It was loss-of-control at 795 km/h.
That Wong had been a full lap behind Jason at the time and completely out of the race made it worse. He should have just made way for the Argonaut to pass. Instead, he hit Jason square on the tailfin.
Wong flailed away to the left, but pulled up safely in a Dead Zone.
Jason, however, veered right and down, rushing down toward the ocean waves, terrified.
He grappled with his steering wheel, but to no avail. He kicked his thrusters, trying to steer that way - and somehow managed to run the Argonaut over a full line of demag lights, thus diminishing its magnetic power.
The Argonaut‘s power drained fast and it slowed and a quick burst from its left thruster caused it to fishtail to a skidding halt a bare foot above the waves.
Other cars boomed past it, shaking the air.
The Bug and Sally were shouting in Jason’s earpiece - but all Jason could do was sit there and stare forward and swallow hard.
He looked at his hands.
They were shaking terribly.
When the Argonaut returned to the pits, towed by a recovery vehicle, Jason saw Scott Syracuse standing in front of Horatio Wong, letting him have it:
‘ - what the hell was that! Straight section of track and you suddenly lose control…and you take out his tailfin perfectly!’
‘I just lost control, sir,’ Wong shrugged, looking down. ‘Lost my steering and never saw him there. I can’t explain it.’
‘You just lost control. Lost your steering. Never saw him.’ Syracuse shook his head with disgust. ‘I’m not so sure about any of that, Mr Wong. Get out of my sight.’
Wong stalked off, glaring darkly at Syracuse.
Sally came over to Jason, who was still badly shaken. Jason said, ‘What’s going on?’
‘Syracuse just went ballistic at Wong for hitting you,’ Sally whispered.
‘But it was an accident,’ Jason said. ‘At least, it looked like one.’
Sally said, ‘Syracuse didn’t think it was an accident at all. When it happened, he was standing next to me, watching on the monitor. He said it was a classic pro tactic: when a young racer is coming back from a bad accident and his self-confidence is shaky, you hit him in a similar way on his return race - and thus crack his fragile confidence. It’s a tactic designed for one purpose: to put a young racer out for good.’
‘But Wong also put himself out of the race by doing it,’ Jason said, perplexed.
‘That’s what pissed Syracuse off the most. Wong was the patsy, the junior guy who did the deed and took the fall - someone with pro experience told him to take you out. That’s why Syracuse was chewing out Wong. He reckons Wong was doing someone else’s dirty work.’
Jason looked over at the departing Wong, and thought about his new dining companions.
Sally put her arm around his shoulder. ‘Confidence hits. Geez. Those sort of tricks aren’t gonna be a problem with you now, are they? Jason Chaser, Superstar of the Sponsors’ Tournament, Hero of Italy, little guy with nerves of pure steel. Like you’d ever have a confidence problem.’
Jason didn’t reply.
He just hid his shaking hands.
CHAPTER SIX
Jason had two days till he had to race again.
And he was absolutely dreading the prospect of it. Whoever had told Wong to take out his tailfin had been smart.
ery smart. Because it had worked.
Going into Race 42, Jason’s confidence had been wavering, not that he’d dare tell anybody in his team or family. And losing control in exactly the same way as he’d lost it in Italy had totally freaked him out.
He didn’t want to tell the Bug or Sally that he was losing it. Didn’t want them to think he was somehow a lesser driver. Nor did he want to confide in his parents: they got such a buzz out of his achievements, he didn’t want to disappoint them by revealing his fears.
That was the bonus of having Dido around - she was sort of external, not a family member or a team-member.
She didn’t have any expectations. She just liked him for who he was.
They met each other for lunch the next day, at a coffee shop not far from the Race School.
Jason got there early, and was already sitting at a table when Dido arrived.
And then a strange thing happened.
Barnaby Becker walked into the shop at the exact same moment Dido did, and as he stepped up to the takeaway counter, he checked her out.
Jason was sitting close enough to hear every word of the ensuing conversation:
Barnaby said, ‘Hey there, cutie. You’re the chickie who’s been hanging out with little Chaser, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, so?’ Dido had replied.
‘So. You ever want to go out with a real man, Becker’s the name, give me a call.’
Dido had snuffed a laugh. ‘That’s a very nice offer, but I don’t like Neanderthals. I like cultured and courageous young men. Men like Jason. Good-bye.’
And with that, she’d spun on her heel with the grace of a ballerina - leaving Barnaby speechless - spotted Jason, and waltzed over.
By the time she sat down, Jason was grinning from ear to ear.
RACE 43
Two days later, Jason was back in the driver’s seat for Race 43. If he was going to finish the year in the Top 4, he needed to finish in the points today.
He ended up finishing 7th, garnering four points, having spent the greater part of the race staying well clear of all the other cars. It was a timid drive - and both the Bug and Sally noticed it.
That said, there was one hairy moment very early in the race: in the hurly-burly of the start, with all the cars jostling for position, Jason could have sworn that Joaquin Cortez had tried to ram his tailfin.
Jason had swerved wide, clipping some demag lights for his trouble, and the two cars had missed each other by centimetres.
