Chapter 11
The DAR--or whatever Karter had made it into--was quite a vessel. In terms of raw speed, it was a hair faster than Betsy. In terms of maneuverability and creature comforts, the DAR left Betsy in the dust. Lex had always considered a heated leather massage seat to be a ridiculous waste of money. His lower back was now urging him to reconsider. It was just as well, because the time lost on the trash heap, coupled with the renewed sense of urgency to be rid of the package, meant that there wouldn’t be many more stops. The spicy sawdust bars that were supposed to be keeping him alive right now had mercifully been destroyed in his crash, so he stopped to dump some chips on a replacement. The best value this time came in the form of tubes of protein/vitamin fortified peanut butter. He wisely picked up more than the usual complement of water, as well. Once he was stocked up, he began a series of marathon sprints that would have made a legitimate courier go on strike. It was mind-numbing, exhausting, and left him looking and smelling like a vagrant, but in just under the six-day deadline, he was watching his destination pull into view.
Tessera V was, in some ways, a lot like Golana. It was a major transit and shipping hub. Unlike Golana, it was also much, much more. The average climate was famously gorgeous. So much so that most corporations kept a campus there for employee retreats. There were also no less than three highly prestigious colleges. Perhaps the most famous and respected opera house for half a galaxy made its home there. Famous beaches, iconic national parks, and all manner of vacation destinations dotted the landscape. In short, it was a center of commerce, culture, and tourism. And since that sort of place attracted an awful lot of the criminal element, there was a considerable legal presence as well.
It was that last part that he needed to deal with at the moment. The sheer amount of traffic in and out of the average planet meant that a fair amount of ships were allowed to slip through without notice. Such was not the case at Tessera V. The entry process involved the exchange of codes, verification of credentials, and if they didn’t like what they heard, a thorough ship search. Figuring out how to get through the arrival processing at planets like this was one of the hardest parts of being a freelancer, and techniques that worked were guarded jealously. Lex had come up with a procedure that usually worked, but he hated to do it. It was one of the more overtly illegal parts of his job, and if he were to get caught, it would cost him a fortune in fines. However, since there wasn’t much a choice at the moment, he would have to give it a shot. He dug out the DAR transponder and fired it up, then hailed the arrivals center.
“Tessera V, northern hemisphere arrivals, please transmit landing auth code,” the voice of a young woman said, with all of the enthusiasm she could be expected to muster for a phrase she’d surely had to say several hundred times that day.
“I’ve got an equipment malfunction. Request vocal code submission,” Lex said.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, murder in her tone. “Please provide the final sixty-four digit code following the--”
“Um, you want to try that again?” he warned.
“Please provide the sixty-four digit--”
“One more time, please. How many digits?”
“Six. Four.”
“What, may I ask, happened to the other four hundred and forty-eight digits you were supposed to be asking for?”
“Oh, no . . .”
“It looks like I’m going to need you to provide your employee number,” Lex said with a heavy sigh.
“Goddamn it,” she fumed.
The full landing authorization code was a five hundred-twelve digit hexadecimal monster, a mess of letters and numbers that took forever to read out correctly. Worse, once it was read, it was to be read back for confirmation. Absolutely everyone who worked the arrivals desk for more than a few days figured out that all but the last sixty-four digits were identical for every ship in a given day, so they only asked for the unique portion. It was a simple, obvious, time-saving measure, and without doing it, the queue of people awaiting permission to land would quickly get hours long if even a single person requested to enter their code manually.
Like most simple, obvious, time-saving measures, though, it was utterly against protocol, and thus the only person who would actually object to the short version would be an auditor.
“Hey, listen, this is no picnic for me, either,” he said. “Loads of paperwork.”
“You guys are flying DARs now? I thought surprise audits were always on cargo vessels.”
“It wouldn’t be a surprise if we did what you expected. What’s the time?”
“Twenty-two fifty-three, galactic; seventeen twenty-eight global.”
“That late? Look, I’ve got seven minutes to get my reports turned in, and that’s pretty much not going to happen if I have to write you up, so let’s just say this never happened, okay?”
“Ohthankgod,” she said in relieved burst, “So, uh, you wanna give me your auth code?”
“I could, but it would be invalid. That’s how these things go, remember? Then they’d have to pull the log of the call, and we’d both get in trouble.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right. I’ll do a whisper pass, then?”
