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Howland West, something of a mechanical prodigy, has a comfortable life. Decent job. Regular bar. Then he meets Paige Laurel, a racing pilot from the same town, who wants something more...

Hello friends! Here's a standalone story that came to me when I was in a kinda contemplative place. I hope you enjoy and it works for you. It's set in the Star Patrol universe, but a little more serious. Thanks to Spudz for putting in the OT to get this finished on schedule.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

"Blinded by the Light"_ _by Rob Baird

---

Twin suns dawned simultaneously over Inverness, red and brilliant and all the more terrifying for being three hundred meters away. And then the bulk freighter Akaroa flared her engines again. Deep in the ship's heart, fusion reactors fed their initiative straight into two huge, fearsome, hungry sublight thrusters.

Crimson light washed, for a moment, over everything; when at last it began to fade it was only because the Akaroa was climbing: two kilometers up already and accelerating fast. Each reactor put out 2 terawatts, an entire country's worth of power, and she had six of them.

Howland tossed a wrench from one paw to the other, catching it deftly, and turned from the sight while the freighter was still--just barely--in view. The coyote flipped the black goggles up and off his eyes and gave his vision a moment to adjust. Even behind the hangar doors, the blast shield and the goggles, the ship's launch had still been fairly impressive.

He was used to it, though, already relaxed and whistling as he let himself into the control room that overlooked all the maintenance bays. Kim was on shift, working dispatch, as was usual when there was a ship leaving--though she'd told him she thought they wouldn't make their target for the launch.

"I told ya," he teased her. He teased her often; huskies were made for it, and she gave as good as she got. "You said I wouldn't be needin' these..." He threw his goggles towards her in a breezy arc.

"Got lucky," Kim repeated, even as she snagged them out of the air. The husky spun in her chair, sliding the goggles onto her desk and picking a mic handset off it in the same movement. "Akaroa's off at 0630, on schedule; bay C's clear."

"Roger that, dispatch," someone else's tired voice filtered through the equally tired speaker. "Hey, is Howl with you?"

"Of course. Where else would he be?"

"Tell him he better get scarce if he wants any sleep tonight."

"Did one of his exes show back up?"

"Worse. It's the boss."

Howland paused, swiveling an ear in the speaker's direction. On cue, and without looking over her shoulder, Kim held up the handset and held in the transmit switch for him. "It's me. What's up, Harry?"

"Akaroa was your last job, right?"

"Yeah?"

"You're off shift, right?"

"Yeah."

The door to the dispatching office opened, admitting a bear who made up in girth what he lacked in height. He raised his paw to point straight at the coyote, who met him with a grin. "West."

"Phil?" Phil MacLean ran the shop, and he always got what he wanted, even when what he wanted was enough to make even a coyote like Howland wary. "I'm off now, what's up?"

"Got a new freighter waiting in the holding pattern. Triumph-class inter-system bulk transport, the Tenerife; captain says she lost thirty percent of her thrust in the number three atmospheric booster on their last ascent."

Howland listened carefully, and nodded. "Okay."

"She says the engineer faults the coolant cycler. It's a notorious problem in those old bulkers."

"She's wrong, but okay."

Phil furrowed his brow, as if he wasn't sure what Howland was trying to say. "Uh..."

"Do you have a question, or what?"

"Well, I mean, we want to take it, and..."

Howland crossed his arms. "I told you, I'm off."

"Twenty percent overtime, West. Or, I can give the OT to Campbell, if you want; he's been asking for more jobs, but I figured you might want the money."

The coyote's foot tapped, a compulsive twitch, against the office floor. "Tell the master it'll be a complete rebuild. Two days, all parts and labor, but you can charge 'em for three. Two million credits."

Phil licked his chops. "You're kidding me. There's no way they'll pay two million credits. Nobody docking in Inverness pays that much."

Howland grinned again, an easy grin; he was back in his element. "Tell 'em to run the number three up from forty to eighty percent throttle. See if the thrust response is linear or not. Two million credits, Phil."

MacLean, his eyes still reflecting the sudden promise of money, squeezed past Howland. "Kim, can you patch me through to the orbital switchboard? Tenerife is on channel NN-36."

The husky played around with her radio and handed her boss the microphone. "You're through, boss."

"Tenerife, this is MacLean Maintenance. I have a question from one of our experts here. Do you have the diagnostic data from your number three engine? Specifically, if you increase power through the middle band, do you have a linear response?"

Howland reached over, and lifted his boss's finger off the transmit switch. "Or a flat transition at around sixty percent, then it jumps back to the normal curve at sixty-five or so." Phil twitched, suppressing a growl at the way the coyote deigned to touch him.

Inverness didn't have its own connection to the orbital comms network; the signal was patched by landline to Dunkirk, then by line of sight to a floating barge, then to the main satellite uplink. The Tenerife's master came back with a thin, alien voice through all the distortion, tinny and unhappy. "It's almost linear. We see a blip at maybe two-thirds."

"You're looking at a complete rebuild of the number three engine. Probably three full days of work, but we can get it done for you here." And that, even if the captain wasn't happy about it--the signal degradation made it hard to tell--was that. Phil slapped the coyote's shoulder, and left the control room whistling at the thought of the paycheck.

Kim watched the door close. "You let him play you, you know. Campbell could've taken it." That, and Phil knew Howland didn't actually need the money--he had nothing to spend it on. His pride was easier to appeal to.

"Campbell's a hack." Ronnie Campbell was one of the new kids, a drive engineer with a master's degree and a head full of crazy thoughts and theory. He was the son of some businessman in Inverness, and had a lot of pull. Not that Kim was wrong, he probably could've done it... eventually.

"Can you actually rebuild that engine in two days?"

"Why not?"

"Well, good luck. Not that you need it," Kim added, and stuck out her tongue.

Howl cracked his knuckles and left the office without a word.

His brain worked on the principle of pairing eighty percent intuition and twenty percent photographic memory. The memory didn't work with everything, but it sure as fuck worked on starship engines. Triumph-class ships had four huge Mercury M5 impulse motivators. The two inboard and two outboard engines shared a fuel system each; the coolant cycler was part of the fuel system. If it had been a fuel system issue, one of the other engines would've had problems, too.

When he swiped his badge to access the maintenance hangar, the screen above the lock briefly flashed red. 42/40 hours, it said. At 45, they'd stop letting him in to the bay. Howland's brain filed that away as one more variable.

The space seemed awfully empty with the Akaroa gone: only a couple lighters were in, and the hulk of a long-term project MacLean had taken as payment when the owners went bankrupt. Howland knew it would never fly again, but Phil didn't believe him yet, so the hulk stayed.

In the emptiness, the coyote's entrance was conspicuous. Half a minute later, one of the other workers was at his side: Lewis Louden, a Border Collie who might as well have been Howl's alter ego. Lew was from Inverness, too, born and raised. He hadn't gone to school, either. He'd joined MacLean's when Phil's father Garry still ran it.

Like Howland, Lew had never left Inverness. On the other hand, he was twenty years older. For now, the black and white dog served as a good friend and a partner Howl would never think of as there-but-for-the-grace-of-god...

"Not sleepin', laddie?" Lew asked.

Howland chuckled, and indicated with a jerk of his thumb the still-closed hangar doors. "We'll be getting a new one in as soon as she lands. A _Triumph-_class bulk freighter with a bad number-three engine that's down on power. They've got those Mercury M5s, probably still the early generation..."

The colliedog nodded, and pulled a thin computerized notepad from the breast pocket of his heavy worksuit. "Aye, likely." He wrote in a shorthand that even Howl had difficulty with: Tri 30k? f/l? !3 u M5?. Sometimes the coyote wondered if, perhaps, it was Lew's way of guarding his job.

"No throttle response from sixty to sixty-five percent. The engineer thinks it's probably the coolant cycler kicking in a safety shutoff."

Lew cocked an eyebrow. "Aye, right--well, he's no' a good engineer then, is he?"

He hadn't written anything else. They stopped at the employee locker, while Howland got his own work jacket out: thick, fireproof, and covered in a hydrophilic coating designed--in a bit of wishful thinking--to ward off grease. "No?" Howland asked.

"It's a knackered second-stage magnetoconstrictor, obviously. It has to be... maybe an insulation failure between the second and third couplings. Tch--coolant? That's the problem with crew these days, Howland--cannae call yerself an engineer an' forget how awful those Mercurys are with insulation."

Howl ran his finger up the front of his jacket, and the fabric sealed beneath his touch. He turned back to face the collie. "Probably cracked the constrictor core right under the bypass lines."

Lewis tilted his head, looking closely at the coyote. Howland saw his eyes flick, walking through what must've been the younger man's logic. When the core cracked, the ship would've lost thrust; instinctively the helmsman must've increased the throttle, and a surge of heat through the bypass line provided a temporary weld that kept the constrictor from failing completely.

But such a temporary weld would be inefficient, massively increasing the resistance in the core. From then on, it took until the next stage activated for the damaged core to work at all, which explained why it shut down for part of the throttle range. Lew's laugh was a fond, fatherly bark. "Aye," he decided. "Might be."

"We'll see, right?"

"You might make a good engineer one day, lad."

One of Howland's earliest memories was of his father's shadow in the doorway of their small apartment. The older coyote was glaring at his son. More accurately, he glared at the pieces strewn about him: parts of what had once been the apartment's cleaning robot. They lived alone, and the elder Howland worked full-time; the robot was the only thing keeping the apartment together.

But while his father glared, he hadn't yelled at the pup--five years old, give or take. He bit his tongue not out of pity for his son, in the lonely apartment, nor of sympathy for the teasing he'd learn to endure in school, but because he understood what had happened.

Some children dismantled things out of boredom, failing to understand the consequences of their simple curiosity. For some, though, the curiosity was anything but simple. For some it was their first hint of the enlightenment that lay tantalizingly within their grasp. The first hint that there was no ghost in any machine, dead or living; that study could lay bare the rules by which the universe ticked.

Howland had taken the robot apart meticulously. He was too young to understand the physics of the gears and circuitry, but even then he knew that one day he would. In the years that followed he would come to learn other things, as well. Each new discovery cast light that only deepened the darkness around it.

In the robot's arm were the servomotors that made it move. In the servos were the metal gears, arrayed in their complicated clockwork, turning to nanometer precision. The metal represented a fine alloy. The alloy was made of atoms; the atoms of smaller particles still. Some inquisitive types at last found their limit, in the depths of their investigation--realizing, with a shock, the immensity of the unknown that surrounded them.

And, respecting the bounds of their comprehension, they assigned the rest to the realm of the metaphysical and unknowable. Howland never had. Sometimes, thinking back twenty years to the way his father helped him reassemble the robot, doing his best to explain it all, Howl suspected his father had known that, too. He'd been smart, in his own way.

Not smart enough to listen when his son warned him against taking a temporary job on a mining scow, mind. It was good money; he'd been hinting about finding a way to pay for Howland to go to college, and...

Well. And, there were other ways to make money. Howl told himself his dad would've understood the role he fell into, working at MacLean's. The pay wasn't great, no, but it paid his simple bills and Howl enjoyed his work.

He felt alive, at the shop, no matter the hours he'd put in. With the maintenance goggles dropped over his keen eyes, pouring schematics and diagnostic overlays into his optic nerve, he was as close as he figured he'd ever get to becoming one with the machines he loved so much. His understanding for them bordered on instinctive.

The Tenerife did, in the end, have a cracked core. The coyote anticipated it, and because Lew trusted him the Border Collie had already ordered a replacement. It was waiting for them by the time the maintenance robots got the engine apart.

And so they made their deadline. No big deal.

He had a pounding headache, and his badge said he was 30 hours over his weekly limit and 20 into next week's limit too. Howland didn't mind--practically didn't even notice. It was how things worked, and it was why Phil kept him around despite his attitude. Nobody else could've done it, not in that time. Definitely not Campbell, that superior little academic fuck with his polished language and spotless claws.

