"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.
Princ.i.p.al LeClerq took his place behind the lectern on the stage.
"Ladies and gentlemen, sponsors, a.s.sembled 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."
The media photographers clicked away on their digital cameras. Their photos would be on news sites around the world in seconds.
LeClerq continued: "To the new intake of candidates, I say this: welcome. Welcome to the hardest, most demanding year of your lives. Make no mistake, this school is a crucible, a cauldron, a daily trial-by-fire that will push your skills, your minds - your very characters - to their limits.
"Race School is not for the faint-hearted or the weakkneed. You will experience the elation of victory...and the deflation of loss. You will all partake in the School Championship, while those of you who actually win a race will have the extra privilege of partic.i.p.ating in the mid-season Sponsors" Race.
"Some of you will emerge from this crucible forged and strengthened, and hence worthy of the t.i.tle "racer"...and from that, worthy of a contract with a professional team. Others among you will not - you will be broken. But take heart, it is no disgrace to withdraw from Race School. Just being invited to come here in the first place means that you are something special.
"Speaking of something special," LeClerq grinned, "I am pleased to announce that we have a bit of a surprise for you all today. To give this year"s Commencement Lecture, we have a very special guest, an alumnus of this school and, let"s be frank, a rather famous individual. Ladies and gentlemen, to give the Commencement Address, I present to you the best student I ever taught...Alessandro Romba, the current World Champion!"
The auditorium came alive.
Heads turned in delighted shock. Murmurs raced across the room. Jason almost fell out of his seat.
At the lectern, Jean-Pierre LeClerq gave a satisfied smirk - he had sprung his surprise perfectly.
Alessandro Romba was quite simply the most famous man in the world.
La Bomba Romba.
The reigning world champion on the Pro Circuit, he was the lead driver for the Lockheed-Martin Factory Team. He was also Italian, drop-dead handsome, and perhaps the most daring man to ever helm a hover car: his nickname "La Bomba" - the Bomb - was very well-earned.
He endorsed aftershave lotions, Lockheed-Martin hover cars, and Adidas sportswear. Not a week went by when his face did not appear on the cover of some major magazine or newspaper.
When Alessandro Romba strode out onto the stage from the wings, the entire audience fell into a respectful hush. Not a few women in the crowd primped their hair.
He embraced LeClerq like a son hugging his father, and then he stood behind the lectern and smiled that million-dollar grin.
The media cameras clicked like machine guns.
Thirty minutes later, La Bomba Romba concluded his speech to roars of approval and a standing ovation. Jean-Pierre LeClerq retook the lectern.
"Thank you, Alessandro, thank you. It will come as no surprise to any of you that in his year at Race School, Alessandro romped away with the School Championship by a record twenty points. I understand that he will be staying for lunch and is happy to sign autographs too.
"But to some administrative matters: I will now call out each candidate"s name and a.s.sign them to their mentors. Your mentor will be your teacher here at Race School - as well as your guidance counsellor, your confidante and your surrogate parent. Each mentor will be responsible for three driving teams.
"So. Starting alphabetically. Team Becker, driver Barnaby, you will be under the tutelage of Master Zoroastro. Team Caseman, driver Timothy, Master Raul. Team Chaser, driver Jason, you will be a.s.signed to Master Syracuse: Mech Chief to be a.s.signed. Freeman, driver Wesley..."
Jason turned to the Bug. "Well, little brother. It"s time to start Race School."
CHAPTER THREE.
THE INTERNATIONAL RACE SCHOOL PIT LANE.
Pit Lane pulsed with the noises and smells of racing.
The whirring hum of magneto drives. The whine of hover cars screaming down the straight. The acrid smell of spent drives and the sweet mint-like odour of green coolant liquid.
After the formalities of the Opening Ceremony were over, it was straight to the racetrack for the new candidates. Their bags were all taken to their dorms, where they would meet them later. Their cars had been unloaded from the liner during the ceremony, and were waiting for them in the pits.
Naturally, Jason and the Bug got lost on the way to Pit Lane.
Race School was a pretty big place, with no fewer than six practice courses and thirteen compet.i.tion courses, all fanning out from a central pit area on the banks of the Derwent called Race HQ. Finally, they found Pit Lane, with the Argonaut sitting inside a bay emblazoned "55".
Scott Syracuse was already there, waiting for them.
"Master Chaser. Master Bug," he said. "So nice of you to join us."
Standing with Syracuse were seven other students - two drivers with their navigators and Mech Chiefs...plus one extra student.
