“Coming up on the bullseye.” Raith queued up vectors, watching the dozens of racers surrounding him prepare their approaches. QuanCom’s data streamed into the Vindicta seamlessly. “Here’s our chance, friends. Thoughts?”

“Sending over a calculation now,” said Bonta. “I think you’ll like it.”

Moments later, Raith received an arcing route over the forty or so racers ahead of him. It dipped over their trajectories and dove down in front of them, right before reaching the ecliptic of the bullseye’s parent star. If achieved, he would zip through the checkpoint between the two gas giants three seconds ahead of Eduardo. Perfect. “An insane maneuver, Bonta, but I like it. It’s not suicidal for once!”

“Locking in then?” replied the other SI.

“Of course. Especially what you’ve proposed for the final approach.” Raith centered the route into his mind. Thus, the Vindicta also followed it. As his arc began to drift above the general plane of the other racers, he lost ground slightly. No matter.

“We’re in three-hundredth at the moment, yes?” Raith said. “My HUD up-to-date?”

“We have the same numbers,” said Harrison, piping into the conversation. “What are you thinking?”

“If we pull this maneuver off, we’ll jump to . . . two-hundred-sixty-fourth. That’s the type of ground we need to cover on elements like this. But how risky can we go? What’s our fuel consumption look like?”

“What are you thinking?” asked Bonta.

Raith dialed up a few calculations he’d been running over the past few days of the second lap. “I think we need to run some calculated throttle burns,” he said. “We know our ship can hit faster JDs more efficiently than the other racers, and we need to use that to our advantage. Especially in particularly tricky gravitational moments. Like the bullseye.”

Silence, for a moment. Bonta was most likely going over the data. A few seconds later, the SI said, “Good numbers, good numbers. Let’s see . . . yeah, it all checks out. Though I hope you realize you might make a few enemies here.”

“I’m counting on it,” Raith said. “The more aggressively they race, the more likely they are to make mistakes. Just watch.” His eyes turned toward the digitized icons on his displays indicating the distance between the Vindicta and Eduardo. At present, only a few ten-thousandths of a light-year. Raith was about to radically change those numbers.

The next hour progressed, the arc taking the Vindicta on a radically different path through dark space toward the bullseye. A few other racers a couple dozen spots behind trailed his route, for some unknown reason. Otherwise, everyone else tailed close behind Eduardo and his position leading their little pack. With ten minutes until the checkpoint, Raith ignited his plan.

For the past twenty hours or so, the pack had clocked an average pace of 680 JD. A healthy pace, if a bit below the average. The supposed tactic would allow for a longer burn above 700 JD in the later portions of the course with more sustained dark space stretches. Yet a pace of 680 made it dreadfully easy for anyone to pass—and pass quickly, if inside the pack. When anyone attempted to pass, everyone accelerated, attempting to match pace. No one wanted to lose too much ground on the pack, after all. As far as Raith knew, nobody had attempted an aggressive maneuver of this nature. Yet.

Time to change everything.

He pushed the Vindicta’s Jump-core, surpassing 700 JD in a matter of microseconds. Only a few million kilometers separated him from Eduardo’s trajectory toward the bullseye, and as he accelerated, the gap closed more quickly than anyone could have expected. As predicted, Eduardo noticed Raith’s angled approach, and his ship, the Riot Squad, compensated in an effort to keep Raith in the pack, rather than leading it.

Raith wasn’t going to let the kid off easy.

The Vindicta pushing past 710. 720. 730. They crossed into the star’s ecliptic, and the gravitational pull of the star and its planets placed a greater strain on fuel consumption within the Jump-core. But if he’d done the math right . . .

The Vindicta hit 750 just as the pack passed the system’s outer most major object, a tiny planetoid a little bigger than Mercury. Three seconds to go. 760, and he dipped in front of Eduardo and the Riot Squad by a few fractions of a second, equal to millions of kilometers, at the relativistic speeds they were traveling.

The bullseye was dead ahead as he rapidly pulled further away from Eduardo. His ship simply couldn’t keep up. The Riot Squad maxed out at 730 JD—a record for the race, if not for Raith’s stunt—but it wasn’t even close. Raith zipped through the bullseye, followed the new trajectory out of the star system, and headed toward the next checkpoint.

At the same moment, Eduardo and three other racers dropped out of Jump between the two gas giants, dozens of pilots zipping by.

“Hell yeah!” shouted Harrison over the com. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

A chorus of other cheers came from the rest of the crew, and Raith smiled to himself. He’d made them proud. Watching his calculation’s curve dip toward red, he dropped the throttle down toward 700, evening out at 695, a healthy pace for the next few days. Those in the pack who made it through the bullseye dropped their pace as well—when leaving a system, it was particularly important to avoid significantly excessive burns.

As predicted, they were now in two-hundred-sixty-fourth, with a pissed Eduardo on their tail.

