Chapter 110: Last Hour On Driftmark

For half a second, the alcove was dead silent then Harper completely lost her mind.

CLANG!

"THIRTY-NINE THOUSAND!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, throwing both arms in the air and leaping half a meter off the deck plates.

She practically tackled Jin-Ah into the grav-sled.

Whatever had been sitting on her chest since the Vein, for one moment the sheer size of the number blew it clean away.

"WE DID IT! WE’RE FILTHY, STINKING, UNHOLY RICH! CAP, LOOK AT THOSE NUMBERS!"

Camila let out a wild breathless shriek of joy and threw her arms around Elena’s waist, squeezing her in a fierce tearful hug that completely dismantled the heiress’s dignity.

Elena gasped and flailed for balance and went bright red, stammering protests, and then gave up and laughed out loud... a real unguarded laugh that none of them had heard from her before.

Aoi let out a long shuddering breath of relief, and her eyes shone behind her glasses as she leaned against Leo’s shoulder with her hand resting warm on his arm.

Chloe bounced up and down on her small boots, swinging her long sleeves with tiny triumphant squeaks, and Leo stood in the middle of all of it laughing, while something huge and warm swelled in his chest and washed away every cold memory of the void.

They had a war chest, earned with their own hands...

Vexa watched it all from a step away, with her hands clasped behind her back and her tail swaying slowly though she didn’t join in.

’It looks cute...’

She just watched them hugging and shouting and crying over a number that she’d have spent on a single afternoon, and there was a soft wistful look on her face, like someone pressing their nose to a bakery window.

’Is this what it means to have friends...?’

Twenty minutes later, they marched into Torv’s shop on the lower gantry.

The big copper-hided reptile was behind his titanium bench cleaning an injector pin when Leo pushed through the thermal curtain and dropped a heavy steel lockbox on the counter.

THUD!

"We’re here for the coils, Torv. Eighteen thousand... In Guild brass o course."

Torv slowly lowered his loupes.

All four of his yellow eyes blinked as Jin-Ah popped the latches and the gleaming stacks of tokens caught the light.

"By the deep iron," he rumbled, with real respect. "Word came down from the Guild hall, and I didn’t believe it... You cleared the Vein in an afternoon."

He didn’t bother to count the brass.

Torv hauled the long cylindrical case down from its overhead cradle and set it on the bench, and it bloomed open to show the four paired coils resting on their magnetic cushions, gleaming with violet potential and their golden plasma ribbons twisting under the clear ceramic.

Harper lunged at the bench, and her hands were trembling as they touched the casing as actual tears welled up in her eyes.

"Look at the winding density," she whispered, sniffing loudly and tracing the microscopic channels with her thumb. "Torv, you beautiful four-armed bastard... This is art. Look at that capacitor bridge! It’s wound to half a micron!"

"Install them," Leo said, grinning, and squeezed her shoulder warmly. "Let’s make her fly."

For a heartbeat, Harper’s shoulder stiffened under his hand then it relaxed, and she ducked her head over the coils so he couldn’t see her face.

"Yeah, Cap..."

The installation took three straight hours.

Torv supplied the hydraulic gantries as Harper and Elena worked shoulder to shoulder in the lower propulsion bay.

Elena’s Mechanical Attunement synchronized the power shunts while Harper’s Kinetic Tuning balanced the magnetic coils to near-zero tolerance, and the four huge iridium rings went in one by one ahead of the ion reaction chambers.

For three hours, the two women who couldn’t stand each other didn’t snipe once as they were too busy finishing each other’s work.

Halfway through, Leo came down with two flasks of water.

Elena took hers with a nod and went straight back to her shunts while Harper took hers and didn’t look up from the coil she was seating.

"Thanks, Cap."

"...You’ve been a bit quiet, is there an issue?" he said.

"Busy." She tightened a flange bolt with a hard precise twist. "...Somebody’s gotta make your new toys work."

"Harper..."

"It’s fine, Leo." She still didn’t look at him. "Go check on your racer. I think she’s lonely without you."

The words came out light and joking though there was something underneath them that wasn’t either.

