Chapter 22
By the time he was dropping back out of FTL outside the destination star system, his narrow, twelve-hour buffer had been shaved to a sliver. The smattering of side conferences and news reports had already started--the business equivalent of a pregame show. In less than two hours, the CEO would speak. When he was through, the broadcasters and bloggers would run his words through the meat grinder, form the resulting mush into their news bites, and pack up and head home. The stock would spike or dip, depending on whether the investors liked what they heard, and the public interest would wander. The streamlined flow of information afforded by the net meant that news cycles had shrunk from days to hours. Realistically, it might be as little as two days before enough time had passed that the disaster could safely occur with no financial impact on the company. Lex didn’t have that long, though. If what he had in mind was going to work, he would need as many cameras on hand as possible. He had to get this done during the press event. That was the plan, at least.
Ah, yes, the plan. He settled the ship into an automated holding pattern and began to work through what he and the AI had managed to put together. He remembered reading somewhere that if you were working with a plan with many possible points of failure, the best thing to do was to work backward from your intended goal until you reached your current point. Reformulating it at every step of the way ensured that, no matter what had gone wrong thus far, you had a clear path to victory. It had made plenty of sense when he was reading it, and he’d decided that if he ever had some epic undertaking, he would do that.
Now that he was staring down the barrel of a task that would give a special ops team a hard time, he found the fatal flaw in that line of reasoning. Specifically, you would have to be some sort of super genius to throw together a full plan at every step of the way. After losing his train of thought seven or eight times, he decided that he was better off starting at the beginning.
“First step, get to the planet’s surface,” he said out loud, flipping his receiver to the guidance frequency. “That shouldn’t be too tough. How many times have I done it when delivering a package? Plenty. Just breathe easy, stick to the old reliable methods, and everything will be fine.”
“Hello, my name is Jeannette Morray, and I would like to welcome you to Verna Coronet,” purred a voice over his radio.
Lex recognized the voice and name. She was a famous actress, the sort who demanded enough money to build a stadium for fifteen minutes of screen time. The idea that VC had enough money to hire her for their holding pattern announcements managed to make him even more nervous. Briefly, he wondered how much the small fleet of voiceover artists who provided Ma’s piecemeal voice charged. If any of them were still working, it might be nice to hire her to read the dictionary or something, to give Ma a more consistent persona.
Verna Coronet Western Hemisphere Port Station came into view, a silver thread of a space station stretching impossibly far in all directions. As he drew closer, it began to resemble a long, thin strip of metallic netting, the brilliant specks of starship engines slowly organizing themselves into orderly rows, creeping along like the tail lights of cars on an old-fashioned freeway.
Steadily, the details of the station became visible, a deep framework of personways, narrow pressurized tubes leading to authorization stations that stuck out into space like thorns. Each station had its own line of ships. The network of tubes and stations must have continued for miles to the left and right, and was easily half a mile from top to bottom, and nearly as deep. It was a huge piece of fragile infrastructure, designed to efficiently monitor and record the entry and exit of every ship looking to access this half of the planet. The voice continued.
“Discovered and colonized in the early years of wide-scale space exploration, Verna Coronet was developed quickly, one of the few planets to require almost no terraforming. It became an indispensable port of call for trade and transportation within years of its settlement. A small company that shared the planet’s initials, then called the Vector Corporation, was founded to map and regulate local trade routes. Today, VectorCorp is responsible for more than seventy percent of all intersystem communication and transit.
“Verna Coronet remains the central headquarters of VectorCorp, which is now the only significant corporate presence on the planet. Please enjoy your stay, and await further instruction regarding your landing. Thank you. Current wait time is: Forty. Three. Minutes.”
Lex swallowed hard. The preliminary festivities would be nearly over by the time he made it to the surface at this rate. He didn’t know how long it was going to take to do what needed to be done, but he had a feeling that it would take longer than he expected. This was time he couldn’t afford to lose. Unfortunately, knowing that didn’t make things move any faster.
