I crossed right over the top of the death hauler, sunroof sliding open. Not even looking up/down as Wobbler aimed, I dumped a Sun Shot into the fuel core of the flamethrower. Yeah, that petrol looks pretty, but it’s pretty explosive, y’know?
The fire-tosser screamed, and then it blew, brushing past me as Joy completed her rollover on the opposite side of the truck, hit the ground, bounced, gripped, and redirected momentum forwards as the back of the kill-rig was enveloped in flames, and several flaming individuals were ejected from their shooting positions.
It was fortunate they hadn’t thought a roof was all that important right there, just shooter platforms...
I doubted this guy had learned his lesson, and he had to be extra pissed that I’d just blown up all his shooters, even as the coms whooped with glee and the crowds went nuts.
Now, being he was a cheaty-type for the track owners, he’d get warnings of the triggers, and actually wouldn’t trigger them with his rig. That was blatantly unfair, but the Killer Whale was there to kill, not to be killed. It also bred a certain complacency, as since he didn’t have to worry about them, he wasn’t as concerned about where he was on the road.
Driving a great big flaming load of naptha, he veered at me, and Joy nimbly danced inches in front of his prow-blades, sending up a few sparks, her tail wagging and suddenly dancing into a wild spin right in front of his eyes, across his field of vision.
Like any good hunter, he veered after me, ignoring the trigger warning as I spun across the trigger with all four tires, just like I had with Drum-Drum.
I was three-quarters of the way through my spin when I saw his head jerk up at the collision alert, and SNAP, the Wall went up across the center lane, missing my ride by about a quarter-inch as it did so.
Yeah, that was three feet of durasteel, just a big ass slab of metal. It wasn’t moving for nothing, and they couldn’t stop it from going up in time.
His prow spikes bit in a good six inches, but that didn’t mean shit. He went from eighty to nothing in no time, and had all that steel behind him wanted to keep going, too. I saw the shock gel go off as I completed my spin, my tires gripped, and the back of the Killer Whale rose him up and over and came down on him in a great flaming mess as it ripped him over the Wall, and ground him down along the road beneath fire and steel.
I fishtailed back into the center lane as the rest of the pack came up behind me. They couldn’t hide their cheers, because that was a damn awesome sight, and now the track owners were going to be pissed at me.
Fuck ’em, I needed the Karma, and they were all killers, they got what was coming to them. They’d probably try to kill Fyr after the race was over... but hey, that was even more Karma, and they weren’t expecting a Driver to be a swordswoman, even though they knew I could shoot.
My Six needed Karma as much as my main self, especially if I was going to cut them free. I couldn’t do it right now, the link was so strong that it didn’t even need the Marks to maintain itself now. But I figured if I could get these thoughtstreams up to the 30 Charisma, get them to Ten, and cut the Marklink as I went into their past lives, they’d be able to stand alone outside the link with their own souls and identity given extra force by accessing all those extra years.
I didn’t mean to take their lives, and even if I enjoyed being multiples of me, I considered it wasn’t right, and they’d certainly be more productive independently than as extra hands for me.
Maybe. In any event, I agreed with myselves that it was the right thing to do, and would be trying it when my Karma got up there. If it didn’t, darn, I guess there’d just be seven physical me’s to complement the extra six or so mental ones currently in my ExLite head...
Anyways, I had a race to finish. I’d already done the research on the drivers, and only two of the sixteen who started this race weren’t hardened killers, and were driving for reasons other than killing ruthlessly for the prize money.
I’d be doing my best to make sure they finished the race with me, but I was still going to win.
Joy rumbled and peeled out ahead, as gunfire started to ring on my tailshield again, and the wolves chased my white rabbit as I peeled back a smile to reveal my canines.
They weren’t packing holy hand grenades...
------------------
Janus Prime, as befits a mega-city, had a metric arse-load of roads, and all of it was run by the fine folk at Traffic Control.
First you had the subways, the massive transport tubes moving people and freight around below ground. What could be pumped and piped was, but some shit needed rails and roads, and so a lot of stuff moved belowground in massive amounts, shuttling stuff around.
Then there were the roadways at ground level. Public transport was part of this, high-speed rails shooting the length of the city with people moving between distant bloks and factories who couldn’t be bothered to keep going up and down bloks and Spires. There was plenty of civilian traffic at ground level, but TC kept it carefully free of the rails and high-speed lanes. If you wanted to cross them without TC’s permission, well, it was all on you, baby. TC proudly kept lists of the idiots who thought the traffic was going to stop for them, and you could access them and make bets on which freight haulers would have the best numbers over a period of time.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Freight Engine GR00-76XC, ‘the Sexy Groot’, had won that competition ten times in the past century, thanks to the route that took it between three high-density bloks and a major interchange into Downspire, and the total lack of fences along that route as enthusiasts kept tearing them down to keep the kill numbers up. Engine SU-I3D188, ‘Suicide 8’, was the most popular train-kissing target in the city, generally getting half a dozen a day trying to make the biggest splatter possible.
