Surra listened as the count headed toward the sixty second mark. “Sixty-four, sixty-three, sixty-two. One minute!”
“Charging!” Taylor barked, all business. Surra checked her harness to make sure the straps were tight. If Taylor’s capacitive shot to the high torque motors he’d installed worked as promised, she’d be in for a helluva jolt.
She glanced at the bike on their right. Externally, It wasn’t much different from theirs. All of the entries in the race were modified three-wheeled prospector bikes. The riders on the one beside her sat in the saddle on top, where the prospectors normally rode, one behind the other. Taylor had shown her the drawbacks of that design; it gave you better visibility but made the center of gravity too high at the speeds they’d be using. That could be dangerous in a tight turn.
Taylor’s modified bike—she could not bring herself to think of it as hers—used a side-mounted configuration with him on a outboard cradle on one side and her on the other. Because of the limited visibility this gave them, the only way they could communicate was through the intercom.
“Thirty-two.”
Damn, she shouldn’t be wool gathering at this point. She activated the map display in the inertial with a thick-gloved finger. The color screen came to life immediately, their current position atop Olympus marked with a bright red dot and the track they’d planned a yellow line. The inertial would have been a handy gadget to have a few years back, when she’d been prospecting in the wastelands, she thought. But she couldn’t have afforded it then, any more than she could now. Damn rich kid! What did he know about Mars?
“Twenty-five.”
What was she doing here, Surra asked herself for the hundredth time. Taylor could have bought a full year of her family’s services for the price he’d spent on this stupid race. What the devil were all of these idiots trying to prove, anyway? With most of Mars’s prospectors struggling to earn enough to pay the exorbitant fees for the oxygen and imported water, this race seemed a ridiculous waste of money and resources. But the government said that it put new capital into Mars’s marginal economy, and that was good. Hell, anything that would improve the lousy economy was good! Maybe it would even improve enough to get her damn sister off her back.
Most of these racers were in it for the glory, she knew. Big fucking deal; beating the forty-eight hour record for the run from Bottomos to Rescue Point. The other record, the one nobody liked to talk about, was ten idiots killed trying to do the same thing. Her first husband had been one of them.
“Eighteen,” said the radio. Why was time dragging so slowly? She felt her blood surging in her ears and heard the air rushing into her lungs. Every sense was heightened, every detail stood out in sharp detail.
“Tennineeight.”
How had the time gone by so fast? The adrenaline was flowing now. She could feel her heart rate shoot up. Her palms started to sweat. She braced her feet against the stops near the back of the cradle.
“Brakes off!” Taylor shouted through the intercom, loud enough to make her ears ring.
“Five.”
“All secure,” Surra said curtly and braced her chin against the helmet’s padded collar.
“Three!”
“Applying power,” Taylor reported, sounding calmer now. He’d said that it would take three seconds for the capacitor to charge up from the battery.
“Two!” Surra held her breath.
“One!”
“Ya-hoooooo!” Taylor shouted as the bike leaped forward.
Surra hadn’t heard the start count clearly enough to know if they had gotten off properly. If Taylor’s calculations had been correct the capacitor should have discharged across the motor, spinning the drive wheel up to 6,000 revs in an instant.
The bike screamed off the starting line and, throwing a stream of pebbles and dirt behind them, hit the gentle slope thirty meters away, beyond the edge of the caldera. It bounced twice and then pitched to the right. By the time Taylor got the bike back under control two other bikes had dashed ahead of them.
“Damn!” he exclaimed. The speed increased and settled into a rattling, shaking, bone-shattering ride.
“Don’t worry. She’ll settle down in a bit,” Taylor shouted and, true to his word, the bike did.
Now it was only rattling and bone-shattering.
The slope at this level was the youngest part of the mountain, the most recent lava flows. Most of the surface was hard, bumpy rock. They wouldn’t encounter any change in the scenery for another twenty bruising kilometers.
Soon the leading bikes started to turn to the left. “Follow them,” Surra instructed. “You’ll be able to see the fissure’s edge in a minute.” No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the northern edge of the first transverse rima appeared. The leaders of the pack were already swinging to avoid the second one.
“Watch it!” Taylor swerved the bike to avoid a broken slab that appeared in front of them. She glanced back and saw that most of the bikes behind them did likewise. One didn’t, hit it, and spun out of control, throwing its riders. Surra said a brief prayer for them. A smashed helmet in this vacuum was an instant death sentence. Farther down, where the atmosphere was thicker, you could survive for maybe a minute longer than instantly—faint comfort in either case.
They were now moving down a fifteen degree slope that was relatively clear of debris, moving at about thirty or forty klicks, just on the edge of too damn fast for safety and a hair slower than the leaders of the pack.
“Stay back. Don’t try to keep up,” she reminded Taylor. It would be just like the kid to be so pumped that he’d forget her insistence on caution.
“Right,” he said, too sharply. Apparently, steering the bike was taking a lot of his attention. Their practice runs earlier in the week had shown how unforgiving the bike was, despite Taylor’s claims of increased stability. Prospector’s carts were never meant to race; they were designed to carry a couple out on the desert and back. They hardly ever moved faster than ten, fifteen klicks. Mechanical burros was all they were, not thoroughbreds!
Surra finally got used to the swinging rhythm of the bike as it bounced over the rough surface on its fat, limber tires. The pack was staying pretty close together, with no clear leader as yet. That would change in the next hundred kilometers, when everyone started to maneuver to avoid the rougher ground farther down the mountainside.
“Next turn coming up,” she told Taylor as they approached a bright orange cone someone had placed on the bare rock.
“I see it,” Taylor said and took them in a banking turn to the right, right on the boundary of too reckless, she thought. “Be careful,” she warned.
“Don’t worry,” Taylor responded with a laugh. “I’ve designed this bike to be stable on the turns.”
A few kilometers farther and the front group of bikes started to turn again. Taylor continued beyond their turning point and then, when he noticed that they’d overshot, turned sharply. Immediately Surra’s side shot up as the bike tilted hard to the left.
“Don’t turn so damn sharp!” she barked. But her warning was too late. The bike slewed around, spinning one hundred and eighty degrees. At the moment Surra thought they were going to tip over the bike slammed back down with a teeth-crunching shock.
“Sorry,” Taylor said calmly as he took the bike into a broad turn that put them at the rear of the pack. “Takes a little getting used to,” he explained.
“I told you and I told you; don’t take sharp turns. Weren’t you listening to me, damn it!”
“I said I was sorry,” Taylor repeated. “How soon to our next turn?”
Surra glanced at the inertial. The red dot showed them about ten kilometers from the spot where they would leave the main route to go on a different course. “Twenty or thirty minutes. We need to make up the time we lost back there.” The bike shot forward before she completed the sentence.