The minutes ticked by painfully slowly. To keep himself busy, he decided he would work on setting the record for world’s fastest ulcer by watching patrol ships work their way systematically down the lines awaiting processing. They were checking everyone in a given line, starting at the front and sliding along quickly and efficiently. They weren’t being thorough, just stopping briefly at each ship, long enough to take a quick look. They were checking faces.
Sweat ran down his neck. He may have underestimated them. They were clearly looking for him, but there shouldn’t be any reason for that. It wasn’t like they knew his plan. It would have taken an idiot to come directly to their headquarters when the company wanted him dead. Were they really that smart, anticipating his moves so well? Or were they just that paranoid? At this point, they may as well be the same thing.
His heart started to pound. Plan A wasn’t looking good, but it could still work if he made it through the check before the patrols started on his line. Three more to go. Now two, now one.
“Hello, and welcome to Verna Coronet, corporate headquarters of VectorCorp. Please transmit your landing authorization,” said an alarmingly chipper-sounding young man over the com link.
“I’m sorry, I’m having transmitter problems,” Lex said, trying desperately to avoid sounding as desperate as he was. It was a losing battle. “I’m going to have to ask for a vocal code submission.”
“That will not be a problem sir. Will you please provide the five hundred and twelve digit alphanumeric landing code found on your authorization screen?”
“Wha-wha--” Lex stuttered, feeling for a moment as though the ground had been yanked from underneath him. “How many digits?”
“Five hundred and twelve. You can find them--”
“Oh, yeah, I know. It’s just that, uh, most of the time people only ask for the last sixty-four.”
“Mmm. Yes, that is a common shortcut, but I’m afraid standard policy calls for the full code. Also, if you would, please shift to the manual check-in queue to your left as you authorize, so that fully-functional ships can continue through on the automated system.”
Lex looked to the manual line. There wasn’t a security ship waiting there. There didn’t have to be. The line had its own security checkpoint. Plan A had officially failed.
“Sure thing, just a minute,” said the pilot, mopping his head, “Do you mind if I ask your name, sir?”
“Not at all. I am Orbital Check-in Agent Lionel Sanders.”
“Well, Lionel, I just want to congratulate you on doing an excellent job. This was a surprise security audit, and I’m pleased to say that you passed. I’ll just get out of line and head back to the audit firm.”
“Well, thank you very much, sir, but you are still in Verna Coronet orbital space, so I will need your official authorization, and if you don’t mind, your audit license number as well, for our records . . . Sir?”
Lex punched a few buttons on his console, his engine beginning to rev and shudder. As he entered various codes and secret combinations, he spoke.
“I would like to apologize in advance for this.” The engine was beginning to interfere with the radio now, a deep, throaty growl overlaying the transmission. ?
??You’re doing an excellent job, and I have nothing against you.” Now the building power was beginning to produce an unsettling glow in his engine cowling. “Hopefully your superiors don’t hold you responsible for what is about to happen.”
“Sir, please power down your engine,” Sanders said, trying to sound stern. A sizable dose of panic slipped through along with it. “There are security personnel en route. What exactly do you think you are going to do?”
“Plan B,” Lex said, cramming his mouth full of gum.
He punched the engine for all it was worth and activated the radio-scrambling mode that Karter had installed. The result was immediate, swallowing the signal of everyone around him in a sea of distortion and white noise. With no way to coordinate, chaos reigned. Lex wove through the lanes of waiting ships, wringing every ounce of speed and agility out of the S.O.B. Behind him, at least a dozen security ships narrowly avoided colliding with each other as they chased after him. All around, screens and indicators began to light up, alerting the ships waiting to be processed that a police activity was occurring and directing them to clear the area through indicated routes.
A glance in his rear viewer assured him that the ships had wrangled themselves into a staggered line behind him, each trying with varying degrees of success to simultaneously get close to Lex and keep away from each other. While his ship was blacking out communications, though, it was virtually impossible. The thin, metallic passageways that made up the space station whipped by with horrifying speed. With each one, Lex found himself both fearing and praying for one of his followers to smash into it. The goal here was to keep people from getting killed, after all. Was it acceptable if a few security guards and a few port workers got killed in the process of saving hundreds of thousands of other people? What was the moral balance?
