Starship Repo

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  By the time she fed the “final” numbers into the computer and it spat out her ideal course, First only had twelve seconds to get herself in the lane and orient her sling for the burn. The angle and windows painted across her display were disconcertingly narrow, barely four times the width of the sling itself. It would be like throwing two apples in the air a second apart and hitting them both as they aligned with an arrow fired from two countries away.

  Somehow, impossibly, First hit both apples and committed to the turn. She really wished she’d thought to bring one of those mouth guards to keep her from cracking her teeth under the strain.

  “Next time,” she said aloud, then laughed at her own joke. After this stunt, there was no way she’d ever be allowed within a light-year of the cockpit of one of these things again.

  Five seconds to burn. This would be a long one, only eight g’s this pass, but she’d have to stay awake for exactly seventeen seconds. First took one last look at the race order and wished she hadn’t. Maximus had moved up to fourth place. He was relentless.

  First pitched the nose up, pointing it almost directly at the mocha moon, and set the drive spike to its maximum deflection. The turn timer reached zero. She put the pedal to the metal and locked the stick. The weight returned instantly, marginally less than last time, but still like being sat on by a quarter horse instead of a bull. She wished her seat would recline all the way so she could lie flat on her back, but there was a fusion reactor in the way.

  She repeated the process, clenching her arms and legs as the weight tried to press her like a wine grape. Only this time, instead of the smooth, linear pressure of the last turn, her sling began to rattle and shake as the winds in the mocha moon’s upper atmosphere buffeted against its fuselage. A glow of ionizing gases enveloped the glass outside her cockpit. Faint at first, it grew in brightness as the hypersonic shock waves forming around her craft instantly excited all the gas they encountered into plasma.

  The plasma wasn’t all that glowed. As the buffeting grew more intense by the second, the sling’s nose began to glow and char like a lit cigarette. Six seconds left before she had to black out. Would the sling survive another sixteen seconds merrily skipping through hell? Sweat racing down her face, her sling smoking like a roadie, First almost bailed on the turn, but she just didn’t have enough quit in her. She was scared, and that made her angry. The final two seconds ticked away and she let herself go limp as a rag.

  Sweet nothingness embraced her amid the violence. But outside, her sling fought back. Intumescent paint, activated by the extreme heat, popped and bubbled into a char-blackened foam along the sharpest angles of the fuselage, insulating the structural materials underneath and buying time before they succumbed. The cooling system kicked into overdrive, pumping superchilled liquid hydrogen fuel through a network of small-diameter tubes in the outer skin to act as a heat sink before the return trip sent it into the pea-sized star inside the reactor bulb.

  Ten more seconds elapsed, and the sling had suffered enough. It canceled the turn and straightened out, its momentum sending it shooting out of the atmosphere like a dart. Error codes and damage reports scrolled down the cockpit display, but First stayed unconscious longer this time. A cackling in her helmet and an unfamiliar voice finally roused her.

  “Unidentified pilot of sling two seven,” it said. “This is the control tower. You are not authorized to participate in this event. Set heading one-five-eight and clear the course, then power down your drive spike and wait for—”

  First cut the link and shut off the com. There was no point letting it chew up power anyway. So Fullok had ratted her out. Took him long enough. It didn’t matter. She’d have been discovered in the end anyway.

  She was, miraculously, still alive and sailing through open space again. But the skinny dip through the moon’s mesosphere hadn’t come without a cost. The prow of her sling looked like it had caught herpes, but the damage there was mostly cosmetic. Still, Loritt wouldn’t be happy. The thermoplastic of her canopy glass had fogged and crazed from the onslaught, limiting her view of the outside. But at these speeds, she was basically flying blind on instruments anyway.

  Far more serious were the damage reports streaming over her display. Two of the twelve high-efficiency counter-grav nodes that powered her drive spike had taken damage and were starting to overheat. They’d have to be taken offline before they blew out entirely and risked damaging adjacent nodes, cutting her maximum sustainable thrust by a sixth.

  She might be able to run the rest of them hot for short bursts, but she’d have to run the rest of the race on a sprained ankle.

  The data in front of her wasn’t all bad, however, not by a long shot. Her dive into hellfire had paid off in spades. The rest of the racers in the pack had just skirted the atmosphere, if they’d dipped into it at all. First’s gamble had rewarded her with not only a bump of three spots in the rankings but a commanding relative velocity advantage that would carry her past at least two more in the next hour, and there was basically nothing anyone could do about it short of ramming her.

  However, freshly—and no doubt smugly—in the lead sat Maximus, taunting her with his natural aptitude. With her head throbbing from the repeated blackouts, First struggled to focus enough to run some trajectory projections. There were still four minor turns to go. If she cut them close, broke late, conserved momentum as much as possible …

  She’d still overtake Maximus eventually, but not until a few thousand kilometers after the finish line.

  First pounded her armrests in frustration. She’d already torched the asset she’d been sent to recover. Loritt was going to tear seven strips off her at a minimum for the damage already incurred in the execution of this stunt. She was not walking away from this race with nothing to show for it. There had to be something she could do to close the gap.

