Bypass Gemini

Chapter 6

That took him back to the start of the crash. It was either 58 seconds or 97 minutes since then, depending on your frame of reference. He’d watched a pair of additional plasma bolts drift by outside the ship. At normal speed they were just brilliant points of light that you tried desperately to avoid. From his current point of view they were fluffy purple-pink clouds that just happened to convert anything they touched into a cloud of vapor. None of them came close to hitting him before scattering against an orbiting lump of metal. That was nice, since the only thing his safety system would do was slow it down, and chances are that something that would melt his face off at a thousand miles per hour would still melt it off at ten.

The debris was behind him now. That was the good news. The bad news was that there were only a few seconds of timeshift left, and a hell of a lot of free fall. As the last hundredths of a second started to tick down, he made sure that everything he was going to need after the crash was strapped to his person. He clicked the seat harness off so that he could move around more freely, and went to work. The metal briefcase was the first to be locked down. If it had cost him his ship, he was damn sure going to get it there. It was a matter of pride now. The only other thing inside the bounds of the emergency shield was the box he’d picked up from Blake’s. He couldn’t quite remember what was in it, but he might as well bring it along.

He’d only just gotten it strapped on when time came charging back with a vengeance. It had been difficult to tell in slow-mo, but the ship had gotten itself into a pretty vicious spin. That presented a number of problems. First and foremost, he couldn’t safely eject while it was spinning like that. There was a second consequence too, which he hadn’t anticipated. The inertial dampener must have been hit at some point, because when time came back, it brought centripetal force with it. The rotation threw him out of his seat and pinned him painfully against the force field for a moment or two before he hauled himself back into the seat. He buckled himself back into the harness and made a mental note to never, ever unbuckle it during a flight again. He then pulled up the auxiliary controls and gave them a try. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of functionality left in old Betsy. There might be one engine left that was still running and had controls intact. One or two of the maneuvering thrusters was still working, too. That would have to be enough.

A little of trial and error and an awful lot of finesse took the ship out of its death spin. The ground wasn’t as close as he’d expected. Gravity must have been a little weak here. A little more fighting got the ship oriented generally upright, and the time came to say his goodbyes.

“Well, girl. We had some good times, but this is where we part ways,” he yelled over the rush of wind and rattle of broken machinery, patting the arm of the chair one last time before hammering the eject button.

Nothing happened.

He hammered the button a few more times, because that’s what you do when technology fails you. It had roughly the same result it always did. That is to say, none at all.

“Come on, babe. It’s time to let go,” he said nervously.

There was a groan of jammed clamps, then more nothing. The ground was getting a lot closer now. With very few options, and zero time to come up with anything intelligent, Lex was forced to desperate measures. He unbuckled again, reached behind the seat to snag his Extra Vehicular Activity pack, strapped it on, and grabbed onto the broken frame of his view window. Getting through the mangled mess of broken glass and twisted metal would have been tricky in any situation. Doing it with two bulky cases and a backpack, all while plummeting in a barely controlled nosedive added an extra challenge. One final heave tore him free and instantly he was caught by the wind and torn from the roof of his ship. Shaking fingers found their way to the panel of his EVA pack, and he activated its jets.