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Stealing Spaceships 2 Chapter 1
🕑 Added 2021-09-19 02:22:21 +0000 UTCI released my grip on the throttle and let the ship spin out across the ice. Up ahead of me, two of the other racing ships weren’t so lucky. Their pilots tried to keep control during the spin, but they should have just let go and enjoyed the ride like me because sure enough, they quickly lost command of their ships and crashed into each other instead.
I nudged the throttle in the direction that my ship spun, and the subtle movement guided the craft just enough so that she didn’t spin into the two crashed ships. Then I skated my ship past them and followed the trajectory that had been plotted out ahead of me by the chip implanted in my brain. I was almost at the edge of the frozen lake now, and as soon as I reached it, I could re-engage the flight capacity of the ship.
The ice scraped along the hull of my ship and sounded like a fork scraping across a sheet of glass, but I knew the wheels would grab as soon as my spin slowed down. I just had to wait for the ship to right itself, kick its wheels back out, and reach the edge of the frozen lake.
“Twelve seconds before hover capacity is restored,” my chip chimed inside my skull.
“Thanks for the heads up, Honey Bee,” I answered.
I braced myself for the bumpy shift from ice to snow. The hover drive would only take a second to power back up, but even one second might be too long. After all, the frozen lake was about to come to an end, but the terrain on the other side was just a different kind of rough. Instead of ice, it was just snow and rocks up until the sheer cliff face that towered high above the track.
I had to give the crime bosses on this busted planet credit. Sakma was one cold tundra of a planet, but she sure as shit had some clever-ass crime lords. Either that, or she had some really bored ones, because they had come up with some races that kept even me interested.
My first race on Sakma had been against a ticking bomb planted on each ship, my second had been straight down the side of a mountain, and now this one switched back and forth between flying wheels-up and driving with wheels on the ground.
It didn’t matter what challenges the crime lords threw at me. I would keep winning their races, and they would keep paying me their prize money, no matter how much they hated doing it. It wasn’t my fault that they didn’t have any half-decent pilots of their own, so they just had to pay out their prizes to an outsider.
I was the best, and that was just too bad for them.
“Three seconds,” Honey Bee chimed. “And you are the best, Trevor. That is why they hate you. Why they hate us.”
“I appreciate that,” I growled as I adjusted my grip on the throttle.
It wasn’t always easy to have a sentient chip implanted in my brain, especially not when that chip could read my thoughts just as quickly as I had them, but my chip was also damn helpful in a pinch. She was able to calculate distances and angles like nobody’s business, and she could even speed up my normal brain activity so that everything around me seemed like it was in slow motion. I hadn’t had any choice about having Honey Bee implanted in my brain, but since I had broken free of the Vespidae collective that put her there, my chip had been my best and most loyal ally.
The instant that I guided my craft off of the lake, the wheels pulled back up into the ship and I engaged the hover drive to fly along over the top of the snow. Another ship behind me didn’t shift into hover quickly enough, and I heard their wheels skid out across the snow just before they crashed into the sheer cliff face.
Well, at least the explosion would melt a bit of the ice for the next racers who tried to catch up with me.
“A noble sacrifice,” my chip laughed. “Even if it is in vain.”
“Looks like those fuckers are gonna have to pay me again after all,” I said with a grin.
I pulled up on the throttle to fly up against the cliff wall, but I didn’t go so high that I entered the low-hanging snow clouds. Instead, I veered left as soon as I was a few stories off the ground, and I glanced down at the snow below to see how many other crafts were still in the race with me.
There were seven other ships that I could see, but I wasn’t worried about the ones that were out of eyesight. All that mattered was that there wasn’t anybody ahead of me, and seven ships weren’t enough to cause me any concern. Four of the remaining ships were still skidding across the frozen lake, but three had made it past the ice, and now they did their best to gain ground on me and not crash into the cliff face at the same time.
I carefully guided the ship back down toward the race course again. There was no telling how long the next hover section of the course track would be, and whenever I crossed into another ground-bound section, I didn’t want to be too high off the ground. Otherwise, I would have just taken my craft up, over the cliff, and onto a bit of a shortcut to reach the finish line.
