C: To the Ring

The route from Gyrfalcon to the final checkpoint near the edge of the Central region lined the entrants up so that they would merely skim the fringe of the traffic system. If they had no reserves left to change their course, it also, probably not coincidentally, put them under the system's direct observation so that they could be intercepted before they traveled very far out the other side.

Rafaela couldn't help feeling surprised, as the scout shot through the final checkpoint, and she received her official placement. It wasn't that she'd doubted the system's accuracy, it was just that she'd spent the last leg of the race waiting for the next unexpected event, and instead everything had proceeded just as the core system had predicted. She glanced at the plump fairy on the screen, who was waving a tiny triangle cloth that had the word victory written along its length.

"You really won!" she agreed laughingly.

"Technically you won, I am merely part of your ship," the core system assured her.

Rafaela opened her mouth to object, but the words that sprang to her lips made her realize that in all the time she'd spent as the scout's pilot, she'd never thought to even give it a personal name. Even the most basic system could be given at least one name that it would respond to.

Her memory library effortlessly provided its impersonal default identifier, which would sound like sissy in English, if you left the numbers out. She shook her head. The word didn't suit the mature face of the avatar, or the argumentative but friendly speech mode, so she told her ship, "It is still your win sys20si."

"You really couldn't have done it without me," the ship agreed smugly.

Her core system could be really vexing. Maybe she should name it Vexatious.

For ships that could still manage a course change, and as long as the pilot, or her ship, had accurately predicted her position and filed for a place in the queue well in advance, there was another opportunity to use clever navigation to reduce the fuel cost of their deceleration. The Eks Central Station where the ceremony would be held had a set of receiving rings for long distance cargo pods.

The rings were aligned with the outermost habitable planet, which was currently in the segment of its orbit that brought it closest to where the entrants would skim the Central Traffic System. There were only about a dozen sets of receiving rings for long distance cargo pods within the system, because they were quite expensive, even for a corporation as powerful as Eks Corp.

Their relative positions were always aligned with their sister launch arrays on the other end of their routes, but fortunately that didn't mean that only a cargo pod could use them. The high powered artificial fields within the rings would drag at anything that passed through their radius. And even with empty tanks, the beyonder scout was massive enough, and contained enough metal, to generate almost as much energy as it would consume as it passed through the fields.

If it had been built from more modern materials the ship wouldn't have been able to afford to register itself to the cargo delivery queue. Thankfully the catch fee would be very small, but when Rafaela reached the designated station, both the reaction mass in her tanks and the last of her credits would have evaporated.

She tried to keep those consequences of her decisions in mind as messages began flooding her data connection, but… she was too elated. Even if she had laughed at the core system avatar's enthusiasm, she couldn't help wanting to celebrate. Somehow, she'd actually done it. She'd placed first in the Princess Race. A hundred thousand macro credits.

SkyWater would automatically receive less tangible benefits for having backed her entrance, but she would also be able to invest that phenomenal reward into the company that her father had built. Elektra would also benefit from that, as the current head of the corporation, but Rafaela had known that from the beginning. She was also certain that her father would have wanted her to take care of her step family.

Rafaela opened the anim from Bellamy and Schmidt first. The two old Cinder Sector experts were ecstatic in their congratulations. Tyr Schmidt whooped with glee as though they'd just hit a block of pure ice in the belt. Vache Bellamy's excited exultations about how she'd known their 'Cinderella' could do it exposed the truth. Neither of them had been expecting her to actually win the race, but they were so happy about it that Rafaela couldn't stop laughing.

Her grin was so wide that it blurred her words as she sent her reply, "Hey now! You two better not start celebrating yet! I'm not officially the winner of the race until I've attended the big party at the end! I'll call you when I'm a bit farther in!"

The message from Zhou Shu let her know how much strain the administrator had been under lately. He kept repeating how thankful he was, which sobered her a little. And her reply also reminded him that it wasn't official yet, with less amusement.

The message from Elektra actually forced Rafaela to verify the identity of the sender, because she couldn't believe the apparent sincerity with which her stepmother's congratulations were spoken. There was almost no amusement left in her voice as she sent her short reply, "Thank you. It's not official yet, but I'll do my best to arrive safely."

The bulk of the congratulatory messages were from people, corporations, or other entities that Rafaela had never heard of. She didn't reply to those, but she noted the names to her memory library in case she needed to speak to any of the people or company representatives at the ceremony where her first place position would be finalized.

There was even a short message from the mad genius who had enabled the recovery and installation of the beyonder core system. Brennant had sent a written message instead of an anim, which read, "Well done. I've recovered some data."

It included the access code for a data storage system, but she had no credit to spare for the transmission to see what he'd gotten. She even waited until after the scout had successfully threaded the first ring before she placed the call to the SkyWater repair shuttle, so that she was far enough into the Central region to reduce the rate for the anim transmission.

Bellamy and Schmidt answered laughingly, but sobered with a slightly comical delay as they reacted to her appearance on their own screens.

"Trouble?" Schmidt asked.

Rafaela shook her head and assured them both, "Looking good so far. I got a message from Elektra though, and one from Brennant. He got some data off the old core, but I can't afford to look at it yet."

"He's charging extra?" Bellamy demanded indignantly.

"No, it'll just be the standard system transmission fees to retrieve it, but I'm using the cargo receiving rings to slow the ship down," Rafaela assured them.

"And that woman? What did SHE want? Is it extortion for her approval? I still can't quite believe he left you and SkyWater subject to her whims," Schmidt grumbled.

"She sent her congratulations, that's all," Rafaela explained. "What about you two, how's the framework holding up?"

The repair shuttle was still enroute to the shipping depot, despite the fact that the scout had just traveled across nearly a quarter of the solar system within the same time span.

"Sturdy as a rock," Bellamy assured her.

"Sturdier than any rock," Schmidt corrected. "We're good! You just focus on arriving at the ball safely!"

"The ball?" Rafaela asked with confusion. "Isn't Eks Central's C Station an old fashioned cylinder?"

Bellamy rolled her eyes and explained, "Not that kind of ball, he means the fancy dance party kind."

Rafaela grinned at the screen and protested laughingly, "But I haven't got a dress!"