Flight of the 500, page 5
Alarms blared, the simulation ended. Fatal error. The four ships on his tail zipped straight through the checkpoint.
“What the actual—”
“Those two planets,” said a voice, “have an extra-orbital of moons given their combined mass.”
“I told you not to watch my simulations,” Raith said, disconnecting from AR.
“And I’m not.” Bonta stepped into the room. “I’m watching the data from your simulations. And I know the course. I’ve studied every kilometer of it for the past three years.”
“Have you flown it? Even in a simulation?”
“No, but it’s all—”
“Then I don’t want to hear it.” Raith pushed past the other SI and into the freighter’s corridor. They were a day out from S-1022, a day out from having a station on which he could escape these four annoying fools. Thinking they were better than him, knew how to fly, what he needed to do to win. He was Raith, the most decorated racer in a century.
“You agreed to work with us,” Bonta said. “We’re here to help.”
Raith turned, pointing a metallic finger in the SI’s blinking blue eyes. “I’ve told you how you can help.”
“And we’ve told you how we can help.”
Raith barreled into the lounge where Donyi and Erika sat sprawled on a couch, watching a soap opera. “I’m not sure what you expect me to tell you, Bonta. I’ve always flown on my own. It’s my thing.”
“That’s not true and you know it.” Harrison’s voice echoed down the hall, most likely from the kitchen. “You had a crew.”
“Don’t you talk about them.”
Bonta raised their hands in placation. “Look, we’re not trying to replace Hector and—”
“Don’t you say their names!”
“—the rest, but we know as much if not more than them about how these ships work, what this course is going to be—”
Raith lashed out, curled fingers slamming into Bonta’s chestplate. “I said don’t say their . . .” he held back the rest of the sentence.
The other SI stood its ground, unmoved by the punch. “I’ll ignore that.”
“We land in twenty-four hours,” Raith said, backing away. “When we land, I’m heading straight to the bar. Don’t follow me.”
S-1022: suspiciously well-populated for an unnamed system. The Juniper dropped out of Jump three thousand kilometers out from their destination, and as sensors brought in updated data, the ship received com traffic and engine vectors from throughout the system. Raith watched it all from his room, content to avoid the crew until they landed.
Thousands of ships darted about from dozens of space stations spread throughout the orbitals of the system’s twelve planets. QuanCom’s Race Hub orbited S-1022-C, the third planet and a rocky chunk without an atmosphere. The Hub was massive—at least ten kilometers in diameter—and most vectors moved between it and other destinations. Raith pulled up data on the other stations . . . of course. Party boats for the wealthy, waiting for the race to begin.
Less than an hour later, the Juniper contacted the Hub’s transit authority, and they received a berth in one of its immense hangars. When an alert chimed, notifying him they were locked in and landed, Raith darted out his room, not pausing in the lounge to speak with his “crew,” and headed down a ramp not even fully extended. To their credit, his four shipmates said nothing, letting him leave. Better that way. They needed to stay out of his way.
Reaching the hangar floor, he glanced up, noting Vindicta still safely attached to the Juniper’s hull. He was already going through the AR motions of scheduling a practice run outside. He ached for the opportunity to fly the thing for real, rather than in simulation. Once he actually flew it for real, he’d iron out the kinks and figure out how to nail the sections of the course he kept screwing up.
Their hangar was massive, though it looked like they shared it with a few other teams. Raith gazed around, noting three racing pinnaces each as beautiful as his own. Crews darted about, finishing paint jobs and tuning thrusters. Exo fuel canisters lined the walls, ready to replenish Jump-cores between practices runs and laps. Raith’s olfactory sensors kicked in, and copious amounts of ozone and neon filled the air. The elements’ presence reminded him of the good old days.
