Chapter 28
Shimmy is a blanket term that encompasses any unexpected vibrations experienced by a ship during flight.
It’s usually the result of something not being secured properly.
It’s bad news for a lot of reasons (the poorly attached part could snap off, the vibrations stress the rest of the machine, etc.), but the good news is that it’s usually a one-off fix.
You find whatever isn’t dovetailed together perfectly, you correct it, done.
Elemental’s aft fuselage has had an intermittent shimmy all year, and they still don’t know why.
It’s been driving the technical team insane.
They spent the first two months of the season trying to pin down a root cause, but at a certain point they had to turn their attention to other problems—largely managing symptoms of the shimmy, as parts wore through too quickly or malfunctioned due to vibration.
It’s become just another thing Clarke has to compensate for every time she’s in the ship.
If she’s going fast, she’s probably going to get some shimmy, and she’ll just have to pray that it doesn’t get worse.
It gets worse during the Tempe Terra Grand Prix.
Qualifying’s messy, due to shimmy-unrelated reasons.
One of the Bright Doors puts his ship into the barrier during Q1, and the session gets yellow-flagged.
The track is a twisty one, and Elemental’s power-loss-on-ascending-banks issue causes both Clarke and Raff to get eliminated during Q2.
One of the Martian Motors’ race engineers inexplicably doesn’t warn their pilot that their team’s other pilot is doing a timed lap in Q3, and the two MMs make accidental contact.
“I told you,” Amira says, standing next to Clarke as they watch the MM pilots shout at each other while the cleanup team retrieves their ships. “Weather delay. Bad sign. Things go wrong.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Clarke says, privately wondering if hoping that Martian Motors and Bright Door can’t turn around the repairs fast enough with the race only six hours away makes her a bad person.
Amira clicks her tongue. “We’ll see.”
The shimmy, when it comes, starts small.
It’s lap forty. Clarke has battled her way up to P8 after starting in P14. She’s just about to make a play for P7 when she feels it, a now-familiar buzz from the seat between her shoulder blades. “I’m getting shimmy.”
“We see it, too,” Amira responds. “Is it manageable?”
Clarke uses the single straightaway on this track (a vertical ascent that parallels a skyscraper) to adjust the widgets on her control deck so she can keep a better eye on warning signs for the other components that’ve crapped out due to vibration this season.
She’ll be numb through the shoulders and upper back after another twenty laps of this, but she’s done it before. “For now, yes.”
“Okay. Go easy on your shells.”
Amira’s saying it because it’s her job to say it, Clarke reminds herself during lap forty-one. It’s not that she thinks Clarke doesn’t know how to manage her thruster shells while dealing with shimmy. Amira’s just—
The ship jolts hard, like someone’s hit her from behind. Clarke swings wide with the shock of it, banking up the side of the course, coming within inches of the barrier, waiting for the shaking to stop so she can stabilize and figure out what the hell that was.
It doesn’t stop.
“Suspension failure,” Amira says in her ear. “Secondary to the shimmy, we think. Not something we can fix in a pit stop. You’re going to have to retire the ship.”
The track corkscrews around a skybridge between two buildings.
Clarke grits her teeth and pulls against understeer, speaking between bumps.
Without suspension, she’s feeling every bit of the shimmy in her whole body, and the dirty air coming off P7 in front of her isn’t helping.
“Because—it’s—going to hurt the—ship, if I stay out? ”
Amira’s silent for a second, getting information from other team members. “No. The suspension can’t break any further, and we don’t anticipate downstream effects beyond understeer. But it’s not going to be comfortable for you.”
No fucking kidding. There’s already an ache starting in Clarke’s lower back. “What do the medics say?”
She rockets up the skyscraper again while waiting for Amira’s response. “You’re unlikely to suffer permanent damage.”
The part of Clarke’s brain that shies away from pain doesn’t like the sound of that. The rest of Clarke’s brain opens her mouth and says, “Good enough for me.”
The next eighteen laps are some of the most miserable in Clarke’s life.
Nothing else breaks, miraculously, but it hurts.
The vibration’s strong enough that her teeth clatter, so she tucks her tongue between her molars and bites it bloody.
She loses feeling in her legs somewhere around lap forty-eight, and works the pedals solely from muscle memory.
