attention shift from the other ships and the beacon to the real problem. The two pulsars were spectacular, rapidly rotating neutron stars orbiting each other at a distance of a single light-minute.
Even as Ivan looked at them, the screens around him darkened to protect his eyes from the flash as one of the poles swung close enough toward them for the radiation beam to be visible.
He didn’t need to see the data from the beacon to know that the Black Pulsar Race was going to take them right between the two spinning blades of astronomical death.
The other courier ship, the largest racer after Restoya herself, made turnover slightly ahead of them. Charpentier followed suit, as did most of the other ships pulling fifteen gees or above.
As the pilot had predicted, the tiny five-thousand-ton racing shuttle blazed past them toward the beacon. Of the ships still burning directly for the beacon, it was the fastest and Ivan had to swallow a sense of foreboding as he watched the racer leap ahead.
Charpentier had been worrying about that ship and it was rubbing off. They were taking risks, cutting things short. Ivan knew he was going to have to watch at least one ship die today. There was no way around it—not in a contest that had never had every racer finish alive.
“I hope the rescue ship has him locked in,” Ivan muttered.
“That will only help him for a couple of hours, assuming everything goes on schedule,” Charpentier replied. “And in any case…do you see a rescue ship?”
That sent a chill down Ivan’s spine, and he looked at the screens again. Not just the visual around him, which was enough to pick out the cluster of high-acceleration racers who were choosing to decelerate toward the beacon, but the long-range radar and passive scanners.
The Race Master had said there was a rescue ship, but there was nothing out there. No one was watching them at all.
“They lied?” he asked. “That seems an odd thing to lie about.”
“It is,” Charpentier said grimly. “Even in a race like this, I wouldn’t expect them to lie about that.”
The channel was silent.
“Our racer will hit the beacon in five minutes,” the pilot continued. “I guess we all see what’s going on then.”
“Two beacons after that before we bring the engines to full?” Ivan asked.
“Exactly. By then, we’ll start to see the clusters of who is going to make it and who is going to fall behind,” Charpentier told him. “That’s when we break everyone’s rules.”
“I may take a nap after we see what this guy does,” the Mage admitted. He was exhausted. The jump spell was the single most draining spell he knew. It wasn’t necessarily complicated, but even that was mostly because it was so ritualized and standardized that he could do it in his sleep.
It just took everything he had out of him.
“Good plan,” his friend replied. “If they’re following standard race layouts, that won’t be long, but it’ll give you at least an hour.”
“I thought you said we’d be an hour between beacons,” Ivan asked.
Charpentier chuckled.
“The beacons are set up to be one hour apart for a ship doing a zero-zero course at ten gravities…on average,” he specified. “I get close to zero—no course is ever straight-line, like I said—but I have never run any course at ten gees, my friend.”
Ivan grimaced.
“Once we go to thirty, how long will we be at thirty?” he asked.
He saw Charpentier’s grin widen and he knew the answer.
“The rest of the way, Ivan,” the pilot told him. “We burn hard and we burn until it’s over.”
Deal or no deal, Ivan had to wonder if Aquila’s people were ready for that—and deal or no deal, he was definitely going to hope that they weren’t!
“There he goes,” Charpentier murmured.
The pilot in the racer shuttle reached the ten-thousand-kilometer bubble around the beacon first. Not by much, five other ships were making the same gamble, but by enough that he was also the first to change course.
The beacon wouldn’t acknowledge any transmission from more than ten thousand kilometers away. The right transmission from inside that bubble, using the keys they’d each been given, would send an encrypted package back.
The racers then decrypted that package for the coordinates of the next beacon. This early on, Ivan figured the beacon was probably the three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers of “one hour’s flight at ten gravities” away. If he’d been in his old destroyer, they could probably find it.
Even in this mess. The pulsars’ radiation