Free Bypass Gemini by Joseph Lallo Page B

patch was utterly random and beyond reckless, crisscrossing the same space and coming close enough to some of the rocks to change their spin. It took better than five minutes, but finally Fisk was searching fruitlessly near the sunny side of the briar patch as Lex spat back out the dark side. He oriented his ship, selected the course, and shifted to FTL.
    As the view outside his window shot quickly past the point of visibility, he kept his eyes glued to the scanners. If Fisk was going to have any chance of catching him, he would have to get on Betsy’s tail almost immediately. Two minutes went by with little more than a flicker on the screen, probably the agent taking an educated guess that would leave him light-years away. Lex leaned back and breathed a sigh of relief.
    This was a short sprint, just a few minutes, so there was no sense getting comfy. He rattled through a list of things he would have to deal with thanks to this unplanned bit of excitement. It had left him a little off course, but that wasn’t too much of an issue. Being a freelancer pretty much meant doing almost a whole trip on a route most pilots would consider wildly off course, so this was business as usual. The engines were running a little bit hot. They were back down to ninety-eight percent now, but he should probably run them at twenty or thirty percent for a while until they cooled off. That could wait until the FTL stretch was over.
    One would think that if pushing engines too hard at conventional speeds was burning them up, moving faster than the speed of light would fry them in no time, but such was not the case. It was an aspect of space travel that Lex was never completely able to grasp. There was a field generator involved, he knew that much. It produced something called the Carpinelli Field, which partially shifted everything in the field’s radius into an alternate dimension. There were different physical laws there, and the engines pushed along using those rather than stricter native laws. He’d heard it described as similar to how an outboard motor dips into the water to push a boat along. Of course, he’d also heard that the outboard analogy was an insultingly inaccurate oversimplification that ignored the more complex issues the Carpinelli Field overcame, like time dilation and the like. It was easy to remember, though, so it was the one he stuck with. Lex didn’t care HOW it worked, just so long as it did. Plus, it had the bonus of allowing the same engines to do the work for FTL and conventional acceleration, so he only had to learn to tinker with one system.
    The line of thought had drifted to the specific tinkering he had in mind when the universe began to assert itself again. When everything dropped down to the sort of speeds physics intended, he was approaching the orbit of a planet he didn’t recognize. It hadn’t been on the initial flight plan, after all, so suddenly seeing it show up was a little like waking up in a hotel room and forgetting you weren’t home.
    “ Betsy? Remind me where I am.”
    “ Entering the gravity well of Sigma Six. Colloquially known as Big Sigma. It is a-”
    “ That’ll do, Betsy. The trash heap.”
    Lex didn’t know the history of the planet. It should at this point be clear that he was not a man of penetrating curiosity. Trash heap, though, was probably as close a description to the planet’s actual role as any. It was visible on the viewer as a grayish blob. There was nothing wrong with the visual. The planet just looked like that. Junk of every size and description cluttered the orbital space in a shroud so thick it was difficult to make out the surface features. If nature had anything to do with it, that trash cloud would settle into a ring, clump together into a few moons, or come crashing down. Instead, something kept it spread in a uniform, jumbled layer of filth. It wasn’t populated, but it did have some sort of salvage facility. That was probably what kept the junk cloud so