The Great Race

by Tom Clancy

  She sighed. ‘I suppose I should thank you,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Everyone else was just pretending not to hear what those four were saying.’

  Leif nodded. ‘I guess we Americans are too dumb to be deaf.’

  Ludmila shook her head. ‘We are what we are. I can’t blame Jorge for being angry with me - after all, I helped knock his team out of the race. But that was what my team needed.’

  ‘And you always do what your team needs?’ Leif asked.

  ‘I read an interesting biography not too long ago,’ Ludmila said.

  Leif thought she was trying to change the subject, but he said nothing.

  ‘It was about an Olympic skater from one of the old Communist countries - the place doesn’t even exist anymore. After the country became democratic she was criticized because she went out publicly with the son of the supreme leader.’ Ludmila looked at him. ‘She explained that dating the boy was one of the things she had to do if she wanted to skate.’

  ‘I think I see where this is going,’ Leif said.

  ‘I wonder if you do,’ Ludmila said. ‘You have computers built into your offices, your hotels, even your houses. Do you really know how hard it is to get your hands on a computer in my country?’

  ‘I know it takes a long night of hitting the clubs,’ Leif said mildly. ‘You see, Alex de Courcy is a friend of mine. By the way, did the government let you keep his laptop?’

  For a second, he thought he might have overplayed his hand. Ludmila looked ready to leap up and push past him. Her expression opened a little - into pure embarrassment. ‘If you knew about that, why did you stop Jorge? The two of you could have a fine time calling me names.’

  Leif shrugged. ‘Alex, as I’m sure you found out, is a nice guy - with a lot more money than sense. When he told me about you, it was as a joke on himself. He called his evening with you an unexpectedly expensive date.’

  That actually surprised a laugh out of her. ‘But I don’t think he’d be happy to meet me again.’

  ‘Oh, he might be. He enjoyed himself,’ Leif said airily. ‘But he’d probably spend the evening with one hand on his wallet.’

  Ludmila abruptly sobered. ‘I didn’t do what I did for money. That computer is the reason I’m on the team. It helped me work on the engines—’

  ‘So you designed that sword-ship?’ Leif asked.

  Ludmila shook her head. ‘Zoltan - the big boy on our team - had overall charge. He’s sort of like Jorge - large, and he likes to be in charge.’

  I’ll bet, Leif thought, wondering if Zoltan was aiming jealous glares his way. He couldn’t tell without looking back. And if he looked back, that might tell Zoltan something.

  ‘But when I ran the stress analysis for the various engine types—’ Ludmila suddenly cut off her flow of words.

  Just when you think you know the face of the enemy, Leif thought, the enemy goes and shows you a human face. I expected to be flirting with a sexy spy. Instead, I’m talking to a would-be computer nerd who’d go to any lengths to get a computer to work on. Maybe there’s something to this ‘power of the will’ stuff after all.

  Then he thought, We’ve got a lot to learn about our friendly enemies in the Carpathian Alliance.

  ‘So you’re the engineer on your ship?’ he asked.

  Ludmila nodded.

  ‘Me, too - although I might as well have been the figure-head. I was just lucky to be chosen.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think you were lucky.’ Somehow, Ludmila didn’t make that sound like a compliment.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The blond girl just shrugged. ‘Just what I said. I don’t think you were lucky, considering the captain they put over you. How can you stand being ordered around by - by a black one?’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Leif stared at the girl for a long, long time. He almost decided to get out of his seat and just leave her.

  At last, when he thought he had his voice under control, he spoke.

  ‘I think you should know,’ Leif said in a low, flat voice, ‘that David Gray has been a friend of mine for a couple of years. He’s the one who designed the Onrust. Spacecraft are a sort of hobby of his. Without David, my team wouldn’t even have a ship. We wouldn’t even be a team. He recruited us for another project, and then we heard about the Ultimate Frontier contest. But basically, I’m the engineer on our ship because I’m David’s friend - and because he invited me.’

  That’s enough, he decided, his spurt of anger dying as he saw the expression on Ludmila’s face. She looked as if she’d just been slapped - hard.

