Bypass Gemini by Joseph Lallo Page A

jostled his way through clouds of gravel-sized junk. It was like flying through a hail storm, only the hail stones are made out of high density tungsten and moving at orbital speeds. Larger slabs ground against each other ahead of him, rebounding just enough for him to slip through.
    If he’d had the brainpower to spare, right about now Lex would have been doubting the wisdom of entering this death cloud rather than just taking his sentence like a man. As it was, every spare cycle of his brain was busy plotting the trajectories of half a dozen hunks wreckage, trying to figure out if the gap between them would be big enough to squeeze through by the time he reached it. Normally this was the sort of thing a flight computer would do for him. Unfortunately they were designed to KEEP you out of situations like this, not GET you out of them. Thus, his very expensive, top-of-the-line nav system had decided the best course of action was to flash a seizure-inducing array of warning lights and blare out an annoying siren right when he most needed to concentrate.
    Things only got worse the lower he went. The wreckage got bigger and more plentiful and the swarms of nuts and bolts got denser. The shields were now shimmering with a pretty much constant and uniform glow. He’d never seen them do that before. A moment later the glow abruptly stopped as the shield generator finally overloaded. Now the flash and sparkle of deflected debris was replaced with the slung-gravel clatter of metal on metal, little nicks and gauges appearing each place a fragment struck his ship. He should have been terrified, and a large part of him was. Another part, one tucked deep underneath the sea of adrenaline and panic in his mind, was reveling in the thrill of it. Steadily the noise of the alarms and the flash of the lights started to fade into the background. Navigation slipped from his conscious mind to his reflexes. He found himself in a groove, a zen-like union of man and machine that he hadn’t felt since his final days on the race track. He nudged himself deeper and deeper into the debris field, drawing closer to the atmosphere and its clear sky below. Amid the clatter and crash of detritus against his hull, there was a voice warning him to pull out, but he ignored it. There was nothing in the universe but himself, his ship, and the challenge ahead.
    Actually, there was one more thing. A maniac VectorCorp agent firing plasma bolts at him from the safety of high orbit.

Chapter 6
    That took him back to the start of the crash. It was either 58 seconds or 97 minutes since then, depending on your frame of reference. He’d watched a pair of additional plasma bolts drift by outside the ship. At normal speed they were just brilliant points of light that you tried desperately to avoid. From his current point of view they were fluffy purple-pink clouds that just happened to convert anything they touched into a cloud of vapor. None of them came close to hitting him before scattering against an orbiting lump of metal. That was nice, since the only thing his safety system would do was slow it down, and chances are that something that would melt his face off at a thousand miles per hour would still melt it off at ten.
    The debris was behind him now. That was the good news. The bad news was that there were only a few seconds of timeshift left, and a hell of a lot of free fall. As the last hundredths of a second started to tick down, he made sure that everything he was going to need after the crash was strapped to his person. He clicked the seat harness off so that he could move around more freely, and went to work. The metal briefcase was the first to be locked down. If it had cost him his ship, he was damn sure going to get it there. It was a matter of pride now. The only other thing inside the bounds of the emergency shield was the box he’d picked up from Blake’s. He couldn’t quite remember what was in it, but he might as well bring it along.
    He’d only