Howl's apartment looked out on the port. In nicer cities, the seaview might have commanded a premium. In Inverness, it put those rooms at the mercy of the big ships and their sublight engines, blasting sleep from anyone unlucky enough to have a front-row seat. Every window was permanently tinted.

And the coyote, anyway, saw none of it; he'd long since nailed some scrap foil over the window, reflecting most of the light. Engines and machines were one thing, but ships themselves didn't interest him much. Some folks in town liked to watch them, looking up at the stars and wondering when they, too, would be among them. But why? Inverness was fine. Small, maybe, but fine.

Most of a day later, he woke up again.

No reason to go to the shop. No messages on his computer. Nothing to do at all, really: it was mid-evening, but Inverness had no night life. He made himself some chili from one of the nice, convenient, single-serve containers that filled his pantry, then pulled on a jacket and went to Coasters.

Coasters had a trendy name, and a holographic sign out front that changed perspective as you moved around, but it hadn't been actually trendy since the 24th century, when the planet was newly settled and Inverness had plenty of local tourists.

Those days were gone. It wasn't the kind of place to show up in a tour book, that was for sure. As soon as the bartender saw Howland, he started pouring a pint of the Glencoe lager that would serve as the rest of his food for the day.

"How's the life, 'yote?"

"Not bad, not bad." Howland took the beer, and looked around to see if anyone interesting was around. Not yet. "You?" The barkeep shrugged, and they both laughed.

'Life,' for most definitions, happened far away from Inverness, which learned about it by proxy and rumor. Sure enough, an hour later one of the longshoremen was in to say they'd been loading up a freighter bound for the Amal Loop. "First one of those I ever fuckin' seen with armor. Shit must be bad out there."

"They got pushed back from Sarakhel," someone else said. "Nobody's heard from Admiral Mann, neither."

"Can't be!" the first shot back. "That's a brand-new ship. Must be on a secret mission, that's it."

Howland shook his head. "New or not, ain't shit gonna take one of those antimatter torpedoes and live to tell it." The Confederation's war, now in its eighth year, hadn't been going particularly well.

If you asked Howland, it was really a question of fighting style. The Terran Defense Forces--they'd started calling themselves 'Star Patrol,' thinking that it sounded less dangerous, though nobody bought the rebranding--were too cautious. In love with their technology, rather like Howland was, they put too much faith in wonder weapons, and too much emphasis on minimizing losses.

Terran Defense Forces ships were spacious, large, and not particularly maneuverable, relying on engaging their foes at a distance. By contrast, the foe in question--the Pictor Empire--emphasized close combat and fearlessness. They tried to board their opponents. And if that failed, their antimatter weaponry did the trick. It required the sacrifice of an attacking ship, maybe--but if it took down a million-ton dreadnought like Admiral Mann's flagship...

The longshoreman, a bear with the same temperament and build as Phil MacLean, snorted when Howland said that. "Think we're soft, eh?"

"Not exactly. Unprepared, though."

"Did a number on the Nekal, didn't we, boy? Don't see them saying we're unprepared."

There wasn't much of a comparison between the Pictor, a larger empire than the Confederation, and the Nekal Collective. The Nekal controlled a few systems, spanning a parsec or so in total. They objected to the Terran colonization of Sepin-Sirte. Nekal had a tradition of ritual combat; they didn't know what to do with real particle cannons.

Not that what the longshoreman said wasn't true. The Nekal had sued for peace and joined the Terran Confederation. And the Confederation, immediately after pulverizing the entire Nekalese battle fleet, welcomed them with open arms and paid for the system's reconstruction. Thirty years after the war's end, Sepin and its moons were prosperous if a bit lawless.

"With the Pictor, now? That's different, man. They're wild. You ask me--"

"Ask me," he was cut off by a tigress with family in the Terran Defense Forces. "I say we drop a fleet right outside their homeworld and glass the fuckin' rock."

Howland grinned. "No doubt. But I bet they got a protective screen up; knock us right outta hyperspace and clobber us. We need to start adapting; fight like they do. Faster ships. Little ships."

"So fuckin' smart," the bear muttered. "Why the hell don't you join up and teach 'em, then?"

The barkeep answered for him. "Howl's so fuckin' smart 'cause he don't sign up to get his skinny ass sniped, Jake." The round of laughter, which Howland took in his customary self-deprecating way, seemed to agree with the sentiment.

And their conversation moved on, from the war to the economic fortunes of Inverness. The two were somewhat linked; Inverness stood to benefit from increased military traffic. As long as the front lines didn't get too close. And they wouldn't: the port was safe, if sleepy.

The bartender kept looking away, over Howland's shoulder at one of the tables closer to the door. Some of the regulars were in conversation with a newcomer. A weasel--no, a marten, probably; slinky, but not quite sharp-eyed enough to be a weasel. "Seen her before?" the coyote asked. She was obviously out of place. Standing next to her was a lion he recognized as Ronnie Campbell's brother Carson.

"Nope. Cat bitch, though, I think."

"Really? Here?"

He nodded. "I heard something about a race. And she looks it, right?"

Out on the fringes of Confederation space, where sanctioned entertainment was rare and regulations were lax, bored--and competitive--freighter captains were known to race their ships. Those were sublight challenges, mostly, planet-to-planet or from one harbor out and back again.

It made sense. They learned to get the most out of their equipment, and they learned the most efficient ways to navigate a planetary system. Even if a trophy meant little to a freighter crew, saving ten percent of their fuel budget on a clever transfer certainly did and a race was a good opportunity to find new trajectories. Or, at least, a good opportunity for fun.

Sometimes the races were standardized. Solar catamarans, small twin-engined hulls with just barely space for a pilot and his flight engineer, were by far the most common. They'd started out adapted from the lighters that ferried cargo between the bigger ships. Now cats were their own thing, and cat bitches were their own breed of pilot.

The woman with Carson could've stepped right out of an encyclopedia article on the subject. She had one of their snug jackets, custom-tailored to support them in hard maneuvering. Her hair was cut short, ostensibly because it made their helmets work better. She appeared to be the living, pine marten version of a hot rod, with anything extraneous traded for performance.

"Hot like one, at least," Howland said. Catamaran jockeys lived on adrenaline and poor decisions, and it seemed to attract a particular type of personality. Young men and women, in peak condition, looking for an excuse to die before age sapped anything from them. A lot of them managed to get their wish.

"Yeah, Howl?" the barkeep teased him. "Wouldn't mind showin' her your re-entry profile?"

He figured she was probably there with Carson--maybe the Campbells were getting into racing to pass the time--but it couldn't hurt to see. The coyote kept his ear lifted and turned, trying to follow along. The marten didn't have a catamaran in mind, he discovered; she was talking about a different class. He caught a name, in passing. "The Sisters Cup?"

"Huh," the keep said. "Yeah, it's a big-ship challenge. Well, not big, but freighter-class. The Seven Sisters Line runs it from here to Ocala. Starts in a few weeks."

"Weird." Howland always kept a few electronic notebooks on him, in case inspiration struck. He fidgeted with one until he could get a data signal, and pulled up whatever information he could find. As the bartender told him, it was an old challenge started by the Seven Sisters Line, a freight cooperative looking to promote its image not just as haulers, but innovators.

The record time from Inverness Harbor to the next planet over, Ocala, was twenty-nine hours and thirty-four minutes; it had stood for two decades. Cat bitch, whoever she happened to be, was saying something about just under twenty-nine.

Boasting was a good way to get attention, and she had her audience's ears. The longshoreman was one of them. "How?" the bear demanded.

"A new profile." As Howland slid away from the bar and silently approached, she drew it out on a ratty placemat at the table. "See this? The normal route has a conservative burn that ends in a gravity assist here. If you had enough thrust, you could get a different transfer here instead--pick up another seventeen thousand kilometers an hour, yeah?"

"You're bloody nuts, duck." The ruddy squirrel who snorted this gestured so emphatically that a good few swallows of Glencoe slopped over the side of his glass. "You'd burn up, bleedin' off that much speed comin' back in."

"That's not really the--"

"Aye, lass. Aye." She was cut off by the morose judgment of another freighter type, older and less energetic than the squirrel but no more optimistic. "You remember the Hartford Ensign, don't you, now? Came in hot like that too, she did, and you can still see that meteor show, sometimes, when she's dark enough. Eh?" The world-worn shepherd intoned it like a ghost tale.

The story, like any of a lost and local ship, stirred the crowd. A scarred, equally white-muzzled fox gave his own verdict. "Bullshit. My father worked computers for orbital control. He said it wasn't no re-entry problem. Just blew up the damn reactor; those ore carriers always were like as not to do that. Death traps; dad said anyone dumb enough to work on 'em--"

"Hey! It was my aunt on the Ensign," the shepherd protested. "And the controllers' guild paid out on that suit 'cause they said they was at fault."

"Heard that too," added the squirrel, his confirmation muddied by the glass of beer. "Can't do it, girl, trust me now. End up just like them."

"It's close," she admitted, unwilling to give up. "But doable, yeah? Within heat tolerances, if you had the right hull design and a skilled pilot."

Carson Campbell said they had a hull in mind, which he described as a 'modified Sundie': a common VIP transport in the system and one of the fastest in its weight class. He talked it up, as he'd no doubt talked it up to the marten, but nobody else was impressed. Subtly reading over the design on his computer, Howland wasn't either.

"Suicide," the squirrel declared. He paused, gulping the rest of his drink. "And anyway. We used to talk about something like that, but it can't be done. Freighters like that, duck, they're not much like your cats. They don't develop enough instantaneous thrust."

"Mm-hm." Some other random listener, happy to have a chance to interject an ill-informed opinion, leaned in to nod severely. "On the old run, we used to say if you could get from Ocala to Dawson Rock within half a kilometer per second of the guidebook, they'd give you a damn medal, and my captain--now he was one of the good--"

"Joe, your captain learned back when they still had oars an' a drummer to keep time." The shepherd said it with a laugh, knowing the others would laugh, too. "'Tention all hands: pull,'" he added, and pantomimed the act.

Rallying, the marten waited for the two to finish. "It could be done."

"No way. You'd need to get... thirty percent over rated power on a Class J engine, and ain't nobody can do that. Get maybe... one-ten?"

"Doc Silly--worked for Sisters, actually," the shepherd telling his story said, but caught himself before the tangent went further. "He got one-fifteen, back on that rescue haul."

"Not enough. No, no way."

It proved to be the general sentiment around the table. Carson Campbell shrugged. "I told you." By his tone, he wasn't particularly surprised at the bar's opinion. "I think you'd be better off with the plan I offered, Paige. It's not like they'd bankroll you, anyway."

"That isn't really the problem." She corrected him on the matter as though the discussion had been rehashed again and again. "But you're right. It's the safer option."

"I think it's a good chance to win."

"You're racing, too?" someone asked him. "That's new, even for you rich folks."

Carson said that he hadn't planned to, but things changed. He'd met the marten when he and his brother were hanging out down at the harbor office, heard she was looking for a partner, and volunteered his ship for the task. A ship of that make had won the Cup eight years prior and, according to the marten, they had a few tricks up their sleeve. Carson agreed. "You know, with those Harris thrusters, it's a real sleeper ship. You'll see. My brother knows his stuff."

Howland, with nothing better to do for fun, finally spoke up. "That's fuckin' stupid."

The table turned, as a body, to look at him. "What?" Carson stammered his way into a question.

