Two months later…
Certain jobs just weren’t meant to be done by humans. It was an intelligent and well-reasoned policy. If it required long periods of inactivity interspersed with the sudden need for precise action, it was probably best suited to a machine. Like most intelligent and well-reasoned policies though, there would always be those who rejected it outright. Perhaps the prime example of such behavior was the thriving profession of freelance interstellar courier, or simply “freelancer.” Those who earned a living in this questionably legal career would spend most of their time sitting in the confined space of a cockpit, waiting for hours or days to roll by as they “sprinted” at faster-than-light speed. Then they would slow down, perform some evasive maneuvers to “juke” any authorities that might have pursued them, then sprint again. In theory a decent autopilot could do the job flawlessly. In practice anyone attempting to automate the process inevitably ended up with an impounded ship and a lot of explaining to do to the VectorCorp Security in charge of “discouraging” such behavior. Computers are exceptional at many things, but if a task needs intuition and dishonesty, give it to a human.
After some bad decisions had cost him a promising career as a racer, Trevor “Lex” Alexander had been paying the bills with a handful of jobs that required similar piloting skills. Officially he was a hoverbike courier on his home planet of Golana. Less officially he was a part-time chauffeur using the limousine he’d purchased back during his brief brush with celebrity. Unofficially he was a freelancer, and these days it was paying more of his bills than was either advisable or healthy. For most people the most difficult part of the job was the evasion of pursuit and the selection of safe routes. For Lex those were first and second nature respectively. The toughest part of the process for him had been adapting to the downtime in between.
Physical fitness was one problem. His ship, the Son of Betsy, was many things: fast, stealthy, and packed to the gills with sneaky technology. It was not spacious. Since sitting in a heated massage chair for sixteen hours at a time isn’t the healthiest activity, Lex had become extremely familiar with the sort of exercises one can do in a cramped cockpit with no gravity. Boredom was staved off with a battery of videos and video games he kept loaded on his slidepad, a sort of all-purpose communicator and pocket computer that looked like a cross between a plastic business card and a holographic display. Finally there was the loneliness, which he hadn’t realized was an issue until an alternative had come along.
“Dropping out of FTL now, Squee. A couple more minutes and we’ll hit Operlo,” Lex said.
Squee perked up at the sound of his voice and yawned from her traditional perch across the back of his neck. Most people thought Squee was a dog with a fancy black-and-white color scheme. More observant people commented that the beast looked more like a fox, or perhaps a skunk, but those people were few and far between. In reality she was a funk, a cross between the aforementioned woodland creatures. Squee was one of two such creatures concocted in a laboratory by a madman named Karter. Through a complicated sequence of events, Squee had been presented to Lex as a thank-you gift. Since he so frequently had to leave his home for days at a time, he had begun bringing her along. It was remarkable how quickly the one-sided conversations he had with her during his deliveries became an indispensable diversion.
He reached up and scratched her between the pointed ears and received a few adorable nibbles in return. “Let’s see what messages I missed while I was off the grid.”
Being “off the grid” was the part about freelancing that posed the greatest threat. The populated portions of space were connected by vast, carefully monitored and maintained transit corridors. When using these corridors, one could be reasonably certain that there would be no wandering asteroids or other hazards that deflectors and shields couldn’t handle. Of course, it also meant you had to pay the keepers of the corridor their fees and tolls, and obey their rules. Freelancers made a living by avoiding such routes and ran the risk of colliding with an unseen piece of space debris at several multiples of the speed of light, which was not uncommon, and quite spectacular. One of the minor consequences of avoiding the main routes was the lack of real-time communication. For Lex, having to sift through a backlog of video, audio, and text messages after every sprint was almost worse than the constant threat of his sudden demise, which would at least be quick and only happen once.
