34
PIXELITO, CAPITAL CITY OF MALASTARE
MID RIM TERRITORIES
There was almost no love left for podracing anymore. Kevv thought that was a shame. Just looking at the hologram of the Pixelito Racing Plains, which stretched out for twenty kilometers beyond the city proper, made him ache for a time when podracing had gathered thousands of downtrodden beings to watch racers to chant and cheer for them, and, in some small way, imagine themselves doing something as liberating and glorious as the racers themselves. But the Empire misliked the sport of podracing for numerous reasons, not the least of which was that it was conducted by rogues, miscreants, outsiders.
Rebels.
It had not escaped Kevv that the very nature of the sport attracted such desperate types. In fact, there was a time not too long ago when he thought about doing it as a profession. Imagining the glory of being the first Duros to ever do it was deeply alluring and romantic, there was a part of him that would always wish he had just bitten the blaster and done it.
But then, there was a better than decent chance he would have ended up in an Imperial prison, or slaving away the last of his days on Kessel. It did not help that the sport had a large non-Human appeal, and the Empire, being the Empire, tended to lean towards more “refined” sports for “noble” men and women. Non-Human beings tended to get rounded up by the Empire at one point or another, especially when they were involved in any sport where they cheered on the underdogs.
Wouldn’t want people getting used to that. Palpatine really knows how to break people’s spirits, Kevv thought, rotating the hologram of the Racing Plains. He was examining the vast fields of ponds and lakes, zooming in on the Tall Cliffs, then gazing into the Black Tagladar Caves that wound labyrinthine underground and were prone to collapse—
“Echa kah’i pinda?” someone said gruffly.
Kevv glanced up at the Dug that had just wandered in on its upper limbs. The small, brown-skinned being glared at him with beady eyes that smiled over its long, fanged snout. Kevv knew a little of the Dug language, the fellow was asking if he was ready to go. “As I’ll ever be,” he said.
“Fo-fo oduhu millah,” the Dug replied: Then come this way.
Kevv switched off the hologram. He was only given five minutes to study the sanctioned route across the Pixelito Racing Plains before he had to get ready. That was how the sport was played now, much more daring, due to limited information of the route you’d be taking. The Dug, who was a Games Archon, led him out to the Racers’ Hall to join the others. Kevv followed him down a long, dark corridor, the walls lined by holograms of past winners of the Malastare Open, as well as portraits of Yanba the Hutt and all her descendants along the Desilijic kajidic. A Hutt clan was called a kajidic, and they were often long-lived and had vast-reaching power, with their fat little fingers spread into a number of sugar pots across the galaxy. Yanba the Hutt had been dead eight hundred years, but her kajidic had reigned supreme over Malastare for all that time.
Armed droids stared blankly at Kevv and the Dug as they stepped through a door and out into the bright, shining light of Striar, Malastare’s only sun. Both of the moons were also out, the red one peeking out cheekily from behind the yellow one. There were no clouds. The large ponds before him were calm and mirror-like, with a number of hovering, orb-shaped camera droids moving slowly over the waters. The ponds were scattered about randomly and stretched far into the horizon.
Tall, purple ileekchi grass grew between each body of water and undulated like seaweed in a current. Ileekchi grass was grass in name only—it was actually the hair follicles of hundreds of large odenars, hairless bantha-like creatures that hibernated below the surface during the summer. That grassy-like hair gave off electrical charges that could snatch anything from an insect to a bird out of the air, and reel it in beneath the soil to be devoured by the sleepy odenars.
The doorway Kevv had stepped through led to wide, pearl-colored stairs, and all around him were the old stone bleachers of a thousand-year-old coliseum. Once, these bleachers would have been packed with beings shoulder to shoulder. Now it wasn’t even at one-quarter capacity, but the people that were in attendance were Malastare’s richest sentients, all of whom were themselves doing something daring today: they were making a public appearance to view one of the galaxy’s rarest and most illegal sports, and should they be caught, they would all be sent to a spice mine.
“Edugi brunnishi opoya gurrg’ic ag-ta?” the Dug asked.
Kevv believed the Games Archon was asking if he had memorized the route across the Racing Plains. “I think I got it.”
The Dug only smiled and stroked his whiskers. You are doomed, foolish man, his eyes said.
