Bypass Gemini

Chapter 18

Lex pulled into the Lab hangar and landed the ship. Once he stepped out, he walked a wide circle around it. Despite the extended dog fight, some combination of his reflexes and the no doubt overpowered shield Karter had installed had kept his ship almost perfectly untouched. An embarrassingly large chunk of his mind had been preoccupied with keeping his ship safe not because he was inside of it and he would probably die if he didn’t, but because he JUST got it fixed and it looked GORGEOUS.

“Not a scratch on it...” he said, in disbelief.

“Excellence flightiness, Mr. Alexander,” Ma said.

“Nice shooting, Ma!” he exclaimed, “That was nuts out there! And we did it! Oh, man, if you had a body, I would kiss you right on the lips!”

“I appreciate the sentimentality,” she said.

“Where is Karter? I need to high five someone before my head explodes!”

“Mr. Dee is attempting to access a lowered level Labrador in accessibility section five to restoration an importance component to functionality. Many doorways and lifts are malfunctioning. I will lead you to him shortly. I mustard reboot systems affected byway the data corruption, including myself.”

“You gonna be okay?”

“Yes. Do note worries. I william be back to fully functionality in six minutes. Systems will become coming backward online in orders of priorities. I am lasting.”

“… Okay. I’ll talk to you then.”

There was a crackle and beep on the loudspeaker as Ma finally dropped away to straighten herself out. Lex, with nothing else to do, decided it would be nice to get some food in his stomach. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find that cafeteria. He’d been there before. As he headed off toward the stairs, he thought he heard a door shut at the other end of the hangar.

“Karter? That you?” he asked.

The only reply was his echo. Lex shrugged and pushed open the door to the stairwell.

Karter was several floors down, heading further. The facilities were dug deep into the planet, more than twice as deep underground as they were tall above it. Some shafts and vaults ran much, much further. The more important, more fragile things tended to be found in these areas in order to protect them from surface threats. After the collapse of the Asteroid Wrecker, half of the elevators were out of operation, and power was spotty, so the inventor was reduced to using the stairs.

“Stairs,” he muttered to himself, “What am I, a caveman? This is f-”

He was interrupted by a siren and spinning red warning light.

“Ma! What’s that all about?” he complained.

There was no reply.

“Oh, right. The reboot. Security came up pretty quick.”

He entered some commands into an unseen control panel evidently installed on his false arm and brought up a Heads Up Display in his eye. It listed the status of various systems, then printed an alert.

“Intruder alert. That’s probably Lex. Pain in the... two intruders?”

He began to cycle through available cameras. He quickly found Lex milling about in the upper levels, evidently having trouble finding his way through the building. None of the other cameras seemed to be turning up anything. Quite a few of the them were nonfunctional after the attack... but there were seven nonfunctional cameras in a row along an access corridor right above him. And now there were eight. He switched quickly to the next in the sequence and caught a distant view of a man in military dress raising a gun and firing it before that camera blacked out too.