by J. S. Morin
“No time,” Carl replied. “I’m cutting it tight as it is. I’m off to Phabian for dinner tonight. Then I’ve got to get back in the morning for—”
“Hazard avoidance,” Roddy said, cutting short Carl’s ramble. “Who do you think you’re telling here? I’m the one who reminds you what your schedule is.”
“All right. Smooth,” Carl said, backing away down the corridor as he talked. “I’ll catch up with you after tomorrow’s training session.”
“Yeah,” Roddy mumbled. Didn’t matter. Carl wasn’t listening. All he was seeing was violet eyes.
# # #
Savage Eden was trendy, glitzy, and conspicuous. It was the sort of place that took more than a reservation to get into. Nestled into the depths of Phabian’s monolithic cityscape, it was the place to be for fashion models, sports stars, and political up-and-comers. Somewhere in the mix, they were willing to let in celebrity holovid racers.
“Gotta give you credit, Ramsey,” July said. “This is one of the swankiest places I’ve eaten.” She wore a tight black skirt and halter, with matching spiked leather collar and bracelets. It was a compromise between a night on the town and keeping up her tough-girl vibe. While dinner was just minutes away, Carl was getting the wrong appetite whetted.
The music was loud, but clever projection speakers kept the noise at tables themselves to a volume that allowed conversation. Everything Savage Eden played was modern synthetic anyway—soulless crap churned out by computer programs and wildly popular among laaku and humans alike. Someone had told Carl once that the teenage years set up musical taste for life. If that was true, every primate between 10 and 15 should have been planted on a special colony that only played Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin. Would have done the galaxy’s ears a world of good.
“Not my speed,” Carl replied. “But it’s real food here, at least.”
“I’m on Phabian, and I still haven’t gotten a chance to try all the miracle foods,” July said. She was rocking gently to the musical beat.
“All the same shit, crammed back together and made to taste like anything,” Carl replied. “You had one, you had it all. How’s things with Mobius?”
“Thought we weren’t here to talk work,” she said. Glancing over to the throngs in between tables, writhing to the music, she added, “I’m guessing you’re not the dancing sort.”
Carl snorted. “Lucky guess. But I’ll watch if you go.”
July stared at the dancers. It was a mass of upraised arms and swaying hips and knees. Most of them were probably drunk, and all were human. She sighed. “You are so old sometimes.”
Their dinners came, and they ate. July kept glancing out at the dance floor. Carl watched her watch them. She drank a synthetic Earth-vintage wine, while Carl had a beer with his steak. He’d kept dry around Roddy for the laaku’s sake, but he’d be damned if he was cutting himself off on his night out.
Carl paid for the dinner with a digital account flush with Harmony Bay funds. While the box-for-clone trade might have been more than a week away, he’d twisted Puente’s arm until he got the 25k up front. It wasn’t like he could disappear with it. On the cab ride to the hotel, July was more relaxed. She’d had enough wine to get over the annoyance about wanting to dance with him. While she might not have been quite drunk, she was certainly intoxicating.
They crossed the hotel lobby with July leaning against Carl, carrying her heels in her free hand. She was shorter than he’d realized, closer to Esper’s height than Tanny’s. He regretted the mental comparison instantly and blocked the women on his crew from his mind. Tonight it was just the two of them.
“Oh, I’m going to miss this place when the Mobius gets back,” July said as they entered her room. She let her heels drop to the floor and crossed to the window, overlooking the cityscape. Lights glowed from distant windows and whizzed around attached to vehicles of every sort. It was like the legend of the fireflies that once haunted old Earth. “Can’t I just stay here instead? Your quarters smell like sweat and spilled beer.”
“Overhead,” Carl said. “Money for this place comes out of the profits. Besides, you’re the liaison. You gotta liaise. Can’t be parading the whole crew up here. People would talk.”
July laced her fingers behind Carl’s neck, and the lids of her eyes relaxed. “I thought I wanted people talking.”
