Bypass Gemini

by Joseph Lallo

  “Ma! Damage report!” Karter ordered, marching down the hallway with purpose.

  “Partial collapse in the arm-arm-arm-ory-ry. Primary Power coup-up-uplings severed. Wide-ide-ide spread power fluctuation-tion-tion-tions. Affected Systems: Light-ighting, Environmentals, Gravit-vit-vitation, Securit-rit-rity. Attempting to restore power by re-re-re-re-re-re-...routing through secondary,” the computer reported, voice files stuttering at random, “Also, I appear-pear to be malfunct-unct-unctioning-ning. How very distressing. Initiating self-diagnosis-nosis-sis-sis.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Lex said anxiously.

  “Data bussssssssss corruption found. Reboot recommended.”

  “Not yet, I need you awake for now. That thing is going to shoot at us in about eight minutes,” Karter said, hurrying down the hall.

  “You mean shoot at us again, right?” Lex said, keeping pace.

  “No, that was just the targeting laser.”

  Lex stopped.

  “What...”

  “It painted a cross hair on the complex. The actual weapon is going to be a little more exciting when it goes off. We should probably try to stop it before then, because we won’t be around afterward.”

  “Well... well can’t Ma just shoot it down with the lasers?”

  “Those are for pushing debris around and zapping turds. Any half decent shield will shrug them off. If we hadn’t sucker punched Fisk, they probably would have had trouble with him.”

  “Approximately half of our lasers have been damaged-aged-aged or destroy-troyed in the targeting las-las-las-las-las-as-as-as-sssssssssss... speech module malfunction, activating alternate speech modules.”

  “Yes, fine, we get the point!” Karter snapped.

  Suddenly an explosion rocked the building.

  “What NOW!” Karter growled.

  “Aviones de ataque han sido desplegados,” the computer alerted.

  “What?!” Lex moaned.

  “Attack drones. Lex, I’m going to need you to get out there and try to deal with them. Aren’t you glad I rigged up some sneaky weaponry on your ship?”

  “Me? Get out there? What are you going to be doing?”

  “Trying to scrape together a weapon to take out that wrecker before it knocks the planet out of orbit.”

  “You mean you have all of this crazy crap and you don’t have any weapons?!”

  “I’ve got enough weapons to overthrow a world government, but they are all over in the armory, which is the first thing they went after.”

  “So you put ALL of your weapons in the same place!?”

  “Knowing what you know about me, do you think it would be wise to have weapons readily available?”

  “… No, I guess not.”

  “Right, so get down to the hangar, and quit wasting my time!”

  Lex ran toward the elevator, but considering the fact the lights had yet to be restored, it seemed like too much of a gamble to trust it. Instead, he threw open the doors to the staircase and bounded down them, skipping as many steps and hopping as many banisters as possible. About half way down, the lights finally stopped flickering.

  “Parcial de energía restaurada.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish!” Lex exclaimed breathlessly.

  “Teilweise Power restauriert.”

  “I don’t even know what language that is!”

  “Deutsch. Sie sollten sich überlegen Erlernen weiterer Sprachen.”

  The monolingual pilot ignored the statement and kicked open the doors to the repair bay, throwing open the hatch and climbing into the cockpit of his repaired ship.

  “Öffnung Hangartore kaufen. Viel Glück, Herr Alexander.”

  “Whatever you say, Ma.”

  The instant Lex was in the seat – which was the same fancy model that had been in the DAR, he would have to thank Karter for that – he felt the panic start to subside. He was still scared out of his mind, but this was a ship. This was HIS ship. It was the one thing he was good at, the one thing that he didn’t have to think about. His fingers found their way to the appropriate switches, powering up systems, adjusting straps. Tweaking, tapping, testing. When the systems were ready, he juiced the throttle.

