a balled up fist, and the two workers looked like they were eager to do the same. Being forced to venture out into sauna heat has a way of souring one’s attitude toward the parties responsible. The larger of the two, a gentleman with a name tag reading “Hoss” stepped up to Lex. He was wearing khaki shorts and a matching shirt. The shirt was open a few more buttons than was really socially acceptable, revealing a white undershirt with a horrifying yellow stain. The entire ensemble was sweated through, and with the addition of mirrored sunglasses, appeared to be a uniform, since his unhappy partner, “GreenMeat,” was dressed precisely the same, right down to the yellowed wife beater.
“State your business,” Hoss said in a voice far too young and squeaky to belong to someone on the unhappy side of 350 lbs.
“Yeah, my bosses sent me out here about some... Converters or inverters or whatever?” Lex said, squinting at the manifest in his hand, “Some electronics delivery from a while back. I’m supposed to talk to a clerk or something.”
The worker snatched the sheet, looked it over, then handed it off to his second in command.
“Call it in,” he said.
GreenMeat pressed a finger to his ear and muttered a few numbers off of the sheet. Then the three of them stood waiting and sweating. In Lex’s case, the sweat was motivated as much by his generalized anxiety about the whole situation as it was by the heat. Finally, second banana piped up.
“That’s one of those big projects. They say he has to talk to that second tier number cruncher in the west end,” GreenMeat said.
“Heh! Aren’t they getting audited? Security or something? Man, do I love when the pencil jockeys screw the pooch!” Hoss said gleefully, “Okay, you see that complex w-a-a-a-a-ay on the other side of the shipyard?”
Lex squinted until he could just make out a dark patch of wavy desert heat between the rows of ships and hovercars.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said, not entirely convinced it wasn’t a mirage.
“Go in there, show the hardass at the desk the manifest, and ask for shipping accounts,” Hoss instructed, wedging himself alongside GreenMeat in the glorified golf cart.
“That’s like two miles away, and there aren’t any closer parking spots. Could you give me a lift?” Lex asked.
“Yep,” replied Hoss.
He then promptly rode the cart away in the wrong direction, laughing a greasy little laugh.
“… Asshole,” Lex muttered.
Briefly he considered piloting the ship over to the building and just touching it down someplace closer, docking bay or no, but he quickly decided against it. It was extremely illegal, but something told him it wasn’t the police he was going to have to worry about here, and chances are that the sort of vigilante justice that would be levied upon the borrowed ship would be much worse than a fine anyway. He was just going to have to walk. After cramming everything he could fit into his flight suit’s pockets in hopes of guaranteeing he wouldn’t forget something and have to come back for it, he tied the shirt from his Lon Djinn ensemble around his head and set off.
Forty-five scorching minutes later, he stepped into the mercifully climate controlled office complex. His skin felt positively crispy, and his boots were making an unpleasant squish with each step, thanks to the half gallon of sweat he could feel pooling around his toes. The young Indian woman at the desk watched him warily as he stalked into the center of the room, spotted a water cooler, and practically ran to it.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked in a professional tone.
“One minute,” Lex said, dropping to his knees and running the water over his head.
When he felt as though the temperature of his scalp was no longer in the boiling range, he stood and looked to the receptionist. She was in fairly traditional business attire, though there were a few aspects of it that were a little bit outside the norm. The gray business dress hugged her curves much better than one would imagine was acceptable for an office environment, and the curves were quite pleasing indeed. She had her jet black hair pulled back in a tight bun, and a pair of wire rimmed glasses were perched on her pert little nose, a gold chain dangling from each earpiece and disappearing behind her neck. The receptionist’s face was nothing short of gorgeous, and held in a practiced look of professional detachment. Her dark skin and flawless features, combined with the business suit, gave her the look of a Hindu goddess who had just received her MBA. Running a hand through his soaking wet hair and wishing he’d noticed he was dealing with a beautiful woman before he’d made a fool of himself, Lex tried to scrape together the shreds of his dignity.
“I’m here to talk to, uh, shipping accounts,” he said, pulling the now disturbingly moist manifest from the pocket of his fight suit.
She took the document, not for a moment betraying a hint of disgust about handling a piece of paper that had been marinating in Lex’s juices for the better part of an hour. A few gestures on her datapad – the larger, less portable cousin to the slidepad – managed to prompt the first change in expression since his arrival, as her eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch. A final gesture brought the chirp of an intercom system.