Her neck and shoulders are a throbbing mass of pain.
The medics put her on warning at lap fifty-one.
She crosses the finish line in P9. Four points. Amira has to help her out of the ship, because she can’t do it herself.
“You should go to Medical,” Amira says, keeping an arm around Clarke’s waist as they use the cheers from the podium ceremony (Julian’s teammate Engel took first, with the two Provenance pilots in second and third, and Julian in fourth) as cover to get to Clarke’s prep room without notice.
“Healing pods only help with acute injuries,” Clarke says. Breathing is a chore. A rattling, wheezing chore. “Nothing’s broken or torn. Medical won’t help.”
“Medical has drugs. The good ones.”
If Clarke goes to Medical, she’s going to have to deal with medics and press and a million invasive questions. On a good day, not an issue. Today, with everything built up inside her and the pain rendering her brittle, she’s liable to snap and say something she can’t take back.
“No. Just—away from everyone. Please.”
She doesn’t have long to pull herself together.
Team debrief will start during the post-race press conference in a little less than an hour.
She stumbles into the shower in her prep room and runs the water as hot as it will get for several minutes, then flips it to a hair above freezing and stays in the spray until her fingers are turning blue but the pain is somewhat muted.
She gets dressed with tiny, jerky movements.
Julian is standing in the hall when she opens the door to go to debrief.
Clarke fights through the tide of conflicting emotions at seeing him, and the battering ram of agony that hit her when she pulled up short in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
Julian has showered and dressed down, in the Chronicle version of the Elemental athleisure clothes Clarke’s wearing. He looks soft and worried, and a little bit like he’s scared she’s going to throw him out. “Are you okay?”
“Julian.”
“There’s footage of you not being able to get out of the ship by yourself after the race.”
“That happens to pilots all the time.”
“You flew with no suspension for half an hour. I’m not here to argue about whether or not you’re in pain, I just—” He tilts his head back, resting it against the wall.
The new angle exposes the line of his throat.
Clarke makes herself look away. Julian’s got the ceiling covered; she’ll take the floor.
“I needed to see you. I went to Medical first and you weren’t there, so I came here.
Your race engineer said I could wait for you if I left when you tell me to leave. ”
Clarke needs this to be over. She can’t do this, can’t handle being alone with him for the first time since Graham’s wedding, while she feels this raw. “Leave.”
His smile is a ghost of what it should be. “I will, if you can make me.”
It’s a trap, and Clarke falls for it. She manages the two steps across the hall just fine, but when she reaches out to grab his elbow and shove him toward the exit, her back seizes up.
She stumbles and loses her balance, tensing in anticipation of hitting the wall or floor, but she doesn’t.
Julian catches her, warm hands a shock against skin still icy from the shower.
He sweeps her into his arms while she’s hazy with pain, carries her into her prep room, and shuts the door behind them.
He lowers her gently to the floor, hooks his forearm behind her knees, and slowly presses her thighs up toward her chest. Clarke has to trap whimpers behind her teeth, but she knows what he’s doing, so she cooperates as best she can until—there.
The muscles of her back release, and tears spring to her eyes at the relief.
And at him being here. Helping her. Caring.
She can’t have this. She can’t.
She replaces his hands with her own, holding her knees to her chest. “Thank you. You can go now.”
“I’m not going to leave you like this. You should be in Medical. Why isn’t anyone from your team here? How—”
“This is the sort of thing pilots get benched for,” Clarke says through a clenched jaw. She does not owe him an explanation, but if giving him one means he’ll leave before she splinters, so be it.
“With good reason! You have full-body soft-tissue trauma!”
“Do not fucking dare try to tell me that I should accept getting benched when we both know you wouldn’t. It’s pain. I can handle pain.”
He glowers. “If you don’t respect your body’s limits—”
“You don’t know my limits! And unless you got a medical degree when I wasn’t looking—”
“I did a lot of shit while you weren’t looking,” Julian snaps, then jams the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t—sorry.”
“No, by all means, keep going,” Clarke says, latching on to the tangent. This is better. This is bad, but at least it gets her off the defensive. “What else did you have time for after you stopped talking to me?”
Julian sets his jaw. “Stop trying to pin everything on me. I didn’t stop talking to you, and you didn’t stop talking to me, we just—”