of the road.”
“You’re right,” the pilot said slowly. “You owe me that. As for the rest…fuck, I don’t know, Ivan. You sold me out…but you saved my life, too. I need to think about this.”
“Unless something’s changed, you think best when flying,” Ivan pointed out. “We’ve got a few hours of that ahead of us.”
“And neither of us is going anywhere,” Charpentier said. “That’s two people who tried to kill me in this race, and what I can see suggests we’re still in the lead. Somehow.
“I have no intention of letting anyone catch up to us! Thirty gees till the end.”
Ivan groaned.
“You’ll forgive me for not sympathizing with your pain as much as I might have yesterday,” the pilot said with an unforced chuckle.
13
They didn’t see another ship for the remaining twelve hours of the race. Astonishing displays of astronomical stellar power, radiation beams that could cut a ship in half like a toy, beacons that had somehow placed themselves in the middle of the deadly storm…but not a single ship.
“So, the sixteen-hour estimate was bullshit, I see,” Ivan noted. “I make that beacon twenty.”
“So do I,” Charpentier agreed, the pilot starting to sound exhausted. He’d been flying for hours upon hours—and while a lot of it was straightforward, a lot of it hadn’t been.
There wasn’t much in terms of debris out there, but the radiation beams and gravity waves that made that the case were hard to maneuver around.
“Hold on one moment,” the pilot said. “We are at one hundred KPS relative to the beacon and within the bubble, transmitting…”
Charpentier exhaled, a long deep sigh.
“Receiving,” he told Ivan. “That looks like jump coordinates to me, Ivan. I’m cutting the engines to fifteen gees. Are you going to be able to walk?”
“Walk? Yes,” Ivan said. “Use my right shoulder? No.” He sighed against the gel of the acceleration couch. “I’ve also probably bled all over the couch.”
“There are bodies on my bridge, Ivan, and the couch put pressure on the wound,” Charpentier replied. “Believe me, wiping down the acceleration couches isn’t high on my concerns.”
“Also bodies in Engineering and near the main airlock,” Ivan told him. “We…probably will want to deal with those before we get back to Xanth.”
“I have no interest in dealing with murder charges, so yes,” the pilot agreed. “For now, you should be able to unlock the couch and get down to the simulacrum chamber. This place is gorgeous and terrifying and apparently full of people who want to kill me.
“I look forward to never seeing it again.”
Ivan chuckled as he hit the release on the acceleration couch. Drug injectors—they’d fired once an hour for the last twelve hours—withdrew from his neck. The upper layers of the cocoon folded back into the safety bars and then folded back to the side.
He could feel the crusted scabs on his shoulder from both the original wound and the new one he’d created removing the darts. The plastiskin was mostly holding, but he winced as he moved.
He was no doctor, but he suspected it was going to take careful medical attention to save his arm. Medical attention he wasn’t going to get on a mob ship—not that he’d trust, anyway.
“I’m on my way down,” he told Charpentier. “Soon, we’ll be clear of this mess.”
Blood loss and having been motionless for twelve hours left Ivan dizzier and slower than he’d expected, which meant it took him five minutes to reach the simulacrum chamber instead of one.
To his surprise, Charpentier didn’t say anything when he finally brought the intercom video online.
“It’ll take me a minute or two to calculate the jump still,” Ivan told the other man.
“I know,” Charpentier told him. “I’m watching the scanners for the rest of the racers.”
“And?” Ivan asked, bringing up his calculation program and plugging in the coordinates. Looked like they were exactly one light-year away. Apparently, whoever was watching and betting on the race was only really going to see the end.
No one would ever really know what happened to the ships that hadn’t made it all the way. Even the ones that Ivan and Charpentier had seen destroyed…who could they tell? They’d been in the middle of the illegal race themselves, after all.
“I’m getting pings back near beacon seventeen, but nothing solid yet,” the pilot replied. “I think we’re several hours ahead of everyone else. That’s what thirty gees buys us.”
“I can’t imagine you’re surprised,” Ivan said. He glanced at the sensor data himself. He needed to factor a lot of information into the