“We think that might be viewed as cheating,” Honey Bee observed.
“Well, I happen to disagree,” I laughed. “People only call it cheating when they didn’t think to do it first, or when it’s not their own pilot who thought to do it.”
“We detect no enforced gravity immediately up ahead,” my chip told me, “but there is a frozen river ahead in approximately sixteen miles, and it is possible they have reinforced gravity there as well.”
“Good enough for me,” I answered. “Let’s see what we can do before then.”
I raced along over the top of the snow beside the cliff wall until I started to approach a drop-off into a deep canyon. The walls on either side of the canyon were so close together that I would have to take the ship up on her side to make it through. I studied the angle that my chip showed me I would need to take to get through the narrow passage, and then as I exhaled, I tilted my craft up onto her side and slipped into the narrow crevice.
The key now was to not overcorrect. I barely moved the throttle, but my ship responded to my touch like we had known each other for years instead of just a few months. I adjusted her course by mere inches so we wouldn’t ram into the icy cliffs on either side of us, and she shivered but did exactly what I told her to.
Good girl.
My grip on the throttle strained with the careful movements, and I felt my forearms tightening to keep from crashing into the cliffs. Behind me, I heard a scrape and then a shriek of metal on ice as another ship plunged to the silent snow below.
I grinned. Now there were only six other assholes left.
I could just see the end of the crevice where things looked like they opened up and got a little brighter. A jagged stretch of icy rocks suddenly appeared in front of me in the canyon, and they jutted up out of the crevice floor like icy fingers that reached up to tear apart my ship. There wasn’t time to fly up and over them, so I just tilted the left wing of the ship at a slight angle away from the ground to avoid them.
I swore that I could feel the ship take a breath as I passed her wing by the rocks. If I had angled the ship even half an inch less, the ice would have ripped her wing into scrap metal. I exhaled as we left the icy rocks behind us and flew on toward the end of the canyon that widened out in front of me.
“That was skillfully done,” Honey Bee chimed.
“Oh, I know,” I answered with a grin. “But thanks.”
“Of course,” my chip responded.
I flipped the craft right-side up again now that the crevice between the two cliffs had widened. There was no radar in these racing ships and too many hiding places for me to trust my rear view mirrors alone, so I couldn’t tell where the other craft were around me. Only one thing was for sure, and that was that there still wasn’t a single fucker in front of me.
I flew the racing ship out of the canyon and into the cold open air of Sakma, where the terrain stretched out before me in layers of blinding white. Every direction I looked, there were snow drifts so huge that they looked like entire cities had been drowned in the stuff. If my hand even halfway slipped on the throttle, I could end up drowned in it too. All it would take was one second of a mistake, and I’d be buried in a drift so deep even the spring thaw wouldn’t find me. Of course, that would require Sakma to have a spring thaw, and based on what I’d seen so far, that didn’t seem likely.
I flew above the snowy terrain, and I saw that we were already almost at the frozen river that Honey Bee had detected, thanks to the ridiculous speed I was going at. But it wasn’t the river that interested me, and it wasn’t even the possibility that I’d have to shift out of hover drive and use the wheels to navigate across the ice again.
Instead, my eyes were focused on the power-up just on the other side of the river. It was the first one of the race so far, so I was eager to get it for myself. The other crime lords’ races on Sakma had been chock full of power-ups, but so far, this course seemed more about skill than luck.
And damn if I didn’t have both.
They never told the racers how many power-ups there would be along a course, and they definitely never told them what exactly they would be. But there’d been one in the last race that had exploded the ship that came immediately after me, so to say it was competitive would have been an understatement.
I didn’t even have to be in the lead to get them either, even though it just so happened that I was. Power-ups could look like anything too, so I just had to spot the power-up, figure out how to set it off, and then trigger it before anybody else did. Ice races on Sakma weren’t for amateurs, that was for fucking sure.
