The Great Race Read online

  David was still sure that all it would accomplish was crashing them into a chunk of comet-ice.

  Better than winding up really dead due to some Carpathian-inspired programming glitch. Leif thought. He was certain that the lethal ace up Cetnik’s sleeve would be aimed at the ship most threatening to a Thurien victory. They wouldn’t want to kill all the competitors. The crew of the Onrust was therefore the most logical target for whatever Cetnik had planned.

  As a consequence, Leif’s stomach felt tight as he joined his teammates on their computer-link couches and synched in.

  A second later, he was on the bridge of the Onrust, The roiling gray of hyperspace stood frozen on the viewscreen. Ahead of them was an indistinct shape - the Thurien sword-ship. As for the rear view, no matter how hard Leif examined the viewscreen, he couldn’t find a trace of the ships trailing them.

  Alone at last, Leif thought. And they’ve got the better weaponry.

  The lights dimmed, and Hal Fosdyke’s voice asked the contestants to sound off. He sounded a litde strained tonight - perhaps he was afraid of new unpleasant surprises being sprung in this session.

  They counted down, the viewscreen came to life, and the ships were moving.

  ‘We’ve got one chance to get ahead of them,’ David muttered. ‘If we can cut our breakout time even a couple of milliseconds after theirs …’

  ‘We’ll be deeper into the system and closer to the finish buoy,’ Andy finished with him. ‘You programmed to breakout - think we can do it?’

  ‘The problem is, we don’t know how finely calibrated their breakout software is,’ Matt said. ‘I’ve got a manual override programmed in, but I can’t predict what their threshold is.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Leif said. ‘But the Corteguayans had a better system than theirs - that’s who Ludmila was sent after. So we’ve got a chance.’

  They hurtled forward on the strength of the hyperspace current, penetrating deeper into the system. As they reached the end of the breakout envelope, conversation ceased. All eyes were on the irregular blob that represented the Thurien vessel through the distorting grayness of hyperspace.

  ‘Coming close,’ Matt muttered.

  ‘Running out of time.’ That came from Andy.

  Ahead of them, flickers came from the gray blur. ‘They’ve disengaged their sails!’ Leif called.

  Matt gave a yip. ‘They’re out of here!’

  David was staring with deadly concentration at his armrest readouts. The computer ticked off the last tiny nanoseconds, then initiated the sequence. ‘Breakout!’ he announced.

  The sails deployed, sending them on a new course. The sail power down, warp power up -

  The ghostly tail of the comet they were chasing filled most of the forward viewscreen. A tiny dot in the rearview display represented the sword-ship they’d just overshot.

  ‘Andy, lay in the course,’ David ordered. ‘Maneuver speed on the sublight drive—’

  Before his words were finished, a man-sized glow appeared between the scanning and helm consoles. It grew in brightness, was surrounded by a brief corona of energy … and solidified into the figure of Commander Dominic. ‘Belay that order!’ he exclaimed, a smirk on his handsome pirate’s face.

  The crew members all stared at him. ‘What are you doing here?’ Andy burst out.

  ‘Who are you really?’ Leif wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, I’m really me,’ Lance Snowdon assured him. ‘I’m not here as the good commander, though I’m wearing the uniform. No, I’m Lance Snowdon, actor - and activist. On a little mission for the Carpathian Alliance.’

  With that, he aimed the hand-pulser he carried at Matt and pulled the trigger.

  The usual blue spark leapt from the weapon’s muzzle. It hit Matt even as he struggled from his seat.

  And then he dropped like a poleaxed steer across his console.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Snowdon assured them as he stepped round to cover them all with his weapon. ‘I just hit him with the pulser’s knockdown charge. He should be back with us in a moment or two.’

  The actors’ handsome face smiled at them. ‘That’s all it will take for the program my Carpathian friends are implanting to disqualify you.’

  He nodded at Leif. ‘I’m afraid it’s going to be your fault, Leif. You won’t quite balance the acceleration of the engines. And though you’ll keep the ship from tearing itself apart by throwing everything into the hull-stabilization fields, you’ll be too far off course to do anything as the Thuriens slip in to claim the prize.’