  ‘I - I was mistaken,’ she said. ‘I thought that - that Mr Gray had been put over you by some government faction -some sort of quota. But from what you said - and the way you said it - I see that I was wrong. I’m sorry.’

  Abruptly, Leif remembered that racism was one of the supposedly dead ideologies that survived in the Carpathian Alliance. All her life, Ludmila had heard about how hominids might have appeared first in Africa, but then evolved elsewhere – especially, of course, among the Slavs.

  ‘I didn’t think everybody in the C.A. believed that masterrace stuff,’ he said. If he had a lot to learn from Ludmila, she had a few things to learn from him as well.

  ‘I - I didn’t really think at all,’ she finally admitted. ‘It’s what everyone says back home. The government… our teachers.’

  ‘And do you think your people are the perfect race?’

  She gave him a painful half-smile. ‘I think they’re remarkably … human. Good people. Bad people. Smart and foolish ones. You make me begin to wonder which group I fall into.’

  ‘Sounds like your people are just like people every-where,’ Leif said. ‘I’ve traveled around a bit, seen more of the world than most of my countrymen. Lord knows, you can find a lot of foolish people in this world - and in the U.S. Lots of them live in California. Just think of the fads and the fondness for silly things.’

  He leaned closer to her. ‘But one thing I’ve learned from seeing all those people is that it’s not as easy as you think to classify them. The fact that a person is of a certain nationality - or race - doesn’t automatically make him smart or stupid. The fact that a person comes from a certain country doesn’t automatically make her evil.’

  Leif leaned back, a little embarrassed. That sounded remarkably like a speech, he thought. And I’m not even running for public office.

  ‘Ludmila,’ he said, ‘you’ve had a chance to see a little of America. Is it what you expected from the way your government described the country?’

  ‘There are things that seem strange,’ she admitted.

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Leif said, thinking of some of the charges made by the C.A. propaganda machine. ‘Do we look like a nation of warmongers run by a secret police?’

  Ludmila seemed strangely wary. ‘But - aren’t you connected with the secret police? The Net Force?’

  Score one for Carpathian intelligence, Leif thought. He and his friends hadn’t advertised the fact that they were Net Force Explorers. But Ludmila obviously knew about the connection.

  Did the mysterious Mr Cetnik have dossiers on him and his friends? On all the teams?

  ‘The Net Force Explorers are a youth group sponsored by Net Force,’ Leif said quietiy. ‘But we aren’t cops. We have some training to help in case of emergencies, but if we saw a crime, we’d just report it like any citizen ought to.’

  I hope that doesn’t sound as stuffy as I think it does, he thought.

  ‘But more importantly. Net Force is hardly a secret police. They’re right out there, trying to stop criminals and shady business types from robbing and pillaging on the Net, not to mention protecting our computers from terrorists and—’

  He paused for a second.

  Ludmila looked at him with a laugh in her eyes. ‘And unfriendly governments, no?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s hardly secret. I could take you into the offices—’

  He stopped as a slight shu
dder went through her. ‘The National Defense Police have offices, too - right in the middle of the capital, near Mesarovic Square. Many people go in there.’

  Her voice lowered until it was littie more than a whisper. ‘Few come out.’

  • • •

  The tour guide tried hard, but she had a very tough audience. None of the racers was in a much better mood by dinnertime at a very trendy - and touristy - Thai/ Mexican place.

  Leif was in a bad mood, too. The Carpathian Alliance team had all but grabbed Ludmila as they got off the bus at the restaurant. Once inside, they sat down at a small table, big Zoltan glaring at Leif.

  Now that her coverts been blown, he’s feeling proprietary, Leif thought.

  To top it off, Leif caught that fish-oil taste of mock-meat in his burrito.

  The bus ride out to Pinnacle Studios was quiet - too quiet, Leif thought. It was a sullen silence, from people angry at one another - and frankly worried over the next stage of the race.

  ‘Would’ve been better if they’d skipped dinner and just let us go back to the hotel and relax.’ Even Andy’s wise-guy cheerfulness had taken a brooding turn.