All eyes were on Kevv as he made his way down to the starting line, where his podracer was waiting. Besides him, twenty other suicidal daredevils had shown up to this illegal gathering, all with pods of varying sizes, shapes and colors. He looked at all their faces. They each had only five minutes to study the route, just like him, and the nervousness on their faces showed that some were not at all sure they had adequately memorized it.
Everyone kept staring at him, including the six Hutts high up on the balcony, and the wealthy gamblers sitting in the stands.
Kevv knew why they were staring. He was the only Duros here, all the other beings were much smaller than him. Typically, podracing was only done by the smaller species—Ugnaughts, Dugs, Jawas—or else by extremely thin species, like Glymphids. Beings such as Humans, Twi’leks, and Duros were seen as having too burdensome bodies for the cramped confines of a pod’s cockpit.
And you wanted your pod to be small, if you were a serious podracer. For one, the turbine engines that pulled the pod were large on their own, and to go fast you did not want the engines laboring to pull a heavy pod. Secondly, you didn’t want your pod getting snagged on anything—going at such high speeds, it could easily mean dismemberment or death. So you wanted your pod to have a small profile. And finally, a small cockpit made the racer’s overall maneuverability, and the simple act of turning, much easier.
But there was a balance you had to strike, the perfect size and power of your turbines, in harmony with the size and shape of the pod. That meant if you wanted to do well at all, you could not be a large or bulky being.
Kevv had done some shopping around for the turbines, and once he had them, he knew exactly what kind of pod he wanted. In a way, he had been designing his own podracer his whole life, in his boyhood dreams, which most pilots kept close to their hearts well into adulthood. With the funds he had, he was able to afford a pair of red Radon-Ulzer 820D turbines, an upgrade of a type of turbine not seen in the sport since maybe the Boonta Eve Classic, which was some thirty-five years ago when a small Human child had won the Eve with them. They were smaller than most other turbine engines, and sometimes had trouble stalling out, but they gave enough pull in tight turns, and their light weight would compensate for the pod itself, which was a bit bulkier to accommodate Kevv’s size.
The entire thing was painted a dark red, with white letters in Aurebesh that gave it the name Cyndil. Most pod pilots did not name their racers, but Kevv was a former combat pilot, and combat pilots named everything, even if they kept that name a secret. It was just good luck. Like saying May the Force be with you.
“May the Force be with me,” he mumbled.
“Gentle-beings of all types!” a voice shouted over an intercom. The voice carried loud and clear across the tense morning air all around the coliseum, echoing across the Racing Plains. “The games are about to commence! At this time we ask that all your bets be finalized, and that you have your wager tickets in hand before the race starts!”
As Kevv pulled on his helmet, he watched the Games Archon give him a raised eyebrow, and heard him mutter something under his breath as he chuckled and walked away. Kevv had a feeling the Dug was saying something to effect that “This Duros is going to end up a dark spot on the downside of a canyon wall.” Kevv was not at all sure he was wrong.
Kevv put one foot inside the cockpit of his pod, then looked out across the Racing Plains, across that swaying ilkeechi grass and that endless series of ponds that disappeared at the horizon two kilometers away. And, just where those ponds terminated, the Tall Cliffs began. From what Kevv had seen in the holographic map, those cliffs were jagged and treacherous. And the caves beyond them were—
“Racers, start your engines!”
There was a series of explosions that made him jump. All around him turbine engines were detonating as their racers cued up power. Each pod and engine levitated, and the power couplings activated, and a thin, jagged line of purplish energy connected the two engines magnetically. Kevv could barely heard the excited roar of the crowd over the din of turbines. It’s so different. In space, there’s no sound but your instruments. He shook himself. You’ve run through the podrace simulators, and you ran a few test runs with this racer on Tatooine to prepare for this. You’re ready.
The crowd was on their feet, waving banners for the racer they were rooting for…or betting on.
“It looks like it’s going to be a fine, fine day for a bit of daring-do, gentle-beings!” the announcer called out. “You’ll notice we have Kalangnyro Teedus returning from last year’s near fatal crash against the Tall Cliffs! Oh, what a sport, what a sport! You’ll recall she was on her third and final lap when that power coupling failed her! Perhaps she’ll be able to reclaim her title this year against Iff Porhl, the upstart from Nar Shaddaa! That Porhl, he’s cutthroat! The racers will have to keep an eye out for him, won’t they, Olo?”
