Bypass Gemini

Chapter 19

Fifteen minutes later, Lex and Karter were back in the upper levels of the Lab. Ma had announced that the food was ready, and had supplied yet another replacement arm. After heaping up their respective cafeteria trays, the men each took a seat.

“Uh... listen. I’m sorry about the... stuff that happened,” Lex said, legs tensed for a quick getaway in case Karter had another one of his “episodes.” Considering the fact that half of his base and most of his face had been wrecked, Lex was fairly certain he would be justified this time around.

“Meh. It happens,” he said, taking a pull off of a beer.

Lex stared at him silently for a moment. A medical probe, probably the same one that had patched up Lex’s leg, trundled into the room and started to scan and treat its inventor.

“It happens? That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“You almost caved my head in with a crowbar for showing up in a ship later than you expected.”

“Well it was a dicky thing to do.”

“And yet, you saved my life when I first crashed here.”

“That was before I knew you were a dick.”

“And now, after a giant corporation declares war on you and almost destroys your whole place, not to mention you, for reasons that kind of, sort of, halfway could be considered my fault, I get ‘Meh. It happens.’”

“You want me to go get the crowbar?”

“No! No, I’m just, you know, confused by the rationale.”

“I showed you the nuthouse certificate, right? That’s my ‘Get Out of Rational Thought Free’ card. Besides, this takes me back. Remember, Ma? When the crew was together?”

“Yes. Disruptions of this sort were considerably more frequent,” she said.

“The crew?” Lex asked.

“Classified,” Karter replied.

The pair finished eating while Karter was restored to relative health, then sought out a room a few levels down that Ma had indicated was prepared for their ‘research session.’ The room looked like something out of a corporation. In the center was a long conference table. Its entire surface was a display, as were three of the walls. The final wall had the door and a long work counter covered with various old fashioned drafting tools, pencils, and pads of paper.

“Is... is that a protractor?” Lex asked.

“No, that’s a compass. THAT’S a protractor.”

“And what’s this?”

“That’s a french curve. Quit touching my stuff,” he said, taking the odd shaped piece of plastic out of his hand and poking him in the chest, “What do we have, Ma?”

“The analysis of the information has turned up data of two distinct varieties: stellar surveys and cargo manifests.”

Two tables of data appeared in the center of the table. Karter started to dig through, dragging text boxes aside with his fingers.

“Did you get anything on your own?”

“Significant data trends are as follows. A total of one hundred and sixteen stars are listed. All stars listed are main sequence stars. Their distribution is consistent with a random selection algorithm.”

“Wait, random?” Lex said.

Karter nodded.

“It makes sense. If they had something planned for one of these stars, they would want to bury the target of interest in a pile of garbage. What other kind of data was there, Ma?”