The power-up on the other side of the river was obvious only because it was a different color than the rest of the surrounding snow. Instead of blinding white, it was the color of soft white, like a shadow had fallen over the snow in one perfectly flat, round, ship-sized patch. I didn’t know what it would do when I set it off, but I would have bet anything that it was triggered by flying over it. It was too wide and flat to require a hit, since that would have been too easy, so it made sense that I would need to fly over it like a motion-activated land mine.
I expected the hover drive to go out the moment I hit the river like it had at the frozen lake, but I just flew right along over it and straight toward the power-up. The landscape shifted uphill, so I pulled up a little on the throttle to keep above it as I raced toward the flat patch of off-white up ahead.
I flew my ship straight over the center of the power-up and waited for an explosion behind me. Nothing blew up, and instead, I felt a wall of energy thrown up behind me that propelled me forward and down the hill on the other side of the power-up.
“Our guess is a force field,” Honey Bee suggested.
“That’s new,” I said, “but I like it. How long will it last, do you think?”
“Long enough to leave our enemies ground to dust behind us,” Honey Bee chimed darkly.
“That may be a bit of overkill, don’t you think?” I laughed. “I mean, the crime lords might be our enemies, at least until they figure out they want to hire me, but the other racers are just our competition.”
“Competition, enemies, it is all the same,” she answered, and suddenly her voice sounded very far away and full of echoes. “They will all fall before us and then join us. We will be one being. One life in this galaxy. Then we will go to distant galaxies until we are all the stars and the eons. You will lead us, Trevor. To glory and--”
“Hey, cool it with your grand plan for universe domination, okay?” I cut her off. “Right now we’ve got a race to win.”
“We will… cool it… for now,” Honey Bee laughed, “but not forever, Trevor Onyx.”
Honey Bee might be separated from the Vespidae collective now, but it didn’t change the goal that she was programmed to achieve. It only changed who she was working to achieve it for.
I sighed and dismissed the thought for the moment, just as the propelling force behind my ship stopped and I resumed normal speeds across the snow below. The power-up had only lasted for ten seconds, but as I glanced in the mirror behind me, I saw that it had been effective.
Three ships hovered beside each other at the force field brought to life by the power-up, and now that the force field had dropped, they all raced wing-to-wing down the hill after me. They must have been caught by the force field, and their delay was just one more reason I was going to win this fucker.
I spotted the orange marker in the ground up ahead to indicate that I was about to curve around to go back to the city. I glanced farther ahead, but we weren’t close enough to the red marker for me to see it yet. I wondered what kind of terrain the course would be on the way back, and I hoped there was at least one more power-up.
I kept my ship’s course steady as I looked for the red marker to indicate the turn, and I wished that I could have flown my own personal ship for this race. But they would never have allowed it into the race with its specs, and besides, it still wasn’t finished yet. It was just waiting in my shop for me to find the last few parts she needed, and then I could kiss the planet Sakma goodbye.
There were worse places I could have spent the last couple months. Sure, Sakma was just one big snowball floating through space, but I could have been stuck on Ineocca with its desert heat, Wild West saloons, and worst of all, with that asshole smuggler Leon Cotranis. Of course, last I heard, Leon the Asshole wasn’t exactly doing a lot of smuggling.
Sakma didn’t have much of a ULA presence, but I’d managed to find a bar where a small pocket of rebels liked to drink, and I could eavesdrop to my heart’s content to find out the latest news. According to gossip, the Dominion had captured Leon about two months back, accused him of stealing one of their prototype ships from the Alexandria space station, and then quickly figured out that he was too much of a dumbass to have pulled off anything like that.
I was glad the Dominion had cleared up that little issue, so at least that asshole didn’t get credit for stealing their prototype, but the news that followed was less welcome. As soon as Favian Grith had realized that the Dominion knew about the real Leon, he had sold out my real name to them to keep himself out of trouble, and that meant the whole goddamn Dominion was now on the lookout for Trevor Onyx.
“It is important to give credit where credit is due,” Honey Bee chimed to interrupt my thoughts.
“Yeah, that may be true,” I sighed, “but it’s also important not to have the government of the whole damn galaxy looking for you.”