  The man’s ‘smooth actor’ facade was fast disappearing. His eyes burned with an ideologue’s fervor. ‘And what a prize it will be! A chance to get their hands on some of the finest computer technology available in the world, finer even than any available on the American market today!’

  ‘It won’t happen,’ Leif told him flatly. ‘We’ve already informed Net Force about that little scam.’

  ‘Then we have to fall back to Plan B,’ Snowdon said. ‘If we can’t get our hands on the technology, we’ll carry it off in our brains. Cetnik tells me his little cyber-spies are like sponges, primed to soak up everything they lay eyes on. Maybe then people in Washington will learn that you can’t declare embargoes on ideas!’

  ‘Okay,’ Andy said, ‘We’ve gone through what and how, so my question is: why?’

  ‘You mean, why turn against our glorious government? Why can’t I knuckle under to the rules set down by a handful of people who only live for power?’

  Andy shook his head. ‘Actually, I was thinking more along less lofty and more practical lines. Why are you helping a bunch of junior warlords get the technology to make more trouble in their part of the world - and maybe ours?’

  Snowdon switched back to his suave-actor persona. He even managed to look hurt. ‘The way you guys are talking, you’d think I was the bad guy in this little drama! Not so. Cetnik had an alternative program - with a fatal glitch that would leave you all dead. He really liked the propaganda possibilities - decadent American kills young people while the hard-working individuals of the Carpathian Alliance won the prize,’

  He put the hand that wasn’t holding the weapon on them over his heart. ‘You should be thanking me! I managed to convince him not to use the killer glitch when he stopped by Milos Wallenstein’s.’

  David regarded the actor steadily. ‘Doesn’t it bother you at all to help a would-be murderer?’

  That dart got through. Snowdon looked guilty for a second, but he forced his features to harden. ‘Mr Cetnik was a student with a good career ahead of him when the last war started. He and the cause he supported had to live through very harsh times - caused in part by this country. If we don’t like people like Slobodan Cetnik, we have to remember that we helped create him.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what terrorists always say. “We’re good guys - you’re making us do all these horrible things.” ‘ Andy sneered. ‘And usually we seem to cause all this trouble simply because we’re breathing.’

  Snowdon’s fingers went white on the grip of his hand-pulser.

  Leif decided to step in and distract him. ‘Tell me something. Wallenstein didn’t have a thing to do with Cetnik and his plan, did he? You were the contact who pulled everything together at the studio.’

  Snowdon looked disgusted. ‘Wallenstein is a fat old dinosaur who hasn’t contributed anything new to the show in years. I offered him scripts! I wanted to direct—’

  Luckily, the actor cut that tirade off himself.

  ‘I thought Wallenstein was committed to the anarcho-libertarian movement,’ Leif said.

  ‘He talks about it because it’s the new thing and he wants everyone to think he’s young at heart. He may even throw money around, but does he really struggle? Is he ready to act?’

  The starfield on the forward viewscreen began to shift. ‘Ah, we’ve taken over. Now, as long as there’s no extraneous input from your controls, we can bring this to an end quickly and painlessly.’

  He gave
them a superior smile. ‘Cetnik is also spooling a view of this bridge specially animated to match the ship’s actions. Needless to say, I won’t be appearing on it. Relax and enjoy the ride, guys. You’re out of the race. And if you try to complain about it after the fact, well - recordings never lie, do they?’

  Snowdon was laughing at his own witticism when another transmatter glow appeared on the already crowded bridge. It resolved itself into a completely unexpected figure - Ludmila Plavusa.

  ‘Zoltan pulled us out of the ship! It’s running on remote control!’ she cried. ‘He wouldn’t explain why we shouldn’t be in the simulation - but I heard him when he went outside, talking on a miniature phone with Mr Cetnik. The lethal trick - it’s a defect programmed into this approach! It might kill you at any minute!’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Lance Snowdon snarled, aiming the hand-pulser. ‘I’m aboard, taking care—’

  ‘Ludmila! Cut out!’ Leif yelled, hurling himself from his duty station to keep the actor from shooting her. The actor’s reaction time was abysmal. Apparently, Commander Dominic’s fights were fixed. Leif hit him squarely, forcing his weapons hand up over his head.