Since no system designer could possibly anticipate every eventuality, there was always a way to just force a ship through without authorization or logging. Generally, it was intended for diplomatic or military vessels, but it was available at the behest of the operator to correct problems that don’t present a security threat.
“That’ll do.”
“Roger. Clearance applied to your transponder code for twenty-four hours. Thanks for being cool about this.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just don’t get used to it. They pay us to not be cool.”
Once the com clicked off and the landing light went green, Lex fairly collapsed back into his chair. He was not a con man, and pulling a stunt like that was well outside his comfort zone. Sure, he had nerves of steel when it came to coaxing insane maneuvers out of vehicles of every description, but when it came to this sort of thing he could practically feel the ulcer forming. One of these days, he was going to have to just try to outrun the patrols like they used to in the old days.
After dropping down into the high atmosphere, he scooted his ship to the appropriate continent, as specified by the delivery instructions. It was a long, narrow strip of land off the coast of the main continent, running from the polar region to a bit past the equator. The whole island was almost perfectly straight, and currently was experiencing night. From high in the atmosphere, it looked like a dotted line of glowing clusters, several hundred cities lined up one after the other along a high-speed railway that ran the length of the island.
The sliver of a continent was called Makou and if it was a distasteful necessity, it was done there. Waste processing, prisons, power generation, industry, and anything else that looked bad or smelled bad got relegated to Makou, which seemed to exist specifically so that the rest of the planet could be beautiful.
Lon Djinn was a region of cities along the northern third of Makou that was composed almost entirely of administrative offices and warehouses. The package was to be delivered to, and thus the other half of his payment was to be collected from, a locker in a transit hub at the very center of Lon Djinn. Lex managed to find a shipyard that would accept chips as payment for docking his ship and tried to figure out where he was headed.
As the names would suggest, there was a fairly strong Asian influence to the area--though he’d been told that most of the names had been selected because they sounded Asian, rather than actually being of Asian origin. Tessera V started off many years ago as a US/Chinese joint colony, and even though it had since become home to every race and creed, the nature of society meant that neighborhoods tended to take on a certain flavor over time. In this case, almost all of the signage was in Mandarin (or Cantonese; he never could tell the difference), and the cuisine tended to come with optional chopsticks. After subsisting on food from a tube for the last few
days, Lex took a moment to pick something at random off of a menu he didn’t understand. A few minutes later, he was rewarded with some sort of spicy noodles and dumplings stuffed with meat that was as delicious as it was unidentifiable. A trip to a second-hand store for a dirt cheap change of clothes and a duffel bag, and he was on his way to the train station.
To call Lon Djinn crowded would be akin to calling the ocean moist. There were so many people that the traditional shoulder-to-shoulder sidewalks and perpetually clogged streets were simply not enough. Not only did hovercars mean that the airspace over the main road was at least as congested as the surface, but a series of elevated walkways along the outside walls of the towering buildings, called skywalks, gave the whole city the look of a shopping mall.
One would think that spending any time at all as a courier would have led Lex to some level of tourism prowess, but language and pedestrian navigation skills eluded him. With the help of a translation program in his slidepad, Lex managed to coax enough information from the busy people on the streets and the new age hieroglyphics scattered among the signs to find the rail station.
Almost instantly, Lex could feel that something was off. He’d made his way down to one of the lower levels, to the commuter lockers so that he could drop off the case and collect his fee. Locker areas tended to share some features regardless of their location. One was the distinctive odor that developed in areas where travelers kept their things. That was present in abundance. Another was homeless people. Between the roof overhead, the lack of business hours, the cheap storage, and the high traffic, transit locker rooms ended up as last chance motels for the financially disadvantaged.
But right now there wasn’t a beggar in sight. That meant that either Lon Djinn had experienced a socioeconomic epiphany and solved the homeless problem once and for all, or something had scared them away. Bums were the canary in the coalmine when it came to law enforcement. It didn’t take long to spot the three plainclothes agents. Being observant and inconspicuous at the same time was a tough trick, and these guys hadn’t quite mastered it.
No points for guessing which locker they were keeping a close eye on.
Lex kept walking, passing through the locker room and hoping that it he wasn’t obviously avoiding eye contact with the cops. He stopped at a snack machine so that it wouldn’t look as though he was passing through for no reason. A wave of his slidepad netted him a candy bar with a picture of a crab on the wrapper, which he dearly hoped was a mascot and not an ingredient. From there, he took a few twisty turns and ducked into the most fragrant bathroom he’d ever been brave enough to step into.