While the two announcers had their back-and-forth, Kevv looked at the two beings they were talking about. Teedus, a female Ugnaught, had a large, bulky pod, one that she used to bully and even sideswipe other racers. She was cunning and fearless, and her body was now riddled with artificial replacements that had helped her recover and get back into racing.
But Porhl, he was the truly lethal one. The male Chadra-Fan had not yet participated in a race where someone hadn’t died, and he had raced in over fifty races. In the old days, a racer was expected to die in perhaps one out of every ten or twenty races—but that was the old days. Now that the sport was fully illegal, killing an opponent was not such a terrible thing because, well, who were the Games Archons going to report it to? To report a death in one of the podraces you conducted was to admit you had conducted an illegal race.
The sport of podracing had never seen a deadlier era than this.
Before he squeezed into the cockpit, Kevv took one last look at the balcony twenty meters away, where the Hutts sat with several humanoid attendants all around them. One of those humanoids was counting on Kevv not to die.
Kevv folded himself tightly inside and strapped himself in. Tightly. The methane fumes from all the turbines filled his nose and he almost gagged. In his test drives of this racer, he had been disgusted by that smell, but it was nothing compared to all of these engines in a tight space at once. Coughing, he pulled on a rebreather to help with that, and he just knew the attendants watching on the droid cams would get a good laugh out of that.
Let ’em laugh. I’m the one’s gotta race to win.
Looking through the gate at the far end of the coliseum, and focusing on his objective, he said one more quick prayer. Then he activated the pod’s repulsorlift and cued up engines. His Radons thundered and spat exhaust back at him. The air around them shimmered and the pod levitated off the ground. He felt the vibrations of repulsor motors through the steering handles. The thin beam of energy that connected his Radons sputtered to life, and the nine-meter-long podracer surged forward unexpectedly. A warning came to his console, straight from the Games Archon, telling him it was forbidden to move his pod even an inch before the race begin. Another violation like that and he would be automatically disqualified.
It had been a slip of his hands. Nerves. Get it together, Kevv. Namyr’s counting on you.
Suddenly, horns played over loudspeakers.
Droids marched out in front of the racers, holding up the flags of Desilijic kajidic, as well as the symbols each racer had selected to represent his or her pod. Kevv had chosen the Sigil of Izrinoll, a goddess of flight once worshipped by his ancestors on Duro. After a minute, the droids cleared themselves off the track, and an IH-7 maintenance droid flew far, far out over the Racing Plains, hovered over one of the glimmering ponds, and extended a blaster. Its huge domed belly had three lights on it. Every engine around Kevv growled, beasts ravening for prey.
Kevv pulled on his piloting gloves and gazed at the horizon, at the Tall Cliffs.
The two orange lights on the IH-7 blinked—
“Dopa…” said a Hutt over the loudspeaker, beginning the countdown.
—the green light on the droid’s belly blinked once—
“Bo…” boomed the Hutt.
—the green light blinked once more—
“Nobo!”
The green light stopped flashing and the droid fired a single shot, and every racer sent his engines screaming to full power. Kevv shoved the accelerator forward and his spine was pressed into his seat with such force it felt like his whole body would break. He nearly blacked out.
* * *
Suddenly the ground all around him was soaring underneath him and dust was flying into his face, and it got worse once a green-and-black pod pulled in front of him and spewed its exhaust at him. Feeling like an idiot, Kevv reached up and flipped down his goggles—How in blazes did I forget those?—and throttled up the attenuator on his antigravs to adjust his pod’s height above the ground. The ilkeechi grass was a mite taller than he had predicted and the electrical follicles were already snapping blue arcs of energy at his pod and playing havoc with his controls as he flew over them. Already he saw Edri Lanosar, a Glymphid, lose all power and fall into the grass.
Kevv saw emergency vehicles rushing to save him, but he doubted they would make it in time before the electrical charges did Lanosar serious harm.
The podracer’s crash set off a chain reaction, and all the rest of the electric follicles now snapped and swirled like busted firehoses and tried to reach the racers. And now the racers smashed into one another, jockeying for position over the ponds and lakes—the small bodies of water were the only sanctuaries from the ilkeechi grass, and every player knew it.
