Throttle Eleven

“Hey, you’re finally back,” Diana said. She was sitting on one of the wheels jutting out of the bottom of the Scrap Rocket while a few aliens worked on taking apart the tarps that had been hiding their ship. All of the tarps in the room were going down, and some vehicles were already being wheeled out of the garage.

“Yes, Mistress,” ChaOS said. “I won’t be able to stay here for a prolonged period, but I did have time to give you this.” The robot reached into its own chest, then removed a handgun which he passed to Diana.

She took it carefully. It was about as long as her own hand from wrist to the tip of her middle-finger, with a stubby handle and a rotating barrel. “A revolver?” she asked. It looked a little strange compared to the revolvers she had seen before, with three rotating barrels that seemed able to spin around a central pin.

“It is, technically, a revolver. None of the weapons I presented were permissible. I had to steal a device they would give permission to enter.”

Diana blinked. “Wait, you stole this?” she asked.

“Indeed. Another contestant entered an identical weapon. I scanned and recreated it.”

“Do they even care about that here?” Diana asked. “They still have theirs, right?”

“It is, according to some laws, theft of intellectual property. Technically, it would more appropriately be called piracy,” ChaOS elaborated.

Diana shook her head, then flicked the rotating barrels around. They clicked satisfyingly as the entire barrel assembly spun around the central pin. The bullets were in the back, in an unmoving disk that lined up with the barrels as they turned and slotted into place. “Twelve rounds,” Diana counted. “Weird, but alright. This is the safety? And… not much of a sight on this thing.”

“Your augmentations that assist with spatial reasoning should be able to compensate and calculate something as simple as a bullet’s trajectory,” ChaOS said.

“I’ll manage,” she said before tucking the gun into one of the pockets in the side of her jumpsuit. “You’ll be watching?”

“Next to the emergency response vehicle parking area. If I see that you’ve injured yourself, I intend to steal one of the vehicles and use it to reach you as quickly as possible.”

“That sounds very illegal. And you were worried about a little piracy?”

“The piracy is less excusable than doing an illegal action in order to ensure your survival. My primary directive is to assist you, which I cannot do if you are dead.”

“Well, thanks,” Diana said. She glanced over, saw that the last of the tarp was gone, and that one of the worker aliens was giving instructions to Ahvie, who was nodding along. “I think we’ll be heading out now. Wish me luck?”

“Break their legs, Mistress.”

Grinning, Diana hopped off the wheel, then jogged over to where Ahvie was finishing up. She signed something on a tablet, then turned towards Diana. “We are all ready,” Ahvie said. “The Scrap Rocket has fuel, the permissions are signed, and we just need to apply these to the sides.” Ahvie gestured to a set of panels laying on the ground next to her. There were four of them, all relatively small, with rubbery studs on the back.

“What are those?” Diana asked.

“Our numbers,” Ahvie said. “We didn’t get to choose. We’re number one hundred and twenty-two. We’ll be starting near the back.”

“That’s fine,” Diana said. “It’ll mean others can test out the route ahead for us.”

“Can you help Ahvie hang the signs? Ahvie will climb up, and you pass them to her?”

Diana agreed, and soon she and Ahvie were crawling around the racer, pressing the pads to the side where they clamped on. The number, written in a strange alien script that reminded Diana a little of Roman numerals, was lit up from behind by a strip of thin LED-like lights.

A crew of workers showed up just as they were finishing up, with a sort of hovering tow-truck and half a dozen aliens in bright pink high-visibility vests. They waited for Ahvie and Diana to climb up into the cockpit before hooking onto the Scrap Rocket and pulling the ship forwards.

“You getting into position now?” Diana asked. The cockpit was hardly big enough for the two of them.

Ahvie pushed Diana’s seat forwards a little, then opened a hatch in the rear, revealing a nook just behind it with a smaller cockpit and a lot of pipes and valves. There were plenty of cracks in the side from which Ahive could see out of the cockpit, and some pedals for her to control things with.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It was far too cramped for Diana to fit into, not unless she discovered a new talent for contortionism. Ahvie, being much smaller and a bit more nimble, squeezed herself in with no problem and sat on a seat covered by some folded cloth. “Ahvie is ready,” Ahvie said.

Diana readjusted her seat, then tapped the pedals without pressing them, just to make sure they were all in reach. “Okay,” she said. They were moving along at the slow, careful pace preferred by foreman types. “Give me a quick rundown of what we can expect here.”

“Ahvie thinks that we’re one of the faster ships here.”

Diana could believe that, seeing the other vessels being tugged along. Many of them were wheeled, others had repurposed hover systems. A few were quite large and tanky, but for the most part, the vehicles around them were smaller, lighter things, meant to zip around. They were mostly engines with a few control mechanisms added on.

“Ahvie thinks that turning will be hard. Did you see the race course?”

“Yeah,” Diana said. She pulled up a wire-mesh map of the course. It was a single loop, a surprisingly large track that started and ended in the same stretch. There were height restrictions in place: if a ship went over a certain height, they’d be tagged out of the race. That meant they were racing in what was essentially a long, curving tunnel.

First through the scrap yard, then across a wide, barren field, then into a set of canyons where the ground had split apart. ChaOS had commented that that was likely caused by the crash of something very big and very heavy a while ago.

The canyon ended, and the race continued through a second scrap yard, this one more of a ship graveyard, where large hulks were parked and rusting away.

A few turns after that, and they’d be back in the scrap-yard after jumping over a river near the end.

This wasn’t some clean-cut course with nice pavement and clear passages. There would be uneven terrain, some turns ending with obstructions, and narrow corridors where anyone with a death wish could slam an opponent into a passing wall.

They had to go around the loop twice. The racer who passed the finish line on their second loop won.

Diana felt an eager shiver running down her spine.

The Scrap Rocket clunked as the vehicle towing them dropped them onto a part of the pavement marked with their number. They were unhooked, and the tow-craft hovered off back to the garage to move the next ship.

Diana tightened her grip on the controls and glanced at the ships ahead of her. Some had turrets, others had spikes jutting out of their sides and rears.

A crane lowered a large screen down over the front line, and it immediately started playing advertisements.

Diana rolled her eyes and focused instead on the stands. There had to be thousands of aliens there, hurriedly finding their seats while others walked up and down and hawked food. Drones flitted above, cameras capturing the vehicles parked there from every angle, though most of those cameras were focused on a few specific racers.

Number one, way at the front, was a low-riding monster of a ship, with two large thrusters at the rear.

Seventeen also had a lot of attention. It looked like a bus, with turrets mounted on the side where some of those osel aliens were handling the guns.

“Fifty-two is Krison’s ship,” Ahvie said.

Diana sat up a little, quickly scanning the ships ahead of them until she found Krison’s. It was a sleek red thing, clearly using the frame of some sort of fighter craft, but retrofitted with more directional thrusters and what looked like a single front-facing cannon.

“Nasty looking thing,” Diana said.

“Ahvie thinks the ship matches its pilot. Ahvie thinks he will be targeting the Scrap Rocket, especially after you insulted him.

“We’ll have to see what we can do about him,” Diana said.

She grabbed onto the controls and tried to make herself as comfortable as she could while the last of the ships were wheeled into place.

A chime sounded in her ear, then ChaOS intruded. “Mistress. It would be against the rules for me to intrude while you’re racing, but seeing as how the race has not yet begun, I wanted to know if you like to hear the commentators speaking as you race? It might be a mild distraction, but—”

Diana nodded. “Give it to me; I’m starting to think that I’ll need every edge I can get here.”

***