Watching from Pit Lane, Jason just stared at the scene with his mouth agape, devastated.
Beside him, the Bug shook his head. He whispered something in Jason’s ear.
Jason snuffed a laugh. ‘Thanks, man. Unfortunately, you’re not the Principal of the Race School.’
Then he spun on his heel and went back to their pit bay to load up the Argonaut.
The Bug scurried after him.
When they got back to their bay, they were surprised to find that someone was already there.
Scott Syracuse was standing in the doorway to their pit bay. He was leaning inside it, peering up at the Argonaut‘s damaged tail section.
‘Er…hi there. Can I help you?’ Jason said.
Syracuse turned, leaning on his cane. He levelled his cool gaze at Jason. ‘Master Chaser, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘An appropriate name for you based on today’s effort, don’t you think? Scott Syracuse. I’m here with Professor LeClerq. I teach with him at the Race School.’
‘I know who you are, sir. I have your bubble gum card.’ Jason felt stupid as soon as he said it.
Syracuse nodded at the Argonaut. ‘Your steering rudder’s broken.’
‘Yeah. I got hit by some debris from that crazy kid who tried to pull a 9-G banking turn.’
‘When did that happen?’
‘About nine minutes in.’
Syracuse stopped, turned abruptly.
‘Nine minutes in? So how did you steer after that? Thrusters?’
‘Yep.’
‘Let me get this straight. You lost your steering nine minutes into the race. But you continued on anyway, steering with your pedals instead of your steering wheel.’
‘That’s right, sir.’
Syracuse nodded slowly. ‘I wondered…’
Then he looked directly at Jason. ‘I’ve got another question for you. You started the race differently to everyone else - you headed out for the gates on the western side of the course while most of the others went north-east. Then you got hit and changed your race-plan.’
Syracuse pulled a map of the course from his back pocket. On it were little markers depicting all of the 250 gates on the course.
‘Can you tell me what your original plan was?’
Jason swapped a glance with the Bug. ‘What do you say, Bug?’
The Bug nodded - eyeing Syracuse warily.
Jason said, ‘My little brother here does our navigating. He’s the guy who plotted our course today. We call him the ‘Bug.’
Syracuse offered the map for the Bug to take.
The Bug stepped behind Jason.
Jason took the map instead. ‘He’s a little shy with people he doesn’t know.’
Jason handed the map to his brother, who then quickly - and expertly - drew their race-plan on it. He handed the map back to Jason who passed it on to Syracuse.
Syracuse stared at the map for a long moment. Then he did a strange thing. He pulled out another map of the course, and compared the two. Jason saw that this other map also had markings on it, showing someone else’s race-plan.
At last, Syracuse looked up, and gazed closely at Jason and the Bug, as if he were assessing them very, very carefully.
He held up their race-plan.
‘May I keep this?’
‘Sure,’ Jason shrugged.
Scott Syracuse pursed his lips. ‘Jason Chaser, hover car racer. It’s got a nice ring to it. Farewell to you both.’
Jason and the Bug arrived back home in Hall’s Creek around seven that evening, with the Argonaut strapped to a trailer behind their dusty old Toyota hover-wagon.
Hall’s Creek was a little desert town in the far northern reaches of Western Australia. The exact middle of nowhere, Jason liked to say.
The lights were on in the farmhouse when they arrived, and dinner was on the table when they walked in.
‘Oh, my boys! My boys!’ Martha Chaser cried, running to the door to greet them. ‘Jason! We saw it all on the television: that silly boy who crashed right in front of you! Are you both all right?’
She swept the Bug up into her arms, engulfing him in her wide apron-covered frame. ‘You didn’t hurt my little Doodlebug, did you?’
The Bug almost disappeared in her embrace. He seemed very content in her arms.
‘He’s okay,’ Jason said, taking a seat at the table. ‘Only thing he suffered was the humiliation of coming dead last in front of Jean-Pierre LeClerq.’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind, mum.’
Just then, their father, Henry Chaser, came into the kitchen, his overalls caked with dust from a day’s work on the station.
‘Well, hey there! The racers return! Good racing today, sons. Tough call with that kid who banged up your tail.’