A green racer ahead of him slashed across his path and bounced off the turbine of a white-and-yellow racer. The two of them grinded against one another until the green racer dipped too low and splashed through the water, shorting out the power coupling for a second and sending one of them sailing towards Kevv.
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Kevv throttled his racer up to maximum power and both his engines screamed like a buzzsaw grinding against metal. Smoke plumed out of the right one, but he got it under control with the flip of a switch, which activated an internal extinguisher. Then something scraped against his pod, and when he looked back he saw Teedus right behind him, the Ugnaught’s engines just now knocking at his door. Teedus sped up, and the horizontal line of energy that connected her turbines came so close they were soon to slash across Kevv’s pod.
Already at full speed, and with racers on both sides of him, he had nowhere to go. Nowhere but up. He didn’t want to do it, because he knew it would overload his power cells, but he ramped up the repulsor’s output and took himself twenty feet higher, allowed Teedus to pass underneath him. Once she was clear, Kevv lowered himself back down. It was no big deal right now, they still had three laps to go and no one was in the lead right now. The field was too cluttered, pilots trying to get themselves safely over a body of water, safely away from the grass.
Kevv tried to get out of the way of Teedus’s exhaust, and pulled over to a lake. For a minute he was alone, but then a purple racer, driven by a small droid, cut in front of him, and its turbines sent up water in its wake, water that completely drenched Kevv, blinding his goggles. He had to slow down to safely move to one side, and wipe his goggles clean.
He suddenly realized he was above the grass.
In a panic, he threw full power to his repulsors and elevated thirty feet, getting clear of the reaching electrical grass that suddenly grew to an unbelievable height. Arcs of blue electricity snapped all around him, temporarily overloading his cells before he came back down to a more reasonable altitude. For a few seconds, all he did was run through a series of system overrides, rerouting power from one place to another. This was an important part of the sport of podracing, the near constant maintenance being done on the fly.
Kevv looked up. Ahead, less than half a kilometer away, loomed the Tall Cliffs. They climbed jaggedly up from the ground, aspiring towards the heavens like wicked blades. He would need to be prepared for them once he got there.
Someone bumped him on his left. Looking, he saw Porhl there. The bat-faced Chadra-Fan gave a toothy smile, and came in again with another bump. Porhl’s sleek, knife-shaped engines and pod were fast and nimble. Kevv jinked left and right to avoid him, but it was no good, his smiling opponent zoomed behind him, then went above him and dropped in front of him before braking, forcing Kevv to swerve suddenly to avoid collision, almost losing power coupling cohesion as he sliced through the ilkeechi grass. Luckily, though, he made it over another small lake, and into the clear. Nothing below him now but water—
Porhl came at him again! The Chadra-Fan was really trying to wreck him!
But Kevv had a plan this time. He waited for his opponent to draw near, and kicked all power to thrust. Then Kevv threw full power to his repulsor and went high, letting Porhl overshoot him underneath, and nearly crash himself into the grass. Kevv nearly hit the same green racer as before, who had also gone high to avoid the mayhem below. He dropped halfway down, barrel-rolled underneath the green racer and slashed in front of Teedus just a moment before they reached the shadows of the Tall Cliffs.
* * *
Engines screamed in the tight confines of the rocky cliffs. There were numerous stone outcroppings, from which hung green and red homocho’lok moss, shimmering like glass, creating blinding after-images that confused Kevv’s eyes. But the most perilous terrain came from the ootomba trees; pointy, cone-shaped trees without branches, but with large nests of quad-winged eater-wasps that were each a quarter-meter in length. Their blue stingers could penetrate flesh, and even take a hunk of it back to their queen.
At first, Kevv saw no problem from the eaters, they simple buzzed out of the way of the racers all jockeying for position. And was glad for it, too, until at least one ootomba tree exploded and a swarm of the eaters took flight. They soared high, high above the canyon, swirling in such numbers that they half blotted out the sun for a moment, forming patterns that looked oddly symmetrical, even meaningful.
And then they dove down at the racers with the all the mindless need of drones programmed to defend a territory.
The first eater-wasps ahead of Kevv got sucked into his turbine engines and their guts were blown out the back, splashing across his face and almost causing a stall. More and more were drawn in, guts splattering across his neck and chest, the shrill sound of damaged engines and alarms filling his ears. His Radons kept on firing though, and thankfully none of the eaters’ entrails had blinded his goggles, else he would not have seen the sharp turn away from the trees and through the narrower path he had memorized from the holographic map moments ago.