  Another sling faded behind her while she pondered the problem. Her early recklessness had built up an almost insurmountable advantage over the rest of the field. Where Maximus had surgically executed perfect tactics and maneuvers, she’d been a sledgehammer, throwing convention and her own safety out the window to smash through the standings. They’d probably call her things like blunt and ungentlemanly. The thought brought a smile to her face, which hurt.

  She went through turns five and six by the book and grabbed another spot. Her closing distance on the other slings fell again as they ran their spikes hot to try to fend her off. At turn seven, around a tiny little rock barely larger than a soccer pitch, she broke really late and put herself under eleven g’s for seven seconds without relying on the safeguard trick. Her vision grayed out and shrank to a pinprick tunnel, but she broke off in time.

  Her body screamed and ached from the repeated strain, and First knew that was the last time she’d be pulling that stunt during this race or maybe ever again. She was pretty sure she’d lost a centimeter in height somewhere back there.

  Now only Maximus, his arrest-me-red sling, and a single turn stood between her and the finish line. The optimal, fuel-conserving course was a gentle curve between turns seven and eight, owing to a Lagrange point between Percolete and its sun. A straight line would be marginally faster but burn up more fuel fighting against the flow.

  Fortunately, breaking late meant First had a few spare liters in the tank, so she burned them running the fastest course and closed the gap between her and Maximus by almost two-thirds.

  It was all down to the final straightaway. Judging from the plot on her display, because she couldn’t see a damned thing through her clouded canopy, Maximus had answered her charge by, appropriately enough, maxing out his counter-grav nodes. Even four thousand kilometers behind him, his sling glared in her infrared camera like a planet in daylight.

  It was certain the control tower had already alerted the rest of the racers to her illegitimate status and that she’d been given the heave-ho. Maximus had the rest of the field beat dead to rights. He wasn’t whipping his sling to win the race; he already had. He
was doing it to beat her, personally, without even knowing who she was, to leave no lingering question of who the true victor had been. It spoke to the intensity of his competitive nature. First almost caught herself admiring him.

  Almost.

  Her only chance now was to match him move for move. So, hesitantly, First brought the two damaged counter-grav nodes back online and threw them all to 120 percent, hoping the whole system had been as overengineered as the rest of the sling. If they overheated and blew, at least they’d give her a few minutes of full thrust. If they knocked out the nodes next to them, well, she wouldn’t win without them anyway.

  Sometimes, you just had to roll the hard six.

  First watched as her velocity climbed right along with the temperature warnings for the damaged nodes. The display screen became very insistent, saying things like “Design Tolerance Exceeded” and “Critical Component Failure Imminent” and “No, Really, I’m Serious,” but First was fixated on the data from her surviving range-finding lidar. A thousand kilometers and closing, but the finish line loomed large on the virtual horizon.

  Think, think, think, First admonished herself. There had to be some advantage still to wrangle out of her sling before something broke. And there was. With a shock, First remembered she still had almost her weight in hydrazine left in the maneuvering thruster tanks. She could line up for a final ballistic approach and purge the rest and … and the extra thrust might be enough, but it would leave her at Maximus’s mercy. If he tried to ram her or play chicken and misjudged her reaction, they’d collide and she could only watch it happen.

  Precious seconds flew past before First came to a final decision. If that was how Maximus wanted to play, it would be his choice, and the results would be on his conscience. Not hers. First called up the command prompts and purged all but the last two kilograms of her thruster reactant mass into space in a great cloud.

  The eunuchs who’d built Maximus’s sling probably hadn’t wasted the mass on a rear-facing camera sensitive enough to notice, and even if they had, Maximus probably hadn’t been looking at her, preferring a virtual view of finish line. Now, all she could do was sit and wait.

  Two hundred kilometers.

  The rest of the field had been well and truly left in their dust by this point. One of her wounded counter-grav nodes gave in and detonated like a hand grenade, causing critical failures in the nodes to the left and right of itself, sending them into automatic shutdown.

  One hundred kilometers.

  In their zeal, First and Maximus had reduced more than thirty seasoned professionals in a sport they’d pioneered into spectators while two upstart humans socked it out for the gold and silver medals in front of a crowd of millions of aliens, many of them witnessing humanity for the very first time.

  Fifty kilometers.

  No matter what happened, the people in the crowds below, huddled on the pair of rocks on either side of the imaginary plane that defined the finish line would say, “I was there when…”

  There was no sensation when she broke the plane. No red tape snapped across her chest, no checkered flag waved with exuberance. The only way she knew what had happened was when the leaderboard on her display updated an eternity later.

  “First,” it glowed back at her.

  “Yeeeeeeeaaaasssss!” she bellowed into her helmet, absolutely beside herself with exhilaration. She’d done it! She’d fucking, karking done it and … and …

  And her sling’s instruments went completely haywire as they tried and failed to make sense of the universe disappearing as she slipped through the Goes Where I’m Towed’s high-space portal.

  “Oh, shit,” she cursed as she flicked the sling’s coms back on and prayed to whomever that Fenax was scanning the control tower frequency.