‘Damn idiot mangled our steering,’ Jason groaned as he wolfed down some mashed potato. ‘Wrong place, wrong time, I guess.’
‘Oh, no,’ Henry said, smiling. ‘No, no, no, no. You lost your steering, Jason. You put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Now, Henry, leave them be…’ Martha rolled her eyes. Her husband was a hover car racing enthusiast. He watched it on the television all the time, loved to analyse it - the classic couch coach. It was he who had introduced the boys to mini-cart racing in the back paddock at the ages of five and three.
Jason took the bait. ‘No way, Dad! I didn’t put myself in the wrong place. It was just plain bad luck…’
‘No it wasn’t,’ Henry said. ‘It was racing. I think this was a good lesson for you both. Racing not only involves beating the other top contenders - it also involves avoiding those who aren’t as talented as you are.
‘Sometimes racing isn’t fair, Jason. Sometimes you can do everything right in a race and still not win. Hell, I remember once in the Sydney Classic, the leader was ahead by two whole laps and then he got sideswiped by a tail-ender coming out of the pits. Just like that, he was out of the race - ‘
The doorbell rang.
Henry Chaser got up, didn’t stop talking. ‘…Guy was way out in front and he just got nailed by this stupid rookie. God, what was his name? Hell of a driver, he was. Young fella. Got wiped out a couple of years ago. Ah, that’s it, it was…’
He opened the door. And remembered. He turned back inside. ‘…Syracuse! That’s who it was. Scott Syracuse.’
He turned to face their visitor.
Scott Syracuse stood in the doorway. Tall and formal.
Henry Chaser almost swallowed his own tongue.
‘Oh. My. Goodness,’ Henry stammered. ‘You’re… you’re…’
‘Good evening, sir. My name’s Scott Syracuse. I met your sons at the race today.’
‘Ah…ye - yes,’ Henry Chaser said.
Jason stood up. ‘Mr Syracuse? What are you doing here?’
Scott Syracuse remained in the doorway. ‘I came to ask you a question, young Master Chaser. Oh, and your brother, too.’
‘Yeah…’
‘I was rather taken with the way you drove today, Master Chaser. With your feet and with your heart. I believe that with the proper training, your skills could be sculpted into something very special. I also ran your little brother’s race-plan through a professional course-plotting program on a computer. His race-plan was 97% efficient. Almost the optimal plan for that course. But you guys didn’t receive the gate layout until two minutes before race-time. Your little brother formulated that race-plan in the space of two minutes in his head. That’s impressive.
‘In short, I think you two make quite a team. Nobody else caught my eye today, but you two did. And now that I work at the Race School in Tasmania…’
Jason felt his heart beating faster. ‘Yes…’
‘Master Chaser,’ Syracuse said. ‘Would you and your brother like to come and study at the International Race School under my supervision?’
Jason’s eyes went wide.
He spun to face his mother. Her eyes were tearing up.
He turned to the Bug. The Bug’s face was a mask. He slowly kicked back his chair and came over to Jason, stood on his tiptoes and whispered something in Jason’s ear.
Jason smiled.
‘What did he say?’ Syracuse asked.
Jason said, ‘He says your race computer must be broken. His race-plan was perfect. Then he said, “When do we leave?”’
PART II: RACE SCHOOL
CHAPTER ONE
THE INTERNATIONAL RACE SCHOOL
HOBART, TASMANIA
Dangling off the bottom of Australia is a large island shaped like an upside-down triangle
Once known by the far more intimidating name of Van Dieman’s Land, it is now simply called Tasmania.
It is a rugged land, tough and forbidding. It features jagged coastal cliffs, ancient rainforests and a winding network of long open highways. Dotted around its many peninsulas are the grim sandstone remains of British prisons built in the 19th century - Port Arthur, Sarah Island. Names you didn’t want to hear if you were a 19th century criminal.
Once Tasmania was the end of the world. Now, it was just a pleasant two-hour hover-liner cruise from Sydney.
Jason Chaser stood on the deck of the liner as it sailed up the Derwent River, and beheld modern Hobart.