"It's a passenger ship with a Harris layout, so you figure you'll shut down life support to the passenger and cargo decks and push that into the engines, 'cause you can. Easy enough; the grid'll take it." He spoke evenly and quickly, keeping his muzzle just above the rim of his glass. "'Course, since it's a passenger ship, it wasn't designed to maneuver, so you're gonna wind up manually reinforcing the thruster pylons because the integrity field won't dampen forces of those magnitude. Your brother told ya you can directly couple 'em to the keel and he's almost smart enough to remember the resonance component--fuck, flip a coin and say he did. He told you a seven percent decrease in acceleration impulse because that's the formula in the last handbook he read. Bit out of date, but what the hell? It'll work."

Carson seemed a bit flustered, though the marten followed along well enough. "If it'll work, then what's stupid about it?"

"Sunderlands radiate heat into the lower decks through the environmental system--they do it 'cause it quadruples the effective working area and smooths out the engine harmonics, which you want in that kind of design; figure, what, DV coefficient is 2 or 3 depending on your temperature? When you decouple everything, the engines will run just fine until they hit their saturation point, which, at a DeVallois coefficient below one, where the system isn't pretending to be a goddamn capacitor, means you have no throttle limiter, which means you blow out your safeties and go dead in the water. You'll find that out about twelve hours in, depending on how aggressive you are."

"You sound awfully certain about that," Carson retorted.

"I mean, your pilot knows it's too good to be true. Otherwise, she wouldn't be trying to rework the orbital parameters of a racecourse on the back of a napkin in a fuckin' dive bar. You and your brother probably don't, since the behavior of an engine setup like that at a low DV coefficient isn't in Scherbakov's Elements of Sublight Propulsion, 6th Edition Revised, because only an idiot would describe a limousine with adjustable leather seats and a robotic minibar as a sleeper ship, which is why the team eight years ago spent four months stripping theirs down."

Carson, who lacked an immediate answer, had to be saved by the marten. "We can probably work around it ourselves, too," she said.

Rambling came easily to Howland, but dried out his throat. He whetted it with a breezy sip of his remaining beer. "Probably. Incidentally, it wouldn't be hard to get the power you're looking for out of a Class J engine."

"No?"

"Look at the refractor configuration for the fuel intake formers. It's kind of obvious."

The longshoreman from earlier coughed, snorting his laughter. "Better question. If you're so goddamn smart, 'yote, how come you're workin' for fifteen an hour at MacLean's?"

The marten's expression shifted, becoming inscrutable. "You're not a stardrive designer?" She sounded puzzled, and looked even more so when he shrugged.

"A mechanic." The longshoreman had given Carson a lifeline and he took it. "Mr. West fixes stuff for Phil MacLean, like my brother does, except less important. He got kicked out of school when he was twelve. Or... was it eleven?"

"Don't really know. Can't count that high." His easy grin showed no sign that he'd taken any insult, even if he had. And the sense that he was in on the joke preserved his decency as, with a final wink to Carson and his pilot, the coyote abandoned the table and returned to his place at the bar.

"Not worth it, Howl?"

Howland laughed. "Not worth it." Nice as the marten might've been to look at, and fun as it might have been to talk starships with her, the opportunity was probably lost and it wasn't much of an opportunity to begin with. Fun like that could be had in many other places.

The engineering problem was still, as such things went, interesting enough. His answer went against the spirit of the Cup--trying to find more efficient ways to navigate the system and trying to find faster ones didn't always go hand in hand. It was possible to get a lot of power out of a Class J engine, so long as you didn't mind the fuel consumption.

Working his way through another beer--and a pause for a debate on the performance of the Inverness football team in the coming season, with their best striker down and all--gave him long enough to work out a few more of the details. He saved it to one of the electronic notebooks he kept around for such occasions.

He saw the marten on the walk home, still talking with Carson. He couldn't tell what they were talking about; the lion towered over her, leaning into her personal space. Probably he'd given up on trying to explain his brother's genius and was falling back on generic masculine posturing. Howland chuckled to himself. What the hell, he decided. "Catch."

The marten looked over; with a pilot's reflexes, she managed to snag the notebook out of the air. She glanced at it briefly before slipping it into the pocket of her jacket--no doubt figuring it was just his number or something. Her loss.

Truth was, Howland had plenty of excitement and didn't really need any more. Needling Carson had been enough to redeem his night, even if it would come back to bite him in the ass. Carson would complain to his brother, his brother would complain to Phil, Phil would complain to...

Well, to Lew, probably. It would end there; Lew liked him too much.

And either way, he'd already gone through half his hours for the week. Maybe by the time he went back to the shop, Ronnie Campbell would've calmed down. Back in his apartment, in the darkness, Howland put on some music, leaned back, and relaxed until sleep took him.

A day and a half later, early afternoon found the coyote hunched over the desk in his apartment. Somehow the object of his affections, a machine the size of Howl's fist, had turned into a tabletop's worth of pins and gears. He had a pair of goggles on, a cheaper version of the ones in the shop, magnifying everything he looked at down to the scratches in the metal.

The sound of his doorbell was so alien that it took him a few seconds to recognize it. Nobody ever stopped by. Tax collector? Cops? So far as he knew, he wasn't in any trouble, but the doorbell rang again so he went to answer it.

It was the marten. She'd traded her tight-fitting racing coat for a loose hoodie and a pair of ratty jeans; without the odd fire in her eyes she might've passed for normal. "Mr. West?" she asked. He was still wearing his goggles, which hid the upper part of his face.

"Yeah?"

"We need to talk. Can we talk?"

Howland powered the goggles down and undid the strap that fastened them to his head. Then he stepped back, letting her into an apartment that was not untidy so much as a completely new form of chaos. "What's up?"

The marten was staring at his desk. Her head tilted, puzzled. "That's a good question. What is this? Or... what... was it? It looks like a computer, yeah? Is this a difference engine?"

Fuck. He didn't want to be getting off on the right foot with someone so new. "No. But close, it's a mechanical calculator. It's more than five hundred years old--somebody traded it to me for some work three months ago, and it was broken. I think I almost know why."

She nodded. "That doesn't surprise me. Can we do introductions? I'm Paige Laurel. Do you actually go by 'Howl'?"

"I'm a coyote," he said, and moved a box of old electronic parts from the couch so she could sit down. "'Howl,' 'Yote,' 'Dog,' 'Mutt,' 'Asshole'--I can be flexible."

Paige leaned back in his sofa and opened her muzzle; he could see her deciding not to think better of what she was about to say. "It's how I found you. I asked around for the name of some cocky asshole coyote mechanic. It didn't take long."

"That's me, sure. What's up?"

She reached into her hoodie, pulled out the notebook he'd given her, and held it up. This time, she did pause to consider her words. "This. This is up. Where did you come up with this?"

"It's kind of obvious, at some level."

The marten shook her head firmly. "No. Don't fuck with me, dog. Did you read Kazan and Quma's article in the last Applied Aerospace and Astronautics Journal?"

Howland took a seat in his desk chair, and spun it around to face her. "Yes. Did you?"

"No. But I sent these diagrams to a friend of mine, Dr. Galloway, in the propulsion division of the Star Patrol research center at Kifrea. He said it looked like it was derived from their research. He also said nobody at Kifrea has been able to make it work in practice. He knows Dr. Quma personally."

"They'll get it. Have they scaled the refractor to match the radius of the field at maximum amplitude? If so, it's just a matter of filtering out the added resonances." Involuntarily, he'd taken one of the metal calculator pins and was twisting it in his fingers, inspecting some scoring that was probably the reason for the machine's failure.

His habit of multitasking contributed to the coyote's reputation--as though he couldn't be bothered to pay attention to his audience. As though he was better than them. In truth, he simply needed the fidgeting to be able to pay attention to anything at all.

Paige, if she thought he was doing it on purpose, betrayed no sense of judgment. She was, however, watching him curiously. Momentarily self-conscious, Howland held the pin up as if the marten could be invited to the diagnosis. "Pretty worn. I think it's why the calculator's broken."

"Could you actually do the stuff you scribbled down?"

"Yeah, I guess." He set the pin back. "Did you talk to Carson about it?"

"No. I decided not to work with him. Would you be interested in building these modifications, if I paid MacLean to do the job?"

Howland tried to remember what, exactly, he'd written. Sometimes the coyote's scribbling was incomplete, and assumed the solution of open problems. So far as he knew, it wasn't one of those times now. "I could think about it. Do you have a ship?"

"You won't like it, but... yeah."

Paige told him the rest of her story on the walk down to the pier. Her parents worked at an offshore power station; the life was comfortable, but limiting. She wanted off the planet. Her hostile relationship to authority made her a poor fit for the Star Patrol--also, with the war on, she agreed with her parents that it wasn't exactly a smart choice.

Instead she raced things. First wheeled cars, then hoverboats when those got too slow. Then solar catamarans; she went on about her first cat race with a distant, adrenaline-hungry look in her eyes. One of those types, Howland thought, but he couldn't really judge people for their hobbies.

She went on to say that Inverness was too small and too far away to attract much attention, as solar catamarans went. Closer to the Confederation's core, cats were faster and far more advanced--also, the prizes were larger. A racing pilot's living, the marten said, was pretty scanty in a place like Inverness.

Her plan was to win the Sisters Cup and use the money to buy a ticket offworld and a secondhand ship where she could prove herself to one of the bigger racing teams. Carson volunteered a ship and his family's financial support. Now that she'd split, Paige had to look for help elsewhere.

"Means I get a smaller cut of the pot," she admitted. "And now I have to pay you, too. Carson was offering to work for free. I think it'll still be enough, and even if it's not... well, even if it's not, I'll be off this fucking rock, right?"

"Carson did expect payment," Howland pointed out. "After a fashion."

"Oh, I know." She hopped easily down the worn concrete steps to the pier, leaving Howland to follow her more cautiously, lest they crumble under his feet.

"You ever..." One of the steps did crumble, and he had to grab the rusty handhold for support. "Did you ever hear a saying about looking before you leap?"

"Heard? Sure. Listened? Nah. It gets worse."

"It does?"

"Remember I said you wouldn't like my ship? Brace yourself." The marten pushed her paw against the hangar door lock, and it slid up on worn, creaky rails. As the lights came up, Howland did as he was asked, bracing himself.

He didn't recognize the exact vessel--Kaikoura was painted on the nose--but the coyote damned well recognized the type, a Streak-class fast transport. Those were older, a transitional species of ship intended to work in-atmosphere as well as outside it. By the 25th century, most freight lines had separate suborbital and interplanetary craft.

The Kaikoura had a hull made of geometry and aggression. From above, she looked like a perfect triangle, with two vertical stabilizers driven like crucifixion nails within the wingtips. Underneath, she had a boxy fuselage with slanted sides that came to a point at the glass of her cockpit. Behind the cargo hold, four wide sublight thrusters ended in wedge-shaped nozzles that gave her stern the unsettling appearance of a mouth full of teeth.

Howland, followed by the marten, walked in a careful circle around the sixty-meter long starship. Part of him wondered why she'd picked it. For a freighter in its weight range, it was short and maneuverable. On the other hand, it was also slower than its shape implied, with weak engines--that was why it needed four of them.

"It wouldn't have been my first choice, either," Paige answered one question for him unprompted. "But there were only two people willing to sponsor me. It was this or an old Terran mining shuttle... I figured this would be easier to work with, even if it took a bit more work, too."

"More work?"

"Persuading the owner. I had to put up more for collateral. Um. Everything I own, actually. So if you don't feel like taking the job... well, it's up to you, but I'd be kinda up a creek, yeah?"

Howland looked over the ship again. Working on the old thing was a job Ronnie Campbell would've rejected out of hand--even Phil MacLean would be skeptical. Howl could bring him around: winning the Sisters Cup was a nice bit of prestige, sure to drum up business.

Besides, he wasn't Ronnie Campbell. And he hadn't gotten his paws on old engines like that. They were sure to hold some kind of fun secret--those clever tricks engineers used to get around the limitations of their old technology. A fascinating look into the past, if nothing else.

