Well, no more. Here, for this short time, he wasn’t scared any more. Inside the shell of his cockpit, driven beyond fear by the intolerable stress of so many near-misses one after the other, he felt powerful at last. And by damn, he was going to prove he wasn’t a loser. He’d prove it to himself. Not the Cap’n, not Jez. Himself.
In some dim and distant recess of his mind, a small cowardly voice wailed and ranted in terror. But it was drowned out in a white blaze of adrenaline, carried away by the roar of engines, the shrieking wind, and the clatter of machine guns.
Through the first marker, and into the second lap. Harkins was in the middle of the pack, third place of five. The pilots broke into evasive swoops as everyone let fly with their weapons. Harkins fired and was fired upon, but the opportunity was brief. The gorge split in two, divided down its length, and the pilots had to choose.
Harkins, conscious that he had two pilots on his tail, feinted to the right, where Sleen and the fat man were heading. At the last moment, he banked hard, cutting under the firing line of his pursuers and down the left-hand route.
Tracer bullets followed him as the walls closed in. He looked hurriedly over his shoulder. He’d lost one of his pursuers, but the Yort in the Airbat was on his tail again. Damn it, why didn’t that son of a bitch leave him alone?
The flanks of the gorge seemed to be subtly moving now, thick foliage nodding under the barrage of rain. Harkins dodged and dived as tracer bullets whipped past his cockpit and burned away into the grey gloom. The Airbat was faster, but the pilot wasn’t interested in getting in front of him at this point in the race. Harkins hissed a string of curses under his breath as he threw the flight stick left and right.
He could see the end of the divide approaching, where the pilots on either side would come together again. They would be wise to the danger this time, and would vary their altitude. Hames Nnderkins, occupied with keeping away from the Airbat’s guns, pushed the throttle harder. The bellow of the Firecrow’s thrusters filled the cockpit. Water crawled past him in branching rivulets along the hood. Lightning flickered and thunder rolled across the sky.
The craft came together in a flurry at the bottleneck, huge, dark shapes swooping in and out of the rainy gloom. Harkins clamped his finger to the trigger and raked a stream of bullets along somebody’s tail. The racer’s stabiliser fins were shredded in the barrage. It went into an uncontrolled roll, corkscrewing wildly until it smashed into the wall in a bright streak of fire.
Harkins felt nothing about the man’s death. All he cared about was that one more competitor had been eliminated. There were four left now, including himself. Sleen in his Nimbus, the Yort in the Airbat, and the fat man in the Blackbird.
The second marker came quickly. This lap, driven by the threat of the guns, seemed so much faster than the first. The Blackbird fired on Sleen, Harkins fired on the Blackbird, and the Airbat fired on Harkins. Mostly they were shooting wild, since they were occupied with dodging and manoeuvring through the tight canyons. But the Yort, with nobody on his tail, was hounding Harkins mercilessly. A few stray bullets hit the Firecrow’s fuselage, but the armour turned them away. There were advantages to flying a fighter craft in a race like this.
‘Get off my back, you damn Yort sack of shit!’ Harkins yelled, spittle flecking his chin. The Airbat seemed to have been chasing him since the race began. He couldn’t help feeling persecuted.
After the second marker, the gorge fractured into a maze. Harkins chose the same route he had on the first lap. He had to take risks if he wanted to get ahead of Sleen, and he knew this way was fast. Sleen and the Blackbird took different routes. The Airbat followed Harkins. He might have known it would.
The walls closed in on them. There was barely space to evade the Airbat’s guns now, but the hammering wind and the rain meant that the pilot was busy trying to keep stable. He sent a few speculative bursts up the gorge after Harkins, but nothing hit.
The gorge swung to the left. Harkins remembered it from the first time: a steep S-bend. He slowed and hit the corner tight, skimming the edge of the gorge. Hanging vines reached out after him as he passed. The world rolled outside his cockpit as he banked hard to starboard, accelerating out of the S-bend into the curve beyond. He wanted to put distance between him and the Airbat, which would have to slow for the bend. It couldn’t turn as sharply as a Firecrow.
But despite his efforts, the Yort was soon close enough to start harrying him again. Harkins vaguely hoped that he would forget about the projection of rock at the end of the curve, but there was no such luck. Both pilots raced past the obstacle with ease, taking the high route over the top.
The route split into three. Harkins had had time to think about his choice this time. The Airbat was going to score some real hits on him sooner or later. He’d been ursqsent a nable to shake him off so far. That left only one real option, if he wanted to win.
He shot down the central route, into the dead end. The Yort had chosen a different path at this point on the last lap. This time, he didn’t.
‘Alright,’ muttered Harkins. ‘Let’s see you follow this.’
He dived hard. The pitch of the engine rose steadily as he plunged towards the river at the bottom of the gorge. The Airbat was slow to follow, perhaps unsure what he was doing, but when he did he came down fast. Harkins levelled out sharply just above the river, blasting a V of spray in his wake as he tore towards the gaping tunnel mouth. The Yort, coming in above him, suddenly found his vision clouded by the heavy mist. Harkins approached the tunnel at reckless speed, forcing the Airbat to keep up. At the last moment he hit the airbrakes hard, turned on his floods, and then he was inside.
The second time was different to the first. Instead of terror there was a steely calm. It was as if he’d been pulled out of the world, into a temporary interlude in reality, thirty dream-seconds of rock and darkness. He travelled in a bubble of electric light, surrounded by an echoing roar of mindless sound, and his only purpose, his only reason to exist, was to fly a steady path through the chaos and not touch the sides.
Distantly, he was aware of the Airbat coming up fast behind him, too fast, because the pilot hadn’t seen him brake and had been overeager to stay on his tail. All it would take was one twitch of the trigger finger and Harkins would be done. But taking out Harkins was probably the last thing on the Yort’s mind at the moment.
This time, Harkins was ready for the dip in the tunnel, and rode it when it came. The Airbat wasn’t. Harkins was on the level stretch, with the end of the tunnel in sight, when he heard an impact: a wing or a stabiliser, clipped by the stone. Then the sound of rending metal, terrifyingly close, as the Airbat ploughed into the wall behind him.
The craft detonated, concussion shoving at his tail. Flame billowed up the tunnel to meet him. Harkins burst out into the open, soaring through a cloud of roiling fire to freedom. An exultant howl escaped his lips as the pennants of the third marker flickered past him.
Gunfire. Harkins’ triumph turned to alarm as the rain came alive with blazing tracers. He twisted in his seat, trying to spot his attacker.
Not just one. Two of them. The Nimbus and the Blackbird, neck and neck. He’d come out of the tunnel ahead of them.
He remembered thinking the first time round how dangerous the long, wide curve between the third and fourth marker would be when weapons were active. He was about to find out just how dangerous it was.