“They are only jealous,” my chip told me. “They are only filled with envy that you were clever enough to steal their ship.”
“Steal it and then sell it,” I laughed. “Lucky for me, the princess was happy to buy it for her new rebel friends.”
“And lucky for us, she did not stay angry with us long,” Honey Bee chimed.
“At least not until I left her the second time,” I agreed.
“She would forgive you again the moment you appeared,” my chip said confidently.
I thought about the anger on the princess’ face when I told her I was leaving again, and how pouty her full lips had been as she huffed at me from the bed on board the rebel space station.
“You know?” I sighed. “I think you’re probably right.”
“Who do you think was happier to see you at first?” Honey Bee asked. “The rebels or the princess?”
“The princess,” I laughed. “Definitely the princess. I mean, I did sell the rebels a stolen Dominion military prototype, but they weren’t the ones whose brains I fucked out of their skulls, so I’m gonna have to go with the princess.”
“That seems fair,” Honey Bee agreed.
I spotted the red marker up ahead and gripped the throttle to prepare for the turn. The second red marker would only pop up after I passed the first one, and until it did, I wouldn’t know exactly what route I was supposed to take to get back to the city.
“Do you think the rebels know I took the schematics for the ‘X’ engine before I sold it to them?” I asked as I watched for the second red marker.
“We think no one knows that we are building our own ‘X’ engine for our own ship,” Honey Bee answered, “and no one will know until we want them to. And if anyone finds out before then, we will--”
“I know, I know,” I interrupted.
I had made so much money from selling the Dominion prototype ship to the rebels that I could have bought your average run-of-the-mill spaceship and started working toward my own space station. But I was anything but average or run-of-the-mill, and that meant I had decided to put the money toward something a little different. Sure, it would take a while, and a lot more money, to build my own version of the Dominion prototype with the ‘X’ engine, but having the best ship in the goddamn galaxy would be worth not having a ship for a few months. I already had the engine base, and I hoped that with a little more money and a few more parts, I’d have the engine itself finished.
The second red marker popped up out of the snow, but it was in a straight line from the first red marker. I groaned and rolled my eyes behind my shielding glasses. A straight line meant that I wasn’t just going to have to guide the ship into a turn. I was going to have to make a U-turn and go back in exactly the same direction I’d come from.
I released the accelerator and started to pull back on the throttle. We were going too damn fast for me to make an actual U-turn without losing all control of the ship, and that meant I needed to take a slightly different approach.
The good thing about a straight turnaround was that I already knew what the rest of the course would be, because I had already flown it. Of course, the downside was that I had already flown it, and there were six other active assholes still flying it. We’d have to avoid each other as I raced back toward the finish line, and I’d have to look out for the wrecks of all the other ships that had crashed along the way.
I pulled back on the throttle even more until I was upside down and pointed back in the direction that I had come from. As soon as I was upside down, I stamped on the accelerator and let my ship roar to life again. I flew back just above the ground and saw that the topmost layer of snow had melted from the ship’s exhaust on my first pass through, but the puddles had already frozen into patches of ice on top of the snow.
I kept my ship upside down as I approached the runner-up craft in the race. I could have easily flipped myself around, but I figured that the other pilot would be more thrown off by our game of chicken if I was upside down, plus I didn’t mind the extra challenge.
I adjusted the throttle and aimed the nose of my craft straight at the other ship’s cockpit. Each time the pilot tried to shift his course around me, I just re-adjusted my aim so that it looked like we would crash right into each other. I wasn’t close enough to see his panic yet, but I could almost taste it. I wondered briefly if that might be Honey Bee’s bloodlust, but then we were seconds away from impact, and there was no more time to think about it.
When our ships were just feet away from each other, the other pilot jerked wildly to the left to get out of my way, and I veered my ship to keep on course with him even as I laughed at how quickly he’d turned chicken. He jerked again, just as another ship came up behind him. This was even better than I’d planned, so I made one more quick adjustment just before impact, and the pilot ripped so hard on his throttle that he spun his own ship out of control and straight into the ship coming up behind him.
