Chapter 23
The streets were crowded with both foot traffic and street traffic. It wasn’t like Lon Djinn, where the city was used to that sort of thing and had adapted. This was clearly rare, and the city was ill-prepared for the uptick in population that conventions invariably brought to an area.
Verna Coronet was very Earth-like. Across its five continents, every climate was represented, and the VC tower stood on the east coast, just a bit above the equator. The place was practically a vacation resort, with cool sea breeze blowing over a lush, green environment. Palm trees imported from California, and trendy restaurants and boutiques--also imported from California--lined every street.
People were mostly hustling to make it to the tower to witness the VC CEO explain that his company, sure enough, still had more money than God, and such would remain the case for the foreseeable future. Sifting among the legion of designer labels and spray tans was a curious sight: an unshaven man in a flight suit, all of its pockets bulging, with a dull gray bundle strapped to his back. His face was smudged with irregularly-shaped black splotches, like a football player’s war paint if it had been applied on a roller coaster. He wore bizarre mitts on his hands, thick blue gloves. Despite the fact that he stuck out like a sore thumb, Lex didn’t garner a second glance from anyone. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even get a first glance.
He nervously twitched a knob on his backpack. Karter had managed to “ruggedize” the mental cloak, meaning that he’d given it a somewhat sturdier covering than its duct tape cocoon. He’d also thrown out an awful lot of amplification and power apparatus, knocking its range down to about two hundred meters and its weight down to about ten kilos. This, he claimed, would “probably” prevent it from causing seizures. The threat of sudden, debilitating brain ailments managed to be the last thing on Lex’s mind, though. Mostly he felt naked. The face paint was to foil facial detection and identification, and it seemed to be working.
On the other hand, he was trusting a piece of machinery that was currently undergoing its first actual test--and operated on principles that he would have sworn were just made up--to keep him from being seen in broad daylight on a crowded street. He felt like the emperor wearing his fancy new clothes. Yet, astoundingly, it was working.
It wasn’t like he was invisible. It was better. If he’d been invisible, he’d have had to worry about people constantly running into him. With this piece of technological witchcraft, people were actually stepping out of his way, making room for him as he jogged by.
A half-hour of moving unnoticed through the crowded streets took him to the outskirts of the VectorCorp Tower Plaza, but simply being ignored wasn’t going to help him anymore. The courtyard was utterly packed, shoulder to shoulder, with nowhere to move. Most attendees were men and women in suits, gathered to witness a speech from their glorious leader. These people worked eighty-hour weeks for this man, but squinting at a podium several hundred feet away on the steps of the building, or on one of the pair of massive screens set up along the side of the tower, was likely the closest they would ever come to actually meeting him. By rights, the VectorCorp CEO should have been the most famous person in the galaxy, but this was one of those occasions where specific names just didn’t matter anymore. VectorCorp was a force. People cared about as much about the man in charge as they cared about the names of the engineers operating the trains they rode--or, in the case of Lex, the train that was about to hit him. A parade of silver-haired men--and women who all paid small fortunes to avoid being silver-haired--had held the post over the years, like different actors reprising the same role on a soap opera.
The rest of the crowd was made up of broadcasters of every type: bloggers, vloggers, business media, generic news, local, regional, galactic. It didn’t matter what language someone spoke, or where they lived--over the next week, they were not going to be able to avoid seeing clips of this speech.
It would be nice to think that all he had to do was de-cloak in the middle of the crowd and scream that VectorCorp was plotting to kill thousands of people, but that sort of thing happened every year or so, and press laughed it off as a harmless lunatic’s rantings. Lex had, too. Now he wasn’t so sure. But what he did know was that he needed a better way--or, at least, better evidence--and that meant getting inside.
Between the promise of hearing their elusive boss speak and the promise of coverage of the hottest news event of the year so far, the crowd wasn’t budging an inch. Having people not notice him when he was scooting by them was one thing. Shoving people aside would probably override any sort of pseudo-magical powers his backpack had. It was just as well. He hadn’t expected to be able to walk through the front door anyway.
He scanned the area, looking for a way in. The courtyard was definitely out, so he began to work his way around the fenced-off speech area, looking for a door or window that wasn’t actively being guarded. He’d just spotted an access door in a low wall around the yard, just forward of where it connected to the building, when he saw a contingent of security guards walking with purpose toward him. They were sweeping the area with their eyes, talking conspicuously into headsets. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on. Someone manning the security monitors had spotted a suspicious idiot with face paint on near the cameras, and they’d been sent to intercept.