“Oh, come on!” he muttered.
Missing were the standard “sit down” toilets that nature had intended. In their place were the porcelain holes in the floor that Lex was fairly certain existed exclusively to mock tourists. The last few patrons evidently hadn’t been up to the sharpshooting challenge, either. There was, however, a handicapped stall. He dove inside and locked the door.
“Okay, okay. This is bad,” Lex muttered, as near to silently as he could. “This is bad. Can’t deliver the case, can’t get my money. Don’t panic. They might not know who I am. I’ll just ditch the delivery, get the hell out of dodge, and then . . . what? Lie low for the rest of my life? I don’t even know what they’re after . . . But I’m gonna find out!”
He dug into his duffel bag and pulled out the box Blake had been holding for him. It had taken a lot of research and a couple of weeks of sifting auction sites, but he’d finally managed to score an all-frequencies decrypting receiver. If the sales pitch could be believed, this baby could sniff the airwaves and decode all conventional police and security bands--and, since it was receive-only, it was undetectable. Lex had hoped to test it under less extreme circumstances, but if those cops were talking about him, he needed to know.
The box was the size of a lunchbox, but once he’d torn apart the packaging, he was left with something that looked like a pack of cigarettes, with a low resolution screen on the side and an old-fashioned wired earpiece, along with a haystack of assorted adapter wires. He powered it up, and it revealed a readout of all of the relevant radio signals. A few security bands, a few corporate ones, and one law enforcement. He slipped the earpiece into place, selected the police band, and . . . was struck with a flood rapid-fire Mandarin.
“Son of a--”
He sorted through the tangle of wires until he found one that fit his slidepad and activated the translation program. Once it started to spit out English, he put the device to his ear.
“. . . transport hub in the vicinity of Long Genius all the staff. We’ve got the news that a suspect has been at a lower level vending machines, locker room C1 area using a looked-at account. Being the lookout for the more than average height white man of suspicion. Image to follow.”
He stared blankly for a moment.
“Stupid cheap translator app! Uh . . . okay. A looked-at account . . . a watched account. VC must be watching my bank account activity . . . Vending machines . . . Oh, my god.”
Lex reached into his pocket and pulled out the crab bar. He’d bought it with the slidepad, which meant not only did they know he was here, they knew he was trying to drop off the package, since he was right by the drop site. Which meant they knew he still had the package. This was bad. This was very bad. He grabbed his duffel, strapped it to his back, and rushed out of the bathroom. All the while, he kept the slidepad held to his ear as though he were in a conversation. It still spat nothing but mangled Chinese-to-English translations in low quality text-to-speech, but it was better than nothing.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” he muttered out loud, “don’t run. They’ll know you’re onto them if you run. You’ll look suspicious. Move slow, look calm. Once you are out in this crowded mess of a city, you’ll be able to lose them. Just try to make it out one of the lower exits.”
“Image likeness having been received. Make obstructed the exits of lower level,” squawked the computerized approximation of the police dispatcher.
“Okay, then, upper exits,” he corrected.
The now-fugitive pilot’s attempts at subtlety weren’t achieving a very high degree of success. Perhaps it was because he was sweating bullets. More likely it was because he was a foot taller than almost everyone around him and had a cheap duffel bag hung awkwardly behind him while he yammered to himself in a foreign language. Chances were the police would have been keeping a close eye on him even if he didn’t perfectly fit the description of a suspect. Even now, cops--uniformed and not--were beginning to sift their way through the churning station-goers toward him.
He switched the slidepad to speaker and shoved it into his pocket as he weighed his options. It didn’t take very long, because it wasn’t a very long list. When he tried to turn down a slightly less crowded hall, one of the cops shouted. He didn’t understand the order, but that hardly mattered. All it meant was that it was time for him to drop the inconspicuous act and default to what he did best: escape.
Using reflexes honed during four years of changing class in a high school with three times as many students as it was built for, Lex slid between the confused patrons without losing a step. He managed to put a fair amount of space between himself and the pursuers before another handful of badges appeared at the opposite end of the hall. Their guns weren’t out. No officer with more than a day of training would ever be stupid enough to draw a weapon in a crowded train station. The ensuing panic and stampede would kill more people than the bullets ever could. Instead, they rested their hands conspicuously on their pistols, edging sideways with their eyes locked on him. There was no chance he could slip by them, and the way back was even better protected.
