TURBO Racers

by Austin Aslan

  What am I doing out here? There’s been a terrible mistake.

  The other ’nauts each stood beside their roadsters. Except for Katana, their helmets all rested in their arms, their faces plain to see. They watched Mace approach, his face covered. The compulsion to take off his own helmet was nearly overwhelming.

  Mace jumped down off the truck. He studied the other TURBOnauts as he strode over to Trailblazer, recognizing all of them. Most were in their early twenties. Talon was at the head of the pack. His burnt-red helmet gleamed under his arm. Near him was Taz Nazaryan, who drove Pitchfork, a maroon-and-gold-striped roadster. Shaped more like a stock car than most other trimorphers, it would turn into a respectable airplane and skimmer—but it ruled the ground track, gripping the asphalt like no other.

  “With fifty ground laps to start the race, Taz will lap you by the time you launch to air,” Carson had warned him. “Don’t sweat it. Know it’s inevitable, but stay as close as you can and overtake him in the air as soon as possible.”

  On and on down the line, Mace identified the competition, recalling important notes. Apocalypse’s Randall Horseman: older, but a former Glove winner. He always wore his Golden Gauntlet while racing. Akshara Brahma and Untouchable. They’d been on a tear all year. Ariel Pterin was inspecting Pterodactyl. Bethany Ironsides was next to Blacksmith. All of them had already qualified for the Prix.

  Carpe Diem. Yolo “YOLO” Volkov was Europe’s hottest commodity behind Guillotine’s Leon “Napoleon” Dubois. Castle. Monsoon. Five Alarm. Ursa Major. Forty competitors, all told. About a quarter of them amateurs. Mace glazed over those, uninterested, unconcerned, until he came to the next-to-last roadster in line.

  The green-and-lavender Lotus. Standing poised beside her: Katana.

  Aya, dressed in a new metallic-green flight suit, was the only other ’naut already wearing her helmet. Mace caught her watching him through her polished, eggplant-colored visor. “Katana,” he said. He nodded in her direction. She studied him closely.

  She must suspect that Mace was Renegade. Tempest would be suspicious, too. Both Renegade and Trailblazer would raise alarm bells for her. But it was too late. Mace was on the track. There was nothing Tempest could do to stop him now.

  Robert Gerber, Trailblazer’s crew chief, greeted Mace on the tarmac. They circled the craft, feeling every inch of it for imperfections. The ground was sticky, covered with Coca-Cola—on purpose—to give the racing wheels better traction coming off the start line.

  “You notice anything off about the unified fuel control?” asked Mace.

  Mr. Gerber gave the hood a pat. “It’s temperature sensitive, but should adjust to the Northern California weather long before you go airborne.”

  Mace cocked his head questioningly.

  Mr. Gerber gave his mustache a stroke. “Nothing gets by you. Your throttle’s locked at ninety-percent capacity, Mace. I dialed it back so you don’t kill yourself out there. Trust me, even at ninety percent, Trailblazer’s still more powerful than almost anything else. Keep your training wheels on until I’m convinced you can handle the extra g’s.”

  “Okay.” Mace frowned. “I have manual override for that, yeah?”

  Mr. Gerber gave him a long, hard look. “Don’t touch it unless I give the go-ahead. Which I won’t. Winning is great—but coming home alive and in one piece is WAY more important.”

  Carson came back in time to help Mace into his seat and to help him perform the safety checks and last-minute diagnostic run-throughs.

  Carson punched his shoulder. “You got this, Renegade.”

  Mace grinned. “Let’s hope there’s no chain-link fences out there.”

  “Nothing’ll stop you this time.” Carson winked.

  Mace gave him a gloved thumbs-up, glad his face was hidden behind a visor. “I’m choking up in here. Honestly, there might be tears,” he replied, trying to sound like he was joking.

  Carson laughed and shut the top glass canopy. He and the rest of the crew backed away. The cheers of the crowd became a roar like nothing Mace had ever heard. It sifted through the glass, its very own kind of silence.

  “Okay,” he told himself. “Now you can look.”

  He glanced to his right. Directly across from him, in the first row, sat his parents.

  They were holding hands. They saw him looking and waved.

