RACING SUN
Before the race, I’d searched for the ultimate custom blade (the anti-gravity racing machine, not the traditional sword section). Powered by retrofitted jet-propulsion systems, blades defy the lithosphere. They bullwhip racers through relative sound barriers and yank them around switchbacks at supersonic speeds that numb the extremities.
But results were scant.
Now I’m sitting in a retinal implant-rattling test rig. Caution strobes may as well dot the thrusters, punchlines to a joke called Hooder Aerosports.
“Crooks. All of ‘em,” grandpa would grumble while running hacks on a blade belonging to Cayn Huges. “They’ll throttle your credflow and put you on wheels - for a fix!”
(Cayn was blademaster champion - back when bladerunners were called pilots. He’d made at least as many enemies as he had friends: people who'd liked him better in memory. Hirelings of a hireling had hired gramps: told him to backdoor into Cayn’s blade and disrupt its co-pilot A.I. They liked to pay with illegal credits and… that’s all I know. Because grampa locked his memories in Acer Naim’s preformatted neuro strata. Then dumped the key in a password protected engram, buried in the neurons of 1 of 3,000 clones that operate discreetly out of an He3 aerostat factory).
Anyway, the four-eyed brothers at Eden Courier Custom might say my ride’s closer to a prototype than their spacetracks in microgravity will allow, but what do they know? To be frank, I’d rather be saddled in a cool, muted Lowd 451. Olive drab, racing stripe so dark your eyes just slide right off it. A converted mobile weapons platform strapped to Devcou DC 5’s twin-thruster system. Then I’d have a chance against suicidal mechanoid, Sun Mateeb.
Sun scans me from a Barracuda blade, mounted high in Emmet Barant’s ultra-light space frame skinned with chromatic cowling. It watches me, a traditional female face nanofused to circuity: convincingly brown eyeotics piping exabytes of visual data along fiberoptic nerves to Nova CoreTek’s processing unit, situated posterior to a nanotube infused olfactory set. It covers its left eye analogue with an unskinned hand and that’s when I know it’s rogue.
I answer with engine revs, flicking switches to appear indifferent and unintimidated. But the mechanoid’s working off of microexpressions that betray my terror: images analyzed and interpreted at the speed of light, with error-correcting prediction models coded by machines. It knows I’m sweating under these heat-resistant nanofibers. Also, it knows I’m sitting in a flying stovepipe, if it prefers to think in such terms.
And we’re off.
I drop the hammer a trillionth of a second before getting the signal to lose as fast as possible to Sun Mateeb. The mechanoid powerboosts off the line with zero turbolag, soaring several yards ahead, using potential and kinetic energy to drive compressors in the Barracuda blade’s turbocharged superjet engines. I upshift and slip into its slipstream, making up time, but Sun cuts right and puts my face in a vaportrail spilling off its left flank.
How’d I get myself into this? Simple tradition: my father was a bladerunner. His father was a bladerunner. His father’s father held a prestigious membership in an invitation-only Jet class, featuring match racing with Diebek-built Z-48 “Koschei” superjets, racing at speeds in the 1000+ mph range. So you could say racing’s in my blood: a vestigial but prominent drive to drive for sport. I was born to blade.
But Sun? Sun was designed to die.
Assembled in a Zarokhli-Anin autofactory on San Kei, a single H97-3 model could fly an explosive, pilot-guided monkey wrench into a migration project and wipe out 70% of its population. Their use in the San Kei conflict was almost mandatory: they were sent out by the thousands to cripple in coordinated suicides; to sink capital ships for the San Kei Front; to put every vessel in the system on high alert. When the war ended, active units like Sun were left to find other ways to fulfill their function.
I back out and nearly clip the hub of a massive, industrial-grade cast iron pipe. We’re racing through a narrow, V-shaped tidal riverbed in the irradiated Mastan shipyards; a steep-walled ditch littered with AxiCorp powercells and warp engine artifacts. The kind of place where one runner’s luck is another runner’s miscalculation. I zig-zag my blade back into coherence and zip unto a broadway that’s overcast with military corvettes. Their floodlights wash across the racing line, oscillating to and fro like emergency spotbeams. Sun dips into a watercourse about a klick distant and I’m running flat-out. I try to keep the mechanoid busy, but it’s me against a .000 reaction time, and the reaction time is winning.
So I do what any self-respecting bladerunner would do. I improvise.
First, I activate the blade’s co-pilot A.I. and link to the Interplanetary Network. Then, using an old trick my dad taught me, I run a program that lets me authenticate into Sun's Barracuda via Hedgemony Throneworld’s low orbit comsat array. The program is hardly new: cornerdroids use a sponsored version to alert co-pilot A.I. of obstacles that would otherwise go undetected by organics. In my case, it’s just a matter of tricking the Barracuda’s co-pilot A.I. into responding to a hazard that doesn’t exist.
Suddenly my blade trades paint with a hullplate, panels buckling as I send a faux alert to the Barracuda’s co-pilot A.I. Meanwhile, Sun’s running lean to conserve fuel cells, so I maximize my advantage with a timed boost that puts me back in its slipstream. Then I wait.
And wait.
When you’re racing a suicidal mechanoid, things can get real messy, real fast. I might be in it to win, but Sun Mateeb was programmed to do one thing. My grip tightens around the yoke. What if it tries to do me in with a suicide move? I narrow the gap between myself and the machine as thick, black smoke spits out of my left engine. Sun doesn’t want to win, I realize. Sun wants to –
The Barracuda screams and dives into the ground, kicking up regolith as the co-pilot A.I. tries to duck under a non-existent overhang. I overtake Sun at mach 2 and activate my blade’s autorepair system, which drops my speed long enough to give me a passing glimpse of its cold, inert visage. It regains control of the blade with horrifying precision: self-correcting programs jerking it back into a stable state before my brain can process the event. I panic-boost and veer wildly to keep it from latching on to my slipstream.
We break into the final stretch with me in a split-second lead, Sun trailing close enough to boost-ram me into the next life. I check the rearcam. It’s trying to pass. I nail it. It’s filling my rearview. I try to lose it. It anticipates my action potentials. My nerves are static. Then it downshifts and falls back, receding into the noisy background of the camfeed. I plow through the finish and lock the airbrakes after about 25 yards. It takes almost that far to stop.
As the cooling fans wine, I check my rearview and spot Sun several yards distant. It appears to have stopped. Somewhere, beyond the ditch, a Titan Crane groans as it lifts a ship out of dock. I check the Network to view the postrace stats, and the winner is…
“INDETERMINATE?” I repeat aloud.
I check the other postrace stats:
Mata Wai International. Winner: Gabriel Vorsh
San Kei Eliminator. Winner: Jenna Ferrante
Cayn Hughes Testimonial. Winner: Angul
Sun Mateeb’s Gutter Run Challenge. Winner: INDETERMINATE
Something’s not right. What happened to Sun Mateeb? My rearcam shows it on approach, gaining speed. Then it hits me: the mechanoid is going to kill me.
I scramble to reactivate the controls, but the blade’s in queue for pickup. By luck, I manage to free myself from the blade’s tight cockpit just as Sun forces it into early retirement.
The concussive blast boots me from the wreckage, banging me up and leaving me for dead. As I slip out of consciousness, watching flames consume the blades, it starts to make sense. I check the Network again and there I am: The official winner of Sun Mateeb’s Gutter Run Challenge.
And yet, somehow, I doubt it.
