Clarke climbs into the cockpit and fastens her harness. Maki, her favorite start crew engineer, leans in and hands Clarke the air tube, which she clips into the port in her helmet just above her visor. He then runs the tube along the crest of Clarke’s helmet, clipping it again against the side of the headrest. A second, thinner tube gets fed up through the bottom of the helmet, giving Clarke access to the hydration pack contained in a pocket behind her seat.
“No leaks, yeah?” she jokes, taking a tiny sip to make sure it’s hooked up properly before giving a thumbs-up to Maki, who’s nearly fully inverted over her while he works.
“One time. That wasone time,” he says. “All right, prime the deck for me?”
Clarke presses her gloves together, palm to palm. When she draws them apart, a holoscreen hangs in the space between, ten inches across and eight inches tall. Covering the screen are the ship’s controls: mode shifts, pedal pressures, pitch/yaw levers, diff settings, throttle netting.
Clarke wraps her fingers around the edges of the control deck like she’s holding an old-school steering wheel. There’s a bit of haptic feedback at the base of her thumb, as her gloves and the deck auto-run a quick diagnostic. All the readouts on the deck light up and fade as each component is checked.
“Looks good.” Clarke holds still while Maki jerks on her harness, checking that it’s secure. The five-minute siren sounds, and the first of five blue lights turns on across the top of Clarke’s deck as well as on the big marquee above the starting line. “Biometrics?”
Maki projects a display. It shows Clarke’s heart rate, respirations, blood levels, and some other data streaming from the chip implanted below her elbow. “Strong and steady. Need anything else?”
“Nope. All clear.”
“All clear,” Maki repeats, unclipping the retractable tether on his suit from a safety bar and jetting off.
Then it’s just Clarke and the ship and the track.
That’s how it seems, anyway. In reality, there’s a good deal of chatter in her ear as the team does final confirmations, and several members of her start crew are still darting around ensuring that the ship is ready to go. But to Clarke, everything falls away as the minutes tick by and the blues turn on. She is focused. She is determined. She is a really fucking good pilot, and Lion’s Head ishercourse.
With a minute left, the board is fully blue. Clarke breathes.
The minute ends. The blues go out, and the five reds light up instead, one per second.
Red across the board is an instant that lasts for infinity. Then all the lights go out, and Clarke shoves her hands and feet forward, and they’re racing.
The first few seconds of a race are when contact with another ship is most likely. Everyone’s stacked on top of one another at the starting line, and then they all kick forward at once with their back drafts and sidewashes. A few people inevitably go high and maybe invert to try to jump a few places. F0 tries to actlike it’s a sport of control and mastery, but those first few seconds are nothing but chaos and reaction.
Clarke makes it out of the fray and into the first element, a descent. She’s still P1.
Amira, on the radio. “Good, Clarke. It’s Delphine behind at two-tenths. Corkscrew’s next.”
Clarke throttles down and steers into it.
It goes like that for the rest of the first lap. Clarke stays in P1, Delphine on her tail. P3 changes, a rotating cast of Belette, Julian, back to Belette, Oliver, Julian again. The ship feels good. Clarke feelsgood.
She crosses the line to start lap two, and this is where the real fun begins.
“Eyes up,” Amira says. “Consider dropping back when you can. No sign of the first variable yet.”
Clarke spirals through the corkscrew for a second time, then sees what’s ahead of her. “I see it. Rotation on the climb coming out of the corkscrew’s been reversed.”
She leans in, spinning over her right wing instead of her left. After a second, the gold track beacons in her periphery flare. “Amira?”
“Delphine’s gone off,” Amira says. “Recoverable. She’s looking at a three-second penalty, give/take.”
The beacons that mark the track double and triple as zero G and barrier generators. The barrier is fully solid in many sections, to protect the spectators and space station (when they’re off-planet) or delicate city infrastructure (on-planet). If you hit the wall in those areas, you’re stopping. But in other sections—when there’s nothing to collide with—the barrier will let a solid object like a ship through. You can deviate from the course without physical impact, but at the cost of a time penalty. Youhave to pay back every fraction of a second you’re off the track, either at a pit stop or at the end of the race.
Delphine just lost three seconds. This race will take about ninety minutes all told, but those three seconds might be everything.
Clarke can’t think that far ahead right now. She dances through a patch of chicane, sails past the cascade, and starts the next lap.
Lap four: Clarke, begrudgingly and at Yves’s terse reminder that this is their strategy, lets Oliver overtake her.
Lap six: Oliver doesn’t adjust fast enough when one of the turns on the back half of the course is tighter than previous laps. He goes off the track. Clarke doesn’t.
Lap seven: Clarke clocks a 3:08.75, just a few hundredths off her Q3 time. That’s the fastest lap out of anyone so far.