Before he could find an answer, Elena cleared her throat sharply from the other side of the ring.

"Bell, I need your hands on the third coil, now,"

Harper was gone around the housing, and the moment closed like a door.

Leo stood there with his own flask in his hand and Aoi’s words in his ears.

CLANK-WHIRRR-HUMMMMM!

When the last flange locked home, the propulsion grid gave a deep purring chime that ran through every plate of the ship.

[Upgrade Installed: 4x Tier-2 Accelerator Coils!]

[Treasury: 39,200 ? 21,200 Zuni]

[Cruising Velocity: 6 km/s ? 28 km/s!]

[Transit Time to Nexus-Prime: 4 days]

Four days... A long exhausting month of crawling through raider-infested corridors had been crushed down into a four-day sprint.

Harper sat back on her heels on the deck of the propulsion bay, staring up at the four glowing rings, and Elena stood beside her wiping her hands on a rag.

For a long moment neither of them said anything.

"Good work, Bell," Elena said finally, without looking at her.

Harper blinked up at her. "Did you just compliment me?"

"I complimented the work," Elena said crisply. "You happened to be attached to it... Don’t get happy all of a sudden."

Elena then walked out, and Harper stared after her with her mouth open.

’What a bitch...’

They came out of the propulsion bay smeared in hydraulic grease, laughing and exhausted, and stepped out onto the main concourse to find a real meal.

That was when the crowd hit them.

STEP-WHIRR!

As they passed the central transit arch, a young insectoid technician with a telemetry slate stopped dead in its tracks.

Its compound lenses whirred and focused on the pink girl strolling at Leo’s side.

"Wait," it clicked, and its translator collar squealed with excitement. "Pink hide... violet crest... white racing suit... IT’S HER!"

A feathered prospector nearby snapped its head around and its golden eyes went wide.

"The Neon Phantom?! The champion of the Core Nebula?!"

"THE NEON PHANTOM IS ON DRIFTMARK!" someone screamed from a balcony.

Within sixty seconds, the concourse turned into a madhouse.

Hundreds of spacers, mechanics, prospectors and residents poured out of the shops and bars and swarmed around Vexa in a roaring shoving tide of starry-eyed fans.

Silicate miners held out grease-stained data pads, insectoid drillers waved diagnostic wands, and blue-skinned merchants shoved expensive pens at her, all of them shouting for autographs and greetings.

"VEXA! SIGN MY CORE INJECTOR!"

"DID YOU REALLY DRIFT THE SEVENTH ACCORD AT FORTY KLICKS?!"

"LOOK THIS WAY, CHAMPION!"

Vexa didn’t look annoyed in the slightest.

She lit up like a stage under spotlights, threw her arms wide, winked at the cameras and signed pads with lightning-fast sweeps of her claws while her tail wagged so hard it made a breeze.

"Hi, everyone! Yes, it’s me! Don’t push, there’s enough for everybody!" She giggled and blew kisses up at the balconies, completely in her element.

Then, in the middle of it, she reached out through the crowd, grabbed Leo by the wrist and dragged him in beside her.

"And THIS," she announced to the entire concourse at the top of her voice, "is the best pilot I’ve ever seen in my whole life! Better than me! Remember his face! Leo Kaine! You’re all going to want his autograph someday!"

The crowd roared. A dozen data pads swung toward Leo’s face at once.

He stood there frozen with his ears burning bright red while Vexa beamed up at him like she’d just handed him a medal, and fifty meters of shouting strangers chanted a name they’d never heard ten seconds earlier.

When the crowd finally let her go, Vexa grabbed his sleeve and leaned in, suddenly anxious.

"Was that okay? I didn’t ask first. I just really wanted them to know about you... Are you mad?"

Leo looked at her worried face and the tail that had gone still but he couldn’t summon anything close to mad.

"Just warn me next time..." He said, rubbing his burning ear.

The tail exploded back into wagging. "Next time! There’s a next time!"

Harper, Elena and Aoi stood three paces back with their mouths slightly open.

"Holy crap," Harper breathed. "She’s actually famous. Like, galaxy-famous..."

