RACE 25.

RACETIME: 4 HOURS 24 MINS.

LAP: 11 [OF 20].

Race 25 was easily the most hard-fought race of the season so far.

No-one was giving an inch.

Those racers who hadn't yet qualified for the Sponsors' tournament were going all-out for the win. While those who had qualified were racing just as fiercely - they were well aware that if a pre-qualified racer won, it meant one less contender to deal with on Sat.u.r.day.

The intensity of the racing was simply furious.

And at Lap 11, Jason was still in it.

After narrowly avoiding a wild three-car crash on Lap 2, he had stayed in touch with the early leaders - Xavier, Varishna Krishna (a talented young racer from India) and Isaiah Washington - and now, after more than four hours of racing, he was well positioned in 4th place.

The ripple strips had caused chaos - if you took a turn too wide, you would edge over the top of them and suddenly your magneto drive levels would drain before your eyes.

The big crash on Lap 2 had been the direct result of the ripple strips, and it had taken out some of the contenders in this race.

It was Barnaby Becker's fault.

He had slid out over the ripple strips flanking the tight hairpin near the pits. He had stayed over the demag strips for almost five seconds, enough to deprive all six of his magneto drives of nearly all of their power. Out of control, he had slid back across the track, collecting two other racers - among them Ariel Piper - on the way through, ending all of their races.

Ariel wasn't pleased.

For his part, Jason felt he was handling the strips pretty well - not perfectly, but well. On any given lap, he might edge over a couple of them and lose a little bit of power. But judging by the similarity of their pit-stop schedules, it didn't seem as if any of the other contenders were doing any better.

Significantly, no racer had attempted to use the short cut.

The leaders completed Lap 11, and flocked into the pits - Jason among them.

He swung into his bay and the Tarantula descended on the Argonaut from above, its arms bristling with magneto drives and coolant hoses.

Jason gulped down some energy drink, breathed hard. Their pit stops had been good in this race. Their mag drives and computer systems seemed okay - And suddenly the Tarantula froze in mid-action. 'No!' Jason yelled.

Sally McDuff dived for the Tarantula's console, started tapping keys. 'The system's crashed again! d.a.m.n!' she yelled. 'I have to reboot!'

She typed fast on the computer.

Jason snapped round - to see Krishna, then Washington and then Xavier zoom out of the pits, one after the other, rejoining the race.

'Sally! Come on!'

'Almost there...!' she called back. 'Almost there!'

'G.o.dd.a.m.nit!'

The seconds ticked by - every one of them sinking the nails deeper into Jason's coffin.

10 seconds...

15...

20...

'Got it!' Sally called.

The Tarantula completed its work, then swooped up into the ceiling and Sally yelled 'Go! Go! Go!' and Jason floored it and the Argonaut shoomed back out onto the course - - to be met by a surprising sight.

Just outside Pit Lane, Jason saw Car No. 1 - Prince Xavier's black Lockheed, the Speed Razor - splayed

sideways in the centre of the track, stopped. Xavier was waving his fists at an orange hover car crashed into the

treeline nearby.

Jason deduced what had happened immediately. As Xavier had been exiting the pits, the hapless driver of the orange car - a perennial tailender named Brent Hurst - had been zooming by, completely unaware of Xavier emerging from Pit Lane. A near miss had ensued, with the Speed Razor fishtailing to a halt, while Hurst had missed the next turn, hit the ripple strips and gone careering off into the treeline.

By the time Jason had emerged from the pits shortly after, Xavier was powering up and so the two of them rejoined the race together, 20 seconds behind the leaders, with the Speed Razor just in front of the Argonaut.

Over the next three laps, try as he might, Jason couldn't narrow the gap on the leaders.

There were more pit stops, but since everyone was pitting more or less as well as each other, the lead time between the two leaders - Krishna and Washington - and the rest of the pack, led by Xavier and Jason, remained at about 20 seconds.

It was with the completion of Lap 14 that Jason realised. He was running out of laps.

There were only six laps to go, with most racers planning for two more stops, and he wasn't gaining at all. This was terrible. With an enormous 20-second gap to reel in, he just couldn't win - and he had to win this race!

Unless...

'Sally! Bug!' he yelled into his radiomike. 'Quick poll! Next lap, do we try the short cut?'

