Chapter 132: Racing With Vexa [II]

For three long heartbeats, neither of them said a word.

The two racers hung side by side above the blue curve of Nexus-Prime, so close that the glow of Vexa’s engines painted soft pink light across Leo’s canopy, and the only sound in his headset was her breathing.

"Hehehe..."

Then she smiled.

It was a smile he hadn’t seen on her before with her fangs just showing at the corners, and something about it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

"Okay," she said softly. "Okay, Leo... no more holding back."

Leo blinked.

"You were holding back?"

"A little," Vexa admitted, and her tail thumped once against her seat. "I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of your girls... but you’re not a trainee anymore, are you?"

She tipped her racer over.

"Let’s see if you can keep up with the real me..."

WHOOOOOM!

The pink racer dropped away from him like a stone with its nose pointed straight down at the glowing planet, and its engines flared so bright that Leo had to squint.

"Oh, come on!" he shouted, and threw his own racer after her.

KA-WHOOOOOM!

The two racers dove toward Nexus-Prime together.

The planet grew in the canopy with terrifying speed, from a beautiful blue ball into a vast shining wall of ocean and cloud and the thin glowing line of the atmosphere rushed up to meet them like the surface of a lake.

[Reentry in 10 seconds...]

Leo’s grip tightened.

’Okay, think,’ he told himself. ’Going up, I was lost. Going down should be easier, right? Gravity’s on my side this time... just point at the ground and don’t burn up.’

’...Don’t burn up. That’s an important part.’

[Reentry in 3... 2... 1...]

WHOOOOOOOSH!

They hit the atmosphere side by side and the world outside the canopy exploded into fire.

A sheath of blazing orange plasma wrapped around the nose of the racer and swept back over the glass in rippling waves, so bright that the whole cockpit glowed like the inside of a furnace, and the ship began to shake hard enough to rattle Leo’s teeth.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOAAAR!

The grips buzzed in his hands like they were alive.

[Hull temperature: 1,640°C]

[Heat shield: Nominal]

’Nominal,’ Leo thought, with his eyes watering against the glare. ’Sure... totally nominal. Everything’s on fire, but it’s nominal.’

The grips were getting warm under his palms, and a thin whistle had started somewhere behind his seat, rising higher and higher as the racer bit deeper into the air.

[Hull temperature: 1,910°C]

[Warning: Heat shield stress rising]

’Okay, that one’s not nominal... Ease the angle, ease the angle!’

He tipped the nose up a fraction, and the fire across the canopy flickered and thinned as the whistle dropped back down to a low hum.

[Heat shield: Nominal]

He let out the breath he’d been holding.

Through the flames, he could just make out the shape of Vexa’s racer beside him, wrapped in its own halo of fire, a pink ghost in an orange storm.

She was ahead of him by a nose... then he was ahead of her by a nose... then she was ahead again.

They kept trading the lead back and forth through the fire, and every time one of them pulled ahead, the other one clawed it back a second later, and neither of them could get more than a few meters clear.

And then the guide in Leo’s back flared.

It came on so suddenly and so strongly that he gasped, a wave of bright golden warmth rolling up from the base of his spine and spreading through his whole body all at once and right at the same moment, somewhere in the fire beside him, he felt something answer it.

It felt like an echo, the same frequency ringing back at him from the pink racer feeling pretty familiar.

Over the comms, Vexa let out a small startled breath.

"Leo," she whispered. "Do you feel that...?"

"Yeah," he said. "I feel it..."

It was the asteroid stream all over again, except this time, it was stronger and clearer, like a song played much louder.

Leo knew exactly where Vexa was going to go a heartbeat before she went there and she knew exactly where he was going to go.

They started flying almost perfectly mirrored, rolling at the same moment, banking at the same moment, sliding apart and back together through the burning air like two halves of the same ship, and neither of them could shake the other because every move one of them made, the other felt coming.

’This is crazy,’ Leo thought, half laughing and half breathless. ’She can’t lose me, and I can’t lose her... We’re just going to fly side by side all the way down!’

"Ugh!" Vexa groaned over the comms. "This is so annoying! It’s like racing against my own reflection!"

"Same here...!"

"Stop copying me...!"

"YOU stop copying ME...!"

Leo was laughing so hard that his ribs ached against the harness.

’This... this is what flying’s supposed to feel like,’ he thought. ’Just flying, for the pure fun of it, with somebody who actually gets it... I forgot it could be like this.’

The fire around the canopies began to thin, and the bright orange faded to a dull red glow as the plasma then peeled away from the noses of the racers in long trailing ribbons, and they burst out of reentry into open sky.

WHOOOOSH!

The sky was deep blue again, and below them, a thick layer of white clouds spread out across the ocean like a field of snow, kilometers wide with the late-morning suns turning their tops to gold.

The racers dove straight toward it.

"Okay," Vexa said, and her voice went very quiet and very serious. "Okay... I didn’t want to use this, Leo. I really didn’t but you leave me no choice."

Leo’s stomach dropped.

"Vexa... what are you doing?"

"Winning," she said simply, and he could hear her grinning.

FLASH!

Her racer split apart.

One moment, there was one pink racer beside him, and the next, there were five, all of them glowing faintly violet, fanning out across the sky in five different directions, and every single one of them looked exactly real.

’Violet Afterimages... Oh, come ON!’ Leo thought. ’She can do that in a race?!’

The five racers dove into the cloud layer at five different points.

PFFFFF! PFFFFF! PFFFFF! PFFFFF! PFFFFF!

