Chapter 76: The Pull

The optical tracker on Vexa Tarn’s panoramic console replayed the last three seconds of Strike Unit Six over and over in a glowing amber wireframe.

The fifty-meter gunmetal corvette with the fresh slate patch along its starboard belt hung in the middle of her holographic projector.

...On the loop it snapped through a violent zero-radius pitch, swung its dorsal turret onto an impossible angle and gutted her third ship’s reactor with four rail-slugs while the poor fool was still dangling on the end of a harpoon line.

Three ships... Her three ships, gone in under four minutes...

Vexa sat with her long bare pink legs crossed lazily over the edge of the flight console, swinging her left foot in slow circles.

A wild bouncy cascade of purple hair tumbled over her bare shoulders and the collar of her custom flight vest with her pointed chin rested in the palm of her hand and her cheeks were flushed with a sudden prickling heat, while her large luminous violet eyes stayed completely unblinking.

She supposed she ought to be angry.

Unit Six had flown under her colors for two whole seasons.

They were loud and greedy and they smelled like cheap deuterium, and their leader had a habit of calling every captured crew "pretty little cargo" in a voice that made her skin crawl... but they’d been hers, and she’d sent them in first, the way she always did, because watching a hunt was more fun than starting one.

She’d expected the usual.

A frightened little seeded ship, a panicked pilot, three minutes of screaming on an open channel and then a long boring tow back to the auction yards.

...Instead, she’d just watched a ghost dance her entire strike wing into the grave.

A tiny breathless smile tugged at her lips until her sharp white incisors caught the dim cockpit light.

’Weird flying...’

The thought rolled through her like an electric spark catching dry moss.

It was utterly bizarre.

It was reckless and jagged and completely free of every textbook maneuver taught at the flight academies across the core systems, and it broke every rule she’d ever been taught to respect.

No military commander in their right mind cut forward thrust in the middle of a three-on-one crossfire just to spin around and shoot backward on pure inertia, and no sane pilot ever flew a pursuit craft straight at a hollow rock a split second before something enormous came crawling out of it...

He hadn’t known that beast was there.

She’d seen it in the way his ship flinched, the way it jerked up and away a heartbeat before the rock split open, before any sensor on that corvette could possibly have warned him.

...He’d felt it.

A sharp delicious shiver ran through her limbs and raised goosebumps along her smooth pink skin, and she let out a low musical giggle that echoed through the quiet cockpit.

’A real pilot,’ she thought, her fingers tapping restlessly against her cheekbone. ’Way out here in this forgotten sun-bleached scrap heap of a belt... there’s actually someone who knows how to dance.’

She’d been born under the violet skies of Thyrra, in the dense glowing nebula clouds of the high-gravity core, and she’d known before she could even walk that she was different from everyone around her.

As a child running between the towering crystal spires of her home world, she had always felt a strange sensation resting right between her shoulder blades, a faint persistent prickle like an electric tingle that flared to life whenever she came near a ledge, or when a sky-car tore around a blind corner, or when a crystal shelf was about to shear off the canyon wall.

...It was a whisper in her spine that pulled her left when logic said right and tugged her backward before her eyes could see the falling rock.

Her tutors had called it hyperactivity.

Her family had called it nervous sensitivity, and the local physicians had tried to medicate it into silence with neuro-suppressants she spat into the recycling drains the moment their backs were turned.

She hadn’t understood what it was until she turned fourteen, stole her older cousin’s stripped-down sub-orbital interceptor and pointed its roaring fusion manifold straight into the storm canyons of the Thyrrian ridge.

The moment her hands closed around the flight yoke and the acceleration pressed her back into the couch and the drop opened under her wings, the tingle stopped whispering and roared.

It took her hands and guided her through the shrieking wind shear, pulling her through razor-thin mountain gaps that had killed a dozen veterans and telling her the angle of every updraft seconds before it hit.

...In the cockpit it became a perfect clarity that made the whole universe feel slow and clumsy and fragile.

She’d left her family’s estates within a week.

She’d entered the illegal canyon sprints, then the planetary atmospheric leagues and finally the grand interplanetary circuits, and within three seasons her face was plastered across holographic billboards in forty solar systems.

They called her the Neon Phantom of Thyrra and the fastest living thing on this side of the civilized stars... She’d won the Obsidian Cup, shattered the speed record across the Rings of Kel-Vara and piled up enough prize money and sponsor shares to buy three private pleasure cruisers outright.

And through every victory lap, in every screaming stadium of five hundred million fans, she’d felt a deep crushing loneliness, because nobody else could feel it.

She’d searched the circuits for it.

She’d met star champions, test pilots, ace military interceptors and arrogant academy prodigies who swore their instincts were unmatched, and every single one of them had disappointed her.

...They flew by instruments, calculation and memorized lines, or by the cold predictable algorithms of autopilot assist, and when she dragged them out to the ragged edge where physics stopped making sense and asked them to trust the invisible seam running through the turbulence, they panicked.

They hit their brakes, and then they hit the walls.

She’d sworn to herself that she would only ever give her heart to someone who could feel that same spark, someone who carried the same impossible current in their blood, so she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life flying alone in an empty sky.

But the years had dragged on, the silence of the galaxy had grown heavier, and the grand circuits had turned into a dull repetitive chore with tracks too wide, rules too tight and rivals who moved like molasses in frozen grease.

So, to escape the soul-crushing boredom of her own perfection, she’d taken her custom racing machine out to the lawless border belts, signed on with the regional pirate syndicate under a quiet alias and taken command of a little strike wing of her own.

Hunting stragglers and running down panicked smugglers was the only thing left that gave her even a microscopic hit of adrenaline.