  Karter did good work. The acceleration was astounding, multiples of what old Betsy had. He put some distance between himself and the swarming drones and pulled a hard turn. The ship was as nimble as it was fast. It left his old one in the dust. And yet... Perhaps it was because he’d reused some components, or perhaps it was some engineering mojo that he would never understand, but somehow this ship FELT like Betsy. It was something in the rattle of the engine, in the hum of the electronics. The body of Betsy was dead and gone, but the soul was still kicking.

  A moment of thought dredged up the procedure necessary to get his “gun” functional. When he held down the release and flipped on auto-lock, all of the little moving dots on his ship’s sensors were suddenly updated with ranges and estimated hull integrities. He popped a stick of gum in his mouth, wrapped his hands around the controls, and grinned.

  “Let’s do this.”

  Chapter 17

  Lex led his new ship into battle, its new and improved shield kicking on automatically. A quiet voice in his head felt it was necessary to point out that he’d never once been in a dog fight, nor had he done any training. He silenced it. Flying a ship was all about getting it to go where you want to go and do what you want it to do, and he’d always been able to do that. Besides, he’d had to avoid being shot before. The only difference this time was that he could pull a trigger every now and then. A lifetime of video games had gotten him ready for that.

  The drones were everywhere. His computer claimed that there were forty, and he was in no mood to count them personally. The things looked less like spacecraft and more like some sort of mechanical insects, thrusters, sensor nodes, and weapons fused into a spindly, gangly mass. As soon as he was nearby, they stopped assaulting the lab and started targeting him. The in-ship safety systems started their usual litany of warnings, but he tuned them out. After a quick glance at the new options present on the tractor beam menu, he quickly selected “Auto Target: Best Target” and “Auto Fire: Enabled” from the appropriate menus and picked a drone.

  Despite the substantial upgrade he’d gotten in terms of hardware, the drones were far more agile. It took all of the reaction time and steering nuance he could muster to get behind one, and by the time he did, three more were heaving shots at him from all sides. He kept at it, sweeping close to the buildings to clear away swarms and nudging his ship out of line of fire until finally the modified tractor beam did its thing. The sound was like an angry jackhammer, flipping alternately between attract and repel at a devastating frequency. In a few seconds the shield of the targeted drone suddenly failed, and a moment later the craft literally rattled to pieces.

  “Yeah!” he cheered, but his celebration was cut short when a pair of plasma bolts slapped against his shield, knocking it down to 75%. If he was going to survive this, he was going to have to be VERY careful.

  A trio of ships swept down in front of him, but he cranked up the speed and twisted the ship’s belly toward them. The beefy shield and extra mass of his vehicle tore through them like tissue paper. From above there was a volley of shots, but he angled the ship between them, then opened fire on his opponents, taking one of the ships out and clipping another before having to dodge another salvo from above. Racing and freelancing instincts slowly began to find their niches. Reflexes honed to take advantage of passing opportunities started to adapt to firing opportunities. Skills used to identify safe paths through asteroid clusters found use in zipping through ship attack formations. Everything was falling into place. The question was, would it be enough?

  Inside the lab, Karter was moving as quickly as his piecemeal body would allow, fetching reels of cable, connectors, and jacks.

  “Ma, how are we looking on power?” He asked, glancing at a watch.

  “Einen Moment,” Ma replied.<
br />
  The lights flickered one last time.

  “Volle Kraft wiederhergestellt. Jetzt versucht die Schwerkraft und den Umweltschutz wiederherzustellen.”

  “Full power, excellent. Skip the gravity and enviromentals for now. Whatever lasers are still working, get them to work helping out Lex. I’m going to need cover in a minute.”

  “Ja, Herr Dee.”

  “And work on getting English back online, would you? German makes you sound creepy.”

  “Säuberung Audio-Puffer. Bitte warten Sie,” she said.

  There was a sudden, intense screech from the speakers.

  “Audio buffalo purgatory completely. Primary language modular restoration.”

  “Still not quite right, Ma,” he said, “Do me a favor and get the big door open.”

  “Negative. Power fluctuating have causeway security clearance issues.”