Carl tapped a finger on her nose. “Work first. How’s Hatchet coming with putting together a Squall’s worth of Typhoon parts?”
“Slow going,” July replied with a sigh. She released Carl and dropped into one of the room’s plush chairs. Unbuckling the collar around her neck, she rubbed at the reddened, sweaty area beneath. “There’s no aftermarket to speak of. Anything a Squall would use, the racers don’t trust secondhand. Anything a Typhoon might need, the navy keeps in their shipyards. Not a lot of cracks for parts to slip through.”
“Trust him,” Carl said. “He’ll come through.” He took a data crystal from his pocket and set it on the bedside table. “Roddy copied over all the serial numbers for my Squall. Get Hatchet to find someone who can encode these on the parts you manage to find. I don’t want anyone finding amateur hour in the wreckage. Those numbers have to match.”
“Fine,” July muttered.
“What about the pro circuit races?”
July unclasped her bracelets and let them slip from her grasp to the floor. “Esper tracked down three potential first races for you after the contest. Which they go with depends on how much of a see-the-freak tour they set up for you. I can’t imagine they’ll miss the chance to run you out to a few venues before putting you in a real race. First time you get waylaid by actual pros, the shine comes off that smile of yours.”
“Three, huh?” Carl said. He ran a hand through his hair, catching a glimpse of his blue locks in a wall mirror. He needed to do something with it; it was getting unruly in addition to being off-color. “We can work with three. See if she can work out routes for all three venues.”
“That’ll be a lot of work,” July replied. She twisted in the chair and put her legs over one side, letting her head dangle over the other. Violet hair spilled to the floor, but Carl was paying more attention to the topographical view he was being offered.
“Esper’s a smart girl,” Carl said. “She’ll manage.”
“I don’t want to hear about Esper,” July said. “For the rest of tonight, there’s no Esper, no Hatchet, and definitely no Roddy.”
Carl sauntered over to her. As he bent over to kiss her, July slipped the jacket off Carl’s shoulders. It caught on his arms instead of falling to the floor. When he stood, he shrugged it back on.
“Can’t stay,” Carl said. Damn, but he wanted to. “Got a contest to win and atmospheric racing in the morning. Those clods took it seriously when I kept mentioning how I was the best in vacuum. They’re in for—”
“Shut up and stay,” July said. She rolled in place, coming upright with her elbows on the arm of the chair and her bare feet kicked up in the air. “Take an express shuttle. Pay the extra. Tonight I want you.”
Carl gave her a sad smile. “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes you get what you need.” He pointed to the data crystal on the bedside.
“She warned me about your poetic bullshit, you know. Old song lyrics. She gave me a fucking list of them.”
Tanny had heard them all. It had taken years for her to catch onto where he’d come up with all those old, wise, often romantic sentiments. Apparently she disliked July enough to clue her in and ruin the magic straight off.
“Every rose has its thorns,” Carl said with a shrug. “Doesn’t make them any less true. I’ll send you a comm when I can meet with you again.”
# # #
The nearest world to Velocity Prime was Phabian VIII, also known as Ehklet. It was a terraforming project still years—if not decades—from completion. Initially it had been a desolate, frozen ball of ice and gasses around a core of rock. These days, it sported a (
barely) breathable atmosphere and an inhospitable (but not instantly lethal) climate. There was no biome yet. Plant and animal life wouldn’t be imported until the final stages of terraforming. But the planet had continents and oceans, along with a few terraforming colonies and assorted related equipment, both magical and scientific.
It also had a racecourse.
Carl watched the holovid run-through along with the other contestants. “The race is a continent-long slalom through mountain ranges,” Stacy said, her voice amplified by a mic clipped to her jacket collar. “Sensor buoys at the peaks will mark the upper boundary of the course. If you intersect the twenty-meter keep-out zone at the top, you will be docked an amount of time equal to the time spent violating the zone. Break through the zone, and you’ll be disqualified.”
Gthaa raised a scaly hand. “From this race, or from the whole competition?”
