Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen Read Free Page A

a delight.
    Sally Tincakes approached on Jane’s left—a looming comedy from the days when men alone had ruled the moon.
    “How’s it feel for yah?” Bill’s voice said in Jane’s helmet.
    “Liquid,” Jane said, smiling.
    “Happy so far?”
    “So far,” she said.
    Sally came up fast, and then was gone to Jane’s rear. She glanced once over her shoulder, watching the old racing icon begin to shrink in the distance. She snickered quietly.
    “What’s so funny?” asked Bill.
    “You really think that stupid thing’s killed five people?”
    “All I know is when Frank’s wife caught wind of the fact that Frank had been sleeping around with one of the few female drivers then on the circuit, there was hell to pay. Big press conference. Sally threw her ring in Frank’s face and said the offending driver would never win a series on Frank’s track as long as Sally had something to say about it. Then she divorced him and went to Mars.”
    “And that’s it?” Jane said.
    “No,” said Bill’s voice, crackling. The way he’d said it told Jane the other shoe was about to drop.
    “Two weeks after the divorce, Frank’s girlfriend had a bad spin-out on this track and augured in at 400 KPH. No chance of survival. Not at those speeds. Three years later, the woman’s sister came up in the ranks and she raced here too. Explosive engine failure at 375. They were picking up the pieces for days.”
    “Bad luck,” Jane said, hunching down on her machine as she took it through a series of challenging turns, the gee pulling ferociously at her while she dug her toes into the boot clips and hung on to the control bars with clawed hands. A driver didn’t sit in the Falcon so much as on top of it.
    “Bad luck my ass,” Bill said. “Six years after that, another woman came up in the standings, and she died here too. Collision with two other bikes. Ten years after that, same thing. A dozen years later, and the very next woman—”
    “I know about her,” Jane said, pulling out onto a significant straightaway. The throttle on the Falcon glided, pushing Jane up for an extended speed run just prior to the next set of tight turns. “Ellen McTaggert was a legend on the junior tracks. Youngest woman to ever win the Imbrium and Crisium Cups in the same year. She’d have taken the big one if she hadn’t been killed.”
    “Did you know that she died here?”
    “No,” Jane admitted.
    “They don’t like to advertise this stuff because it’s bad for the track and it’s bad for the senior circuit overall. But I’m telling you, Jay-Jay, this track is death on women drivers. And old Sally’s got something to do with it.”
    “I thought you said the original Sally went to Mars?”
    “Went, and never arrived. To this day nobody knows what happened to her, or the clipper ship she was on.”
    Jane felt a sudden chill run down her spine. Her parents had vanished in a similar fashion. It was supposed to have been a short trip. Asteroid to asteroid. Their ferry had simply disappeared. A rare but not unheard of event in deep space. Hazard of the business, she’d once heard a veteran astronaut quip.
    Which didn’t make Jane feel any better. Even now.
    “So Sally disappears,” Jane said into her suit’s helmet-mic. “What’s left in it for Frank?”
    “He kept the statue up because it was too much of a crowd-pleaser. Frank and the other track co-owners didn’t dare take it down. Then, after the third female death on this course, none of us on the circuit thought it was a coincidence or simple bad luck. Not anymore.”
    “Nonsense,” Jane said. But she still felt a chill.
    Time to burn it off.
    She approached a new set of turns with eagerness, slewing the Falcon with a hip-shake, then tapping her reaction control thrusters to fix her angle. Instead of spinning like a paddle on an air hockey table, Jane’s bike stayed nose-down as it went up the banked length of the turn. She was dead-on for the next turn, slewed again,