by Logan Jacobs
“How we doing?” I asked my chip.
“Fourteen minutes to shields down,” Honey Bee chimed.
“Fourteen?” I whistled. “For that, we may as well just win the damn thing.”
Another ship dove at my left wing to try to edge me out. I barely moved the throttle, and the Alfaromero-31 purred as she rolled out of the way. I gave an excited whoop as I spun her into a barrel roll that spat me out just under a drifting asteroid. It didn’t matter that it was fake. If I hit it, I’d be just as dead as if it was a real one.
I pulled up as soon as I cleared the asteroid.
“Nineteen minutes needed to win,” the chip hissed.
I grinned. “Well let’s just see if we can shave off about five minutes then, shall we?”
The thrusters were at full blast, but I still had half of the impulse drive I could kick on. I just had to time it right. I’d already zipped past most of the other racers, but four remained ahead of me. Two of them would be easy pickings to pass, but the other two were built by the same engineers that had built mine.
I kicked my ship to the left toward the wing of the ship that had tried to spin me out. Its asshole jockey only thought his ship was the greatest thing since edible MRE’s, but he was in for a rude surprise. I flew right next to him, our wings damn near touching, and gave him a little wave when he glanced over from his cockpit window.
“Mistake.” I grinned before I flapped the spoilers on my left wing up for three seconds before folding them back against my ship. It was just enough drag, and I was just close enough to the asshole, that it wobbled his right wing. He overcorrected, like assholes always did, and the motion allowed me to zoom ahead of him.
This ship handled like a fucking dream.
Three to go. The next one was easy, just a simple feint as if I would clip him, and when he rolled away, I took his place just as the track narrowed to force us to pass between two black holes. We could only fly two abreast without being destroyed in one of the black holes, and I’d thrown him off course just enough he couldn’t correct himself in time.
“Better him than me.” I shrugged as the other pilot’s crash sent a momentary shudder through my craft.
I was even with one of the two remaining crafts now. The leader was ahead of both of us, but still within sight. I decreased the impulse drive so my craft fell back behind the current second-place ship. It dipped and rolled to try to avoid having me on its tail, but I kept pace right behind it.
“Seven minutes needed to win,” the chip seethed above my ear.
“Got it, Honey Bee.” I grinned.
The second-place jockey had given up trying to lose me on his tail and was now just focused on catching up to the first-place ship. The first-place ship was a beauty of engineering, some love-child cooked up between an architect and a painter. Who had ever heard of a ship using green metal and honest-to-god gemstones to keep the cockpit window fastened shut? It was gaudy, sure, and nothing like the sleek beast I was flying, but I couldn’t help admiring the piece of artwork.
The Alfaromero-31 hissed with the effort of staying in the second-place pilot’s drag, and I patted her controls. All she wanted to do was pull ahead, but I needed her to be patient for just a minute more. We were approaching the part of the track with the massive sun again, and I needed to stay focused if I was going to stay in the other ship’s wake while making the turn.
All three of us veered to the right now that we were on the final lap. The finish line was up ahead, in the form of a comet streaking fire back and forth in a straight line. Only one empty stretch of black space was between us and the finish line, so it was now purely a test of speed.
The pilot in front of me seemed to have forgotten all about me riding in his slipstream. Premature excitation. But a lot could happen between now and the finish line, and I sure as hell intended to make sure it did.
With under a minute until I crossed the finish line, I jerked my ship out from behind the second-place craft, shoved my queen’s impulse drive to high, and slingshotted myself ahead until I was just even with the lead racing ship.
“Twenty-four seconds needed to win,” the chip chimed, her voice calm and clear as always.
I jerked my craft down until I almost hit the ground. While the pilot above me tried to figure out what I was doing, I took advantage of his half a second of confusion and pulled right on ahead. The fire of the finish line was close enough now I had to squint behind my shielding glasses at the brightness, and even my ship gave a little moan as she approached the phantom heat.
I stayed on course, despite the blinding brightness, and twelve seconds later, I crossed the finish line with a one-second lead.
The crowd below lost their minds. The shields keeping us in the closed circuit still made it so I couldn’t see my audience, but that certainly didn’t stop me from hearing them. I felt like fucking Robin Hood. I might not be giving the poor all the funds I’d make from selling the Alfaromero-31, but anyone who wasn’t an idiot would have placed their bets on my queen of ships.
It looked like I wouldn’t be the only one who’d be getting paid today.
I slowed my ship just enough to not be suspicious as I waited for the firework show to begin. A hum started outside the ship so loud it might have broken apart a lesser craft, and then the shields keeping us all locked in flickered and faded. The evening terrain of Deltulu stretched out before me in dotted scrub brush and water-starved trees, but I flew past them all so quickly they looked like gray streaks of exhaust frozen in time.
The fireworks started in a crash of blue and green fire swirling in patterns all around the track. I only had a minute before the shields went back up, and I knew they would be down just long enough to let the fireworks escape so as not to kill the crowd with their fumes.
