C: Savor the Chance

Rafaela inhaled the scent rising from the warm autoserve container and savored it before tasting the food itself. Some of the foods that could be created with the additions from the specialty autoserve packets that she'd chosen were so luxurious that she felt a little guilty for eating them alone.

A person could survive for a lifetime on the simple foods created from the materials refined from a ship or station's recycling system, but their complexity was limited. Most of the rarer elements were always added from supply packets to simplify the process, and 'real' foods were commonly packaged for reconstruction as recipes called for them, like the strawberries that had been in such short supply on SkyWater station after Elektra and her daughters had come aboard.

Some of the 'real' foods that were used in autoserves had never even been grown in their natural forms within this system. The supply packets for them were complex constructions built on a detailed atomic level that an average autoserve couldn't handle, but that didn't mean they couldn't be replicated.

On the main display, the plump winged figure had a table of flowers. Tiny flower cups and platters held a glimmer of faintly colored liquids, that the ship's avatar lifted to its lips and drank from with every evidence of satisfaction as Rafaela savored the first bites of her meal. It was just a simulation, but somehow the fact that the little humanoid was presented as eating what suited it, instead of what she was eating, added a layer of comfort to the illusion.

Rafaela hadn't modified the ship's automatic reaction to her meals. Her parents had always insisted that at least one meal in a day cycle should be shared. And even Elektra, for all her ridiculous demands and requirements, had placed importance on eating together.

Her eyes wandered away from the little avatar as she checked the proximity flags that represented the ships of the nearest entrants. The scout's main drive was designed for constant use, since it was what would normally carry the ship between systems, but it provided a relatively low rate of acceleration. It was also the most efficient drive, but they had already passed the fifth checkpoint, and no one except the race officials and the prince seemed to know how many were left.

Rafaela didn't think that the checkpoints had been chosen randomly, as many commentators had speculated after the fifth checkpoint had turned them out toward the belts after the fourth had sent them centerward again in a zigzagging course. They were simply running an obstacle course too large, and too intangible for most people to see. Every sharp course change so far was set at a point in space where there were gravitational bodies of one sort or another to either hamper or assist with the change.

She idly speculated on their next destination, as she savored the last of her meal. It would be too useful for the scout for the course to skim the rings where it could scoop up extra mass, which most of the pleasure craft and courier ships weren't capable of, so she decided to bet that they would be sent farther outward instead. She almost hoped that they would need to navigate through one of the crowded parts of the inner belt, where the scout could take advantage of its maneuverability.

Ten or twelve checkpoints, she decided. If she was wrong then she was probably being too conservative, but the positions of her rivals indicated that she wasn't alone in her speculations. Even the ship that had held the lead in the beginning had fallen back to a more conservative acceleration after having to dump a lot of momentum to make the last course change.

--

Rafaela couldn't help the grin that spread across her face as she realized that the fastest course to the next checkpoint really was going to take the entrants through the Norse belt.

"There are a dangerous number of collisions in progress," her ship advised primly.

"I know. This belt is the source of most of the strays in our system," Rafaela replied calmly. "They think that a rogue dwarf planet stirred it up only a few thousand PiYears ago."

Rafaela pulled up the latest records on the largest bodies within the field, and had the ship display the most efficient course it could plot. After a few minutes she asked warily, "Can I reduce the automatic collision avoidance override down to 10 meters?"

The ship bargained quickly, "If we reduce our speed to within…"

Rafaela listened to the bargain with less alarm than she had felt when the ship first argued with her over proximity within the Eks Corp Central system. She knew now that she could disable the safeties if she really wanted to, and the ship's core system had learned a lot since its first days. Rafaela had also learned a lot about it, while it was learning about her and their home system.

The ship gave a range of acceptable motion for close maneuvers relative to the largest bodies in the belt's orbit, which meant that they needed to start deceleration immediately if they were going to cut through the belt instead of detouring. Other entrants were already adjusting their courses and accelerating, but Rafaela chose to slow down.

There was only a moment of freefall as the ship neatly spun on its axis and she barely lifted out of her seat before being pressed back into it much more firmly than she'd quite been expecting. Numbers measured reality, but physics in action were far more tangible than they often seemed in theory. Her instincts loosened her jaw and straightened her spine's alignment before her mind caught up.

She wasn't surprised by her own body's reaction. The safety techniques that had been drilled into her as a small child had never seemed difficult, even though everyone except her parents had always seemed as though they were fighting their own bodies for control when they did the actual practice runs. She'd never quite understood why it was supposed to be difficult.

Even her father had warned her not to take the exercises so lightly, especially the pressure drop practices where they trained to release the air in their lungs, instead of holding it in as humans supposedly would instinctively do. He hadn't understood how easy they seemed to her, how instinctive, even though he demonstrated the techniques with ease himself.

Looking back on it, she was startled to realize that most of her practical safety training had always felt more like a reminder of what her instincts knew she should be doing than a learning process. She wondered if it was because her parents had started teaching her those things when most children were still learning to walk, but quickly focused on the display screen in front of her.

Some older Cinder Sector pilots swore that human reflexes were still better than any system, but thousands of PiYears of data argued against that. For one thing, humans were designed to process the data from two eyes, not two hundred. On the other hand, a system and a human that worked well together could pull off things that should have been impossible for either of them.

Rafaela knew that the course she'd chosen was not safe, especially at the velocity the scout was still moving, but it also seemed like her best chance. She wasn't the only entrant who had chosen to cross the field either. Despite the way many entrants had begun to veer away, as many more were paralleling the course she'd chosen.