Formula Zero

1

There's an art to crashing a Formula Zero racing ship in a way that doesn't kill you. Madeline Clarke is as close to mastering that art as it gets, but this is becoming a bit much, even for her.

The race is going as smoothly as it can (given that Elemental Machines' ship is a box of shit with wings this year) until she goes to angle her thruster shells to take on a vertical loop during lap forty-nine and the shells stay stubbornly locked in place. Frustration spikes through her as she pulls up hard to compensate, and for a second it works-she clears the first part of the loop-but she knows it's not sustainable. There's an awful rumble-whine of tension as she hits full inversion, the strain of machinery under pressure, and an alarm blares as her trajectory becomes irreversibly compromised.

Managing a Formula Zero crash is mostly about controlling your reactions. The steps get drilled into every young pilot from day one: kill the power unit, take your hands off the controls, go limp, and stay calm. Fear doesn't factor into it. Fear can't factor into it.

She gets the power unit shut off just after the apex of the loop, but that's all she has time for. Physics is physics, even in an artificial zero-grav environment, and momentum carries her forward. The nose and bottom of her ship slam into the track as it starts to bend, and the impact's hard enough to make her vision gray out even with thick, clear gel flooding up from under her seat to distribute the blow. She rebounds. Hits another section of track, and another. Hears the shriek of metal tearing apart. Loses all sense of orientation as she spins and spins and spins.

The motion eventually stops. Her heart hammers hard in her chest, and her breath comes in choppy gasps.

The art of walking away from a crash really comes into play in the immediate aftermath. Turning the engine off, getting your hands clear, staying loose and calm-that's the science of surviving impact. The art happens after, when it's just you and whatever remains of your ship. There are a million ways for machinery to have crumpled around you and become compromised. There are dozens of components that could burst or catch fire. There are nineteen other ships on the track; the danger of secondary collisions is real.

Your team and trainers will give you a lot of advice about what to do in those hazy seconds, but in Clarke's experience, it comes down to how quickly she can unscramble her brain. She starts big and works her way down to the details.

She's alive. Her entire body hurts. Her vision is blurry. There's a voice, low and tense, cutting through the ringing in her ears.

"Clarke?"

Amira. That's Amira Bahtri, Clarke's race engineer, on the radio. She sounds stressed.

"Clarke."

It's not Clarke's vision that's blurry, she realizes. There's something smeared across her helmet. She reaches up with shaky fingers to swipe at her visor.

Crash gel. Right. It would've drained immediately after the ship stopped moving, but it's still clinging to every surface. She manages to clear enough of it away that she can see, but the ship must've come to rest upside down. All she can make out past the safety bars that ring her cockpit is the vibrant gold of the beacons that mark the track.

It's close enough to touch, and Clarke's dazed enough that she tries. She stretches-

-and stifles a scream when trying to get her left elbow above her shoulder sends a lance of sharp, hot pain all the way down her arm.

"Clarke!"

"I'm okay," Clarke mumbles, hugging her arm back into her torso and fighting the bile trying to climb up her throat. "Arm's hurt. I think I'm blocking the track."

"You are, partially," Amira says, relief coloring her voice now that Clarke's responding. Pilot biometrics are streamed real-time during a race, so they would've known Clarke was alive, but there's a lot of space between alive and talking coherently. "There's a double yellow flag, and a safety ship coming out."

Good. That's good. All the other ships will have to slow down, giving Clarke time to get herself clear of this mess. The anxiety scrabbling at the back of her skull eases off somewhat as she cranes her head around, looking for an exit strategy. Her field of vision is limited between the visor, neck brace, and the cage of safety bars, but she can just see out the side of the cockpit.

Flickering orange light. Faint, compared to the track's gold, but getting stronger.

"Clarke, the bottom of the ship is on-"

"Fire," Clarke croaks. "Yeah. I know."

Fear finally kicks in. Clarke smashes it down ruthlessly. Freezing up is not an option, and that's what she needs right now: options. She says as much over the radio.

"You're upside down against the track, so you can't eject. You'll get blown into the barrier," Amira says with forced calm. "Can you push yourself far enough away manually to get out?"

The ship weighs 902 kilograms, but that doesn't matter in zero G. Keeping her injured arm tucked close to her body, she reaches up with her other hand. She can get her fingertips past the safety bars, but only just. She pushes against the track. The ship shifts, barely.

"Not sure I have the leverage," she wheezes. The harness is digging into her shoulders as she strains up out of her seat against it, sending waves of nauseating pain through her whole left side.

There's a beat of silence before Amira says, voice tight, "The emergency team will be there in twenty seconds."

Clarke gives her own beat of silence to make sure what she's about to say is accurate and that she can say it without her voice shaking. "Not sure I have twenty seconds. The fire's getting hotter. I can feel it."

She's going to die here. Every shallow breath that passes without an answer from Amira confirms it. There's a miniature interstellar-class kickdrive seven inches behind Clarke's spine, and when the flames reach it, Clarke is going to die. On the track. Just like Connor.

The fear comes back, and this time, Clarke lets it. If she's going to die, she might as well be honest with herself about how it feels, and it's terrifying on a visceral level.

"Okay," Amira says. "We'll try to-what the hell is-Grayson, control your pilot-"

Clarke's not sure if it's ironic or pathetic that the last few seconds of her life will be spent listening to her race engineer yell at someone else's race engineer. At Julian's race engineer, no less. Maybe it's neither ironic nor pathetic, actually; maybe it's just fitting. It still feels unfair, though, and she's opening her mouth to-to-she doesn't know, ask Amira to tell Clarke's family that she loves them or something, but her ship rocks to the side before she can get the words out.