"I'll take it. Call Phil and have him tow it to a maintenance bay."

Paige looked relieved. "Great. I budgeted about two hundred thousand for the work, based on what you said. Can you... do that? It's coming out of the purse. You said forty-five thousand per engine, there's four engines instead of two, and I kind of figured... anything you can do below two hundred is your cut."

"What's the purse?"

"A million credits for first place. The Kaikoura's owner is taking half that straightaway. Two hundred thousand for maintenance..."

"Three hundred to you and twenty to me?" Howland asked. "And if MacLean finds out, he'll want part of it. Hell of a deal." Like he would've turned it down--it was more money than he'd ever seen at once, anyway.

Besides, Paige was astute. "I figured you were being generous. You think it can be done for... one-fifty, tops, yeah?"

"Maybe." But, with the ruse blown, Howland chuckled. "I think. We'll see--it can be done, sure. Lookin' forward to it. If Phil gives ya any trouble, I'll bring him around."

"Thanks." She led him out of the hangar, closing the door behind them, and took a deep breath. "I kinda need something else."

"What, besides this?"

"This was business. Can I ask a favor, though?"

"Maybe."

"I kinda got rid of everything, yeah? Including my apartment. Could I maybe crash on your couch for a few weeks? I know it's imposing, but it... could be useful, too. We'll need to talk about the work and everything..."

"My place is kinda shitty," he pointed out.

She didn't argue, and didn't use it for leverage. "It's okay. I don't mind."

With the limited time he spent there, Howland didn't mind either. She helped him clear the boxes off his couch. They contained the parts for an outdated housecleaning robot. Paige asked what he had it for, and accepted his answer of 'sentimental value' without prying.

The marten was less inclined to accept the opaque shades over his window. "Don't like the view, really? All those ships coming and going--I love watching them. Particularly the liftoffs. You don't?"

"Nah. Seen one light hauler and you seen 'em all. Guess they're fun enough to take apart, but once they're not in pieces anymore... well, it's just so much light and noise."

"You don't ever wonder where they're going?"

Howland shrugged. "I know where they're going. Out to Ocala, maybe the belt... come back with a bunch of nickel and water and shit. It's not that interesting."

"Well. Some of them are going further."

In the end Paige learned that she wasn't going to persuade him to take the shades down. He was more flexible on other topics. He agreed to buy actual food, and to fix the haphazard wiring in his shower. That discussion came two days later, when she stepped out of it, dripping wet and scowling.

"Did your hot water turn off?"

"I don't pay for hot water." More accurately, a valve somewhere in the building's old pipes was stuck shut, and he didn't pay for the water because none got to his unit. "Window shades have cells on 'em."

"It looks like the showerhead is, like... the manifold off an old inertial translator."

"Yeah. It is."

From his place on the bed he could only see her head peeking around the corner. It tilted, water dribbling slowly from her whiskers. "That's... innovative, yeah? But..."

"Hey. It was always fine when I lived alone."

He put it on the list of things to do, anyway. Most of that list stayed occupied by the Kaikoura. She'd been run hard, but competently, and pretty much everything was in good shape. Howland concentrated on what it would take to strip out and rebuild the fuel system. He estimated two weeks of work. They still had three until the race.

Most of the time, when he saw Paige she was engrossed in her computer. Looking over her shoulder presented a screen full of equations and lines that he took to be orbital trajectories. Every now and then she looked up to ask him about the new thrusters: how fast they'd build to full power; how long they could keep going.

Sometimes he didn't see her at all. She had a habit of disappearing, going for walks she said helped to clear her mind. Howl had no reason to interrogate the marten, whether or not he believed it. She put up with him, and he put up with her.

Just a bit odd, that was all. The day he finished up most of the remaining work on the new thrusters, Paige came into his apartment late in the evening, slightly out of breath. Her jeans were torn open, and there was a hint of dried blood in the fur that showed through when she nudged the door shut and the movement forced the ripped denim wider. "Oh, hey," she said, grinning. "I hope I didn't wake you up, yeah? I wasn't expecting you back here."

"I work odd hours," the coyote replied. "But no, I wasn't asleep. Did you have a good day, too?"

Paige laughed, sparing a look down at her pants to let him know she understood what he was getting at. She aimed her computer at the shade blocking his windows, and clicked it on to project a panorama of the bay beyond Inverness. With a wave of her paw, the marten panned the image around, showing off the whole of the little town.

"Doesn't look so bad, at a distance."

"Ever wonder what the view looks like from the commlink tower?"

The tower, at the edge of town, stood about a hundred meters tall, giving its transmitter line of sight to other nodes nearby. "You climbed it?"

"Most of the way. Security twigged to me before I could get all the way up. I had to jump the last couple levels down and run for it, but I tell ya... tell ya, it was a rush. Haven't had anything that exciting for a bit!"

Howland didn't bother to profess empathy, though he also didn't judge. "You need this race to happen already, don't you?"

Paige shrugged; then she eyed the bed, sizing up where his legs were, and pounced to flop crosswise atop them. "I guess, but I can't really speed up time, yeah?" She was still focused on the window, but changed the projection from her ill-gotten imagery to a map of the system with all the major bodies marked along with her trajectory calculations.

"Are you making progress with that?" The marten's body was fairly warm, had she been ten centimeters closer to his hips there might've been problems, but as it was he could mostly handle himself.

"Day at a time. Sure am, though." She waved her paw again, and narrowed her focus on one small section of her flight plan. "This is the tricky part here, the transfer to pull off that early gravitational assist. You say you can give me six meganewtons out of those engines, though, and I trust you..."

"The modifications are almost done. I've pretty much maxed out my hours to do it, but they're done. Six and change. Over five and a half meganewtons, you're going to start running into efficiency problems pretty fast." As in, the specific impulse--how much thrust you got out of every gram of fuel--dropped by eighty percent. It certainly wasn't sustainable for the full flight.

"I know. But it should be enough. The rest of it's just... tricky. Like I said." She fidgeted briefly, and as she squirmed Howland realized he hadn't been that close to the marten before. Something about climbing the tower had put her in a weird, excitable mood.

"Anything I should know about for the engines? What kind of 'tricky'?"

"Not coyote 'tricky,'" Paige assured him. She grabbed her computer, and rolled herself off his legs, settling down on her back next to the coyote instead. The system map glittered on his ceiling. "You know how this works?"

"Not in detail."

"So... this here, for instance, this is using a patched conic to calculate the trajectory. Patched conics work on a quick change in acceleration between two gravitational bodies, but... there's a tradeoff between thrust and efficiency, so freighter captains tend to go for long burns instead."

"The simplification doesn't work," Howland said.

Paige reached over to pat him on the chest. "Good. Smart dog. There are a few different models for long, low-thrust burns but they all amount to integrating some parameterized function." And, she went on, upsetting the assumptions in those parameters wasn't especially difficult. She felt her own models were rigorous enough to be trusted.

"And you can manage this... thing you want to do."

"Yeah. These shortcuts are kinda known, yeah? Some of them are. The transfer I want to hit is called Hester's Drop, after the first pilot who said it could be done. Nobody's managed; they've all given up. The window for actually getting extra delta-v out of the burn is small, and you waste your fuel doing it..."

"What I'm taking from this is that you're not really as crazy as you said you were."

"Well, I could be crazier. There's an assist here... one there... some people say the Cup started because of the moon, Kokhonak. It's in a place where you'd think you could use it. But you can't--not in these boats. You'd need twice the thrust, not thirty percent over, and they're not designed for it. I said it's a tradeoff, yeah? The best route takes a couple weeks, not a day and a half, but nobody wants to wait."

"Impatient?"

"Yeah." The marten tossed the computer away and rolled over. She was half on his side, half atop him, her nose curiously close to the coyote's muzzle. "So. Hey. So I was thinking... it's not like we've known each other for that long... but..."

"Yeah?"

"You should come with me. If I already had a stateroom on a passenger liner, another ticket wouldn't be that much. I was thinking about Isili, but I could be talked into something else. Where would you go?"

It wasn't the question, or the suggestion, Howland was expecting. "Why would I go anywhere?"

Paige sat up; clearly, given the marten's look, it wasn't the question she had been expecting. "What do you mean? Inverness is... it's..."

"It's home. It's always been home. I like it here."

Her head canted. "Really? But--I mean--you can just. Uh. Howl, you figured out how to fix those engines half-drunk in a bar. If you were at... at... you could be anywhere. If you were at Kifrea or Giap Ge or--even on Terra, you... with your mind..."

Howl raised an eyebrow. "With my mind what? My mind's happy here, Paige."

"At fifteen credits an hour patching up hundred-year-old freighters?"

"As opposed to what? Go work for Mercury Dynamics? Squeeze another point six percent efficiency at orbital thrust on the next M5s by redesigning the first stage so the constrictor doesn't lock down?"

The marten still looked puzzled. Howland figured it was the first time she'd ever gotten close to someone who wasn't so hellbent on looking for wherever the grass was greener. "It wouldn't have to be engines. I just said engines because that's what you do now."

"Yeah, then what? Go work for Star Patrol? Fuck, I'll bet their particle cannons could really use someone to tune 'em up. And they do good work, mostly; sure, I bet there's collateral damage now and then but it's a good paycheck, right? Better than fifteen an hour. Which isn't what you meant, of course, you meant I'm better than this town. Fuck that. This town's great."

"Why? It's a serious question, yeah? What makes this town great? The one bar, or the other bar, or the third bar that even you don't go to? C'mon, Howland. You have to know that--you put in all this overtime, you... you have to know you could do better."

"I work the overtime 'cause I like it. Not everybody is addicted to adrenaline."

She shook her head, trying again as he got out from underneath her and to his feet. "It's not the adrenaline, just--"

"Just what? Just, it's fucked up I don't want to run away from home for the fuckin' thrill of it all? I get your parents don't understand how shitty it is with you facin' down the prospect of a decent desk job and all, when you could be out makin' your goddamn fortune--"

"Where did parents come into this? It's--even if--Christ, Howl, I'm just saying you... you shouldn't wind up in this dump forever and I... I really don't understand how you... I don't get..."

"No," he agreed. "You don't. Look, I'm out. I got work to do."

"You said you'd put in your hours already..."

"Maybe I can use the OT to buy a whore or some whiskey or something. Or, hell, just hit a bar and drown my dumb-as-fuck small-town problems with my dumb-as-fuck small-town friends, eh? Stop by if you get bored." If she said anything, before he slammed the door, Howland didn't hear it.

Lew was working on another ship when he came in: an old water-processing rig, repurposed to act as an orbital relay station. The ship's positioning thruster was in pieces, spread in neatly marked sections on the floor of the bay.

"What's the problem?" Howland asked, joining the Border Collie, who was inspecting the parts with his hands on his hips.

"Midlife maintenance. There weren't any gripes."

"No gripes? You're kidding me."

The collie chuckled. "None worth taking seriously."

"You check out the seal on the fuel bypass line? These old GD units are bad with that."

Lew looked at him sideways, with a fatherly grin and a fresh laugh. "You learned that from me, laddie," he reminded the coyote. "Looked fine. How about your ship? From the bay logs, it must be close to done."

"Should be ready for a firing test tomorrow or the day after. It's funny, those old engines... lot of shielding, lot of extra metal--they really don't build 'em like they used to, do they? I cracked one of the regulators open and got about six liters of thermal goop dumped on me... nowadays nothing would be inefficient enough to put out that much heat on a control circuit."

"Aye. It costs, for sure. Anywhere but here and that'd be in a museum."

The Kaikoura was awfully striking, and with a new paint job she'd be a gorgeous static display, but Howland liked her better in use. "You know, the girl who hired me--uh, us--hired MacLean. She asked me to go with her."

"On the flight?"

