FEDOROGRAD VELORING, VIKAR OF KRASNOVA
Lunar Firestorm Garage – Saturday Post-Qualifying
The two racing girls of the New Solisian Union were coming in to see the timing screen at the center of the pit wall. It blinked in harsh white luminescence against the darkening Krasnovan dusk. And, at once, they saw what they needed to see.
- P7 – Viting Horsele (Tango et Kartuma): 1:43.533
- P8 – Karina Monraksha (Lunar Firestorm): 1:43.546
- P9 – Kamila Saidova (Team Sasha): 1:43.559
Thirteen milliseconds ahead. Thirteen milliseconds behind.
Karina kept herself close to Juzui, standing with her helmet tucked under her arm, adjusting her glasses, just a little, with one gloved hand as she studied the numbers. Unlike Coda, Karina was not the kind of woman who would commit herself to the slamming of chairs and the throwing of tools. Though Karina shared the same Ayr blood in her veins with Coda, the same sort of blood that ran hot like the sun above the deserts and mountains and hills, Karina merely exhaled a slow, controlled breath that misted in the cold, coastal winds that were still coming in after them, the winds just blowing off the naval docks.
"Sector Two's clean," Karina said calmly, glancing over at Jeanne. "The active floor did decently at Turn 8, but down that back stretch, Horsele’s car just walked away by half a tenth. I hope I am not being too rude, but I must say that we're scrubbing too much on the top end."
Further down the bay, Nassrena was unstrapping her HANS device after putting Egamela in P16 with a 1:46.431. She walked over, wiping sweat from the back of her neck with a towel, and offered Karina a quiet nod. "Traffic was stacked through Sector Three on my final flyer, but I feel planted. The car's planted," Nassrena reported, leaning against the workbench. "I have no issue with any of the corners. It’s just that when we hit the long straight, everyone else has another gear to give. Starting sixteenth is going to be a serious struggle into Turn 1, but if we can't pass on the straight, we’re stuck."
Jeanne threw down her grease rag and turned toward the back of the garage, where Canzal sat studying the championship telemetry on her tablet.
"They're right, Canzal," Jeanne said bluntly. "The Veloring is forty percent straight-line running, and tomorrow, I think if I recall it all correctly, there's that damned prognostic calling for heavy winds. If we sit on our hands, the high-drag setup will get murdered in crosswind gusts. We need to really consider using Upgrade Package Two tonight."
Canzal didn't answer immediately. Her dark eyes flicked across the telemetry data, weighing the risk. Forzala 1 regulations allowed three upgrade windows per season. The team had preserved their package through Cerfonlande and Zarbia, relying on raw mechanical cornering grip. But looking ahead at the final high-speed rounds......
"Reliability's good across every race," Canzal noted, her voice steady. "The cooling systems are overbuilt for these colder northern tracks. We can consider changing things for ourselves."
She looked up at Jeanne. "Pull out a little from our focus on reliability and put yourselves into top speed. Re-trim the floor diffusers, lean out the fuel-air mixture on the V10 for maximum top-end revs, and reduce the frontal wing attack angle. Let's give them a car that can do the work properly down the straight."
Jeanne’s face lit up with a wolfish grin. "You heard the boss! Crack open the aero crates! We're trimming the trim tabs and remapping the power units before midnight!"
Within seconds, the Lunar Firestorm bay erupted into purposeful, coordinated chaos. Air guns whirred while titanium bolts clattered into magnetic trays. The scent of race fuel and heated carbon fiber filled the chilly Krasnovan night as the mechanics swarmed the two cars.
LUNAR FIRESTORM — OFFICIAL TECHNICAL UPDATE (UPGRADE #2)
Effective: Round 14 – Krasnova GP (Fedorograd Veloring)
- Top Speed: 96 (+10)
- Cornering: 93 (Unchanged)
- Acceleration: 86 (Unchanged)
- Energy: 70 (Unchanged)
- Reliability: 55 (-10)
- Total Allocation: 400 Points
Around 22:00, while the mechanics torqued down the revised floor assemblies, Karina and Nassrena sat on a shipping crate near the back of the hospitality tent, sharing a thermos of hot tea and a small box of spiced dried fruit. Outside, the heavy freight trains rolled past the distant perimeter, their whistles cutting through the salty air as the Solisian military news broadcasts silently looped on the wall monitor.