With a casual gait, Raith strolled through the hangar, heading toward its exit a few dozen meters away. No one paid him any attention—just another SI in a sea of faces—and he passed through the door, his already-cleared credentials logging his arrival at the Hub. He’d filed all the registration paperwork while in-transit. As he walked, he pulled up a list of the racers already approved for qualification. Four hundred and sixty confirmed participants, with another seventy awaiting acceptance. So there’d be a bubble for qualifying, if they kept their goal of five hundred racers at the start. Bubbles always made things interesting. Qualifying became more aggressive.
He searched the list, hoping he’d recognize a few names. Felix. Familiar—an SI from Mars, Raith was pretty certain they raced half a century ago. Xi Kim—nope. Sanderson—nope. Carter Ricks—nope. Eduardo—he stopped. Eduardo Gueirez . . . Carlos. Of course. The Gueirez mentioned in the bar when he first left prison? A new Gueirez.
He’d known a Gueirez. He’d lost his last race to a Carlos. There’d always been rumors the two racers were romantically involved, but . . . how old could this son be? The names were common. Could be someone else. He added an extra query for the racers bio.
Twenty-one years. Eduardo Gueirez-Carlos was the son of Victor Gueirez and Husan Carlos. Victor hadn’t been in the last Solar Sprint, but Husan Carlos was a dick. His son couldn’t be any more polite. This race just kept getting better and better.
He kept searching, hoping no other past-triggering names showed up. He searched “Kana” just for good measure, in case the racer had a relative with a grudge against him, but the query returned no results. At least he wouldn’t have to face a jury of angry fans targeting him—alongside an obsession for whomever their new love was—for accidentally killing their former hero. Well, anything was possible. Race fans had a long memory.
But Gueirez-Carlos? He might be a problem.
Lost in his thoughts, Raith absent-mindedly walked right into the bar, following the directions overlaid on his HUD. As he opened the door, a cacophony of sounds erupted and overwhelmed his perceptions. Nothing like the Rusty Convict back on Dagestan, the tavern, named the Lightspeed Café, apparently housed every person on the station and then some. Packed to the brim, racers and engineers shouted for their drinks. In booths along the wall, parties clamored over each other’s voices. In the back, a dance floor erupted and pounded to the sound of the techno-babble currently known as “music.” SIs and humans gyrated in sync with one another, their bodies entangled in a web so dense it was impossible to know who was with whom.
Raith approached the bar, accessing its menu. Skipping past the drink, he paid the SI visiting fee without looking at its price, charging it to the Juniper’s accounts. He assumed One Synthetic was picking up all expenses, including his social sojourns. He’d make certain of it, because he planned on visiting the bar quite a bit.
His charge approved, Raith moseyed about without worrying about a bouncer taking unwarranted notice. This was his crowd. His people. Racers and their crews, mingling without a care for the worries of the ICH or any governmental body. They flew for the thrill of it, and then afterward, they reminisced. He bobbed his head. Above one bar, an old-time series of screens played vintage recordings of twentieth and twenty-first century circuits. Indianapolis. Daytona. Monaco. Le Mans. And was that . . . he chuckled. The old wonky in-atmosphere races from the early decades of the twenty-first, back on Earth. Such pitiful competitions, though hilarious to watch.
Passing the bars, Raith reached a room off to the side with a dozen or so green, visually empty tables. As he walked under an arched threshold, AR kicked in, revealing the colored cards in players’ hands and cascading dice bouncing along randomly generated paths. If the bar was home, this was his playground.
Without pausing, he approached an open seat at one of the poker tables. The virtual dealer nodded to him, and he squeezed in between two human men engrossed in the game. As cards appeared in hand, their values visible only to him, the men nodded, welcoming him without words. His other competitors were two women paying more attention to each other’s faces than their chips, and an SI who looked bored out of—he checked for pronouns—her mind.
Raith threw in a hundred, giving him a hundred chips. The blind was five, and he called it immediately after seeing his cards. A king and a queen gave him plenty of options.
“Pot’s good,” said the SI, after glancing down at her cards.