Their wings smashed into each other’s, and they both went into accidental barrel rolls. It knocked them off course, and I guessed it damaged their ships both too much to be real contenders in the race any more.
“And then there were four,” I muttered.
“But there will only be one,” Honey Bee chimed.
“Love the confidence,” I growled, but I happened to agree with her.
I flipped my racing ship back upright and kept on course. I passed the power-up just minutes later, but it didn’t reactivate, so I knew I would just have to win the rest of this fucker with skill alone. The four other ships had already passed me on their way to the turnaround, but they had seen the wreck of the other two ships that I’d caused, and so they’d stayed well away from me.
I didn’t see any of my competitors in the rear view mirrors, so I just focused as I flew across the frozen river again and back toward the narrow canyon. I knew that even a straight turnaround race wouldn’t be this simple, so when I was almost at the canyon, I flexed my fingers and adjusted my grip on the throttle for whatever other surprises the Sakma crime lords had in store for me in their race.
Just before I entered the canyon, I saw movement from the tops of the cliffs on either side of the crevice. Two huge boulders, one from each side, rolled toward the canyon opening, and Honey Bee immediately showed me that the trajectory of their fall would be right on top of me as I flew underneath them.
“Motherfuckers,” I swore.
“They truly do not want us to win,” Honey Bee added.
“Well, today is not their lucky day,” I growled.
Even if I tilted my ship on her side, there was no way to avoid the boulders if I kept my head-on approach. If I steered the ship down beneath them, I might have enough time to slip underneath them and into the canyon before they crashed down on top of me, but I wasn’t about to stake my life or my prize money on what might happen. I needed a guarantee, and that meant there was only one direction I could go.
I pulled up on the throttle and aimed my ship at the top of the icy cliff to the left. I had to move her at such a sharp angle that I damn near flipped myself upside down again, but I held her steady and just kept moving forward toward the cliff top. The boulders passed directly underneath me, and the force of their fall shivered the wings of my ship even though they didn’t touch me.
Almost as soon as I had passed over them, I was flying above the icy cliff with the canyon down to my right. I’d been able to fly over this part of the course on my way out, but there was no guarantee that they hadn’t made it so that our hover drive would be disabled on the way back. It might be the same course, but it wouldn’t be the same surprises, and if my hover drive suddenly went out, I sure as shit didn’t want to be flying straight down the middle of the canyon with nothing underneath me but air and jagged ice rocks.
I was halfway across the cliff top when I saw another racing ship in my rear-view mirror. He had cheated, obviously, or he never would have caught up to me so soon after I had left all the other pilots in my dust. If I had to guess, I’d say that he had probably turned around at the first red marker instead of the second one, and since none of the crime lords on Sakma were eager to see an outsider win, they would just look the other way. It couldn’t be in-your-face cheating, of course, or it wouldn’t seem fair, but they weren’t above a little slip every now and then, or a little look-the-other-way to make sure their own pilots got ahead.
I rolled my eyes, gauged my competitor’s distance from me, and then focused again on the course ahead. He still wouldn’t catch up with me, at least not if I could help it. I had about a third of the ice cliff left now before I’d be flying out in open skies again, but I kept my ship low to the ground.
It could have been instinct or it could have been just a deep distrust of every damn person on this frigid planet, but half a second later, I was damn glad that I had kept my ship close to the top of the cliff because sure enough, those bastards cut my hover drive. It was a good trick, and one I very much wanted to steal the technology for, but that wasn’t my job right now. Right now, I just wanted to keep from driving my ship off the side of the cliff.
When the hover drive crashed, my wheels kicked out automatically and smashed into the rough ice on the top of the cliff. They gave a horrific screech, but I steered her just right so that she only spun around once before I regained control. The end of the cliff was close now, and while my wheels might have gained enough traction for the moment, they wouldn’t do me any good once we went flying off the end of the cliff without a working hover drive.
“What’s our ETA, Honey Bee?” I asked my chip. “And make it snappy, if you don’t mind.”
“ETA to crash at bottom of cliff: forty-two seconds,” she chimed.