“Spam. Spam. Spam. Either they need to update the junk filters, or the number of collapsed governments randomly reaching out to strangers in hopes of transferring vast wealth has skyrocketed. Henderson Conventional Transport… why do I know that name?” After a moment, it struck him. “Oh right. That’s the new name of the bike courier biz. I wonder what they want.”
He tapped the message and received a short snippet of audio from a man with a managerial tone of voice. “Report to the office immediately.” The time stamp on the message was an hour after his usual start time, the previous day.
“Real helpful, boss… Eh. I’ll deal with it later.”
Lex tucked the slidepad into a pocket of his flight suit and leaned aside to look at the package he’d been hired to deliver. With an exasperated sigh, he pulled it from the straps beside his seat and looked at the address.
“Diamond In The Rough Contracting and Construction, 685 East 45.5554 Longitude Drive, Southern Fringe, Northern Habitable Zone, Operlo,” he read out loud. “You know what this box is, Squee?” His furry companion failed to show any curiosity, instead focusing intently on a cheese cracker that had drifted up from where it had been pinned between the package and the floor. “This is trouble. I’m supposed to deliver this to Nick Patel. The mobster Nick Patel. The mobster Nick Patel who owns our apartment building. I don’t know what’s in the package, but there is no way in hell it is good news.”
Squee whined quietly, eyeing the drifting cracker. Lex snagged it and tossed it her way. She snatched it out of the air and crunched away happily. His slidepad chirped a few times, lighting up the console of his ship with an incoming connection from Diamond In The Rough C&C.
“Speak of the devil,” he said, accepting the connection. The video overlay of the SOB’s main window illuminated and displayed the flawless face of a dark-skinned woman with an exceedingly executive demeanor. Her black hair was gathered into a bun, wire-rimmed glasses were perched on her pert nose, and she wore a charcoal-gray business suit. Her thin eyebrows arched slightly when she saw Lex’s face pop up on her own screen, the only evidence of emotion on her otherwise dispassionate features. Her name was Preethy Misra. She was Nick’s niece and assistant, and since his little real estate acquisition, she was also Lex’s landlady.
“Mr. Alexander, I see you are entering the vicinity of Operlo. Quite punctual.” Her voice had no hint of an accent.
“I aim to please.”
“I’m forwarding some coordinates. I will personally receive your delivery there.”
“Why not the main office?”
“Mr. Patel has expanded my role in the organization. I work out of a new facility now.”
“You got a promotion? Congratulations!”
“Thank you, Mr. Alexander. I’ll see you shortly.”
She disconnected, leaving Lex to plug in the new coordinates and admire the sights of the steadily approaching planet Operlo.
To conjure to mind the proper image of the planet, one would begin by picturing a sunbaked ball of speckled sand hurtling through space. One would end there as well. There wasn’t much to the place. Its surface broiled at well above inhabitable temperatures around the equator, and there weren’t more than a half-dozen cities on the entire planet. Vast solar collectors dotted city-sized patches of ground, and what few residents weren’t in the mining or power industry were employees, associates, or contemporaries of Nick Patel. It was a forgotten corner of the cosmos, a hiding place for those who had business that was best kept hidden, and a place that few would willingly call home. In a way, it was a planet-sized counterpart of Diode Station 888, but at least here there were some redeeming features. Not the least of them was Preethy Misra.
She stood in the shade of a wide silvery parasol when Lex set down the SOB. He popped the cockpit hatch and was immediately struck by the full might of an overeager sun. He squinted at the ship’s thermometer and watched it visibly climb past 130 degrees by the time Ms. Misra reached him.
“I would hurry down from there if I were you,” she advised. “Or have we forgotten what happened last time?”
He held the package under one arm and Squee under the other, hopping down from the ship. His boots practically sizzled against the parched ground. He hurried to the shade of her oversized parasol. “How could I forget? By the time I got out of the sun, I was positively crispy.”
“What precisely do you have there?” she asked, a single eyebrow raised as she looked over the already panting Squee.
