make sure everyone was safe…but they could only do so much when ships were flinging themselves around at ten to fifteen gravities.
“We knew this race lost ships,” Ivan reminded Charpentier. “That’s part of why I still think this was a terrible idea.”
He had a long list of other reasons, too, but he couldn’t tell the other man most of them.
“I know.” The courier captain studied the competition again, then waved vaguely at them. “Nothing out there will break twenty gees,” he noted. “Acceleration isn’t everything, but it’s the single biggest factor in the game. We can out-burn them all, though we’ll want to choose when we pull that out of our hat carefully.”
“I think that one’s on you, Karl,” Ivan told him. “As I understand it, we get the jump coordinates at the last beacon? Between the beginning and the end, I believe I nap.”
Charpentier chuckled.
“Basically,” he agreed. He was pacing the length of the wallscreen now, looking at each ship in turn. “I saw someone try to do one of the in-system races with a Mage cooperative once,” he said. “They’d get the beacon coordinates and microjump. I think they must have had ten Mages aboard to make it work.”
“That seems doable,” Ivan said as he started to carefully lower the pierogies into boiling water. “Not exactly easy on the Mages—microjumps are a bitch—but doable. Did they win?”
“No,” Charpentier admitted. “Four of the beacons were too close to the planet for them to safely use the teleport spell, and it turned out they hadn’t put particularly good engines on the ship they were using. Some of us managed to make up the time in the gas giant’s atmosphere and cut ahead of them. They came third in the end.”
He grinned.
“I won.”
“Remind me again why you’re this desperate for cash?” Ivan asked drily. “If you kept winning races…”
“There aren’t that many races,” Charpentier admitted. “Maybe six legal and four illegal a year. If I won every one of them, I’d pull a total purse of maybe two million. But fuel isn’t cheap, and the acceleration drugs aren’t cheap, so each race sets me back fifty to hundred grand.
“I made two million in prizes but spent most of a million to compete. If I had a year before the bank needed their money, maybe—but if I came second in even one race, the margin got thinner,” he said quietly. “And, well, I started in the hole.”
Hence the massive payment the man needed to make. Ivan nodded his understanding, watching his pierogies carefully as much to be sure his friend couldn’t see his face as to make sure they didn’t overcook.
If he followed the chain correctly, Charpentier had borrowed from the mob to fund the races he needed to win to pay off his mortgage debts…and it sounded like he’d discovered it wasn’t going to be enough after he’d started doing that.
The hole was entirely of Charpentier’s own making. That didn’t make it any less of a terrible place to be. Ivan truly wished he had another way to help him out of it than the plan he’d made.
9
“All racers, this is the Race Master,” a noticeably accented voice said over the radio. There was no video attached to the transmission, though Ivan’s console in the simulacrum chamber chirped receipt of a data package.
“You should all have now received the coordinates of your jump emergence and of the first beacon,” the Race Master told them. “They’re basically the same, just enough difference that no one should be emerging in the same place as the beacon.”
The man on the radio chuckled and a shiver ran down Ivan’s spine.
“If someone does that, everybody loses,” he noted. “Of course, the poor bastard who tries to coexist with a beacon loses most.”
Ivan felt Restoya tremble around him as Charpentier brought the courier ship’s engines online. He was busy pulling the coordinates into his own jump calculation program and running the numbers. Many Mages used a program they’d coded themselves, but he used the standard RMN system.
He’d spent twenty-five years jumping with the Navy’s code, after all. He knew it like his own skin.
“We have eyes and a rescue ship on the first three beacons,” the Race Master continued. “Same on the last two. In between, well.” The shrug was almost audible. “You knew what you signed up for.
“I remind you, as most of you start to finish up your jump calcs, that jumping early is a disqualifier,” he said. “Not least because I won’t be transmitting