15 for 15 Contest --- Closed

Jordan reversed thrust on the space tripper. It came down to a soft landing on the moon's surface. He had beat the second place tripper by a full ten seconds, if he'd beat him by a parsec!

The tractor beam pulled his tripper back into the ship. Once inside he popped the hatch and jumped out. Once he was out of the ship, he lifted his helmet visor and saw several of his fans running toward him. His smile was wide, but still a piece of him wished that Darby could be there sharing this moment with him. The last race on Marlac had proved too much for old Darby, and they'd almost lost him.

For a moment Jordan's mind flashed back to that race. Everyone knew races to the edge of the galaxy were always the most dangerous. Racers were far away from rescue crews, the race trajectories were unstable, and a host of other things could go wrong, as they'd found in recent years. They took pains to hold the races up until the conditions were more favorable, but even the stewards still were not entirely sure what caused the upsetting conditions.

Darby was in the space tripper that day only because Jordan had been diagnosed with some space bug during his prerace physical evaluation. Jordan felt fine, but he couldn't convince the doctors that there was nothing wrong with him that would compromise his safety. Although Darby was ten years Jordan's senior, Jordan knew he wasn't ready for the challenges of a race that close to the edge of the galaxy. He'd spent the next three days trying to give Darby all of the knowledge he had, going through every scenario he could possibly think of. He'd explained when to hold up, when to hammer down, and when to just hold the line.

But, in the end, Darby held up when he should have hammered down. His tripper was jettisoned not only off of the track, but to the very edge of the galaxy line. No one could know that, at that moment, the Blandathars were conducting a mission just outside the reaches of the galaxy. They might have had an idea there would be a space tripper race during that time frame, but they couldn't have known that one tripper, the most coveted tripper with a pilot with the most coveted knowledge of current warfare technology, would have busted loose out of the race trajectory. They couldn't have known they would have the opportunity to capture that space tripper… not only the tripper, but its pilot, as well.




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