Kendrick "Shade" Sullivan's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Omar had been gone two days when the next rig rolled onto the lot. It was a hover racer, low and wide, painted matte black with a bent side panel. The owner was a lean woman with grease on her knuckles. She said her thruster kept cutting out at full throttle. She wanted it back by Friday. Shade nodded and quoted her a price. She paid half up front and walked to the corner to call a ride. Shade stood by the open engine bay and looked at a nest of wiring he had never seen before. He traced one harness and lost it behind a plate. He traced another and found three leads that all looked the same. On a sedan he would know. On this machine he was guessing. He picked a lead that ran to what he thought was the throttle relay and spliced it clean. He powered the rig up. The relay popped with a flat crack and smoke curled from the housing. He killed the power and pulled the switch out. The metal was black at the edges and the contacts were fused. He set it on the bench and stared at it. He had just cost himself a part he could not source and a customer he could not afford to lose. He called Omar. Omar picked up on the third ring, wind loud behind him. Shade told him what happened. Omar was quiet a moment. "You need books," he said. "Not one. All of them. Every rig you take in, you need the owner's manual and the mod notes. Racers keep journals. Some sell them when they part out. There's a stall at the Moon Bazaar that deals nothing else." He named the seller. He named the aisle. "Go tonight. I'll wire you what's left of the parts money if you're short." Shade closed the shop early. He caught a ride to the bazaar and walked under the purple glass until he found the stall. The seller was an old woman behind a table stacked with binders and spiral-bound books. Shade asked for anything on hover racers, thruster rigs, sand-runners. She pulled a hand-marked journal from a low shelf, tabbed and worn, filled with a previous owner's notes on wiring colors, relay codes, and torque values. She had eleven more like it. He bought all twelve. He carried them out in two canvas sacks and paid a driver to haul him back. He spread the journals on the bench next to the burnt switch. He found the racer's model in the third book he opened. The throttle relay was fed by the blue lead, not the red. He had spliced the wrong one. He wrote the correction into the margin in his own hand and started a fresh page at the front: every rig, every wire, logged as he learned it. The relay was dead. The customer was still owed a running machine by Friday. But he had the map now.