Lex scanned his surroundings. Along the wall to his left was a section of floor roped off for maintenance. The tiles looked like they had some sort of water damage, and caution tape formed a protective perimeter around them, strung between narrow stands with heavy, stable bases. Beside the cordoned area was
a service door. He dove for it. A rattle of the handle revealed that it was, predictably, locked. He grabbed the nearest of the tape stands, pulling down the entire row as a result. The sudden clatter of metal sent a startled shockwave through the crowd, clearing the area around him and tripping up the approaching authorities. After carefully logging that lucky little discovery for future use, he made use of the extra elbow room to swing the hefty base of the stand at the knob, breaking it off and wrenching the door open. He disappeared inside.
The maintenance stairs were completely empty, at least for the moment. Lex took full advantage, sprinting up them three at a time. It didn’t take long for his lungs to start burning and his legs to gently remind him that, if vigorous activity had been in the plan, half a week in a cockpit and a belly-load of mystery meat weren’t the best preparation. Stopping wasn’t an option, though. The translation in his pocket rattled off floor numbers and lockdown orders as quickly as he reached new landings. Over his heaving breath, he heard a key code being punched into the door ahead. As it opened, he drove his heel into it, slamming it shut again and hurling his would be captor backward.
In the back of his mind, somewhere buried in the panic, a voice of reason pointed out that there generally weren’t many exits on the upper floors of a train station, but he shoved it aside. Judging from the pounding of feet on the stairs below, up was the only option. There was still hope, wasn’t there? There could be a window open or a fire exit, couldn’t there? There damn well better be, because he sure as hell wasn’t going go to jail because of a stupid crab candy bar.
Finally, he was out of steps, facing a final door that was miraculously free from the sounds of commotion on the other side. He gave it a solid whack with the tape stand he hadn’t had the good sense to drop ten floors ago. The flimsy, low-bid security door swung open. He’d made it through and wedged it shut with the battered remnants of the stand before his brain registered what he’d managed to step in to . . . or, rather, out of.
The door had led to a metal catwalk that ran a short distance along the outer wall. His mad rush had managed to bring him all the way to the top of the fifteen-story station. Whoever designed the building must have valued form over function, because evidently a petty little thing like a safety railing would have ruined the aesthetic. Instead, there was a narrow-rung ladder leading a few dozen feet to the roof, and a steep drop to the sidewalk below, the station being one of the few buildings in the area without skywalks wrapped around it. The multilevel traffic jam hovered, jostled, and shuddered forward at a snail’s pace just below him. Behind, the door was beginning to rattle with the blows of police eager to apprehend.
“Okay, Lex. Let’s think this through,” he reasoned with himself. “You had a good run. The cops won this one, that’s all. How bad could jail be, right? Three hots and a cot. They couldn’t hold me for more than a few years, but at least I’d be alive . . . Except . . . Sarah Jones. She was the only other person who handled this case, and now she’s dead. They killed her, and a whole shuttle of other people just for mailing it . . . I’m as good as dead if they catch me.”
The door released a cheap “ping” noise, sending a bolt twirling into passing traffic and warning that he didn’t have much more time to weigh his options. He shuffled up to the edge and watched the bolt bounce and ricochet its way through the afternoon rush, causing expensive nicks and scratches to a dozen cars before he lost sight of it. A plan came to mind, though calling it a plan was perhaps a bit charitable. It was only marginally less suicidal than turning himself in to VectorCorp, but he wasn’t exactly spoiled for options.
Taking a few steps back, Lex made sure that the duffel was as secure as he could make it. A checklist formed in his head and he began to mark things off. Laces: tied. Belt: buckled. Pockets: zipped shut. Fingers: crossed. He took a deep breath, ran for three long strides, and hurled himself off of the edge just as the police managed to break the door open.
Some things, Lex knew, were difficult to fully appreciate until they've been put into the proper context. Twenty feet, for instance, didn’t sound like much of a drop. And ten feet seemed like a fairly short distance to jump. When the twenty-foot drop was the top two stories of a fifteen-story building, though, and the ten-foot jump was to the roof of a temporarily stationary hovercar, the distances suddenly seemed very significant indeed. It didn’t take a fancy safety system to make time slow to a crawl this time. His brain did it all on its own, evidently deciding that if this was the last thing it was going to experience, it might as well be thorough.
Approximately three lifetimes later, he came slamming down on the roof of a delivery truck. It took three painful bounces and a few feet of sliding before his brain was willing to take enough attention away from the very important task of screaming profanities to actually try to hang on. By then, he’d run out of truck.
