Chapter 77: Impossible Flying

The realization hit Vexa like a physical blow to the chest.

All her life she’d been the only one, the freak and the prodigy who could see the invisible threads of the void while everyone else stumbled blindly through the dark and now, dancing through the deadliest asteroid graveyard in the sector, was a battered gunmetal corvette flying with the exact same terrifying miraculous intuition.

"Don’t you dare run away from me!" she shouted, half laughing and half pleading, her purple hair whipping around her face as she threw the Mirage into an even harder burn.

She began to match his madness move for move.

When the Wanderer-7 pulled an inverted ninety-degree dive around a rotating nickel spire and scraped its harpoon housing along the rock, Vexa rolled the opposite way, cut through the spire’s gravity pocket and came out right on his tail, eight hundred meters behind him!

When the corvette killed its thrust, spun sixty degrees and fired its attitude jets to bounce off the pressure wave of a bursting gas pocket, Vexa mirrored it instantly and used the same wash to slingshot her lighter frame forward...

They flew like two predators tangled on a single thread.

The two ships wove through the churning storm of stone, carving twin wakes of turquoise and lilac fire through the dark.

They threaded needle-eye gaps between tumbling boulders barely wide enough to clear their hulls, and skimmed the faces of ancient cratered rocks so low that they kicked up showers of frozen dust and static that crackled across their canopies in spiderwebs of blue lightning.

The corvette’s dorsal turret swung around toward her.

Vexa’s breath caught, and then the guide in her spine told her it wasn’t going to fire... and it didn’t.

The barrels tracked her for one long second and then swung away again, as if the pilot had looked at her, decided she wasn’t worth the slugs and gone back to running.

"Rude!" she yelled at her canopy, delighted.

The laser batteries on the corvette’s shoulders flashed instead.

ZAP! ZAP!

Two crimson beams lanced across the space ahead of her nose, a warning shot laid down so precisely that it carved a glowing line through the dust exactly where she would have been half a second later.

She felt the pull a heartbeat before it fired, flicked the Mirage into a tight barrel roll and slid through the gap between the two beams with her violet hull glowing red in their reflected light.

"Oh, you’re flirting with me now?" she laughed breathlessly. "Okay... Okay! If you’re a man, I would definitely marry you, hell a woman too! I don’t discriminate!"

Between maneuvers she could feel the resonance building in the small of her back, hotter and sharper than she’d ever felt it on the grand circuits.

It had stopped guiding her through the rocks alone and started locking onto the ship ahead of her, humming in harmony with whoever was holding the controls of that battered corvette.

’Look at him...’ she thought, her eyes shining with open ecstatic adoration as the Wanderer-7 slipped through a closing crevice with centimeters to spare. ’He’s listening to the void the same way I do... He has the same guide... The same tingling on his back!’

She pushed harder.

The Mirage was faster on the straights, and she knew it.

Every time the belt opened into a clear lane she gained two hundred meters, three hundred, until she was close enough to see the scorch marks on the corvette’s stern plating and the slate patch glinting along its flank.

Every time the rocks closed in again, he took it all back, cutting lines so tight and so strange that she had to fight her own instincts to follow them.

Her sponsors would have fainted watching the hull stress readings, and her old flight coach would have had a heart attack.

She wasn’t sure anymore whether she was trying to catch him or simply trying to keep up, and she didn’t care at all.

On the next straight she pushed the Mirage right up alongside him, close enough that the turquoise glow of his drives washed across her canopy.

She craned her neck to look into his cockpit, but the glare off his glass hid everything except the faint dark outline of someone sitting very still in a big chair, hands down at his sides, not even reaching for a stick.

’Who are you?’ she thought with her heart racing. ’What do you look like? Do you laugh when you fly? Do you feel it in your back the way I do, or somewhere else...?’

The corvette dipped away from her like it had heard the question and didn’t feel like answering, sliding under a tumbling boulder so neatly that the rock seemed to lift itself out of the way, and she had to haul the Mirage into a corkscrew to follow before the next one crushed her.

A dense brown dust cloud swallowed both of them a second later, and her sensors went blind in a wall of static.

Every instrument on her console screamed that she was flying into nothing, and she let go of her eyes completely and flew on the feeling alone, dipping and rolling past shapes she never saw.

When she burst out the far side, the Wanderer-7 burst out right beside her at the exact same instant, on the exact same line, like they’d rehearsed it...

She laughed so hard it hurt.

The racers on the grand circuits had needed clean tracks and painted markers and a computer in their ear telling them when to turn, however this pilot was flying blind through a meteor storm in a battered gunboat with mismatched armor, and he was doing it better than any of them ever had.

...Then a gravitational shear rolled across the belt like an invisible wave, a sideways pull strong enough to yank a ship a hundred meters off its line, and both of them felt it coming at the same moment.

The corvette and the Mirage tipped into the shear together and rode it like a pair of surfers on the same swell with their noses swinging in perfect unison, and came out of it side by side as if they’d been flying together for years.

Up ahead, the belt reached a terrible choke point.

Two mountain-sized asteroids, each more than two kilometers across, heavy with iron and pitted with deep craters, were tumbling toward each other on crossing orbits.

The pull between their huge masses was dragging them together faster and faster and their jagged faces were closing like the jaws of a vise.

The gap between them was shrinking at forty meters per second.

Smaller rocks pinballed off the faces of the two giants as they closed, and one fist-sized pebble clipped her nose and made her barrier flicker in a brief blue ripple.

Vexa watched the gap fall from three hundred meters to two hundred, and then to one hundred, and her stomach dropped with it.