With its elegant mix of the very old and the very new, Hobart had become one of the world’s hippest cities. Two-hundred-year-old sandstone warehouses blended beautifully with modern silver-and-glass skyscrapers and swooping titanium bridges over the river.
Through a quirk of fate, the entire island was owned by the International Race School, making it the single largest privately owned plot of land in the world.
Back in the early 2000s, the Australian state of Tasmania had been in decline, its population both aging and dwindling. When the population fell below 50,000 people, the Australian Government took the extraordinary step of privatising the entire island. Tasmania was bought by an oil-and-gas company that never saw hover technology coming. In the liquidator’s sale of the dead company’s assets, the island-state was bought by Harold T. Youngman, the leader of a strange group of people who planned to create a school for the nascent sport of hover car racing.
The rest, as they say, was history.
As desert boys, Jason and the Bug had never seen anything like the east coast of Australia.
Their cruise liner had swept past Sydney on its way to Tasmania. Just off Sydney, stretching down the Pacific coastline, they’d seen the famous Eight Dams - a simply amazing feat of mass-scale construction. A few years ago, engineers had literally held back the Pacific Ocean while they built eight massive hydro-electric dams a few miles out from the coast.
The eight waterfalls that now streamed majestically down the faces of the dams provided an endless supply of clean power with an added bonus: the waterfalls were the second most-visited tourist attraction in the world behind the Pyramids, and a spectacular backdrop to the annual hover car race held in Sydney - the Sydney Classic - one of the four Gland Slam races.
The cruise liner pulled into the dock at Hobart.
Jason and the Bug grabbed their bags and made for the gangway bridge - where they were cut off by two surly youths.
‘Well, if it isn’t little Jason Chaser,’ Barnaby Becker sneered, blocking their way. Becker was 18 and a full head
and shoulders taller than Jason. He was also now the Indo-Pacific Regional Champion, a title that garnered some respect in racing circles.
Barnaby nodded to his navigator: Guido Moralez, also 18, with shifty eyes and a slick sleazy manner.
‘I dunno, Guido,’ Barnaby said. ‘Tell me how a little runt who comes stone motherless last in the regionals gets
to come to Race School.’
‘Couldn’t tell ya, Barn,’ Guido said smoothly, eyeing Jason and the Bug sideways. ‘But I hope they’re up for it.
You never know what sort of accidents can happen in a place like this.’
This exchange pretty much summed up their trip. After their unexpected invitation to come to Race School, Jason and the Bug hadn’t seen Scott Syracuse. He was taking a private hover plane to Tasmania, and had said he would meet the boys there. Unfortunately, this meant Jason and the Bug - already outsiders on account of their ages - had had to endure the taunts of Becker and Guido all the way to Tasmania.
Barnaby, knowing that Jason and the Bug lived with adoptive parents back at Hall’s Creek, took particular joy in including the word ‘motherless’ in most of his snide remarks.
The Bug whispered something in Jason’s ear.
‘What! What did you say?’ Barnaby demanded. ‘What’s with all this whispering, you little moron? Why don’t you talk like a man?’
The Bug just stared up at him blankly.
‘I asked you a question, punk - ‘ Barnaby made to grab the Bug by his shirt, but Jason slapped the bigger boy’s hand away.
Barnaby froze.
Jason didn’t back down, returned his gaze evenly.
‘Ooh, I smell tension,’ Guido Moralez rubbed his hands together.
‘Don’t you touch him,’ Jason said. ‘He talks. He just doesn’t talk to people like you.’
Barnaby lifted his hand away, smiled. ‘So what did he say, then?’
Jason said, ‘He said: we ain’t motherless.’
CHAPTER TWO
The Race School was situated directly opposite the dock, on the other side of the wide Derwent River, inside a shimmering glass-and-steel building that looked like a giant sail.
Jason and the other new racers were led into the School’s cavernous entry foyer. Famous hover cars hung from the ceiling: Wilmington’s original prototype, the H-1, took pride of place in the centre, where it was flanked by Ferragamo’s Masters-winning Boeing HyperDrive and an arched gate from the London Underground Run.