Higher up were the pedways, which were strung halfway up Bloks, and across the roofs of lower Habs, moving people around the city through and between the buildings, without allowing major cars and freight, despite the pleas of many corps to add pipes and whatnot to the many foot routes. There were parallel access roads to many of them for Juris bikes, but non-officials using them were generally headed to iso for a few months to think about stupid life choices. Such pedways formed a pretty complex spiderweb between the various habs, bloks, and Spires, and you could generally tell how good a blokzone was doing just by the extent of the pedways. Old districts, or those ready for rehab, often didn’t have any at all, removed so low-lifes couldn’t get into Spires or Bloks easily.
Between the pedways and the ground were the hoverzones, basically reserved to hovercars and hoverbikes zipping about on private business. A second set of hoverzones existed between the pedways and the highways, the great roads that existed just above the Blok roofs, who often formed its foundation supports. Low hoverzones ran east and west, high hoverzones ran north and south. Traffic control was a little bit looser in the hoverzones, so a lot of boarders, bikers, and enthusiasts took matters into their own hands. This inevitably ended up in collisions with Bloks and other drivers, and hovercars falling from the sky onto the unlucky below, but that was the price you paid for flying around and not using TC.
The highways were big roads going the whole length and breadth of the city, with only a few major gravity ramps for getting on and off located around major bloks or in the spires themselves. For the most part, vehicles on the highways basically never came down to the ground, and pretty much all the midspire and high-end Blok traffic was on them, along with personal transports to and from a lot of spires.
They also had populations of people who literally lived on them. The major highway, a macroway that circled the entire city, was called the Big Mac, and was a quarter-mile wide, with whole communities of people living there on moving buildings, mobile homes that stayed mobile, with moving stores, lots of drone deliveries, and whole communities of riders and drivers going in endless circles around the Big Mac. Fusion power meant they didn’t need to be refueled, and energy wasn’t a problem. It was a nomadic lifestyle of sorts for people who couldn’t be cooped up in a blok, and if their personal gilded cage was moving, they didn’t have any trouble with it.
Above them were the skyways, the Spire-centered traffic coming and going between the biggest pillars of the city. This was where all the big flying stuff was: expensive shuttles, personal jets, floaters, yachts, and the like. Juris drones operated in the area between the skyways and the highways, looking over everything, while a combination of teams waiting on standby near the Spires and active hoverwagons in the skies were deployed to be ready to intervene in anything exciting going on.
Only military clearance got you higher than the skyways, and really, there was no need to go higher. The skyways weren’t that heavily clustered, as the money needed to use them was right there with the actual need. The skyways were almost for vanity, but the top families had to look down on stuff, and so the skyways and the expensive cargos that used them were definitely a thing.
Most of the air-racing took place in the hoverzones.
Hoverzones covered almost a thousand feet vertical, giving racers plenty of room to maneuver, and the areas between habs were generally a hundred yards wide, giving them plenty of horizontal room, too (and the ones that weren’t were exciting choke points). Pretty much all you had to do to set up a formal race was let Traffic Control know, pay the fee, and they’d route normal traffic around your race course. Putting up the obstacles, gates, and whatnot was on you, of course, and you were liable for any damages that happened during the course of your race.
Getting hab and Blok permission was pretty much a given, as the residents often had front-row seats to the excitement, and seeing out of control riders go crashing into a balcony and take out some watchers was part of the fun. TC didn’t really care... you wanted to spectate, you took your life in your hands. The soylent wagons were always in motion, after all.
This, of course, was where Azure loved to be.
There were races pretty much every day in Janus Prime. It was a big city, after all, with a whole lot of people starved for entertainment, and if it was deadly and potentially explosive, all the better.
Azure was Born To Fly. Wingsuits, hoverbikes, hoverboards, flitters, hang gliders, rocketpacks, grav-choppers, even hoverboats, whatever; she was born to race them, and rapidly had her own crew making up spec-worthy and -breaking rides for her to use in all of those things. As her Crafting focus was Avionics of all sorts, I was constantly building and rebuilding her rides, shifting from one race to the next, going from combat wingsuit paragliding one day to jet-propelled hang gliders the next.
Risk and rewards drove the Karma as she was going up the racing scale, already making a name, qualifying for bigger events, attracting sponsors and attention from the gambling syndicates who were starting to eye her as good money for fixing races.
She had only smiles for those trying to strongarm her, and then they tended to get violently dead. The number of would-be saboteurs going after her crew and rides was closing in on three digits steadily, and the competitive pressure was pushing her crew to the limit, too. Of course, with her fans doing nothing but growing, the blue-haired nymphal was gaining her own recruits, and her organization and trainees were expanding as a result.
Getting into combat aircraft would require her to be in the military, all other things being equal, and I was definitely looking forwards to that.
In the meantime, prize money and enemy crews cheating flagrantly made for exciting good times, and the occasional sniper or suicide racer helped. The challenge of cutting-edge tech at the various levels as she and the crew ranked up only made what came next more fun, and racing against wired borgs jacked into their rides as bodies all the more challenging.
It was fine. The more cybered they were, the lower their potential was, and while they could perform simple tricks ever more perfectly, the physics-defying crap grew ever more beyond them.
And hey, blue hair flying in the wind, Azure looked a lot better than they did, too!