Inside the elevator, Lex switched the mental cloak back off and slid down the wall to the ground. His heart was pounding out of his chest, sweat was beginning to soak his mask, and there was a nasty, acidic taste in his mouth that didn’t bode well for his gastrointestinal health.
Fisk’s office was on floor seventy. That should have translated into a long ride during which he could recover, but the elevator was modern enough to have a serious motor driving it, so the numbers rocketed by. It was not, however, modern enough to have an inertial inhibitor, so the acceleration kept Lex on the floor despite a few half-hearted attempts to stand. As it neared floor seventy, it slowed, decelerating nearly quickly enough to make him leave the ground. He staggered to his feet, activated the mental cloak, and started the count to thirty in his head.
The doors slid open to a floor very different from the one he’d left behind. The institutional hallway was replaced with something that he would expect to see in an upscale law firm. Black marble floors, modern filing cabinets, and, unfortunately, a secretary behind a clerical desk. Lex rushed quickly to the hallway behind her, noting as he passed numerous rooms that looked like fancier versions of “waiting room six” back on Operlo. With about ten seconds to go, he turned a corner to a smaller hallway, out of the view of the secretary. With the exception of a pair of potted ferns, there wasn’t a living thing to be seen, so he deactivated the cloak.
Running parallel with the main hall, this smaller area had only three doors. One was facing the primary hall and elevator, and had the name plate “Security Chief William Trent.” At a dead end on the right was the “Secondary Records Room,” and at the end of the dead end to the left was his destination, a door label “Senior Agent Emanuel Fisk: Asset Protection and Loss Prevention Specialist.” He swiped the finger across the door and slipped inside.
The office wasn’t precisely what he’d expected from the dead man, but it was close. There were guns of various sorts mounted on the walls, ranging from top of the line energy weapons to what looked to be a wood and steel lever-action rifle that must have cost a bundle. There was a monitor showing muted video of the still in progress speech from the CEO, probably via an intraoffice feed. He had pictures of himself being decorated for various achievements, a disturbing number of pictures of horses, and a glass bowl filled with taffy. It made Lex slightly uncomfortable to see the human side of the man whom he’d been so relieved to see killed. The compassion was wiped away when he noticed eleven very conspicuous notches carved into the edge of the wood trim of his desk. This was a man who had not only killed people, but was proud of it.
He couldn’t afford to delay any longer. In the center of the desk was a cutting-edge datapad, a touch surface inset into the surface of the desk in place of what in days of old would have been a mouse and keyboard. Lex swiped the finger across the surface, activating the terminal, and began to enter in the commands that Ma had listed for him. At least, he tried to. Three attempted gestures were met with disappointing beeps before he noticed that it was informing him of “unauthorized access attempts.”
“What the hell?” He groaned.
A swipe of the finger he’d used to log in, however, was accepted as input.
“It reads his prints for every input!?” Lex hissed under his breath.
The freelancer’s already slow data entry skills were reduced to a snail’s pace as he was forced to drag and tap with the purloined print, but, one by one, the commands were entered. A full graphical environment gave way to a white letters on a black screen. Drives were located and mounted. Directories were listed and navigated, and, finally, a deep file search for the word “Gemini” was initiated. Three dots began to flick on and off in sequence as the search dug through exabytes of data. At irregular intervals, a file name would pop up, but invariably it dealt with the astrological sign, or a model of car, or the constellation and the planets surrounding its stars. Fear-sweat ran down from beneath Lex’s mask, trickling along his eyelids and dripping from his lashes.