  “Then shut down security for now, I need that door open.”

  “Are you surefire?”

  “Yes, and open all doors and hatches to the roof. And get me an express lift ready to take me there.”

  “Yes sirius.”

  Outside, the longer Lex tangled with the drones, the tighter their formations became, and the less room for error he had. He’d only managed to take out ten of them before the shield was taking hits as quickly as it was recharging. The new and improved ship might be faster and more powerful, but it was also a huge target, and the drones were like wasps, packing more of a punch than they had any right to. Without the need for a pilot, they were basically just engines, guns, and shields. That made for a very light, very elusive target. If he didn’t make some progress soon, he was going to be left with no options but to make a mad dash and hope he could out run them.

  As a cluster of the ships were aligning for an attack, a sequence of laser blasts from the roof scattered them. Sure enough, the lasers weren’t enough to do any serious damage, but they managed to cause the drones to prioritize, and in the brief confusion, he shot a handful of them down and darted out through an opening.

  “How’s the ship holding up?” Karter asked, over the com system.

  “Little busy,” Lex replied.

  “I bet. Listen. In a second, I’m going to be up on the roof. Do me a favor, and don’t let anyone shoot me. I’m going to have something volatile, and I’d like to avoid having my face blown off.”

  “I’ll do my best, but my hands are kind of full.”

  “Well your best better be good enough, because we’ve got about a minute twenty, give or take, before that ship lets loose with a shot that could probably cut a moon in half.”

  “No pressure or anything.”

  “Most office the lasers have been damages, butter I williams do what I cannon to scatter the focus of the drones,” said Ma.

  “Okay... thanks,” Lex said, trying to ignore the fact that a malfunctioning AI that couldn’t even speak properly would be firing lasers in his general direction.

  A hatch flipped open on the roof, and up rose a forklift with a familiar device balanced precariously on its tines. It was the concoction he’d referred to as the magic mirror, and from the looks of it, he hadn’t been gentle with it during its removal. The ship above had been slowly maneuvering, turning on end and orienting the gaping mouth of its cannon at the surface of the planet. Karter, at the controls of the forklift, eyed it up and angled the hulking device as accurately as he could. He then threw down an old fashioned manual jack under the edge before lowering the rig to the ground.

  Drones roared overhead as he crouched and put his mechanical arm to work, jacking up the end of the device until it was roughly pointing at the wrecker. He then pulled out a bundle of cables and ran to the base of a handful of broken roof lasers, hooking up to their power supplies and jacking into the crudely aimed device.

  “Okay, step one, deactivate safety devices,” he said, pulling out a hammer and smashing a small control box on the side. “Done. Now, let’s see how dangerous I can make this thing.”

  Power started to flow into the device as he flipped switches and turned knobs. The current was enough to make the cables shudder and smolder. Slowly the menacing black dot began to form. Bolts of energy were peppering the roof, but the combined efforts of Lex and Ma managed to draw most of the fire. That was fortunate, since Karter was paying absolutely no mind to the chaos going on around him. His eyes were fixed resolutely on the growing back dot, an unsettling grin on his face. It wasn’t until the ship above started to produce a pulsating thump that he tore his eyes away.

  “Let’s see how that shield handles a singularity!” He announced, hammering a button on the controls.

  With a crackle of energy, the refrigerator sized hunk of machinery fired the barely visible speck of black. The force of the recoil drove the rest of the machine halfway into the roof like a tent peg and launched the forklift off the edge of the roof. Almost immediately the tiny dot was invisible, but Karter closed his natural eye and focused his electronic one, tracking the trajectory.

  “Come on, come on!” Karter growled, “How’s containment, Ma?”

  “Containment holding. Guidance fieldglass holding.”

  The super-dense projectile shuddered through the air under the influence of the machine’s fields, growing slightly as it went. When it struck the shield, it passed through without slowing, the marble-sized collision managing to light up and collapse half of the deflector array. The armor plating wasn’t much of a match for it either, a perfectly circular bite being taken out of it as the singularity passed through like a stone tossed into a pond. Presumably it continued to pass through the various systems and mechanisms of the Asteroid wrecker unimpeded until it struck the tube of the main weapon.

