Chapter 31 Sanre-tay Day 13 – A Spook in Black
This morning I found myself lounging, hands in trouser pockets, in the large and loud buggy garage under the grand stand watching Molaye and Riv make their final checks of our crater buggy, the “Lucky Star”. There was a dozen such lanes, lined with bays filled with enough buggies to keep the races going one after the other around the clock. The bays were divided by half walls where driver and crew worked on their machine while gaggles of swaggering spaceers milled about in the alley between the bays exchanging brags, boasts and banter with the rival teams.
Molaye, tall, willowy, very much a moon-born lady in her space suit, minus the helmet, was slowly walking around her buggy checking everything. Riv was underneath, making a final check of the power cables and Myes was leaning against the other half wall, keeping the curious at bay with a fierce scowl. Our buggy was a standard four seat recreational unit – egg shaped driver's compartment set in a web of tubular framing which had been stripped down to just a frame, four wide wheels with motors in their hubs and the driver's compartment. The compartment was pressurized, but drivers still wore spacesuits on the chance it was ruptured during the race.
I'd been slipped the word that Molaye would be getting lucky today so it was safe to put credits on her. I'm not a gambler – though I was assured this wasn't actually gambling – but I did put a modest amount on her winning, mostly as a token of confidence. She was still four tiers below Az and would need this win to advance to the next tier, and two wins each in the remaining tiers to race against him. Though Min had yet to set a definite sailing date, I expected it within the next month, so she had to get lucky often, but not too often, in order to advance and still make wagering on her a payday.
Glancing up at the clock I saw we'd less than two minutes before the spectators would have to leave for the stands to view our race, so I pushed myself off the wall I was holding up and wished Lucky Laye good luck.
Then, as I turned for the exits I felt a sudden sharp chill streak down my spine. I gave a start and a shiver. I think. I'm not certain of the precise order of events, I may've swung around on account of that knifing chill, or I may've already started turning, but in any event, I started, shivered, and turned, noting a slim figure in a black uniform brush past me. There was something in that confused instant that made me watch her as she sauntered towards the clearsteel exit doors ten meters away. Or rather, her reflection in those doors. My eyes were drawn to her face, darkly reflected, and our eyes seemed to meet and hold for a long second in the dark reflection. She may've even smiled, and I shivered again. She pushed through the doors and disappeared into the crowd beyond them. I found my heart pounding as if I'd seen a ghost.
The whole incident lasted all of six seconds, and on the surface, so trivial it should be beneath recording. And yet there was that sudden chill and that twist of fear in my gut when I saw that slim figure in black – and a dark sense of Deja vu, with flashes of blue lightning.
She was only a spaceer in a black uniform. Black is the most common uniform color and slim spacers hardly rare. So why the chill? Why the feeling she was watching me in reflection in the door? And why the smile, if she had indeed smiled? And why couldn't I shake the feeling a plasma dart was our connection? I stood stock still chasing these thoughts around in my head, until the buzzer rang to clear the garage and I absently headed for the doors in the press of the crowd.
Outside, she was nowhere to be seen, so I joined my shipmates in the crowded stands that overlooked the rugged, airless crater-track beyond the clearsteel wall harshly lit in the unfiltered light of Azminn. The race course wove its way through the crater, in and around rocky outcrops, narrow rifts and steep hills. Crater buggy racing in low gee, at least as practiced by spaceers, seems to be a free for all, involving a great deal of bumping, crashing, tumbling and flying buggies. Knowing nothing about the sport and still preoccupied with my eerie encounter, I could still see Molaye made several mistakes, taking turns too wide, and getting knocked about, and yet, right at the finish, she got one lucky bounce off a shallow outcropping rock that sent her buggy flying into the leader, knocking him aside and allowing her to come a buggy's length ahead at the finish line, Lucky Laye lucking out again. We cheered, went back down to congratulate Lucky Laye and the crew and on to collect our winnings. With the win, Molaye would be moving up a division, so she had the rest of the day off. However, she and the crew still needed to put the buggy back, more or less together again, so those of us with nothing else to do, left them to their work. I signaled Kan to come and take the few of us staying on the ship, back up.
Once aboard ship, I slipped into the medic bay to do a med-scan for some peace of mind. I was thinking of a toxic dart, though we spaceers undergo immune system augmentation procedures to make visits to other worlds relatively safe, health-wise. That procedure should make it very difficult to poison a spaceer. Should, being the operative word. No toxins showed on the scan. Then I used my com link to do a full spectrum scan for any radio tracking tags I might have picked up – and didn't find any either. The sharp chill seemed more psychological than physical.
Still, I decided I had to trust my intuition and operate on the assumption the spaceer I saw was one of the system pilots from the Azure Night, possibly our yacht club assassin. Though I was going mostly on intuition, there was a logical reason as well. To pick me out of the thousands of spaceers who enter and leave CraterCity each day and track me would be a hopeless task for anything less than a large organization. However, if she was indeed a spaceer, she'd likely know my crew had a racing buggy and she could assume that I'd show up at the track sooner or later. So I could be found – and may have been. I was also one of the most likely people to lead them to their real target, Min, so the encounter, if not just in my imagination, made sense. And yet, I didn't see how she could follow me without some sort of radio tracer, which I'd not found. Was there another way? Rafe might know, but I dared not ask him without Min's approval.
In the end, I called Min and briefly told her of the incident, in my best Last Striker danger be damned style. She took it seriously, and warned me again to be on my guard. I assured her, I was being my old cautious self. We left it at that. Nothing more could be done. Vynnia and Tenry had been with her when I was at the races, so they weren't at risk for being tagged, this time.