Flight of the 500, page 16
Then—to find Carter.
“We saw everything unfold,” Harrison said. “You and Carter’s final maneuver. Based on our scopes, looks like he cleared out those bogeys waiting at the finish line. We lost track of him after that, though.”
The kilometers between the two ships decreased quickly, the Juniper and Vindicta aching to reunite. Nothing could stop them. Nothing.
Appearing out of Jump, a craft Raith instantly recognized, alongside four other fighters, appeared.
Olive. She’d finished her race.
There was no time to react. The fighters fired, kinetics and missiles, all blasting apart the Juniper in an orb of crimson fire. It faded all too soon, signaling the final deaths of Raith’s newest crew.
Raith’s heart melted.
Seconds later, a plasma burst sliced through the wing of the Vindicta.
Darkness. Darkness all around. Raith floated thousands of kilometers above the planet, his mind watching the scene.
The moment plasma blasted through the Vindicta, the ship immediately ejected his capsule, its compartment flying at an infinitely tiny fraction of the speed of light away from the soon-to-be fireball.
As if disconnected from it all, the vacuum of silence surrounding him, he observed Olive’s fighters dance around the wreckage, presumably searching for survivors. He, instead, sat hundreds of kilometers away, watching. Whatever the Vindicta had done, the escape procedure evidently wasn’t something of which Olive had been aware. Just like the ship’s ability to arc around the black hole, she hadn’t known more than a few things about the ship, contrary to her arrogance. If Erika and Donyi installed the feature, he now owed even more to them.
So he watched. Hours passed.
Her ships left.
And he waited.
The battle ended, ICH forces pushing away the Conglomerate.
And still, he watched. Waited. Survived.
Alone.
Even though he believed all was clear, he sat, in low power mode, observing the fight all around. More importantly, he mourned. Mourned Erika and Donyi, more so than he’d mourned them over the past months. He mourned Hector and his old crew; hell, he mourned crews from centuries past. All gone. He was alone, again, as always.
Perhaps today could serve as a fitting end. His final day, racing, fighting for those he loved. Carter must have died in the battle. If not, Raith hoped he escaped to safety. The man deserved to live a long life, exploring and racing across the galaxy. These factions and their wars . . . what was humanity becoming? For centuries, SIs and humans had navigated the ever-evolving politics of interstellar space with kid-gloves, but what did the battle today mean?
To Raith, nothing. He didn’t care about political beliefs, economic goals, power grabs. None of it mattered. His life—the lives of his friends—living and loving together? Screw the powers-that-be and their silly wars. Why did it matter who controlled the most sophisticated quantum communications technology? Or who owned the most advanced SI-ready racing ship in the galaxy. Raith wanted to spit at them all. Their conflicts only got good people killed.
Even so, the whole past year? Truly worth it. He raced again. He met four wonderful people, all devoted to him even when he’d been an ass. And Carter, of course. If only he could have had another day with Carter.
Lingering in the back of his mind, too—the behemoth. Somehow, he was one of the lucky few to witness it. While in transit toward S-1022, he and Carter focused on the race, not talking about the thing. But certainly, the man realized what it was too. If not, Raith would die with one regret. They shared that moment, together, witnessing something beyond all comprehension of humanity’s biologists. No one else could claim a similar shared experience.
Hours turned into days. The system became a graveyard, ships darting about on salvage operations overseen by the ICH. Still, no one approached his wreckage after Olive picked it over and escaped. Depending on who she really worked for, maybe she had labeled it as “Conglomerate” debris and cleared it of survivors, signaling the ICH that it was of no concern. If so, he was doomed to a slow orbital death, eventually falling to the surface of the planet below.
He would embrace his fate.
He had lived his meaningless life, finding his own way in the void. He had found love with friends over the years, and companionship. And he’d thrown it all away, in the past. When he went to prison. He was happy and content with what he had made of his second chance at freedom.
Finally, Raith pushed out of the little capsule, exposing his synthetic body to the raw vacuum of space. He had lived in space for most of his life; he would end it there, too.
Alas, an end was not in the cards.
Raith floated, arms spread, drifting in the void. But only a few minutes after escaping his capsuled prison, floodlights from a nearby ship illuminated every centimeter of his body.
Powering up all his faculties, he recognized an incoming connection request from the nearby vessel. “This is . . . Raith,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“You really thought you could just float about out here without me? The Bloodhound’s in need of a new crewmember, and I think you might want to hop aboard.”
Carter.
It was Carter.
“My friend, I could kiss you,” Raith said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, you need to make it through the airlock first.” A pause. “I can’t believe I found you. I’ve been searching since the battle ended. Raith . . . I thought you were dead.”
After everything, after the entire race, after losing everyone.
He was home.
Thank you for reading Flight of the 500!
Flight of the 500 is a stand-alone novel set in the same universe as two of my other novels: First of Their Kind and Their Greatest Game, the first two books of the Chronicles of Theren. I hope you enjoyed the tale as much as I enjoyed writing this wild ride. As an independent author, every review matters; please consider reviewing the novel on the websites of major retailers, your blog, or Goodreads. And please! Tell your friends about Flight of the 500.
To read more from the Chronicles of Theren and join my SciFi & Fantasy Readers Group, you can download a copy of Before Inferno, the secret prequel to First of Their Kind, for free.
I look forward to the next time you dive into one of my stories!
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C. D. Tavenor, Flight of the 500
