The Blood Racer (The Blood Racer Trilogy Book 1) (39 page)

              Even with my ship wounded, even with my body wounded, I still managed a hint of a crazy smile. “Let’s kick the tires,” I said.
              At once, I leaned forward on the stick and put the
Kicker
into a dive, headed straight for the dark, merciless Veil. The wind through my broken glass thrashed at me, jarring me in my seat as I dove further and further. This was the same sight that countless other ship captains had seen before they were overtaken by the toxins. How many men and woman had been cursed with this as their final sight? My mother had been one of them. My father had been another. Now I was chasing after their ghosts, trying to defeat the very thing that had cost them their lives. That thought, right there, was all I needed. My will was harder than wrought steel, now. Not even the Veil could frighten me.
              I thought I had seen it all as a pilot, storms, gusts, pressure drops, wind changes, everything you could think of, but I had never been inside the Veil. It was vaguely reminiscent of diving underwater, or like flying through a smoky storm cloud, but one so thick that that you couldn’t hardly see fifty yards in front of you. This was, perhaps, the dumbest, most reckless thing I had ever done…and I was about to make it worse. Wasting no more time, I slapped the ignition for Leap engine and held on for dear life.
              Nothing happened.
              “No!” I cried, punching the button with my fist. “No, no, no! WORK!” I pummeled the button one final time before hearing the Leap finally whirring to life behind me. Instantly, I was thrown against the back of my seat as the engine fired up.
              I couldn’t see anything around me, but I could definitely feel the speed. I was tearing through the sky, completely hidden by the heavy black Veil around me.  I knew I was already past Audra by now. I had to be. I wanted to be sure, though. I wanted to be so far ahead that she couldn’t even hope to fire a shot at me. How close was I to Rainier? I couldn’t tell. With a bullet in my altimeter, I couldn’t even tell what altitude I was at.
              What I
was
sure of, though, was the harsh vibration in my pedals and my yoke. My hands and feet were going numb from the shaking of it. The speed was too much for the
Cloud Kicker
. From behind me, the unmistakable sound of bending and stressing metal could be heard. With a glance in my mirror, I tried to spot the source of the noise, but all I saw were several large bolts and a random metal bracing dropping from the roof and walls. In front of me, cracks from the bullet holes were spider-webbing across the windscreen. Beside me, the port wing gave a terrible groan, and my pedals began to positively convulse under my feet.
              My ship was falling apart.
              “Come on, baby,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Come on, we’re almost there!”
              On cue, Mount Rainier appeared in front of me, materializing from the blackness of the Veil. With a wild cry of terror, I cut the Leap engine and pulled back on the stick as hard as I could, wincing at the sound of my ship rattling fiercely from the stress. Thankfully, the
Kicker
still had enough functionality to turn its nose upward and begin climbing. I felt every jolt, every lurch as the belly scraped along the dead tree tops and branches that stuck out from the mountain side.
              “Come on!” I screamed again, my voice muted by the gas mask on my face. “Climb! Climb up!” My strength was fading as I continued bleeding from my ribs, but I managed to hold the yoke as far back as it would go, and after a long, nerve-rattling minute, I was able to get a bit of distance from the mountain itself as I exploded out from the Veil and back into the sun.
              As I burst forth from the darkness, the light was blinding on my face. For a moment, the entire sky had been set on fire, blazing around me in oranges and yellows more brilliant than any I had ever seen before. It stung my eyes badly, but I didn’t dare close them.
              With my left hand once again clamped over my wound, I angled the nose toward the Rainier docks, which were literally right in front of me. I had done it. I had arrived before Audra. Unfortunately, that’s where my good fortune ended.
              Reaching up to my radio, I yanked down the rubber cord to free it from its clip. With a glance around my interior, I made sure all the toxic remnants of the Veil had left my ship before I stripped off my gas mask and jacked the radio into my leather helmet.