‘This way,’ their guide said, leading them into a high-tech theatre that looked like Mission Control at NASA. An enormous display screen up front faced fifteen rows of amphitheatre-like seating. Each seat was fitted with a computer screen. A gallery at the very back of the theatre was provided for the media and at the moment it was full to bursting.
‘Welcome to the Race Briefing Room,’ the guide said. ‘My name is Stanislaus Calder and I am the Race Director here at the School. Trust me, all of you drivers will come to know this room very well. Please take a seat. Professor LeClerq and the teaching staff will be joining us shortly.’
Jason looked around the room, checking out the other racers. There were about twenty-five drivers in total, most of them older boys of seventeen or eighteen. Nearly all of them sat with two companions: their navigators and Mech Chiefs. Jason and the Bug didn’t have a Mech Chief, having always done their own pit work. Syracuse had said they would be matched up with someone upon the start of classes.
Jason saw Barnaby Becker and Guido sitting up the back with some other older boys. A few girls were scattered about the room, most of them wearing the black coveralls of Mech Chiefs, but the assembled crowd was largely male.
One girl, however, caught Jason’s eye. She was very pretty, with a nymph-like face, bright green eyes and strawberry-blonde hair. She looked about seventeen, and sat all on her own, way over at the right-hand end of the front row.
It took Jason a moment to realise that not a few of the reporters in the media gallery were gazing directly at her, pointing, trying to get photos of her. Jason didn’t know why.
‘Close your mouth and stop drooling,’ a husky female voice said from somewhere nearby.
Jason turned to find the girl seated immediately behind him also staring at the pretty girl in the front row. ‘Ariel Piper is way outta your league, little man.’
‘I wasn’t looking at her like that,’ Jason protested.
‘Sure you weren’t.’ The girl behind him was about sixteen, with a round face, bright flame-orange hair (with matching flame-orange horn-rimmed glasses) and a wide rosy-cheeked grin.
‘I’m Sally McDuff, Mech Chief and allround great gal from Glasgow, Scotland.’
‘Jason Chaser, and this here’s the Bug, he’s my little brother and my navigator.’
Sally McDuff assessed the Bug for a long moment. ‘The Bug, huh? Well aren’t you just the cutest thing. How old are you, little one?’
The Bug went pink with embarrassment.
‘He’s twelve,’ Jason said.
‘Twelve…’ Sally McDuff mused. ‘Must be some kind of mathematical wiz if someone invited him here. Nice to meet you, Jason Chaser and his navigator, the Bug. I imagine we’ll be running into each other again over the course of this year. Hope you get a good mentor.’
‘What do you mean?’
Sally McDuff said, ‘Gosh, you are a newbie. Getting through Race School ain’t just about being a great racer. Having a top teacher makes a huge difference. Apparently the best is Zoroastro. The Maestro. His students have taken out the School Championship three out of the last four years. Word is, Charlie Riefenstal is light on homework and heavy on track-time, so a lot of drivers want to get him.’
‘What do you know about Scott Syracuse?’ Jason asked.
‘Syracuse. Yeah. Teaching full-time this year. I heard he did some fill-in teaching last year when the full-timers went on vacation.’
‘And…’
‘Apparently, his students were relieved when their regular mentors got back. They say Syracuse works you long and hard. Lotta theory. Lotta pit practice - over and over until you get it right. And a lot of homework.’
‘Oh,’ Jason said.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason.’
At that moment, the rear doors to the theatre rumbled open and everyone fell silent. Jean-Pierre LeClerq entered the Briefing Room, followed by about a dozen teachers and lecturers, all dressed in flight uniforms. Last in the long line of Race School staff, Jason saw Scott Syracuse, limping along with the aid of his cane.
Principal LeClerq took his place behind the lectern on the stage.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, sponsors, assembled members of the media and most importantly…racers. Welcome to the International Race School. The year has barely begun and yet the world of hover car racing has already seen some great upheavals’ - Jason could have sworn LeClerq glanced over at Ariel Piper when he said that - ‘but we here at the Race School have adapted accordingly and while the debate has been vigorous, we welcome change.’
Hover Car Racer Page 2
