Fuming, First pushed the tool chest out of the way with a kick and got behind the tank. With the high-traction soles of her racing boots gripping the deck plating, she pushed for all she was worth, surging again and again until her calf muscles burned with acid.
All her efforts were rewarded with the ear-splitting shriek of metal on metal and forward movement of approximately six millimeters before it ground to a halt again.
“Oh, come on!” First shouted. The time until launch was slipping away, but she couldn’t afford to launch without full hydrazine tanks. She’d run out of thruster propellant halfway through the race and be dead in space, unable to make the sort of fine trim adjustments to her course that made the difference between an amateur’s run and a podium finish. She moved around to the front of it and tried pulling. But no matter how she struggled, the tank simply would not budge.
“That looks heavy.” The voice startled First badly enough that she slipped and fell on her ass. Looking up, she found a pair of eyestalks staring down at her. “Want some help?”
It was the Ish mechanic that had pointed her to the slip.
“Yes. Yes I do.”
CHAPTER 21
First pulled her fully fueled sling into its starting slot among the other racers awaiting the amber light. Fullok had done the hard work of qualifying seventh among the field of thirty-six, a respectable pole position for anyone. He’d been a better-than-fair racer. Too bad his financial acumen had proven less so.
As far as anyone in the observation galleries knew, Fullok was once again in his cockpit, eagerly anticipating the light. Some of the other sling pilots knew better, particularly the ones who’d been berthed in the slips to the immediate left or right of First’s newest acquisition. But it was apparent Fullok had made more enemies than just the Ish mechanic. If any of the other racers or their crews had concerns about her taking his place on the line, they’d decided to keep them away from the race officials.
Because the truth was, First wasn’t a licensed sling racing pilot. She hadn’t passed any prerace physicals. She was not insured in the event of a breakdown or a crash. Everything that was about to happen rested entirely on her head, and she had no one to bail her out if it went south. Not even Loritt, who would be furious at the loss of the asset he’d sent her to fetch.
Regardless of how the race ended up, she’d be discovered in the end and disqualified. Her standing would be meaningless. Her name never even entered into the final results.
Sitting alone in the cold cockpit, sucking on canned air, and peeing into a bag strapped to the inside of her thigh, First had what drunks across the galaxy referred to as “a moment of clarity.”
She stared down the long nose of her sling and up the drive cone of the rig ahead of her and swallowed hard.
“First, what the hell are you doing?” she said into her helmet.
She’d peel away. Yeah. Signal engine trouble to the tower and puff away from the starting gate on a little cloud of hydrazine. As soon as the rest of the racers left, she’d take off in last place and make a no-frills beeline for the pickup point, skipping the race course entirely. In three or four hours, she’d be in high-space heading home for Junktion with another bounty strapped down in the cargo bay.
No risk.
And no reward.
First looked down at her tactical display, for lack of a better term. The primitive sensor suite on board her sling was at least sophisticated enough to pick up the emergency beacons of the other racers, label them, and render them in a wire-frame display between her legs.
Three slots back in the number-ten poll position sat Maximus and his first-of-a-kind, Italian-built, Ferrari-red sling. All doubt melted away under her furnace of anger at the memory of his thoughtless, careless, automatic dismissal. Some rewards were worth the risks.
“Yeah…” First jammed her fingers into the buttons that would prime the drive spike. “That’s not happening.”
She took a moment to consider her advantages over the other racers. She could think of only two. One, she was lighter than any of the other pilots by at least a dozen kilos. In boats where every gram was weighed and considered, that was an enviable figure. Two, beginner’s luck.
That was the end of the list. Her list of disadvantages was too long to give it serious consideration without psyching herself out.
Then, the amber light went up, and the window for fear and indecisiveness closed. Ahead of her, the number-one through number-six slings lit off in sequence, their drive spikes jumping to life barely a tenth of a second apart. In the space between heartbeats, it was her turn. That’s when she felt it. The split second of transcendence between firewalling the throttle and the sixty thousand horsepower monster sitting behind her screaming to life.
When it did, it was all First could do to stay on top of the onslaught of violence pouring out of the back of her sling like Niagara Falls. Less than three seconds into the race, First made her first mistake. Her sling drifted too far to port and into the gravity wake of the sling immediately ahead of her. Like a strong headwind, it slowed her acceleration, pushing her backward relative to all of the slings charging up behind her like thoroughbreds.
Her proximity alarm went off to port as a competitor’s sling came dangerously close to a collision. First hit her thrusters but overcorrected, setting off another proximity alarm to starboard as the ninth-position sling passed her as well. Unable to tame the beast, First throttled back to three-quarters on her drive spike and watched helplessly as Maximus Tiberius sailed past her. Just like that, the advantage Fullok had unwittingly built in for her evaporated. She was losing. Already.
That just wouldn’t do.
Working on reflexes drilled into her in simulations over the last month, and instincts that went back far deeper in time than that, First clawed her way back on top of the wild animal she’d strapped herself to and got it pointed in the right direction again with quick, decisive inputs to her thruster quadrants.