"Forty-two consecutive championships across the Core," Jin-Ah reported, scrolling through the public registry with wide eyes. "Her public asset holdings exceed forty million Zuni. She owns a twelve-square-kilometer estate on Nexus-Prime, bought outright with her own winnings. She’s... a celebrity."

"A spoiled racing idol with an army of unwashed admirers," Elena said, watching Vexa bounce around in the crowd with a mixture of aristocratic disdain and reluctant respect. "How predictably vulgar."

She paused.

"...Though her standing may prove exceptionally useful."

Aoi said nothing at all.

She was watching Leo’s red ears with Vexa’s hand still wrapped around his wrist, and her face had gone very still.

’Why are they so close all of a sudden...?’ Aoi’s right eye twitched.

They ate at a noodle stall in the transit hub, the eight of them crammed around a tiny steel counter while the vendor with a cheerful insectoid, ladled steaming broth into bowls.

Vexa ordered for all of them without asking and then ate three bowls of something bright blue and spicy herself, slurping happily with her tail curled around her stool.

Camila tasted everything, scribbling notes about spices on a napkin while Chloe sat on Leo’s knee with her lemon water, sniffing Vexa’s blue noodles suspiciously.

"It smells like engine coolant..." she decided.

"Well, it might smell like that but it’s delicious!" Vexa protested.

"I didn’t say it wasn’t," Chloe said. "I said it smells like engine coolant..."

Jin-Ah, very solemnly, wrote that down on her new slate.

’Noodles that smell like engine coolant...? Space truly is weird...’

High on the second-tier balcony overlooking the concourse, the shadows were cold.

The Blood-Drift captain stood behind the safety rail of the Guild’s administrative vestibule with his yellow slit eyes locked on Leo’s broad shoulders and his tail twitching against the stone.

In his right claw, he held the encrypted comm-link and on its small screen, a confirmation rune glowed beside a pale white three-pointed emblem.

...The relay had answered.

The Pale Federation had his coordinates, and somewhere out in the staging hubs, hunters were already being dispatched.

He slipped the comm-link back into his webbing, and his wet snout curled back over his fangs in the first real smile he’d managed since the Guild hall.

"Laugh while you can, little man," he whispered into the sulfur haze. "The hunt has already left the slipways and I hope they do catch you..."

They spent the last hour on Driftmark doing ordinary things, which felt like the strangest luxury of all.

Camila haggled shyly for a bag of dried alien peppers at the apothecary and won, to her own astonishment.

Krax spotted Harper from his stall and bellowed across the concourse that he’d pay double for her next batch of slugs.

Jin-Ah bought a second slate, purely as a backup, she insisted while Aoi bought nothing, but she stood for a long time in front of a stall selling star charts printed on real paper and touched them with her fingertips, and when she walked away, Leo went back and bought the one she’d touched longest and tucked it inside his jacket.

’Just to give her later of course...’

An hour later, the Wanderer-7 was ready to go.

The holds were sealed, twenty-one thousand two hundred Zuni sat locked in the safe, and the new coils were humming at ninety-eight percent in the propulsion bay.

The boarding tube had retracted, and the ramp was down on the deck plates of Berth Forty-Four.

Leo stood at the top of it with his hands on his hips, looking out at the glittering industrial ring of the station with the folded star chart crackling faintly inside his jacket every time he breathed.

Behind him, the bridge was alive with departure checks.

Aoi was laying in the vector for the first jump corridor, Elena was watching her shunts, and Camila was setting out fresh tea for the long burn.

At the bottom of the ramp stood Vexa, with her hands planted on her slim hips.

From the scuffs on the deck plates and the empty noodle cup beside her boot, she’d been standing there for most of the hour, waiting, exactly as she’d said she would.

Her purple hair caught the amber work lights, and her huge violet eyes looked up at him with an eager and slightly dangerous sparkle.

Her tail swished slowly behind her, and her little fangs flashed in a mischievous grin.

"Nexus-Prime, right?" she called up. "I live there... Twelve orbital defense platforms, three customs rings and a few thousand mercenary gunboats patrolling the upper sky."

She tilted her head.

"...You’re going to need me to get in."