Bypass Gemini

Chapter 12

After the customary three random jumps to make sure he wasn’t followed, then a dozen more for the sake of paranoia, Lex took a deep breath and tried to gather his wits. In hindsight, it was an act of pure optimism to imagine he could have dropped off the case and been done with it, but when things are looking hopeless, the tendency is to revert to what you know best. Now, with that long shot put firmly to rest, he had nothing left but to face facts. They knew who he was, they wanted the case, and they killed the last person who had it. He probably hadn’t helped matters with his highly conspicuous escape just now, but once again, the last person who had the case was dead. When death is already the consequence, the thought of “making it worse” seems a little ridiculous. So the question wasn’t “What is the worst that can happen?” The question was “What am I going to do about it?”

There was no doubt it was VectorCorp that was after him, but even THEY couldn’t be everywhere at once, and judging from the fact that they’d let the relatively inept local police make a grab for him, they didn’t feel comfortable throwing their weight around in public. Not yet, at least. That meant that, whatever the reason was that they wanted him, it was something they didn’t want played out in broad daylight. Which raised another issue. He didn’t even know what it was that had driven them to such lengths. Lex’s eyes turned to the duffel.

Ever since he had learned of Ms. Jones’ death, he’d tried to avoid even looking at the silver case, as though her fate was somehow contagious, and could be avoided by minimizing exposure. At this point, though, he was already in over his head. Digging his grave any deeper hardly made a difference. The least he could do was find out what he was dealing with. One by one he peeled off the strips of duct tape that were holding the battered suitcase shut, revealing the single feeble and damaged lock that hadn’t completely failed. Two good shots with the heel of his hand dislodged the twisted clip, and the case slowly squeaked open.

Lex wasn’t sure what he had been expecting to find. Half of the time, exchanges like this ended up being blackmail articles; soiled underwear, compromising photos on a data drive, things like that. Judging from the amount of resources being dumped into the retrieval of this particular delivery, it was likely a good deal more substantial. A part of him had been hoping for something exciting, like vials of biological agents or perhaps the launch codes of some globe shattering weapon. What he found instead, to say the least, defied expectations.

It was a short stack of pages, hard copy printouts with some handwritten notes. They were gathered into two bundles. The first was a thick packet, cluttered with charts and dense scientific language. Lex didn’t understand half of what the pages said, but he recognized enough buzzwords and symbols to know that it had to do with stars, a stellar survey or the like. There were a few hundred stars detailed in total. Most of them had the sort of alphanumeric gibberish for a name that was tremendously helpful if you were a stellar cartographer and utterly incomprehensible if you were anything else. The information about each star was incredibly technical. Just about the only portion of it that had any sort of meaning to Lex was the location coordinates. The rest had to do with precise mass, magnetosphere fluctuation cycles, etc.

The second packet was a handful of shipping manifests with various components circled. The manifests themselves were pretty standard, the full contents of one of the massive cargo haulers that made the rounds throughout the galaxy. The indicated shipments didn’t seem to have an awful lot in common. They ranged from mundane stuff, like reels of copper wire and fiber bundles, to slightly more niche items, like superconductive coils, and a few hundred tons of other miscellaneous equipment. They shipped from easily a hundred different companies, on behalf of a hundred different companies. The one thing many of them shared, though, was a destination. A planet called Operlo. The name rang a bell for some reason. More than a few were addressed directly to a construction company there.