Stacy aimed an accusing finger at him. “Don’t you start with me. You’ll get zero points for this race if you fly out of bounds.”
“How are we supposed to fly Squalls in atmosphere?” Carl asked. He hadn’t bothered raising a hand. “They’re streamlined, but there are no aerodynamic surfaces anywhere on them.” It was a good question, the sort of question someone who’d never flown a Typhoon through sub-troposphere strafing runs might have asked. Most civilians thought of fighters, and they imagined it was all ship-to-ship dogfighting. No point letting Stacy or the other contestants think any different.
“It’s all in the maneuvering thrusters,” she replied. “You’ll be fighting the wind and air resistance the whole way. If you let off the main thrusters you will slow down.”
Jordan leaned over. “Idiot,” he whispered in Carl’s direction. “How hard was that to figure out on your own?”
“Big talk for a guy slipping back into the pack,” Carl replied, speaking through tight lips like a ventriloquist. He kept his eyes on the holovid as Stacy resumed her briefing.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Jordan said.
It was a worrying thing to hear. Jordan being a whip-thin lad of 18 years with little muscle on him. Jordan, a kid who was a 98th percentile racer in a contest with the best Earth Navy had churned out in years. Jordan, the one whose mother still flew out to see him race and had brought cookies to the pilots’ dorm. He should have been shitting his pants, knowing that he didn’t stand a chance against Carl. The kid might—just might—have been the next best racer in the field. But if he wasn’t scared of former Lt. Commander B. Carlin Ramsey, then he was the idiot.
“Good for you, kid. Even I’m scared of me sometimes.”
Stacy droned on, going over checkpoints, emergency protocols, and warnings about jet-wash from tailing another ship too closely. “It’s not like ion wash. There’s a lot of mass churned up behind these ships in atmosphere. I don’t want to be scraping these Squalls off the mountains. Now… for the final twist. For the second leg, there’s an engine change and refueling. You’ll be meeting your mechanics at the end of the line. Whether you assist in the overhaul is up to each of you, but the faster you get airborne, the faster you’re back in the race. You’ve each got your own secured hangar bay to work out of, so there’s no opportunity to interfere with other racers. DO NOT attempt to land in another racer’s bay. You will be refused entry, and if you block or impede another racer’s hangar, that will also be grounds for disqualification. Understood?”
Carl raised a hand. “Is that all going to be written down somewhere? I stopped listening partway through, about where you said I have to change out my own engine.”
Stacy clenched her jaw and glared at him. “Any questions from racers who were paying attention?”
“Why such a long course?” Gurdi asked. She was the points leader overall, and Stacy’s current favorite as far as Carl could tell.
“We just had a quick-twitch event with the drag racing,” Stacy said. “We need to show off the other side of the coin. The viewers know who’s good off the line, who the sprinters are. Now they’ll get to see who the marathoners are, not to mention the atmospheric element looks great on holo. We get a lot of bonus footage from these races.”
No one else had any questions, and some lowly staffer pulled Carl aside and handed him a datapad with the day’s rules and regulations. It was only a half-hour trip out to Ehklet though, so Carl didn’t bother reading it. It was some mechanic thing, and Roddy was good for that stuff. He was all set.
# # #
The rush of wind over the hull of his Squall made the race novel at first. Carl had grown accustomed to the piped-in sound that oriented a pilot in the silent vacuum of space; that was just a control system to aid situational awareness. This was the real deal—honest-to-God wind howled outside the cockpit. Most of the flying he’d done in atmosphere had been using shaped shields that mimicked aerodynamic surfaces. Using the atmosphere to maneuver hearkened to the earliest days of flight. What he was doing now was forcing a bullet through the sky by brute force.
The Squall’s engines and maneuvering thrusters fought the wind and air resistance. Now and then, Carl would have to adjust to a change in weather patterns, angling the maneuvering thrusters to keep on course in Ehklet’s hellish crosswinds. The rest was just a matter of staving off boredom on the interminable race.
