The Great Race

  The Great Race

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgements

  We’d like to thank the following people, without whom this book would have not been possible: Bill McCay, for help in rounding out the mauscript; Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, and John Heifers at Tekno Books; Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers at BIG Entertainment; Tom Colgan of Penguin Putnam Inc; Robert Youdelman, Esquire; and Tom Mallon, Esquire; and Robert GottUeb of the WiUiam Morris Agency, agent and friend. We much appreciated the help.

  Chapter One

  Without taking his eyes from the readouts on the console in front of him, Leif Anderson pursed his lips and blew. He was hoping the gust of breath would deflect the bead of sweat heading down toward the tip of his nose.

  His attempt failed.

  Leif tried a quick head shake. That only made it worse. The drip took off floating in microgravity until it hit the face shield of Leif’s helmet. There it splashed like a raindrop - except this was on the inside of the clear plastic panel. A set of numbers on the screen, blocked by the droplet, turned into an unreadable blur.

  Leif’s breath hissed through his teeth. He needed those readouts if he was supposed to regulate the braking on this bucket. And there was no other way they were landing on Mars.

  He glanced at his fellow Net Force Explorers - not that there was much to see, with them all swathed in space suits. David Gray sat at the Mars lander’s piloting position. Leif knew that his friend’s face would be as set and hard as if it were carved from ebony. He was the one who’d ordered the crew to button up their space suits. After all, the trickiest part of the whole trip was coming up.

  Tom Cloncii’s Kei Force Explorers

  Matt Hunter was like a bird dog on point before his copilot’s console. Leif could imagine his friend’s eager brown eyes taking in every bit of data. Andy Moore sat in front of his controls with an almost disinterested slouch -but what could you expect from the joker of the group?

  As for Leif, he was ‘enjoying’ all the smells a person could possibly enjoy while being locked up in a plastic and metal cocoon and sweating like a pig. It was bad enough breathing recycled air and living in cramped quarters with three other guys. But when you were stuck in cramped quarters with yourself …

  The trip to Mars was no easy job. Just getting off the ground had been a considerable effort. The Mars spacecraft alone weighed in at 2500 metric tons - more than five and a half million pounds. And that didn’t count all the additional tons of docking hardware to get the bucket into orbits nor the fuel, nor the little details like food and air for the crew of four for a round trip that would take a good three years.

  Adding to the difficulties of the trip were the inevitable changes that accumulated in the human body after months without gravity. Leif didn’t like the weird posture his body took on when the muscles designed to hold him upright against Earth’s pull had nothing to work against. It took a regimen of relentless exercise throughout the trip to keep a person’s body from turning into a cloud of boneless mush.

  Proceeding from orbit around Earth, they’d reached Mars and swung into a circle around that planet. That had been hairy enough - the Mars Observer craft had been lost back in 1993 during orbital insertion.

  But that was the equipment of twenty years ago. And the Mars Observer had been an unmanned craft, operated by remote control from the Earth. On a job where every split second counted, it took radio waves an average of four and a half minutes to reach the space probe - space is big, even when something’s moving at the speed of light.

  Their old bucket didn’t have light-speed engines, just good old-fashioned rockets. But it also had a four-man crew aboard to ride down in the Mars lander, explore, then launch up the Earth return craft - two hundred metric tons altogether. All they had to do was balance it on top of a jet of white-hot gases until they touched down on the Martian surface with a bump - and not a crash.

  Leif initiated another braking sequence - the last before touchdown - and prepared to become just another passenger. David and Matt would have the job of goosing the bucket upright during its descent with attitude rockets.

  The effect of the retrorockets hit, giving Leif and his fellow Net Force Explorers the brief sensation of weight.

  Then they were weightless again - and red lights lit up all over Leif’s board. He punched the buttons and flipped switches, his fingers clumsy in their gauntlets.

  ‘Something’s wrong with the fuel pumps - they cut out in the middle of the sequence!’ he reported into his helmet mike.

  This was the worst of bad news. They were dropping swiftly through the thin Martian atmosphere. Even though the planet below was pulling at them with much less than Earth’s gravity, they were moving at a terrifying clip.

  And the brakes didn’t seem to be working.

  Leif kept trying to troubleshoot the fuel-delivery system, wishing he could crack open the faceplate on the helmet and wipe his dripping face. The inside of his suit seemed very hot and damp right now. ‘I can’t find what’s wrong!’ he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

  “I’m going to try to trigger the retros manually - prepare for a jolt!” David warned.

  The engines roared, then spluttered, roared, and spluttered again. The vibrations shuddered through the metallic structure of the ship, carrying the news of impending disaster with them.

  That was not what Leif wanted to hear. He turned to the readouts, trying to catch an indication of their speed.

  Too high. Way too high.

  ‘Do we just abort the mission?’ Matt broke in on the circuit. ‘light up the engine on the return craft and get out of here?’

  ‘I - I don’t think we can do that,’ David’s voice was numb as he tried to deal with a situation he’d never counted on.