Three cards flipped, revealing a five of diamonds, three of hearts, and a ten of clubs. Apparently, none of the cards worked for anyone else, for they all checked around the table. A jack flipped, and Raith laughed. Of course his first hand sets him up for a classic risk. A roughly one-in-thirteen chance an ace flipped, but . . . it was worth a shot. “Twenty,” he said when it was his turn.
No one looked up from their cards, though signals through AR noted all but one of the women called. The next card flipped. Ace of diamonds. “All in,” he said.
In turn, each of his opponents looked at him with bemusement, but one of the men called while everyone else folded. He’d clearly been sitting there for a few hours; his pot ranged somewhere close to a thousand. Cards flipped, Raith won, and his spirits rose. “This is going to be a good night,” he said. No one responded. “For me,” he added.
Another few hands passed without much fanfare, and the lack of engagement from his fellow players started to annoy Raith. This wasn’t what he remembered. Where were the jeers? The jovial jabs? Probably just a bad table. He prepared to check out and switch tables—his winnings so far would allow him a buy-in with a higher stakes table—when footsteps clattered from behind.
“Well look wha’ we ’ave ’ere,” said a voice.
Swiveling in his chair to find the newcomer, Raith twisted face-to-face with Eduardo Gueirez-Carlos. Great. He turned back to his table.
“Look everyone!” Eduardo’s slurred voice revealed his lack of sobriety. “We got oursel’es a relic! It’s Raith, back from the dead!”
Without looking away from his cards, Raith said, “I was never dead, Eduardo.”
“Oh right, but you were dead to your fans. What’s the difference?”
Raith splayed his fingers on the table, his cards momentarily fading from AR. He needed to let the words go. Jumping back into the racing world had opened him up for these attacks. An acceptable risk.
“I’m surprised they let you in,” Eduardo added. “Not because of your crimes. You did your time. You know, because you’re not even a racer anymore. Twenty years”—he hiccupped—“without a race?”
Raith clicked cash out, forfeiting the chips on the table. He stood, turning to face his verbal assailant. “You look at me, boy. You say those words to my face.”
“Heh. You. Can’t. Race.”
Raith laughed. “And neither could your fathers.” He was baiting him now, knowing what the boy would say next. He didn’t care.
“Oh old man, is that what you told yourself these past twenty years when you tried to dream away every race you cooked?”
Raith glanced toward the poker room’s entrance, where a large, straight-shirted man pushed his way through the crowd toward them. “I was able to cook those races,” Raith said, “because I could fly. I did what your parents wished they could do. Every racer wished. I just got sloppy.”
“Or maybe because you made a few mistakes that put you on the wrong side of the road, we hear.” Raith now noticed the three other men standing around Eduardo, their shirts slightly unzipped. “Maybe you jerked around the wrong folks, indebting yourself to a few johns too many?”
Ah, the toxicity of the racing crews never died. Raith sighed. The straight-laced bouncer was leaning against the doorframe, watching. “Is this really the fight you want to pick today, boys?”
“You almost killed my pa twenty years ago, Raith,” Eduardo said. “I’m going to end you out on the racecourse . . . just like you ended Kana.”
With those words, Raith’s fist connected with the kid’s chin.
Hours later, Raith looked up as Bonta and Harrison drifted into the security office. Raith, back pushed into his chair, smiled as they approached.
“Seriously?” Bonta said. “A fight, less than two hours after we landed?”
“Hey, he practically—”
“We saw the footage,” Harrison said. “You started it. You could have walked away, and you threw the first punch.”
“He had it coming.”
“Eduardo might be a punk, but he’s a rich punk. He will do what he can to kick you out of this race before it even starts.”
“Get up,” Bonta said, motioning with their hand. The SI nodded to the security officer, who returned the gesture. “One Synthetic coffered the fine. But we’ve been told if you do this again, it will come out of your final cut. You’re lucky QuanCom wants you in this race. The administrators are raving mad at you.”
Raith read between the lines. He was lucky QuanCom thought they could make money off his presence in the race. “Whatever.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Thanks?”