They vanished into the white, one after another, and Leo’s scanner lit up with five identical signatures, all moving at the same speed... all heading roughly toward the coast.

He had maybe half a second to choose.

He picked the one on the far left, because it was closest to the straightest line toward Tarn Point, and he dove after it into the clouds.

WHUMP!

The world went white.

There was nothing outside the canopy except thick blinding white, streaming past the glass so fast that it made his head spin, and the only things that told him he was still flying were the instruments and the steady roar of his engines...

He followed the signature on his scanner, deeper and deeper into the cloud then the guide yanked at him.

It was sharp and sudden, a hard cold tug to the right, like someone grabbing the back of his collar.

’Wrong,’ it seemed to say. ’Wrong one!’

Leo looked at his scanner.

The signature he was following was heading downward, steeper and steeper, straight toward a huge dark mass inside the cloud bank, a towering column of storm cloud full of churning wind and flickering lightning.

It was a fake, leading him straight into a storm cell...

"No, no, no!" Leo shouted, and wrenched the grips hard to the right.

The racer swung away from the storm column so close that a crack of lightning flashed right past his canopy, lighting up the whole cockpit in blinding white.

KRAKA-BOOOOOM!

The thunder shook the racer like a toy, and the wind from the storm cell grabbed his tail and tried to drag him in, and he fought it with every bit of strength in his arms... the same new strength that had thrown a ninety-kilo bar around in Vexa’s training room, until he finally broke free.

WHOOOSH!

’That was close... that was way too close... She sent a fake into a storm on purpose?! That’s evil!’

The fake signature on his scanner flickered and disappeared, swallowed by the storm.

He was alone in the white, with four signatures still on his scanner, and he had no idea which one was real.

’Okay... okay, calm down. Calm down. Don’t look at the scanner.’

He made himself take his eyes off the instruments.

He took a deep breath, loosened his grip on the grips and let the guide reach out.

It spread through him like warm water, out through his hands and into the racer, out through the racer and into the clouds, and somewhere ahead of him and a little to the left, he felt it... that same familiar echo that answered his own.

Only one of the four signatures was humming back.

’There you are,’ Leo thought.

He turned toward it.

PFFFFFF!

He burst out of the bottom of the clouds into bright open sky, and there, a few hundred meters ahead and just to his left, was one pink racer, the real one, with nothing violet about it at all.

Behind him, the other three afterimages faded away into nothing.

"WHAT?!" Vexa’s voice exploded through his headset. "How did you find me?! Nobody finds me! I’ve used that trick in forty-two championships..."

Well she knew the answer and he did too.

"I felt you..." Leo said breathlessly.

There was a stunned silence.

"...You felt me?" Vexa said, and her voice had gone very small and very strange. "Through the... through the thing in our backs?"

"Yeah."

For a second, she didn’t say anything at all then she laughed, high and delighted and a little bit shaky.

"That’s not fair," she said. "That’s not fair at all... but it’s kind of amazing."

Her voice went softer.

"Do you know how long I’ve been flying with this thing in my back, Leo? My whole life and nobody else ever felt it... Nobody ever answered."

"Well if it helps, I’m answering now," Leo said.

Vexa went quiet, and when she spoke again, he could hear her smiling.

"Yeah... you are."

Below them, the clouds broke apart completely, and the coastline of Sector Four came rushing up out of the haze...

The violet sea, the long white beaches, and far ahead, the dark line of the cliffs, with the pale shapes of Tarn Point’s pavilions glinting on top.

Leo pushed the grip all the way down.

WHOOOOOM!

He dropped low over the ocean, so low that his exhaust tore a long white wake across the violet water behind him, and he came up alongside Vexa’s racer until they were level again.

Halfway to the coast, a huge cargo hauler came lumbering out of the haze ahead of them, flying low over the water... a slow grey brick the size of a city block with its running lights blinking lazily.

"HAULER!" Leo shouted.

"I SEE IT!"

They split around it at the same instant, Vexa rolling hard to the left and Leo diving under its belly, so close to the water that his exhaust kicked up a wall of violet spray.

SHHHHHHHHH!

The hauler’s dark underside blotted out the sky above him for one long terrifying second, and its engines roared past his canopy like a thunderstorm.

VRRRRRRRRMMMMMM!

Then he was out the other side, and Vexa came swinging back in from the left, and they snapped back together like magnets.

"Stop playing with your life!"

They raced toward the cliffs side by side, skimming the waves, so close together that their exhaust trails twisted around each other in a long pink-and-blue spiral behind them.

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The cliffs grew taller and taller.

The pad at the top came into view, a flat black square on the edge of the rock, and Leo could see tiny figures up on the terrace above it.

’Almost there... almost there... come on...’

"Leo!" Vexa called, and she was laughing again, wild and breathless. "This is the best race of my life...!"

"Mine too!" Leo shouted back.

They pulled up together, climbing the cliff face side by side with their engines howling.

The black rock filled the whole canopy, so close that Leo could see the white streaks of seabird nests and the cracks running through the stone, and the racer shuddered as the climb bled away its speed.

WEEE-WEEE!

[Warning: Approaching stall]

’No, no, not now... don’t you dare stall on me now!’

He squeezed the left grip all the way down, and the racer roared and dug in and kept climbing, and beside him, he could hear Vexa grunting with effort as she fought her own racer up the same wall of rock.

They burst over the top edge of the cliff together into the bright morning light... the pad was straight ahead.

Both racers screamed toward it nose to nose, and both of their landing gear dropped down at the exact same instant.

CLUNK! CLUNK!