By Nino Bonura
I’ve always been a speed junkie. The first time I looked up at the tricked-out ships screeching in and out of the spaceport that raised me, I knew it was where I belonged. No wind resistance. No gravity. No friction. Just you, your ship, and the void. Everyone around me’s always been racing to get somewhere. But me? I’m somewhere getting to race.
The Indiacropolis Five-to-the-Eighth was in its negative eighty-ninth lap, but in base-10, we were over a hundred. The mobius strip stretched out ad infinitum in front of me as I corkscrewed through a sharp W-turn just in time to clip the wing of the modded interplanetary bus on my starboard side. I shifted gears, and my RPM dial ticked downward as the rotation speed of my circular starcraft slowed slightly.
My hacking, sandpaper laughter echoed through the stands as my holo-cam projected my face onto the Mega-Tron screen. The roaring stands watched starstruck as the sweat matted my fur, dripping past my beady eyes and twitching nose. My whiskers were flattened against my jowls from going Mach 90, and my jagged teeth peeked through a wide grin, forced from the speed.
The voidkisser in the bus was floundering. Their panicked hologram was projected onto the screen next to me, making me look calmer than the void by comparison. They button-mashed recklessly before abandoning ship, snatching a chrono-chute and ejecting themselves from their ride to fall out of chronosynch and land somewhere safe within the localized planetary timestream.
The bus took a nosedive, its front bumper evaporating into nonexistence as it dipped into the strip. The bus gained speed as the back thrusters moved less and less weight. At the last moment, one of the thrusters broke free, spiraling onto the track in front of me. Luckily, I had just enough charge on my blinker for one more jump. I flicked the lever jutting from my wheel, and after a few ticks, I jerked the wheel to the side while throwing the ship out of Euclidian gear and into neutral.
To the crowds, I seemed to simply teleport in front of the obstruction, but if they watched my face, they could see how focused I was on the maneuver. Without the engine engaged, I spun unmoored through spacetime, my RPM approaching infinity as my mass dropped to zero. My ship spun at speeds swifter than a star, and the outside world became a blur until finally I blinked back into realspace eight hundred feet ahead. The thruster had long been consumed by the strip, but my ship had emerged from its jump facing the opposite direction.
I thanked the stars for my 360-wheel drive, reached down next to the emergency break, and grabbed the thruster adjuster. I turned the x-axis dial from eight to negative eight, avoiding the dials for the other two axes. With my new thruster coordinates set, I squeezed the z-trigger just slowly enough to angle my ship at the stars above.
The main thrusters slid along the interweaving grooves lining the exterior of my perfectly spherical ship. The pair of thrusters traveled as one on a gleaming white platform that stood out against my black-hole paint job that reflected the stars and the mobius strip. As the thrusters glided along the z-axis of my ship, moving at the speed of my trigger finger, the cockpit moved with it so that the hard-light windshield always faced opposite the thrusters.
I guided the Eight-Ball in an upward arc, circling over my own speed mirage beneath me in a vertical U-turn as I slowed to Mach 40 to avoid crashing into the strip. I loosened my grip on the thruster adjuster as I leveled out, and my leather pilot’s seat corrected my personal orientation, spinning 180 degrees to render me upright. I’d made it out unscathed and with minimal loss of speed, but I’d lost precious nanoseconds turning around. It was time to make up speed and distance.
The strip had stabilized into a straight shot, as was tradition for the last ten laps. I trailed behind six ships that were clumped together barely within short range of the Eight-Ball’s blasters. They’d been depowered by the referees before the race began, but I was used to measuring distance by blaster range. But lasers were for the uncreative anyway.
I flicked a switch, revealing a reflective silver button, which I pressed to engage pinball mode. Chrome leaked from the grooves in the ship, coating the Eight-Ball in silvery, liquid metal. The metal bonded with itself, solidifying into an impenetrable silver shield. I angled my ship precisely with my last few seconds of steering or visibility until I was completely encased in metal. Only then did I shift gears from third to fourth.