Out here there were no judges, no track limits and no marshals waving yellow flags.

With nobody in the known sectors who could match the feeling in her spine, there had never been any reason for Vexa Tarn to hold herself back however, five minutes ago, that had changed.

She swung her legs down off the console and planted her bare feet on the textured floor of her cockpit.

Through the panoramic canopy, twelve thousand kilometers ahead, the gunmetal corvette was lighting its twin turquoise drives and beginning a long sweeping acceleration arc out toward the edge of the system.

"I need to catch up..." Vexa said aloud, her voice light and breathy and suddenly full of a wild hunger that set her pulse drumming against her throat.

CLICK-SNAP!

She slammed her five-point racing harness shut over her chest, dropped both slender hands onto the split-yoke controls of her ship and curled her fingers around the textured grips, and the cold metal warmed instantly under her touch.

HUMMMMMMMMM!

Her ship woke beneath her with an eager high-pitched scream of power.

The Violet Mirage was a custom-built seventy-meter Class-S racing interceptor forged from seamless iridescent hyperalloy that shifted from royal purple to neon violet under the glare of distant suns.

Along its razor-thin swept-back wings sat six specialized micro-bored ion thrusters with hyper-conductive plasma coils, and their acceleration curve could turn an ordinary pilot’s organs into jam.

...Vexa didn’t even glance at the navigation computer.

SLAM!

She shoved both throttles straight through the forward detents until the levers hit the stop plates!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The six thrusters on the Mirage erupted into the vacuum in a screaming torrent of lilac fire.

The acceleration slammed her deep into the molded cushions of her racing couch and flattened her purple hair against the headrest, and she let out a bright ringing laugh of pure joy as the speed on her heads-up display leapt from zero to nine point four kilometers per second in the space of four heartbeats.

The Violet Mirage shot out from behind the dead moonlet like a purple needle thrown through velvet with its stealth baffles peeling back to let its full sensor array lock onto the turquoise plume ahead.

The range counter spun down through ten thousand kilometers, then eight, then six, and the gap closed with blistering terrifying speed as the Mirage carved through the thin dust lanes like a hawk diving on a sparrow.

Up ahead, the corvette’s pilot must have caught the sudden thermal bloom on his rear sensors.

Vexa watched through her optical zoom as the Wanderer-7’s twin drives flared from a steady cruise into two violent hundred-meter lances of emergency thrust.

It didn’t hail her or broadcast an ID, and it didn’t wait to find out whether the needle-thin violet ship was friend or foe.

It banked instantly and dove nose-first into the worst navigational nightmare in the whole sector... the Boiling Belt.

Vexa’s violet eyes widened with delight.

"Oh, you crazy, beautiful bastard..."

The Boiling Belt was a high-speed counter-orbital collision zone where two ancient planetary crust fragments had smashed together centuries ago, leaving behind millions of jagged basalt and iron asteroids hurtling at anything from three to twelve kilometers per second.

They ricocheted off one another like cannonballs and tumbled on every axis at once, churning a grinding sea of pulverized gravel, gravitational shears and dust clouds thick enough to swallow a sensor scan whole.

Navy transports gave it a berth of three astronomical units, and even the most desperate pirate captains treated its outer edge like a wall.

The Wanderer-7 plunged straight into its thickest, most violent core without slowing down by a single meter per second.

WHIRRRR!

"Hahahahahaa!"

Vexa laughed out loud, flicked her twin yokes to roll the Mirage onto its port wing, and dove in after him.

The universe instantly turned into a screaming kaleidoscope of black basalt, flashing static and hurtling stone.

A four-hundred-meter iron slab spinning end over end like a thrown cleaver whipped across her path from the upper right with its jagged crest tearing through the vacuum at five kilometers per second.

The tingle between her shoulder blades flared and she felt exactly where it wanted her to go.

She snapped the port thruster lever down, fired the starboard ventral nozzle and dropped the Mirage into an inverted knife-edge slip that threaded underneath the spinning mass with barely two meters to spare.

For one long second her violet hull reflected the pitted grey craters on the rock’s belly, and then she shot back out into open space laughing.

"Catch me if you can, sweetheart!" she purred through her teeth, with her pulse singing in her ears... and then she remembered she was the one doing the chasing, and laughed even harder.

Two kilometers ahead, the Wanderer-7 was doing things that should have been impossible.

Vexa leaned forward against her harness with her eyes tracking every tiny movement the gunmetal ship made, and the longer she watched, the more her breath began to hitch in her throat.

...The corvette was reading the belt like a book.

A cluster of high-speed nickel boulders burst out of an impact cloud right in front of its nose, and the pilot ignored the obvious clear lane to starboard.

He couldn’t possibly have seen the basalt wedge hiding in the shadow of that clear lane, but he banked hard to port instead... straight toward what looked like a solid wall of grinding stone.

Vexa’s breath caught.

’No, you’ll smash your bow—!’

CRACK-SPLIT!

Before the corvette reached the wall, two asteroids slammed together in a silent burst of violence, shattering each other into a thousand smaller pieces and opening a narrow temporary corridor of clear space exactly where the corvette arrived.

The Wanderer-7 slipped through without losing a single meter per second, and its turquoise wake blew the expanding debris into a glittering halo of dust.

A sharp electric jolt tore straight up Vexa’s spine, so intense and so achingly familiar that her hands trembled on the grips.

’There’s no way he calculated that,’ she realized, and her heart started hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. ’His sensors couldn’t see through that dust. He knew the gap would open before it opened.’

Her lips parted.

’He felt the pull... just like I do.’