Bypass Gemini

Chapter 5

The sprint was supposed to be a 9 hour stretch, so Lex had set his alarm and decided to catch up on his sleep. Just under 8 hours later, a loud beeping noise jarred him awake. It wasn’t the alarm. At least, not the one he’d set. Most of the things sensors rely upon are far too slow to do any good when a ship is moving faster than the speed of light. Gravity was on the short list of things that weren’t. It wasn’t that it was fast. It is just that it is always there, tugging and pulling at everything else in the universe. The gravity sensor was used in FTL to let you know when something moving about the same speed as you was getting too close. Handy for ships in established routes to keep from bumping into each other. It shouldn’t ever make a peep during a sprint. As such, when it started blaring, it had his attention.

“What the hell?” he said, groggily brushing the sawdust wrappers off the console.

He fiddled with some settings just to be sure, but there it was, a dot on the navigation overlay with an approximate distance and an approximate mass. It was a ship, it was behind him, and it was getting closer.

There were only two things it could mean. It could be another freelancer. It wasn’t. No freelancer stupid enough to stay on someone else’s tail that closely would live very long. That only left the far less pleasant possibility that someone was purposely following him, and that meant The Law. Probably a VectorCorp security patrol, but there was no way they could have found him. He took precautions. The only way that he could have been followed is if he’d managed to come close enough to a couple of their marker pylons for them to plot a speed and heading from his transponder code, but for that the transponder would have to be active, and there was no way he was stupid enough to...

“Son of a bitch...”

He rapped on the dash and the transponder light winked off.

“Okay... okay,” he muttered to himself, “Should have done the curved sprint this time. That would have shaken this guy. Too late for that. No big deal, no big deal. forty-five minutes to the next stop. He can’t do squat to me until then. Then I just bob and weave, standard juke, then do a curved sprint to a secondary stop, and that’s that. Piece of cake.”

He began to sift through the nav computer. A curved run at FTL speeds was generally ill advised. There was no real reason for it when you could just as easily and much more safely do two straight ones. A decent turning radius at that speed would practically be measured in parsecs, and plotting a course was immeasurably trickier. The one upshot was that a calculated trajectory like the one this guy must have followed would pretty quickly be millions of miles off course. That meant that if he could lose him just for the few seconds preceding the jump, he’d be home free.

His eyes flew over the stellar maps. If he’d known he was going to be pulling a turn, he would have chosen a different starting point. The area was fairly thick with VectorCorp trade routes, and of the places he could squeak through, most didn’t lead to anything that would be even remotely effective for evasion if he was followed. Eventually he dug up a route that might work, and plugged it into the computer. There were three minutes left before he would drop out of FTL and try to shake the pursuer. Nothing to do but wait and try to piece together what information he had.

The ship on his tail was lighter than his, and faster. That was difficult to achieve. It wasn’t like you could make a space ship more aerodynamic to give it some extra speed in space. In the absence of an atmosphere a brick flew just as well as a dart. The only things that mattered were power, mass, and cooling. Betsy had a power to mass ratio that was off the charts, and the sheer size of the engines allowed for pretty decent heat dissipation, too. That meant his adversary had the money to invest in a more efficient set of equipment, which pretty much confirmed it was corporate security.