Don't ask me twice

The Zenthari's starting klaxon shrieked like a gutted animal, and Susan's pod launched forward before the sound finished echoing. Engine torque slammed her into the cockpit's makeshift restraints—a frayed cargo harness Adam had reinforced with stolen stabilizer cabling. Eris's voice slithered through her neural port: *"Biometric spoofing initialized. Forty-seven seconds until merge point."*

Susan's grin was all teeth. Forty-seven seconds to either save sixty racers or become scrap metal herself.

Her hands danced across the controls as the pack surged into the first turn—a spiraling ascent through Freeport's derelict docking arms. Two pods clipped each other midair, spinning out in a shower of sparks that painted the debris field crimson. Susan banked hard left, skimming so close to a shattered fuel tank that her port stabilizer screamed in protest.

*"Engine stress at 89%,"* Eris reported. *"Recommend—"*

"Recommend nothing," Susan growled, yanking the yoke right to avoid a tumbling engine block. The maneuver sent her pod corkscrewing through a gap narrower than its wingspan. Metal screeched. Her starboard wing sheared off a comms array, sending jagged shards raining down on the racers below.

Adam's voice crackled over comms, half-laughing: "You're supposed to *avoid* the obstacles, psycho."

Susan bared her teeth as her pod emerged from the debris cloud. The merge point loomed ahead—a bottleneck where six orbital lanes converged into a single death funnel. Scanner arrays pulsed along its perimeter like hungry eyes. *"Twenty seconds,"* Eris murmured. *"Spoofing sequence primed."*

The pack tightened as they approached the choke point. Susan counted seven pods jockeying for position—including a sleek Zenthari-built razor with its hull plates retracted to reveal serrated grinding wheels. Perfect. She angled her pod sideways, deliberately clipping the razor's wing. The impact sent them both careening toward Scanner 49's targeting arc.

*"Five seconds. Brace for—"*

The razor's pilot overcorrected—a fatal mistake. His pod slammed nose-first into a floating derelict, the impact detonating his fuel cells in a bloom of plasma. Eris's spoofing program hitched a ride on the explosion's electromagnetic pulse, flooding all six scanners with identical death signatures.

Klaxons shrieked across the orbital track. *"Racer down. Racer down. Initiating retrieval protocol—"* The announcement glitched, repeating sixty times in overlapping waves. Below them, the cryo-pod storage bay's maglocks disengaged with a seismic groan.

Susan whooped as she punched through the merge point's turbulence. "Did it—"