Only an Idiot…

Inferno XTR.

Four-hundred eighty pounds. 2.7 meters long. 0-100 in 1.2 seconds. Quantum-fusion powered. Plasma-boosted cylinder operation. KaMeLeone mesh networked along the cherry red chassis bent optics on the chase while the solChroma geist-intuitive underglow drew stares on the street. Bespoke gyroscopic weight redistribution systems ensured up was always up, even when it wasn’t, and the whisper-silent engine emission reduced all noise to zero and turned it back up again with just a flick of the eyes. Predictive LAI assessed trajectory, shields, torque, speed, everything and anything to hold momentum and keep course collision-free. Autonomous operation, while available, was permanently suspended via USBKill to prevent ALEPH from locking the controls.

Fuel-free. Drag-free. Inertia-free. Weapons-free. Totally free.

Two wheels. One rider.

Aragoto.

Though, not wholly accurate as of a few hours ago. Two riders, tonight. Lightweight, but enough to still throw off years of practiced perfection in every possible category. Pain in the ass in normal circumstances, but these were different. Shou had a mission. The road they needed him to drive wasn’t a four-lane highway or a lonely mountain road or, hell, even a subway track, but a maintenance tunnel buried deep in the guts of a space station, tube barely wide enough for a pedestrian much less a motorcycle with two riders. And the security drones in hot pursuit, well, they had the advantage—ripoff Roadbots repurposed from old O-12 castoffs, dumpster dove and spitshined enough for the corpos to pitch them as ‘sewer sharks.’

And they were armed, too. Marksman rifles. The PanO kind. Refurbished, though, with the quality and propellant of their projectiles reduced to match the asteroid miners’ dwindling budget. It’d be no issue for any Aragoto’s armored jacket to deflect a few shots and leave only bruises behind. After all, only an idiot would obsessively shave down their combat armor to push their bike’s max speed. Only a real fuckin’ idiot would cut holes in the polymer weave and patch them up with a badass rocker of twin wings spreading out of the kanji for Shou, which coincidentally also meant ‘soar.’

At least he had a Ryuken in the way.

Two pops from down the tunnel behind them transformed into two spark-bursts on the steel ahead. Anezaki shouted behind him, her arms tight as a vice around his midsection and only getting tighter. Without looking, Shou knew her eyes were crushed tight, body tense as a rail on the back of his Inferno XTR. All she needed to complete the image was to open those perfect lips of hers and say—

“Please be careful!” Anezaki shouted, voice barely winning over the scream of the recycled air whipping past their heads. “You’re going—you’re going too fast!”

Ahead, a chunk of the maintenance tunnel ignited with blue light. “It goes faster.”

“Wait,” she gasped. “There’s a turn, a turn! Ahead! Wait, wait, it’s—”

Whatever remaining protestations she had drowned out under the rev of the engine. A cocktail of oil and burnt metal shot up his nose to the back of his throat from the machine under his legs. Stress on the engine. Routine. Nothing to worry about. And when gaslighting himself didn’t work, he accelerated harder and tried apathy, instead.

The laser grid closed around the bulkhead, but they were already past it. A sharp corner necessitated a tight lean, helmet’s visor so close to the floor panels he could count the screws in each grating section. Anezaki had no concept of balance and leaned too fast, too far, and it was everything Shou could do to play counterweight and keep them on their wheels.

She pounded a fist into his back. “You’re going to kill us!”

“Close calls are part of the fun,” he said. “If the secu-drones catch up, you think they’ll be gentle? We just bombed some high-value organics shipment.”

If it was possible to stiffen worse, she did. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right, right, secret, your-eyes-only, disavow—whatever. Say whatever you want, lady. That container was huge, and it had more cryogenics and life support systems than most cargo holds!  I have a brain. I can put two and two together.”

“We’ll see how much brain you have when it’s painting the walls of this corridor because you won’t slow down.”

“That’s crazy,” Shou said, and hit the next turn just as fast.

Three more spark showers erupted ahead, bathing Anezaki’s black hair in golden lights. Judging by the motion, she was looking back now. From the oscillating planes of light under her ODD—approximately near her hip—she unlimbered her SMG.

“At this speed, shooting back’s basically impossible,” Shou advised. “Think long and hard about what kind of physical evidence you’re leaving.”

