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There’s an art to crashinga Formula Zero racing ship in a way that doesn’t kill you. Madeline Clarke is as close to mastering that art as it gets, but this is becoming a bit much, even for her.
The race is going as smoothly as it can (given that Elemental Machines’ ship is a box of shit with wings this year) until she goes to angle her thruster shells to take on a vertical loop during lap forty-nine and the shells stay stubbornly locked in place. Frustration spikes through her as she pulls up hard to compensate, and for a second it works—she clears the first part of the loop—but she knows it’s not sustainable. There’s an awful rumble-whine of tension as she hits full inversion, the strain of machinery under pressure, and an alarm blares as her trajectory becomes irreversibly compromised.
Managing a Formula Zero crash is mostly about controlling your reactions. The steps get drilled into every young pilot from day one: kill the power unit, take your hands off the controls, go limp, and stay calm. Fear doesn’t factor into it. Fearcan’tfactor into it.
She gets the power unit shut off just after the apex of the loop, but that’s all she has time for. Physics is physics, even in anartificial zero-grav environment, and momentum carries her forward. The nose and bottom of her ship slam into the track as it starts to bend, and the impact’s hard enough to make her vision gray out even with thick, clear gel flooding up from under her seat to distribute the blow. She rebounds. Hits another section of track, and another. Hears the shriek of metal tearing apart. Loses all sense of orientation as she spins and spins and spins.
The motion eventually stops. Her heart hammers hard in her chest, and her breath comes in choppy gasps.
The art of walking away from a crash really comes into play in the immediate aftermath. Turning the engine off, getting your hands clear, staying loose and calm—that’s the science of surviving impact. The art happens after, when it’s just you and whatever remains of your ship. There are a million ways for machinery to have crumpled around you and become compromised. There are dozens of components that could burst or catch fire. There are nineteen other ships on the track; the danger of secondary collisions is real.
Your team and trainers will give you a lot of advice about what to do in those hazy seconds, but in Clarke’s experience, it comes down to how quickly she can unscramble her brain. She starts big and works her way down to the details.
She’s alive. Her entire body hurts. Her vision is blurry. There’s a voice, low and tense, cutting through the ringing in her ears.
“Clarke?”
Amira. That’s Amira Bahtri, Clarke’s race engineer, on the radio. She sounds stressed.
“Clarke.”
It’s not Clarke’s vision that’s blurry, she realizes. There’ssomething smeared across her helmet. She reaches up with shaky fingers to swipe at her visor.
Crash gel. Right. It would’ve drained immediately after the ship stopped moving, but it’s still clinging to every surface. She manages to clear enough of it away that she can see, but the ship must’ve come to rest upside down. All she can make out past the safety bars that ring her cockpit is the vibrant gold of the beacons that mark the track.
It’s close enough to touch, and Clarke’s dazed enough that she tries. She stretches—
—and stifles a scream when trying to get her left elbow above her shoulder sends a lance of sharp, hot pain all the way down her arm.
“Clarke!”
“I’m okay,” Clarke mumbles, hugging her arm back into her torso and fighting the bile trying to climb up her throat. “Arm’s hurt. I think I’m blocking the track.”
“You are, partially,” Amira says, relief coloring her voice now that Clarke’s responding. Pilot biometrics are streamed real-time during a race, so they would’ve known Clarke was alive, but there’s a lot of space betweenaliveandtalking coherently. “There’s a double yellow flag, and a safety ship coming out.”
Good. That’s good. All the other ships will have to slow down, giving Clarke time to get herself clear of this mess. The anxiety scrabbling at the back of her skull eases off somewhat as she cranes her head around, looking for an exit strategy. Her field of vision is limited between the visor, neck brace, and the cage of safety bars, but she can just see out the side of the cockpit.
Flickering orange light. Faint, compared to the track’s gold, but getting stronger.
“Clarke, the bottom of the ship is on—”
“Fire,” Clarke croaks. “Yeah. I know.”
Fear finally kicks in. Clarke smashes it down ruthlessly. Freezing up is not an option, and that’s what she needs right now: options. She says as much over the radio.
“You’re upside down against the track, so you can’t eject. You’ll get blown into the barrier,” Amira says with forced calm. “Can you push yourself far enough away manually to get out?”
The ship weighs 902 kilograms, but that doesn’t matter in zero G. Keeping her injured arm tucked close to her body, she reaches up with her other hand. She can get her fingertips past the safety bars, but only just. She pushes against the track. The ship shifts, barely.
“Not sure I have the leverage,” she wheezes. The harness is digging into her shoulders as she strains up out of her seat against it, sending waves of nauseating pain through her whole left side.
There’s a beat of silence before Amira says, voice tight, “The emergency team will be there in twenty seconds.”
Clarke gives her own beat of silence to make sure what she’s about to say is accurate and that she can say it without her voice shaking. “Not sure I have twenty seconds. The fire’s getting hotter. I can feel it.”
She’s going to die here. Every shallow breath that passes without an answer from Amira confirms it. There’s a miniature interstellar-class kickdrive seven inches behind Clarke’s spine, and when the flames reach it, Clarke is going to die. On the track. Just like Connor.