"What was that?" she asks, still desperately scraping at the track with her gloved fingertips. She can't see anything, just orange and gold and shadows, and Amira's end of the radio is distant, unintelligible shouting. "Amira? What's going on?"

The ship rocks again. It keeps going this time, rolling fully onto its side, and then boots drop onto the nose of her ship.

"Eject!" Julian Casperi, Clarke's childhood best friend turned professional rival, shouts at her. His helmet is off, sweat-drenched dark hair on his forehead, eyes darting over Clarke's ship, the track, the fire. His voice is muffled through Clarke's helmet and the ringing in her ears, but she hears him. "Now, Clarke, move!"

There's no time to be surprised. Julian's given her an option that isn't dying trapped under her ship, and Clarke takes it. Her seat detaches with a jolt of propulsion behind it. Julian snags her by the five-point harness the instant she's clear, rips the air tube connected to her helmet out of its socket, braces his feet against the mangled fuselage, and launches them away from the wreckage. Clarke focuses on keeping her limbs close so she doesn't impede their progress. She has to use her right arm to keep her left from flopping around.

She also focuses on not vomiting.

Julian aimed well. He catches them on the wing of his own ship and releases Clarke so he can climb back into his cockpit and jam his helmet on. Clarke gets with the program enough to snag one of his safety bars with the toe of a boot and uses it to reel herself in. It's awkward and painful as hell, and she winds up with her knee pinned between her seat and Julian's hull, but she gets her right elbow locked around the bar.

Julian looks up at her as they get moving. They can't talk to each other with their helmets on, not over the collective roar of the fire and Julian's engine competing with the wailing sirens of the incoming emergency team, and Clarke can't see Julian's eyes through his visor, but there's a distinct tilt to his chin as he checks to make sure she's hanging on while he flies them out of the blast zone.

Amira ends a string of creative, multilingual swears. "You're okay?"

"Left arm's a mess," Clarke says, relief starting to cascade through her. "Shoulder, I think, or collarbone. But I'm okay. The ship is-"

Clarke's ship doesn't completely explode. The kickdrive is shielded, to mitigate collateral damage in just such an event as this. But the atmospheric pressure that's been mounting suddenly snaps with a sound like the sky splitting in half, and a wave of force rips Clarke away from Julian's ship. The airbags built into the sides of her seat deploy and she goes limp again, calling on every minute she's spent getting flipped around in a multi-axis trainer so she doesn't puke in her helmet as she tumbles in what feels like all directions at once.

She's still spinning when the airbags start popping. She comes to a sharp halt in the next second, and she can't hold back the groan that tears out of her chest. Hands wrangle the deflating airbag material out of the way, making space for a yellow-suited medic to start cutting her out of her harness.

"Talk to me," the medic says, loud and clear through Clarke's earpiece. Amira must have patched him onto the Elemental channel.

"Gonna throw up," Clarke says honestly.

This is an on-planet track, one that cuts in and out of the heart of a city. Clarke's lucky. If they'd been off-planet, up in the vacuum of space, removing her helmet wouldn't be an option. The air on Mars is breathable after centuries of atmoforming, though, so the medic helps Clarke get her helmet off just in time for her pre-race meal to make a second appearance.

It puddles and clumps in midair. The medic produces a bag from a belt pouch, shakes it out, and neatly traps the vomit inside.

"Clarke?"

That's Amira again. Clarke swallows against the appalling taste in her mouth. "Yeah?"

"We're going to have to retire the ship."

Clarke mutes her mic so her hysterical laughter won't be recorded. Julian got them around a bend in the track before the explosion, so she can't see the wreck with her own eyes anymore, but there are massive screens projected along the course so spectators on the ground and in the surrounding buildings can watch. The one she's got the best angle on right now is showing her ship's corpse, billowing blue-black smoke through the foamy clouds of suppressant being dropped on it by another emergency team. Definitely not the type of damage the crew can repair in time for Clarke to finish the race. She hates this year's ship, but guilt still pangs through her, thinking about how much work the team will have to do to rebuild for next week.

It's her fifth Did Not Finish of the season. Eleven races in, only thirteen to go, and it's already her fifth DNF. Elemental was supposed to be competitive this year. Clarke was supposed to be competitive this year.

The medic has a small propulsion system strapped to his back. He flies Clarke to the waiting ambu-ship. Just before he closes the doors behind them, Clarke sees Julian hovering along the side of the track.

Clarke waves. Julian turns the nose of his ship forward and flies away. Clarke lets her head fall back against her neck brace and closes her eyes.

Shit.

2

"Well, that was certainly exciting!"

Julian levels the offending reporter with the flat glare he's become infamous for. "Delphine's win? I don't see how that was exciting. Pretty expected, actually, if you ask me."

"I can understand losing to me would be getting dull for you at this point," says Delphine Hart, winner of today's race and reigning interplanetary champion. "But we should give the people what they want, no?"

"Sorry, just, that's not what I meant," Silver Sight says, speaking louder to be heard over the chuckling. He shifts his gaze to Clarke, and Clarke knows it's rude to focus on people's physical appearances but he's had both his eyes replaced with full metallic implants and really does look like the villain from a kids' show she used to watch. "Clarke. What happened out there?"

Clarke's left arm is in a sling. She went to Medical while the race finished, and her broken collarbone isn't broken anymore, but the limb is swollen and tender. She would give anything to be in bed right now, but there's a clause in every pilot's contract about doing the post-race press conference when tapped.

Clarke's media persona is carefully cultivated. It's easier for her to be approachable, humble, and dedicated when her entire skeleton doesn't feel battered, though, so she lifts the microphone to her mouth and says, blunt, "Wasn't it obvious? I crashed. Again."