Howland shook his head, not bothering to suppress the shudder that thought brought out in him. "No, no. Afterwards. She wants to leave--buy a ticket to Isili or something. Said it wouldn't cost too much for a second passenger."

"Huh," Lew said.

"I know. Some people, Lew, right?"

Lewis turned away from the disassembled thruster to face the younger canine. For a few seconds, staying silent, his gaze occasionally turned back to the floor, which still held the coyote's attention. He sighed. "I won't lie, Howland; I'll miss you."

The old collie sounded so serious that Howland burst out laughing. "Don't worry. What, you think I took her up on it? C'mon, Lew."

The laughter, which he'd thought might be reassuring, didn't settle the collie's mood. "I hope you did. Or you will."

"Oh, don't you do this, too. It's a good place, Lew. Fuck, even MacLean's a decent guy. I'm happy here. Get to work with you, get to work with these engines... what the fuck is the universe supposed to offer to top that?"

"Consequences."

Lewis was distracted enough from his work that Howland realized he wasn't going to get the collie to return to it easily. He gave up, directing his focus on the other engineer. "What do you mean?"

"You're no' happy here, Howland. You're content--an' that's different, lad. This is easy; I know it's easy. You're the kind can just look at an engine and know what it takes Campbell six years of school to learn. Doesn't bother ye; doesn't take effort nor pain."

"Yeah? And why should it?"

"Campbell can fix these engines. I can fix these engines. So can you, it just takes ye a third as long. MacLean likes that, and... well, I won't lie there, either; it's damned helpful. But we could do it without ye."

Howland shrugged. "You're saying I'm a big fish in a small pond. They don't get eaten, do they?"

"I know," the collie said. The unfamiliar, intense heat he put on the word caught Howland's attention, and the coyote couldn't help but perk his ears. "Like I said, lad: no consequences." And for once, it was someone else predicting what Howl was going to say, and cutting him off before he could open his muzzle. "It's no' about your legacy, laddie. You can stay in Inverness 'til the day you die. Nobody'll write on your tombstone 'here lies Howland West; he coulda done better.' The universe doesn't care."

Then if I don't, and the universe doesn't, why do you? It was the question, a dismissive reflex, that first came to him. But it wasn't the one, even as he started posing it, he realized he wanted to ask. "Why do... well. What is it about, then?"

"Inverness is a small pond, aye. You can't do so bad here. Can't fail. But you owe it to yourself, Howland. Failing is how you know there are questions you can't answer yet--problems you haven't explored yet. And don't you fuckin' lie to me, lad--you need challenges. Not 'cause I say so; fuck, I don't know why. You tell MacLean you can do a week's job in three days and you know one of these days you won't be able to."

"Hasn't happened yet." He'd never heard Lewis curse, and the shock of that blunted any more sarcastic response.

"No, but it will. The great Howland West will meet his match, and you'll tell yourself that you do have limits and y'aren't perfect, and you'll be lying to yourself same as you'll be lying to me. 'Cause the truth is, that isn't the kind of failure you're worried about. Everybody misses a deadline."

"Then what am I worried about?"

"You're worried that if you left, if you really started looking--really started challenging yourself--you'd find something you couldn't explain. Couldn't master no matter how hard you tried. You'd be like Ron Campbell: out of your depth. Overwhelmed. Scared somebody will realize it, and call you out the way you call Ronnie out."

"I'm not like Ronnie Campbell," Howland muttered.

"You're not." The collie granted it to him, it turned out, not as an absolution but as a fresh blow. "That's what makes it worse. Two questions for ye, lad. What if you met somebody who was your equal? Smarter than you, even? Would you hate them for it?"

"No. No, of course not. But I see where you're going with that. Lew, it ain't like this town's holding me back. Ain't like I gotta talk down to you and it's--"

"What if you opened yer big damned mouth in a bar to say something about fusion reactors and the other guy cut you off to say it was yesterday's news: he had a better idea, he knows how to completely rework them to fit 'em in the palm of your hand and he's twelve steps ahead of you. Would ye throw your drink in his face?"

Now Howland wasn't sure where the collie was going. "No. I'd... have questions. I'd have lots of questions. Something like that would be pretty revolutionary, to say the least."

"You'd be interested."

"Of course."

"Has it ever happened to you?"

"No."

"Will it happen here?" Lewis let that hang, unanswered; Howland's ears were starting to lower. "Second question, then."

"You've asked a lot more than two."

The Border Collie just glared. "You're not getting out of this that easy, lad. I don't think you'd be miserable here. But I want you to think of the moments in your life you remember. The best ones. A good meal, now, you can have that again. A good joke, a good drink with your mates... a good lay," he added, with a wry smile that was the first bit of levity he'd allowed himself. "There'll be more of those in your future here. For that, it's a good town."

"It is a good town."

"What about the way you felt when you had an engine apart for the first time that you knew no' only how it worked but why, and that when you put it back together it would work again. So many people would take it for granted, but you, Howland... you understood it. And you understood that magic isn't pulling birds out of hats, it's that secret knowledge you have of the universe that others don't. That's out there, laddie," Lewis insisted, and pointed up to the ceiling. "And the question isn't can you live with yourself, not ever knowing that again. It's why would you?"

Howland's ears were all the way pinned. "But Lew..."

"You haven't answered me either time. That engine'll wait, son. Leave it. Take a walk an' work on yourself, instead. If you give me good answers, well... well, I'd keep ye, Howland. Always said you'd make a good engineer one day; meant it, too, and better believe I knew it meant you'd leave. But if you can give me real answers... well... then this really is home. If, laddie."

Even if he'd wanted to argue and work on the engine, the coyote suddenly feel like he didn't have the energy. He clocked back out and went home. Paige had gone; a handwritten note on his desk said simply: left. needed space.

Objectively, if the coyote had been able to think of himself with the same clinical appraisal as he thought of engines, he did too. But in spite of Lew telling him to 'work on himself'--whatever the fuck that really meant--Howland wasn't in the mood for silence or solitude. He went to Coasters instead. The bar was usefully busy, enough to drown out any pesky thoughts.

"Been scarce," the bartender said. He had the coyote's beer ready.

Howland took it, and tried to make himself savor the taste. The urge was to drink it all at once. "Been busy," he corrected the man. "Work and all."

"That race, yeah. Heard you're entered or something."

"One of the racers went to MacLean for some modifications. Fun work," the coyote said. In simple terms, it was easy to maintain the pretense of meaningless, affable conversation.

"The Campbells entered, too. They have some ship, I guess--well, they have the money for it, so no surprise. Maybe you'll have yourself a real race, huh?"

Howland forced a chuckle. Carson Campbell couldn't have been much of a pilot, and his brother was just enough of an engineer to... well, to figure out a fix for their ship's problem, if Carson remembered enough from what I said.

It seemed a reasonable bet, and added a bit of irony to his whole discussion with Lewis. Paige assumed she'd win. What if she didn't? There was an old terran proverb about counting your chickens before they hatched: Paige and Lew were both counting chickens, but maybe she'd lose. Probably she'd lose, the more he thought about it. With his modifications, against what the Campbells were likely to do to their Sunderland...

"Whatcha workin' on?"

He looked up at the barkeep. He'd gotten out his computer instinctively, almost subconsciously. "Running some numbers on that other ship."

"You think Carson has a chance? I have to know where to put my money."

Their easy rapport was starting to put the coyote back at ease. He grinned. "Like I'd tell you?"

"Throw me somethin'. C'mon, Howl, you got it easy."

"Do I?"

"Sure. You don't have to give a shit. You get paid either way. Me, I gotta take a risk. Odds on your ship are six to one against--naturally, the bookmakers haven't heard of the great Howland West, so you had me thinking it was easy money..."

"What about the Campbells?"

"Two to one. The ship's a proven design. It's won before, that's what I heard. And if you're telling me..." He trailed off.

Howl chuckled, and went back to his beer. "Not tellin' you shit."

The bartender wouldn't change his bet, the coyote figured. Maybe that would be a lesson to him--can't always bet on the 'great Howland West.' Fuck, it doesn't sound that much better when he says it than when Louden did--and at least I knew Lew was insulting me.

He settled his bill after one beer and walked back to his apartment. Paige was still gone. No surprise. Then again, they wouldn't see each other after the race anyway. If she won, she'd be leaving, and if she didn't he figured they wouldn't really be on speaking terms. Particularly not if she lost to the Campbells and blamed him for it.

That was a lesson for her, too, same as the lesson the barkeep would learn. The connection brought him up short: did he want them to? In such bitter terms, it sounded an awful lot like a shitty lesson. Don't worry, I can let people down, too. Howland knew he came off as cocky; he didn't like to think of himself as a complete jerk.

He'd reassembled the mechanical calculator. They were interesting machines: you set the numbers and the operations you wanted to perform, turned a crank, and the answer came out on top. Only a pleasing clatter hinted at what was actually going on in the device's precision innards, a dense bunch of cylinders ridged to match different digits, and gears that meshed with those ridges.

The theory went back almost a thousand years, to Leibniz. It took three centuries for someone to turn it into something so small, and six more for a restless coyote to toy with it, trying to picture in his head the way it all went together. In that sense, Lewis had been right: figuring out the rules was magical.

And it hadn't taken leaving Inverness, now had it?

That's the real lesson, right? Be happy with what you have. Don't expect others to rescue you from it. I mean, fuck, don't expect me to rescue you from it. I didn't ask for that and it isn't my job. A nagging voice pointed out that, so far as he could honestly claim, Paige wasn't actually asking him to rescue her from anything.

But she still wasn't happy, and that still wasn't his fault.

He turned the crank on the calculator again. It was kind of funny, in a way. Lew would've said he found fixing the calculator easy, because he did. Everything about its functioning was understood. It took a little patience and steady hands, but no great leaps of logic. Anyone could grasp it.

One more turn on the crank. What would it have been like to be the calculator's designer, back on Earth? He wouldn't have thought it simple at all. And sure, in the end he could've drawn the cylinders out on a blueprint and explained how it all went together, but that first leap, that first bit of intuition...

Howland played off his modifications to the Kaikoura as simplicity itself because, as Paige knew, they weren't really his idea. Propulsion experts at Kifrea discovered it, all he'd done was fix a few bugs. He'd learned about it from his reading. Maybe if Ronnie Campbell had Howland's gift for recollection, he could've done the same thing.

Don't really believe that, though, do you? It was true, but the next question--prove it--came with no obvious answer. Howland put the calculator aside, though his finger continued to draw a slow circle on the desk. Go on, Howl, he mocked himself. Say it. There's your life. One endless loop, over and over...

He switched to drawing the infinity symbol instead. The meaning was the same; the symbolism, though, was a bit less bleak. Somebody'd told him once that it was meant to recall a Möbius strip, that curious shape along which a hapless insect would walk endlessly.

It wasn't. Its original significance, if it had one, was unclear. Anything else, any interesting coincidence or mystical import, had been added later. People found meaning in all kinds of odd places, from arcane symbols to the shapes of clouds.

Howland found meaning where it was practical. Möbius strips were a good example: they'd been used as drive belts, because with only one side they wore easily. And in theory they could serve as resistors that generated no parasitic inductance. In theory, because it didn't matter enough to make the added complexity worthwhile. That aspect was just idle curiosity.

Mere trivia.

His claw kept wandering. And wandering. He stared at it. The first time the idea came to him, Howland batted it away with a flick of his ears. The second time, his eyes narrowed.

The third time, he pulled his closest notebook over, and sketched an outline on it. It was part of an engine--one of the engines on the Kaikoura, in fact, though he didn't manage that level of recall consciously. He considered the shape, stripped of its surroundings and supporting hardware.

Throwing out his first dozen ideas, refining the next dozen, and realizing at last what he was actually seeing took Howland most of the day. Wasn't what Lew meant when he told me to work on myself, the coyote thought. Then again, maybe it was? His roommate hadn't returned when he was done; there was no sign that she'd come back while he slept, either.

