Hot Discs
I'd hardly reached the Pacific Air Corridor when the first competitor caught up to me. His four-disc car was one of the new Fords, a Strato I think. He’d waited at about 4000 feet over Sydney, and cannoned upward the moment his scanner detected me.
"Bugger," said Skidmark from the passenger seat. He was one of those HyperGene wombat pets that were all the rage with rich kids a few years back. As a card-carrying environmentalist, I loved animals. I found Skiddy dumped on a surface road three years ago and he's ridden shotgun ever since.
"Me splat the mongrel," he said, cocking the shotgun.
"Not here. We're still in the main traffic stream. Do you want to risk hitting a school bus?"
"Think he worry about that?"
"I asked you first." I eyed the allaround view monitor, speckled with weekend traffic. It had already noticed the competitor and painted him red on the display. I moved in toward a cluster of small Japanese cars.
Our pursuer closed to a hundred meters beneath us and let fly with a garbage cannon. A hatchback beside me, one of those paint-splashed girly ones, took a burst in its power plant. The accelerated garbage consisted of beer bottles, judging from the glittering spray. The car spiralled earthward, puffing like a popcorn kernel as its external gas bags deployed.
My car filled with a hailstorm of noise as garbage struck our armour. Ammo for the weapon was readily available, and they left behind very innocent looking evidence for our overworked police force. I felt annoyed. These killers had no respect for the environment.
Our car shuddered. The realtime diagnostic dutifully informed me that I could no longer demist my windows.
"Sod this" said Skiddy. He pawed the window button and thrust out the shotgun. Its targeter squealed, seeking a lock.
I killed the power to disc fans one and three, and waggled the stick as we went down. This denied Skiddy a shot, but we looked as stricken as the hatchback—I hoped—and kept the competitor beneath us.
Skiddy made his frustrated sound, like a garden mulcher with a throat full of phlegm, but he realised what I was doing before I had to prompt him. He moved the car’s flaps to landing position to get them out of the way, and as garbage hammered us again he smacked the gumball button.
It had a very short range, but it was the only non-lethal option available. I watched the allaround. The balls hit the slipstream like dandelion seeds and fanned over a wide area, an area that the Ford Strato happened to occupy. The gummy balls splattered over his turbofan discs, and he began a lazy arc down toward the gray expanse of Newcastle.
I laughed. His defeat was complete, and biodegradable of course. I found a good cruising speed and we sped northward, weaving through the traffic.
"Who was them?" said Skiddy.
"Dunno. One of the new ones I guess. The Red Slicers, maybe. Did you see what colour their car was?"
"No. Got no shot for some reason". Skiddy laid on the guilt. He was a bloodthirsty little terror when he got going.
I tried to think of something responsible and parental to say, when my car's external temp spiked. It could only have been a Line Of Sight Energy Radiator. LOSER beams can do nasty things to a car’s electricals (and driver), but they need at least four seconds of constant bombardment. I didn't sit still for that long, slipping around the side of a tourist coach until the temperature dropped.
"Who that now?" said Skiddy, pawing the shotgun eagerly.
"Nobody I can see." Everything seemed clear on the allaround. "Someone with a big power plant, to have a LOSER beam. Our last little tussle must have caught their eye. Hang on."
I tried a technique that's gotten me out of trouble a few times. I zipped across to where two cargo haulers trundled along at three hundred ks, and slid in between them. I cut power to one fan, redlined the others and headed out at ninety degrees. Anything tracking my energy signature would lose the lock, and anything close would hopefully lose sight of me.
No good. The car started to heat up again after a few seconds. That meant he had to be at a good distance above or below the traffic stream. Above was the obvious choice, a better attack position. I focused the scanner upward, increased the range and saw him.
My detail camera zoomed. The black car looked like a brick ringed with discs, one of the big six-fan drives like the north shore cappuccino cowboys drove. Only this machine looked like all that power was actually used. Those of us who lived on the wind called them tambourines, but the name didn't fit this one. From its underside a painted bird of prey glared down at me. One I recognised.
"Crud. It's the Eagle Men."
Skiddy growled. They'd killed a few in this game, including two of my predecessors.
"This is how we earn the big money," I said with more bravado than I felt, and redlined all four fans. The energy drain of a LOSER beam was so great that he couldn't fly with me and fry with me. I hoped.
The black car fell behind me, and the beam cut off. Not that this helped the situation, they merely dropped to my altitude and throttled up.
Ahead I could see a line of cars streaming down from the corridor, the Taree exit. Families heading north for the weekend usually made it this far before their little tykes in the back demanded Happy Meals. Our pursuer had lost his vantage point, so I wove among the thickest cluster of traffic and then took the exit. I coasted with the down traffic a few hundred meters, dawdling, then leveled out and pushed into the up traffic.
No shots came our way during that vulnerable moment, only two horn blasts and an obscene finger. "Get ready, Skiddy," I said. "You might get your shot."
