HOVER CAR RACER.

MATTHEW REILLY.

PART I: JASON AND THE ARGONAUT.

'Imagine twenty fighter jets racing around a twisting turning aerial track, ducking and weaving and overtaking at insanely high speeds.

and you've just imagined a hover car race.'

- Rand Thoma.s.son, 3-time Hover Car Racing Champion.

A FEW YEARS FROM NOW...

CHAPTER ONE.

INDO-PACIFIC REGIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS,.

GULF OF CARPENTARIA, AUSTRALIA.

The race was barely nine minutes old when Jason Chaser lost his steering rudder.

At 690 kilometres an hour.

The worst thing was, it wasn't even his fault. Some crazy kid from North Korea driving a home-made hunk-of-junk swamp-runner had lost control of his car while trying to pull an impossible 9-G turn and had crashed spectacularly into the crocodile-infested marshes right in front of Jason, sending sizzling pieces of his car flying in every direction - three of which punched right through Jason's tailfin like a volley of red-hot mini-meteorites, rendering his steering vanes useless.

Jason jammed back on his collective, and somehow managed to right the Argonaut with only his pedal-thrusters just as - shoom!-shoom!-shoom! - three of the other top contenders whizzed by, rocketing off into the distance, kicking up geyser sprays in their wakes. The Argonaut slowed to a complete stop, hovering three feet above one of the thousands of water-alleys in the vast swamp at the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The Bug's voice came in through Jason's earpiece. The Bug was Jason's navigator, co-driver and little brother. He sat in the back of the Argonaut's c.o.c.kpit, slightly above and behind Jason.

Jason bit his lip as the Bug spoke.

Then he shook his head determinedly. 'No way, Bug. I didn't come here to bow out in the first ten minutes. We're not out of this yet. You just plot our course, I'll do the rest.'

And with that, he gunned the thrusters, flinging the Argonaut back into the race.

When they had arrived in Pit Lane earlier that morning, Jason and the Bug had sensed an unusual level of excitement in the air.

It was a good crowd - 80,000 bustling spectators taking their places in the giant hover-grandstands overlooking the Gulf.

Of course, this was nothing like the crowds they got at the pro events. There, anything less than a million spectators was seen as a poor showing.

Part of the excitement stemmed from the fact that this year there were five drivers, including Jason, who were in contention to take out the regional championships and thus garner a precious invitation to the International Race School, gateway to the professional circuit.

But it was in Pit Lane itself where the excitement was at its highest.

Everyone was whispering and pointing at the two distinguished-looking gentlemen being shown around the VIP tent by Randolph Hardy, the portly President of the Indo-Pacific Regional Directorate of the IHCRA, the International Hover Car Racing a.s.sociation.

Whispered voices: 'Gosh, it's LeClerq! The Dean of the Race School...'

'...other one looks like Scott Syracuse, the guy who was in that accident in New York a couple of years ago and almost died...'

'Someone was saying they're here to scout for extra candidates for the Race School...'

'No way...'

Jason eyed the two visitors strolling through the VIP tent with Randolph Hardy.

The older man was indeed Jean-Pierre LeClerq, Princ.i.p.al of the International Race School, the most prestigious racing school in the world.

Located in Tasmania - an enormous island at the bottom of Australia that was wholly-owned by the Race School - it was more a qualifying school than a strictly teaching inst.i.tution. While lessons were certainly taught there, it was your ranking in the School Championship Ladder that really mattered. It was that ranking that got you a contract with a pro racing team after your year at 'the School'. Not surprisingly, the Race School had produced nearly half of the drivers currently on the pro circuit.

LeClerq was a regal-looking fellow, with a perfectly-groomed mane of white hair and an imperious bearing. His suit looked expensive. Jason figured it probably cost more than his entire car did.

The man beside LeClerq was far younger, in his early 30s. He was sort of handsome, with intense features and impenetrable black eyes. He also walked with a cane and looked like he'd rather be at the dentist having root ca.n.a.l therapy than be here at the Indo-Pacific Regional Championships.

Jason recognised him instantly. He had the man's collector-card in his bedroom back home.