  Seconds ticked away as the Net Force Explorers tried more and more desperate measures either to stop their fall or to head back to space again.

  Leif imagined the view below them. Mars had already dominated the vista through the observation ports for weeks, a ruddy pockmarked ball that had grown larger and larger. It has almost been as if Leif could reach through the heavy plastic and grab the planet in the palm of his hand.

  Of course, trying that would let the vacuum of space into the cramped crew quarters, removing the atmosphere, sucking the very breath of life out of their lungs, leaving four asphyxiated, freeze-dried corpses floating in a derelict ship. The airlessness outside, or rather, near-airlessness -they were already in the tenuous wisp that Mars called an atmosphere - meant that they could see every feature of the planet’s surface with uncanny clarity.

  It was also the reason why David had insisted on full space suits and closed helmets. He wanted to protect the crew members in case of a bumpy landing. David just hadn’t planned on taking the situation to such an extreme.

  They wouldn’t bump when they hit the surface.

  The landing would fall somewhere between a splat! and a kaboom!

  Leif gritted his teeth. This was not the time to think about how anything would fall,

  David continued the struggle all the way down. Leif could imagine the rust
-red, stony landscape coming closer and closer—

  ‘I’ve had enough of this!’ Andy Moore suddenly burst out. ‘I’m sweating like a pig!’ He opened the plate in his helmet and wiped a face so pale, faint freckles stood out.

  David half-twisted in his acceleration couch. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It won’t matter in another second/ Andy flared. ‘This is nothing a suit could help me through!’

  David shouted, in rage, or fear, or perhaps a combination of both.

  Leif arranged himself on his acceleration couch. It was warm in the control room. Was the Martian atmosphere going to ignite them like an oversized falling star?

  He took a deep breath …

  And the crash came.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Huuuuuuuuuuuggggh!’ Leif nearly fell out of his computer-link chair when the system crashed. He slouched against the luxurious, contour-hugging foam material3 rubbing his temples. Then he got up, wobbling slightly, and took a few steps.

  The computer-link chair reminded him too much of the acceleration couch aboard the ill-fated Mars lander.

  Could have been worse, he told himself. If we’d been on the real thing, instead of just a virtual-reality simulation ofity we’d be a messy spot on the Mars landscape.

  Leif paced around his room, his hands rubbing at his temples and the back of his neck, trying to massage away the headache - or rather, the pain around the circuitry implanted under his red hair. Those implants allowed him to interface with the computer-link chair and enter the Net, the global web-work where computers talked to one another, transferring money, information - and any kind of fantasy that the wildest imaginations could come up with.

  Through the magic of veeyar - VR, or virtual reality -Leif had been many places and done many things. A couple of times a week he was a wizard on a pseudo-medieval gameworld. His Net Force adventures in that world had turned out better than his stint as a crewman on David Gray’s Mars expedition.

  David’s private space program was a hobby, rather than a commercial venture like the lands of Sarxos, the gameworld where Leif practiced wizardry. David enjoyed engineering virtual copies of space hardware - usually the great unmanned probes of the early days of space exploration. His Net programs were some of the best, even though they could leave a person with a wicked headache after an unplanned bounce out of a scenario. David believed that even virtual mistakes should have consequences.

  Leif doubted that David had planned to make the consequences this severe. Leif was currently extra-sensitive to any kind of implant problem. He’d recently suffered serious implant trauma when a would-be prankster had circumvented veeyar safety protocols to add a real kick to the virtual bullets he was firing. Now it didn’t take much to give him a killer headache. Not that Leif complained to the guys about his problem. And he figured it was worth taking the risk in exchange for the privilege of going along on the journey.

  The Mars expedition had been David’s most ambitious effort to date^ requiring a four-person crew and multiple sessions in veeyar over several weeks - David only simulated the critical moments in the months-long flight, rather than the whole space voyage. The technology was antique, dating back to 2010, fifteen years ago. With today’s nuclear-electric space drive, a voyage to Mars took only a couple of months.

  Leif’s father was particularly proud of doing his bit in space. He’d ordered his company to help fund the basic research for the new drive.

  And made a handsome profit on it, Leif thought with a grin. I guess the family spirits punished me for traveling the old-fashioned way - even in simulation.

  He sighed. At least the worst of his computer-crash-inspired headache had faded. Leif accessed his computer -by voice, this time - and asked for a hologram link to David’s system.

  A moment later, a three-dimensional image of David’s face swam into existence over the computer console. The seventeen-year-old looked no better than Leif felt, despite the burnished ebony skin that hid any post-crash pallor. Maybe David even looked little worse - after all, it was David’s brainchild that had crashed. Still, he summoned up a smile when he saw his caller.

  ‘Hey, Leif.’

  ‘Sorry, David.’

  David shrugged. ‘My own fault, I expect,’ he said. ‘I make the hardware too real. The Mars astronauts had years to familiarize themselves with the equipment. All we had was a quick-immersion course.’

  ‘We got pretty close,’ Leif tried to comfort his friend.

