Pilots can have a run of luck, but they'll be dead soon. Buried in backwater racing holes if not obliterated in space. Their lives are short, lived at the edge of death. One wrong step, one collision. Collisions are inevitable. Samson Ford presses a small, wooden cross against his chest and feels how different he is from other pilots, and knows he is no different at all. He thinks of their color hued, cosmetically engineered skin and looks down at his own tanned brown hands. Of their too bright, sparkling eyes and how beautiful their women are. As if they weren't human. As if none of them were, not only the pilots. None of them believed in the god. He thinks of the woman he loves and wonders if she believes. The woman who is one of them, who has secrets, who is different. He lays in his bunk on a small cargo carrier cruising slowly across the Solar System and stares through a ship's window at distant stars. When he closes his eyes he dreams of the Solar Regatta, the great race around the sun.