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.
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 put 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.
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.”