Just racing? Jason thought. Or was it something more? Or was he just getting paranoid?
Either way, he thought, he had to do something about this confidence thing.
The next race was on Tuesday. So he had three whole days to work out a solution.
He started on Sunday morning…at 5:30 a.m.
Before first light, he got up and, leaving the Bug fast asleep in his bunk, went down to Pit Lane and in the silence, pushed the Argonaut out of its garage.
He clamped some new mags on her, and attached a little hover-trailer to her rear hook. Then he jumped in, and blasted out of the pits, heading inland, up toward the forested northern end of the island.
And there he ran loops around a course of his own design, a tight winding track around the upper forests and islands of Tasmania.
At first he did his laps alone, just timing himself with the Argonaut‘s digital stopwatch.
Later, he pulled eight mechanical objects from his hover-trailer - hover drones.
Bullet-shaped, superfast and extremely nimble, hover drones were training tools usually used to train very young hover car drivers, giving them a taste of other racers flying all around them, but without risking anyone’s safety, since they were equipped with proximity sensors - meaning they couldn’t actually collide with a car. For a racer at the Race School to be using them was like an Olympic swimmer using floaties to swim. They were only at the School for Open Days when young kids came to race around the School’s tracks and get tips from the teachers.
Jason, however, reprogrammed his drones to race the course with him in a hyper-aggressive manner, darting and swooping all around the Argonaut as it raced - giving him the sensation of closely-moving rival cars, retraining himself. That said, he still kept their anti-collision proximity sensors switched on.
At first, the drones whipped across his bow as they raced, cutting dangerously close - then they started zinging across his tailfin, missing it by millimetres.
And Jason drove…and drove…and drove.
Indeed, he was concentrating so intently that he never noticed the pair of people watching him t
hrough digital binoculars from a nearby hilltop.
Monday morning.
And he went up north again, and raced alone in the dewy green forests of Tasmania.
This time he disengaged the drones’ anti-collision sensors, and at one point in his racing, one of the drones bounced hard against his tailfin, denting it, creating a loud bang, shocking Jason.
He immediately pulled to a halt.
He was hyperventilating.
‘Don’t do that!’ he yelled aloud to himself. ‘Start your car again, and get back up there.’
He keyed his power switch and flew back out onto his track. Immediately, the drones were swarming around
him like a pack of killer bees.
Bang! He was hit on the side.
He clenched his teeth, kept driving.
Bang! Again. Other side.
Kept racing.
Bang! This time it was in the tailfin, and the Argonaut lurched violently to the side, losing control…
…but Jason righted her…
…and regained control.
In his helmet, he breathed again.
And he smiled.
The two people watching him from the hilltop did not. He was back at his apartment before eight. The Bug was
still snoring.
Tuesday morning. Race Day for Race 44.
Again, Jason headed north before sun-up.
Only this time, when he reached his start point with his trailer full of drones, two people were already there, waiting for him, the same pair of people who had watched him practise by himself the previous two mornings.
Sally and the Bug.
‘Hey there, Champ,’ Sally said, illuminated by the winglights of the Argonaut. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’
Jason froze. ‘I…I just wanted to practise on my own…’
‘On your own?’ Sally frowned. ‘Why?’
Jason winced. ‘I just…I was…I mean - ‘ he sighed. ‘I’ve been a wreck ever since the Italian Run, Sally. That crash freaked me out. And then when Wong hit me in my first race back here, I just cracked. I’ve been coming up here trying to get my nerve back.’
‘We know,’ Sally said. ‘We’ve been watching you. The first morning you came, the Bug heard you leave. He followed you, to see where you were going, and then he called me. Why didn’t you ask us for help?’
Jason shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to let you guys down,’ he said. ‘I wanted to figure it out…and fix it…and I thought…I thought that was my responsibility.’
Tears began to form in his eyes. He bit his lip to hold them back.
Sally saw this, and she stepped forward.
‘You know, I screwed up once, and some little punk gave me some good advice. He said, “We win as a team, and we lose as a team.” He was right, Jason. We’re all in this together. And whether we win or we lose, the members of Team Argonaut back each other up. You don’t ever have to go it alone, Jason. If you’ve pissed me off in any way by doing this, it’s sneaking off and coming up here all by yourself.’
‘But I have to be the best…’ Jason said.
‘No, you don’t,’ a quiet voice said.
Jason started.
So did Sally.
Because it wasn’t Sally who had spoken.
It had been the Bug, standing beside her. It was the first time Jason had ever heard him speak to two people at the same time.
‘You don’t have to be the best. You just have to do your best,’ the Bug said quietly. ‘If you do your best,’ he shrugged, ‘I’ll follow you anywhere, Jason. I love you.’
‘Me, too,’ Sally affirmed, smiling. ‘The follow-you-anywhere part, not the love-you part.’
And Jason laughed.
‘Now then,’ Sally clapped her hands. ‘The whole world’s against us, our backs are to the wall, and we need to win some races if we’re gonna make the Top 4. But our fearless racer is a little nervy. The question is, what the hell are we gonna do about it?’