“Oh, sorry. This is my pet funk, Squee. Squee, Preethy. Preethy, Squee.” The creature looked the businesswoman up and down, then scrabbled to get free from Lex’s arm and onto his shoulders.
A slight smirk curled the corner of her mouth. “You always find a way to make a unique impression. This way.”
Though her attitude could not be more businesslike, Preethy’s wardrobe suggested she was well aware that her virtues went beyond her administrative talents. As always, she wore an outfit that was a half-step beyond what might be considered appropriate for a business setting. The skirt was a centimeter too high, the neckline just a bit too low, and the overall fit just slightly tighter than it should be. There was no single part of the ensemble that was scandalous, but taken as a whole it made a rather firm impression. Keeping in the shade required Lex to walk extremely close to her, and by the time they were halfway to their destination, he felt as though he needed a cold shower for two entirely different reasons.
She led the way toward a large and extremely new building. There were still scaffolds and unpainted sections of the structure along one side, but the remaining work seemed to be cosmetic. The whole of the building had a massive overhanging canopy of solar panels, and the shaded area underneath bristled with cooling fins. In the distance, dust rose from what looked to be a massive construction project distorted by the wavy heat of the desert landscape.
“So, what’s going on here?” Lex asked.
“Mr. Patel has always felt that the less hospitable portions of Operlo had tremendous potential if put to the proper use. Solar farms are useful, but those we have in place already supply the planet’s needs many times over. A few months ago he was struck by inspiration, an opportunity to turn the otherwise wasted land into an attraction that would draw viewers and visitors from around the galaxy.”
Lex looked at the rocky wasteland around him. “If your uncle sees opportunity here, he’s got an awful lot more vision than me.”
“I quite agree. He has more vision than most.”
They reached the shade of the solar panels, and she folded her parasol. A touch of her fingertips activated an automatic door that released a tantalizing rush of air-conditioning as it slid open. The pair stepped inside. Like the outside, the inside of the building wasn’t quite finished. Plastic still covered furniture, and banks of monitors and lights had not yet been connected to power. It wasn’t entirely empty, with the quiet echo of footsteps and scooting chairs standing out against the relative silence, but it was clear that it was not ready for the public.
“This is the first of several such facilities. We hope to have the entire enterprise completed by next year,” Preethy said.
Lex knew it was probably best if he just handed her the package, accepted payment, and left as quickly as possible. Instead he followed, quietly observing the strangely familiar surroundings. He was more than a bit curious about what exactly Nick had dreamed up, but primarily he knew that the sooner he was through here, the sooner he’d have to go back outside. A few moments thinking about the broiling sun made a short visit seem like a wonderful idea.
The place had consoles and partitioned counters that reminded him of a casino, but there were far too many windows for it to be any casino he’d ever seen. He knew he’d been to a place like this before, but he couldn’t quite place it. Finally they reached the door of one of the only fully lit and completely finished rooms they’d encountered. It was a large and tastefully decorated office, its entire front wall made from glass panels. The opposite side was a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall tinted window overlooking a portion of what must have been the same construction project he’d noticed on the way into the building.
“The package, please,” she said as she opened the door and led him to an oak-and-polished-granite desk that dominated the room.
He handed over the box, which she sliced open with an etched dagger letter opener. Inside was a crystal prism, about thirty centimeters long, with a brass nameplate attached to one side. She placed it on the leading edge of the desk.
“Preethy Lata Misra, COO, Operlo Entertainment Enterprises,” Lex read. “Whoa. That’s a big step up from secretary.”
“Administrative assistant,” she corrected. “And yes, it is.”
“So what sort of entertainment are we talking about?”
“I suppose it has been a few years, but a glance outside should clarify matters,” she suggested, motioning to the window as she approached a bar along one wall.
While she filled a small ice bucket with water and set it on the floor, an offering to Squee, which the little creature eagerly lapped up, Lex looked at the unfinished construction outside. Very little had been done beyond smoothing out a wide ribbon of the ground beyond the window. There were some poles and crossbeams, one of which held what looked like a traffic light. The image gradually slid into place. He knew exactly what this place was.
