Throttle Twelve

“Heeeeeeellloooo Dirah Prime and the fine sentients watching from home! Welcome to the Overflow Cup!”

Diana couldn’t help but chuckle at the announcer’s enthusiasm.

“I’m Te! And with me today is two-time Teal-Cup winner Long Can! Say hello, Mister Can!”

“Hm.”

“Aweeeesome! We’re going to have one insane race today, every beings. One hundred and eighty-two competitors, in their own scrap-heap racers, all gunning for this cycle’s Overflow Cup! Who’s going to win? Who’s going to get splattered? How many members of the crowd will be crushed by flying debris? We have no idea! Remember everyone, betting is entirely illegal in this quadrant! If you want to know more about that, please visit one of the handy betting-information booths and get some flyers! I hear the odds on last year’s winner Krison’s own flyers are pretty great.”

“Heh.”

“Let’s check on the competition this year! At position number fifty-two, in the Bone Crusher, is Krison himself! A local hero to the osel.”

Diana glanced up and towards Krison’s ship. The osel had all four legs spread out so that he could stand above his ship’s cockpit and was waving to the crowd. There were hoots and hollers and a few confetti-like pops. Some of the osel were removing their tops and exposing what Diana figured were rather private parts of their anatomy.

“But he’s not the only favourite this cycle; Zil Rossi is here, in her Purple Streak! Check out the odds on number forty-four every being!”

Diana leaned onto the side of the cockpit and found the Purple Streak, a sleek ship in a deep purple. A fox-alien, like that journalist she’d met, was arguing with someone that Diana imagined was their mechanic while pointing to a hose hanging out of the bottom of the ship.

“We have Jelsha Young-Sprout One-Five-Six-Nine in the Autumn Branch at number seven! You don’t see Jelshas racing all that often, not in the boonies!”

“Mmhm.”

Diana could barely see that ship. It was a rusty thing, asymmetrical in a way that made her a little uncomfortable, and with a large rotating gun on its side.

She tuned out the announcers, especially when they started talking about sponsors and other advertising stuff. She didn’t exactly care about which flavour of alien soda had the most calories in it.

“You ready back there?” Diana asked.

“Ahvie is ready,” Ahvie said. “Are you ready?”

Diana laughed. “I’m always ready.”

The ads ended, and there was a final rush of pilots and mechanics jumping into their ships. All around them, vessels started to hum to life, turbines spun up, and ships rose off the ground. “We’re about to start!” Te shouted, this time over loudspeakers that echoed across the entire stadium. “Racers, appendages on pedals, the countdown’s starting! And remember, no shooting until you’ve passed the red line! If you do, we’ll toast you ourselves!”

“Hah.”

A hovering holographic bar flickered to life at the end of the arena space, just past the finish line.

“Engines on,” Ahvie said. The Scrap Rocket shook, then lifted off the ground, the suspension on the wheels creaking. The turbine in the centre of the ship started to spin up, and the thrusters on the side whined to life.

The amount of sound beating at them from every direction rose and rose until it was almost impossible to even hear themselves think. Diana gripped the throttle, ready to slam it forwards. Her feet settled on the pedals, and she hyper-focused on the line ahead while still remaining aware of all the ships around them.

A large circle appeared and started to drain away. Engines revved, aliens of all sorts settled in, and the tension rose to almost unpalatable levels.

The circle sank, closer and closer to fading away.

“Let the race… Begin!” Te shouted just as the circle faded and the red bar hovering past the finish line winked out.

Diana slammed the throttle all the way down and pressed her foot to the side.

A hundred and eighty one ships took off with a cacophonous roar.

Diana’s wasn’t one of those. They hovered in place, only slowly gaining speed as the secondary engines spun up. “Ahvie! Why aren’t we moving?” Diana asked as she scanned the cockpit’s displays for trouble.

A ship juked around them, slammed into another ship, and both of them went crashing into the far wall of the arena where a shield popped up in time to protect the audience from the explosion that followed.