I glanced at the other ships all crossing the finish line now. “Time to go,” I muttered. I hit my flashers to light up the jhozium seams of my craft, to the great delight of the watching crowd. And then, as if I was just taking her out for a victory lap, I punched the accelerator.
Then I threw my head back and laughed as the race track disappeared behind me.
This was gonna be a good payday. I could feel it. It was hard work, stealing ships, and I’d more than earned what I would sell her for. The Alfaromero-31 purred under my hand as I veered into a canyon.
“I know. I’ll miss you too, sweetness,” I told my latest conquest. It was tempting to keep her, of course. It wasn’t every day I got to fly a galaxy-class Granix racing ship. But she’d be flagged before I could get to the other side of the planet, and since she wasn’t meant for space, she really wouldn’t be much use to me in the end.
But damn if she wasn’t pretty.
The chip clicked in my ear, and I felt the vents open in my shielding glasses to let out the excess heat from my brain. Having a chip in my brain was handy, sure, but when it processed too much or for too long, it overheated. And if the chip overheated, my brain would fry like a crispy piece of breakfast spam. The glasses helped. They plugged directly into holes in my skull, so they acted both like vents to let the heat out and like mini-refrigerators spitting coolant into my skull cavity.
Back in the ancient Earth days, they had a term: “With great power comes great responsibility,” but the reality is that “with great power comes the need to cool it so that important things don’t fry or explode.”
Honey Bee was great power, stolen from a being that wanted her, and me, back. The important thing that could be fried was my brain.
I jerked the ship to the right to slip through a narrow passage in the canyon, then pulled up and left to make it through the next one. Flying through the ravine would jam their trackers, at least long enough for me to get away. By the time their signal came back online, I’d have their trackers disabled. And besides, I’d be far enough away by then that no one from the race would be able to catch up to me.
I flew the ship under a natural land bridge, and my Honey Bee did the math so that
my new baby just barely avoided being clipped by the red rock formation. My eyes moved back and forth under my shielding glasses as I scanned to find all the trackers embedded on the ship.
There were three total, and it would only be the last one that might give me any trouble. One was in the cockpit with me, meant to double as a distress signal when activated by the pilot. The second was underneath the ship, but I should be able to disable it while still flying. The third, though-- that was on the impulse exhaust itself. Clever.
I glanced at the controls to see my coordinates. I was still on track, with just the right amount of fuel left to get me where I needed to go. It would have been nice if the Den wasn’t exactly on the other side of the planet, just to put a little more distance between me and the scores of people who now wanted to see me fry. But with limited fuel and a hot ship under my hands, I was glad there were just under a hundred miles to go before I could pawn this beauty off. It wouldn’t be enough to buy my own space station, but it’d make a good dent toward it, that was for sure.
I exited the canyon before it ended in a sheer cliff face. The terrain ahead was flat and empty, and in the evening light, it flew by in muted grays and greens. Deltulu’s two moons were rising to my right. They shone blue as they crested the horizon, and if I hadn’t known any better, I’d have said they were reflecting the jhozium blue seams of my queen of ships.
Three trackers to disable before I came in sight of a city and had to worry about cameras. And if I was able to get them all in time, I’d manage to avoid the countless cops and drones on high alert for the clever fuck who’d stolen the queen of the Abn Presa.
I grabbed the knife from out of my vest, and with one hand still on the controls, I fidgeted with the tracker underneath the control panel. When I felt its seam, I plunged my knife in and tore it away from the ship’s metal. It took a bit of back and forth prying, but it came away like a stuck pig. I held the tracker against the controls and shoved the knife in deeper until there was a sizzle and pop, and a final spark to tell me it was dead.
Two more trackers to go.
“Distance to the Den?” I asked.
My brain was beginning to feel a little like it was going to fry me up itself instead of waiting around for the certain death sentence I’d get if I was caught. I pressed on the manual release along the side of my shielding glasses, and enough heat escaped to steam the cockpit window.
I flipped the dehumidifying switch, and the excess steam slipped outside into the threadbare terrain of Deltulu.
“Estimated time to the Den.” My brain clicked as Honey Bee tried to counteract the heat. “Time. Thirty minutes, current pace.”
I nodded to myself and headed toward a cluster of water-hungry trees. Their branches were brittle but hard enough for what I needed, and I cut down my speed so I wouldn’t take off the hull completely. None of the jhozium seams were on the bottom of the craft, so my payload would still be intact, but I didn’t want to have to fly missing half the ship if I didn’t have to. After all, it was just one little tracker.
“Starboard, 47 degrees from hull mid-seam.”
I was too focused to respond to my chip. I had almost reached the cluster of trees, and I still needed to angle my ship five more degrees to starboard. My hand felt like it was moving through mud as I steered the queen ever so slightly to the right.
As soon as I reached 47 degrees as my angle of approach, I dropped my descent and raced toward the clump of brittle trees. The hull shivered as I clipped the top branches, and I rattled in my seat from the impact.
“How’d we do?” I asked. I’d circle back around if I had to, or find another clump of trees, but I was pretty sure I’d clipped the tracker off on my first pass.
“One tracker remaining,” Honey Bee chimed in my ear.