He was Scott J. Syracuse, otherwise known as 'The Scythe', one of the best racers ever to have helmed a hover car...until he busted the neurotransmitters in his brain in a horrific crash at the New York Masters three years ago. These days, modern medicine could fix just about any broken bone in your body, even a busted spine, but the one thing man hadn't figured out was how to fix the human brain. If you busted your brain, your racing career was over, as the Scythe had found out.

And then suddenly Syracuse turned and his ice-cool eyes locked on Jason.

Jason froze, caught staring.

A full second too late, he looked away.

Truth be told, he actually felt embarra.s.sed under Syracuse's glare. All the other drivers here wore coordinated outfits that matched the colour schemes of their cars. Some even had the new Shoei helmets. Others still had full pit crews wearing their team's colours. Jason and the Bug, on the other hand, wore denim overalls and their dusty farmboots. They raced in old motorcycle helmets. Jason scowled. He could hide his eyes, but he couldn't hide his clothes.

He also couldn't hide his hover car from Syracuse's level gaze. But that was another story.

The Argonaut.

Car No.55.

It was Jason's pride and joy, and he spent every spare minute he had working on it. It was an old Ferrari Pro F1 conversion that he'd found in a junkyard four years ago - one of those early hover cars converted from old Formula One cars.

It had the bullet-shaped body of an old F1 car, complete with nosewing, hunchbacked fuselage and wide tail rudder, but with the added features of a navigator's seat tucked immediately behind the driver's c.o.c.kpit and a pair of swept-back wings stretching out from its flanks.

Most incongruously for an old F1 car, however, it had no wheels. Hover technology - the six shiny silver discs on its underbelly called magneto drives - had made wheels unnecessary.

While he liked to think otherwise, Jason knew it wasn't a real Ferrari Pro F1. Only the cha.s.sis. The rest of it was a hodge-podge of machinery and spare parts that Jason had scrounged from farm vehicles and the local wrecker's yard. Even its six race-quality magneto drives - a mix of GM, Boeing and BMW mags - were second-hand.

Despite its eclectic innards, the Argonaut's exterior was beautiful - it was painted blue-white-and-silver in a way that accentuated the car's fighter-jet-like shape.

Jason himself was 14 years old, blond-haired, blue-eyed and determined. At school, he was good at math, geography and game theory. He wore his sandy-blond hair in a messy 'mohican' style reminiscent of the retired English footballer, David Beckham.

At 14, he was also rather young to be at the Regional Championships. Most of the other drivers at this level of racing were 17 or 18. But Jason had finished in the Top 3 in his district trials just like the rest of them, which meant he had as much right to be here as they did.

With him as his navigator was the Bug - his brother, and at 12, even younger. With his tiny body and his big thick-lensed gla.s.ses, the Bug confounded a lot of people. He didn't talk much. In fact, the only people he would speak to were Jason and their mother, and even then only in a whisper. Some of the doctors said that the Bug was borderline autistic - it explained his excessive shyness and social awkwardness while also explaining his mathematical genius. The Bug could tell you what 653 x 354 was...in two seconds.

Which made him the perfect navigator in a hover car race.

The Carpentaria Race was a 'gate race'.

The most famous gate race in the world was the London Underground Run - a fiendishly complex race through the tunnels of the London Underground system - and the Carpentaria Race was based on the same principle.

Instead of doing laps around a track, a gate race had no actual track at all. Rather, it took place over a wide area of open terrain 600 km wide by 600 km long. In today's case, that terrain was the vast swampland on the edge of Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria: a marshy landscape that featured a labyrinthine network of narrow waterways cutting through the swamp's eight-foot-high reed-fields and the high coastal sandbars of the Gulf itself.

Positioned at various points around this maze of natural ca.n.a.ls were approximately 250 bridge-like arches through which the racers drove their hover cars. As your car whizzed through a gate-arch, an electronic tag attached to your nosewing recorded the pa.s.s.

Pa.s.sing through a gate gave you points. Gates farther away from the Start-Finish Line were worth more; those that were closer, less. The farthest gate from the Start-Finish Line, for example, was worth 100 points. The nearest, 10 points.

