Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

“One soul on board,” Bero said.

“What? That can’t be right.”

“There is one soul on board.” The ship sounded amused with her exasperation at first listen, but there was something in the ship’s voice that nagged at her. Something… tight. Could AI ships even slip like that? It seemed to her that something with that big of a brain would only use the tone it absolutely wanted to.

“In the medibay, yes, but the rest of the ship? How many?”

“One.”

She licked her lips, heart hammering in her ears. She turned back to the control panel she’d sent the squawk from and pulled up the ship’s nav system. She couldn’t make changes from the bay unless she had override commands, but… The whole thing was on autopilot. If she really was the only one on board… Maybe she could convince the ship to return her to Ada Prime. Handing a smartship over to her superiors would win her accolades enough to last a lifetime. Could even win her a fresh new leg.

“Bero, bring up a map of the local system, please. Light up any ports in range.”

A pause. “Bero?”

“Are you sure, Sergeant Greeve?”

Unease threaded through her. “Call me Sanda, and yes, light her up for me.”

The icons for the control systems wiped away, replaced with a 3-D model of the nearby system. She blinked, wondering if she still had goop in her eyes. Couldn’t be right. There they were, a glowing dot in the endless black, the asteroid belt that stood between Ada Prime and Icarion clear as starlight. Judging by the coordinates displayed above the ship’s avatar, she should be able to see Ada Prime. They were near the battlefield of Dralee, and although there was a whole lot of space between the celestial bodies, Dralee was the closest in the system to Ada. That’s why she’d been patrolling it.

“Bero, is your display damaged?”

“No, Sanda.”

She swallowed. Icarion couldn’t have… wouldn’t have. They wanted the dwarf planet. Needed access to Ada Prime’s Casimir Gate.

“Bero. Where is Ada Prime in this simulation?” She pinched the screen, zooming out. The system’s star, Cronus, spun off in the distance, brilliant and yellow-white. Icarion had vanished, too.

“Bero!”

“Icarion initiated the Fibon Protocol after the Battle of Dralee. The results were larger than expected.”

The display changed, drawing back. Icarion and Ada Prime reappeared, their orbits aligning one of the two times out of the year they passed each other. Somewhere between them, among the asteroid belt, a black wave began, reaching outward, consuming space in all directions. Asteroids vanished. Icarion vanished. Ada Prime vanished.

She dropped her head against the display. Let the goop run down from her hair, the cold glass against her skin scarcely registering. Numbness suffused her. No wonder Bero was empty. He must have been ported outside the destruction. He was a smartship. He wouldn’t have needed human input to figure out what had happened.

“How long?” she asked, mind racing despite the slowness of coldsleep. Shock had grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her fully awake. Grief she could dwell on later, now she had a problem to work. Maybe there were others, like her, on the edge of the wreckage. Other evac pods drifting through the black. Outposts in the belt.

There’d been ports, hideouts. They’d starve without supplies from either Ada Prime or Icarion, but that’d take a whole lot of time. With a smartship, she could scoop them up. Get them all to one of the other nearby habitable systems before the ship’s drive gave out. And if she were very lucky… Hope dared to swell in her chest. Her brother and fathers were resourceful people. Surely her dad Graham would have had some advance warning. That man always had his ear to the ground, his nose deep in rumor networks. If anyone could ride out that attack, it was them.

“It has been two hundred thirty years since the Battle of Dralee.”

Firefly meets The Fast and the Furious in this science fiction adventure series that follows a crew of outcasts as they try to find a legendary ship that just might be the key to saving the universe.

A washed-up treasure hunter, a hotshot racer, and a deadly secret society.

They’re all on a race against time to hunt down the greatest warship ever built. Some think the ship is lost forever, some think it’s been destroyed, and some think it’s only a legend, but one thing’s for certain: whoever finds it will hold the fate of the universe in their hands. And treasure that valuable can never stay hidden for long.…

The straight opened before the two race cars: an oily river, speckled yellow by the evening sun. They shot down the tarmac in succession like sapphire fish, streamers of wild magic billowing from their exhausts. They roared toward the turn, precision movements bringing them within centimeters of one another.

The following car veered to the inside. The leader attempted the same.

Their tires only touched for a moment. They interlocked, and sheer torque threw the leader into the air. Jagged chunks of duraplast glittered in the dusk as the follower’s car passed underneath, unharmed but for a fractured front wing. The lead race car came down hard, twisting eruptions of elemental magic spewing from its wounded power unit. One of its tires exploded into a hail of spinning cords, whipping the road.

In the background, the other blue car slipped away down the chicane—Nilah’s car.

The replay lost focus and reset.

The crash played out again and again on the holoprojection in front of them, and Nilah Brio tried not to sigh. She had seen plenty of wrecks before and caused more than her share of them.

“Crashes happen,” she said.

“Not when the cars are on the same bloody team, Nilah!”

Claire Asby, the Lang Autosport team principal, stood at her mahogany desk, hands folded behind her back. The office looked less like the sort of ultramodern workspace Nilah had seen on other teams and more like one of the mansions of Origin, replete with antique furniture, incandescent lighting, stuffed big-game heads (which Nilah hated), and gargantuan landscapes from planets she had never seen. She supposed the decor favored a pale woman like Claire, but it did nothing for Nilah’s dark brown complexion. The office didn’t have any of the bright, human-centric design and ergonomic beauty of her home, but team bosses had to be forgiven their eccentricities—especially when that boss had led them to as many victories as Claire had.

Her teammate, Kristof Kater, chuckled and rocked back on his heels. Nilah rolled her eyes at the pretty boy’s pleasure. They should’ve been checking in with the pit crews, not wasting precious time at a last-minute dressing down.

The cars hovering over Claire’s desk reset and moved through their slow-motion calamity. Claire had already made them watch the footage a few dozen times after the incident: Nilah’s car dove for the inside and Kristof moved to block. The incident had cost her half her front wing, but Kristof’s track weekend had ended right there.

“I want you both to run a clean race today. I am begging you to bring those cars home intact at all costs.”

Nilah shrugged and smiled. “That’ll be fine, provided Kristof follows a decent racing line.”