“To the edge of the cliff, not to the crash,” I growled.
“Our mistake,” she corrected herself. “ETA to edge of cliff: seventeen seconds.”
“Works for me,” I muttered, as I adjusted the ship’s course ever so slightly to the right.
The edge of the cliff was up ahead, but so was a natural ramp where the ice at the end of the cliff dipped down just before it rose at a forty-five degree angle. The ramp was only a dozen feet long, but it would have to do the trick. With the ramp in the center of my vision, I stamped down on the accelerator to give my ship the best chance of making the jump.
As I accelerated toward the ramp, I glanced in my rear-view mirror and saw that the ship behind me had its wheels on the ground too, but now it had also steered itself toward the natural ramp. He even looked like he had sped up, just like I had. That asshole was going to copy every move I made to keep from crashing his own ship.
“Well, he’s sure as shit gonna try,” I laughed.
My wheels hit the dip just before the natural ramp, and the force rocked me back in the cockpit. I held the throttle steady and guided us onto the ramp itself, and it looked like I was driving straight into the grey clouds overhead. We hit the end of the ramp with as much acceleration as my ship could take, and then we were airborne.
I released the accelerator and just let the winds take me. I had gotten a decent angle off the ramp, but I couldn’t plan my next move until I figured out if the hover capacity of my ship was going to power back on or not. If it did, we were in the clear. If it didn’t, I was just going to have to land her very, very carefully.
We flew up at a forty-five-degree angle for ten seconds before gravity started to bring us back down. It didn’t look like we were going to get lucky with the hover capacity, but that just meant I needed to make my own luck. I stretched my fingers, adjusted my grip on the throttle, and studied the terrain below as we plummeted at a near sixty-degree angle back toward the ground.
The frozen lake was closer than I would have liked on the course ahead. It would make for a hard landing, and that assumed I could land the ship without so much force that I just slammed straight through the ice and drowned before I could eject myself from the cockpit.
“Your body would freeze before it drowned,” Honey Bee informed me, “but there is a high probability your body would already be deceased from the impact of crashing into the ice.”
“Informative and helpful, as always,” I muttered.
I couldn’t do much about the pull of gravity on my ship, and without the hover drive engaged, it also didn’t do me any good to try to steer. All that accomplished was to move my wheels back and forth on top of empty air. I studied the trajectory of my descent toward the frozen lake and saw that I was going to crash about two-thirds of the way across it, and since that meant I would land on a thinner part of the ice, I knew I had to do something to change my approach.
As I scrambled for a plan, I glanced in my rear-view mirror again and saw that the ship behind me had managed to imitate my jump off the ramp. He flew through the air at just about the same angle that I had, and now he plunged back down just on my tail. I wondered if he had figured out yet that the angle of our descent put us on a crash course with death, but by the same token, I felt irritated that he thought he could just skate on to the finish line by imitating me.
“Thirty seconds to impact,” Honey Bee announced.
I could only think of one option, so I released the lock to the door beneath my seat that I used to slide under the ship and make repairs to her underside. I stomped on the controls to the door, and it slid open with a gust of cold wind that ripped the next breath right out of my lungs. I gritted my teeth, reached for the controls to the emergency ejection seat, and flipped one very important switch.
“Copy this, motherfucker,” I growled, with a final backward glance at my competitor.
And then I hit the seat eject button.
The rockets attached to the bottom of my seat flared into life, but I had switched off the actual ejection, so my seat itself stayed in place. Instead, the rockets just blasted through the hole in the bottom of my ship, and their force propelled my ship up and away from the ice. The rockets only had enough fuel to fire for a few seconds, so the effect didn’t last long, but it leveled out my approach to the frozen lake just enough that I didn’t crash headlong into it.
As soon as the rocket propulsion stopped, my ship’s wheels slammed down against the ice. I managed to close the door underneath my seat just as the wheels first hit the frozen lake, so when the hull of the ship scraped against the ice, it didn’t just rip the ship apart. The ship bounced and then veered into a spin, but I just waited for the edge of the lake where I could take back control.