I grinned. Aside from a scratch along the titanium hull, I was doing pretty good keeping this beauty intact enough to sell.
I was just getting ready to take care of the third tracker when the sensors pinged with an incoming vessel alert. Half a second later, my chip echoed the alert, and that’s when I heard the shrieking sirens of the Deltulu cops on my tail.
Chapter 2
The cops were far enough behind me that I couldn’t see them in the rear camera, but six of them blinked onto my radar. Three were coming up from behind me on my right, two from behind on my left, and one directly on my tail.
They must have been the only police crafts at the race capable of even thinking they could chase after the Alfaromero-31. Cops would be on the alert in the next city, of course, but the beautiful thing about the Den was that it wasn’t in a city at all. If I could just dodge these assholes and ditch the final tracker, I’d be clear and away en route to what promised to be a very happy payday.
There weren’t any canyons across this stretch of country, or I would have been able to lose the police ships there. I was in an endless expanse of the same now, just scrub brush and brittle trees out here in the flatlands. The landscape would only get more treacherous when I got closer to the Den.
The cops were gaining ground, but only because I was letting them. If I was going to pull this off, I needed to conserve as much fuel as possible while I still could, so I shot up higher into the air until I was almost touching the clouds. As soon as I was sure the cops were following me, I grinned, aimed my ship at a fifty-degree angle toward the ground, and let my queen fall out of the sky.
It confused the hell out of them. That was all I needed it to do, really. That, plus it saved me a little fuel as I let gravity do some of the work to pull me down and forward. While the cops scrambled to alter their courses after me, I turned my attention to the last tracker.
“Alright,” I sighed. “Here goes nothing.”
I disabled the fuel guard with my left hand. As soon as I was close enough to the ground for my plan to work, I pulled up on the throttle with my right hand just in time to avoid turning into a pulpy mess. A second later, and I might have been splattered all across the flatlands.
With the fuel guard disabled, I turned the switch to open the fuel tank, and thick pungent liquid streamed out. The fuel formed a semi-circle on the ground below as I started to guide the ship into a circle to double-back on itself.
“This is either really brilliant or really stupid,” I exhaled.
“We need nobody to survive,” the chip chimed.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I groaned.
“Any time,” Honey Bee pinged cheerfully in my brain. It sounded just about happy enough I almost forgot it wasn’t really me.
“Continue to tell yourself that.” That time, I wasn’t sure if it was my brain or just the technology embedded in my brain speaking.
When the fuel light came on, I flipped the switch back to close the tank. The cops were gaining distance as they careened down toward me from out of the evening sky, and I knew I only had one shot at this. Only one chance to shed the last tracker and the cops all at once.
I was coming back up on the patch of fuel I had dumped at the start of my plan, and when I was just about on top of it, I yanked up on the emergency brake to send the nose of my craft spinning up. Her rear hovered just above the ground, and I ripped the impulse drive so a shock of fire blasted down at the fuel patch.
It erupted in a lake of blue-hot fire.
I gripped the throttle with both hands to keep her steady as flames lapped at the rear of the ship. The ship’s sensors screamed at me, but I flipped off the automated system with my foot when she threatened to override my control. I just needed her to hold still for ten more seconds.
The temperature gauge was exploding where it monitored the exhaust pipes. I could almost hear them warping in the fuel fire, just as I imagined I could hear the frustrated cursing of the cops who’d lost sight of me in the black smoke billowing up toward their ships.
The titanium frame would hold, and so would the jhozium seams. It would have been nice not to ruin her altogether, but she just had to stay in one piece f
or a little longer. As soon as the temperature around the exhaust pipes crossed the threshold of the next thousand, I knew I’d won. The palladium tracker wouldn’t have been able to withstand those temperatures, and if it was still clinging to the impulse exhaust, it was only as a melted heap of metal scrap.
I jerked down on the emergency brake to release it. With the smoke still so thick above me that I couldn’t see the cop crafts, I figured they couldn’t see me either. I dimmed all the lights inside the ship and flipped off the reflectors. As soon as the queen of the Abn Presa was flying dark, I hurtled away from the heat and toxic fumes of the fire and back on course for the Den.
The fuel light turned orange now. With my rear cameras melted away along with the tracker, I couldn’t see anything behind me. But it was late enough now that the evening light had been swallowed up by the night, which meant that I really was flying dark.
I glanced at the control scanners, but no other ships were on the radar. The cops must have gotten tangled in the smoke, maybe even crashed into each other, and by the time they flew out of it, I was long gone, and so was the tracking beacon they’d been using.
The fuel light began blinking red.
“Uh, a little help?” I asked.
The coordinates of a refueling station flashed across the part of my eyes where there ought to have been irises. I punched the numbers into the ship’s system and kicked the automated system back on. She’d fly as carefully as she could to preserve fuel until we made it to the station.
All the controls stayed dark to conserve power as the automated system took over. After a minute, even the fuel light stopped blinking to save energy. We started the slow descent toward the refueling station. It was the single bright spot in the flatlands, and just about the only sign of civilization before the Den.