whirling lines of the rune matrix that expanded his magic converged there from all over the ship, all of it meeting at the simulacrum itself.
Those lines, the seventy-six characters and fourteen connectors of Martian Runic, covered the surface of the silver model of the starship as well. There were only two spots on the simulacrum that weren’t covered in runes.
Ivan’s palms, inlaid with their own silver runes, settled into those gaps with the ease of long practice and intense training.
He studied the numbers one last time, looking at the screens surrounding him with a view of the empty space around Restoya, and then unleashed his power into the simulacrum.
The world vanished…and then reappeared as a wave of crushing exhaustion hammered into him.
“Jump complete,” he reported.
“Checking coordinates,” Charpentier told him. “Exactly on target; I’m scanning for…well, that was easy.”
New icons appeared on Ivan’s screen. Every surface of the simulacrum chamber was covered in high-resolution screens, creating the illusion that he was floating in deep space. It allowed him to understand the space around him better than anyone else aboard the ship.
Even struggling against the weariness of the jump, he followed Charpentier’s highlight. A motley-looking collection of ships was already gathered at the exact coordinates they’d been given.
Four were siblings to each other, armed civilian ships. At a quarter-million tons or so, the jump-corvettes were toys compared to Martian warships—but they dwarfed the racers and their weapons would be perfectly capable of obliterating any of the racers that did something dumb.
“That looks like a starting line to me,” Ivan said. “Anybody going to shoot at us?”
“That would be against their own interests,” Charpentier pointed out. “The race organizers need the underworld to trust them. At the beginning and the end, under the eyes of everybody, we’re safe.”
“And in the middle?” Ivan asked.
“A quarter of the racers disappear,” his friend said grimly. “I’m pretty sure no one cares if the pulsar gets them or the other competitors do!”
8
Restoya slid into the starting zone next to the rest of the racers as Ivan entered the mess to pour himself a cup of coffee. One wall of the combined kitchen and dining area was a full screen, and a few commands on his wrist-comp set it to a view of their competition.
Coffee came first as Ivan eyed the other ships, though he paid more attention to what he was doing as he actually put together a meal for the two of them. The supplies were about as plain and cheap as he’d expected, but they were plentiful enough.
They had almost twenty-four hours until the race itself, so he busied himself making pierogies from scratch. It was a complicated process that fully engaged his attention, enough so that he missed Charpentier joining him in the mess until the other man grabbed a cup of coffee and leaned against the prep counter, staring balefully at the starting lineup.
“I hate this part,” the racer said quietly.
“The waiting?” Ivan asked.
“That’s part of it, but also looking at the other racers,” Charpentier told him. “No one is running the Black Pulsar Race because they want to. Everyone here is desperate and, well…”
He sighed and gestured at the screen.
“Restoya is big for this work,” he admitted. “There are two other couriers out there, but we’ve got ten thousand tons on the bigger one. Acceleration, fuel capacity…all of that factors into the victory, so often the smaller ships have an edge.”
“But?” Ivan asked after a moment of silence.
“Nobody builds a race in space that is a straight-line acceleration course,” his friend explained. “They’re multi-point courses, usually cutting around planets or asteroids. The closer you can cut the path, the better off you are. But that has its own risks, and smaller ships are vulnerable—and that’s when we’re not racing through pulsars.”
Charpentier drank more of his coffee as they both stood. The only sound for several minutes was Ivan’s knife as he cut the shells for his pierogies.
“So, the smaller ships are higher-risk?” he finally asked.
“Yeah.” Charpentier stepped up to the wall and tapped one of the ships. “This guy has no business here at all. That’s a five-thousand-ton speeder. She’s a glorified shuttle I didn’t think anyone could put a jump matrix in…and I watched an almost-identical ship crash and burn cutting too close to a gas giant three months ago. And that race was legal.”
Even some of the races back in Xanth had been illegal, Ivan knew. The legal ones were supposed to have all of the measures in place to