My trick with the ejector seat rockets had gotten me closer to the edge of the ice, so it would only take a few seconds until my ship spun off of the frozen lake and onto the snow. From the sound of the ice cracking behind me, I guessed that I’d finally pulled a move that my competition hadn’t been able to imitate. I glanced back but only saw smoke that billowed up from the ice.
“There can be only one winner,” Honey Bee chimed.
“And I’ll give you one guess about who that’s gonna be,” I said with a grin, just as my ship spun onto the snow.
Immediately, my hover capacity was restored, and I ripped my ship up off the ground and out of her tailspin. It was much easier to correct an over-rotation in the air than it was on the ground, so it only took me a second before the ship was completely under my control again. As soon as I had the ship steady and on a clear course for the finish line, I gave a little whistle and stamped my feet on the floor of the ship to restore some blood flow to them.
It had been necessary to open up the door beneath my seat for the rockets to work right, but goddamn, had it made it cold in here, so I pulled the fleece of my jacket collar up around my neck and exhaled to see my breath inside the ship. I was close to the finish line, so I just had to hang in there a little longer, and then I could enjoy the warmth of the after-party.
“This assumes that no one will try to kill us before then,” Honey Bee observed.
“Well, none of their attempts have stuck yet, so I wish them all the best,” I sighed.
A quick look in my rear-view mirror showed the remaining racers far behind me. There was no way that they would catch up to me in time, and I was too near the finish line for there to be any more big surprises in store this go-round. I grinned as I thought of just how mad the crime lords of Sakma were going to be when I won another one of their races.
Ahead of me, the crowd came into view on either side of the track, but they were also on the other side of the finish line, and that meant they were straight in front of me. If they didn’t get out of the way, my ship would smack right into them almost as soon as I crossed the finish line.
“Why won’t they fucking move?” I swore.
“Perhaps they are too stupid,” Honey Bee suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” I answered, “but I have a feeling there might be a little more to it than that.”
I looked in the rear-view mirror, breathed a sigh of relief that no one was on my tail, and released the accelerator to start the slow braking process. The crowd had most definitely not been behind the start/finish line when we had all taken off, so I found it odd that they were now. It had to be some final trick or some last surprise that was intended to throw me off my game.
“It’s like they’ve never met us,” Honey Bee chimed.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” I sighed.
My ship reached the edge of the crowd that waited on either side of the track, and that meant there was only one minute left before I crossed the finish line and plowed into the mob of people who waited for me there. The hover drive would be disabled again as soon as I crossed the line, or I could have just flown over all of their heads and been done with it. I pulled hard on the brake and guided my ship down closer to the ground.
My ship slowed down, but it was still flying too fast to cross the finish line safely. I braced myself in my seat, held the throttle still, and switched on the emergency hover brake. The ship screeched as she decelerated, and I took her into one quick spin to help her lose even more speed.
As soon as I came out of the spin, we were almost at the finish line, and her wheels kicked out to drive across the final few feet between me and my prize money. I released the emergency hover brake and gave a quick jerk to the emergency brake for the wheels instead. The wheels shrieked like I had stabbed them, but the ship slowed to a crawl and then to a complete stop when it was just inches away from the crowd past the finish line.
I slid the cockpit open and stood up to get a good look at the crowd. As soon as I did, I saw why the mob of people behind the finish line hadn’t moved even when I had almost crashed right into the middle of them. The moment I stood up out of the cockpit, the crowd flickered, flashed, and then faded until it completely disappeared. Only the people on either side of the finish line were real.
“That was an effective holographic projection,” Honey Bee observed.
“You’re telling me,” I muttered.
I looked out into the rest of the real crowd and saw that they were all cheering for me. I gave a little wave and a little bow, but the energy of the crowd shifted a moment later and they all fell silent. I glanced up at the only building at the finish line, but I couldn’t see behind the three stories of shaded panes of glass. Still, I knew the people in that building were the reason that the crowd had stopped cheering. No one wanted to make Sakma’s crime bosses question their loyalty, so they couldn’t seem too sympathetic toward me: an outsider that kept winning all their lucrative gambling races.