Tracking her down was easy, at least. He saw her silhouette from a hundred yards back, at the edge of a cliff on the north side of town. Her ears flicked at the sound of footsteps, so she must've heard him, but she didn't move.

She didn't speak, either. That fell to him. "Hey. Paige?"

The marten turned her head. "Hey, asshole."

Howland, who knew he'd earned it, laughed and made his way warily forward. He indulged some hope that the cliff might have been an illusion, but no: below them, a sixty meter drop seemed to go straight to the ocean. "I deserved that. Okay."

Paige shifted over to make room for him to sit, and waited until he did so. "How'd you find me?"

"Can I lie and say I've been lookin' all over?" She looked at him skeptically. "You still have my notebook. It's got a locator in it."

"Oh. Right. You want it back?"

"Eventually, yeah." Paige's legs were kicking aimlessly at the cliff, and every time she did so it reminded him how unsafe their position was. Howland tried to look away. "Anyway, I had a question. Remember you were saying if you had more instantaneous power you think you could slingshot around Kokhonak?"

"Mm-hm."

"I can give you twice the power out of those engines. At least twice the power."

She gave him another sideways glance. It was one of those that said she still wasn't happy with him, but was willing to put up with it for the sake of whatever he'd been planning. "Yeah?"

"Eleven or twelve meganewtons, in my initial models."

"How? That's a whole other displacement class, 'yote."

Howland felt one of his ears flicking as he thought of the easiest way to boil it down. "Basically, the assembly that shapes the drive plasma draws power off the reactor to do so. As the plasma moves through it, it induces a current in the assembly that's directed... uh... basic right-hand rule, okay?" He pantomimed it for her. "It's transmitted perpendicularly to the plasma flow. It's why the engine's insulated."

"Yeah?"

"If you arrange them into a particular shape, you can use the induced current to accelerate the plasma rather than just treating it as waste heat. The more power you apply, the faster it accelerates. You get more thrust and greater fuel efficiency."

He heard Paige kicking the cliff harder. "Sounds pretty good."

"There's a catch. I haven't found anyone else writing about it. So maybe I've made a mistake somewhere and I don't know it yet."

"Alright."

"There's another catch. Or maybe they're related, and it's one huge problem. The system is built on a positive feedback loop and there's no real way to make it safe. If you lose containment, the whole thing will decohere. Probably violently. At best, you'd need to eject." He let her finish the thought.

"At worst, I'd also decohere? Nice job, dog. Thank the gods for testing, eh?"

"Yeah. So... so there's another catch. I can rebuild the assemblies, but... it'll take me the rest of the week to shape and install them. We won't have time for a proper test."

The marten took that in better stride than most sane people would've. Her foot had even stopped kicking. "Good thing I like taking risks, yeah? You really could do it, though?"

"I can. There's, ah, one last catch."

"God damn it, mutt!"

"You said you knew somebody at the University of Kifrea."

"Adam Galloway. He's from up the coast in Glencoe. We're old friends, yeah? Since the Scouts."

Howland nodded. "If I did this, and if it worked... would you be willing to put in a word for me?"

"That was your last catch?" Paige looked at him. "Guess that settles it, then." And, with a shake of her head, she pushed herself forward and off the cliff.

Howland didn't even have time to shout. He leaned forward instinctively, enough to notice the rocky ledge a few meters below them that he hadn't been able to see before. The marten was picking herself up; dusting off her jeans. "What the fuck, Paige?"

"C'mon," she beckoned him down with a paw. "We don't have all day."

The ledge wasn't more than a meter wide, and the coyote lacked a racing pilot's suicidal impulses. Rather than jumping, he turned himself around, and lowered himself carefully down to her level. "You didn't answer my question. What the fuck?"

Paige pointed further along the wall. Stairs had been carved into the cliff, heading all the way back down to the city. "There used to be a radar reflector here, before they put the other beacons in. You didn't think I was completely impulsive, did you?"

He followed her, walking in single file and making use of the metal rings that someone had driven into the cliff rock decades ago. Those people--smarter people--had used safety lines. "I have my doubts."

"Well, there's a first time for everything, Howl. What changed your mind, anyway?"

"I saw an interesting engineering problem," he said, lying and well aware she knew it.

"Here or on Kifrea? Maybe it doesn't matter, as long as you decided you didn't want to be stuck here."

"There are worse places to be stuck than Inverness."

"If you say so. Maybe we should try it once before we leave, huh?"

As they descended, getting closer to the surf, he had to strain his ears to catch her voice. "What?"

He had his paw on one of the metal rings, grabbing it for support. Paige did the same thing, using it to spin herself around quickly. He almost bumped into her. At least she didn't have to shout anymore. "I was making a knot joke, Howl. Did it not land? Maybe it didn't work as well as I thought."

"Maybe I was just surprised."

Paige laughed, and closed the last small distance between them for a brief, rough kiss that ended before he could even fully process it. "Sure you were, Howl. Build me that engine," she ordered, and turned back to the path.

Howland went back to his apartment first. Paige came with him, and admitted she'd spent the previous night at a shelter. Rather than dwelling on it, the marten settled down to work on replanning her starship's course, ignoring the coyote as he looked around to take stock of his life.

His timecard said he had put in forty-four hours for the week. That was good enough to get him into the maintenance bay one final time before they locked him out. He spent half an hour scheduling deliveries of coffee and food; he'd have to sleep in the Kaikoura.

Lewis Louden found him with his jumpsuit already on and the diagnostic goggles going through their last checks. "You work too hard, laddie."

"Want to try something new," he said. "Idea I had about the engines."

"Can I help?" The collie was already out of his own work clothes, and probably getting ready to head home.

Howland gave him a notebook. "This is a list of everything I own, and the conservative value. Can you put this on the Kaikoura? Right now, it's paying six to one."

Lew scanned through the list. "Aye. I can. You never cared about money before."

"Phil's gonna ask why I ordered twelve kilos of platinum and twenty Fiedler inverters."

"Is he, then?"

The coyote checked his goggles again before nodding. "Yes. And he's really going to ask why I did it just before I quit."

"Is he, then?" Lewis smiled, not a friendly smile or a mirthful one but the expression of a father seeing his son off. A mix of pride, and relief, and a hint of melancholy softening the edges. He didn't say any of it aloud. "All the material's for a customer, right? Shouldn't they be paying?"

"I'm thinking of it like an investment." Paige had pretty much used up her two hundred thousand credits already.

He nodded. "Good luck, lad."

Howland rubbed his paws together and turned the goggles up to full intensity. An overlay projected over the Kaikoura's hull let him see inside the freighter. He spun his right paw and the parts of the rightmost thruster spread out, with every component and connection neatly labeled.

And all he had to do was remove a third of them. Every bit of the fusion containment system would need to go. He tagged them for removal; each time, the computer prompted him to confirm his intentions. This is a safety critical component. Are you sure you want to remove it?

Yes.

This engine may no longer be compliant with TCICC Stardrive Regulations Part 62.

"Oh, I know," Howland told himself--the computer didn't care what he thought, and ignored what he said.

While the shop robots figured out the best order to disassemble the engines, he worked his diagnostic computer to clone a virtual copy of the nacelle in a clear area of the hangar. New users of the augmented-reality displays sometimes found it disconcerting to walk through what their goggles projected as a solid object. Howland stepped into the virtual engine as easily as Paige had hopped off the cliff.

He switched on a visualization of the path the drive plasma took, and as he manipulated the engine's throttle his eyes narrowed, searching carefully. Anyone watching would've seen his tail starting to wag. The coyote was beyond noticing.

I think... I think if you just... He drew a new path for the containment coils by hand at first, then let the computer resolve them into a precise mathematical definition of the manifold; it would be easier to manipulate that way. In the end, everything came down to physics and math.

He restarted the simulation. At ten percent throttle, the engine now put out as much thrust as it had at twenty percent before. Yes! At twenty percent, it was as powerful as the old design had been at half throttle. At half throttle, the simulation flashed an alarm and he jumped in surprise.

CRITICAL ERROR. THE FOLLOWING COMPONENTS HAVE FAILED:

Thousands of parts were listed. The computer meant to say that the entire ship would have been lost. It was not an ideal outcome. Howland tried three more times, and got the same result. Growling softly, he started fresh, incrementing the throttle fractions of a percent to watch what changed.

The tap on his shoulder startled him as much as the alarm had. He turned to find Kim's head poking through the engine's nozzle. She held up a vacuum flask. "Somebody came by with a liter of coffee. Nobody else is working this late. You shouldn't be..."

Six hours had gone by without his noticing. He turned his goggles momentarily off and took the vacuum flask. "Probably not. But you know how it goes, right?"

The husky laughed. "With you? Yes, I do. I just hope it's important, Howl."

He wished he could say one way or the other. Was it? When Kim left, he poured a cup of coffee and tried to think of what might be happening in the engine. Without the help of the virtual environment, he read through his models again. Nothing in them offered any clue whatsoever.

Freighter captains and starship engineers came to MacLean's shop, on occasion, complaining about 'gremlins.' Intermittent malfunctions that couldn't be reproduced and couldn't be diagnosed. They blamed mysterious flaws in their ship on something supernatural.

That was bullshit, of course. He couldn't say it to their faces--those types lived on superstition. They were, if anything, less worried about gremlins than about the notion that gremlins might not exist. That didn't change anything: there were no monsters, only faulty parts and flawed designers.

And his simulation treated engine parts as perfect, so the buck had to stop with the engineer. Despite the coffee, Howland was running out of energy at the same rate he was running out of ideas. He took the computer with him and settled down to rest in one of the Kaikoura's bunks.

With the hatch closed and the ship's power disconnected, the crew quarters were pitch black. Genuinely, completely black. The coyote saw things anyway: shifting, dancing shapes and colors no more real than a gremlin was. Despite all its power, the mind had plenty of shortcomings.

Or, Howland reflected, his senses did. After all, he couldn't see because there was nothing in the visible spectrum. What if he could perceive ultraviolet? Or infrared--plenty of things were giving off heat, the canine included. He thought of how Paige had felt, lying across his legs, her computer projecting a star map on the blank, blocked screen of his window. Nice and warm and...

"God damn it." He rolled out of the bunk, turned his computer screen on, and used the dim glow to find his way back through the ship to the hangar bay. With the goggles back on, he restarted the computer simulation, and added in an overlay for the engine's electromagnetic radiation.

Immediately his vision blanked. Now that the drive plasma was more than a set of clinically labeled vectors, the light it emitted also became obvious. He hadn't accounted for the extra heat the engine absorbed as a result, and which changed the performance dramatically. Not that the coyote had an answer, not at first, but it was a place to start.

Better than gremlins. He managed a few hours of sleep, then rose to finish off the coffee and his models. Twenty hours later and Howland was left with a set of plans that the simulation told him worked and his intuition trusted enough to send the schematics over to the shop's fabrication lab.

At the end of another nap, he found a note from Lewis waiting. Phil wanted to know why the workshop had been booked for a full day. The promise of money--everything Howl owned, at six to one odds--pacified him. Good luck, the note ended. Not that you need it. Kim said that sometimes, too. They all knew he didn't believe in luck.

The Border Collie appeared in person with a delivery from the shop's lab. The device, resting on an antigravity sled, was taller than either of the engineers: a twisted, warped metal helix with a flawless surface that glittered in the clean white lights of the maintenance bay. Howland knew it would be large--he hadn't known it would be quite so striking.

"Takin' up modern art, are ye, laddie?"

"Sure, if this doesn't pan out." He checked his goggles quickly to confirm the dimensions. The fabricator's result matched his schematics within ten nanometers of accuracy. Not bad, for a day's work.

"What is it?"

"Uses the integrator to shape the exhaust, rather than a separate constrictor stage."