“Mr. Hendricks to reception. Escort to waiting room six,” she said, turning to address Lex, “Mr. Hendricks will be with you shortly. He will show you to our waiting room while we consult the proper files.”
“Sounds good,” Lex said, reaching for the manifest.
“Mr. Hendricks will be needing this. I’ll just hand it to him when he arrives,” she said, placing the seasoned sheet of paper into a manila envelope, “May I have your name for our visitors records, please?”
Lex froze.
“What do you need my name for?”
“For our visitors records,” she repeated.
“Oh, right. That makes sense. Uh, you can call me, uh,” Lex stuttered. It had suddenly struck him that by now his name might have found its way to some watch lists and perhaps he should have prepared an alias of some kind during the several days he’d spent coming here.
“You can record him when he exits, Miss Misra,” said a rail thin man as he entered.
His hair was black, and his face and accent were both vaguely European. He was wearing an immaculate white shirt with a black tie. Black suspenders held up a pair of high quality dress slacks, and his shoes were polished to a high gloss. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing forearms so wiry they looked like they were braided together out of rawhide.
The man’s face was long, carefully shaved, and showed a handful of noticeable scars. Topping it all off was a pair of gray eyes that stared so intensely, Lex was fairly sure he could burn a hole through a cinder block. He couldn’t have radiated “ex-military” more clearly if he was wearing combat fatigues.
“Yes sir, Mr. Hendricks,” said the receptionist, handing the folder over.
“This way, sir,” Hendricks said.
Without waiting, the surly man walked crisply from whence he came. Lex sloshed after him. Automatic doors opened and closed a handful of times as they wound their way through half a dozen different hallways, working deeper and deeper into the office complex. As they progressed, the sterile look of scattered cubicles became less frequent, replaced instead with downright antiseptic white concrete walls.
“Kind of a long way in for a waiting room,” Lex said, his voice echoing in the empty hall.
“We don’t get many visitors,” Hendricks said.
“… Then why do you need six waiting rooms?” Lex asked.
The question hung in the air for a few moments before they came to a door. Hendricks waved a slidepad over a sensor and the door hissed open.
“Wait inside. Accounting will be with you shortly,” Hendricks said.
Lex glanced into the room.
“That’s waiting room six?”
Hendricks nodded.
“I don’t think I want to wait in waiting room six. There aren’t any magazines. Or potted plants. Or net terminals. Or windows. Or witnesses,” Lex said.
In fact, there was nothing but a pair of wooden chairs, a metal table, and a surveillance camera in each corner. No doubt people did a lot of waiting in a room like that, but he didn’t want to think about what they were waiting for.
“You know what? I’ll just go.”
“Step. Inside,” Hendricks replied, slowly and deliberately.
He didn’t say it in an overtly threatening way, but something in his posture suggested that right now, inside was the safer place to be. Lex entered the room and took the seat on the opposite side of the table facing the door.
“Accounting will be with you momentarily,” he said bleeping the door shut.
For several minutes, Lex sat, quietly assessing his life. His finely tuned instincts, which he seemed to have made it a nasty habit to ignore, were telling him to make a break for it. His common sense chimed in a moment later to point out that, ignoring the security glass, security cameras, and labyrinthine halls, the chances were very good that a two mile sprint in 150 degree heat would do a lot more damage than whatever these people might have in mind ... probably. So he waited and tried to plan out what he was going to do.
The wait lasted long enough for the sweaty flight suit to dry into a greasy, uncomfortable mass of synthetic fabric. Finally the door hissed open without even a hint of approaching footsteps. The room was soundproofed. That wasn’t a good sign. Through the door stepped a large-ish woman in frumpy business casual. She had a nervous look on her face, which was no doubt largely due to the fact that whoever had sent her had felt she needed two meaty escorts, both men, both the sort who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a natural history exhibit.
“Yes, hello, Mister...” she said, tucking a datapad under one arm and extending the other for a shake.
Lex briefly considered giving her an alias, but it was pointless. Any system with a camera and a decent network connection would be able to face match him in 30 seconds anyway.
“Trevor Alexander,” he said with defeat, “Call me Lex.”
“Lex. Okay. I’m Miss Morris. I’m a supply and stock manager. I understand you have a problem with our inventory?”
“Yeah. I was asked by my superiors, who know that I’m here and will be expecting a report,” he said, eying a camera, “to follow up on some items they had delivered.”
“May I ask who your employers are, and what they suspect may be the problem?”