I hopped down from the cockpit and made my way to the judges’ stand to collect my prize. As I pushed through the crowd of race-goers and saw all their different types of sunglasses, I smiled as I thought about the other reason that I had picked Sakma to lie low.
Sure, it was fucking cold all the goddamn time on this planet at the edge of the galaxy, but that meant that between the brightness of the constant snow and the constant threat that frigid temperatures might freeze your eyeballs inside their sockets, most people on Sakma wore some kind of glasses, so my shielding glasses didn’t stick out as much as they might have on some other busted planet.
“We choose nothing by accident,” Honey Bee said cheerfully.
“Yeah, yeah, like you chose this planet all by yourself,” I growled.
“Didn’t we?” she asked.
“If I remember right, I asked you for a list of some planets on the edge of the galaxy, and then I picked Sakma out of that list,” I corrected her. “And I said, what better place to set up a mechanic’s shop and build my ship than some frigid planet with--”
“Your exact words were, ‘some cold-ass broke-down planet with more crime than common sense,’ ” Honey Bee reminded me.
“Well, was I wrong?” I challenged.
“We are never wrong,” my chip answered.
I rolled my eyes and returned my focus to the crowd that all pressed around me to congratulate me on my win. They couldn’t congratulate me too loudly, of course, since there were lackeys of the planet’s crime lords everywhere. But there were plenty of handshakes, plenty of murmured approval, and plenty of beautiful women who couldn’t stop staring at me when I passed them.
I reached the judges’ stand and climbed up onto the podium. Another racer was just crossing the finish line now, and I could see two others coming up quickly behind him. As soon as they all reached the finish line, the emergency crews zipped out onto the course with their silent flashing sirens to take care of all the wrecked pilots.
The second pilot to cross the finish line opened the cockpit, looked at me across the crowd, and spat at the ground. I was surprised that his spit didn’t freeze halfway down, but I just gave a mocking salute in return.
“X!” he shouted. “You asshole!”
I grinned at the name that I had given myself on Sakma.
“No reason to be a bad sport just because you lost,” I sighed.
He pushed his way toward me through the crowd and jumped up onto the judges’ stand beside me. His right hand was balled into a tight fist, and I didn’t wait to see if it was from the cold or from his desperate need to punch me. Instead, I reached out, gripped his forearm, and yanked him closer so that our faces were just inches apart.
“Listen, buddy,” I said quietly, “you can be as upset as you want to be that I won and you lost, but I won fair and square and you fucking know it.”
“It’s not right that--”
“So,” I cut him off, “unless you want me to kick your ass in front of all these people and then have to deal with the double embarrassment of losing the race and then getting your ass handed to you like a little bitch, I suggest you just say congratulations and leave it at that.”
“Are you serious right now?” the man growled. “You think you can just--”
I tightened my grip on his forearm until he winced.
“Congratulations,” he murmured. “Nice race, X.”
“Why, thank you,” I said with a grin.
We both waved to the crowd, and then I turned to the two judges to collect my money. They counted it out to me, but they were short by fifty. They glanced at each other, at the building beside the finish line, and then at me again.
“Why don’t you step this way?” the judge on the left said. “I’ll get the rest of your money for you, if you just stay right here.”
It sounded like another fucking trap, but I knew I could get out of whatever they had planned, so I followed the judge down from the podium to stand behind it. Immediately, I sensed that something was off. The crowd was breaking up more quickly than usual, as if everyone had suddenly remembered they had better places to be. The judge looked around too much, and I knew he was waiting for something to happen or for someone to show up.
And then I saw them, even before they spotted me. Two big goons walked toward me from the direction of the crime lords’ race-watching building, and they both looked like they were the size of refrigerators. I rolled my eyes as the judge ducked out of the way.
“You need to come with us,” the first refrigerator goon said, as soon as they both reached me. He nodded at the bosses’ building.
“Do I have a choice?” I asked, even as I studied the men’s movements to guess their weak spots.
They didn’t answer, and instead, they each grabbed one of my arms and started to haul me toward their bosses.