The field behind her had bunched up and broken around to avoid the obstruction, while the field ahead had piled on distance under full acceleration. The result was she had a small bubble of space directly ahead of her with absolutely nothing and no one in it, which was fortunate.
The inputs on Fullok’s sling—scratch that, her sling—were more sensitive than the simulation she’d trained on. Coupled with the fact the layout was designed for a Nelihexu’s four arms, she had to suffer through a lot of wasted time and movement just to keep it straight and level.
As on-the-job learning experiences went, it was pretty goddamned intense. And she’d almost been swallowed whole by a hentai tentacle monster once.
But with open space ahead of her, First had a few moments to herself to get properly acquainted with the small, savage craft. Fear and exhilaration embraced in her stomach like reunited lovers and proceeded to get nasty. Heart racing, pupils dilated, senses keened, and burning up oxygen with short, hard breaths, First brought the sling to heel, then spurred it back up to full throttle.
Back in the race.
Her miscue had cost her five spots, but it could have been worse. The slings behind her had mostly failed to capitalize on the opportunity, and a few of them seemed to have fallen into the same trap as a result of the sudden shifts to avoid collision. Already dozens of kilometers ahead of her, the rest of the field wasn’t even visible to her naked eyes. But their beacons burned bright on her display.
Maximus had already made up two more spots, damn him. Her new sling was fast and carried a featherweight pilot, but the gap closed with excruciating slowness. Even at full throttle, she was only clawing away a meter or two per second relative to the rest of them.
But her first opportunity to really eat up some distance was coming up just around the bend, literally. Races were decided in the turns. Anyone could firewall a throttle in the straights, but banking, breaking late, cutting the inside, and enduring the g’s, that’s where skill, strategy, and boldness came into the picture.
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She didn’t have much of the first and had no experience with the second, so she’d just have to triple-down on the third. And First had an idea.
Her sling didn’t have an autopilot; that would defeat the purpose of racing. But it did have a handful of automated safety systems designed to keep the craft from accidentally killing the pilot. Systems a clever racer could exploit, provided they didn’t mind violating the spirit if not the letter of the rules.
First didn’t mind. She accessed the safety protocol that canceled a high-g turn and reset the stick to a neutral position in the event of a pilot blackout. It was set to kick in ten seconds after a blackout was detected by the health monitoring system built into the pilot’s helmet. First ran some quick math. A ten-g turn-and-burn would eat up all of the space between her and the leaders and take twenty-two seconds. It was too long to remain conscious for any human, but that’s where the ten-second safety cutoff came in.
The trick was, she had to remain conscious for exactly twelve seconds. Any shorter, and the turn would cancel early and she’d waste even more time and fuel getting back on course once she came to. Any longer and she’d turn right into the moon she was trying to sling around.
But she had a plan for that as well.
The first turn warning marker whipped by her cockpit glass so fast it barely registered in her visual cortex. Ahead, the airless, crater-scarred sphere of Percolete’s smaller moon filled her canopy. If everything went right, she’d slingshot around the other side of it in less than a minute, traveling even faster than her entry velocity, thanks to a gravitational assist. If it didn’t go right, she’d be a cooling stain on its gray regolith, but at least she’d be unconscious for it.
First started breathing deeply, trying to saturate her bloodstream with oxygen before the onslaught to come. Ahead of her, the leaders began their turns. She waited one second, two, three … the distance between them plunged. The turn alarm she’d set went off with a wail in her helmet. First rolled the sling, then pulled back on the stick as far as it would go and locked it.
The centripetal force smashed into her like a piston as her weight jumped by an order of magnitude in a second. Her heart was in her stomach, and her stomach was in her feet. Centripetal force pulled at the blood in her brain, draining it down to pool in her legs and arms. To counter this, First used one of the oldest aviation tricks and tensed all the muscles in her limbs as hard as she could, constricting the blood vessels and slowing the process, buying time.
Oh, lord, it had only been three seconds. Her vision blurred at the edges, the beginnings of gray-out. In seconds more, her field of view collapsed into a tunnel, but she had to hold on, her limbs clenched and searing. Just a few more seconds. The longest damned seconds of her life.
Finally, mercifully, the turn clock approached twelve. A fraction of a second before it did, First relaxed her entire body. What little blood remained in her head rushed back down her veins, and everything went black. Her head rolled forward hard until the chin of her helmet dug into her chest.
For ten long beats, First experienced nothing. But her sling flew on, locked into its course while her suit’s health monitors shouted to the computer that no one was home. At the count of ten, the joystick unlocked automatically and returned to a neutral position, centered the drive spike in its mount, and killed the thrusters.
The sling still charged forward, but on a straight course and no longer under thrust, the effective gravity dropped back to zero. Still, it took a few seconds for the blood to return to First’s oxygen-starved brain and a few seconds more for her synapses to start firing in their proper sequences again.
First rejoined the world slowly, badgered by an intermittent warbling sound that set her teeth on edge. A strobing red light diffused through the thin skin of her eyelids. Painfully, she opened one of them into a slit to see what was so karking important and realized she was staring at the collision avoidance alarm.
