The Great Race Read online

  For a girl I only met a couple of days ago and have every reason to distrust^ this is getting intense, he thought.

  He also knew that he had to see her again. She had been on the verge of telling him about something her team was up to, until Cetnik turned up and scared her away. So in spite of what Comrade Cetnik wanted, Leif would have another talk with Ludmila Plavusa.

  Just as Leif was about to get up and head back to his suite, the other members of his team entered the restaurant.

  ‘There you are!’ Matt greeted him with a grin. ‘We thought you’d been kidnapped.’

  ‘Transmatted away,’ Andy added, with an appropriate oooooh-wheeee-ooooooh sound effect.

  Leif shook his head. ‘There’s something unhealthy about people who are this cheerful so early in the day.’

  Even David had to smile. ‘You look like you should have had breakfast with Mr Mustache. Cetnik’s walking around with a face like he mistook the vinegar bottle for his flask of slivovitz’

  ‘He’s afraid one of his team members is up to individual instead of mass action,’ Leif said, stealing the slogans of the radical anarcho-libertarians. He pitched his voice lower. ‘I think Ludmila was trying to warn me about something, but he turned up and scared her off.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Andy said in cheerful disbelief. ‘She’s fallen for your manly sophistication.’

  ‘I think it was more my after-shave,’ Leif replied. ‘But seriously, I think something is up.’

  Matt rolled his eyes. ‘What next? Are these guys going to start dropping antimatter mines on the ships that are too close behind them?’

  ‘What exactly did she say?’ David pressed.

  Leif didn’t know how to answer. If he gave the full story, the guys would probably blow it off. So he edited -considerably. ‘She was talking about how the Carpathian Alliance trains its kids almost from infancy to be ready for an invasion. And as they grow older, they’re taught to fight the invaders.’

  ‘Pretty cool,’ Andy said.

  Leif was reminded of Captain Winter’s comment over the phone - the one about kids thinking they’re immortal until their first firefight. Here’s one who’s never gotten past playing guns, he thought.

  ‘Anyway, the last sim she was in was combat against U.N. peacekeepers from Africa - and Americans. Since she had to be the gunner on the sword-ship, it just made me think—’

  ‘What?’ Andy jibed. ‘That she’s gonna gun us down next?’

  ‘There’s the Laragant ship ahead of us,’ Matt said.

  David concentrated on the practical problem. ‘Good figuring. Of course, she’d have to be operating the weapons system.’ Then he frowned. ‘I just wish you’d found out something a little more solid.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Leif told him. ‘I’m going to try and track her down. But for this next sequence, we’d better be ready for anything.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Andy looked back as he and the others trooped over to the buffet. ‘That should narrow down our worries a bit.’

  Leif spent the rest of the day in search of Ludmila. But she was nowhere to be found - probably in the suite reserved for Mr Cetnik and the Carpathian Alliance team. She did come out to the pool in the afternoon and ate in the restaurant that evenings but each time she was surrounded by her teammates. Zoltan, the team’s captain, developed a murderous scowl on his face whenever Leif got within twenty yards of the girl.

  Ludmila’s expression just silently asked Leif not to cause trouble.

  Defeated, Leif finally went up to his room and looked longingly at his bed. Well, maybe just a couple of minutes to rest his eyes …

  The next thing he knew, Andy was roughly shaking his shoulder. ‘Wakey-wakey! David said you looked so sweet there, zonking off, he didn’t have the heart to disturb you. But we’re supposed to be driving over to the studio this evening, and that means we’ve got to be starting soon.’

  Leif flopped around on the bedspread for a moment. Dropping off had been a bad idea. He felt almost drunk -or drugged. Struggling to his feet, he shambled off to the bathroom to throw cold water in his face.

  He felt a little better as they drove over to the studio. But he was still clumsy - his hands felt as if they were a size too large.