In the end, it was the Bug who came up with the answer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
RACE 44
Race 44 saw Jason lead from start to finish, the win earning him ten beautiful points on the Championship Ladder.
That was the Bug’s plan.
Win the start - and lead all the way, thereby staying out of range of any would-be assassins - and thus winning the damn race. Simple. Then in the days between races, Team Argonaut would work together, helping recharge Jason’s broken confidence.
It helped that Race 44 had been a Super-Enduro, meaning that lapped racers (like Horatio Wong in Race 41) hadn’t been a problem.
It also helped that Xavier Xonora had sat out Race 44, choosing to rest, since he was so far out in front of the rest of the field on the Championship Ladder.
* * *
Every morning from that day on, Jason and his team could be found practising up in the far northern forests of Tasmania from sun-up to breakfast time. Then they would return to the Race School and commence their daily classes.
Word got around.
The locals and their families - business owners and workers on the School-owned island - many of whom lived up on the northern islands, would come out onto their balconies with their morning cups of coffee and watch the Argonaut get harried by its drones in the light of the rising sun.
Soon the local kids would come out and watch, cheering as the Argonaut clashed with its drones.
A series of tiny dents now pock-marked the Argonaut‘s tailfin. It looked shabby, but as far as Jason was concerned, every dent was another brick in his wall of confidence.
He was rebuilding himself.
He was coming back.
He charged through Race 45 like a demon, coming third behind Xavier and Barnaby. Eight points.
More early-morning practice.
Race 46 was a gate race, and guided by a brilliant strategy from the Bug - a course that kept him well away from any assassins - he won, albeit in a tie with Xavier, the two of them ending the race on an equal amount of gate points. Ten Championship points.
More early-morning practice.
Then Race 47: win (over Barnaby and Washington in a race that employed the Port Arthur short cut - the Bug remembered the correct way through; Xavier didn’t race).
Race 48…second (to Xavier; in this race, Ariel bowed out with another technical problem, a few of which had started to occur lately).
Race 49…third (behind Krishna and Barnaby; Xavier hadn’t even tried to win the race; he just cruised over the line in 10th place, needing only the one point to claim an unassailable lead in the School Championship).
And so, with one race left in the Race School season, Jason had charged up the Championship Ladder:
INTERNATIONAL RACE SCHOOL
CHAMPIONSHIP LADDER
AFTER 49 RACES
DRIVER NO. CAR POINTS
1. XONORA, X 1 Speed Razor 307
2. KRISHNA, V 31 Calcutta-IV 296
3. WASHINGTON, I 42 Black Bullet 278
4. BECKER, B 09 Devil’s Chariot 276
5. CHASER, J 55 Argonaut 276
6. PIPER, A 16 Pied Piper 275
7. WONG, H 888 Little Tokyo 274
8. SCHUMACHER, K 25 Blue Lightning 273
Xavier was untouchable on 307 points, the Championship his.
Varishna Krishna, on 296 points, was also going to New York no matter what happened in Race 50.
But below them, it was a six-way tussle for the final two invitations to New York. Any one of the next six racers could - depending on the finishing order in Race 50 - could come in the Top 4.
Jason and Barnaby Becker were level on 276 points, equal 4th on the Ladder (and now one point ahead of Ariel, whose niggling technical problems in recent races had hurt her badly).
But they weren’t truly equal - if Barnaby and Jason ended the season on equal points (for example, they both crashed in Race 50), Barnaby would beat Jason on a countback, since he had come 2nd in Race 49 when Jason had come
3rd.
In the end, for Jason, there was only one option in Race 50: he had to beat Barnaby Becker and, if he finished low in the placings, he had to hope some other results went his way. But with Barnaby’s new allies also out there on the track, just finishing Race 50 was going to be a tough prospect indeed.
To cap it all off, the final race of the year was the perfect kind of race to conclude the season.
Designed to test every hover car racing skill imaginable, it was to take place on the rarely-used Course 13 - a super-difficult track that began by stretching southward, down over the Southern Ocean along a superlong straight, before it transformed into a twisting and turning series of bends that weaved between the outer icebergs of Antarctica.
In that section of the course, racers could - if they were prepared to take the risk - opt to take one of three shortcuts between the bergs, but every short cut ran between two bergs that clashed together (thanks to an underwater mechanism), giving them the name: ‘the Clashing Bergs’. The standard course did not run through any clashing bergs, but it was longer. High risk, high reward.
After that, the course turned back north, returning to Tasmania, where the racers had to slow dramatically to negotiate the tight highways of the island, before reaching the Start-Finish Line in Hobart.
Each lap took about 14 minutes. And since Race 50 was a 51-lap enduro - that meant a 12-hour race.
But there was one more feature to Race 50 that made it an absolute killer: not only was it a test of endurance and skill, it was also a test of race positioning - Race 50 was a Last Man Drop-Off race.
Technically, it was classified as a ‘51-3-1 Super-Enduro Last Man Drop-Off’ meaning: it would be fifty-one laps, and every three laps, the last-placed racer would be eliminated, until only four racers remained to fight out a six-lap sprint to the finish, a sprint that would involve one last pit stop.