              “Unbelievable!” I heard Reed shouting in my ear. “She’s out of the Veil! She’s alive! The Blood Racer is alive!” Behind his words, insane fans were cheering at a deafening level. Reaching up again, I switched from the civilian frequency to the tower band.
              “Rainier tower, Rainier tower, this is the
Cloud Kicker
!” I rattled off, trying to keep my ship level as I headed straight for the dock. “Mayday, mayday! My ship is heavily damaged and I cannot make it to a cradle! Get the people off the docks!”
              I pulled down on my throttle, hoping to simply decrease my speed. Instead, however, I felt the
Kicker
give an almighty shudder before going quiet. There was no engine sound at all. The only sound was the wind whistling through the holes in the hull. My engine wasn’t getting fuel. Something must have been shaken loose. Now, I was only gliding, coming in way too hot into the Rainier docks.
              “I’ve lost power!” was all I could say. With my blood-covered hands trembling, I switched on my turbines, trying anything to pull out of the freefall. To my great relief, it was working. The turbines powered up with a squealing, grinding sound, but they were working. I was slowing down and the docks below me were being cleared of all civilians. As I descended at an alarming rate, I had to use both my hands to control the turbine joystick. I needed to be sure that I set down in a safe spot, after all. I don’t think I could have ever forgiven myself if I had accidentally landed on someone.
              In a panic, I had just reached to my left to unwind the landing gear when my aft turbine ground to a halt with an earsplitting whine. Immediately, my tail began dropping, leaving me staring up at the sky, completely oblivious as to where I was landing.
              “No!” I cried. With nothing left to do, I shut down the forward turbines and slapped the Leap engine ignition, feeling its power as it fought the gravity that was pulling me down. With no control, though, the
Kicker
pitched over to the starboard side. For a moment, I was falling upside down, my stomach and intestines slowly cramming themselves into my throat as I plummeted. Where were the docks? Was I still over them? This wasn’t happening. Not like this. I didn’t finally beat Audra just to die in a crash at the final stop.
            After a moment, the weight in the nose tilted the ship downward and I was once again falling straight down. I cut the Leap engine. The docks were right there in front of my face. I was seconds away from impact. Somehow, my brain still had the capacity to make me flip on the VTOL turbines one last time. Just as before, only the ones in front whirred to life, roaring from the pipes behind me. Their force was just enough, though, just enough to bring the nose up so that I could crash belly first on the docks below.
              The impact was tremendous. As the
Kicker
slammed hard onto the Rainier docks, I felt the horrible shockwave shoot up my spinal cord as I held onto my safety belts for dear life. Metal crunched and glass shattered, detonating together like a bomb exploding around me. Things were hitting me, small, sharp things that dug into my skin. I felt something land on my head, but it wasn’t heavy enough to cause much pain. I couldn’t even guess as to what it was because my eyes were shut tighter than a bulkhead seal. All I could do was wait for the chaos to end.
              Once the movement had ceased, I gave it a few more seconds before I slowly opened my eyes. Only now did I realize that I was hanging from my seat. The fuselage had bent in the middle from the force of the crash and the cockpit was now facing downward toward the ground. Against my better judgment, I took a look at my surroundings.
            It was the
Cloud Kicker
, all right, but it was virtually destroyed. The windscreen was completely gone. The instrument panel and my chair were still relatively unharmed, but the frame of the cockpit had been contorted by the impact. Something behind me was hissing and I had the terrible sensation that it was a leaking hydro tank. I needed to escape the wreckage before it went up in a fireball.
              “Oh, I’m so sorry, baby!” I moaned softly, feeling the tears in my eyes. “I’ll fix you up, I promise!” My heart was breaking more with every second, realizing that I had destroyed my ship, the one thing in the world that I could always rely on.
            After taking a moment to stuff my pistol back into the cubby hole in the instrument panel, I hit the clasp of my safety belts and immediately tumbled out of the open windscreen, landing hard on the tarmac of the docks with a loud groan.