An eater slashed towards him, opening its chitonous jaws and exposing rows of razor-sharp teeth. Kevv freed up a single hand to punch it out of the way, and he heard it give a squeal like a Gamorrean deprived of its lunch.
He heard an explosion. Glancing behind him, he saw the green racer had crashed, and a hundred eaters were descending on his racer.
No time to focus on that. He checked his power before advancing. Earlier, Porhl and Teedus had forced him to elevate himself, which drained his power cells. It would take some time before the cells were cooled down enough to do that again and still maintain balanced. He was near the back of the pack as they entered the Black Tagladar Caves.
* * *
The Tagladars were titanic creatures that had lived in Malastare’s prehistoric age. They had not walked the planet for millions of years, dead from a massive solar flare that stripped part of the planet’s atmosphere away. Their fossils had slipped beneath the surface of the primitive tarpits and fossilized, then been excavated by Dug archaeologists, but left in situ out of reverence for the extinct animals. The kilometers-long tunnels were the result of their kilometers-long fossilized ribcages, and those fossils were meant to be off-limits, practically sacred, but right now two dozen engines were screaming through them, flames erupting from the exhausts, filling up the hollow bellies of a dozen long-dead Tagladars.
Cyndil handled like a dream in Kevv’s hands, yet even the racer struggled to slip out of the way of an opponent, then slide backward hastily to let someone take the lead, barrel-roll out of the way of the stalactites that hung from the cave roofs like the teeth of a huge predator. Cyndil plunged down the gullet of the ancient Tagladar and slashed through a waterfall made of the previous day’s rainfall. An eater-wasp flashed across his field of vision, got sucked into his intake, and exploded. Its copper-tasting guts went across his rebreather, seeped in, and he gagged.
While cleaning it out, somebody else zoomed ahead of him, their engines on fire and the smoke filling his vision.
There were intermittent openings in the cave roof, subterranean veins that went all the way to the surface and let in shafts of sunlight and gave brief glimpses of ancient cave paintings left by ancient civilizations that first plundered these fossil-caves. That light also gave a view of Porhl and Teedus ahead of him, swapping hull paint as they scraped and rammed and shoved one another. Their debris came off in flecks of metal that slashed across Kevv’s turbines, and some small piece embedded itself in his right shoulder.
He let out a scream.
A ball of flame erupted from a gray racer’s turbines beside him, and the racer fell back to take care of the problem. Kevv’s own engines were redlining. He flipped a switch to dump the emergency coolant into the systems, then upped the power to the thrusters and established equilibrium with the power coupling before steam shot out of his left turbine. As he passed through another waterfall, he turned off the primary radiator, and that seemed to do the trick, and then switched on the backup.
“Got it!” he shouted triumphantly, his words stolen by the roaring racers. “You got it, Kevv! You got—”
From behind came another explosion. Kevv looked back in time to see a blue racer collide with a purple-and-white racer. The blue smashed into a piece of the Tagladar’s ribcage, ricocheted off a stalagmite, and shattered.
Porhl and Teedus’s battle ended with the Chadra-Fan falling back, a geyser of lubricants splashing from the engines and splattering the walls. Porhl was screaming in rage, likely cursing his machine, even as he fell behind Kevv.
There came a long, sustained left turn, through what would have been the throat of the ancient Tagladar, and one of the racers ahead of him clipped a stalagmite, careened into another tunnel, and vanished. The turn became tighter and tighter, and Kevv’s Cyndil was one of the few racers that could hang. He was pressed into the right side of his cockpit as the turn continued to curve, seemingly infinite.
A gout of flame shot from Kevv’s right engine, the extinguishers did their job and put it out, but the smoke was pouring into his face. His rebreather kept him from choking, but he could barely see.
Another eater-wasp smacked into him and its stinger stabbed towards his face. Kevv jerked his head to one side, just in time to prevent his skull from being impaled. The insect’s stinger embedded in the headrest of his seat before it ripped away and flew off.
“Dank ferrik!” he cursed. “Who the blazes thought up this sport?!” He was now reconsidering his boyhood dream of podracing.
A warning bleated out like a klaxon and he saw he was redlining again.