  ‘A little too close, while moving at several miles per second,’ David retorted. ‘You know what they say - it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.’

  ‘How are Matt and Andy?’ Leif asked about his other crewmen/friends.

  ‘They both buzzed in before you - they’re fine. In fact, they’re stopping by to watch this week’s Ultimate Frontier with me.’ David hesitated. ‘If you wanted to plug in—’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t think so.’ David and his friends all lived in the Washington, D.C., area. Leif was at his parents’ apartment in New York City. He didn’t mind making a quick virtual visit to David’s house, but linking into the Net for a long period of time right now would just intensify his headache.

  ‘Then I guess we’ll see you at the next Net Force Explorers meeting,’ David said.

  Leif nodded, wincing a little - implant headaches were miserable things. ‘Later. Take it easy.’

  ‘You too.’

  They cut their link.

  Stepping over to the bed, Leif plopped down and caught his reflection in the mirror. He was slender, and his landing was graceful enough - a genetic favor from his mother, a former ballerina. His red hair was a bit tousled from his attempts to make that blasted headache go away. Leif supposed he was good-looking, in a sharp-featured kind of way. Just the thing for a future globe-trotting playboy.

  Right now, though, his blue eyes were soft and there was a silly, fond smile on his lips. The Net Force Explorers had offered him a welcome escape from the world of the rich and jaded … one that didn’t involve bizarre fantasies.

  Net Force was a government agency, a subdivision of the FBI tasked with the job of policing the Net. Net Force agents found themselves up against terrorists, criminals, foreign governments up to no good, and even thrill-seeking kids out for a virtual spree.

  The Net Force Explorers weren’t exactly Net Force’s junior auxiliary. They got some physical training, provided by Net Force’s Marine component, but the Net Force Explorers spent more time learning about the Net than about being cops.

  What Leif especially liked was the comradeship with his fellow Net Force Explorers. Even though he saw them more often in veeyar than in the flesh, these guys kept him grounded in reality.

  Take David Gray - where else but Net Force Explorers would a rich kid in a New York penthouse end up hanging out with a young black guy whose father was a D.C. cop?

  The truth was, between Net Force and the Net Force Explorers, Leif had wound up in some pretty interesting situations - even if he sometimes ended up in a crash.

  Still smiling, Leif got up, headed for the kitchen, and made himself a snack. Food usually helped these headaches go away. When he finished, he looked at his watch. Hey, Ultimate Frontier would be on in a few minutes!

  Leif padded over to the living room and warmed up the holo-suite. As usual. Dad had paid for the very best. The effect of the three-D projection was just a little short of actual veeyar.

  The theme music came on, and Leif seemed to swoop through space, veering around stars and planets.

  Maybe this is what the old Mars bucket needed, he thought. Computer-controlled everything and sound effects to let us swooosssh! through airless space without too much interference from the laws of physics.

  The seemingly never-ending saga of the star cruiser Constellation was a spin-off from an earlier series, which in turn had been spawned by a decades-older version, and so on and so on, back to the days of flatscreen television.

  Le
if settled back on the couch. Okay, he thought, let’s see what Captain Venn and the crew get up to this time around …

  In Washington, D.C, David Gray and his friends sat in a crowded living room, watching Ultimate Frontier. They were all on the couch. David’s mom had the armchair, and David’s kid brothers James and Tommy lay on the floor, staring up at the holo image.

  Andy Moore was in what David called their friend’s ‘motormouth mode.’ With a big grin on his freckled face,

  Andy kept up a steady stream of talk, goofing on the plot and the characters.

  In this episode, the Constellation had the unwelcome job of convoying representatives from several alien races to a major diplomatic conference. Of course somebody was trying to assassinate the various representatives.

  Mrs Gray sighed as the Nimboid ambassador, an energy-being composed of ever-twining glowing tendrils, was somehow discharged into the ship’s electrical systems.

  ‘No big deal,’ Andy hooted. ‘The engineer will somehow figure a way to shunt the ambassador into the computers.’

  ‘This isn’t a rerun, is it?’ Matt Hunter asked with a skeptical glance at his pal.

  ‘No, but that doesn’t stop the writers from rerunning the same old ideas. Good old Mr Pendennis - did you ever notice almost all chief engineers in this universe are Celtic? Frankly, I think they’re pushing the envelope with a Cornishman. But anyway, Mr Pendennis will whomp up the magic thingamajig that will save the alien’s life.’

  ‘I just think the aliens are too weird-looking nowadays,’ Mrs Gray complained. ‘In the old days, on the flatscreen—’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mrs G!’ Andy burst out. Then he looked embarrassed. ‘Sorry. But the makeup budgets must have come from studio candy sales back then. Either that, or all those aliens lived on planets with very bright suns. They got big wrinkles on their foreheads or between their eyes from squinting in the sunlight.’ He tried to scrunch up his nose and forehead to demonstrate his point.

  David laughed. ‘Nowadays, the aliens are all based on demographics - audiences the show wants to appeal to.’