              Before I could be glad of the fact that I wasn’t paralyzed, a sudden and colossal explosion of cheering startled me so badly that I had to cover my ears. After hearing the cheers, it took only a second for me to remember that I was still in a race. I rolled over onto my stomach and slowly pushed myself to my feet, staying hunched over to prevent my seeping wound from tearing open even further. As it was, I was covered in my own blood. Glass shards had cut me in a dozen places, my hands and knees were scraped from falling on the docks, and the wound on my ribs had stained the entire left side of my hip and abdomen. Rather fitting for the Blood Racer, really.
              The crowd was certainly in agreement. Signs with my name on them, young children with tiny wooden carvings of my ship, even the catcalls from middle-aged men, it was all in support of me. They wanted me to win. They wanted me to finish what my great-great grandfather had started all those decades ago, and I was so close.
              As I began walking, I noticed that my left knee wouldn’t support my weight. I couldn’t even bend it properly. Each step shot daggers of pain through my entire leg. I didn’t know if it was broken or just sprained, but I knew I would surely be hobbling to the finish line. Ahead of me, the blue velvet podium stood serenely just beyond the docks, framed by an elevated stage and surrounded on every other side by screaming citizens. From the pocket of my pinstriped slacks, I pulled the heavy brass medallion that I had picked up in Adams and started toward it.
              “Go, Elana!” Someone shouted at me.
              “Come on!”
            Fifteen yards away, now. I could almost feel that blue velvet under my fingers.
              “It’s right there!”
              “Hurry!”
              “Here comes Audra!”
              Out of the thousands of voices, that one caught my attention. With my eyes wide, I spun around to face the direction I had come, just in time to see her ship sputtering into one of the docking cradles. She would be upon me in a matter of seconds. I couldn’t let her catch me now. With every cell in my body screaming at me to stop and rest, I turned back toward the podium and limped as fast as I could, crying out in anguish every time I had to set my left foot down. The crowd was unbelievably loud. It seemed like every person in the Dominion was roaring in my ears. I chanced another glance behind me and saw Audra, her sleek body tilted forward in a sprint, heading right for me.
              Using every ounce of adrenaline I could muster, I dove forward, smacking hard into the podium. It took all of the upper body strength I had left just to hold myself up, but there, in front of thousands, with my blood smearing all over the legendary blue velvet, I slammed my medallion into the slot on that podium…
            And won the race.
              The crowd’s roar became no more than a mind-numbing static as I slowly slumped down against the podium. It seemed like every man, woman, and child was jumping up and down with joy, enormous smiles plastered on their faces. Some had tears running down their cheeks, some looked disappointed and angry, and some were throwing papers at me, covered in names and private radio frequencies. I did the best that I could by giving them waves and weak smiles, but they vanished quickly as Audra came dashing toward me. Instinctively, I reached to my right hip for the gun, but it was no longer there. All I could do was watch her jog up to me, her face turned down in an ugly grimace. As she reached me, the crowd quieted down considerably, all of them waiting for some sort of final climactic confrontation.
              I cleared my throat, making sure she would hear me before I spoke. “That,” I said loudly, “was for my mother.”
              With a smile that almost seemed sad, Audra extended her finger and grazed it along the velvet podium, nodding her head. She knew she had no choice but to accept it, to accept that I had withstood every terrible thing that was thrown at me. She had ridiculed me, she had knocked me down, she had shot me, she had tried to kill me a dozen times in a dozen different ways…and I had still defeated her.
              As she set her medallion on top of the podium, I couldn’t suppress the tiny spark of respect I had for her. She had lost, but still felt the need to officially finish. She wasn’t crying about it, she wasn’t throwing a tantrum over it…as cutthroat as she was, she was a true competitor. So, when she bent down and offered me her hand, I only stared up at her for a few short seconds before taking it.
              The crowd cheered again, relishing the sight of the sportsmanship as she helped hoist me to my feet, a move that brought me immense pain and – more than likely – a fair amount of satisfaction from her. As the audience applauded, she pulled me in close, staring into me with her cold, black eyes, and pressed her lips to my ear.