The 'Princess Race' had been underway for six hours already, and 'Cinderella' was still in last place, but Rafaela wasn't feeling particularly distressed. It was a relief to put the confusing strangers from the station behind her, and spaceships did not race like children in corridors, where every beat of your heart and the angle and force of each step had an immediate effect. Spaceships raced more like sailboats in a three dimensional sea.
The waves and currents that the ships moved through were not as tangible as the wind and waves that a terrestrial ship danced with, but they were quite real and measurable. The solar system was a sea of gravity, a web of overlapping waves of the most powerful force in the universe. Gravity could bend even light and pull everything that existed into its complex dance, and as planetary seas held both storms and dead zones within their limited expanses, so would the gravitational fields between the planets.
