P: Checkpoints

Brendan's tiny ship passed through the dead center of the first checkpoint coordinates, and it was already curving toward the first slingshot opportunity in the race as it sped onward. Of course, he had the advantage over all of the entrants in that he already had the entire course plotted. The ship hummed so softly that the sound of his breath seemed loud.

He shifted his position against the adjustable surface that was currently shaped as a seat, and tried not to imagine that it felt warmer than the diagnostics claimed. Even though the drive was currently barely accelerating the ship, heat was still building up within the small dense object that was carrying his personal bubble of air through the void. Soon he would need to stop accelerating and deploy heat radiators, if he didn't want to start dumping superheated mass.

He could still deploy them while accelerating, but it would reduce their longevity and they wouldn't operate as efficiently because of their protected placement around the jet. In an anim, the radiators would have deployed like an ocean going vessel's sails, puffing out around the ship as if they bellowed on the wind, or perhaps gently unfolding around the ship like a spray of delicate flower petals. However, when it was in cooling mode Brendan's ship would look more like a long tassel, a small body with many delicate tails trailing behind the shielding.

When the drive finally shut down, some of the enchantment of being free of a planet's gravity or a station's strong centripetal pull was lost simply because of the cabin's small size. Brendan had spent long hours sitting in the small cabin before, but he'd never had the time to spend days there. He was beginning to think that Adrian's arguments against the artificial limitation he'd imposed on the cabin's size had had more merit than he'd attributed to them at the time.

The tiny ship's performance range was excellent, and it looked very unique when sitting in a construction bay, but perhaps an extra meter or two would have been worth the extra mass. Fortunately, some of the tiny space he did have was allotted to an immersive gaming system, since he had plenty of time to waste between the few moments when his attention could affect the situation.

Messages from Adrian and his sister occasionally interrupted his concentration as he tested his reflexes against a variety of improbable foes. The most recent message made him shut down the game and pull up the attached data, to verify Adrian's speculation.

After a moment he shook his head. There were too many possibilities for him to assume that a few entrants working together was indicative of a larger conspiracy. That didn't mean that Adrian's speculations were incorrect, just that he didn't have enough information. He forwarded the idea to his sister, just in case it lined up with something she had access to that he didn't.

--

Many hours later, Brendan's tiny ship zipped through the center of the second checkpoint, placing him in second place. That surprised him more than he'd expected. Not that any ship registered would be moving at average shuttle speeds, but the overwhelming advantage of having the course plotted in advance, combined with the speed of his ship, ought to have put him in first place according to his calculations.

He'd expected to fall behind again when he made his detour, but even if all of the ships were technically capable of accelerations that could kill their inhabitants, he hadn't expected anyone to surpass him in the maneuver required to reach the second checkpoint. He was curious about who had managed to pull it off, but the official announcement probably wouldn't reach him for several minutes.

Technically even the Prince of Eks Corp shouldn't have been able to pull the data that he accessed from the traffic system without going through official channels, but he had the full ship's registry on his screen a few moments later.

Brendan ruefully acknowledged that his own occasional disregard for procedures was probably a heavy influence on Adrian's disregard for the way the entrant he favored had pulled data without putting in official requests. He didn't know whether it made it better, or worse that his mother was the one who'd shown him the "back door" access he was using. And Adrian could probably access the same data himself without even using the hole in the security.

He looked at the registry data again. He was more than a little surprised by the fact that Zinnia Pensword had been registered in the race instead of her second cousin, the daughter of their family head. He was curious enough to check that Emily Pensword was not also a registrant for Tea Corp, but it looked like Zinnia was truly their only entrant. She was also racing in a yacht that had been built for Tea Corp's president.

The ship's name sounded vaguely familiar, so he brought up another set of databases and verified that it was among the ships that had been modified for exorbitant prices just before the race. The modifications listed did more than a little to ease his concern over the accelerations that the girl had to have endured to outrun his own very specialized little craft. The relationship between Tea Corp and Eks Corp was actually pretty good, so if Zinnia won, it would only strengthen an existing tie. Unfortunately even though he knew her better than many of the entrants, he still couldn't guess how she felt about originals.

He checked on the entrants that he'd marked as high risk, but all of them were listed as maintaining a steady position, neither too far ahead or behind the majority of the participants. His brother's ship was paralleling his pre-planned course quite a ways ahead, and currently appeared no different than the other traffic in the region, even though it was probably armed as heavily as the Security ships around every checkpoint. Lief was also a prince of Eks Corp, but once Brendan had been revealed as the King's heir, he had become a shadow that moved along the edges of where everyone's attention was focused.

Adrian's favorite to win, the half beyonder that SkyWater had registered, passed through the second checkpoint far behind Brendan and Zinnia. But that didn't mean much since it was the seventh checkpoint that would reveal who was truly likely to win. Brendan frowned at her ship's confidential registry information, and opened another file.

He examined the data uneasily as he added Rafaela Donatella and, after a moment of thought, her stepsisters race entries to the database that held the information he had about Corso Donatella's disappearance. He wondered why she'd registered in the race under the identity "Cinderella", but her name wasn't what had captured his attention.

The ship's estimated capabilities were not much different than most of its competition, although it did have the third drive that Adrian had mentioned, but that was actually pretty weird given that it had been registered as wreckage over 20 PiYears ago. He searched the same databases that he'd used to check the modifications to Zinnia's ship, but this ship hadn't been repaired or upgraded recently at any of the many shipyards he had record access to. And yet, it apparently had capabilities that were comparable to those of the brand new ships that it was competing with.

He blinked as his hereditary library presented even more information on the beyonder scout ship than had been available in its registry. Before he had been born, the king had investigated the beyonder, Gabriella Cordozo, and the ship she'd been found in. The system beacon that sent and received information from their newly registered neighbor in the light net system had been constructed with data collected from the beyonder wreck.

The king had assumed that a system that was still sending out manned scouts must lack the advanced technologies of their own system and it's predecessor, but Brendan found himself questioning his father's assumptions. The games he'd been playing were set aside as he sent out information and questions, and began seriously investigating SkyWater.

There wasn't actually any real urgency to the questions that were crowding his mind, because while the system where the ship had been built was relatively close, close still meant that it was a distance that could be traveled in decades, not months.