Chapter 7 #2
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 act like 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 feels good.
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.
You have 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.
Lap eleven: Delphine creeps up behind her again. Clarke manages to block her at first, but Delphine passes her on a turn. Yves is pleased.
Lap eighteen: Clarke and Delphine lap the ship in P20, one of the Harkoners. On-planet, that ship would keep racing. Off-planet, they’re eliminated and have to retire, because there’s got to be a gap between the first- and last-place ships or the race director can’t change variables safely.
Lap twenty-three: Clarke spins out as she emerges from the corkscrew, which has one fewer loop than before. She manages to stay on the course and not get hit, but she drops back to P5.
“Good time to box, Clarke,” Amira says.
Clarke doesn’t want to box already. Everyone has to take at least one pit stop, where they get at a minimum fresh batteries and thruster shells, but that usually doesn’t happen until at least halfway through unless something’s broken.
Nothing’s broken on Clarke’s ship, and Lion’s Head is sixty-two laps.
If she comes in now, she’ll be flying on tired shells toward the end of the race. Tired shells mean less dexterity.
“Can we put it off?” she asks. She’s whipping around the starfall again, chasing Engel Brandenberg from Chronicle and being chased by Belette. “The ship feels fine.”
“We’re getting shimmy, and need to switch strategies for mid-pack racing. Come in.”
Fuming, Clarke does as she’s told. Pilots who disobey orders don’t get their contracts renewed.
The pit lane entry branches off the course from the top, marked by a set of blue beacons.
Clarke swings up toward them and slows down until she can extend her tires without them getting ripped off, then slows even further as she crosses the veil.
Gravity takes effect again. She lands smoothly, barely bouncing at all, and drives toward her box.
The pit lane speed limit is 80 km/h. It feels like crawling.
“You’ll be P9 coming out, maybe P10,” Amira says. “Stay with the pack, and—”
“Why,” Clarke demands. She rolls into the box and takes a second to flex her hands while the crew flurries around her with practiced, efficient movements. “I was top two for the first twenty laps. I’m still fastest average pace. Why wouldn’t I—”
“We’re not taking risks,” Yves says, cutting over both of them. “If you finish top ten and Matthew hangs on to P12, the team moves up the rankings. That’s what we need, not another DNF.”
Emotions tear through Clarke like brushfire: anger, frustration, spite. The crew drops her back to the pavement and she rockets out of the box. She retracts her tires as she crosses the veil again, and the pit lane exit inserts her at the top of the course in P9.
Yves doesn’t want her to be aggressive? Fine, she won’t be. She’ll just make it obvious to everyone watching that today, on this course, she’s better than P9, and they’ll have to let her overtake.
Time to go to work.