The seventh person was someone Jason recognised.
Sally McDuff.
"Oh, no way..." Sally said, seeing Jason and the Bug approaching.
Syracuse said, "You"ve met already?"
"Yeah, at the Opening Ceremony," Sally said.
Syracuse said, "Well, then, for what it"s worth: Jason Chaser, meet Sally McDuff, your Mech Chief. Ms McDuff hails from the wilds of Scotland but don"t hold that against her. She"s a gifted pit technician. For their part, Ms McDuff, aside from being inexcusably late, the Chaser brothers are quite a driving team."
Jason nodded to Sally.
Syracuse indicated the other two drivers - both were big eighteen-year-olds, one Asian, the other African-American. "This is Horatio Wong and Isaiah Washington. They will also be studying under my tutelage this year."
Both Wong and Washington towered over Jason and the Bug. They eyed them as if they were insects.
"Now," Syracuse said. "Today is Monday. On Wednesday, you will contest the first race of the year. Like all races here at Race School, points will be awarded for the first ten cars on a sliding scale from 10 for the winner down to 1 for tenth place - points that will be tallied for the School Championship.
"During your time here at Race School you will partake in every variety of hover car race: gate races, lap races, sprints, knockout pursuits and enduros. Wednesday"s race is the traditional Race School opener: a SuperSprint 30-2-1: Last Man Drop-Off. Thirty laps, but every two laps, the last-placed car is removed from the field. It"s fast, furious, and unforgiving on racers who fall behind. There are no spectacular comebacks in a Last Man Drop-Off."
Syracuse eyed them all closely, his gaze electric. "Now, I know a lot of other teachers allow their charges to prepare in relative peace for this first race, using it as a kind of test-the-water, shake-off-the-rust, get-a-feel-for-the-place race. I do not view Race 1 in this way. I view it as a race. A race to be run and, hopefully, won.
"Nor do I believe in wasting valuable teaching time. As such, I will give you all two hours to prep and examine your cars, to make sure they arrived safely, and for those who haven"t met, to get to know each other.
"We will commence formal lessons in two hours, at 1600 hours, starting with Electromagnetic Physics in Room 17. I have arranged for Professor Kingston, the head of the physics department, to give you all a special private lesson.
"This will be followed by two hours of Pit Practice commencing at 1730 hours. Dinner begins at 1900, but you can always eat later. As for tomorrow morning"s Race Tactics cla.s.s, I expect that all of you will have read pages 1-35 of Taylor"s The Racing Mind plus The Rules of Hover Car Racing, all of which you will find on your dorm computers. There will be a quiz. Any questions?"
The nine candidates just stared at him in shock.
"No?" Syracuse said. "Good. See you in two hours then, in Room 17 for some physics."
Sally McDuff walked in a slow circle around the Argonaut, frowning.
She eyed its hunch-backed fuselage, touched its coolant receptacles. "Hmph." Then she dropped to the ground and slid herself under the car, lying on a hover-plank.
Jason and the Bug just watched.
"Hmmm..." Sally"s voice came from under the car. She re-emerged. Stood up, put her fist to her chin, thinking hard, gazing critically at the glistening bluewhite-and-silver hover car.
"It"s c.r.a.p," she said, p.r.o.nouncing the last word in the Scottish manner: craaap. "An absolute honest-to-goodness cobbled-together piece of c.r.a.p. Little Bug, I can"t believe a smart guy like you would fly around in this thing. Him," she jerked her chin at Jason, "I could believe, but not you."
The Bug smiled. He obviously liked Sally McDuff. But she wasn"t finished.
"h.e.l.l, there must be nine different cars making up this thing. I mean, I can see why she flies fast, but she must be h.e.l.lishly unstable: you"ve got the standard six magneto drives along the underbelly of the car, but it"s a mix-and-match of three different brands. Luckily, you won"t have to worry about that here: the Race School provides us with magneto drives.
"Your Momo directional prism is top quality, but like all the good stuff, Momo prisms wear easily and this one"s only got a few races left in it. And what the h.e.l.l did you do to your thrusters, man? Looks like you"ve been dancing on your pedals! They"ll have to be completely stripped, greased and rebuilt. And you"ve eaten up your coolant hoses to within an inch of their lives."
"We had a problem with our steering in our last race back home," Jason said quickly, defensively. "As for the rest, geez, I did build her myself - "
Sally held up her hand. "Easy, tiger. Easy. I wasn"t finished. After all that, she"s a tough little nut, this Argonaut. Looks like you"ve put her through absolute h.e.l.l and she"s still begging for more. I like tough cars, cars with guts, character, haggis. And this car has haggis. h.e.l.l, I even like the paint job. And don"t you worry, young Chaser. There isn"t an engine alive that Sally Anne McDuff can"t tune to peak performance."
