Throttle Seventeen

Scaring Krison half to death was satisfying, but it didn’t secure the victory.

Diana leapt onto the Scrap Rocket, slid into the cockpit, and grabbed onto the yoke. “Switch control back over to me,” she called back while setting herself back down into the seat. Her arms ached, and she could feel some repair nanites at work on her shins already. Maybe she should have considered wearing some armoured padding before skipping from ship to ship in mid-air.

“Transferring control now!” Ahvie said.

The ship wobbled for just a moment before Diana wrestled it into an even flight. She glanced over her shoulder, spying Krison and his Bone Crusher a dozen metres behind and falling back.

His ship wasn’t the only one she could make out. A dozen others were racing through the ship graveyard, and they were moving fast enough to make up any missing ground.

The fight with Krison had necessitated that they move slower, and those racers they’d left in the dust earlier didn’t just plant themselves there to wait. They wanted to win just as much as Diana did.

She grinned.

It wouldn’t do for her to win without any proper competition. “Ahvie, how much kick can you still give us?” Diana asked.

“Fuel is down to twenty percent, and one of our engines isn’t responding correctly, but Ahvie is manually compensating on the other side. Ahvie thinks we have a coolant leak too. It smells like it.”

“Will we hold out to the finish line?” Diana asked. “Or will we have to do something drastic?”

There was a long beat before Ahvie replied. “Ahvie will make sure we make it without drastics!”

Diana laughed and pushed the throttle as far as it would go. The ship jerked ahead and soon enough they were matching the speed of the ships catching up with them. Krison wasn’t allowing himself to fall too far behind, though he seemed to be keeping his distance.

They rocketed out of the ship graveyard and across the flatlands beyond that. Diana brought them lower, hugging the ground so that the backwash of their thrust kicked up a wall of dust and sand that she hoped would obscure them from any incoming fire.

“Hey, Ahvie,” Diana asked as she focused ahead. The jump across the river was approaching fast. They weren’t quite pulling ahead of the pack, but she judged that they’d make it across the finish line without any trouble, as long as none of the racers had any big tricks up their sleeves.

“Yes?” Ahvie asked.

“What happens once we’ve crossed the finish line?”

“Ahvie doesn’t understand,” Ahvie said. “You mean, if we win?”

“Yeah. I didn’t see a side-course to pull into, or like… a place to stop? A podium?”

“Oh, most ships will slow down and pull up next to the arena. Ahvie expects that some technicians will want to inspect the, ah, Scrap Rocket.”

“Nice, nice,” Diana said. She relaxed back into her seat and refocused on just piloting them to the end.

The river jump arrived, and Diana flew them straight and clean over the gap, landing on the other side with a gentle lurch as they hovered closer to the ground.

On the final turn before they reached the front of the arena, Diana glanced back and grinned at the row of racing ships arrayed out behind her. They were going to come in for an easy win.

It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as when the race ended with only a hair between her and the loser, but she was hardly going to refuse an easy win.

She flicked on the radio to hear what Te and Long Can had to say about the race.

“The rush to the finish is on! Ahvie and Diana are still in the lead, and the others sure as shit aren’t about to catch up!”

“Mmhm!”

“Oh! Even Long Can’s excited about this one, aren’t you, old guy?”

“Hm.”

“Now the race is all about determining who’s going to come in second! Krison’s falling back to third, Xarvis Polelerin is nudging ahead! Dancer-In-Blue-Flame is roaring ahead on a nitro burst! There’s no way they’ll catch up to our first placers, but they might make a grab for second at this rate!”

Diana zipped around the final corner and took in the last of the raceway in front of the arena. She shifted in her seat. If the announcers were going to just ignore their victory to crow about second place, then maybe she had to put on a better show for the crowd?

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“Ahvie, I want to dump all of our thrust in one big burst, can we do that?”

“We can!” Ahvie said. “Just tell me when.”

“Then hang on and keep your finger on the trigger,” Dianah said.

She gave the Scrap Rocket as much thrust as it could handle, the holographic barrier of the finish line hovering ahead.

Just before they struck the barrier, Dianah spun the ship around. Directional thrusters screamed and she dropped the throttle down to nothing. The Scrap Rocket twisted around so hard she was pressed into the side of the cockpit. “Now!” she screamed.

Ahvie did something, and the ship’s engines roared, huge pillars of flame and twisting wind bursting out behind them and slowing them down from a breakneck pace to nothing at all in the span of a hundred metres.

Diana straightened when the g-forces from their sudden deceleration let go. “You okay back there?” she asked.

“Ah… Ahvie’s fine? Did you make us stop?”

“Yeah,” Diana said. She grinned and gestured to the side where the arena stood. The aliens there, several thousand of them, were cheering and screaming and tossing things into the air. “Just had to put on a show, you know? That’s an important part of the art.”

Diana reached down and deployed their landing gear while gently lowering the Scrap Racer down to a more-or-less soft landing just a few dozen metres past the finish line.

Other racers shot past a few seconds after they landed, all of them putting on the brakes to slow down now that the race was clearly over.

Diana grabbed the edge of the cockpit and stood up. She waved to the crowd, and for a moment the screaming changed pitch. “Come on, Ahvie, get up here,” she said as she turned and helped the little alien up and out of her nook at the back of the ship.

“This place isn’t safe!” Ahvie said.

“Oh please, nothing we’ve done in the last few minutes has been safe,” Diana said.

Ahvie made that particular squeaking noise that Diana interpreted as a laugh. “You’re insane,” she said.

“But we won,” Diana replied.

A crew of technicians ran over from the edge of the raceway, with mechas and lifts in tow, and soon the Scrap Rocket was surrounded by aliens who got to work securing the ship. There were other crews rushing out to the ships slowing down further down, heedless of the vessels still crossing the finish line above.

One of them, an osel who wore something that seemed cleaner than the jumpsuits the technicians were wearing, waved up to Diana and Ahvie. “We need you to follow me,” he said. “Media wants video of the winners on the podium. Are you injured?”

“We’re not!” Diana said.

“Too bad, that would help the image, but there’s nothing for it. Quick now! There’s an entire sector watching, and they have the attention span of a bone dog after a toe.”

Diana hopped over the edge of the cockpit, then turned to help Ahvie up and out. “You ever do PR stuff before?” Diana asked.

“What?” was the mouse-like alien’s confused reply.

“Don’t worry about it then,” Diana said. “I’ll take care of impressing the press. And ChaOS can help too!”

The robot in question was smoothly walking over to them, the technicians parting around his well-armed form until he stood right next to the Scrap Rocket. “Well done, Mistress. A textbook victory. Though I do believe some of the risks you took were unnecessary.”

“Ah, don’t be that way,” Diana said. She sat on the edge of the ship’s wing, then reached back and pulled Ahvie up. The alien squeaked in protest, especially when Diana leaned down and dropped her.

ChaOS caught Ahvie with a bending of his elbows and carefully set her on the ground next to him before reaching up and catching Diana out of the air next.

“Okay!” Diana said. “Now let’s go cause a public relations disaster or two!”

“Mistress, no.”

“Oh, come on, I’m hardly that bad. Just got to smile at the camera and say whatever people expect to hear,” Diana said.

ChaOS shook his robotic head. “We don’t currently know what people expect to hear,” he said.

“Miss?” the osel said. He was rubbing his hands together in what seemed to be a universal gesture of barely-contained nervousness. “We should head out sooner than later.”

***