That woke her up.
The other sling was still only a pinprick of light against the black velvet of space, barely discernable from the stars beyond, except it was growing quickly. First looked at her closing speed, which had grown from mere meters per second to entire kilometers. Two seconds to impact, she shook the cobwebs from her head and grabbed the joysticks. What was the protocol out here again, overtaking vessel moves to port or starboard? She couldn’t remember. No time. Careful not to overcorrect again, she nudged her sling a meter to port, two, three.
In the blink of an eye, the entire twenty-meter length of the other sling whizzed past her to starboard. First could’ve sworn she saw the pilot pressed up against their window regarding her with an obscene gesture through their gloves.
“Sorry, sorry…” she said to herself. She couldn’t radio over to them to apologize even if she’d wanted to. Their coms only linked back to their own pits and the race officials, and First didn’t have anyone in her pits.
Regrettably, the sling she’d passed hadn’t been Ferrari red. Still, First’s stunt had not only caught her up to the pack but had moved her up two positions in the standings. With that paint-swapping flyby, she was in eighth, nearly back to where she’d started.
Unfortunately, Maximus was busy proving he was no slouch at the stick, either. He’d already jockeyed into fifth, the karker. But the velocity advantage she’d just gained wasn’t going away as the kilometers between them ticked down second by second.
The other racers noticed her gaining on them. Some lit off their drive spikes again, trying to match velocity with her to maintain their leads, but burning up their fuel reserves in the process, risking their tanks running dry before the finish line. It was all such a delicate balance between tactics, aggression, and conservation. First began to understand why the sport was so popular.
She had to start thinking like a sling-racer. There were seven turns left in the course, which ended a third of the way to the next planet down the well toward Percolete’s sun. Even now, the big blue star’s gravity tugged at them as they dove deeper into the system, adding a fraction of a meter per second to their speed with every second. First couldn’t abuse her blackout trick on every new turn; it was just too physically punishing. Eventually she’d conk out early and blow the whole race.
Turns two and three barely rated the name. They were more like gates on a downhill slalom course, except instead of colored flags, they were asteroids crawling with tens of thousands of spectators of hundreds of species waiting to watch a few dozen slings go flashing by faster than any comet or asteroid.
That’s why the original plan had called for extraction on the other side of turn two: it was far enough from any of the system’s planets or moons to make the transition to hyperspace as smooth as possible without any unpleasant gravitational perturbations or amplification. No point going for broke on either of them; the advantage she’d gain would be negligible. Not worth the risk, and sitting these out would give her time to recover.
Turn four was another matter entirely. The larger of Percolete’s two moons, and the last major gravitational assist before the finish line, that was where First would spend her other drink chip.
She wanted to link up with Fenax just to confirm that they’d made it to the agreed-upon parking spot on the far side of the finish line, but she couldn’t for a number of reasons. Partially because the sling’s dead-primitive coms equipment had no encryption capacity by design, but mostly because the Towed was on the other side of the hyperspace wall and was impossible to communicate with from normal space in the first place. She just had to run the course and trust that Fenax would be there to catch her when she fell.
It was a new feeling for her, relying on others. Before joining up with Loritt and his misfits in the Subassembly, First had always done everything alone. But now that she’d come to depend on them, sitting in the cockpit of her repossessed sling, she felt truly alone for the first time. It was a strange, alienating, unpleasant sensation that only steeled her resolve to win the race and p
ut an end to it as quickly as possible.
Turn two passed with little drama. At turn three, First gained another spot over an orange-and-green sling that was either slow or planned to conserve their fuel to burn up the arrogant upstart closer to the finish line. She waved as she passed them.
The larger of Percolete’s moons grew in the view screen. Ochre, brown, and cream-colored clouds swirled over its surface like the top of a mocha latte, obscuring any topography below. But First wasn’t here on a survey mission and blocked it all out. The only two characteristics the moon possessed that she gave a glot about were its mass and circumference … and oh, crap, atmospheric drag was a thing, too.
First threw out her calculations and started fresh to account for plowing through a few hundred kilometers of the moon’s ionosphere. Despite how slippery her sling’s fuselage was built, skipping along through even the thin gases at the altitudes she’d plotted above the moon would slow her down. But even more importantly, all of that lost speed would be translated directly into heat.
How much heat could the skin of her sling absorb before burning off like a meteorite? The question had been skipped in the mission briefing, on account of nobody thinking she’d go anywhere near an atmosphere. In retrospect, it had been an important oversight.
First didn’t even know what kind of materials the skin was made of, so could only make a wild guess about their heat tolerance. She dug through the craft’s limited onboard computer, looking for density and altitude figures for the moon’s mesosphere. At the speeds she was going, if she got the approach angle wrong, she could burn up or even skip off the atmosphere like a rock off a pond.
The mocha-latte moon was getting really big now. She ran out of time to nail down the numbers, and there were still too many variables. First just punched in ranges and best guesses to save time, hoping the engineers who’d designed the sling had overbuilt its heat resistance as much as the rest of the robust little craft.
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