Andre Norton - Derelict For Trade

They dashed forward, pushing aside the two Rigelians waiting their turn, and dove into the pod. Rael oofed as she hit the heavily padded interior, cushioning her fall with her hands and then lying facedown on

the humped control chaise. The screen only inches from her face lit up as she grabbed the control handles to either side, and she felt the restraints lock in over her back and legs.

Then the pod rocked under Jellico’s weight and lurched forward; he had taken the forward steering position, leaving her the even more critical weight-balancing controls. A surge of pride, of delight, of emotional intensity at his unspoken confidence in her abilities helped her to orient swiftly and make ready for what was to come.

The concourse suddenly slipped back as the pod shot forward and the cries of the cheated Rigelians dopplered away behind them. As it cleared the edge of the concourse it veered sickeningly to run along the cliff edge for a time, past a series of restaurants whose tables gave diners a close-up view of the Delight’s victims. She tried to ignore the dizzying perspective plucking at her peripheral vision over the low sides of the pod and concentrated instead on the stress and acceleration vectors graphically represented on her screen. A smaller window within the screen echoed Jellico’s screen as he chose their course: the controls of spinboggans were deliberately set up to mimic starship navigational metaphors—the trick was to map them to the varying gee field and Coriolis force of a habitat.

Rael had never tried it. She hoped Jellico had; otherwise their ride down would merit the rather sadistic anticipation she thought she could glimpse on some diners’ faces when she looked up for a moment.

PING ! Rael sneezed again and, after a moment’s fumbling, windowed up a rear view. A short distance behind them, two of their pursuers glided along in a pod, the one in the rear propped up on one arm to fire at them.

Their pod slowed abruptly. There was an agonizing pause; then, even though the course plots echoed from Jellico’s controls were still evolving, its nose tipped down, bringing the distant surface into view, and the bottom dropped out of the world as the mechanism threw them into free fall down the track.

The wind whistled past the fairing like a chorus of screams—in fact, Rael noted, the edge of the pod appeared to be fluted precisely for that effect. It didn’t help her stomach.

At least they won't be able to shoot at us anymore.

They were falling along an excruciatingly attenuated spiral, following a path that precisely matched the effect of the Coriolis force at every point along their path.

KATHUMP ! The pod jolted violently.

"Switch point!" yelled Jellico. "Next one we’re going inward, gain some velocity before we hit the Toaster."

Toaster? Rael realized she wasn’t as familiar with this toboggan as she’d thought. She’d never heard of anything on these rides, popular throughout known space, called a Toaster. She flexed the controls, watching the moire patterns of stress and acceleration shift, trying to correlate them with what she was feeling.

And soon, with a kind of rarefied delight, she realized that the way a spinboggan worked had more to do with orbital mechanics than she had thought. Grounders never got used to the fact that in orbit, you decelerated by firing your rockets to move into a higher, slower orbit, and accelerated by using your retros to drop into a lower, faster orbit. Here, due to the combination of track friction, the ’boggan’s rotational motion, Coriolis acceleration—the tighter the spin, the faster one spun—and varying gee levels, it was the same. She wondered if their pursuers knew this.

PING!

Evidently, they did.

But the pod was gaining speed, the scream of its fairing rising in pitch, mirroring her heart rate. On Jellico’s screen echo, their position point inched nearer a huge annular region in the mid-gee levels, crisscrossed by bright lines graduated in yellows and reds.

"Be very careful with the spoilers in the Toaster!" yelled Jellico. "You can pop up right out of the slot if you’re not."

Working frantically, grateful that, for the moment, the track seemed sufficient to keep them on course, Rael labored to call up a help screen.

KATHUMP ! Her stomach lurched, and not just from the sudden swerve onto a faster track. Gees pulled upwards at her recumbent body, but she

hardly noticed, staring in fascinated horror at the readout about the Toaster.

"Here we go!" shouted Jellico as the pod bucked violently. Then the noise of its progress changed to a smooth hiss as it shot into a slot, like a tube open at the top, the opening angled slightly toward the Spin Axis high above. The only thing holding them in the slot was their acceleration; it was up to her to keep them there through whatever course changes Jellico initiated.

Moments later she heard a faint scream, and realized that they were drifting up—the fluted fairing was an audible warning device triggered by its rising above the edge of the slot, not just a nerveracking embellishment!

Then there was no time for thought, only reaction, acceleration, counterreaction, deceleration, in an increasingly dizzy ballet of pursuit and flight.

But their pursuers continued to gain.

"Hold on!" Jellico’s voice held suppressed merriment.

"To what?" she yelled back, glad her voice, at least, sounded as unconcerned as his.

"Your stomach!" he called back with a laugh.

His screen echoed a complex twisting maneuver, chosen from among the maze of possibilities offered by the crisscrossing slots of the Toaster. She started to gasp a protest— surely their pursuers would catch up!

But it was too late. With a shattering thump the pod swerved into the first chicane and she compensated frantically as the scream of the fairing rose to a desperate pitch. In her peripheral vision she saw their pursuers in a parallel track, closing in—and their courses were intersecting.

Then Rael saw what Jellico intended. She could abort the maneuver, but she had to trust that he knew what he was doing.

She raised her head, looking squarely across at the humanoid filling her position in the opposite pod, and, with a broad, challenging smile, lifted

her hands from the controls.

A look of horror crossed his face as the two slots veered together, the two pods converging at tremendous speed. If they collided, the impact would kill all of them, despite any safety features, and she had lifted her hands from her controls. It was up to her pursuers to decide.

With a wail of despair the other yanked on his controls, and Rael heard the scream of his fairing soar to a shout of mechanical terror as the other pod seemed to shoot backwards, hesitate, and then lift out of the slot into free fall. As it tumbled away towards the approaching surface, she watched in her rearview screen, feeling sick.

Then relief washed through her as a parachute blossomed, to lower them ignominiously to the surface. The unknown crew of the Starvenger had probably perished; best that no more die, no matter their motives.

The rest of the ride was uneventful; Jellico steered them through the rest of the Toaster on a conservative course, and then the track resumed, taking them the rest of the way to the surface.

Rael saw the terminus coming up, surrounded by a crowd of excited Shver, and hauled on the brakes. Here on the surface they worked normally, and the pod stopped several hundred feet from its destination.

On the edge of the Shver she saw three others of their race, their aspect menacing. Two were armed with pellet projectile weapons.

"Welcome committee at ninety degrees," Jellico said. "Must have radioed ahead."