...Any sane pilot would have cut the throttle, hauled back and broken away into the clear space above the orbital plane however the Wanderer-7 didn’t break away.

SLAM!

Its twin turquoise plumes flared with blinding intensity, and the corvette dropped its nose and shot straight into the collapsing chasm between the two giants!

Vexa gasped, her knuckles going white around her controls.

"Are you out of your mind?!"

She watched with her heart lodged in her throat as the corvette flew into the dark shadowed trench between the two closing walls, and the gap narrowed to sixty meters, then fifty, then forty...

SCRAPE!

The Wanderer-7’s flank grazed the left rock face and threw a blinding arc of orange sparks into the vacuum, but the pilot never flinched.

With one last impossible twist of its attitude thrusters, the corvette tilted its fifty-meter hull onto a perfect forty-five-degree diagonal, slipped through the final thirty-meter slit of starlight at the far end of the trench and shot out into the open void beyond.

KRA-KOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The instant the corvette’s tail cleared the far side as the two mountains met with world-shattering force.

A silent shockwave of pulverized stone, white-hot molten iron and thousands of jagged fragments burst outward and wiped out the corridor behind it.

Vexa was right on his heels, screaming into the approach at eight kilometers per second.

And in that exact split second...

TUG!

The feeling in the small of her back seized her.

It yanked backward against her spine like an iron chain, screaming at her to pull up, to abort, to break away from the closing jaws.

The pull was warning her with certainty that the gap was gone, that physics wouldn’t bend, and that she couldn’t make the crossing.

"No!" Vexa screamed into the empty cockpit, her violet eyes burning with frantic defiance. "I can make it...! I won’t lose you!"

She defied the pull on purpose.

She shoved the warning down, gripped the yokes with all her strength and slammed the throttles forward, trying to force the Violet Mirage through the cloud of exploding stone... however it was a reckless arrogant mistake.

CRUNCH!

A five-hundred-ton chunk of shattered basalt ricocheted out of the collision and slammed straight into the Mirage’s forward port flank.

BOOM!

The Mirage’s Class-S racing barrier, an ultra-dense layered prismatic shield built to survive the brutal crashes of the high-tier speed tracks, flared into existence in a blinding diamond-white blast.

SZZZZZZT-FLASH!

The barrier swallowed nearly all of the impact, its shimmering lattice rippling with violent violet and gold distortion but the raw momentum of a five-hundred-ton rock knocked the seventy-meter racer completely off its line and sent it tumbling end over end through the debris cloud in a violent sickening spin.

BANG-CLATTER!

The whole hull shrieked as metal flexed around her, and somewhere behind the cockpit something important cracked with a sound like a snapping bone.

Inside the cockpit, the inertial dampeners groaned under the overload.

Vexa was flung against her harness, the five-point straps biting hard into her shoulders and thighs and knocking the wind out of her in a sharp pained gasp.

Her head snapped back against the headrest as loose data chips and spare tools floated through the cabin as the gravity generator flickered and warning lights flashed across her consoles in a sea of frantic amber text.

[COLLISION DETECTED]

[Kinetic Barrier Integrity: 42% (Recharging)]

[Port Attitude Thruster Array: Offline]

[Stabilizer Gyros: Re-Engaging...]

[Warning: Spatial orientation lost... Automated counter-burn initiated.]

HISS-PUMP!

The Mirage’s recovery computers fired the emergency retros in heavy plumes of stabilizing gas, fighting the spin until it gradually slowed, leveled out and finally came to a drifting halt.

In all her years of flying, it was the first time she had ever refused to listen to the feeling... and it had been right.

Silence returned to the cockpit.

Vexa hung in her harness with her chest heaving in ragged breathless pants and a thin line of sweat running down the side of her pink neck.

Her purple hair was a wild tangled mess around her shoulders, and her fingers trembled where they still clung to the cold yokes with her knuckles aching from the force of the hit.

She coughed, tasted copper where she’d bitten her tongue, and reached up with a shaking hand to push the hair out of her eyes.

She swallowed hard, blinked through the faint spots of static dancing across her vision and slowly lifted her head.

Behind her, the two colliding asteroids had become a single fused mass of crushed iron tumbling slowly in the cold starlight, wrapped in a thin glittering cloud of gravel that drifted away into the dark and far beyond them, out in the clean empty void of the deep corridor, the gunmetal corvette was accelerating away.

...Its twin turquoise plumes burned steady and bright and proud as it carved a clean elegant line through the darkness toward the distant systems, without so much as a glance back at the wreckage it had left behind.

A small breathless laugh slipped out of her, half offended and half amazed.

"You didn’t even look back," she whispered. "Not even once, you heartless thing..."

Vexa sat completely still in her seat.

The damaged thruster array, the repair toggles and the multi-million-credit barrier sitting at forty-two percent all slid right out of her mind as though they belonged to someone else.

She stared out at that tiny shrinking needle of turquoise light, and slowly the shock faded from her face.

A bright breathtaking wonder bloomed across her features in its place.

Her large violet eyes widened, catching the distant starlight, and then a radiant shimmering brilliance began to shine from deep inside them in an overwhelming ecstatic joy that made her whole body tremble.

Her hand drifted off the flight controls and rose slowly to press flat against the center of her chest, feeling the wild pounding of her own heart under her ribs while the small of her back still hummed with the fading electric echo of that impossible flight.

’That person...’ Vexa thought, her lips parting on a breathless trembling whisper as a single tear of pure exhilaration traced down her cheek.

’That person... That person is actually using it!’

After all these years, in this whole vast universe, she had finally found someone else who used the same power she did.