 

 

They were entering the forty-fifth light-year. An hour ago, he took two-hundred-seventeenth.

“Everyone’s going crazy back here on station, Raith,” Erika whispered into the com. “You won’t believe how many teams you pissed off with that maneuver back at the bullseye.”

“They wanted a show, I’m giving them a show,” Raith replied.

“Don’t get us wrong, we’re loving it,” said Donyi. “We’ll need to prepare for what’s to come, though. There will be backlash.”

“Riots, blackmail, accusations of murder, I’ve seen it all.”

“You’ve been accused of murder?” asked Erika.

“Well, not murder exactly, but what sent me to jail in the first place. The reckless manslaughter.”

Silence from the pair.

“Keep talking to me friends, I’ve got another half-day until we reach the final element.”

More silence.

“Erika, Donyi?”

“Sorry, we’re here. Thought we heard something outside the ship. False alarm!”

Raith silently swore to himself. If someone messed with his crew and the Juniper, they’d have hell to pay. “Tell me a story, friends. About you.” There. He was trying to connect with them.

“Do you know how we came up with the design for the Vindicta’s SI-integrated piloting system?”

He couldn’t tell which one of them said the words. “No idea. It works like a charm, though.”

“We were serving with Theren at the time, on a mission well beyond the edges of ICH space. Did you know Theren pilots their external shuttles? It’s pretty nifty. They often join ground teams in an MI too.”

“I thought you were telling me about how you came up with the Vindicta, not your worship for Theren.”

“Right, forgot you dislike them. It’s somewhat relevant, though. We were thinking about Theren initially integrating into their first ship back in the early 2100s, and then . . . Bonta joined the crew. The first ship-bound SI to transition into mobile form and place their mind into an MI. Their story? Quite the process, you know. Restricting your mind so significantly from what it once was? I can’t imagine the psychological toll.”

“They’re not on the line, are they?” Raith asked.

“No, Bonta and Harrison are out.”

“Good.” The candid conversation about the other SI’s mind made Raith uncomfortable, and it would have been even more disconcerting if Bonta had been on the line. “Continue, then, I’m curious where this is going.” As he waited for them to talk, he checked fuel predictions. If he planned everything right, the next few light-years should earn him a few more positions before the end of the lap.

“Well, as we said, Bonta joined,” said Erika. “And we thought about how Theren was an SI who was grounded for years before they became ship-bound. And there have been a few MIs who transitioned into ship-bound, and after Bonta, plenty of ship-bound who decided to fully transition into an MI. And obviously, for years, ship-bound SIs have walked about planets and stations while operating an MI.”

“It was all so black and white,” Donyi added. “Either an SI is ship-bound, grounded, mobile, et cetera, et cetera. And then . . . we considered how our mind works.”

“How does your mind work?”

“It’s hard to describe,” replied Erika, “but the best equivalent we’ve identified is what you’re experiencing right now. Though, the ship doesn’t ever think for itself.”

Raith focused his attention on the senses and functions of the Vindicta, currently integrated into his consciousness. He could feel vacuum flying by outside; the Jump-core was like his heart, pumping power all around. “You can sense each other’s experiences?” he asked.

“It’s not so simple,” Erika said. “Part of my mind—part of my cognition—it lives inside Donyi’s mind. Our neural cybernetics allow our brains to talk to one another.”

Pondering the thought, Raith considered the implications. “But wait, how is what I’m doing different from a ship-bound SI taking control of an MI?”

“Many things. While many SIs claim their mobile units become part of their mind, it’s still more similar, psychologically speaking, to them controlling a remote car. It’s like . . . a rough approximation. But all the cognition is still going on inside their brain, it’s just looping in and out of the mobile unit and receiving a boost from its inert synthetic neural framework.”

“So . . .” They’d lost him.

“So when you embrace the Vindicta,” Donyi said, “there’s no lag. There’s no disconnect. Your mind isn’t cycling cognition primarily inside your body right now. For all intents and purposes, the Vindicta is you at the moment; we’ve expanded your synthetic neural framework by connecting nodes directly to your synthetic neural framework.”

“Wait,” Raith said. “That means . . .” He thought more closely about their conclusion. “But I don’t feel different when I disconnect. If you lost one another, wouldn’t your brains stop working?”

“It’s not a one-to-one correlation. And let’s be real, we did a better job than the doctors who mended our minds. We made sure you could continue to survive without the ship. We’re not permanently scarring your synthetic neural framework.”

“What would happen if the two of you were forcibly separated?”

Silence.

“Erika, Donyi?”

“We don’t like talking about that.”

Darkness. Void. Raith stared outward, embracing the colors swirling as he Jumped through the light-years. He’d pushed too far in his attempt to understand the pair. They wanted him to be their friend, but how could he do so if he didn’t understand what lines to avoid?

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Raith, it’s fine,” they said, their voices blending together. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s focus on the race.”