Once they got close, though, the mental cloak kicked in and they couldn’t spot anything that even remotely resembled what they were looking for. He held his breath and tried to think inconspicuous thoughts. They looked with increasing accuracy toward him--in some cases directly at him--but only appeared more agitated. Lex sidled along the wall, near enough to hear the argument.
“I’m telling you, there’s no one here! I’m not an asshole, Don. If there was a painted up weirdo in this area, I think I’d see him. You sent us to the wrong area,” growled the leader of the group, “I’m looking right at the wall. Quit jerking me around. I’m heading to the other side. Let’s go.”
The security guards hurried off, the voice in their earpiece screaming loud enough for Lex to hear him as they passed. When they were out of sight, he exhaled and started rummaging through one of his suit’s pouches. Finally, he came up with . . . a finger. It was one of the fingers that Karter had blown off on the day Lex first met him, and was wired to a small control box with a handful of buttons on it and a screen. He tapped through the menu, seeing a sequence of names slide by that he didn’t recognize, finally digging up “Agent Fisk.” There actually hadn’t been enough of his fingers left to get a good print, but they’d managed to find his gun and lift a set off of that, which was subsequently fed to the programmable fingerprints. He swiped the finger across the reader. Instantly the green “access granted” light flicked on. He opened the door, slipped inside, and shut it behind him.
The door led to a shaded area tucked into the corner of the courtyard that was crammed with as many media rigs as they could fit. Logos of various sites, channels, and stations were plastered across equipment from every price range. A handful of the people present snapped their heads in his direction when the door opened and shut, furrowing their brows in confusion. From their point of view, someone had certainly come through the door, but just as certainly there wasn’t anyone standing there. When they looked away, Lex’s heart started to beat again. Yes, this ulcer was coming along nicely.
He moved as close to the wall as possible, reasoning that elbowing through the crowd wasn’t going to get him any closer to the inside of the building anytime soon. Ma had actually managed to track down a building schematic, but said map neglected to take into account the triple capacity attendance of the speech, so he wouldn’t even bother looking it over until he was inside. He’d barely managed to squeeze three layers deep into the press of press when the door opened again and three of the security crew slipped inside. Their appearance motivated him to sacrifice a little bit of care for speed. He edged, pushed, slipped, and nudged his way through the crowd of microphones, cameras, monopo
ds, tripods, and agitated news casters and crew. His attempts to keep his eye on the pursuing security agents led to him stumbling backward as often as forward. People griped, complained, and snapped at him when he bumped them, turning to look past Lex to the next closest person to blame. When it became clear that the commotion he was causing was attracting their attention even without being able to see him, he tried to restore a level of care to his footsteps. Unfortunately, his panic couldn't be flipped off like a light switch, and it kept its friend paranoia around for company. He turned around to see them, took a nervous step backward, and barely nudged yet another anchor.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the young woman in reflexive politeness.
Lex froze at the sound of the voice. Those three words managed to force every ounce of fear, of duty, of thought from the would be infiltrator’s mind. He turned, eyes wide, and beheld a beautiful young newscaster. Carefully styled and highlighted auburn hair framed a face he would recognize anywhere. She’d brushed on makeup to hide her freckles, but even now she stared with striking blue eyes through a stylish pair of glasses, looking with disappointment at the obstructed view to the podium.
“We aren’t going to see anything from here. I knew we should have gotten here earlier,” she fretted. “Can you get a shot at all, Ted?”
“I doubt it. The transmission truck from NewsCom is blocking the way,” said a squat older man, strapped with cameras, lenses, microphones, and everything else necessary to do a news report from the field. That was the funny thing about optics. The digital sensors had gotten better and better, smaller and smaller, but it never changed the fact that a bigger lens made for a better picture, so the real pros were still working with hefty equipment. “I’ve got the directional, so we can get some decent audio.”
“Well, there’s that. No offense, Ted, you do great work, but if we had brought one of those hovercam modules instead of you, we’d at least get an elevated shot.”
“I’ve got a hovercam, but if we do that, this is going to be low-res. You okay with that?”
As the two began to deliberate over how best to produce a report that probably would decide the direction of their careers for the decade to come, Lex just stared. Without his clumsy, desperate maneuvering though the press area, the security crew had lost track and moved on, but that had hardly been his plan. Right now, staring was all he wanted to do. It wasn’t until a squeal of feedback and a nervous business underling’s voice announced that the speech would be starting in just a few minutes that Lex finally remembered he had a job to do.