Anezaki paused. The SMG went back in its holster. “Great advice, for a criminal.”

“So says the terrorist,” Shou chuckled. “Least I ain’t got aspersions ’bout what I am.”

“I am not a terrorist,” she insisted. “I am a freedom fighter.”

“Then so am I,” he replied, and hit the next corner so hard the rear tire fishtailed up the wall.

From his peripheral vision, a map of networked lines and intersecting corridors began unfolding out until it dominated the majority of his left eye. His geist, an animated manga panel named Trueno, quickly began to swipe and close off routes. Security grates activating. Bulwarks shutting. Only a few paths remained and only one was suicidal enough to stay open.

“We’re taking a shortcut,” Shou said. “Hold on.”

Anezaki scoffed. “Like I haven’t been—”

Going from 100 to 0 in 1.2 was much different than the opposite. Momentum carried them up onto the front wheel, and a twist of the hips was all that the Inferno needed to register the change in dynamic balance and keep them from tipping. A heartbeat later, they were on two wheels again facing the other direction, engine screaming as it fought to pull back to max speed.

The Roadboat ahead roared into vision, its headlight bearing down on them, and Shou closed his eyes.

From here until they hit the turn he’d missed, nothing he did mattered. At these speeds, human perception failed. Wired reflexes and improved human baselines didn’t matter—the human brain just wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t skilled enough, wasn’t specialized enough to see something approaching dead-on and react with any certainty. Maybe a Sin Eater could do it. Maybe the greatest busozoku who ever lived, Asuka Kisaragi, maybe she could do it. But not him.

He had to do it on pure lizard instinct alone.

And so that’s how it was. Sound and light and pressure, wind, speed, timing, the pounding of Anezaki’s heart through her ribcage into his spine, minute adjustments in pineal gland output leading to endocrine imbalance, the beginning of the Molotov cocktail that was adrenaline in his nervous system, the twitch of his hand and his mouth and then—

The Inferno went up the wall, threading the support structures like slalom poles on a mountain. The Roadbot slammed its brakes, turning sideways and transmuting from a motorcycle into a machine soldier. Its eyes locked on him. Its hand rose. Shou leaned his head left, but three fingers still skimmed his helmet’s surface and the sudden drag ripped it from his face. And then they were on the ground again, gravity holding them to the seat of his Inferno XTR, taking the last exit toward extraction.

Anezaki listed to one side. Shou gripped her around his back, kept her in her seat. Blood ran up her face, propelled by momentum. Her nose had been knocked by his helmet when the Roadbot had stripped it. She was unconscious. Maybe dead. Less weight would speed his escape, make cornering easier, give him a better chance. Shou weighed it and chose to hold on. He was a bastard, but not that kind of bastard, not today.

Up ahead, the final bulwark screamed shut an instant after the light trails of his motorcycle passed through. The tunnel pitched upwards, ascending, and at its end a heavy grate was all that stood between him and the hangar beyond. Below, the waiting shape of a low-orbit cruiser with its engines hot waited, ready to make good on their escape. Beyond it, a network of latticed magnetic fields kept open space from sucking the oxygen from the hangar.

Shoulder shaking, Anezaki limp against his back, Shou accelerated. More. More. Trueno tried to limit him, and he dismissed it, overclocking his bike. The smell of metal and oil mixed together and beneath his legs came licks of flame, ion-blue as the quantum-fusion powered engine caught fire from exertion. Eyes barely open, sweat freezing against his forehead, he lifted the wheel of his Inferno to strike the grate and prayed.

The impact wiped him out. Sent him sprawling out of the maintenance tunnel. Wheels turning, spinning in mid-air, he overshot the cruiser. Anezaki lolled like a hurled doll. He might’ve screamed. She definitely didn’t. A thousand pieces of his broken Inferno shot past him like confetti, aimed out toward the stars, spinning wild into the vacuum of empty space—

Anezaki pitched to one side and hung in midair, arrested by her combat armor stuck in the magnetic field. Shou did, too, but not as swiftly—not as decisively. Where Anezaki floated, he began to sink, legs kicking futilely over the vast emptiness below.

Only an idiot would’ve pushed his top speed by 0.1kph by cutting all the metal out of his uniform.