Bypass Gemini by Joseph Lallo Page B

just gotten it strapped on when time came charging back with a vengeance. It had been difficult to tell in slow-mo, but the ship had gotten itself into a pretty vicious spin. That presented a number of problems. First and foremost, he couldn’t safely eject while it was spinning like that. There was a second consequence too, which he hadn’t anticipated. The inertial dampener must have been hit at some point, because when time came back, it brought centripetal force with it. The rotation threw him out of his seat and pinned him painfully against the force field for a moment or two before he hauled himself back into the seat. He buckled himself back into the harness and made a mental note to never, ever unbuckle it during a flight again. He then pulled up the auxiliary controls and gave them a try. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of functionality left in old Betsy. There might be one engine left that was still running and had controls intact. One or two of the maneuvering thrusters was still working, too. That would have to be enough.
    A little of trial and error and an awful lot of finesse took the ship out of its death spin. The ground wasn’t as close as he’d expected. Gravity must have been a little weak here. A little more fighting got the ship oriented generally upright, and the time came to say his goodbyes.
    “ Well, girl. We had some good times, but this is where we part ways,” he yelled over the rush of wind and rattle of broken machinery, patting the arm of the chair one last time before hammering the eject button.
    Nothing happened.
    He hammered the button a few more times, because that’s what you do when technology fails you. It had roughly the same result it always did. That is to say, none at all.
    “ Come on, babe. It’s time to let go,” he said nervously.
    There was a groan of jammed clamps, then more nothing. The ground was getting a lot closer now. With very few options, and zero time to come up with anything intelligent, Lex was forced to desperate measures. He unbuckled again, reached behind the seat to snag his Extra Vehicular Activity pack, strapped it on, and grabbed onto the broken frame of his view window. Getting through the mangled mess of broken glass and twisted metal would have been tricky in any situation. Doing it with two bulky cases and a backpack, all while plummeting in a barely controlled nosedive added an extra challenge. One final heave tore him free and instantly he was caught by the wind and torn from the roof of his ship. Shaking fingers found their way to the panel of his EVA pack, and he activated  its jets.
    Jet packs were a fairly common thing these days. Engineers had not yet had any luck making them particularly safe, but they were cheap, fast, and exciting. In a way, they were the next logical evolution of motorcycles, and thus popular with thrill seekers. There were models that were capable of hours of flight time, the maneuverability of a bird of prey, and more than enough speed to give you windburn. This wasn’t one of those. The jets on his back were the kind intended to move you around during a space walk. At full blast they had about as much thrust as a couple of garden hoses. Had his ship been disabled in space, like 99% of freelancer ships are, this little baby would have been perfect. In an atmosphere, with a planet pulling him down, it was next to useless. All he could do was keep the nozzles pointed down and blazing, and hope that their push and the planet’s weak gravity would be enough to make the fall survivable.
    Wind whistled past his helmet as he fell. The landscape drew closer and closer. As it did, he scanned madly for something that would break his fall. There was nothing. The surface of the planet was an endless gray moonscape, pockmarked with craters and scattered mounds of wreckage and slag. No convenient mound of cardboard boxes. No building with nice flimsy awnings. Hell, even though wispy clouds high up the sky suggested there must