Clarke’s whole chest twinges at the mention of Julian being noticeably upset. “It’s not fair to you to—”
“I’m yourfriend, Clarke. And the Saga of Clarke and Julian has taken some sort of nasty twist, and your former teammate accidentally did an interview that makes you Elemental’s bogeyman, and your new teammate is Raff. I’m allowed to be worried, and you’re allowed to talk to me.”
Warmth spreads in her veins. “I know. Thank you. Now go, don’t keep Lennox and the FIC waiting.”
Thierry hustles off after a hug. Clarke is still anxious about what Atreus is going to do, and frustrated with Yves, and ripped in a million directions over Julian. But Thierry’s words buoy her spirits enough that her stomach unclenches for the first time in a week, and she sleeps well.
28
Shimmyis a blanket termthat encompasses any unexpected vibrations experienced by a ship during flight. It’s usually the result of something not being secured properly. It’s bad news for a lot of reasons (the poorly attached part could snap off, the vibrations stress the rest of the machine, etc.), but the good news is that it’s usually a one-off fix. You find whatever isn’t dovetailed together perfectly, you correct it, done.
Elemental’s aft fuselage has had an intermittent shimmy all year, and they still don’t know why.
It’s been driving the technical team insane. They spent the first two months of the season trying to pin down a root cause, but at a certain point they had to turn their attention to other problems—largely managing symptoms of the shimmy, as parts wore through too quickly or malfunctioned due to vibration. It’s become just another thing Clarke has to compensate for every time she’s in the ship. If she’s going fast, she’s probably going to get some shimmy, and she’ll just have to pray that it doesn’t get worse.
It gets worse during the Tempe Terra Grand Prix.
Qualifying’s messy, due to shimmy-unrelated reasons. One of the Bright Doors puts his ship into the barrier during Q1, andthe session gets yellow-flagged. The track is a twisty one, and Elemental’s power-loss-on-ascending-banks issue causes both Clarke and Raff to get eliminated during Q2. One of the Martian Motors’ race engineers inexplicably doesn’t warn their pilot that their team’s other pilot is doing a timed lap in Q3, and the two MMs make accidental contact.
“I told you,” Amira says, standing next to Clarke as they watch the MM pilots shout at each other while the cleanup team retrieves their ships. “Weather delay. Bad sign. Things go wrong.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Clarke says, privately wondering if hoping that Martian Motors and Bright Door can’t turn around the repairs fast enough with the race only six hours away makes her a bad person.
Amira clicks her tongue. “We’ll see.”
The shimmy, when it comes, starts small.
It’s lap forty. Clarke has battled her way up to P8 after starting in P14. She’s just about to make a play for P7 when she feels it, a now-familiar buzz from the seat between her shoulder blades. “I’m getting shimmy.”
“We see it, too,” Amira responds. “Is it manageable?”
Clarke uses the single straightaway on this track (a vertical ascent that parallels a skyscraper) to adjust the widgets on her control deck so she can keep a better eye on warning signs for the other components that’ve crapped out due to vibration this season. She’ll be numb through the shoulders and upper back after another twenty laps of this, but she’s done it before. “For now, yes.”
“Okay. Go easy on your shells.”
Amira’s saying it because it’s her job to say it, Clarke reminds herself during lap forty-one. It’s not that she thinks Clarkedoesn’t know how to manage her thruster shells while dealing with shimmy. Amira’s just—
The ship jolts hard, like someone’s hit her from behind. Clarke swings wide with the shock of it, banking up the side of the course, coming within inches of the barrier, waiting for the shaking to stop so she can stabilize and figure out what the hell that was.
It doesn’t stop.
“Suspension failure,” Amira says in her ear. “Secondary to the shimmy, we think. Not something we can fix in a pit stop. You’re going to have to retire the ship.”
The track corkscrews around a skybridge between two buildings. Clarke grits her teeth and pulls against understeer, speaking between bumps. Without suspension, she’s feeling every bit of the shimmy in her whole body, and the dirty air coming off P7 in front of her isn’t helping. “Because—it’s—going to hurt the—ship, if I stay out?”
Amira’s silent for a second, getting information from other team members. “No. The suspension can’t break any further, and we don’t anticipate downstream effects beyond understeer. But it’s not going to be comfortable for you.”
No fucking kidding. There’s already an ache starting in Clarke’s lower back. “What do the medics say?”
She rockets up the skyscraper again while waiting for Amira’s response. “You’re unlikely to suffer permanent damage.”
The part of Clarke’s brain that shies away from pain doesn’t like the sound of that. The rest of Clarke’s brain opens her mouth and says, “Good enough for me.”
The next eighteen laps are some of the most miserable in Clarke’s life. Nothing else breaks, miraculously, but ithurts. The vibration’s strong enough that her teeth clatter, so she tucks hertongue between her molars and bites it bloody. She loses feeling in her legs somewhere around lap forty-eight, and works the pedals solely from muscle memory. Her neck and shoulders are a throbbing mass of pain. The medics put her on warning at lap fifty-one.
She crosses the finish line in P9. Four points. Amira has to help her out of the ship, because she can’t do it herself.
“You should go to Medical,” Amira says, keeping an arm around Clarke’s waist as they use the cheers from the podium ceremony (Julian’s teammate Engel took first, with the two Provenance pilots in second and third, and Julian in fourth) as cover to get to Clarke’s prep room without notice.