Throttle Thirty-Six

“What do you think?” Diana asked.

It had been two days since she’d had lunch with Zil Rossi. The ktacha hadn’t said yes to her offer yet, but Diana could tell when someone was tempted, alien or not. All she needed was only the last bit of temptation and they would have a second pilot on their team, which might turn out to be exceptionally useful.

For that temptation to exist, though, Diana had to do some work. She sat in the cockpit of the Star Skimmer, though the ship wasn’t the same high-tech, carefully designed craft it had been just a few hours prior.

The cockpit layout was nearly the same, except for a couple of additional panels. The main body of the ship though, was entirely different. The thrusters were pulled in closer, with a few additional reverse thrusters jutting out of the front, and the body was stretched out like a giant crab, with four large arms reaching out under the ship.

A long net was stung out between the arms, parts of it bending around the large form of a massive stone that had been captured.

“I don’t actually know what you are thinking about,” ChaOS said. “This stone is acceptable. Closer inspection reveals that the asteroid is mostly composed of cobalt, nickel, and iron, as well as dozens of trace elements.”

“That should fill our need for a bit,” Diana said. She gently turned the ship around and started heading back.

The Slow and Steady sat a few hundred metres away, matching velocity and with one of its large holds open to space.

The interior wasn’t quite empty.

Over the last couple of days, Diana and ChaOS started preparing for the Tyrant Cracker. That meant that they had to build an entire ship within the hold of the Slow and Steady. The scrap metal Ahvie had donated lasted them all of a few hours as they processed it. It wouldn’t cover much more than a few armoured panels once the nanomachines were done with it.

ChaOS crunched the numbers and laid out a simple plan: they needed several hundred tons of various materials, some of which were not available for easy purchase at Waitless station.

That meant that they would need to make those themselves.

Which would require furnaces, refineries, and the power to run both.

In the end, an entire hold of the Slow and Steady had been turned into a single massive machine that took in raw materials and used them to improve itself so that it could take in even more raw materials and process them faster to improve itself faster.

Even with everything turned towards producing more nanomachines to eventually build the ship Diana wanted for the race, they would be cutting things close.

ChaOS had a long list of not-entirely-necessary modules and components that they could ignore when it came time to build the main ship.

Diana was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. “I meant about Zil,” Diana said. “Or is it Rossi?”

“The ktacha, or at least some groups of them, don’t have anything similar to family names. Zil Rossi is Miss Zil Rossi’s entire name. What about her is on your mind?”

Diana leaned into her control seat. Flying a ship loaded with loose cargo into an entryway that was barely bigger than the ship itself wasn’t something she needed to give her whole attention to. “I’m on the fence about including her in our plans. She seems like a good pilot, and she deserves a chance, and I guess more help wouldn’t hurt. But yeah, I give her fifty-fifty odds of betraying us.”

“You don’t seem to believe that Miss Ahvie will betray us,” ChaOS said.

Diana considered it for a moment. “I think it’s because Ahvie reached out for help, but she did so expecting little. And… yeah, she seems nice. Zil Rossi though, she’s got that competitive spirit in her. She’s been slighted by her injuries, and she wants to be the best despite that. I think she might see everything as an adversary right now, including anyone that helps her? Maybe? Look, I don’t know how to read aliens well, so I’m guessing a lot here.”

“I will ensure that any betrayal on her part is short-lived then,” ChaOS said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be all… peaceful and nice?” Diana asked. “You know, as part of your programming.”

“Only towards humanity.”

Diana nodded. That made sense to her.

“Did you finish looking over the files Zil Rossi gave us?” Diana asked.

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“Indeed. Are you certain you want them now?”

“Yeah, nothing better to do.”

“Mistress, you are piloting several hundred tons of heavy materials towards the only ship within this entire end of the system. A slight mistake could lead us to be stranded outside of the range of any rescue.”

Diana shrugged. “Yeah, but if I look at the files now, I won’t have to look at them later. It’s all about efficiency.”

“Sending the files now,” ChaOS said. The AI didn’t quite play his sigh audiotrack, but she had the feeling he wanted to.

She blinked as a heap of files sprang up into her storage. Her mind split, half of it still on the task of flying the ship, the other half opened onto a list of racers and their ships.

The information was pretty spotty, but it was more than she had before, and it gave Diana a picture of what they would be competing against once the race started.

Abatrath was there, near the top of the list. One corvette and six escort fighters.

The corvette was called the Craggler. The type and model were listed as well. Diana imagined that ChaOS was already looking into those for more details. The fighters were all Type 14 Scourge Wings, which told Diana nothing.

Ven Geddi was there as well, the ktacha that Zil Rossi had tried to join. They were heading in with a team of eighteen ships: twelve fighters divided into two wings, and six of what Diana suspected were some sort of bomber.

One mix-raced team was heading in with a single vessel, a formerly decommissioned destroyer called the Nova Cavali.

A borel team were going in with a trio of gunships called Nebula Drifters. Their leader was named Invic, and they had apparently won a Tyrant Cracker a few years ago with a similar setup.

The Romantic Ionosphere was the only other ship that Zil Rossi’s files had any information on. A single-pilot fighter craft, being piloted by a yovar that seemed to be entirely new to racing. Diana suspected that the pilot was only noteworthy because they currently had the worst odds among the entire list of ships currently signed up.

There were about twenty other teams, but most of them barely had more than a mention and sometimes the name of a pilot or two. It looked as though most of that information had been copied from a gambling place on Waitless station.

“Lots of blanks in this file,” Diana said as she shut the partition down and refocused on flying. She was turning the ship around to better fit into the Slow and Steady’s hull. She didn’t want to run into the ship by accident.

“I imagine that that is normal. Some people will be going through some effort to hide as much information about themselves as possible. I believe only the larger, more serious contenders will be ambivalent about hiding their capabilities.”

“Because with more members it’ll be impossible to hide everything,” Diana said. “And because if they’re a larger team, then they have more room to hide a few little details away as well. Yeah, it makes sense. I guess, in a way, this race started a while ago.”

Diana fired up her reverse thrust, slowing down just enough that when her cargo met the reaching graspers inside the cargo hold, it was with little more than a heavy clunk.

“Dropping the nets now,” Diana said.

A shudder ran through the ship, and it suddenly became much more responsive as it shedded several tons of mass. Diana slipped out of the cargo hold, then back to the next hold which was opening to give her a place to dock.

In a few hours, the asteroid chunks would be processed into usable materials, the waste would be jettisoned, and hopefully ChaOS would be able to tick off a few more elements off the long list of materials they still needed to get their plans moving.

And if not, then they could always just grab more rocks. The galaxy had no lack of floating detritus in empty space.

“So, you want to run through some sims while we head over to the next rock?”

“We don’t know what the exact characteristics of the final ship will be,” ChaOS said. “Nor do I know what the adversary’s vessels will be like.

“Then let me fly against ships that are top-of the line in the worst case scenario version of our own ship,” Diana said. “Practice is practice, you know. And I think I might need some if I’m going to guarantee the win.”

***