Lex probably wasn’t qualified to answer that question even when he had his full mind available to consider the issue. As S.O.B. clipped a transmission array, knocking it loose to be dashed apart by the growing trail of pursuing ships, it became clear that philosophical debate should probably wait until he wasn’t running for his life.
The first wisps of atmosphere were beginning to whistle across the ship’s surface now. Wisely, the port of entry was geostationary over roughly the center of the largest of Verna Coronet’s oceans. The idea was that, if something went wrong, there probably wouldn’t be a city at the point of impact. This also meant that those ships behind him could open fire without worrying about hitting a skyscraper full of white-collared executives.
Sensors screamed warnings as Lex took evasive action. He twisted, bobbed, and twitched the ship, looping around volleys of plasma bolts and trying to aim roughly for the mainland.
It wasn’t just a matter of speed. In the atmosphere, wind resistance was already starting to heat up the hull of his ship, despite his shields. He couldn’t afford to push it any harder, and the well-funded VC security force was equipped with ships that could easily match his current speed. This was going to be pure evasion, and it was only going to get more difficult, because the space station was out of range of his jamming, which meant that word was now reaching every available ship and hovercar to head to his position and take him down. The air was thick with hissing plasma shots, ships all carefully clustering on one side to be sure that they wouldn’t catch friendlies in the crossfire. Bolts splashed against his shield, but Lex kept on target, making each dodge and sweep take him closer to the continent with the HQ.
More ships arrived, and formations and flanking maneuvers began to form despite the lack of communication. These guys were good, the best training money could buy. If he let them stay on him for much longer, no amount of fancy flying would get him out of this alive. Time to pull another ace out of his sleeve.
He dipped down, sweeping into the thicker atmosphere. His hull started to glow with air friction, but he continued to push the limits of his ship, slowing only as much as necessary to keep from collapsing his shield entirely. The ships began to cluster behind him, opening fire freely now, with only open water below. Shield integrity warnings blared at him. His protective force field was in the single digits and ticking steadily down as it was pelted with air molecules at supersonic speed. Finally, the pursuit ships were gathered into a tiny slice of the sky, directly behind him, and near enough to make dodging their weapons fire nearly impossible. Now was the time.
He punched the button for the heat dumper, activating one of Karter’s other countermeasures, an EMP burst, targeted to the rear. The electronics systems of the pursuit vessels lit up like a dozen slot machines, rogue electrons suddenly confusing signals and corrupting data streams. Controls were useless, along with weapons, communications, engine electronics, and basically anything else that used complex computations. Without continued thrust, they quickly slowed to terminal velocity as gravity took over as the driving force.
Lex pulled up and hissed along the surface of the ocean, scooping out a deep furrow in the water below and leaving an epic wake behind. The ships behind struck the water one by one, like a handful of gravel hurled into a well. Mechanical safety systems worked their magic with air bags, magnetic fields, impact foam, and all of the other hocus-pocus that engineers had managed to come up with to keep the human brain from becoming scrambled eggs during a high-speed impact, even when the computers were on the fritz. Water hissed to steam in contact with the hulls; pilots slowly came to their senses and tried to make sense of what had happened. When all was said and done, the nearly three dozen ships on Lex’s tail had been reduced to three stragglers that had been too far away to get the full brunt of the EMP.
They began to close in on their target. The shore was in sight now. Time was running out for them, so desperate measures were called for. The more vicious weapons began to come online. Missiles dropped into launch tubes; the heat signal of the invading ship identified and locked, they were launched.
Lex looked at a string of threatening white dots with rapidly decreasing range indicators as they closed in. A waggle of his stick and pivot of the ship shoved his shields momentarily below the surface of the sea, heaving a wall of water up behind him. The delicate warheads smacked into the water at many multiples of the speed of sound and detonated, but no sooner had they been dealt with than a new cluster were on their way, and there simply wasn’t enough shield left to do a repeat performance.
The shore was close now--close enough for seagoing traffic to start flashing by. Huge tankers, little pleasure crafts, and a cruise ship or two came and went. Lives were in danger now. Innocent lives. Lex held his breath and gave the controls a shove. There was a flash of light, and a sound like a meteor tearing into the surface of the planet.