C: Good Vibrations

The 'Princess Race' had been underway for six hours already, and 'Cinderella' was still in last place, but Rafaela wasn't feeling particularly distressed. It was a relief to put the confusing strangers from the station behind her, and spaceships did not race like children in corridors, where every beat of your heart and the angle and force of each step had an immediate effect. Spaceships raced more like sailboats in a three dimensional sea.

The waves and currents that the ships moved through were not as tangible as the wind and waves that a terrestrial ship danced with, but they were quite real and measurable. The solar system was a sea of gravity, a web of overlapping waves of the most powerful force in the universe. Gravity could bend even light and pull everything that existed into its complex dance, and as planetary seas held both storms and dead zones within their limited expanses, so would the gravitational fields between the planets.

The ships and the pilots who understood the dance weren't focused on their restricted progress through the regions dominated by the orderly traffic system of Eks Corp Central, they were busy speculating on the location of the second checkpoint. Even the ship that was currently in the lead had not yet reached the first checkpoint at the edge of the Central region, and most people who were following the race were feeling rather surprised by the paucity of rumors about the checkpoint locations. That no one really seemed to know more than that the Prince of Eks Corp had chosen the checkpoints himself was an impressive display of the tight operations of Eks Corp Security.

Rafaela spun idly in her seat, as she listened to a free data stream that was already showing a noticeable amount of lag. The speaker insisted, "The second checkpoint is actually going to be the first real checkpoint in this race! Even the Kittiwake entrant, who has incurred an incredible 43 thousand credits in traffic fines to maintain the lead so far, has only gained a little over an hour's head start on the slowest entrant."

Rafaela frowned. "Over an hour already, that's kind of impressive. But doesn't anyone realize that the first real checkpoint was the starting coordinates, and that this leg of the race is probably also some kind of test?"

"An hour is a very inaccurate estimate," the ship complained rather petulantly. "What do you suspect that we are being tested for?"

The core system's voice sounded genuinely curious, and Rafaela stopped the spin of the chair with her toe where she could see the anim of the fairy avatar. Her expression matched her voice, which was something that any good anim system was capable of, but not something that was generally a feature of a ship or station's core system.

Rafaela shrugged and admitted, "It's just a guess, but it would have been easy to hold the entire race outside of the Central traffic control system, so I suspect that something aside from our speed is being measured. In the fine print it does say that either the Prince or the winner can refuse the marriage contract at any time if they find their partner 'unsuitable' during the engagement."

The data stream gave them another 'real time' report that included the coordinates of each entrant, which couldn't truly be provided in real-time. Rafaela wondered what they planned to do if the race went far enough out system that the communication lag left them with data that was already obviously old by the time they received it. Her step sisters' ships were listed in the chaotic pack of entrants who were trying to maintain the fastest pace possible without actually incurring fines.

Her own ship was only "minutes" behind that tangled traffic pattern, and Rafaela's eyes strayed to the marks that represented the leading ships. If what was actually being tested in this region was the depths of their pockets, and the rest of the checkpoints were "local", then she and everyone who had chosen to obey the restrictions of the traffic system may have already lost. But if it wasn't, or some of the checkpoints were at the far edges of the system, then the opposite might be true.

Since every ship had been required to carry a minimum of two weeks of supplies, Rafaela was betting on the course being long enough, and traveling far enough out system, that the old scout could show its 'legs'.

She listened to the quiet hum of the ship around her with a certain amount of satisfaction. People were noisy by nature, and a living ship or station vibrated as much with their movements and words as it did with the hum of the mechanical constructs that operated within it. Her mother's ship had sat in silence for most of her life, but now it flew with what was almost an inaudible purr.

When Rafaela had first learned that noise was a sign of inefficiency in a machine, Corso Donatella had told his daughter, "It's true that a noisy ship is an inefficient ship, but a silent ship is a dead ship." Rafaela actually smiled as the system's fairy avatar huffed at the discrepancy between their actual position and their reported position. Her ship was far from silent.

--

When the ships ahead of 'Cinderella' reached the first checkpoint's coordinates, they did not all make the same course corrections, and the entrants began to fan out across a wide region.

Rafaela was far enough back that she had the opportunity to listen to some of the startled commentary and speculations of race observers by the time the scout finally reached the first checkpoint's coordinates. Some of the commentators were even asking if there was any way to tell whether or not all of the participants had received the same coordinates for the second checkpoint.

Rafaela's ship wasn't the last ship to receive the coordinates, because one of the entrants had failed to pass the checkpoint within the 5 kilometer limit. Every speaker on the free data feed had already dismissed the entrant from the race, and it was not an insignificant setback, since the ship had to spend as much energy to halt its momentum as it had to build it up.

The next set of coordinates were transmitted to the scout with the proper encryption, and the ship assured her, "The transmission originated from the only Eks Corp Security vessel maintaining this orbit."

Rafaela nodded, and then hesitated as the ship cleared the display to present the route recommendations for the most efficient routes versus the fastest routes. "Best compromise?" she asked after a moment.

"A slingshot around the nearest planet," the ship replied promptly.

The fabric of space was a virtually frictionless surface, and momentum couldn't simply be transferred to another vector by dropping a keel deeper into it, or pressing against it as a wheel would. The new coordinates were not 'ahead' of them, and the ship could not simply turn the 'corner' and head directly toward them, but the planet could help pull them around.

"I don't know if she'll believe me, but if she does, that ship that missed the first checkpoint might still have a chance if she lines up on both of them after she swings around. Please transmit this and the new coordinates to the ship," Rafaela instructed.

The message was simple: "These are the coordinates that I received for the second checkpoint."