  ‘Yeah, and if transmat beamers were real instead of just special effects on Ultimate Frontier, we could have gone home and taken a nice nap,’ David replied. ‘But they aren’t, and we can’t, so we won’t. Make the best of it.’

  Leif and the others went to the writers’ cubbyhole in Casa Falldown and synched in. He wanted to swear at that stupid computer-link chair, but that wasn’t what was eating him.

  It was Ludmila. From the way she had handled Alex and Jorge - probably Zoltan - she’d seemed like an almost Machiavellian intriguer. But after he’d talked to her for a while, she’d seemed like a shy little girl who’d never been out in the world. Which was the real person?

  Was she both? Was she neither?

  She’d seemed to enjoy talking with him on the bus -once they got over the initial shocks. Her stories of life in the Carpathian Alliance had been innocent enough - not a nightmare of oppression, but a land where people walked softly and kept their mouths shut. Her voice had taken on a slight ironic lilt when she spoke of the domovina, the homeland - a word C.A. propagandists must have done to death.

  No, Ludmila Plavusa was no Olga Popova, lady spy. She was nicer than Leif had expected - and more puzzling.

  He pushed the whole line of thought aside. Worry about it later, he told himself. For now, you’ve got a spaceship to drive.

  The Onrusfs next destination was a bit more straightforward - no black holes, no subtle gravity tricks. The space-buoy should be where it had been left.

  But to get to it, the racers would have to navigate their way through a big asteroid field.

  In the old days of the Ultimate Frontier series, such a scene would have meant threading the needle between clumps of styrofoam rocks that seemed about twenty feet away from one another. But with people actually heading out past Mars to prospect the Solar System’s asteroid fields, a touch of reality had crept in.

  When you break up a planet - or proto-planet - and spread its mass across a half-a-billion-mile-wide ellipse, you end up with the pieces stretched mighty thin - miles, dozens of miles, even hundred of miles apart. Passing through all that orbital debris wasn’t a case of having to watch for a new rock every couple of feet or so. It was a case of throttling down the speed to give your ship more maneuvering room. What you didn’t want to do was hit a chunk of something while moving at a significant percentage of light-speed.

  David and Andy had calculated a breakout point well away from the outer edges of the huge debris belt. They planned on making up any lost time once they were past the belt.

  ‘The rock field only extends along the system’s orbital plane,’ Leif had argued. ‘Why not go up and over it?’

  ‘That’s the dirty little trick they played on us,’ David said, displaying the system in holo. ‘The buoy is hidden among the asteroids. You can only pick up the signal when you are within a thousand kilometers of the buoy. You have to be in the asteroid belt to be close enough to have any chance at all of picking up that signal. We have to go through the maze to find it, and in this round of the race, you have to get within five hundred kilometers of the buoy to tag it.’

  ‘With all the related thrills and spills.’ Andy sighed theatrically. ‘Can’t you just imagine holo audiences all over the world, sitting on the edge of their seats, fearing -hoping - one of us will crash?’

  ‘No,’ Leif said honestly. ‘But I can imagine Milos Wallenstein doing it.’

  The bridge lights dimmed, Hal Fosdyke polled the crews to make sure they were ready … and then they were rolling.

  They made their breakout from the hyper-dimensions to normal space without a hitch. David ordered, ‘Commence braking.’

  ‘Braking,’ Leif confirmed.

  He changed the warp of space in the sublight drive to slow them down from the headlong speed they’d used to get out of the last system. Even as he did so, another racer materialized from hyperspace, flashed ahead - and almost collided with something.

  The racer sheered off at the last minute, dumped acceleration, but woimd up moving almost perpendicularly away from the asteroid belt that hid the buoy.

  ‘It will take them a while to come around again,’ Andy muttered.

  They continued on their course - a slow, almost glacial, progress through the asteroid belt - boring, really, except for the need for constant watchfulness. Matt sat hunched over the scanner controls, trying every trick he knew to spot debris. His voice grew tight, and he snapped rather than reported his observations.