He watched Lewis looking over the machine, and could see the Border Collie trying to figure out not merely if it worked, but if he could even understand why it might. The flicker of recognition was fairly slight. "I think that makes sense. Never heard of it before."

"It's new. Call it a... an intensification... constrictor-accelerator. That sums it up."

"A Howland Intensifier," Lew suggested.

"Don't get crazy," Howland said.

The old dog patted his shoulder. "It's got you pretty intense, at least. Can you install it in thirty hours? The ship needs to launch by then."

He cracked his knuckles. "I can do it in twenty."

For the first time, he was wrong. It took twenty-two, and even then the bay was strewn with tools, discarded parts, and an untidy pool of thick thermal compound that spilled from a hatch directly beneath the Kaikoura's main reactor.

Paige, in the hangar for the first time since he'd left her at his apartment, had taken two fistfuls of her short-cropped hair, tugging it in alarm. She was hiding an unsettled expression quite poorly. "Will that go back in?"

"Well... no."

"Was it supposed to come out?"

"No." When he tried to start the ship, a power surge from the new engines overloaded the reactor's safeties and split the coolant system's casing. The thermal compound, designed to hold up at four hundred degrees, had been over twice that when it hit the deck. Fortunately nothing else was damaged. Fortunately nobody but Howland was around.

There were risks, in working so quickly and with so little margin for error. He wanted to isolate the engines better. He saw where they could be more fault-tolerant. He planned a new version that wouldn't need to be directly coupled to the power grid...

"If we had more time, I could fix it. For now, we..."

He'd flinched and failed to finish the sentence. Paige rubbed her neck. "Tell me the truth."

"I couldn't find a way to regulate the current in the drive coils before they come up to full capacity." This wasn't quite 'the truth'--he'd blown up the largest regulators they had in stock--but the marten didn't need to know that. "The ship needs to be started up plugged in to ground power. The city's grid is enough to absorb the momentary shock."

"You need the whole town? I guess I like the sound of that. What happens if I need to restart it in space, away from ground power?"

"You leave the ship. Either in an escape pod, or like that." Howland pointed at the puddle of thermal compound. "Once it's at full power, it'll be stable."

"Will be stable, or should be stable?"

"You said you like taking risks."

Paige took a deep breath and walked over to the cockpit's access ramp. She took a straight line, making a point of walking over every bit of debris on the floor. "None of these are important, I take it."

This time, he felt comfortable telling her the truth. The parts were out because, as he swapped them from the Kaikoura's existing systems, he wanted a record of everything he'd removed. He could compare, down to the level of each circuit, what the original function had been and which part of his new design replaced it. Nothing was missing.

"A lot of things are missing," Paige countered.

"Decreases your weight, though, right?"

He couldn't tell how nervous her laugh was. Then again, she climbed towers and jumped off cliffs for fun; her survival instincts obviously weren't that well-honed. She took the pilot's seat in the cockpit and brought the computer online. "Power looks stable..."

"It is. You shouldn't notice much in the reactor output. And if the coils are de-energized, you won't notice much difference in the thrust output. I'm not a pilot, so... you know. Double-check the orbital program, but I think it's the same."

She nodded, working through the screens of the ship's diagnostic subroutines one at a time. "And if I want more power? I presume that's this... professional job here?" The marten's claw tapped the screen of a computer he'd added to the cockpit. It had been welded in place towards the end of an eighteen-hour shift, and was fed by the tangle of cables that disappeared into an irregular hole with its jagged edges taped over as an afterthought.

But it worked. "Controls the good stuff, yeah. Press this switch to activate the system. There'll be a bit of a lag while the intensifier saturates. Then it should kick in all at once. The thrust multiplier goes up with the throttle setting, so... try starting at low power."

"I'll remember that."

"Should be it, then."

Paige looked forward; the hangar doors kept them from seeing anything but her reflection. "I have a good feeling about this."

"Yeah?"

She turned the computer screen back off. "Yeah. I think we'll actually pull this off."

"Good." Her approval, tentative as it was, took a load off the coyote's mind. "So do I."

"That's why I'm confident. I don't think you'd try to fuck me."

"At least once before we leave, though. Right?"

Paige looked at him over her shoulder. He was leaning against a bulkhead, a familiar glint in his eyes and his old grin starting to return. She shook her head in disbelief. "Now? Now's when you decide to be interested?"

"What's wrong with now?" He was just teasing her--Howland still had work to do, and so did she, and the lack of sleep would catch up with him sooner or later.

The marten played along, though. She rolled her eyes and got up from the pilot's seat, padding over to him. Her short coffee-brown muzzle, tilted upwards, almost reached his own. Her glare closed the rest of the distance. "What's wrong?"

"You heard me."

"It's bad luck," she said. "And here I am, betting my future on a race in a ship old enough to retire with a pension. A partially disassembled ship, with an untested engine designed by an unschooled coyote who hasn't slept in a week. An engine that, if it fails, will explode--maybe, because's nobody ever tried it before. You think I need the bad luck now?"

She'd been drawing herself up, inching closer and closer. The nearer she got, the more he realized she was teasing him right back. She must've been stressed as all hell, too, as close to the deadline as we cut it. Howland snapped his teeth at her, and widened his grin. "Maybe that means it can't get any worse and you should take advantage of it."

Her bright, hard eyes narrowed. "It doesn't work that way."

As long as she was there--kinda leaning against him, now that he felt it--the coyote figured there were better ways to answer that challenge. He kissed her instead. As soon as their lips met, her glare went fuzzy and her lean intensified. "Doesn't it?"

Paige took a careful breath, steadied herself, and shook her head lightly. "No."

He slid his arm behind her, and at once the marten stiffened, pushing against the coyote and pressing their muzzles back together. The bulkhead behind him put Howland somewhat at her mercy: even if he'd wanted to pull back there was nowhere to go. It was up to Paige to end the kiss. By then, his breathing was getting uneven, too.

"Told you... bad luck," she muttered thickly.

"I believe you," he answered, in about the same tone. He stole another kiss, to see if that helped it. "You got work to do..."

His arm was still around her--both of them were, now that he noticed it, with the other about the small of her back--but though the marten put her paw to his shoulder, as if to push herself away, she never followed through despite a nod of agreement. "Mmhm." Her head canted, and when she lifted her muzzle the tilt only deepened the warm, firm contact. Briefly, he felt Paige's tongue brush him. "And you... when's the last time you slept?"

"Dunno."

The marten's paw caressed his shoulder. "When's the last time you showered?"

"Dunno."

Her grip tightened. "Then you're tired and... probably filthy... and I'm not, and..."

He opened his mouth to reply to the filthy part, at least. His words fell dumbly against her tongue, instead, as she pressed it between his lips. Somewhere, as he returned the favor and the marten's scent and taste filled his muzzle, Howland realized they were no longer teasing.

Every time he tried to stop himself, his brain short circuited. He tried to let her go and his grasp just tightened; she wriggled, her lithe body squirming closer to him. He tried to say something, a cautionary note, but his words tumbled into a throaty moan that ended where hers began. He got one of his paws free--only to put it right back to her hip, squeezing until her brushy tail flicked and whipped and her eyes slid shut.

Another grope finally buckled her knees. Paige stayed upright--just barely, clinging to the coyote's shoulders--but her muzzle dipped and he could speak again. "Hrnhm erhn," he said, the closest synthesis he could manage of I was kidding, we can wait until you get back and I need to fuck you so bad it hurts.

The marten had a clearer head, if not a more responsible one. She pointed to his suit. "Off. How does it come--"

Instinctively, he put a finger to the hidden seam, which started to split open. Paige forced it the rest of the way. He tugged his arms free, the jumpsuit peeled away, and by shared agreement her jeans came next. She was unfastening her hoodie when Howland's paw pressed into her panties. Paige froze as the coyote's fingers slid over her warm mound, past the fur to tease at soft wetness.

She chuffed an odd little growl, abandoned the hoodie, and pushed her panties down impatiently. They tangled up in her jeans and her sinewy leg kicked with an urgency echoed in a harsher snarl from the tense marten. "Bunk," she panted, when she was free. "Now."

"Have to clean it up afterwards."

"Good point." She bit her lip; they both knew there was no way they would make it back to his apartment. "Have a better idea?"

He didn't. But just like in orbital mechanics, there were tradeoffs between practical ideas and expedient ones. "Have a faster idea, though," Howland offered. He grabbed for the marten and spun, trading places with her.

That thumped her against the wall a bit harder than he'd meant, driving the breath from her in a startled grunt. She recovered immediately--lifting one leg up and hooking it around the coyote's hips when he pressed forward, pinning her. "That works," she panted.

Her eyes, fierce and sharp, locked on his. The canine's hard shaft, angled up at attention, found its aim almost immediately. The fire in her gaze went brighter--then dimmed, her eyes rolling back and a low groan hissing through her teeth as he sank into her moist folds. She slid by degrees down the wall until he was hilted.

For a few seconds, as she adjusted, Howland's paws at her hips were the only thing that kept the shuddering marten from dropping any further. She wrapped her other leg around him. Howl took the hint, lowered his hips and pumped into her again, harder. She gasped with the coyote cock suddenly filling her, the strength of that firm thrust nudging her up the wall.

A few more strokes in the same full, deep rhythm drove the gasps into a higher register. Paige locked her arms around the coyote tightly, moaning gratefully as he picked up speed. His hips flexed and rocked steadily; he bucked into the marten, pounding her against the bulkhead of her own starship until their mixed groans and panting filled the cockpit.

Again instinct sabotaged his better nature. Howl couldn't pace himself--tried to time his thrusts and got to six before the beat was off. Twelve before he didn't remember what the beat even was. The only thing that mattered was the woman clinging to his slim body, holding on as he rutted wildly into her.

A hoarse cry filled his ears. That one was wordless--the one that came next was his name, or perhaps an order. Howl! But Paige took the initiative and did it herself. The marten's frame twisted and arched. Her warmth, that wonderfully textured heat gripping the coyote's thrusting cock, grew tighter. Wetter. He grunted against the pressure of the spasms that clenched on him.

It didn't do much for his rhythm, shifting into the purposeful, urgent movements of the final act. He grasped the marten's rear possessively, holding her still for each deep plunge as he humped up and into her. Slick precum splashed her folds and lent a telling squish to his thrusting as he slid with more resistance all the way inside.

There was a telling tenor, too, that changed Paige's warbling moans. "Is--is that--a--knot?"

He jerked his hips strongly, testing the force it took to slip the swelling bulge into the marten's pussy. Not yet. Hadn't tied with her yet. He managed a groan, and a nod. "Mm_hm_. Yes." He tugged it free, then pumped right back in as she spread out around him.

"Won't even--oh god!" All her breath left her when he hilted again.

Fit, she was going to say, but then lots of them said that and it always did and he was too close to argue. "Will," was all he got out. The next attempt tried to prove him wrong and the coyote's instincts took over. He leaned against the marten, keeping her steady as his long, throbbing shaft rammed into her swiftly and the need for his release put its emphasis on every sharp thrust. "You'll take it--fuck, you'll take it--oh-fuck-that's-it-that's-it-oh, fuck, Paige!"

"Howl!" she shouted again, but he didn't get further than a snarl.

He lunged up, and gravity pulled her down, and as the sound crossed his lips he claimed her. Her warmth enveloped him fully, grasping his knot, and while he bucked deep on reflex it was already more than enough and the rush of release turned his next try at words into a throaty grunt the marten's shoulder muffled.

Howling fell to Paige again--fixed to the wall, pushed against it by the steady thump of the coyote's hips, hitching rhythmically while he pumped her with his cum. The shock of it gave way quickly to the gentler novelty of being so dramatically filled. Howland's knot had filled out a bit, just a bit; enough to keep every drop of warm, rich coyote seed where it belonged.