  The high sun was at just the right angle to illuminate the cockpit interiors without creating too much glare on the glass canopies. This was no accident, of course. Starting-line ticketholders expected their money’s worth of exclusive views. He waved back.

  The distance and barriers and noise between them were irrelevant. His dad signed. “Get out there. Show the world who you are.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  “Nervous?” Mom asked.

  Mace laughed. He pinched his fingers together, showed them. “Just a little bit.”

  “Don’t be,” she answered. “Just be yourself. Big-T TURBO racer! But promise me: no speeding,” she added.

  Mace leaned back and laughed.

  The announcer’s bold voice came through the cockpit’s closed-circuit radio loud and clear. “Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!”

  The novice pilot just ahead of him—England’s Fenny Adder—revved the engine of Cauldron. Aya answered beside him, and the familiar rattle of Lotus came alive. “This is awesome!” Mace screamed.

  Dex’s voice in his earpiece came to life, barely audible over the roar of the start line. “Um? What are you waiting for?”

  Laughing at himself, he realized he’d forgotten to turn on Trailblazer. He punched the ignition, and his faithful steed awoke beneath him. A wild grin stole over his face. This race was different. He was here on his own terms, and this was the first race of his life that really mattered.

  Let her breathe. Listen to her. She’ll do the heavy lifting. He could tell: Trailblazer was hungry for an honest win. Then he relaxed, a new realization overcoming him like a warm embrace:

  So was he.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mace was tense in his seat, his palms sweaty.

  The pace car led the way, and the grid of roadster-phase trimorphers gathered speed as they entered the first bend of the Sonoma Raceway. The roadsters jostled to the right and left, priming the tires by heating them and scuffing them of factory oils. Mace swerved, too, visualizing a path through the cars ahead, all while accelerating. The tires developed a sticky grip on the road; his handling was tight, fluid. More speed. Everything beyond the other racers became a blur. There was only the swarm of huddled vehicles, the rhythm of the changing slope as straightaways became tight curves.

  He came around the final bend and caught a glimpse of the grandstands. A green flag danced and waved in the distance. Talon, Taz, Yolo, Akshara, and the other leaders were already across the start line at full speed, breaking from the pack, banking into the first curve of the first official lap. The race had begun. The squadron of roadsters directly in front of Mace lurched forward, no distant pace car holding them back.

  Mace gunned it, eager to stay on them.

  His heart beat wildly.

  “Game on!” Dex gleefully shouted in his ears. “Get up in there. Take Aya on the left. You know she hates that. Rattle her early.”

  The curve eased up, giving him an opening. He found Trailblazer’s rhythm; it pulsed up through the steering column into his gloved palms, calming him down. He rocketed past two novices, leaving them tied for last place, and entered the next turn tightly holding to the inside lane, gaining ground and passing Aya.

  Mace had no doubt she’d make him answer for that before too long.

  “Fantastic. Now you’re racing. Keep it up. I want you halfway through the standings by the time you leave the raceway.”

  Forty competitors. I need to be in twentieth place by the fiftieth lap. That meant leaving someone in his dust about every other lap. That’s doable, he thought. His muscles grew steady as he passed another two straggl
ers. By lap ten, he was already in thirtieth place, and starting to feel good about his chances.

  He accelerated and inched up on the other roadsters. “Any chance I can just . . . morph to air for a split second, kinda jump the other racers?”

  “We’re following the rules, right?” Dex asked. Mace could hear the wink in his voice.

  “Okay.”

  “Well, then, you know the drill: you need at least two wheels on the ground during any ground run.”

  “Only two? Why only two now?”

  “New rule. Because some of the skimmers, when they’re roadsters, they tend to pop wheelies during aggressive acceleration.”

  Reports came in that Taz was in the lead. He, Akshara, and Talon were already exiting the stadium. Mace’s eyes widened. How would he ever catch them?

  But then he remembered: this race was a long haul. Ten repetitions to boot. They hadn’t gone airborne yet. Plenty of time to catch up.

  Aya passed him. He passed her. She zoomed by him again, this time leaving him struggling for breath. Tempest had really worked with her ground racing. He let her go.

  Focus on the rest of the amateurs. Worry about Aya at the finish line.