'Jason, I don't know...' Sally said. 'If you screw it up in there, we'll lose for sure.'

'We're already going to lose!' Jason said. 'Unless we get some galactic good luck. Bug?'

The Bug whispered his reply.

'That bad, huh?' Jason said. 'Are there any stats you don't know, little brother?'

The Bug's a.n.a.lysis didn't give him confidence. Only one hover car racer had ever actually won a pro race by successfully utilising a short cut maze - out of 165 shortcut-equipped races. Not good odds.

'We're screwed,' Jason said aloud.

But he kept racing. If he had learned nothing else in his short racing career, he had learned to keep racing. You never knew, something could happen. Who knew, maybe lightning would strike the three cars in front of him.

The laps ticked over: 15, 16...T he lead gap remained 20 seconds.

h.e.l.l, Jason thought, he couldn't even get past the Black Prince.

Lap 16 saw more pit stops.

Krishna and Washington were leaving the pits just as Xavier and Jason swept into them.

As the Tarantula went to work, Jason looked over at Xavier's busy pit bay.

In the midst of all the activity around the Speed Razor, Jason saw Xavier chatting animatedly with his Mech Chief, Oliver Koch. And beyond it all, Jason saw someone else standing at the back of their bay, a young man who wasn't wearing the charcoal-black uniform of the Speed Razor's team - Jason froze.

The young man standing in the very back of Xavier's pit bay was Wernold Smythe.

'Hey, Sally,' Jason said. 'How long has Werny Smythe been in Xavier's pit bay?'

'He arrived a few laps ago. Started talking to Koch about something.'

Jason looked back at Speed Razor's pit bay: saw Xavier and Koch talking. Koch was making sharp hand gestures, as if he were giving Xavier detailed directions.

Then Jason checked out Wernold Smythe again. He remembered seeing Smythe two nights ago, by the side of the road, covered in grey powder, with his hover bike similarly covered.

And suddenly it hit Jason.

'Bug! The short cut at Dunalley. It's an abandoned mine, right?'

The Bug said that it was.

'What kind of mine?'

The Bug said that it had been a coal mine.

'A coal mine...' Jason said. 'Limestone powder...'

'Jason? What are you thinking?' Sally asked.

Jason said, 'Coal mines use limestone powder to guard against flammable gases oozing out from the walls. It's a grey powder that miners spray all over the walls of a mine. Covers everything. I read about it in a thriller novel once.'

'So?'

'So, I happened to see Werny on Tuesday night, out on the road to Port Arthur, completely covered in grey powder...'

And with those words the picture became clear in Jason's mind.

'That's what Koch and Xavier were paying Werny for!' he exclaimed. 'They weren't paying Werny to give us faulty parts. Koch and Xavier were paying Werny to go out and map the short cut for them, to find a way through it! Holy cow, guys, we just got galactically lucky.'

Voom!

The Speed Razor blasted out of the pits - just as the Tarantula lifted up and away from the Argonaut.

His face set, Jason jammed his thrusters forward and took off after Xavier as though his life depended on it.

Prince Xavier's Speed Razor blasted out of the pits pursued by the Argonaut.

The pits were situated right on the mouth of the Derwent River, in the middle of the course's most fiendish section of hairpin turns, each of which was skirted by demagnetising ripple strips.

Xavier ripped around the first turn, a sharp left-hander, banking steeply, closely followed by Jason in the Argonaut.

The next turn was a tight right-hander - and the point at which racers could take the option of cutting the heel of the Port Arthur peninsula at the Dunalley isthmus.

Right on cue, Prince Xavier took the alternative route and charged left, leaving the course proper, going for the short cut.

The crowds in the mobile hoverstands gasped. That the leaders had already taken the longer and safer route made the move daring in itself. But that it was Prince Xavier Xonora - dashing and handsome and the championship leader - who had decided to go for it thrilled them even more.

But then something even more astonishing happened.

The Argonaut took off after the Speed Razor, zooming toward the short cut behind it.

The two cars rushed toward the Dunalley isthmus. As he flew, Jason could see the wide blue ocean beyond the narrow strip of land.

But in the foreground, built into the front edge of the isthmus like a cannon emplacement - as if guarding the way - yawned the squat concrete entry tunnel to the short-cut mine.

The Speed Razor didn't hesitate. It disappeared into the mine at 300 km/h.