Quickly, he realized that this well-timed reunion would eliminate one of the major question marks in the plan he and Ma had constructed. That was, if he could pull it off. It was an idiotic long shot, but at least that made it consistent with the rest of the plan. After shuffling against the wall, huddled between a stack of equipment cases and the support for a banner, and leaning against an intercom panel, he reached back and twisted the knob on his pack to zero.
“Mitch,” he said quietly.
She glanced absentmindedly in his direction. “Mmm? I’m sorry, I’ll be with you in a minute, I’ve got to--Trevor?”
She twisted her head, struggling to grapple with his unlikely presence. A sequence of emotions flickered across her features, starting with surprise, then moving swiftly to confusion. For an all-too-brief moment, a smile came to her face, but the memory of her last conversation with Lex wiped it away, replacing it with suspicion and anger.
“What are you doing here? What is all of this?”
“Shh. Quietly. I have to talk to you, and I don’t have much time.”
Michella stepped closer, blocking everyone else’s view of Lex’s hiding place.
“What has been happening to you, Trevor? First the business with the mobster, then that fiasco on Tessera? The Lon Djinn Jumper?”
“I--you know that was me?”
“I’d recognize that stupid run of yours and your silly haircut anywhere. How did you get here without me seeing you?”
“You were distracted. What do you mean silly haircut? I haven’t gotten my hair cut in months.”
“That’s what I mean. I don’t have time for his now, Trevor. You seem fine with ruining your life, but I’ve got a career to think about.”
“Michella, I--”
“Do you have any idea how important it is that I make a good impression with this broadcast? This will be my first report that will part of the regional feeds.”
“That’s great, but--”
“It isn’t much to work with, and we’ve got a terrible spot, but once my face is out there, I’ll have something to put in my portfolio, and I can--”
“Listen!” Lex hissed, as loud as he dared.
Michella flinched back as though she’d been slapped, shock on her face. Outrage began to creep in around her expression. Lex quickly filled the silence before she had a chance to scream her disapproval.
“I’m proud of you, I really am, and I’m sorry for everything that happened between us, but this isn’t about you and me right now, okay? I can’t go into the specifics, and you wouldn’t believe me if I did, but something very big and very bad is about to go down, and if I don’t stop it, then I’m never going to be able to live with myself, and other people aren’t going to be able to live, period. I can’t do it alone though--I need your help.”
“You honestly think that I would risk helping you do anything after the things you’ve gotten yourself into in the past?”
Lex glanced nervously at a pair of guards who were working their way back toward him. Distantly he heard the one in charge tell his partner, who was having trouble with his communicator, to check in on intercom 100212. He turned. It was the one directly behind him.
“Mitch, please. If you’ve ever trusted me before, trust me when I say this. In a few minutes, whether I succeed or fail, you are going to have the biggest story of the century fall into your lap. You just need to do what you do best. Keep your ears open, keep your eyes open. I’ll signal you somehow. And if you never hear from me again, contact a planet called Big Sigma and talk to a person name Kart--a person named Ma. She’ll tell you what you need to know.”
“Trev, you aren’t making any sense. How will I know the story when I see it?” she asked, concern fighting its way past her anger.
He glanced over her shoulder.
“You’ll know,” he said. He leaned forward and kissed her. “You look amazing, by the way.”
“Trevor, you can’t just come here and say things like this--” she began, turning to see what he’d been looking at.
He took the opportunity to switch the mental cloak on again.
“We haven’t spoken since . . . Trevor?” she said when she turned back. She furrowed her brow and craned her neck, unconsciously trying to see around him in order to find out where he’d gone. He slipped away a moment before the security guard arrived.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m sorry, I need to use this intercom,” he said. “You haven’t seen anything unusual, have you? A man with face paint and a backpack?”
Michella looked around once more, failing to see her cloaked ex-boyfriend edging toward a door further along the wall.
“No. No, nothing like that. Why, should I have?” she asked.
“I doubt it. I think the guys in the surveillance room are running a drill. They’ve got us running all over looking for--”
“Peterson. Don’t talk to the press,” his supervisor sternly instructed.
“I need a decision on this, Ms Modane,” said her camera man.
Michella chewed her lip thoughtfully for a moment. She looked in a direction her mind vaguely indicated was a significant one, but saw nothing but an activated access panel near a security door.
“Go with the low-res hovercam on the podium, close as you can, but keep the full-def cam ready to go on me. And keep your eyes open, Ted. I think I just got the scoop of a lifetime.”