Kevv slowed down, but that was fine. There was a cave painting on his right he had memorized from the interactive holomap. It meant that—
Yes! There it is!
A new tunnel opened on the right, one that Kevv knew would act as a shortcut for this route. He didn’t think many of the other racers would think to use it, since the tunnel would only be accessible to both a narrow pod and a slim set of turbines—and while the other pilots were smaller species with smaller pods, they had also used bigger engines. Whereas Kevv’s Radons were slim, and the power coupling could be adjusted to bring the engines closer together.
He turned left, shot down the shortcut, and was just congratulating himself on a job well done when he noticed two other racers on his tail, taking the same shortcut. One of them immediately crashed into a portion of the Tagladar’s ribcage, managed to slow down safely, but was effectively out of the race.
The other pilot on his tail was Porhl.
* * *
They banked left and right, psyching each other out, and Kevv fought to keep Porhl from taking the lead too easily. His plan was to let the dangerous Chadra-Fan get the lead eventually, but he had to make the guy work for it, had to make him spend time and energy and power cells to do it. Once they hit an incline, and Cyndil started upwards, Kevv faked an engine malfunction and moved to one side, so that he could fall back and let Porhl go. Porhl smiled at him as he raced past.
They both shot out of the mouth of a tunnel on the side of a large, rocky hill. Kevv sailed high over the ground for several hundred feet, from shear momentum, before gravity asserted itself and pulled him down. The repulsor was adjusted to keep him just one meter above the ground, and it felt like he landed on an invisible cushion. Porhl was racing well ahead of him, turning his whole racer briefly sideways to go between a pair of enormous rock columns. Kevv imitated him, but let the Chadra-Fan stayed in the lead.
They rocketed through the Tall Cliffs, watching other racers that had taken the longer route fall in behind them. Way behind.
They stayed like this for two more kilometers, each racer taking this long stretch of uneventfulness to perform more maintenance, reroute power to key systems, and replace circuits with the spares in the glove compartment.
They passed the cone-shaped ootomba trees and more eaters slashed out at them, but since Kevv and Porhl were both at the head of the pack, the flying insects were only able to assemble into a swarm to attack those at the rear.
Which gives us an even bigger lead.
Indeed, the race was effectively down to just him and Porhl now, and as they approached the starting line to complete the first lap, and he heard the cacophony of an excited crowd, he knew he was now in the greatest danger. Any racer left to battle Porhl increased their risk of fatality by a large percentage.
* * *
The next lap was mostly uneventful, with Porhl seeing what he could get away with by getting in front of Kevv and braking, making him turn away hard to avoid collision. And Kevv, for his part, would throw all power to the repulsor and elevate, fly over the Chadra-Fan, and then drop all power like he was going to land on the guy. Porhl resorted to throwing random metal tools! The mean son of a Hutt was actually just actively sabotaging him, “pulling a Sebulba” they called it, where he tried to get in front of Kevv and throw wrenches and hammers into Cyndil’s engines.
One of those wrenches went in, and it caused the left engine to stall for thirty seconds. Kevv’s speed was cut by half, and he watched in frustration as Porhl made it into the Black Tagladar Caves a full fifteen seconds before Cyndil was even operational again.
They both took the shortcut again, and they both wended their way through the narrow passage at the Tall Cliffs, but Porhl managed to increase his lead, thanks to yet another overheated system in Kevv’s right engine. But Kevv caught a break just after he passed the coliseum for his second lap—Porhl’s racer nicked a stalactite in the caves (Kevv suspected he had seen his only true rival catching up to him, and had tried to break off a piece of the stalactite so that it would hit Kevv, but it backfired), and the impact sent Porhl slewing and fighting against his controls.
When they emerged back onto the surface, they were neck and neck all the way through the Tall Cliffs. All of Cyndil’s systems were strained to the limit, Porhl was still creeping ahead, he had to do something fast. This was the last lap!
A droid cam shot in front of them, no doubt trying to get a good view of the close finish. Or to see how Porhl is going to finish me off. No sooner had he thought it than once again the Chadra-Fan pitched hard to the left and their two pods slammed into one another. Porhl spat—he actually spat—a huge gob at Kevv, trying to blind his goggles, but the spittle was caught on the roaring wind and carried away instantly.
Porhl was desperate, and a desperate Porhl was a dangerous Porhl.