  Wonderful, he thought. Just wonderful Tonight we’ve got to do the fan dance with our force-sails, and I’m bumping into things like a stumblebum. The proposed scene would be a real test for the racers’ engineers. They’d have to transfer in hyperspace from the current they were riding to another current that would taken them on their way more quickly. Those who succeeded would build up a nearly unbeatable lead. Those with engineers who were all thumbs might as well have stayed home.

  When they arrived at Casa Falldown, Leif went straight to the bathroom for more cold water on the face. He also let it nm over his wrists.

  Pull yourself together, he told himself sternly. Your mom is a ballet dancer. You can handle this.

  Then he knocked over the pile of paper napkins left on the basin in place of towels.

  ‘Glad you could make it,’ Andy said when Leif joined the team in its little office. They were already set in their computer-link couches. ‘What happened? You trip over one of the bundles of wires?’

  Leif pushed back the stab of annoyance as he dropped into his couch. Tm here now/ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  A moment after synching in, he was on the bridge of the Onrust.

  David spun round his command chair to look at him. ‘You okay, Leif?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Leif answered. ‘But the next time we do this, don’t let me nap so close to show time.’

  He felt more and more with it as the time before the scene ticked away.

  Adrenaline, he thought, still the world’s best natural fog-cutter.

  Leif examined the situation frozen on the forward view-screen. Two vessels - the Thurien ship like a sharp dagger and the graceful Laragant quadship - hung before them, the soap-bubble shimmer of their force-sails extended to their full glory. Shortly ahead, however, the current they were following kinked, and the river of force moved away at an angle from the planet that was their target.

  But there was another current ahead and to the right, lost in the roiling grayness of hyperspace, that could take a vessel to their destination even faster than they were moving now. The trick was to hit the sharp turn, twist the sails to throw them off the current at the correct angle, shift power from the sails to scanning so they could find their next ride, and then deploy the sails to catch that current.

  Simple. Ninety-seven things to do in almost as little time as it took to describe them. Of course, they were programmed into the computer, so that all he had to do was hit a button at the right time. Given that every ship would be trying to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same place, they’d left the initiation of the sequence under manual control. Surely he could manage to push that button at the right time, even in his present state …

  Leif ran damp palms down the seams of his uniform trousers. Handsy don’t fail me now.

  The lights dimmed, and Hal Fosdyke asked the ship’s captains to sound off. Then he announced the countdown … and the world on the viewscreen came to life again.

  Ahead of them, the Thurien sword-ship suddenly slewed round, her force-fields flickering wildly as they moved in a complex pattern to make the most of the current’s momentimi.

  Then came the Laragants, moving in the same intricate dance.

  ‘Engineering?’ David asked.

  ‘Ready,’ Leif replied.

  ‘We’re coming up,’ both Matt and Andy chorused, eyes flicking from their consoles to the viewscreen. Leif studied his own readouts, his fingers ready to dance across the necessary controls.

  ‘Deploy!’ David ordered.

  ‘Deploying.’ Leif ran the program to haul them halfway through the turn and then onto their own private parabola through the hyper-dimensions. His eyes were only on his displays^ monitoring the exact stresses and speeds being exerted
on each sail, his fingers making minute adjustments to their trim.

  Only when they were fully free of the current, the sails down and the power now transferred to Scanning, did he look at the viewscreen again. ‘Are we on course’ he asked.

  Andy didn’t answer. He was staring at the sword-ship ahead of them. The sword-ship whose sails hadn’t gone down. Instead, they began to surge and flare, giant auroras rippling through the spectrum.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Matt asked. ‘Some kind of malfunction?’

  ‘Engineering?’ David asked.

  ‘It’s like no configuration I’ve ever seen,’ Leif began.

  As if to underscore his words, the grossly overblown sails began increasing in brightness, an eye-searing chromatic display that began to pulsate. No. It was blinking. Blinking at an incredibly fast pace, but definitely blinking. As he tried to shield his eyes, his arm seemed to rise in the choppy motion of bad stop-motion animation. Like the old-time rock bands and their strobe lights …

  A queasy feeling expanded in his gut, as if the floor beneath his feet were sliding off at a steep angle. Leif found himself clinging to his console as the only solid rock in a suddenly dizzy universe.