  Mace completed the fifty ground laps at the Sonoma Raceway. He followed the nearest racers onto the highway to San Pablo Bay, which connected to San Francisco Bay.

  He registered a TV tower filled with cameras, and then it was gone in a blur. Up ahead, Vulcan was in his sights. He grinned, positioned himself in Caldera Kahale’s blind spot, and took her on the left, half on and half off the road’s shoulder. He blazed past her, watching as she braked—she actually braked!—startled by the cloud of dust he’d kicked up as he blew by.

  “You’re killing it, Mace!” Carson sounded positively gleeful. “Don’t let up.”

  San Pablo Bay glistened in his crosshairs. He watched several roadsters take the ramp up ahead at full throttle, transform in midair, and then dive below his line of sight.

  The ramp was coming too quickly. He tapped the brakes.

  “Don’t slow down! This is your first morph,” Dex barked. “Everyone’s watching! You want every crew out here reporting that you’re an easy target during morphs?”

  “Good point.” The ramp was beneath him. Through sheer instinct and training, his hand found the morph. He toggled it.

  He pierced the surface of the bay. His smart cushioning grabbed him and held him back. His Pegasus engine dialed wide, transforming into a turbine. It extended and churned. Mace let out a pent-up cry. No cracks in the canopy. He’d survived. All in all, not a bad morph.

  A skimmer shot overhead, zooming past him, but then flipped like a playing card on the rough surface. Disqualified, Mace thought smugly. During the first rep! I’m guaranteed not to come in last place now.

  “Hey, Mace,” Mr. Gerber chimed in. “Don’t forget to calibrate your dorsal flaps. You’re cutting through the current at a twenty-degree angle. Compensate manually. That should give you your speed back.”

  “Thanks,” he said, leaning forward to execute a series of commands on the control panels. He felt a lurch of speed and overtook the next submersible.

  He passed a series of underwater camera drones. A giant ring materialized through the murky haze. He shot through the center of it, no sweat. The wind had churned up a ton of sediment in the bay. Mace relaxed his eyes and sensed each ring before it became visible in the haze. He corrected early and often, flying through hoop after hoop while gaining speed.

  He jostled past four TURBOnauts on the route to Angel Island and knocked one of them off course. Castle veered wide in Mace’s wake, missing a hoop, which would cost her a five-second penalty.

  Dex encouraged him. “You embarrassed a veteran. Great work.”

  Mace glanced up, detecting a pair of approaching skimmers. The colors were muted, but he caught sight of the numbers on their bellies easily enough. 74 and 22. Chariot and Excalibur. They were dueling it out up there, neck and neck, physically nudging each other as they navigated the buoys they had to nail to get time credit. Mace was impressed. Tangling at those speeds was extremely dangerous on the water’s surface. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them—yup.

  The belly of Excalibur lifted out of sight, skipped, lifted again, and then rolled. A crash.

  “Pendragon’s out!” Carson reported. “A huge break for us! Arthur MacLeod won’t advance to the Prix, now.”

  “What about Chariot?” Mace asked.

  “Apollo Milan will pass over you for sure. Take him back later.”

  “Sonar’s catching up, too,” Dex advised. “But this is her strongest terrain. You’ll beat them both back the second you’re in the air.”

  “Got it.” Mace could feel a submersible on his tail. Sonar’s Melanie O’Campo made her move, cutting beneath Mace with a burst of speed. She bulleted forward and disappeared in the haze ahead. A torpedo. But she’d be low-hanging fruit on the other terrains.

  The course was changing. The buoys anchored beneath the surface, marking the underwater track boundaries, narrowed and trended shallower. The bellies of coast-guard ships flanked the track. Mace licked his lips. The morph to air was coming up.

  “Time to prep for launch. Your approach isn’t crowded, which’ll give you a—”

  “Quiet. I got this.” Mace knew what to do. He could execute a morph to air in his sleep. But he wanted this to go perfectly. This was his greeting to the world.

  He tilted upward to the angle of ascent. He could feel in the bones of his ears that his inclination was spot on, that his speed was exact.