For the next two hours, Jason and Sally talked (with the Bug speaking through Jason), about their cars and past races, their homes and their dreams involving the racing world.
Sally wanted to be Mech Chief in a pro team. She was the youngest of nine children and all of the others were boys: all grease monkeys and car freaks. She had spent her early years watching them tinker with their hot rods - but it was only when she got her own car at age 14 that she revealed the extent of her knowledge: her own tinkering produced a veritable hover rocket. Her father, a stout old Scot named Jock McDuff, was so proud.
Jason told her about himself: living in Hall"s Creek in far north-western Australia with his adoptive parents. Martha and Henry Chaser couldn"t have children, so for many years they had raised orphans. So far, over the course of 40 years, they had raised 14 parentless kids.
They had found Jason at the local orphanage as a four-year-old. Seated next to him in the playroom had been the Bug, a tiny troublesome boy of two who, they were told, only became quiet when he was with Jason.
When Martha and Henry decided to adopt Jason, they faced an unexpected problem: the four-year-old Jason wouldn"t leave the Bug behind. Simply wouldn"t leave without him. The dean of the orphanage also begged them to take the Bug, too, since there would be no end to the howling if Jason were taken away without him.
And so Martha and Henry Chaser had simply shrugged and decided to adopt the two of them.
Four o"clock came round and they went to their first formal cla.s.s with Scott Syracuse. It was a killer physics lesson on the workings of magneto drives and the principles behind Wilfred Wilmington"s invention and by the end of it, Jason was mentally exhausted.
Which made the ensuing two hours of pit practice absolute torture: over and over again, he would swing the Argonaut into their pit bay, bringing it to a halt underneath an enormous spider-like mechanism called a pit machine.
The pit machine had eight arms, all of which performed different tasks at the same time: magneto drive replacement, coolant refill, compressed-air replenishment, fin realignment - its operation supervised by Sally, the Mech Chief.
"Clean pit stops are the lifeblood of hover car racing!"
Syracuse yelled above the din of his three teams. "Races are won and lost in the pits! Every variety of race contains pit stops - some, like the Italian Run, even require the pit crew to travel overland to meet their car at multiple pit areas!
"Pit stops provide races with that crucial element of strategy! When should you pit? Should you pit one more time when the finish line is only three laps away? Can you make it round the final lap on only one magneto drive?"
Syracuse smiled. "But before you can formulate pit stop strategies, you have to master the pit stop itself!"
At that moment, as Jason swept into his pit bay underneath the giant claws of his pit machine, he realised - too late - that he"d overshot the pit bay by about twelve inches.
"Chaser! Hold it there!" Syracuse yelled. "Everyone! Freeze! Please observe. Ms McDuff, initiate the pit machine."
Sally hit the switch.
The pit machine"s eight-p.r.o.nged claws descended around the Argonaut - and abruptly stopped, realigned themselves, moved forward a foot, then went about their repair work.
The delay was about five seconds.
"Not good enough, Mr Chaser!" Syracuse said. "Your pit machine will be loyal to you. But are you being loyal to it by performing a sloppy pit entry? Your compet.i.tor just blasted out of the pits four seconds ahead of you and won the race. Imprecision is punished severely in racing. If you are imprecise, you will lose. I don"t know about you, but I do not race to lose."
Another time, while his pit machine replaced his six undercar magneto drives, Jason - in his eagerness to get away quickly - let the Argonaut creep forward over the white line painted on the ground, marking the forward edge of his pit bay area.
There came a shrill electronic scream.
The pit machine immediately withdrew into the ceiling, refusing to work on the car.
"Mr Chaser!" Syracuse called. "Pit Bay Violation! You just earned yourself a 15-second penalty for illegally creeping out of your pit bay during a stop. Fifteen seconds in a hover car race is an eternity. Again, you lose."
"But - " Jason started.
Syracuse stopped him with an icy glare. "Don"t resist your mistakes, Mr Chaser. Learn from them. To err is human, to make the same mistake twice...is stupid."
And with that, mercifully, the pit practice ended.
It was 7:45 p.m.
It was late. Jason and the Bug and Sally were exhausted. And they still had reading to do for tomorrow.
"Thank you, people," Syracuse said. "I"ll see you tomorrow morning."