  As soon as the pulser couldn’t hit anybody, David shouted the emergency code that disengaged everybody from the sim.

  Leif half-flung himself from his couch out there in the real world, his body continuing on in reality with the movements he’d initiated in veeyar to fight Lance Snowdon. As he righted himself, David swooped to snatch up the laptop computer. He hit one of the emergency-maneuver hot keys.

  ‘I hope this overrides whatever they’re feeding in,’ he muttered. ‘Otherwise they’ll blow up the ship.’

  ‘At least they won’t get us with it,’ Andy said, peering into the display. ‘Looks like Snowdon and your blond friend bailed out too.’

  David enlarged the computer’s display so they could get a better look at the viewscreen. The glowing head of the comet began getting larger. ‘I think this is our program!” he said.

  ‘If we were supposed to be losing drive control, we’d be slewing around more.’

  ‘I wonder what they’re doing in C.A. Central,’ Matt said, craning his neck to get a look at the Thurien ship.

  The sword-ship abruptly changed course, arrowing towards the Onrust.

  ‘I don’t think that’s remote control,’ Andy said tightly.

  ‘Zoltan must have brought his crew back in when we broke their external feed,’ David said. He bit his lip.

  Leif could see his friend’s dilemma. Should he order them back into the Onrust? What if Cetnik managed to feed in the lethal order?

  ‘Are they close enough to fire on us?’ Leif asked.

  Matt squinted at the screens in the display. ‘Without my console readings, what you’ll get is only a good guess. But no, I don’t think they’re quite close enough.’

  Leif turned to David. ‘Try the evasive-maneuvers code. That will keep us jumping around enough so they can’t get us targeted.’

  David nodded and input the code, accepting Leif’s unspoken suggestion. We won’t go back in.

  The cometary mass danced in the forward viewscreen as the Onrust started corkscrewing in, jinking and zigging as if it were a fighter craft instead of a fragile racer.

  We may yet tear ourselves apart with these astrobatics in the midst of all that debris, Leif though.

  Red glows began showing on the image of Matt’s console.

  ‘That’s bad news,’ he said. ‘They’ve probably got a fix on us.’

  They hunched over the display, awaiting the laser blast that would end it all.

  But it didn’t come.

  ‘Ludmila!’ Leif breathed. ‘I’ll bet she’s refusing to fire!’

  The Thurien vessel finally did spit a fiery red bolt at the Onrust, but the human racer managed to skitter aside. The warning glow faded away.

  ‘They lost us!’ Matt shouted.

  ‘They may not need to shoot,’ David said, watching the comet’s image grow. ‘We’re getting awfully close. One wrong zig, and we’ll crash into that thing.’

  ‘How about the Thuriens?’ Leif asked. ‘How close are they?’

  ‘They’ve managed to overhaul us, thanks to all our jumping around,’ Matt said unhappily. ‘If they get a fix on us again, I don’t see how they can miss.’

  Leif turned to David. ‘We kept the preprogrammed command for a full stop, didn’t we?’

  David glanced at him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that’s what we should do.’

  ‘They’ll blast us!’ Matt and Andy protested.

  ‘And we can’t try Operation Blindfold unless we know where the Thuriens are in relation to the Onrust,’ Leif snapped back. ‘If we keep dancing around, we can’t aim the sails.’

  ‘I’ll have to do it one after the other,’ David muttered, more to himself than to the others.

  ‘Just pick a good direction, and wait till they’re in the right screen,’ Andy suggested.

  ‘They’re dead behind us now!’ Matt said urgently.

  David tapped a key. The comet suddenly froze in the forward viewscreen. The sword-ship surged up in the rear-view.

  He tapped another key. ‘Casting our net,’ he muttered.

  ‘Contact!’ Matt cried as the force-sails enveloped the Thurien vessel.

  ‘And zap!’ David stabbed down on another key.

  The lights on the Onrust’s bridge sank even lower than they did when the special-effects crew made its announcements.