Traffic had looked like a solid wall of bumper to bumper gridlock from above, but somehow he managed to fall through two more levels of it before landing on a mid-size commuter car with a roof rack. One hand wrapped in a death grip around the rack while the other did a cursory check to see if any bones were protruding from his nice new outfit.
When he was sure that all body parts were present, accounted for, and reasonably intact, it was time to figure out the next step in his master plan. Thus far, it had been surprisingly educational. For one, he’d learned that things didn’t work out in real life the way they did in the movies. Rather than the car he landed on continuing along and carrying him to freedom, this particular motorist stopped suddenly. Most of the people behind him stopped suddenly, too, and those who didn’t do so immediately did so shortly afterward when they collided with their more attentive brethren. Thus, his clever escape plan now consisted of trying to get air back into his lungs as he watched the traffic ahead pull away.
Another lesson he was learning was that, when it came to cursing someone out, no one could go wrong with Chinese. The owner of the car he’d landed on was delivering a scathing tirade that was only slightly softened by the fact that Lex couldn’t understand a word of it. There was a sound that he did understand, however. Sirens. He glanced up to see flashing lights weaving their way in from above.
“Sorry!” he blurted, before leaping from this roof to the next.
After a few sloppy landings, Lex started to get a feel for the footing he could expect from car hoods, windshields, and roofs, as he made his way across the crowded roadway. The slowly flowing column of cars became a cacophony of exotic profanities, blaring horns, and wailing sirens. Rubberneckers gawking at the lunatic jumping from roof to roof soon became the next stepping stone. He swung from bumpers, vaulted over luggage, and cracked sunroofs in his mad attempt to get close enough to something stationary to escape.
Fortunately for him, the chaos he was stirring up made it damn near impossible for the police to get close to him.
Finally, a sporty coupe that had tried and failed to avoid him drifted off-road and scraped against a third-floor skywalk across the street from the station, which he eagerly scrambled onto. Planting his feet on something not actively trying to get out from underneath him for the first time in too long, he took off at a sprint toward what he hoped was the shipyard with his loaner.
A crowded city, particularly one that had just recently had a commotion the likes of which he’d just caused, was a terrible place to have to chase down a suspect. Even sticking out as he was, any time he caught a glimpse of a cop, all he had to do was duck down an alley or two and they were long gone. Through some miracle of bureaucratic oversight, the police hadn’t sent anyone ahead to the local shipyards to keep an eye out for him. Maybe the local cops didn’t think he was worth it. Regardless, he threw a fistful of chips at the clerk, jumped into the cockpit of his ship, and skipped every start-up procedure he could forgo without causing the engines to explode.
“Warning. Warning. Optimal flow rate not achieved. Engine efficiency below fifteen percent,” informed the ship.
“I know, I know,” Lex muttered.
The well-maintained ship lurched up and out of the docking bay amid various complaints and groans. Cold-starting a ship like that was a bad idea for several reasons, but top among them was the dismal power output of an engine that wasn’t up to speed. Until the DAR warmed up, it was like trying to fly a refrigerator. But it was only a matter of time before they realized it might be a good idea to lock down the shipyards, and a flying fridge still had a better chance than a grounded ship.
He was just shuddering up above the city when his luck ran thin. A pair of police cruisers rose up from between the skyscrapers and hailed him. The cruisers were little more than slightly oversized hovercars with heftier engines and blue and white paint jobs. The two of them combined were barely as big as the DAR by itself, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t cause trouble for him. Lex knew that working against gravity meant even minor collisions could cause serious issues, so a pair of little ships teaming up against a big one could easily disable or ground it if they hit the right spots.
They transmitted a prerecorded, all purpose “Stop, you are under arrest” message that cycled through about fifteen different languages, giving instructions on how best to avoid getting into any further trouble. Lex had heard it so many times over the course of his rather rebellious life that he’d nearly memorized it. Evidently, if he were to allow the law enforcement professional or professionals in pursuit to escort him to the nearest retention center or processing facility, he would be treated fairly and his cooperation would be taken into consideration. As tempting as the offer was, he was inclined to try his luck.
