Bypass Gemini

Chapter 2

Lex checked himself over before dropping the limo down in front of the hotel to wait for his passenger. He’d woken up a bit late and had only had time to shower, shove everything from the cargo pants into the tuxedo pants, and pick up the car. Time hadn’t changed the limousine much, other than switching it from a wheeled vehicle to a hovercar. Hell, this one even had little vestigial swoops where the fenders would have been if it had still been equipped with wheels. It was mostly just a very big, very black version of what everyone else was driving, with cushier seats and bar. It wasn’t one of the stretched monsters, partially because Lex felt like they were needlessly showy, but mostly because Lex couldn’t afford one. The limo was one of the last big purchases he’d made before the bottom fell out of his previous career. He’d expected to be driven around town in it. Now he was doing the driving. As an owner operator, though, he got to keep a much bigger slice of the fee. It just meant he had to wear his own tux, too. You take the good with the bad.

He pulled down the console to look up his fare. The kind of mid-level big spenders that tended to hire him liked it when you knew something about them. It made them feel a little more famous, and that meant a much nicer tip.

“Nicholas Patel,” Lex said to the computer.

There were thirty-five pages of results. Super. He poked around the first few. One was an investment banker. One was some sort of entrepreneur. One ran a small contracting firm on a planet in a star system in the middle of nowhere. That one had a disturbingly large stack of news stories linked to him. They all said roughly the same thing, various media euphemisms for crime lord, and the catchy nickname “Diamond Nick.”

“Diamond Nick. How come it’s the criminals who get all of the good nicknames?” he muttered to himself, as a moving wall outside caught his attention.

When he turned to get a closer look, he realized that what had appeared to be a wall was in reality two very, VERY large men. They had the sort of build you would expect a paleontologist to be pulling out of the ground, about three hundred pounds of muscle with another fifty or so of flab for good measure. The word thug fit so well he wouldn’t have been surprised if it was one of their names. Lex scrambled to get out of the car and get the door, but a ham-sized fist grabbed the door handle and pulled it open to allow a slick, swarthy man to enter.

“Diamond Nick, I presume,” Lex remarked.

“Heh, word gets around,” Patel said with a grin, “Starport, please. Quickly.”

Nick was a difficult man to place at first blush. He straddled a few categories. As a crime boss, he looked the part, with a suit that probably cost more than the limo and hair styled to the point of being a fire hazard. His face was typically Indian, as his name would suggest, but his voice was completely unflavored by accent. That isn’t to say that he had an American or English or some other regional accent. He had no accent at all, the sort of diction you usually hear in newscasters and documentary narrators.

His men squeezed through the door and took a seat on either side of him, filling the spacious vehicle almost to capacity.

“Sure thing,” Lex said, easing the limo up.

Above them a lane of traffic moved briskly along in a cordoned off strip of the sky. Lex rounded the top of the strip and merged in from the top.

“So, what brings you to Preston City?” he asked.

“I stopped off on this little transit hub of a planet to talk to some folks about a deal I’m looking to close. Turns out you’ve got more than just a starport. You’ve got some damn good stellar analysts. Helped me make sure I wasn’t being taken to the cleaners.”