  ‘Talk about your power drain,’ Andy tried to joke.

  No one paid attention. They were all staring at the rearview display. David had done well, but he was casting his net almost blindly.

  For a second, the Thurien sword-ship looked like a modernistic piece of jewelry, studded here and there with diamonds and rubies. But right now, those little twinkling flashes were more valuable than any gems. They represented emitters blowing out under the hail of energy David had thrown at them.

  ‘I don’t know if we blinded ‘em,’ David said, looking round at his friends with a slow grin. ‘But we sure poked a stick in their eyes!’

  It looked as though David had called it correctly. The Thurien sword-ship dumped acceleration, almost wallowing in space. Meanwhile David was moving the Onrust slowly and cautiously closer to the collection of cometary fragments.

  Leif’s heart sank as he looked at the tiny picture representing the Onrust’s forward viewscreen. The comet’s core was more like the old-fashioned view of an asteroid belt, with chunks of dirty ice ranging in size from boulders to young mountains tumbling about, sometimes grinding into one another, sometimes springing apart as radiation ionized off parts of their surfaces.

  With only that to steer by, we’re probably at least as blind as the Thuriens, Leif grimly thought. And we don’t have their options in steering the ship.

  But eyes intent and lips tight, David was evidently going to give it a try. He tapped delicately at the laptop’s keyboard, initiating various simple maneuvers at very low speed. The Onrust crept slowly toward a large rift in the jumble of cometary matter.

  From where Leif stood, it looked like an open mouth in a gargantuan face.

  Like a fly zooming into a giant’s mouthy he thought. Try not to image what happens if the giant swallows.

  Matt and Andy were trying to give what aid they could, pointing out possible dangers and offering encouragement.

  ‘You’re doing fine, buddy,’ Matt said tightly. ‘Watch that iceberg on the left …’

  ‘Past it! How’s it going?’ Andy asked.

  Leif thought David would have glared at him in frustration if he could have taken his eyes off the screen. ‘It’s like … piloting an F-18 at full throttle - oh, no! Hah! Missed me! - using a barbell for a stick,’ their captain replied in disjointed phrases.

  ‘In short, stop jogging his elbow, you guys,’ Leif warned. ‘He’s got enough on his mind right now.’

  There wa
s something on Leif’s mind, too. He forced himself to turn away from the tense little grouping around the laptop computer and dug out his wallet. Switching it to phone function, he punched in the Net Force number on his foilpack keypad.

  Captain Winters was frankly incredulous when he heard how far the Carpathian Alliance had taken its quest for a chance to pirate some new technology. But when he heard about Lance Snowdon and Slobodan Cetnik’s latest ploy - and how the evidence to prove what they’d been up to might be partially recorded on the Pinnacle lot - he put Leif on hold.

  After waiting several minutes with muted cheers or groans coming from the peanut gallery behind him, Leif heard Winters get back on the line. ‘I guess even Net Force doesn’t cut much ice when these guys are filming, or whatever they call it,’ Winters said. ‘I finally talked to some guy named Wallenstein. He sounded pretty upset when he got the whole story and put the screws to somebody - Cosgrove?’

  ‘Cosdyke?’ Leif suggested.

  ‘Yeah - anyway, they checked, and there’s definite discrepancies between what your ship was doing and what was supposed to be happening on the bridge. I’ve got our L.A. office trying to trace the tap this C.A. agent is using. If we can catch him with the goods—’

  Behind Leif, three voices rose in almost savage exultation.

  ‘What’s going on there?’

  Leif whipped round to peer at the computer screen in disbelief.

  ‘Against all odds, David just managed to tag the finish buoy,’ he replied. ‘If he can keep us alive for a few more minutes, we’ll win the race.’

  David did not have an easy time jockeying them out of the comet’s nucleus using the laptop’s keyboard rather than the sensitive controls he could’ve accessed from veeyar. On top of that, the racket of a landing helicopter tore through the flimsily constructed Casa Falldown during some of the most difficult maneuvers.

  ‘What the heck is that?’ Matt craned his neck, trying to look out the streaked window.