Hard Luck Hermit

No trip to Paga For would be complete without some indulgence in hedonism, and the crew of the Hard Luck Hermit had found their vice for the visit: gambling. The cracking chasms of the dying planet of Paga For were home to one of the universe’s more spectacular races, the Canyon Crash. The name was literal more often than not. Most of the pilots survived, at least.

Ancient, rusted shuttles, stripped bare of almost everything but engines and a few basic safety features like ejector seats, raced through the canyons one by one, each trying to score the best time through the chasm circuit. Corey found competitive head to head racing a little more interesting, but the canyons here were actually too narrow for the shuttles to go more than one at a time.

The most recent racer crashed into a wall, utterly destroying his shuttle and very likely himself in the process. Corey felt some minor relief when the rescue team recovered them and announced they’d only fractured eighteen of the three-hundred and seven bones their species had. Kamak, who’d been betting on a fatality, was far more disappointed in the announcement. He was gambling relatively small amounts, but winning was winning.

For an evening that was supposedly about gambling, the entire crew had kept it fairly low stakes. Doprel and Kamak were both betting low, Corey had only tried a few before losing three bets in a row and calling it quits, and Farsus had been banned from making new bets after making ten correct bets in a row. Most surprisingly, Tooley, their resident hedonist, wasn’t betting at all. She wasn’t even drinking.

As soon as the racers took flight, Tooley’s eyes were locked on the shuttles. She tapped blue fingertips against her thighs and scanned every aspect of the flight, every sweeping curve and pitch of the wings, never looking away until the pilot either made it through the course or crashed. Sometimes she even mumbled something to herself under breath, usually sequences of numbers Corey didn’t understand. He assumed it was a pilot thing, and though he tried to ask Tooley to explain what she was doing, she never answered him.

Another racer took their turn on the course, and this time it seemed like they might make it all the way to the end. Like every racer before him, he decelerated through a series of hairpin turns and swung his ship through the sharply veering canyon, just barely avoiding an impact with the walls on either side. Tooley’s fanatical focus redoubled as the pilot took the final turn, and her finger-tapping motions redoubled in speed.

The cheers of the crowd exploded as the racer made it across the finish line, and the MC offered a final appraisal of their performance.

“A dashing performance by an experienced racer,” the alien host said. “But let’s take it to the board to see how good they really did!”

A floating billboard of sorts shifted from displaying a close-up to the racer to displaying a list of names and what Corey assumed were times. The crowd cheered as the board updated, displaying the latest racer’s name and a time of four point one drops, which apparently made it into the top ten. Tooley just seemed outraged as she looked at the top spot, a whopping three point seven six drops.

“Three point seven six? That’s it?”

“That’s pretty fast, right?”

Corey knew that a drop was roughly a minute, so taking a course like this that fast was pretty impressive. The canyon racetrack stretched on for a few miles, so conquering it that quickly in a junker ship was pretty impressive, even discounting the hairpin turns and tight spaces that threatened to kill any pilot who flew through.

“It’s fucking pathetic,” Tooley said. Then she stood and, without any further explanation, stormed off in the direction of the shuttle launch area.

“Should we-”

“No,” Kamak said. “Just give it a bit.”

After waiting a moment, Kamak found exactly what he’d expected, as the name Tooley Keeber Obeltas appeared on the docket of upcoming racers. Her status was listed as “amateur” and her odds of surviving the race listed as seven hundred and eighty-seven to one. Kamak went ahead and put ten-thousand cece’s on her surviving, and another ten-thousand on her breaking a record. Corey just stared nervously at the screen until her turn got closer and closer. Meanwhile, in the garage, Tooley felt nothing even approaching nervousness, though she did feel irritation.

“I told you, I want shuttle number four.”

“You don’t get to pick,” the hangar attendant said.

“It didn’t say anywhere in the rules I don’t get to pick,” Tooley said.

“Well- you-” the attendant stammered. He wasn’t actually sure what the rules were. “What do you care? They’re all the same model anyway. We buy them in bulk from mining outpost surplus.”

“It shows,” Tooley grunted. “Give me number four. It’s the only one with ailerons that aren’t busted to shit.”

The hangar clerk looked at their collection of rusty shuttles, all of which were on the opposite side of the hangar. Tooley hadn’t been within fifty yards of any of them, yet she claimed to know their interior mechanisms already. The clerk chalked her up as a lunatic and put a large bet on Tooley dying in a fiery crash.