  “Disabling containment!” Karter announced, reaching down and yanking a cord.

  There was a brief flash, then a clap as the black hole collapsed, unleashing a wave of energy that tore easily through the weapon, rupturing it and sending a string of explosions running through the hull.

  “Yes! YES!” Karter said, slapping the machine, “Oh, I am SO making a black hole mortar now.”

  “Did you do it!?” Lex asked, his voice transmitting out of a communicator in Lex’s arm.

  “Hell yeah I did!”

  “Then why are all of these drones still trying to kill us!?”

  Karter looked up, seeming to notice for the first time that twenty or so robotic fighters were continuing to swarm and bombard the area.

  “Good question. Ma, how’s the wrecker look?”

  “41% hull integral. Running on secondary powerhouse. I am detecting missile modular activation.”

  Karter growled.

  “Fine. They want to play it that way? I’m fresh out of black holes, but they’re fresh out of shields,” he said, kicking the ring from the front of the hopelessly lodged magic mirror, revealing the four particle beams, “So these suckers ought to make a dent.”

  He leaned down and threw a switch on the mercifully still accessible, and still functional, control panel. All four massive weapons fired, producing a continuous beam that struck the wrecker viciously. After a few seconds, the beams burst out the other side of the ship, armor plating running like melted wax. There was no way to aim, but he didn’t have to. The automated ship was attempting to get out of the way of the beam, and in doing so only managed to drag its trail of destruction across the surface.

  “Caution, particular beam heathen levels approaching danger threshold.”

  “Just a little bit longer,” Karter said, mesmerized by the beam’s effect.

  After a few seconds, the path of the beam crossed the main power for one of the engines, causing it to sputter and fail. The whole ship pitched to the side and rotated, allowing the beam to trace a neat spiral across its surface before two more engines gave out. The monster finally dropped out of the sky, missing the half collapsed armory by barely a hundred meters and shaking the entire complex with earthquake force.

  “That’s what you get!
THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!” Karter crowed, stabbing his finger viciously at the downed vehicle.

  “Heathen levels criticism!”

  “Oh, right!” he said, kicking the switch open and shutting down the beams.

  Without the main computer to guide them, the drones suddenly lacked the organization they’d shown before. They worked well when guided, and were capable of organizing themselves autonomously, but the transition from one to the other evidently involved an awful lot of aimless milling about, which made for easy targets. By the time they’d gotten back into an effective formation, there weren’t nearly enough to put up much of a struggle.

  Chapter 18

  Lex pulled into the Lab hangar and landed the ship. Once he stepped out, he walked a wide circle around it. Despite the extended dog fight, some combination of his reflexes and the no doubt overpowered shield Karter had installed had kept his ship almost perfectly untouched. An embarrassingly large chunk of his mind had been preoccupied with keeping his ship safe not because he was inside of it and he would probably die if he didn’t, but because he JUST got it fixed and it looked GORGEOUS.

  “Not a scratch on it...” he said, in disbelief.

  “Excellence flightiness, Mr. Alexander,” Ma said.

  “Nice shooting, Ma!” he exclaimed, “That was nuts out there! And we did it! Oh, man, if you had a body, I would kiss you right on the lips!”

  “I appreciate the sentimentality,” she said.

  “Where is Karter? I need to high five someone before my head explodes!”

  “Mr. Dee is attempting to access a lowered level Labrador in accessibility section five to restoration an importance component to functionality. Many doorways and lifts are malfunctioning. I will lead you to him shortly. I mustard reboot systems affected byway the data corruption, including myself.”

  “You gonna be okay?”

  “Yes. Do note worries. I william be back to fully functionality in six minutes. Systems will become coming backward online in orders of priorities. I am lasting.”