Again, he ran through his options. He was in a temporarily crippled ship in a transit hub on a foreign planet, with two low-atmosphere ships, presumably unarmed, looking to bring him in. Compared to recent history, this was going to be a breeze. All he had to do was stay mobile until his borrowed ship caught its breath. Ideally, he should do some fancy footwork through the train yard below, but since that was effectively an act of terrorism, he decided against it. Likewise, doing a reckless, high-speed pursuit through one of the cities was out. Doing that in a limo was one thing, where the worst he could do is total a few cars. The DAR could probably take down a building if he didn’t handle it right. This was going to have to be a straight up dogfight, minus the guns . . . he hoped.
Once it became clear that asking nicely wasn’t working, the police started to run through the standard operating procedure. Having a rigid set of well-practiced procedures was great for cops, because it meant that they were able to coordinate well and really hone their craft. It also made them predictable. They jockeyed into their positions, setting up what in two dimensions would have been a PIT maneuver. The addition of the Z axis made things more complicated, but an enterprising offensive driver had figured something out. It involved nudging a ship or hovercar into an awkward orientation, thus forcing the pursue-ee to either waste time correcting or go plowing into the ground.
The rearmost ship edged up to Lex’s still puttering ship and made ready give him a shove. Just as he juiced the throttle, Lex pivoted the DAR on its side. The cop missed and ended up rocketing forward, nearly ramming his partner. While they were trying to work out what happened, he took a ninety-degree turn and pushed the wheezing engine for all it was worth. They eventually took a wide turn and approached on either side of him to try to line him up for another try, but as soon as they matched speed, he cut the throttle and fired the retro rockets, bringing him to a nearly complete stop. When the police tried to loop around, he simply flared up again, whizzing between them and choosing a random direction.
The “chase” continued in this fashion for a few more maneuvers before the cops realized that they were outclassed and took a moment to call for reinforcements. They were quick to respond, and there were a lot of them. Aside from a few dozen more cruisers, there were two big, sturdy, space-capable Interceptors, essentially younger siblings of the late Betsy. The good news was that they hadn’t had the irresponsibly large engines grafted onto them like Betsy had. The bad news was that this chase wasn’t going to stop at the edge of the atmosphere anymore.
“This . . . isn’t going as well as I’d hoped . . .”
The console of the ship bleeped and its voice announced, “Optimal flow rate achieved. Engine status: optimal.”
“That’s more like it!” Lex roared triumphantly, setting a course and putting the pedal to the metal.
The better part of the Lon Djinn police force followed suit, but with the DAR engines back online, it was only the pair of Interceptors that managed to keep pace, and only just. The rush of wind outside started to die away as the atmosphere started to thin out, allowing Lex to pour on a bit more speed without his ship spontaneously combusting. For a moment, it looked like he was actually going to get away without any more shenanigans, but his ship’s sensors had two things to say about it. First, there was another pair of ships ahead, part of an orbital patrol. Second, all four ships were far enough away from populated areas to activate short-range weaponry.
Without thinking, Lex aimed for the nearest orbital checkpoint. They couldn’t shoot at him if he was close enough to civilians. Yes, technically he was using a human shield, but since he was running for his life, that sort of thing suddenly seemed a lot less contemptible.
They took a few potshots with “plasma flak” charges, short-range rockets that scattered white-hot specks of energy that would stall his electrical system if he hit too much of it, but that fizzled out after a few seconds, leaving nothing behind to cause collateral damage. Think “spike strip in space.” He managed to steer clear of both. By the time they were ready to line him up for a fourth attempt, though, the checkpoint was in sight and the weapons disengaged.
In seconds, Lex was weaving though the ships at the checkpoint, the Interceptors whisking along the outside edge of the line. He steered with one hand and fumbled for the transponder with the other. An idea had come to mind, but the timing was going to be awfully tight.
He was getting close to the end of the line now. The innocent bystanders were getting fewer and farther between and the Interceptors were getting closer. A massive freight hauler was just coming in. Once they were past it, it was nothing but open space, and anything was fair game. Lex managed to flip the trash ejector open, cram the DAR transponder into it, and seal it shut. Just a few more seconds before those guys on his tail would be willing to warm up their guns again. He prepared the field generator for the FTL jump. With a tight double tap of his maneuvering rockets, he managed to put the hauler between himself and the Interceptors. The very instant the system gave him the go ahead, he tapped the trash eject, sending the external transponder through a series of narrow airlocks and out into open space. A half-second later, he punched the FTL button.
When the Interceptors made it past the hauler, their sensors told them that Lex was heading along at roughly the same speed as he had been. Their eyes told them he had vanished. Presumably, they eventually caught up with the ejected transponder, but by then he was long, long gone.