Her second cry was no less giddy but a bit quieter, tapering off along with the canine's unsteady growls as the marten's shuddering milked the last of his load from her pleasure-tense lover.

Howl managed, with rapidly ebbing strength, to stumble from the wall into the cockpit, and from there to collapse awkwardly into the pilot's seat. At least it didn't have armrests; Paige relaxed her hold on his waist, put one leg astride the chair, and sank against the coyote until they could both catch their breath.

When she was able to speak again, she chittered her whisper into the canid's ear. "Not bad."

"Pretty good, even," Howland mumbled weakly.

"Mm..." She tried to get up and, of course, found herself arrested. The attempt cost Howland more than it cost her: he let out a startled yip at the momentary pressure, drawing a giggle from the marten, who gave up and dropped back into his lap. "So that's a knot, then, yeah?"

Howland calmed down and licked the marten's nose, not quite apologizing. "Yeah."

"When I was in high school, my first boyfriend was a wolf. My best friend was talking about her own partner and I was trying to play it cool, like, 'oh, sure, Mark and I have slept together.' Maybe a year later, after we'd broken up, I told my friend I'd been lying and she just laughed at me. Like, 'I know, Paige, 'cause you wouldn't have shut up about it otherwise.'"

Howl mostly stuck to canines, less strictly out of respect for their sensibilities than because other canines were more likely to put up with a coyote. "I mean, I hope it wasn't too dramatic..."

"Nah. Different. It's nice to have a reason to stay close. Bet it's good for some awkward conversations, though, huh?"

"You mean, 'how long does this last for?'"

Paige stuck her tongue out. "I mean: 'so, I was thinking it's time to start a family...'"

"Oh." That didn't tend to come up in Inverness, where his partners weren't the family-starting types. "Now that you mention it, yeah. That's not an option for us, though."

She snuggled closer in his lap, wrapping her arms around the coyote. "We'd have to adopt, yeah?"

He lifted an eyebrow, watching her and trying to decide how serious the woman was. "We could. They'd have to be willing to adopt to us, though..."

And like that, Paige's laughter broke the spell. "Oh, I know. I'd be a terrible mum anyway, Howland. I could be a fun aunt, maybe, as long as I wasn't expected to watch them too closely. My parents even admit it. As soon as I turned out good at cat racing, they stopped asking me when I was gonna settle down. That's what siblings are for. Do you have siblings?"

"Nah." He left it at that. Later, if she stuck around, later he might tell her that he didn't even remember his mother, though he'd heard she was still working offworld. She hadn't come back for his dad's funeral.

"Howl?" Without meaning to, he'd tightened his embrace of the marten.

"Just..." He fumbled. "Thinking about the race. Are you ready?"

"Are you?"

The work that remained was, at least, manageable. He replaced the missing thermal insulation, cleared the bay, and went over the engine schematics as many times as he could before Paige leaned into his field of vision, flightsuit already on.

"Last chance to tell me we fucked up, Howl," she said.

"It'll be fine," he answered. "We'll be fine."

"Good luck." She hugged him again, and headed for the cockpit ramp.

"Me?"

Paige paused, one foot on the ramp. "If I have bad luck, I'm not likely to care very long, yeah? You'll be the one in trouble."

Howl wasn't inclined to find the argument convincing, but he had the sense that she trusted in luck about as much as he did. "Still. Luck doesn't matter. How's this: have fun, okay?"

"Oh, I plan to."

He watched until the hatch closed behind her, then got into position and dropped his goggles down and into place. His radio was patched into the bay's circuit; he heard Kim's cheery voice over it. "Hey, Kaikoura, dispatch here. Local control has signed off on all the paperwork, so you can join the pattern whenever you're ready. I've transmitted your clearance codes to you and the cosigner. After departure, turn right to heading 1-3-5, then climb and maintain one thousand. Check in on 1-5-2 point 2."

Paige's readback was clear, calm and confident. "Kaikoura. Will depart, turn 1-3-5 and climb to one thousand."

"Okie-doke, that's right," Kim answered on the radio. She was pretty laissez-faire with that. Her job, after all, was simple. "Kaikoura, cleared for startup."

Howland told himself that he wouldn't have chewed his claws even without the work gloves covering them. Fortunately, he didn't have to find out. "Main reactor start sequence active," Paige said, in the coyote's left ear. Only they could hear each other. Howland's visor came to life with diagnostic reports. "Fifteen percent. Switching to internal control systems."

"Hold on," the coyote spoke up. "Wait until twenty."

"Spec says fifteen," Paige reminded him.

"I know. Just... want the extra margin."

"Fine. Twenty," the marten agreed. He could pretty well picture the way she'd be shaking her head at his sudden outbreak of caution. "Holding twenty. Disconnecting ground power."

All the numbers in the coyote's diagnostics jumped at once, then settled down. That hurdle was passed. The power and data bundle connected to the ship's nose fell away and automatically retracted into the bay floor. "Confirmed disconnect." The freighter was on its own.

"Reactor at fifty. Seventy. Eighty."

"External vanes locked." Howland read verbatim from a checklist. For all Paige knew, he did that with every departure.

Something told him she was smarter than that, of course. "Done, sweetie. Ninety percent." And indeed, the lines on his checklist disappeared, marked as 'complete,' almost as soon as he could read them. "Full power. Everything seems correct."

Everything seemed correct to him, as well. "Thrusters one and four: energize ignition stage."

"There's one. Four."

"Two and three, energize ignition stage."

"Two. And... and... three. That's it. Are you clear?"

Howl stepped from the exhaust path of the ship's engines and darkened his goggles. The Kaikoura disappeared, leaving only thin white lines to trace her outline, drawn on the inside of his visor. "Clear. Start it up."

There was a bright flash, blinding even with his goggles for protection. He felt the heat of it on his fur, singeing his ears. And his heart leapt--for it must've worked. Any failure, and he would've been instantly vaporized. Normally, the launch engineer stayed behind heavy blast shields for exactly that reason.

His vision cleared as the visor finally, barely, adjusted. He saw the ship again, a black arrow pointed at the open hangar doors, framed by the glare of her engines. "You look good." Howl heard his own voice without being consciously aware that he was speaking. It was like being intoxicated, high in the best possible way. "Dispatch, it's Howl. They're ready."

"Kaikoura, you're cleared for takeoff," Kim said.

White light flared again, four crisp points of it at the epicenter of four barely contained novas. Howl felt nothing; heard nothing. He was at one with the overwhelming brilliance before him, like a lightning bolt in slow motion. A lightning bolt, bent and twisted into shape by his own effort, guided by the hand of a pilot skilled as any Olympian god.

In that all-consuming furnace, with the wind whipping about his battered ears, his visor failed to show anything at all--but he could picture by something deeper and more intimate than sight every piece of machinery working in its synchronized perfection, every equation, every diagram and schematic and thought that had stoked the fires before him.

And for one brief moment, it all fell away. For one moment, there was nothing but the coyote's soul, dazzled at the abyss into which he'd peered. The thrusters blazed, and his lean silhouette cut a crisp shadow as the light streamed past, and for one moment he glimpsed not a starship's thrusters but the engines that drove the universe itself.

As the light and heat faded, he became aware that the Kaikoura was gone, a shooting star receding into the distance. His goggles were still showing errors from the strain of keeping the light out. They might've needed recalibration; might've been ruined altogether. He turned them off, and strode from the empty hangar bay.

Howland was drained, too drained to parry Kim's teasing. All the exertion, and the lack of sleep, had caught up to him, but it was more than that. The past few days had extracted something from the coyote, taxing long-disused parts of him until they were near to the point of failing. He felt raw and exposed, and the wind plucking at his ears cut more deeply than usual.

He managed to sleep, all the same, but five hours of it didn't do much to rest him. The race had started already; the ships were well on their way. Some name he didn't recognize was in first place; the Campbells were in third. Paige was in seventh. That part was according to plan: the marten intended to conserve fuel. Her critical maneuver wouldn't come for another six hours.

Logically, objectively, rationally, there was no reason for his agitation. Everything that could be done had been done. That didn't change matters. He spent the time pacing. At the last minute, so that someone could be around to call a doctor if his heart stopped, he went to the bar.

"Your ship had a... they called it an unusual deviation," the barkeep told him, as the first thing he said after pouring Howl's beer. "It's off-course."

"Yeah."

"What d'ya mean, 'yeah'? I have money on this, you bum."

Howland looked at the race, being shown with commentary on a screen behind the bar. The Kaikoura was dead last. "It's part of the plan. A different trajectory than normal. It involves a new maneuver, in about ten minutes. You'll see."

"I better." Howl thought the bartender was joking, but as the minutes ticked past and more patrons drifted over, he heard his explanation repeated with growing incredulity.

"My arse, a new maneuver." It was the longshoreman, the old bear. "Maybe the pilot's stealing the bloody ship, more likely."

"You'll see," Howland repeated. His voice was quieter.

One of the commentators had figured out what was going on; Howl caught the phrase 'would take a miracle'--and the other commentator correcting that it would take at least two or three. They laughed. If they're serious about this, they'll be starting a correction in about fifteen seconds, folks. Plus some delay for anyone to see it, with the speed of light and all.

At that moment, Paige would be switching the new systems on. He estimated two seconds for that. Six more for her to bring the thrusters safely to full throttle. Then it was smooth sailing... If the reactor was stable. If the safeties held. If everything kicked in at once--some of the sequences took only milliseconds, and Howl alone knew the precision involved. If there was no power surge to introduce a momentary asymmetry... just enough to destabilize the containment fields... and if it was at the right frequency, it could lock out the controls and prevent a commanded throttle-down before the engines ran away, fuck, how had he missed that, it was obvious in retrospect that--

Howl yelped, more out of surprise than pain. The bear had hit him on the shoulder. "You! You son of a bitch." And there was beer all over the counter--Howland hadn't realized how tightly he was holding the glass until the impact sent his drink sloshing free.

The commentators chattered at full speed. Never seen that before -- could be looking at a new -- could be, hell, there's no way it's not a new record and -- well it's over, there's the home stretch, sure, but that's an unbeatable lead -- one hell of a pilot, I'll tell you, in all my years I've -- folks, what you've just witnessed is --

"Son of a bitch," the bear repeated.

Howland unclenched his paw from the handle of his mug. Nobody'd been looking at his paw, at least. He managed to laugh. "What'd you expect? I told you."

Maybe they saw through it. Maybe they picked up on his nerves--at least how unsteady his feet were beneath him, when he left and made his way back to his apartment. And maybe it wouldn't matter, because he'd never see them again.

Light woke him, the light of active starship thrusters, perfectly angled on approach to shoot through the open window of his apartment. He sat up and watched, letting it bathe his face and glint from his bright eyes as the ship circled closer, making ready to land.

His computer went off with a page from Kim, working dispatch. The Kaikoura was in for a landing, twenty-six hours after she'd left. The pilot had asked for a berth at MacLean's, saying she wanted to talk to somebody about the work they'd done on her engines. Wonder what that's about, Kim said teasingly.

In a minute, he'd pull his boots on and go down to the maintenance bay. In ten minutes, he'd be watching the tug pushing Kaikoura to rest, the heat of re-entry still warping the air above her sharp fuselage. In fifteen minutes, when the ramp dropped, Paige would barrel from it. He'd just barely catch her--didn't have the marten's reflexes, after all. We did it, she'd say. And he'd correct that she'd done it, really--all the hard work, at least. She'd laugh, and hug him until he was out of breath. He'd learn, over the years, that it was one of her celebratory habits.

But until then, he watched the light until it fell below the cliffs and out of view. Then he got dressed, in darkness; there was no longer anything worth seeing. Nothing but the stars, too dim and distant to guide him anywhere in Inverness. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk, a handwritten note, and tucked it into the nameplate of the door when he closed it behind him.

left. needed space