“A raceway? You’re building a raceway on Operlo?”
“Indeed we are,” she said, stepping beside him. She had prepared a rum and cola which she handed to him. “Uncle feels it is an excellent use of his land holdings.”
Lex took the drink and looked Preethy in the eye. “Why do I get the feeling you didn’t order that nameplate from Golana and have it hand delivered because you needed it in a hurry?”
“We’ve spoken about this before, but I thought seeing the state of the project in person might offer a bit more motivation. We would very much like to see you race on our circuit.”
He sighed and took a sip. “I didn’t know you were building a raceway. I thought you were just putting together a sponsored team! Like I said before, I’m banned from all officially organized racing leagues. Remember? The mob ‘encouraged’ me to fix a race and I got found out.”
“Yes, Mr. Alexander. I am aware. But that will not be a problem.” She leaned over to a pad recessed into the desk and tapped at it. She spoke deliberately into it. “Jesse, could you come here, please?” She turned back to him. “We’ve done a bit of research, and you are hardly the only racer to have his or her career cut short by inflexible league policies. Minor drug infractions, accusations of overly aggressive driving and illegal modifications… One moment.” She tapped the pad again. “Charlotte, please come to my office for a moment. Bring Jesse’s file, she isn’t answering. As I was saying, we believe that quite a few racers who could have become household names had their careers not been cruelly shortened by zero-tolerance policies… I’m sorry, one moment again.” Now, somewhat more vigorously, she tapped the pad a third time. “Louise? I’m not getting an answer from the rest of your department. Would you bring Jesse’s file to me, please?”
“Right away, Ms. Misra,” a voice replied after a barely audible sigh of exasperation.
“We really are on a bit of a skeleton crew at the moment. Louise is our head network and media developer. She’s stretched somewhat thin at the moment. Now where was I? Ah yes. Uncle is a strong believer in second chances. He has decided that the exclusionary attitude of the primary racing leagues is long overdue for an alternative. And since no one else is willing to take the initiative, he sees no better person than himself.”
A woman, arms heavily laden with boxes, nudged the door open with her shoulder. She was tall with straight black hair falling to the middle of her back. Her face and complexion suggested an Asian heritage. Lex wondered what sort of precautions someone so fair skinned would have to take to avoid being roasted alive by the desert sun.
“Mr. Alexander, this is Louise Yang. She’s been putting in some very long hours to solidify our digital and visual brand. Ms. Yang, this is Mr. Alexander.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Louise said with a tone that suggested the opposite. She turned to Preethy. “On the wall display?”
“Yes, please. If you would, Mr. Alexander, take a look. Mr. Patel is in the process of organizing his own league.” After setting down the boxes, filled mostly with merchandise, Miss Yang dropped a thick data card onto the desk’s input pad and pressed her thumb to it. The tint on the window darkened, and a hologram emitter dropped down from the top of one wall. It projected a ring of fist-sized rotating icons into the center of the room. The developer stepped up to the outside of the ring and pushed the first of them toward the center of the circle. It swelled to fill an area almost as large as the desk and displayed a rough three-dimensional artist’s rendering of a man and a woman each modeling sleek, logo-strewn jumpsuits. Preethy explained, “These are the official uniforms we had in mind. In addition to the usual advertisements, they incorporate… I’m sorry, Louise, what are we calling them?”
“Anato-trak telemetry. They record body movements,” Louise swiftly replied.
“Precisely. They will allow us to precisely recreate an entire race, down to the mannerisms of the drivers. Unprecedented rebroadcast detail. Ms. Yang, I believe you know the presentation best. Please proceed.”