"Fifty-two laps tomorrow," Nassrena said softly, watching the steam rise from her cup. "With ninety-six top speed, I can make moves into Turn 1. If I manage the rears through the long sweeping arc, the consistency will pay off in the second stint."
Karina took a sip of her tea, her Ayr headscarf resting loosely over her shoulders. She looked across the garage floor toward Juzui, whose crimson-and-gold bodywork gleamed under the work lights.
"Horsele and Monteiro will try to pinch the inside at the start and they're probably going to fuck with me or you," Karina said. "With the extra speed, I won't have to force an impossible dive. We take what’s ours on the tarmac. Clean, fast, and without regret."
Nassrena smiled faintly and raised her cup. "For the Union."
Karina tapped her cup against Nassrena's. "For the Union."
As the midnight shift settled in, around one of the parts benches, Karina stood with her Ayr scarf draped over the back of a metal chair, a cup of warm water in hand, recounting her days behind the wheel of heavy logistics transports in the western interior of the New Union.
"So, we were all cutting through the foothills south of Sukhonai during a flash mobilization drill," Karina was saying, gesturing with her free hand while two young mechanics grinned. "Convoy officer told me to keep ourselves exactly at fifty kilometers an hour across an unpaved service trail. I took the turn too wide, jumped an irrigation berm, and ended up parking a twelve-ton flatbed straight through an old farmer’s melon patch. Two elderly Rasurr men chased the truck for half a kilometer on foot, throwing turnip roots and swearing by the Triad that they’d have my captain court-martialed for treason against agriculture."
A round of chuckles went up from the bench, but before the laughter faded, Karina’s sentence caught in her throat. Her face went completely blank, then drained of color in less than a second. A violent, subterranean gurgle emanated from beneath her ribs, loud enough that the mechanic holding a caliper paused and looked down at Juzui’s gearbox in confusion, wondering if a hydraulic line had just purged air.
Karina set the metal cup down on the bench with a sharp clatter. She turned and broke into a dead, flat-out sprint toward the private motorhome bathroom in the back corridor. What followed over the next twenty minutes defied the known biology of the human gastrointestinal tract.
When Nassrena walked down the hallway carrying a fresh blister pack of stomach tablets, she stopped dead outside the locked door. From within came sounds that bordered on industrial demolition, something like a relentless, earth-shattering evacuation of biblical proportions, punctuated by heavy, shuddering gasps.
"Uh... Kar? Karina?" Nassrena knocked cautiously with two knuckles. "Are you... surviving?"
Inside, Karina was gripping the fiberglass sink rim with white-knuckled desperation, completely drenched in a cold, shivering sweat. Her glasses had slid halfway down her nose, fogged from the sheer thermal output of the ordeal. Her chest heaved in ragged pants, eyes wide in a bizarre, glazed trance of pure agony colliding with an almost transcendent euphoria. It was horrifying, unnatural in sheer volume, and yet profoundly, undeniably relieving.
It was all just a total, volcanic purge for her, one that felt like she was shedding fifteen pounds of pure misery from her core almost instantly.
"...G..Guhh.. D-Don't... Do not," Karina managed between ragged, trembling breaths, "...come in here. For the love of the stars, give it ten minutes."
When the lock finally clicked and the door swung open, Karina stepped out looking like she had survived a high-G centrifuge test. Her Ayr scarf was bunched in her fist, her hair somewhat damp at the temples, but the tension that usually pinched her brow had completely evaporated. She looked entirely hollowed out, thoroughly exhausted, but at the same time, she seemed.... immensely, maybe wonderfully lighter.
Nassrena didn't ask questions and just handed Karina a large bottle of electrolyte-infused water and pointed toward the small dining nook, where a steaming bowl of plain white rice and salted broth was already waiting.
"Drink the entire bottle, eat the broth, and go straight to sleep," Nassrena commanded with calm, no-nonsense authority. "I'll tell Canzal you're on total rest until the morning driver briefing."
Karina nodded numbly, downed half the water in one long, grateful draft, and sank into the bench. With her stomach finally at peace and the car's upgrades locked in, she ate what she could and collapsed into her cot, ready to sleep straight through until the wind began to howl over the Veloring tarmac on Sunday.
Two hours and nineteen minutes after midnight, Nassrena snapped awake in the suffocating stillness of her bunk. The air in the small motorhome room was heavy and stagnant, and all because she had completely forgotten to switch on the little oscillating desk fan before lying down. She sat up and clicked the switch, letting the cool breeze wash over her neck, but an odd, restless hollow remained lodged in her ribs. Needing air, she pulled on a light fleece jacket and slipped outside into the biting Krasnovan night.
The paddock was mostly dark, cast in long, amber shadows by distant perimeter floodlights. As she took a quiet step across the gravel access alley, the toe of her sneaker caught the lip of a steel drainage plate. She pitched forward, stumbling into a clumsy, three-step tumble before catching herself on one knee. Sitting there in the dirt, she let out a dry, self-deprecating chuckle at her own clumsiness. But then the laugh died quickly in the cold.
Nassrena pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping both arms tight around her shins. Looking out toward the dark silhouette of the harbor cranes, the memory of Coda Yin Saodah pressed down on her like lead. She remembered her fury, the shattered benches, the awful silence after the gunshot behind the hotel, and the desperate, fading grip of Coda’s bloody hand. A tight knot seized Nassrena’s throat, and she hugged herself harder, fiercely wishing none of it had ever happened, wishing the pressure and the pain hadn’t devoured her teammate whole.
A quiet footstep crunched in the gravel behind her. Karina emerged from the shadow of the transporter, her traditional Ayr scarf draped over her shoulders and her glasses slightly askew. Seeing Nassrena hunched on the ground, Karina didn't say a single word. She simply sat down in the cold dirt beside her, wrapped her strong arms around Nassrena, and pulled the smaller woman close.
Nassrena buried her face against Karina’s collar, breathing in her scent. For a long, long moment, the world stopped. When they finally eased back, their faces remained inches apart. In the dim wash of the yard light, their eyes locked, both of them breathing the same frosty air, leaning in as if pulled together by an unspoken, magne—
BOOM!
A deafening, concussive blast ripped through the open bay behind them, sounding like an anti-armor munition detonating inside an oil drum. The sheer shock punched the air straight out of both drivers.
In a blind, flailing panic, Nassrena scrambled to spring backward, tangled her shins directly between Karina’s calves, and brought them both crashing down in a heap. Nassrena tried to crawl over Karina, slipped on loose gravel, kicked Karina in the hip, scrambled sideways, got caught in Karina’s pant leg, and tripped over her roughly eight times in a frantic flurry of elbows and knees.
By the time the dust cleared against a stack of spare rain tires, Karina was flat on her back, completely missing both of her slip-on shoes. Her Ayr scarf was snagged on an exposed cotter pin, ripped cleanly down the outer fringe, and her eyes were wide with sheer, murderous disbelief.
Ten or maybe twenty meters away, a thick cloud of spicy steam and gray smoke drifted out of the catering nook. A sheepish young Elizaran mechanic was sitting on the floor, covered in shredded aluminum, charred noodles, and scalding broth after attempting to boil five full bricks of instant ramen simultaneously on an unvented camping stove.
"Are you completely out of your fucking mind?!" Karina roared, hopping up onto one freezing bare foot and brandishing her shredded scarf like a war banner. "Five packs on a three-inch camping burner?! I nearly pissed myself in the dirt! If you blow up this garage before Sunday morning, I swear by the Triad I will throw you into the shipping channel!"
Nassrena, still sitting flat on her backside in the gravel, looked from the steaming, soup-splattered mechanic to Karina standing shoe-less and shaking with rage. A ragged gasp escaped her throat, followed instantly by a wave of wild, breathless, uncontrollable laughter. She fell back against the tires, wheezing and clutching her stomach, tears streaming down her face in pure, manic release.
Across the yard, Canzal came wheeling out of the command trailer like an incoming artillery shell, while Jeanne sprinted behind her brandishing a ten-pound foam extinguisher, both screaming rapid-fire Solisian commands to smother the burning burner before the Krasnovan naval base patrols or FIA marshals caught wind of the disaster.
Karina groaned, muttering a string of blistering Azynian curses as she retrieved her shoes and extended a hand down to Nassrena. Nassrena took it, still shaking with helpless giggles, the lingering ghost of grief thoroughly eclipsed by the chaotic warmth of the team around them.