  What was going on?

  Suddenly Leif remembered a party, an older gentleman telling his father about early computer animation. A flat-screen Japanese TV show that had been pulled off the air well before the turn of the century because the strobe effects in the computerized explosions had caused seizures very much like epilepsy. But every holo and veeyar system in the world had safeguards to keep it from happening again. So what was going on here? No telling, only that it was happening again, safeguards or no.

  ‘Kill the screens!’ Leif screamed. ‘Matt!’

  Leif was trying not to look at the blazing spectacle winking away at him. But the impact seemed even able to penetrate his closed eyelids.

  Leif lurched from his station, grabbing for the command chair to keep upright. David lay half-slumped over, his whole body quivering.

  Matt was out, too. Andy was trying to get up, but he couldn’t seem to get his muscles to work together.

  Facing the empty space between David’s chair and Matt’s was like looking down the Grand Canyon, a horrifying, long drop that made Leif’s stomach and brain spin with vertigo. He took each step with a wooden clomping tread. It felt as if somebody had greased the soles of his shoes. Every time he moved a foot, he was sure it was going to slide out from under him. And if he fell, he knew he’d never get up.

  Somehow, he made it to Matt’s workstation. His friend was lolling over the console. Leif seized his shoulder and nearly threw himself down on the floor trying to move Matt away.

  Don’t let me miss, he silently begged.

  His finger came down on the correct contact. The sensory barrage lifted, as if someone had stopped beating him over the head with the world’s largest, toughest water balloon.

  The room was silent, except for someone making an awful choking sound deep in his throat. At last Leif realized that person was himself.

  Matt came round, wiping a smear of drool from his chin. ‘Wh-what was that?’ he croaked.

  ‘Tell you later.’ Leif’s voice wasn’t that much better. ‘But there’s no way it should have been able to happen. Can you put up the schematic view rather than the real image?’

  On the show, the scanners could deliver different kinds of displays. When they were damaged, or there was spatial interference, or just because the writers wanted them to, the screens could show a radar-type image.

  There was certainly enough interference out there now, Leif told himself. Any more and it would have fried my brain.

  The little blips crawling across the phosphorescent background told the story. The sword-ship, no longer displaying the glorious wings of death in this screen format, was smoothly following the arc of its chosen orbit to catch the next hyperspace current. So was the Onrust.

  But the Laragant ship was going astray. Perhaps the sickening stroboscopic beat had already affected the vessel’s engineer as they shot off their old current. Maybe suddenly spastic hands had made a disastrous maladjustment. The Laragants were adrift. They’d never catch the new current. They’d have to drop out of hyperspace and find a new current that would take them where they wanted to go. Unless they found that current fast, they were out of the race.

  The ships behind them were in even worse shape. A stylized cloud expanded where ships four and five should be. They’d apparently collided. Some were still trying to make the jump. Others had failed even to leave the first current. They were being drawn around the sharp turn, dragged along on an expensive detour.

  Leif had managed to stumble back to Davids who was trying to push himself up. He stared at the screen. ‘Can we still make it?’

  Even as they watched, the Thurien blip suddenly jerked, caught in the new current.

  ‘They can’t be screwing around with the sails now,’ Leif said. At least, he hoped so.

  Matt tried the real-time image, his hand poised to snap them back to schematic if that lethal pulse was still beating at them.

  No. Leif lurched to his action station. They still might make it…

  ‘Spotted the current,’ Matt gasped. A faint glow on the screen indicated their target.

  ‘Conjunction - five seconds,’ Andy said from the helm.

  ‘Engineering?’ The single word seemed to cost David a mighty effort. He listed in his chair afterwards.

  ‘Can do,’ Leif said, resuming his station.

