Elite Trader 1/3: The Starting Line
22 Apr 2016Monolith Preacher
OOC: Sorry it's been so long, folks! Uni's really been taking up my time. My posts might be a bit sporadic, but there shouldn't be any month-long breaks in the forseeable future! To make up for it, I'll be cranking out another "trilogy post" over this cycle and possibly the next.There's not much to say about the RPI race that hasn't already been mentioned somewhere, but that was the letter which had arrived, and I can at least tell my side of the story.
I was racing in a custom eagle made by a company which had quite a history behind it. Anti-Gravity research was originally pioneered as part of advanced racing leagues part way through the 21st century. With the dissolution of the leagues a little over a century later, the companies diversified into civilian and military research companies as was their want, or simply dissolved themselves. Their companies met with varying degrees of success, but most went bust within the passing millennium. As much as capitalism holds for dreams of immortality, Bedford and Sons never made it into Alpha Centauri.
Two companies, however, managed to weather the storm. Sure, controversy abounded when they had to merge into a single unit after being each other's main competitors in speed on the grid, but that was a few hundred years ago now. Either way, they were looking for pilots crazy enough to test out their new prototypes, and I had been put forward as a candidate by Scarlet.
The premise was simple: Scarlet had told them of our innovations in weaponising sound waves, and they wanted to test this out on an Eagle in a racing environment. Apparently, similar research had been made in antiquity allowing for deformation of the ground in a wave-like pattern, but had been lost to the sands of time. The race called for a light and a medium class to be racing together, and so the eagle would test a speaker system with an experimental blend of breakcore and minimalist classical. Such musical genre's hadn't been reconstructed in so long, I wondered if I was about to step into a time warp as I entered the ship, and the camo paint didn't help me feel any safer. If a tree were to fall in space, no-one would be able to hear it.
As the videos show, I was the only eagle in the race, so I finished a good half minute behind the rest. At least it wasn't because of losing my route like during the Black Riband. I still made a good time considering, and it was meant mainly as a publicity stunt for my sponsors. In this regard, it went well. I didn't bother chiding Scarlet for leaking my information. As much as such a violation of my privacy irked me at first, she's probably the one person in the galaxy I'd trust in my mainframe. But I'd never let her near my mechanics. And I was in need of a repair of a different sort to usual.
When I was taking the final turn on my time trial, my secondary fire button pinged off my joystick. Then it pinged off my visor. Then it pinged off my windscreen. Then it flew to the back of my eagle, never to be seen again. I had to visit Sheng, and he wasn't going to be happy with me.
****
As I came into San Wu, I got a direct message from Sheng:
"Ya got nerve, Mon'! Wagwan? an' speak fas', ya' na' welcome!"
I couldn't blame him. He must've been smarting after Scarlet beat him coding. I didn't hold him in any lesser regard, but he'd lost some rep because of my actions, regardless. I had to make it up to him somehow, but I had to keep it short. If he was in a temper, he'd type faster than he'd read. There was an old Sufi saying about people who listen with their tongues. If that was true, Sheng read his screen with his fingers.
"Need sticks, no mate's rates. Whole fleet."
Sheng didn't covet credits, but it was an adequate way to express my apology. Working through a whole fleet wouldn't only give him a nice marketing advert, it'd also give him experience in my Boombox. I knew I was the only customer he had with access to a Cutter, or at least the only one that would let him smoke inside. Still, I waited for a tense few minutes fighting the urge to rush his answer ere he replied.
"Tell me wha' ya' wan' install"
Now I knew I had him.
"Twin sticks. Left on x=vert y=lat thrust, Right on x=pitch y=roll. Rudder pedals as throttle."
His reply took three seconds. The work, I was to find, would take three days...including the time it took me to haul my fleet there.
"Preacher, even I never wire' dat!"