The trick was: there was a strict time limit.

You had three hours to race through as many gates as you could, and then get back to the Start-Finish Line. This final element was crucial.

Every second that you were late coming back cost you one point . So coming home just a minute over the three-hour mark would cost you a ma.s.sive 60 points.

The driver with the most points won.

Which made it a tactical race in which navigators played a key role.

No driver, no matter how skilled or fast, could get through all the gates in the allotted time - which meant choosing which gates to go for within that time limit. And since computer navigation programs were strictly forbidden at all levels of hover car racing, having a good navigator was crucial.

Add to that pit stops - magneto drives overheated, coolant tanks needed to be refilled, compressed-air thrusters had to be replaced - and all the many vagaries of racing, and you had a serious strategy contest on your hands.

The Argonaut screamed across the marshland, rushing through a narrow alleyway flanked by walls of eight-foothigh reeds, kicking up a whitewash of s.k.a.n.ky swampwater behind it.

610 km/h...620...630...

With his steering fins flapping uselessly inside his broken rear spoiler, Jason steered with his two rear thrusters instead - alternating left and right, incredibly using his pedals to control the speeding bullet that was his hover car.

The Bug had plotted their course well. Every trip to the pits allowed Jason to see the big electronic leaderboard mounted above the main grandstand, with its up-to-thesecond tally of all the racers' acc.u.mulated scores so far: DRIVER NO. CAR POINTS.

1. BECKER, B 09 Devil's Chariot 1,110 2. RICHARDS, J 24 Stormbreaker 1,090 3. TADZIC, E 19 San Antonio 1,010 4. YU, E 888 Lantern-IV 1,000 5. CHASER, J 55 Argonaut 990 The accident had hurt them.

Lost them a lot of time. And no matter how hard Jason tried - and he tried as hard as he could - steering with his feet just wasn't as good as steering with his hands.

And with each trip to the pits, he could see the Argonaut falling further and further behind the leaders, dropping ever further down the leaderboard.

What made it a hundred times worse was the ident.i.ty of the driver who was leading: Barnaby Becker, a senior from Jason's school back home in Hall's Creek.

Becker was 18, red-haired, freckled, c.o.c.ky and rich. His father, Barnaby Becker Sr, was a businessman who owned half of Halls Creek.

Mr Becker had bought his son one of the best production hover cars money could buy - a beautiful Lockheed-Martin ProRacer-5. He had also once employed Jason's dad, a fact which Barnaby - a nasty kid if ever there was one - never failed to remind Jason of.

Nevertheless, Jason flew on, right to the end, zinging through as many arches as the broken but valiant Argonaut could manage, following the Bug's revised course.

It didn't matter.

As the giant clock above the Start-Finish Line ticked over from 2:59:59 to 3:00:00, and the last hover cars shot across the Line to the cheers of the 80,000-strong crowd, the Argonaut, piloted by Chaser J, was at the bottom of the leaderboard.

Jason pulled his beloved car to a halt in his pit bay and dropped his head.

In the most important race of his life - in front of 80,000 people; in front of the most distinguished pair of spectators he would ever race in front of - Jason Chaser had come stone-cold last.

CHAPTER TWO.

The world was changed forever with the invention of the hover car.

Indeed, over the course of human history, few inventions could claim such an instantaneous and immediate global impact.

Gutenberg's printing press, n.o.bel's dynamite, the Wright brother's flying machine - sure they were all impressive, but their impact on the world paled in comparison to the global revolution that was brought about by Wilfred P. Wilmington's hover car.

Much of the fuss had to do with the 80-year-old Wilmington's extraordinary decision to make his amazing new piece of technology freely available to anyone who wanted to exploit it.

He didn't patent it. He didn't sell it to a major corporation. Not even a special delegation led by the President of the United States himself could convince him to keep the technology solely for the benefit of the US.

No. Wilfred P. Wilmington, the eccentric backyard inventor who claimed that he had more than enough money to live out his twilight years in relative comfort, did the most extraordinary and unpredictable thing of all: he gave his technology to the world for free.