Bypass Gemini

Chapter 22

By the time he was dropping back out of FTL outside the destination star system, his narrow 12 hour buffer had been shaved to a sliver. The smattering of side conferences and news reports had already started, the business equivalent to a pregame show. In less than two hours the CEO would speak. When he was through, the broadcasters and bloggers would run his words through the meat grinder, form the resulting mush into their news bites, and pack up and head home. The stock would spike or dip, depending on whether the investors liked what they heard, and the public interest would wander. The streamlined flow of information afforded by the net meant that news cycles had shrunk from days to hours. Realistically, it might be as little as two days before enough time had passed that the disaster could safely occur with no financial impact on the company. Lex didn’t have that long, though. If what he had in mind was going to work, he would need as many cameras on hand as possible. He had to get this done DURING the press event. That was the plan at least.

Ah, yes, the plan. He settled the ship into an automated holding pattern and began to work through what he and the AI had managed to put together. He remembered reading somewhere that if you were working with a plan with many possible points of failure, the best thing to do was to work backwards from your intended goal until you reached your current point. Reformulating it at every step of the way ensured that, no matter what had gone wrong thus far, you had a clear path to victory. It had made plenty of sense when he was reading it, and he’d decided that if he ever had some epic undertaking, he would do that. Now that he was staring down the barrel of a task that would give a special ops team a hard time, he found the fatal flaw in that line of reasoning. Specifically, you would have to be some sort of super genius to throw together a full plan at every step of the way. After losing his train of thought seven or eight times, he decided that he was better off starting at the beginning.

“First step, get to the planet’s surface,” he said out loud, flipping his receiver to the guidance frequency, “That shouldn’t be too tough. How many times have I done it when delivering a package? Plenty. Just breathe easy, stick to the old reliable methods, and everything will be fine.”

“Hello, my name is Jeannette Morray, and I would like to welcome you to Verna Coronet,” purred a voice over his radio.

Lex recognized the voice and name. She was a famous actress, the sort who demands enough money to build a stadium for fifteen minutes of screen time. The idea that VC had enough money to hire her for their holding pattern announcements managed to make him even more nervous. Briefly he wondered how much the small fleet of voice over artists who provided Ma’s piecemeal voice charged. If any of them were still working, it might be nice to hire her to read the dictionary or something, to give Ma a more consistent persona.

Verna Coronet Western Hemisphere Port Station came into view, a silver thread of a space station stretching impossibly far in all directions. As he drew closer, it began to resemble a long thin strip of metallic netting, the brilliant specks of starship engines slowly organizing themselves into orderly rows, creeping along like the tail lights of cars on an old fashioned freeway. Steadily the details of the station became visible, a deep framework of personways, narrow pressurized tubes leading to authorization stations that stuck like thorns out into space. Each station had its own line of ships. The network of tubes and stations must have continued for miles to the left and right, and was easily half a mile from top to bottom, and nearly as deep. It was a huge piece of fragile infrastructure, designed to efficiently monitor and record the entry and exit of every ship looking to access this half of the planet. The voice continued.

“Discovered and colonized in the early years of wide scale space exploration, Verna Coronet was developed quickly, one of the few planets to require almost no terraforming. It became an indispensable port of call for trade and transportation within years of its settlement. A small company that shared the planet’s initials, then called The Vector Corporation, was founded to map and regulate local trade routes. Today, VectorCorp is responsible for more than seventy percent of all intersystem communication and transit. Verna Coronet remains the central headquarters of VectorCorp, which is now the only significant corporate presence on the planet. Please enjoy your stay, and await further instruction regarding your landing. Thank you. Current wait time is: Forty. Three. Minutes.”