Louise worked her way through the array of icons, maximizing them and explaining them with the enthusiasm of someone on a tight deadline who had suddenly been asked to conduct a field trip. “Net layout, 2D. Net layout, 3D. Rough Cut Racing logo. Concept of the grandstand. Concept of the climate-controlled spectator seating. The standard daytime hoversled.”
Lex’s eyes widened and the glass of rum nearly slipped from his fingers. He marched up to the latest concept image, a one-third-scale hologram of a unique vehicle. It had a small cockpit, only slightly larger than the man it would contain. On two long outriggers jutting forward from each of the cockpit’s leading corners were a pair of silvery nodes. Behind the cockpit was an engine easily twice its size, studded with cooling fins and feeding two larger rear nodes and a monstrous pair of thrusters. It looked like a cross between a rocket and a dune buggy. There were glowing hotspots on the hologram. He poked each with a finger, conjuring floating readouts of the various specifications.
“Look at those thrust characteristics. The power-to-weight ratio on this thing is nuts. And these repulsors. That’s an insane amount of grip. Oh man, you opted for the front-end turn-assist thrusters! The corners you could make in this thing must be killer…”
Louise smiled. “I knew integrating the specs in the rendering was a good idea.”
“Indeed it was, Louise. You can go now. Thank you very much. Leave the data and merchandise for now.”
The busy developer nodded and hurried out the door. Preethy stepped into the display and stood beside Lex.
“I’m glad you approve of the design, Mr. Alexander,” she said. “It would please us very much to have you at the controls of one of them when they are complete.”
Lex closed his eyes. He could almost hear his willpower creaking under the strain of this new development. Racing was the only thing he’d ever wanted to do. He’d made quite a name for himself in the short time he’d been a professional, and with time he might have become one of the all-time greats. His ejection from the league had been financially and emotionally devastating. The thought of getting back on the track was mouthwatering.
“Listen… the last time I got mixed up with the mob, it really screwed my life up.”
“I assure you that Operlo Entertainment Enterprises is an entirely legitimate firm and will operate with impeccable business ethics.”
“It won’t matter to Michella.”
“Ah yes. Ms. Modane. I understand she is sensitive to even the most tenuous connections to organized crime.”
“To put it lightly. And racing on a raceway owned by a crime lord, for a league owned by a crime lord, is not a ‘tenuous connection.’”
“If legitimacy is her concern, then I invite her to investigate us personally. I’m sure she’ll be satisfied.”
“If you were anyone else, I would jump at the chance.”
“Mr. Alexander, if we were anyone else, we wouldn’t give you the chance.” She opened a box on the desk and pulled out a one-hundred-thousand-credit casino chip. “Your payment. Keep the change. Feel free to finish your drink before departing.”
He finished the rum and cola just in time to corral Squee, who had finished her own drink and was now visibly planning a leap onto Preethy’s shoulders. Preethy led the way out of the office to the front door, opened the parasol, and walked him to his ship. He remotely activated the air-conditioning, cranked it to full, and girded his loins for the sizzling trip up to his seat.
“Lex,” Preethy said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “I admire your willingness to honor your girlfriend’s wishes, but your life is your own. There comes a time when you must make the choice that is right for you. If she cannot accept that, it may be time to find someone who can.” From a pocket she pulled an old-fashioned business card. She leaned a bit closer and slipped it into a pocket of his flight suit. “The offer stands if you change your mind.”
Lex stumbled his way through a thank-you and good-bye, then scurried into the baking-hot cockpit as though he was an eight-year-old afraid to get cooties. The air-conditioner fought to get the temperature down below boiling. He turned to Preethy as she headed back toward the building. It was shameful, but one of the things he most looked forward to upon any meeting with Preethy was watching her leave. Whether it was intentional or not, something about the way that woman moved set gender relations back to the Stone Age.
He shook away the caveman thoughts in his head and started up the takeoff sequence. On his lap, Squee had situated herself directly in front of the air-conditioning vent. “What did I say, Squee? Trouble. Nothing but trouble.”