She collapses the holoscreen and picks up the sticker.
It’s not a sticker. It’s a decal. It’s the type of decal you put on the back of an F0 racing ship. It’s Clarke’s name, in Provenance colors, ready to put on a Provenance ship.
It’s been a long, stressful day, but hope sparks in Clarke’s chest.Happy birthday to me.
23
There’s a red flag duringthe Monza Grand Prix.
It happens two-thirds of the way through the race, when the vigilance required on a crisscrossed track like this has worn everyone thin. Umeko doesn’t pull up quickly enough after a steep descent and bounces the bottom of her ship off the barrier. Clarke sees it happen, the portion of the track Umeko’s on right above the section Clarke’s on. She sees the sparks, the smoke, and Umeko’s ship tumbling tail over nose until it crashes into another barrier.
Clarke’s on the radio before Amira. “Is Umeko okay?”
“We’re not sure yet. It’s going to get flagged. Safety ship’s coming out.”
Clarke slows down. Gaps close all across the order; Clarke in P13 catches up to P12, and P14 catches up to Clarke. “Anyone else involved?”
“It doesn’t look like it,” Amira says. “She was P17. There were only two ships behind her, and they both avoided collision.”
Clarke flies past the timing line. She’s going slow enough to pick out faces in the grandstands. “Anything on Umeko?”
“Nothing yet, but it’s now a red flag. Repeat, red flag. Come to the pit lane.”
“I see it,” Clarke says as the track beacons and her deck border turn red. “Coming in.”
A red flag indicates that the session has been suspended. Given the circumstances, it probably means that the remains of Umeko’s ship are blocking the track, so much so that others can’t pass the wreckage safely. Everyone must return to the pit lane and wait for a decision about how to proceed.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that Umeko’s seriously injured. That’s not the sort of thing they’d signal with flags. Flags are about track conditions, not pilot status. But there’s an awful lot of correlation between the two.
There was a red flag when Connor died. Does Julian think about Connor whenever this happens, too?
The ships at the front of the pack were already past the pit lane entry when the red flag came out. They stop on the course and wait for the ships behind them to box, then spin in place and backtrack. Clarke’s already taken her one mandatory pit stop this race, but there’s no penalty for working on a ship during a red flag, so her crew comes out to top up the battery and swap the shells again.
Amira’s on the pit wall, on the opposite side of the pit lane from the garage. Clarke watches her, trying to read her body language. She leans back into the pit lane a few times, looking down the row to where the race director sits.
There’s a clock on Clarke’s deck that counts the seconds she’s stopped in the box. It’s at0:23when Amira says, “Umeko’s okay. Broken leg, they think, but she’s okay.”
Tension seeps out of Clarke’s muscles. A broken leg can berepaired in Medical in an hour or two. If there are no complications, and with the bye week coming up, Umeko will be back in the seat for Tempe Terra. “Thanks. And the red?”
Amira makes an unhappy noise that sends static over the line. “At least thirty minutes. They think the impact damaged one of the beacons.”
Clarke lets out a low whistle. The type of force it takes to damage a track beacon is astronomical, literally. Umeko’s lucky to have gotten away with only a broken bone. “I’m good to get out, then?”
Some pilots stay in their ships during prolonged red flag stoppages. Clarke’s not one of them. If she has to sit in the ship for more than a few minutes without moving, she gets jittery, and that does more harm to her headspace than having to psych herself up all over again once they get the signal that the session will resume soon. After confirmation from Amira that she can, she collapses her deck, unlatches her harness, and unclips her air tube. She climbs out awkwardly, limbs stiff. Amira comes across the lane to steady her and guides Clarke to a stool. “Something to drink?”
Clarke shakes her head, cracking the seal on her helmet and shoving it up to her forehead. “I don’t want to have to pee when we get back out there.”
Chief Engineer Timothy comes over with a holoscreen in hand. He shows it to Amira and points at a spike in a graph. “We’re going to replace the diffuser.”
Amira’s forehead creases. “Now? In the middle of the race?”
The diffuser was the piece that started smoking near the end of the Iskret race. Clarke asks, “There’s something wrong with the diffuser again?”
Amira taps, scrolls, taps, frowns. “Looks like it, yeah. But we have to do a full shutdown to get to it. The power unit’s in the way.”
“We have the time,” Timothy says. “They can’t just replace the one beacon. They’ll have to run diagnostics on the whole network. The pause will go long.”
The track beacons mark the course, generate the zero-grav environment, and emit the protective barrier. If the beacon network isn’t flawless, ships can fall out of the sky or crash into spectators. It’s not something the FIC is willing to cut corners on.