C: Hazardous Fire

The beyonder scout entered the Norse belt behind a shield of insubstantial flame, or more accurately, the ions being expelled from the main drive.

Rafaela had never lived on a planet, so she wasn't at all disoriented by the fact that the scout had flipped and her head was now pointed in the direction they had come from, while the drives were now at the 'nose' of the ship. Nothing had changed on her navigation screens, and it would never have occurred to her to orient herself by an outside view. Even the idea of fragile transparent materials being included in the exterior to create windows for direct light would have been considered quite dangerous by any designer in the system.

The push from the drive beneath her feet kept her in her seat, and her eyes and hands were busy as she interacted with the screen at her fingertips. There wasn't actually much for her to do yet, but she was nervously rearranging things so that it would take no more than a small movement to react to a danger or direct the ship to alter their course.

A set of coordinates and the anim image of a ship began the announcement that the scout's core system made. Rafaela had never thought of herself as someone who judged others by their appearance, but the image of the plump winged figure with its hands on its hips definitely detracted from the ship's serious tone as it informed her, "Although it was registered with the Eks Corp Central traffic system, this craft may be a danger to us. It has been paralleling our course but is now moving closer and will clearly be entering the field with us."

"It's not one of the other entrants?" Rafaela asked.

"It is not. It also has an unusual design with an abnormal amount of shielding, and a power capacity that may indicate unregistered weaponry," the ship explained.

"You think it's a pirate ship? But the security ships at the checkpoints must have seen it too," Rafaela protested uneasily.

"I cannot guess whether it is involved in unlicensed activities," the ship prevaricated. "But it has reduced the distance between us as we entered the belt, and may be targeting us."

"It might not be us, it could be one of the other entrants," Rafaela pointed out, with a glance at the estimated positions marked on the screen. "It could be following one of the three in the lead at a distance, or even targeting one of the ships behind us."

Most of the entrants who had decided to pass through the belt instead of veering 'above' or 'below' had moved closer, as though they had decided that she knew what she was doing. Her stepsisters were in that group, which worried her a little. She wondered if they had identified the scout as hers and felt obligated to prove that they could take the same route, or if they had each decided that it was the fastest course.

The ship in the lead was the small one that had trailed behind the group until they had passed the first checkpoint. It had fallen behind again after swinging far wide of the cluster of entrants between the fourth and fifth checkpoints, but had been closing the gap ever since, and had entered the Norse belt at what Rafaela considered a suicidal velocity.

The other two ships that had entered the belt ahead of the scout hadn't stopped slowing down, and were in danger of losing the lead they'd gained on the others, as the cluster of entrants followed the course that Rafaela had chosen which crossed the trail of several of the larger bodies within the belt. Ironically, it wasn't usually the larger rocks that were the real danger in a belt, it was the tiny fragments that were too small to detect at a distance, but still big enough to punch a hole through an average vessel's shielding.

The small ship in the forefront was running hot enough that the scout's passive sensors could still track its progress, despite the fragments that clouded the screen between them, and Rafaela wondered if it was creating a plasma screen hot enough to burn up anything small enough to be difficult to evade before it punched through. No miner would ever shoot through a field at a fraction of the speed that the race entrants were moving, for many reasons, the main one being how much fuel they were all wasting.

The suspicious ship that her ship was warning her about was an elusive shadow compared to the leading entrant. It was moving almost as fast as they were, but it was obviously trusting the unusually heavy shielding that the core reported to protect it from the belt 'sand', because it wasn't running any kind of active field that they could detect. In an anim drama the ship could have had stealth fields that would mute the waves created by active shields, but in reality such devices were incredibly difficult to design, used as much power as what they were hiding, and would 'leak' when viewed with movement.

She eyed the graphic that represented the unknown ship that was somehow keeping up with the race entrants. It wasn't the only ship that had almost kept pace with them, but the others had been registered Eks Corp Security vessels. The larger ships weren't as maneuverable, and seemed to be handing off the duty of shadowing them as the entrants caught up to Security vessels that were already traveling between checkpoints.

A message notification popped up, from Elektra of all people, asking for her coordinates and Rafaela muttered, "Not a good time..." But then she brightened as she suggested, "Maybe it's not armed, but is actually a race reporter?"

"Weapon discharge," the ship replied calmly as part of her display lit up.

For a moment Rafaela assumed that the suspicious ship had fired on them, but then she realized that the icon that had lit up belonged to one of the entrants who had entered the belt ahead of them. "Freaking idiot," she muttered as her heart thumped in her ears long after she could have reacted usefully.

The scatter of debris had to have raked the ship that had apparently fired on a rock in its path rather than avoiding it. Rafaela hadn't realized that any of the entrants would be armed, but it seemed to have used something as powerful as a small station's rogue bouncers, and the core predicted that some of the debris would be moving fast enough to cross their own course. Possible shadows were already being lit where larger rocks might provide cover.

Unfortunately they were moving far too fast to simply stop in a safe shadow until the detritus had mostly passed. Rafaela glanced at the markers of the ships that were trailing them on paralleling courses. She wondered if her stepsisters were watching as the scout flipped again, and the force that had held her down suddenly ended as the main drive abruptly shut down.

The beyonder scout slid through the rim of the blast zone with the most easily replaceable and heaviest particle shielding portions of its skin turned toward the debris. Much of the power that had been fueling the main drive was redirected to the repulsion field. The stronger field being generated by the coils wasn't likely to be able to deflect any particles that hit them dead on while moving at high velocity, but it might turn a hit into a near miss, or slow a particle down.

It was a matter of luck as much as timing. Close was relative, and space was large. Even a billion fragments could each be many meters apart by the time they reached the scout, and they would have spread even farther by the time the ships following her reached the edge of the blast radius. The ship that would suffer the most impacts was the one that had fired.

The smart fabric suit that she couldn't afford would have been an advantage in a situation where a microscopic particle might penetrate the ship. There were very few parts of a human that couldn't self repair a needle-like path through them, but even such a tiny hole could render a standard suit useless far too quickly.

When the puncture warning went off, Rafaela moved smoothly, and calmly. Time seemed to slow down, but the pounding of her heart didn't shake her as it had earlier. The scout ship completed the maneuver without her guidance as she became its hands, and she smoothly patched both entrance and exit punctures before more than a small fraction of the pressure within the cabin had escaped. The patches were temporary, but should last until each of the layers of the panels could be individually replaced, and some grubbers claimed to still be flying with more patch in their shells than original material.

Her luck was good, despite the puncture, nothing vital had been hit, and only the one particle seemed to have penetrated the outer shielding. The drive pulled her into her seat as she pulled herself into place, in a perfectly timed synchronization between pilot and ship. She gazed blankly at the anim of the plump fairy who winked at her.