  ‘Deploy!’ David’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Deploying.’ Leif punched in the start of the sequence, and the force-sails sprang into being.

  If they catch, we’re on our way. Otherwise … there was no hope he’d be able to tweak the deployment as fast as he needed to in his current shape.

  They swung round, following the Thurien vessel at the same high speed.

  Leif sagged against his console. They’d done it!

  The scene on the viewscreen suddenly froze. No blinking of lights, no word of warning.

  A voice did speak, but it didn’t belong to Hal Fosdyke. ‘Simulation will cease in five seconds. Please disengage. Simulation will cease in four seconds.’

  The last thing they needed after this was to go through a systems crash. Leif and his friends cut their connections … and found themselves in bedlam.

  Horrible, bubbling screams echoed down the halls. The sound - and smell - of someone losing their lunch assailed them. There were thumps, and bumps - and the ominous sound of someone’s feet drumming on the floor.

  Leif pushed himself off the computer-link couch and moved to the door. He moved about as fast as if he were carrying the couch on his back.

  The damage from the pulsing flare hadn’t been confined to their virtual selves. It had apparendy attacked the senses and nerves of all the synched-in racers!

  It could be worse, Leif realized. Fosdyke and his crew had the scene up in holo, watching it unfold and marking angles of presentation. Would the display version of those murderous wings have the same effect?

  Sirens howled in the distance as the Net Force Explorers picked their way around the cable-strewn floors of Casa Falldown. The name seemed horribly appropriate as they moved shakily into other offices to offer what help they could. Almost everybody in the building had fallen down - and most of them couldn’t get up.

  Leif stood in the blessed darkness outside, taking deep breaths of the freshest air Los Angeles had to offer. His head still ached, and an occasional tremor would hit his hands, but he felt considerably better than he had. The boys had waved in the first paramedics to arrive - there were much more serious cases in need of aid still inside.

  But as the situation calmed down, he and his friends had submitted to examinations and gotten at least conditional bills of health.

  They they’d hiked over to the administration building to call for a cab. No way were they going back into the house of horrors that was
now Casa Falldown.

  Most of the contestants were on their way to the hospital. A stream of stretchers was also coming out of the special-effects building, where Hal Fosdyke and his people had indeed been felled.

  The biggest surprise came as Leif and his friends faced the office building. Several stretchers came out of the main entrance, surrounded by anxious paramedics.

  The twitching, bulky form on the lead gurney was unmistakable.

  It was Milos Wallenstein!

  Chapter Eighteen

  The producer had the most paramedics of any patient Leif had seen, and he didn’t think they were treating Wallenstein by the pound.

  Of course, a cynical voice whispered in the back of his head, maybe he’s getting the Hollywood producer treatment. Or maybe some of the paramedics are Fronties.

  But one of the emergency medics looked very worried as he checked the still-quivering fat man. ‘He’s having a particularly bad reaction.’

  Leif, David, and Andy looked at one another. ‘Maybe it’s the shaking-up my brain got a little earlier,’ Andy said, ‘but this is making less and less sense to me.’

  ‘To us too, I think,’ Leif said. ‘Right now, I don’t want to discuss it. I don’t even want to think about it.’

  David nodded, ‘bed sounds better and better to me.’

  Matt rejoined them, saying that he’d arranged for the cab to pick them up at the main gate. They walked down in silence, too drained to talk about anything.

  A new problem confronted them before they could get some rest, however. The media had gotten wind of some sort of disaster at Pinnacle Studios, and had turned out like a flock of vultures. News photographers clustered across the street, snapping shots of police cars entering and ambulances leaving. The emergency vehicles could scarcely move because of the news vans pulling up - both local stations and national holo-nets.

  Tiredly, Leif turned to Matt. ‘Do you remember the name of that cab company the receptionist called? Maybe we can divert it to another gate.’

  They arrived back at the hotel like thieves in the night, heading straight to their suite - and discovering an urgent call from Captain Winters.