Free Bypass Gemini by Joseph Lallo Page A

pilots liked to call “going belly up,” a sure sign of instrument and control failure. For now, Fisk was dead in the water, figuratively speaking.
    Lex had only had to pull that stunt once before, so as he headed for relative safety, he feverishly tried to work out how long he had before the heavily armed ship would be back on his tail.
    “ Okay, so he’ll curse and try to figure out what happened for fifteen, twenty seconds. Then another fifteen or twenty seconds of fiddling with the electronics before he figures out he has to reboot to get them to come up clean. Then, say, thirty seconds for the systems to reset. So that’s a good minute and a half before he...”
    His calculations were cut short by a flash of blue on the ship in his rear viewer as the engines kicked back on. Evidently Fisk had skipped the cursing and fiddling steps, and the DAR was just a tad heartier than he’d given it credit for.
    “ Congratulations, Mr. Alexander. No one has been able to rev me out in years. But you’re not the only one with EMP,” the agent’s voice muttered out of the cockpit speakers.
    “ Shut up, Fisk!” Lex growled.
    “ Missile lock detected,” chimed the soothing computer voice.
    “ Shut UP, Betsy!”
    The rear viewer painted a flashing yellow dot on its screen with a distance that was ticking down a bit too quickly for comfort. Ahead, the brown haze around the sun was beginning to look a bit more granular. It was one of at least seven different asteroid clusters that had earned the nickname “The Briar Patch” from local astronomers, evidently because local astronomers weren’t the most creative lot. It was relatively new, astronomically speaking. A few hundred thousand years ago it was probably a pair of planets that got too close, and a few hundred thousand years from now it would probably be one larger planet and a couple of moons. Right now it was a big, gooey ball of molten rock with a veritable playground of cooling asteroids around it. As asteroid clusters go it was almost cartoonishly dense. It was exactly what he needed to shake this guy long enough to make his escape. It was also just a little too far away to reach before the missile hit.
    Lex glanced at the controls. The engines were at 98%. Thank god for that, plenty of overhead left. He cranked them up to 120%. The percentages, in this case, had to do with the heating/cooling balance of the engines. Running them at 100% meant that they were cooling off at the exact same speed they were heating. You could go over for a few minutes, provided you ran it at lower power afterward to let things cool off. It voided the warranty, but then, so did grafting on triple the number of engines. With the extra speed he earned just enough time to reach The Briar Patch.
    As soon as the first of the chunks of former planet zipped by, he placed it between himself and the missile and dropped the engines to almost nothing. The weapon smashed uselessly against the faintly glowing space rock, its payload managing to cause little more than some digital static on the control screens. Fisk’s ship came charging around shortly after it. Now came the fun part.
    The scattered, red hot rock made tracking via nearly any type of sensor almost impossible. Infrared sensors were blinded by the sun and the molten masses, radio frequencies were hopelessly scattered among them, and at this distance visual was anything but easy. Lex cut it close to one asteroid, letting the gravity tug ever so gently before twisting and bursting his ship to another tight little cluster. He bounced back and forth, tiny bursts of engine sending him in sharp, sloping curves. To his credit, Fisk followed him into the mess. Most of the times he’d had to shake a security ship they gave up as soon as they lost sight of him, but this guy was willing to get his hands dirty.
    He guided his nimble ship among the stones and did an admirable job of following Lex, but the former racer’s path around the briar