“Sure.” Bonta motioned for him to follow, and Raith finally rose from his seat. “I guess you’re right, by the way.”
Raith waited to respond until they were out in one of the long hallways of the Hub. “About what?”
“You’re not our friend.” Bonta glanced over their shoulder. “I wouldn’t want to be your friend.”
It was morning, based on the Hub’s established local time, and Raith stood beneath Vindicta. The hangar drones detached it from Juniper last night, and it stood on its struts beside the freighter. More importantly, his practice berth had arrived. For the first time, he had the opportunity to fly his baby.
Erika approached, Donyi by her side. “All right, Raith, you ready?” Thankfully, only Erika spoke that time, rather than from both their mouths.
Apparently, they were the two behind the “cockpit” of the prototype. As he stared up at the meta-nodes and sensors inside the craft, he admitted it looked impressive. He couldn’t imagine the trillions of calculations needed to ensure his mind properly integrated with the ship’s framework. Well, he could, he just didn’t want to.
“I’m ready,” Raith said, not bothering to voice his compliment. The platform on which he stood began to rise. “What do I do?”
“Just prepare your mind,” said Donyi. “The ship will do the rest.”
He nodded, not really sure what to make of the idea. The platform reached the bottom of the Vindicta, and a light electric tingle signaled the attempts of the ship to connect with him. Releasing any safeguards, Raith leaned into the experience, and a grav-field grabbed his body, pulling him the rest of the way into the ship. His limbs slotted into position as if he were wearing a massive mech suit, and his head slipped into a socket. Once his body fitted into place—perfectly molded for his model, Raith noted—the ship’s hull began to close around him.
“We’ll be on the microphones,” Erika and Donyi said, returning to their eerie team-speak. “Bonta is transmitting you the practice course. It’s an elliptic outside the ecliptic. Very fast, very safe.”
“Well that’s boring,” Raith said.
“It’s just to check the ship’s systems. All racers must practice the course on simulations only.”
“I know, I know, but . . .”
“We get it, you want to race.”
The ship closed fully, leaving him in darkness. For a moment, he laid there, waiting for something to happen. He considered whether it was all an elaborate prank. Maybe the ship wouldn’t work, and now the Conglomerate had an easy way to ship him to their facilities for processing. Then . . .
A rainbow of perceptions exploded, bombarding his mind with a million waves of data. It was nearly overwhelming, but as his synthetic neural framework adapted to the ship’s systems, processing the new capabilities of his sensory faculties, it felt . . . natural. Like slipping on a glove. The ship’s sensors, and the millions of light-lengths they could detect, became his eyes. Its engines became his legs. Its thrusters, his arms. He joined the ship—they were one. Now he understood what an SI like Persepolis experienced. Why they loved what they were. He could get used to this.
“How do you feel?” Donyi’s voice echoed inside his head. “What do you see?”
“I see the entire universe,” he said. “Everything. I’m alive, like never before. I’m home.”
After a short Jump from the Hub to beyond the ecliptic plane, Raith received his path from Bonta. QuanCom’s new tech truly achieved what it said it could achieve—simultaneous tracking and networking of hundreds of ships at Jump. Data pouring in, he noted the dozens of other racers flirting along various other paths in a mesmerizing display of Jump trails around the system. Almost impossible to catch, but they were there, weaving a shell of ovoid vectors around the star. He was ready to join them.
“You read me?” said Bonta. “You ready to do this?”
“I’m all in,” Raith said.
“Then connect to the QuanCom transmitter.”
Raith mentally nodded, and his consciousness expanded to reveal the new system, waiting on the horizon of his mind. Embracing it, the information received from the Hub transformed from simple charts to real-time, overlaid symbols indicating the dozens of ships looping past. Even though they were millions of kilometers away, their courses and velocities generated and shifted in tandem with one another. He could see the exact locations of the other racers on their practice circuits, beyond what his traditional sensors could immediately detect.
“You’re using Vector Thirteen,” Bonta said. “See it?”