I'd lost the Eagle Men on the scanner during the manoeuvre. The idea was to lose ground (or air, in this case) and come up behind them, but I didn't see them ahead of us. Butterflies danced inside me. I switched the allaround to focus behind the car.
The boom of the shotgun smacked my ear. I'd come up alongside them. The black car was so close to our left front disc that Skiddy didn't need the targeter. He fired in semi-auto, thumping back into his harness with the recoil of each shot like a furry chew toy shaken by a dog. He squealed like a cat in a fight, clearly enjoying himself.
The black car had strong armour, but Skiddy gave it a good hammering. The LOSER beam dish broke off like dry pasta, one disc fan zoomed away as a fiery frisbee, and a spidery hole in the rear window bled smoke. The black car dropped from the sky.
"Yeah!" I whooped. "Skiddy, you deliver!" He shut the window with a paw, and flashed me the glitter-eyed smirk only a wombat can give.
Our car gave a violent lurch as the Eagle Men rammed our underside like a surfacing shark. My head hit the roof. Something cracked beneath me, and the car filled with a high whistling sound.
Skiddy clicked his teeth. "Hurt big."
"It's all right for you, you've got a solid plate of cartilage for a butt."
I did the only thing that came to mind, swerving up diagonally into the southbound corridor. With a heavy scrape the black car fell free. Oncoming traffic scattered around us like fish. My eyes struggled to stay split seconds ahead of my hands.
"Idjit!" cried Skiddy.
"Hey, do you want to drive?"
"Yes."
"Fat chance." I dipped out of the stream and wobbled back to the northbound corridor. Something clanged off the rear spoiler.
On the allaround, still focused behind us, the Eagle Men sprayed bullets from a fixed gun beneath their headlights. The bullets zipped by a few meters away. Either the gun had been damaged when our cars cuddled, or they'd learned to shoot from my brother.
We couldn't take any more. They'd hit us sooner or later, as sure as everyone's grandmother had a butt crack tattoo. What was it about turn of the century fashion, anyway?
"Hey," Skiddy snapped me out of my musing. Some cloud lay along the air corridor, a nice puffy cirro stratus where the Dorrigo Plateau dropped into the Bellinger Valley. Once the traffic entered the cloud I slid in among the cars, driving by instruments.
"Follow this one,
Budgie Boys," I said, and turned the engines off.
They had the weight advantage, but we were almost to our destination and on my home turf. I'd learned to drive here, buzzing little sawmill towns with names like Ulong and Cascade. It was still a risky move but I had to end this, and quickly.
I counted the seconds, spun my fans again and pulled up scant meters above where the Bellinger River snaked out of the rainforest into the valley. Following the river kept me under a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, but we were safe now. Nobody could have followed our powerless descent. I swung the car with lazy confidence, glad that the Men could not follow me down and pollute the pristine forest with their uranium guzzler.
The coast appeared, a cool stripe of blue. I took us over the water and headed north to where Coffs Harbour waited.
The sea around us geysered with cannon fire. "How...?" I said.
"Put tracker on us."
"Nah. Why would they shoot a tracker at us when they've been shooting bullets?"
"Not shot. Stuck on roof."
"Dumb animal. How could they stick one on our roof?"
Skiddy took a patient breath. "Was on their roof. When ramming us."
"They had that prepared ahead of time?" The Men had earned their reputation, and it looked like it was about to be earned again. We were out of tricks.
Skiddy popped his last few shells from the shotgun at them, but they were out of range. The black car sat low to the ocean and moved in from my side, Skiddy's blind spot.
We reached Coffs Harbour from the southeast, zigzagging over a choppy sea. I flew more on panic than plan, but over the southern breakwater an idea leaped into my head. I only had an instant to weigh my convictions against my will to live, and survival won out. I pulled back on the stick and soared over Muttonbird Island with the air horn screaming.
Each August thousands of muttonbirds returned from their northerly migration and settled on the island to raise their young. My sonic assault drove them into the air as a great white cloud, out of which the black car emerged on corkscrews of flame and feathers. It twirled smoke like DNA over the city and hit Red Hill, a steep rise on the far side, in a blossom of fire.
With shaking hands I found the destination address and eased the car down in front of the house. Skiddy, who I expected to be jubilant, sat silent and subdued.
I got out of the car. Surviving muttonbirds wheeled in panic overhead. I wouldn’t be showing my face around the green scene for a while. I fought a nauseous guilt and picked up the boxes from the back seat.
The front door opened to reveal a balding, middle-aged man in crumpled business wear, children around each knee.
"One Sydney Supreme deal with two garlic breads and a mega cola?" I said.
"Yup." He held his eye still while I scanned for the payment. He took the boxes and pointed to my battered car. "Competition still pretty stiff in the pizza game, eh?"
I smiled at the distant plume of smoke. "Getting more stiff all the time."