Lex closed his eyes and tried to remember what had been on the sheet he’d handed over.
“That would be the... Triptech Dynamics. And they had a batch of... rectifiers they were worried about. Something about too many of them being delivered.”
“Triptech Industries, you mean? And inverters?”
“Probably. Listen, I’m an independent agent. They send me around to do this so they don’t have to. I’ve got like forty clients,” he said, tapping his foot nervously.
Miss Morris tapped at her pad.
“Here we are. The shipment of inverters you’ve got circled on your manifest here was accepted on February 26th. Three dozen high efficiency, low resonance inverter assemblies. That is the proper amount, I believe,” she said, flipping the pad in his direction.
He glanced down at it.
“Yeah, so it says, but I need to see them. You know. Count them.”
“The shipment was signed off by both parties. I assure you, there was no mistake.”
“Well, that’s all well and good, but I still have to look at them. The bosses said that the shipment you got might have had some defective units.”
“I was unaware of any recall being issued.”
“Yeah, there wasn’t. It was a very small batch. Just a dozen or so. I just need to take a look at the ones we delivered.”
“Well, I think you’ll find that the serial numbers are included in the receipt. You can just check that against your recall list.”
“No, no I can’t, because there is a secondary run number on the inside of the casing. That’s the one I need.”
Miss Morris eyed the pad before her, flustered.
“Sir, I’m afraid that is impossible. That shipment was months ago. Most of the inverter assemblies have already left storage for installation.”
“Well then I’d say it is pretty darn important you let me go to the site and make sure they aren’t going to overload, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Why didn’t you just wait and include this in the final pre-activation security audit of the Gemini Project tomorrow?” she asked.
“That will be all Miss Morris,” squawked the intercom.
She quickly stood and left the room. The meaty cohorts remained. A moment later, Mr. Hendricks returned.
“Richard, Howard. Empty Mr. Alexander’s pockets, please.”
“Whoa, hey, hey! That’s an invasion of privacy!” Lex said, standing up fast enough to fling the chair behind him.
Before he could take another step back, one of the neanderthal attendants grabbed his wrist and wrenched it up along the small of his back until his shoulder made an unpleasant noise, then shoved him forward, smacking his face against the table with a sound like raw chicken hitting the butcher’s counter.
“No, Mr. Alexander. I’m afraid it is you who is invading privacy, and we are paid quite well to see that the affairs of our clients remain secure,” said Hendricks.
One by one, the pockets of Lex’s flight suit were emptied onto the table. This ended up taking quite a while, thanks to the sheer number of pockets and the fact that he had crammed everything he owned into them before leaving the ship. By the time they were finished and released his arm, there was a mound of food wrappers, scattered poker chips, his slidepad, and various other personal debris.
“Who do you work for?” Hendricks said, taking a seat and beginning to sort through the pile.
“I’m not working for anyone. You are reading WAY too deep into this.”
“You know that someone matching your description is wanted by most civilian law enforcement agencies due to an intellectual property theft charge by VectorCorp, I presume.”
“Intellectual property theft? THAT’S what they’re after me for?”
“Yes. And now you’ve come here attempting to gain access to our inventory and construction sites for the Gemini Project, and you claim we are reading too deeply into it?”
“Look, I don’t even know what the Gemini Project IS!”
Hendricks investigated the crab candy bar with a raised eye
brow before unearthing a small piece of card stock.
“And you won’t find out, because...”
He stopped short, inspecting the card closely and casting a doubtful glance at Lex. Finally he snapped his fingers and motioned for the henchmen to leave the room. He followed them, locking Lex in his painful gaze for a moment before shutting the door.
“O-kay then,” Lex remarked, rubbing his manhandled shoulder.
He returned the crab candy and slidepad to his pocket, along with anything else he felt like hanging onto, then swept the wrappers and garbage onto the floor as an act of protest. They might break his thumbs or whatever it was that shady criminal syndicates did, but they were damn well going to clean up his peanut butter wrappers, too.
Another few minutes passed before the door opened again. When it did, it revealed a man with a polo shirt, dress slacks, and a billion dollar smile.
“Mr. Alexander!” said Diamond Nick, like a man welcoming a friend from college, “Come to see me about that job offer?”
Chapter 13
“My card did have contact information on it. You didn’t have to come in person, you know,” said Patel, leading Lex back into the more hospitable portion of the complex as the pilot struggled come to terms with what was happening.