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Diana didn’t have time to flinch. “Ahvie?”

“Ahvie’s trying!” Ahvie shouted. “The main thrusters are not lighting up!”

“Why not?” Diana asked.

“No spark!”

Diana swore. “Where do you need the spark?”

“Thruster exit!”

Diana jumped out of her seat and ran across the back of the ship. Other vehicles were still zipping by, and she was almost torn off the top of the Scrap Rocket by their engine wash. By the time she reached the back, nearly every racer was long gone. “Push the throttle to max!” Diana said.

Ahvie did, and the air behind the main thruster filled with reaction gas.

Diana dropped onto her belly, planted a foot on an aileron, then tore her gun out of its holster. “Fucking backwater crap,” she swore before aiming down into the gas escaping from the rear. She fired.

There was, predictably, an explosion.

Ahvie screamed as the Scrap Rocket shot ahead and up, then the ship started to wobble through the air, out of control with no one behind the yoke.

Diana shoved her gun away, then let out a creative string of swears as she climbed back to the cockpit.

“You’re insane!” Ahvie screamed as Diana fell into the seat, jammed a foot down on the pedals, then noticed that the throttle wasn’t all the way at max.

“I’m passionate, it’s different!” Diana screamed.

The far wall of the starting straight was coming in fast.

“There’s a wall,” Ahvie said.

“Yeah,” Diana replied. She glanced at the wire-mesh map, then back at the wall. “Can we get more juice out of this thing?”

“There’s a wall!” Ahvie screamed.

Diana pulled the throttle back, adjusted the winglets across the ship with a few taps on the pedals and a twist on the yoke, then shoved the throttle back up to max.

They passed so close to the edge of the wall that the air beating past them was like a bomb going off in a fifty-five gallon drum.

The first section of the race took place in the scrapyard. Dozens of paths crisscrossing around heaps of discarded metals and plastics, some of them already on fire. Diana focused ahead and shifted them gently around the biggest heaps. They were at the back of the group, though they were passing other racers. Mostly those who had crashed into one heap or another or who had been shot up already.

“Open field is next,” Ahvie said. She was hyperventilating on the coms, but was still clearly trying to help. “Ahvie doesn’t want to get shot.”

“We won’t get shot if we’re at the back, but we also won’t win. So, mostly, it’s all bad news from here, Ahvie.”

“Oh no,” Ahvie said.

They pulled out of the other end of the scrapyard, the heaps of trash diminishing, then ending as they found themselves in an open field only decorated by sparse bits of tough greenery and loose scrap that was still flying around in the wake of the other racers.

“We need to go faster!” Diana said. She could see the trailing end of the main group ahead. If this race was like any other, then that was the main body of racers, and those at the front would have a little headstart past that.

The ship gained more and more speed, and Diana grinned as the landscape started to blur past and she had to fight not to be shoved back into her seat. “Faster, Ahvie!”

“The ship can’t take much more!”

“We’re only just—” Diana paused to juke out of the way of a ship that was actively exploding ahead of them, bits of it spinning past. “We’re only just catching up! We need to cut past all the chaff!”

“Ahvie understands!” Ahvie said with a cry. “Pushing more fuel into the secondary engines. It’s not rated for that pressure, though.”

“It only needs to last a few minutes,” Diana said through gritted teeth.

The Scrap Rocket jittered and bounced, then roared even louder, a plume of dust kicking up behind it as it started to gain even more speed.

Ahvie had been right: their ship was clearly one of the fastest there.

They caught up with the back lines, where the racers were fighting tooth and nail to be the first to shoot their competition out of the way.

Diana tugged the throttle back just long enough to let a rocket whiz past where they would have been, then dodged the entire ship to the side to avoid a spray of bullets from another racer’s turret.

She laughed as a round winged off the edge of the cockpit.

This was exactly the kind of fun Diana had been looking for.

***