Fourth gear is dangerous even in open space. At that speed, even the smallest asteroid or comet is enough to rip through your hull before you even see it coming. Atmosphsteering is a fantasy even in third gear, since the slowest you can move is Mach-100. But there was no atmosphere, and I didn’t need to steer. I was encased in Ion-Iron.
I couldn’t see outside of my ship, but I could feel each collision and follow along. I envisioned the track as I bounced off each ship in front of me, glancing off at angles specifically designed to leave as much carnage in my wake as I could. Dings, whirrs, and chimes accompanied the jolts of impact until I counted ram number fourteen, at which point I magnetized the exterior of my hull, propelling the Ion-Iron from the Eight-Ball and out into the strip to float along with the rest of the debris.
In my rear-view hologram, I could see the smoking pileup behind me and the pinpricks of blue light as the pilots’ chrono-chutes deployed. I continued to rocket forward, waiting until the last possible moment before shifting back down to third gear and coasting at Mach 88.
As the stars surrounding the strip shrank from stretching lines to pinpricks of light and the space around me came back into focus, I darted my eyes up at the lap counter, which was spinning rapidly to keep up with my jump to third gear. The gears ground with intensity before slowing to display Lap-99. I had a few precious seconds before placing second, all according to plan.
I’m a competitive guy. Normally, I’d be flipping switches and turning cranks, working my magic to shake off the silver. But I was older now, and I knew my limits. This wasn’t one of them.
The tricked-out sportship in front of me was shiny and new, but it was built for style, not for speed. It was a rich man’s ride, and so naturally it wasn’t its engine but its value that would win it this race. Mach-88 allowed me to gain on it, so close that I could see the uranium smog billowing out of an exhaust pipe the size of a tree trunk. I was lucky to have installed lead shielding on the Eight-Ball, but radiation poisoning wasn’t the only thing stopping me from overtaking their ship.
There were a lot of credits riding on this race, and no bets had been placed on me. I was used to being underestimated, but it wasn’t my scrappy complexion that had turned the gamblers against me. It was the thousand-credit insurance policy posted in my bank account by the owners of the gaudy sportship right in front of me that deterred them from banking on me. Their payday and mine relied on my restraint.
A thousand credits. Was that the worth of a win? It was the smart thing to do. The second mouse gets the cheese. But the glory of the gold, standing atop the competition, moving at speeds no one ever thought possible and making it out unscathed? That was priceless. And here I was, eating the radioactive exhaust of some no-talent nepobaby, voidkisser who’d never moved faster than light.
I stared into the glowing green exhaust pipe, a snaggletooth grin breaking across my face despite my better judgment. With one hand, I engaged pinball mode as I shifted gears with the other. With my feet, I gripped the bottom of the wheel and angled it just right. All at once, I engaged, jumping to a four-digit mach speed while encased in Ion-Iron, screeching forward in a slightly parabolic arc straight towards my competition.
I slid into the exhaust pipe like it was a corner pocket just as I lost visibility, and I braced myself with all four limbs as the Eight-Ball shuddered and creaked with every ding and chime, echoing a symphonic cacophony of destruction as I tore through the inner workings of the sportship.
I broke through the holographic windshield and detached the Ion-Iron just in time to witness crossing the finish line, the sportship a flaming wreckage behind me. But I didn’t stop. I wasn’t willing to relinquish my speed. The sour-faced bookies in the stands were the only members of the crowd who hadn’t erupted in cheers. They wouldn’t be happy, and I knew what they would do about it.
But they had to catch me first.
Nino Bonura is a writer from New Orleans who graduated with a BFA in Dramatic Writing. He specializes in writing novels in the science-fiction, mystery and fantasy genres. Outside of writing, Nino also does a fair amount of stage acting, and he spends his free time crafting more personal stories with tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons.