Alright, here we go guys!

This chapter is gonna be a little bit rushed, but I wasn't sure how to pick up on the story after the last chapter ended. Not only this, but the swoop race proved difficult to set the right mood in (yeah, that part took me about an hour of typing, downing an energy drink and listening to some hardcore rock) so I hope this works out okay!

Another thing: the reviews I receive for the story are delayed or something sometimes, so if I don't respond, please don't take it the wrong way. Just know the chapter is dedicated to you (because this seems to be my little tradition now).

And also, I just wanna thank you guys for sticking with me this far - Taris should be over within these next few chapters, so just hang in there for me. :)

Okay, now: READY, SET...READ!

CHAPTER SEVEN

one day later...

In the cockpit, Fallon sat alone––there was only room enough for one person.

For one person who's about to die, maybe, he thought grimly, trying to steady his heart and familiarize himself to the feel of the controls around him. Gods, all the speed, all the power, that would be shortly at his merely-human fingertips...

Winning the race felt like one in a million already, but actually surviving––

He pictured the swoop bike splintering into a fiery wash of superheated rocket fuel––saw the metal struts around him collapse into fire, swallowing his life and maybe even the fate of the galaxy that hung on his shoulders like an invisible mass far beyond his mortal strength––and a tremble began in his hands, threatening to diffuse into full-blown shakes. He felt faint.

He closed his eyes. Behind them he saw the Commander. Not Onasi, but Shan––back where she was waiting just outside the reach of the racer pits, beyond the slick curves of the raceway, her eyes fluttering against her delicate face, shackled, caged––

Just the thought of the bars that imprisoned her made Fallon's heart burst into a starfire of rage, something he knew wouldn't make his mind any clearer now, but something he couldn't quite control, either.

He sighed shakily. At least she's still alive...

The cockpit speakers crackled. Even through all the static he could hear a grim frown in the Commander's––Carth's–– voice. "I've got your time to beat––please tell me they at least showed you the ropes to that scrap-machine."

Fallon smiled tightly and fixed his eyes on the raceway that curved out in front of him. "Yeah, they covered most of the bases. I've got an idea of what I'm doing here––" Hopefully. "I just gotta be careful and switch the gears when the engines get too hot––the prototype..."

He shook his head to himself as Gadon Thek's words wound on replay in his head:

The accelerator isn't stable; there's a good chance it could explode during the race...

Fallon's smile thinned. He supposed it was to be expected, for Gadon to let him face the dangers, rather than risk one of his own racers. But still...

The picture of the swoop walls around him exploding lapsed through his mind.

"This is ridiculous."

Fallon sighed. Got that right, Commander. "It's our best option, unless you can break Shan free and escape, what with all these gangs around..." He swept his eyes toward the stadium, over the hundreds of alien faces who watched, anticipating.

The comm speakers did not reciprocate.

"I didn't think so." Fallon returned to the controls, hesitantly placing his hands on the yokes. "So what's the time to beat, Commander?"

"...thirty-two point ten seconds."

Fallon almost choked. Seconds––

"Seconds?" he echoed, a little louder than intended.

"That's correct."

Before he could reply, the aerial displays at the tunnel ceiling flashed a yellow so harsh Fallon grimaced. His mouth compressed to a grim straight line.

"Wish me luck, Commander." he said, grasping the handles on the canopy overhead and dragging it shut, watching condensation vaporize as the seals pressed together with a tight hiss. He slipped his arms through the harnesses ganged into his seat and settled his hands on the controls again, trying to force down the trembling that racked his body and burned his nerves.

He couldn't turn back––he was committed now. He could do this. He could win this...

He had to.

He glanced through curve of the canopy, toward the pits. Commander Shan, I'm no Jedi, but this would be a wonderful time to wake yourself up...

.::.

What happened on the track was a dream.

A dream of power. A dream of bliss.

A dream where, purely, no worry ran in his veins, where no living panic sprang for him behind every corner.

Where the fears that chewed away at his heart in the night were vaporized to dust and blown aft, and blasted away in the wash of his sublights faster than the eye could follow.

Here there was only thrill.

All at once, for once, Fallon felt as one.

He eased a little more power into the thrusters, banking the craft that had become his body down a narrow left-hand curve. He didn't hear the seconds that must have been ticking away inside his head. He didn't feel the weight of some invisible, impossible destiny crushing the bones between his shoulders, didn't see the dance of emerald fire against a burning red hell––those were caught in the speed draft, too.

He only felt the present. Only heard the power-washed roar of the engines and the deep hum of whiplashing repulsors, only felt the vehicle vibrating in a song of life and power that melted into his skin and scraped against his bones as he shot past the raceway obstacles, flying, the speed of light itself––

A slow grin hatched on his face as he leaned into a curve; he ramped up the power even further.

One swift shove of the thruster bars straightened the craft, and he accelerated, his hands riding the yokes, his heart beating with the pulses of fissioned life, talking to mysterious whispers in the stream-fusion compounds that rode the wind behind him. It was as if the roaring engines themselves held his mind and his soul together in binders of pure, plasma-integrated energy.

Again the scream of wind over the aerodynamics of the bike's exterior grooves became only sweet, pure music, speaking to him through sounds and feelings––

More than once, he swore he could sense––no, see––every curve, every obstacle, of the raceway before he rocketed around it.

The past and the future were caught behind him, and he was living for the moment.

Only a dream, he reminded himself in some corner of his mind that he was disgusted with, at least for the moment.

Only a dream...

.::.

...in the timeless, lightless ocean, the dragon whispered to her...

Somewhere outside the murky depths that fogged her mind like frozen air against a translucent canopy, the dragon was stirring––

No...

No, the dragon was near. He was close by.

Too close for comfort.

Startled, she pressed herself to move faster, reaching into the Force while her mind's eye followed the circuitry paths in the disruptor clasped around her neck. From what little strand of the Force she'd grasped, she managed to shed a hundred layers of boundaries that had enveloped her conscious––and from that one small strand, she'd expanded to the billions of tiny cilia-like fibers of the Force that would brush power through her system for infinity and on.

Now it was just her mind that slowed her, sluggish and torpid, dulling her senses until they were ugly even to herself.

As she her mind morphed the fog into Force-hands that dragged along microcircuitry panels, some part of her returned to the present, outside the murk, where her ears pricked nervously––

Applause...?

She recalled, vaguely, something about a swoop race...

A voice breached the mind's lightless ocean, pulsing from high pitches to low, as if amplified from ruined speakers deep underwater. She could just hardly make out––

"Put your hands together and show your... For one of the most daring riders this track has ever..."

What the voice announced next was something about a premier rider and a great gory––no, glory––brought to some gang. Despite the urgency of her predicament, her heart sank. Oh, this is gonna be bad...

And then the voice mentioned one name, in particular, that caused her heart to seethe and her brain to smoke on embers she'd been saving up for a long, incoherent but certainly long, time.

Brejek.

Her fingers twitched at her side, just a microscopic movement, and then curled into fists. Oh, this would definitely end badly. Very badly, indeed...

"People––hear me!"

Oh, kriff.

"...before I present the so-called champion of the Beks with their prize..."

...something about cheating? She frowned: what in the thousand hells was a prototype accelerator?

A new voice, this one polished and resonantly basso, sent shivers coiling down into the base of her spine and whispers knocking through the chambers of her heart. Her frown deepened when she heard Brejek's next words––

"...because of this Hidden Bek treachery, I'm withdrawing the Vulkar's share of the victory prize!"

Belatedly, some fuzzy component of her mind clicked into a receptor, and the culmination that she was the prize flooded through––

Oh, kriff no.

She drilled deeper into the Force with so much pressure she thought she might scream, her mental search-vehicle roaring over the microcircuitry that was reflected onto the stormy surface of her brain, invading the disruptor's computerized recesses beneath its scuffed chrome shell––

And then she spotted it, gleaming likes a thousand jewels strewn under a Hurikane sunset. She reigned herself to a halt and swung down toward one singular logic organ of silicon transputers that would reverse the blasted mechanism entirely––

With the right twist of her mind, the disruptor popped open. She barely heard it clatter to the floor as a reserved fist of the Force erupted through her fingertips and sent the bars before her flying off their hinges. Words poured from her lips:

"I might have something to say about that, Brejek."

.::.