  About halfway through. Matt became even more active at his console. ‘I’m picking up signs of a major release of energy,’ he said. ‘Looks like someone hit a rock.’

  The good thing is, it gets us back concentrating just as our attention began to flag, Leif thought. The bad thing is that there’s one less racer. Although they were ahead of us. Does that make two good things?

  Just before reaching the buoy, they were forced to divert from their course. They had no choice - the route they’d intended to take was filled with an expanding cloud of white-hot plasma.

  ‘Almost there - they must have gotten too eager,’ Andy said.

  ‘Let’s not allow the same thing to happen to us,’ David said.

  ‘I’m scanning,’ Matt said - almost a protest.

  A moment or two later, they were in range of the buoy and registered.

  ‘Now all we have to do is worry about getting out in one piece,’ David said in satisfaction. ‘Prepare for maneuver.’

  ‘Helm ready,’ Andy reported crisply. ‘New course laid in.’

  ‘Engines ready,’ Leif said.

  ‘Scanning?’

  Matt’s hands danced over his console. ‘We’re clear.’

  ‘Deploy.’

  Leif activated the program that manipulated the Onrust’s drive fields. The slowly moving ship suddenly changed its axis, tilting up almost perpendicular to its former course.

  ‘Scanning?’

  ‘Clear field ahead.’

  ‘Propulsion - deploy.’

  ‘Deploying.’ Leif cut in the standard drive configuration again^ sending the Onrust out through the ‘top’ of the asteroid belt rather than going all the way through to the inner side.

  David was hoping they’d recapture some lost ground with the maneuver. Leif wasn’t sure, but he had no time to think. He and Andy were too busy manually fine-tuning their course in response to Matt’s shouted warnings.

  ‘I think we’re out!’ Matt’s voice had a sort of exhausted gladness as he made the announcement.

  ‘Keep a sharp eye for any surprises3’ David warned. After a moment^ he ordered, ‘Increase speed fifty per cent.’

  ‘Fifty per cent,’ Leif confirmed.

  ‘On course,’ Andy reported.

  They keep accelerating until they were just above maxing out. The insertion point they wanted was high above the orbit
al plane of this system - where a very favorable hyperspace current headed to their next destination.

  Matt finally shifted from short-range scanning for chunks of dwarf real estate to a longer view that showed other competitors. ‘Thuriens and Laragants ahead of us,’ he reported. ‘The Karbiges decided to go through the belt before shifting course. They’re slightly behind us.’

  He continued to consult the finer readings on his console. ‘No sign of the Setangis.’

  ‘Too bad,’ David said. He’d gotten friendly with the members of the African team racing as the Setangis. From what he saw, they were a scrappy bunch, who’d had to beg and borrow - but not steal - computer time to complete their design. Like the fictional Setangi, they had no technological edge, but kept up with a combination of daring and piloting virtuosity.

  l^//, either too much of one or too little of the other wound up getting them nailed by a rock, Leif thought. I hope you’re happy, Miles Wallenstein.

  They hit the insertion point and snapped into hyper-space solidly in third place. And while waiting for the longer tail of pursuing racers, they had enough time for Leif to try a few experiments at tweaking their force-sails to take maximum advantage of the current.

  The lights flickered, but Hal Fosdyke’s voice didn’t sound for a couple of minutes. Then he finally said, ‘That’s a wrap.’

  Andy glanced around, one eyebrow raised. ‘He didn’t thank us,’ he said. ‘Hal always thanked us before.’

  ‘Quit clowning,’ Matt said grumpily. ‘I want to get out of here, back to the hotel, and into a shower.’

  Andy grabbed the front of his damp tunic, whiffing it back and forth as if he were fanning himself. ‘Good thing this is only virtual sweat. Otherwise the smell in that little office would knock you over.’

  The boys cut their connections and found themselves back in Casa Falldown. Andy sniffed the air. ‘Come to think of it, we could all do with showers anyway,’ he said.

  They stepped out in the hallway to find the African team passing. David stepped forward. I’m really sorry—’