Kevv had only one trick left.
He cut off all power.
Porhl went shooting ahead, laughing madly.
Kevv let his racer come to an almost perfect standstill. All systems were redlined. Steam and smoke poured out of the racer’s every orifice. A fire had started in engine number two. Both emergency radiators were busted. He rerouted all power to a single system. From the side of each engine emerged two quad Ylgx-10 afterburners. It took an incredible amount of power just to switch them on, and after about eighty or ninety seconds, they would melt down both engines and make them completely unusable. A completely stupid move for a competitive racer with long-term goals of becoming a champion; the upkeep on podracers was expensive, and you needed them to last you through an entire tournament season.
But Kevv had no such long-term goals. He only need to win this race, and no other.
He removed his rebreather and put in his mouthpiece to bite down on. This was going to hurt. He might even black out.
He ramped up power, and the afterburners got him moving. He was slowly pressed back into his seat until the count of ten. Then, taking a deep breath, he threw the switches that dumped every bit of remaining energy and fuel.
He blacked out—
—for only two or three seconds, and then he was back, his hands reaching hard for the controls. The detonation of all afterburners deafened him and the heat coming off them made it feel like his skin was cooking. It felt like noon on top of a Tatooine sand dune. The Tall Cliffs went by him in three seconds. All of them, just gone by in a blur. The Racing Plains were once more before him and he saw Porhl approaching the finish line. Porhl’s racer was a dot on the horizon, then fist-sized, then right beside him, and then long gone, distantly behind him in the span of twenty seconds.
The whole world became a blur. The ilkeechi grass and the ponds all melded together in one image. He heard nothing but the roar of the wind and the afterburners. And he watched as the afterburners started to glow red. Then both his engines glowed yellow, then red, then exploded into fire.
The finish line came up far too fast, and he slammed on the reverse-thrusters before he passed through the gate of the coliseum.
Once more, he blacked out, and for a much longer period this time. He opened his eyes briefly to see the blurry, feminine image racing towards him. A Human woman pulling on his seat restraints and yanking him out of the fiery wreckage…
* * *
Darkness. Cold. Weightlessness. The taste of recycled air. Pain, but also pleasure. He tried moving and found there was no floor, no ceiling, no bed. He opened his eyes and found his vision was blurred. Namyr was in front of him but her image was distorted through glass.
Kevv looked around at himself. He was floating, naked except for a slim cloth around his waist. The tingling sensation all over his body was coming from the healing bacta. He was inside a tank filled with the stuff.
Namyr gave him a thumbs-up. He smiled behind his breathing mask and returned the gesture.
* * *
When he woke up, he was staring into the face of a familiar saving angel. Namyr Abjura, codename Mordenta, stood over him. The Human female’s hair was short and dyed black, and she wore an elegant blue evening gown that somewhat clashed with her muscular features. She also smelled of berries and jasmine, some kind of perfume. Most unlike her. Bleary-eyed, Kevv looked up at her and said, “Did we do it?” At least, that’s what he meant to say, the words came out “Deeewweduuhwwhittt?”
“You did it, my friend,” she said, and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah. And I think Mon Mothma’s going to be very happy with you. Might even give you another one of those medals you can never show anybody.”
A cup of water was at his lips. He sipped it, coughed, and cleared his throat. Looking around, he found himself lying on a sofa in an apartment, richly appointed, with a large bay window overlooking Pixelito’s metropolitan skyline. The sun was setting. How long was I out? “Did…” He felt a bit dizzy, and reached out to touch Namyr’s arm to steady himself. “Did…did we get it?”
“The Hutts were very happy to see someone finally beat Porhl,” she said, kneeling in front of him. “They bet against him, and you helped them win big. And this kajidic can be expected to keep its promises, as long as you make them money. And you made them a lot of money today, Kevv. You were…fantastic. I don’t mind saying you had me a little worried when you were…well, never mind, it’s over now.”
“So, we did get it,” he wanted to confirm.
Namyr smiled, and pulled out a datachit. “Signed, sealed and delivered. The hyperspace route to Ossus, and the coordinates to the Great Jedi Library buried beneath the surface.” She placed it in his hand, and that made it real. It made all their work for the last year suddenly worth it. “Have you ever wanted to visit a four-thousand-year-old tomb on a lost planet?”