In Carl’s experience, races were supposed to be exciting, hectic, and fast paced. The only box this farce ticked was the speed. For atmospheric flight, he granted that the Silde Slims racers were making good time. The promised slalom course was too straight, the turns too gentle. Once the racers figured this out, most of them had opened up the throttle to full. Only a few stragglers in the overall points competition lagged behind, playing it safe and just hoping to walk away in one piece at the end, or maybe catch a comet in a jar when it came time for the finals. Racing from the back just wasn’t Carl’s style.
It wasn’t Jordan’s style, either, nor was it Gurdi’s. The front of the pack was rounded out by a human racer by the name of Chaz Marco, a pair of laaku—Dargin of Saabo and Otami of Pim Bok—and Gthaa. It was the presence of the sitharn that surprised Carl. Ever since he’d eliminated July in the head-to-heads, he’d been getting better and better. He wasn’t threatening to take over the points lead, but he was close enough to be a serious competitor in the final race. Maybe it was just a matter of getting used to primate-designed controls? Maybe he had started out with a case of nerves?
Carl tracked their locations on his scanners. The console displays in the Squall were watered down. They didn’t give weapon or shield status on local ships. The IFF tags weren’t shown by default. It was almost as if racers didn’t care how much of a threat the surrounding ships were. It pissed him off that he was starting to get used to the streamlined displays. All he saw was Jordan next in line behind him, and that Gurdi was gaining ground on him.
Time to change that.
The upper reaches of the atmospheric course were amid the peaks of the mountains. It was wide open. Good sight lines. Safe. The trick to staying at the front of the pack was to take the shortest route past the markers on turns. Gentle as they were, each turn was an opportunity to cut off time by staying as close to the peaks as possible. The downside to staying up in the peaks was the constant crosswinds.
Carl dove.
The maps of Ehklet showed a long, reasonably straight segment coming up. The travel lane would be tighter, the atmosphere more dense, but there was a tailwind—not a crosswind—if he could keep to within a couple hundred meters of the ground. The majestic peaks, with their wide-open stretches of boring sky, gave way to vast walls of gray, lifeless rock rising up to either side. He eased off the maneuvering thrusters that had been warring with the vortex of weather in the troposphere, rerouting power to the main thrusters. Mountains sped by in a vertigo-inducing blur.
One by one the other pilots either followed him down to the lower atmosphere or decided to fall back. Carl felt his blood quicken as he twitched the flight stick by millimeters to adjust his course as the mounta
ins rose and fell away all around him.
The comm startled him. “Ramsey, what are you doing down there?” Stacy demanded.
Carl perked up. It was the first time he’d heard a voice in over an hour. “Hi! I’m a contestant in the Silde Slims Cadet Racer Challenge! Today, I’m flying faster than the 15 chumps riding my ion wash. Stay tuned as I—”
“Stuff it, Ramsey,” Stacy said. “This isn’t on the holo-feed. Pull up and stop flying the valley floor. Too many rocks down there. You catch one wrong gust down there and you’re history. Plus you dragged half the field down there with you. Our insurance overseer is having a nervous fit.”
“Sounds like his issue, not mine,” Carl replied.
“Don’t make me disqualify you,” Stacy warned.
Something in her voice made Carl suspect she was serious. He held back the retort he had already queued up for her. Let me talk to the fly-counting toad. I’ll straighten him out for you. Instead he gritted his teeth. “Fine.”
He pulled up. The mountains fell away to either side until he was once more flying among the peaks and jagged crags. Adjusting his thruster outputs, he compensated for the crosswind and buffeting effects. The scanners caught his eye, some old dogfighting instinct that drew his attention to surrounding vessels. One of the other racers passed him, still hugging the valley floor. No, two… make it three racers had just passed him.
Fuck that. Carl angled the nose of his Squall downward and dropped altitude.
“Ramsey! WHAT did I just tell you?” Stacy screamed through the comm. Carl winced and dialed down the gain on the speakers.