It’s early Friday morning, the start of the open practice session. The normal atmosphere has taken on a nervous edge. There’s a lot of staring past the veil, a lot of sidelong glances to see who’s going to be the first to cross it. The session’s been openfor five minutes, and usually there are at least a couple people out there by now wanting to take a quick lap with minimal traffic to test a recent modification, but no one’s left their garages yet.
Clarke’s not scared, to be clear. She’s trained every stretch and curve and variable of this track into her muscles. She knows where the barriers are permeable and where they’re not. She crashed and flew off the track on purpose in the sim over and over. She is not going to get sucked into a black hole.
She’s, like, 80 percent certain she’s not going to get sucked into a black hole. And for a normal person, looking out over this course that looks like something a demon god of the void might dream up, 80 percent wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.
Clarke is not a normal person.
“Okay,” she says, grabbing her helmet from the stool she’d set it on and making for the ship. “Let’s do it.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Amira says, scrambling to keep up. “Were we just having the same conversation? You saidpsychotic. Andwow!”
“I didn’t mean that those werebadthings,” Clarke says. She hops up onto the wing of the idling ship and lowers herself into the cockpit.
“What did I do in a past life to earn this?” Amira grumbles, waving the support crew into position. “If you fly my ship into a black hole, Iwillfind a way to make your ghost miserable.”
Clarke beams at her while buckling in. “This is why you’re my favorite.”
“I’myour favorite,” Maki says, appearing in Clarke’s line of vision and taking over the preflight routine. Clarke’s air tube gets connected and clipped, her radio and biofeed checked, her holodeck primed.
Clarke doesn’t quite hit the same headspace for practice orqualifying that she does for an actual race, but it’s pretty close. She tunes out everything that isn’t how the ship feels under and around her. There’s a lot of conversation happening over her head and on the various radio channels, but she doesn’t listen to them until Amira gets her attention. “Clarke?”
“Amira?”
“You’re clear. Take it easy, all right?”
Clarke grins.
—
She does takeit easy for a few laps. She’s not an idiot. Sims are hyperrealistic, but they’re not real, and Clarke doesn’t have a death wish. She trundles through inversions, loops the loop at a snail’s pace, takes the double hairpin with its odd z-axis exit so slowly she almost stalls. She talks it all through with Amira, explaining the elements she’s concerned about, how she’d prefer to approach them, and how the ship’s handling. If Amira disagrees, Clarke defers. She is behaving herself. She is a professional. She is coachable.
Yves had better be watching.
By the time Amira tells her she can open it up a little, there are more pilots getting their bearings on the track and the race director’s starting to play with variables. They all get plenty of warning when an element’s about to be changed and what the change will be. Clarke takes the double hairpin too fast after a steep adjustment to the angle, loses control, and flat spins for a second, only keeping her ship out of the barrier because she’d made that exact mistake a dozen times on the sim and her reflexes took over.
She idles for a moment after the spin, waiting for her heart rate to settle. She makes sure she’s far enough to the side that noone coming through at speed will hit her, and points the nose of the ship toward the nearest black hole.
Clarke gets why people come to Iskret.
It’s a captivating view, that’s for sure. The black hole resembles a giant eye: a whirling gold-orange-red iris made of gas and dust surrounding a pupil singularity of a black so black it makes you realize you’ve never actually seen true black before. A thin ring of bright light—the photon sphere—separates the pupil and iris.
It hurts to look at. You can’t stop looking at it. You find yourself wondering how close you could get without falling in, and if you’re brave enough to find out.
“Clarke.”
Clarke blinks back to herself. “Yves?”
“Want to explain why you’ve been ignoring Amira and staring into a black hole for five minutes?”
Startled, Clarke checks the practice session clock. It hasn’t actually been five whole minutes, but it’s certainly been longer than she thought. She reorients herself and gets moving again. “Just taking in the view now so I don’t get distracted later this weekend.”
“Finish the lap,” Yves says, obviously not buying it. “Take element twenty-three with ten percent sharper pitch, ten percent less roll than last time, then bring it in. The techs want to adjust something in the drivetrain before the afternoon session.”
“Got it,” Clarke says, and spends the rest of the lap berating herself.
—
“You won mea bunch of money for being first onto the track today, so thanks for that,” Thierry says, offering Clarke a water from the fridge in his hotel room.
