“To our good fortune,” Berx proposed. “And the temporary bad luck of others.”
“Bingo,” Erx replied.
They drank the entire flask in no more than a dozen gulps.
The music began blaring ever louder. Number One had moved away, and the arena was awash in bright sunlight once again. Holo-girls drifted by them as if carried on the wind. The air smelled of power, money, and sex.
“Finally!” Erx exclaimed, turning Berx around and pointing him toward the far side of the arena. A gaggle of racers had floated onto the track and were making their way up to the starting line.
“It’s showtime!” Berx yelled in response.
The first half-dozen racers were variants of the standard Empire Starfighter, the ubiquitous F-176A model, also called the Holy Fighter. It was a needle-nosed wedge, thirty-six feet long and twelve feet wide at the aft. This was the basic Empire design. Blended body, no wings, no tail.
Contestants could adorn their racers in any way they wished; many were predictably outlandish. One of these first racers was colored bright red with checkerboard squares of black and white decorating its aft section. Another racer was sun yellow with blistering orange flames trailing down its back. A third was glowing deep red from its needle nose to its nontail. Three others opted for variations on the always sinister in toto dull-black scheme.
Six more racers came onto the track. They were Starfighters, too, but not the standard F-176A model.
These beauties were rebuilds of a Starfighter design from nearly three hundred years before, known as the F-32B. They were a bit larger, a bit bulkier, but they also sported elegant color schemes, more glowing than shine, and had distinctively large cockpits and antique ID scrolling. These half-dozen racers were regarded as the class of the race, the elegance. They received a thunderous cheer as they glided toward the starting area.
Then came the thirteenth entry.
It did not float out of the waiting area. It rolled, on three strange black things that looked more like toys than attachments to an Earth Race entrant. Few people in the million knew these things were called wheels. Their use had died out thousands of years ago.
This was, of course, Hawk Hunter’s flying machine. It looked huge at fifty-five feet, its wings flapping as it bounced its way along the red-dirt track. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was that Hunter’s canopy was not a tiny piece of squared-off superglass but a relatively large tear drop bubble. Unlike the other racers, the citizens could clearly see Hunter within his cockpit, pushing buttons, yanking levers. What’s more, his craft was not painted in the living hues of the other dozen entrants. Rather it was sporting three simple colors: red on the nose, white on the wings, blue on the tail and body. Like the wheel, this color scheme had not been seen on Earth in thousands of years.
Dead silence fell upon the huge stadium when Hunter’s aircraft appeared. The crowd was stunned by the sight of the odd-looking machine. At first they didn’t know whether to cheer, applaud, or salute.
Then it began to sink in — and the laughter started.
If one million people cheering at once sounded like waves crashing on a shore, that many people laughing sounded more like thunder. Low-pitched, rumbling, building, building into a sonic roar that suddenly stopped… only to start up again a quick breath later.
The stadium was in hysterics now. It had been a closely guarded secret that a maccus had been entered in the race. This was another archaic term that could mean several things, including “unusual one,” or “different from the rest.” But there was another translation that was on everyone’s mind and in everyone’s throats now.
This was the definition of maccus as jester, loon.
A clown… with wings.
Nowhere was the laughter so intense than in the galleries surrounding the Imperial Seat. This area was thick with some of the most high-ranking officers in the Empire. Each one was spit-polished and medal-heavy, each one vying to get as close to the Imperial Family as possible. The sight of the strange participant sent gales through the gallery. Whose unit was this thing from? Is it too late to bet against it?
Down near the starting line, though, two men in the million were not laughing. Actually Erx and Berx were on the verge of tears. The aircraft that had looked so strange and sleek on Fools 6 just looked strange here. Strange and old. Both explorers had bet substantial purses on Hunter’s machine; even more important, they’d been harboring dreams of basking in Hunter’s reflected glory. But all this seemed very much in jeopardy now. Compared to the hovering Star-fighters, Hunter’s contraption looked ridiculous.
Erx and Berx knew that Calandrx, in pulling his own strings with the race organizers, had managed to get Hunter entered as the maccus. But they’d thought he and his strange craft would have been greeted as something new, different, extraordinary, even spellbinding. Never did they consider that their new friend would be greeted with such overwhelming ridicule and abuse. But that’s exactly what was happening now.
“This is not good, my brother,” Erx said as the derisive laughter swelled even farther. “Not good at all.”
The thirteen racers nudged their way up to the neon starting beam. Hunter took the longest to get into position, needing more than a few adjustments of his nose wheel before getting exactly even with the other participants. This only served to throw the crowd into more fits of laughter. Taunting chants of maccus! filled the stadium. Erx and Berx sank even lower into their boots.
“Fear not, my brothers!” a voice boomed in their ears, strong and clear above the roar. “Our time is finally at hand!”
They swung around to see that Calandrx had come up behind them. Unlike them, he was all smiles. The explorers were mildly astonished to see the elderly pilot. How had he been able to find them in this enormous crowd?
“I knew you two would gravitate right to the center of the critical mass,” he told them with a hearty slap to each of their backs. “And a fine location it is, too. Now we three brothers will be in a perfect position to see the extraordinary happen.”
“How can you glow so?” Erx asked him, having to shout above the sustained roar of the raucous crowd.
“The entire Galaxy is laughing at our friend. The man who is carrying our wagers. We could all be very poor this time tomorrow. Your levity is baffling.”
“And you two don’t realize what you miss when you go to sleep,” Calandrx replied tartly, taking the flask from Berx’s hand and helping himself to some slow-ship wine.
“Please clarify,” Berx told him. “Before that wine takes effect.”
Calandrx grinned. All was right in his universe, at least for the moment.
“Did our friend out there ever tell you that when he flew for you on Fools 6, his throttle was opened to only one-eighth speed?”
Both Erx and Berx shook their heads no.
“And did you know that we conducted an experiment six days ago this night, after you fell asleep in my garden?”
“How could we know if neither you or Hawk told us?” Erx complained.
Calandrx shrugged.
“That’s true — but sometimes good things must be held in confidence,” he said. “Even from old friends.”
He drained Berx’s flask, then licked the spout with his tongue.
“But now all you have to do is prepare yourself, my brothers,” he said. “For we are about to see a display guaranteed to put a lie to this rowdy behavior around us.”
Erx and Berx just stared back at him.
“But what experiment are you talking about?” Erx pressed him.