  “Mayday, mayday, mayday,” First barked into her helmet com. “I am dead stick, repeat, dead stick! Black on reactant mass, drive spike damaged. I’m coming in ballistic, Fenax. You’ll have to match my course and velocity. I got nothing.”

  The silence stretched out like a rubber band.

  “Fenax,” she pleaded. “Buddy? Are you reading me? Please be there.”

  Her helmet’s speakers popped and snapped with life.

  “Well,” Fenax’s synthesized voice reached across the void. “Did you win?”

  First let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “You’re goddamned right I did. Took everything this heap had in the tank, but I did.”

  “Stand by. We have company.”

  “Company?”

  “Yes. One of the other slings followed you through the high-space window. I can’t even guess how close they must have been for that to happen. I only kept it open for a few thousandths of a rakim.”

  Maximus, First realized. “Is it obnoxiously red?”

  “I don’t see in your visual spectrum, but the Towed’s cameras tell me it is what you call red, yes.”

  “Bring us both aboard, Fenax. Something tells me his sling’s as dry as mine.”

  * * *

  Minutes later, under Fenax’s skillful ganglia, First and Maximus found themselves standing on the same deck plating for a second time.

  First ignored him and instead ran a hand over her sling’s disfigured fuselage.

  “Where are we?” Maximus demanded from across the cargo bay even as First began the laborious process of strapping the asset down for transport.

  “You’re quite safe, Captain,” she said.

  “While your reassurances are welcome, ‘Clara,’” Maximus said, “that’s not an answer to my question. Who are you? And where are we?”

  “My name is First. I’m a repossession agent. I’ve just nabbed this beauty. And you are aboard my company’s ship. You weren’t supposed to come in second so close behind me. That wasn’t part of the plan.”

  Maximus smiled broadly, then pointed at First’s sling. “I somehow doubt the ‘plan’ called for breaking your stolen goods.”

  “They’re not stolen,” First snapped back. “It was reacquired for the rightful owners, under a legal contract. Besides”—First broke off a chunk of the charred intumescent foam—“this’ll buff out.”

  “Buff out?” Maximus said. “It looks like a sailor’s schlong after shore leave in Singapore.”

  “Say that six times fast.”

  “Trust me, I have.”

  “Ew,” First said. “And whatever. Your sling sure looks pretty back there in second place.”

  Maximus smirked. “I doubt this contract required you to burn up your sling in Percolete’s major satellite’s atmosphere just to get around me, right?”

  “No, that was just for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you said I couldn’t. Because you said I shouldn’t even be in the cockpit. That’s why. And I beat you. I won.”

  “Weeell, no,” Maximus said. “I won. That’s what the official records will say. You stole another racer’s starting position, a mighty good one. You didn’t earn that in the qualifiers. You started out three spots ahead of me on someone else’s ticket. I closed that gap to lord only knows how tight. They might honestly have to break out a photo finish for it, but you were never in the race as far as the books are concerned.”

  “No one who was there will care about the books. They saw me cross first. That will be what they’re talking about tomorrow.”

  “Maybe so,” Maximus granted, “but they don’t know who you are. Mistake number one, kiddo. Never do anything cool unless everyone can see you doing it. What’s the point otherwise?”

  “You know,” First said. “And I know. That’s enough for me.”

  Maximus smiled. “Mistake number two. Your ego can’t feed itself forever. It needs fuel from the outside. That’s what the audience is for. And you just passed up on a massive one.” Maximus took a moment to scan the rest of the Towed’s cargo bay. “Can I assume you didn’t bring me on board as a hostage?”

  “Of course not.”


  “Good, then can I further assume you have some fuel for my sling so I’m not waiting for hours for a rescue crew to tow me back to the finish line when you drop me back into real-space?”

  “I’m feeling generous in victory,” First said.

  “How gracious of you. What’s your name?”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to know who beat me.”

  First nodded. “Firstname Lastname.”

  Maximus pursed his lips. “All right, then. Pleased to meet you. I still want a copy of that interview. Oh, and don’t be shocked if I come looking for you in the future.”

  “I’d rather throw you out an airlock.”

  Maximus scowled. “I didn’t mean anything lurid. Earth is the new kid on this block. We need to make a splash if we’re going to earn respect among all these people. You just dunked on me, and you were willing to die to do it. I won’t forget that. Hell, I might let everyone know humans placed first and second in this race, just to rub the rest of the galaxy’s face in it.”

  “I’d prefer to remain anonymous. Having a famous face isn’t a benefit in my line of work. Besides, you just said you don’t want to share the glory.”

  “Because it’s not about me. Well, it’s not only about me. We’re busy building a narrative out here, and we’ll need more humans like you before this is all over.”

  First crossed her arms. “Before what is all over?”

  Maximus laid a hand on his sling. “That’s beyond your pay grade. I’ll do everything I can to make sure you never learn the answer to that question. But if, heaven forbid, I can’t keep a lid on it, you’ll know. If that happens, there will be a chair open for you at the table.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “What in the name of…” Loritt’s jaw almost hit the floor—which, for a Nelihexu, was a real possibility. He stood there in shock as the racing sling he’d sent Fenax and First on a two-month-long excursion to recover was floated out of the Towed’s cargo bay.