  The nose of the submersible crossed the water’s surface. He morphed at the right moment, that space of time between heartbeats, when the breathing of Trailblazer came to rest, and salt water ran in rivulets off the fins. The craft sprouted wings, hovering above the water on forward momentum alone. The water droplets floated as suspended spheres. The turbine dialed shut. The jet engine opened and ignited.

  He bounded upward into the blue sky over San Francisco, eyes everywhere. He spotted the leaders, flashes of unmistakable color over the city. Iron Dragon, Pitchfork, Radioactive, Pterodactyl, and Blacksmith were holding a horizontal V formation over downtown. A second pack of aircraft in a second V pattern were dipping beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. “How are they so far ahead?” he said. “More than half an air-lap away!”

  “You’ve got your work cut out,” Dex’s voice agreed in his ear. “Now shut your jaw and open your thrusters.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Everything gets faster now,” Mr. Gerber pointed out. “You have to gun it. But this track is tight. Don’t lose control. You can’t afford to miss any checkpoints.”

  Each rep of the Pro-Am course included ten air-laps.

  “What place are the dicer pilots in?”

  Lotus, Guillotine, Carpe Diem, and three other choppers were duking it out on a route well within the outer flight path. They were putting on an acrobatic show for the Bay Area audiences, diving and rising, zigging and zagging, through drone-supported checkpoints that resembled a motocross track hovering over Alcatraz and the Presidio.

  “Don’t worry about them,” said Dex. “The courses connect back up. Just get up into that first pack of aircraft.”

  Mace throttled up. The rocket engine purred. Trailblazer responded to his every whim; even with his engine trimmed to ninety percent power, there was nothing the competition could do to beat back his trimorpher.

  They had built a one-of-a-kind workhorse. Within seconds of soaring upward, he had left Sonar behind. Stay in control . . . Mace veered to the right, punching through the middle of the first checkpoint, no problem. He gained speed, his sights set on his next victim: Chariot. Apollo Milan’s skimmer phase boasted one of the more impressive morphs to air, with its underbelly rising and separating to form wings. Mace slipped ahead of Chariot and zipped past the first of the Bay’s tethered blimp skyboxes. Spectators cheered wildly as he rocketed past.

  Mace overtook an
other aircraft, and then another. As he banked around the headlands, he joined the tail of a pack of four fliers. Using the group’s wake, he broke formation and flung himself forward with a burst of saved-up thrust. He ducked under the Golden Gate Bridge and unleashed the afterburner. He soared over San Francisco, passing above Aya and a swarm of dicers below, accelerating past skyscrapers topped with fans.

  The next pack of aircraft hit the following checkpoint in a defensive, spaced-out diamond formation. They were intentionally denying him a wake to coast within. Mace couldn’t break through. “They’ve wised up.” Mace gritted his teeth. No matter. If I can’t go through them, I’ll go around. The nearest checkpoint was in his rearview. The course opened up. Mace veered wide.

  Really wide.

  “What are you up to, Mace?” asked Dex. “Wide arcs mean longer distances.”

  “Let’s do geometry lessons later,” he answered. Mace shot in front of the blockade with a sharp swoop, blasting through the next checkpoint before they could nudge him out. He felt the smart cushioning strain under the additional g’s, but the tension released as he gained on the next straightaway.

  Air-lap after air-lap, Mace crept up on the leaders. His open path felt more like a time trial. This was how he’d trained, learning to race the clock and push his limits. He felt comfortable and it showed. “Faster,” he kept telling himself. “Go faster.”

  “Careful, Mace,” Mr. Gerber sang in his ears. “You’re at the edge of physics here. The g-forces will squish your brain if you try to cut these turns with too much thrust.”

  The edge of physics, Mace thought. Sounds awesome.

  Air-lap ten. Pitchfork, Iron Dragon, and Untouchable were in his sights. “I’ve got a visual on the leaders,” he reported.

  “Mace, you’ve done everything right so far. Now just stay with them,” advised Dex. “Don’t pass them yet. It’s too early. Join the pack, then hang back and hang tight. Let them know that you have the discipline to wait.”

  Mace let up on the fuel, falling in behind Taz Nazaryan, Talon, and Akshara Brahma. He could give Trailblazer more go, if need be. That was encouraging to know.