“Okay, sure, take whatever one you want, lady,” the clerk said. He threw a shuttle keycard in her direction and waved his hand at the collected shuttle craft. Tooley tried to catch the thrown card, failed, and picked it up off the floor before heading for the shuttles.

Number four was in even worse condition than Tooley had thought, but the small holes in the chassis wouldn’t affect aerodynamics enough to screw up her flying. She checked the frame and the engine for any significant defects, found none, and moved on to the next stage of her inspection.

Tooley popped the cockpit open and hopped inside the shuttle. As she’d expected, almost all of the internal monitors had been stripped out, leaving just the controls. Tooley dug out her own datapad and wedged it into a loose panel, setting it to display Paga For’s atmospheric and gravitational conditions. She already knew it, but there was enough going through her head while she was flying that she wanted the data on hand quickly.

For her final step, Tooley grabbed on to the controls, analyzed how they felt in her grip, and ran her hands along every switch and lever that controlled the ship. Then she repeated that process a few more times. After the fifth go around, she started doing it with her eyes closed, mentally repeating the names and functions of every control she touched as she did so. Every time she made a mistake, she repeated the process a few more times, until she had repeated every function of the shuttle without flaw eleven times in a row.

Once that was done, Tooley was still waiting in queue, so she did the memorization process a few more times just to have something to do. Her name was called mid-routine, and she stopped in her tracks to activate the shuttle’s engines and get it moving. She turned slightly and waved out the cockpit window at the hangar clerk before she went to the gate. The racetrack MC gave her a countdown, and Tooley gunned it as soon as she heard “go”.

“Oh, full acceleration right out the gate,” the announcer said. “Hope nobody’s sitting in the blast radius around that first corner!”

Tooley gripped the controls a little tighter.

“Laugh while you can, fucker,” she mumbled to herself. The first hairpin turn was coming up fast, and Tooley was approaching it at speeds that could best be described as suicidal. If it were anyone else behind the wheel, it would be, but Tooley had a plan. An even more potentially suicidal plan, but still a plan.

As the lethal turn approached, Tooley cut the engines completely and pulled hard on the steering controls. The rusty shuttle pitched hard to the side, and Tooley carefully adjusted the aileron controls to keep it on track. She had to keep the ship’s profile wide, maximize atmospheric resistance, and keep the shuttle at the right angle to make the upcoming turn. The confused crowd watched her seemingly nonsensical maneuvers with breathless anticipation of the explosion they thought she was about to become.

Tooley disappointed them like she’d disappointed a lot of other people in her life. Unlike those prior disappointments, the broken hopes turned to new excitement as Tooley fired her engines back to full speed right in the middle of the hairpin turn. She surged back to full powered flight, barely skimming the canyon wall as she executed a perfect flying drift. The crowd roared with excitement as the MC struggled to describe what he’d just watched. Tooley just held her controls tight and kept flying. Still a few more turns to go.

A few more turns later, Tooley was at the finish line, collecting her winnings for a successful race, and Kamak was collecting on a few well-placed bets.

“I want ten percent of that,” Tooley said.

“Fuck yourself sideways,” Kamak said. Tooley didn’t press the issue. She had more than enough money already, and a nice shiny medal for taking the number one spot. A full course completion at two point nine eight drops, almost a full drop faster than the previous record.

“Okay, that’s enough shenanigans for one day,” Kamak said. “We should get a move on before Tooley tries to beat her own record.”

“Yeah yeah, even I’m not that stupid,” Tooley said. She’d made a few small errors, but nothing that cost her more than a few milliticks. She was confident her record would stand the test of time. “But hold on one second.”

Another racer was taking the gate. Tooley couldn’t see the racetrack, but she could hear the engine roar and the MC start to narrate.

“Full acceleration into a sudden brake and drift,” the MC said. “Looks like we have a copy cat on our hands!”

The next thing Tooley heard was a very sudden and very loud explosion.

“Well, not for long we didn’t,” the MC said. Tooley chuckled to herself and polished her new medal as she returned to the ship with the crew. They’d be taking off tomorrow morning, giving Tooley plenty of time to count her winnings and admire her own reflection in the shiny medal.

It was proof she was one of the best. A shining mark that she could fly better than some of the biggest would-be hotshots in the galaxy. Proof that somewhere out there in the galaxy her name was up in lights as the best of the best when it came to flying.

The smile Tooley saw in her reflection lasted about ten seconds before fading. The next time she saw her own reflection, it was at the bottom of a glass.