Hover Car Racer Read Free Page B

question, young Master Chaser. Oh, and your brother, too.’
    ‘Yeah…’
    ‘I was rather taken with the way you drove today, Master Chaser. With your feet and with your heart. I believe that with the proper training, your skills could be sculpted into something very special. I also ran your little brother’s race-plan through a professional course-plotting program on a computer. His race-plan was 97% efficient. Almost the optimal plan for that course. But you guys didn’t receive the gate layout until two minutes before race-time. Your little brother formulated that race-plan in the space of two minutes in his head . That’s impressive.
    ‘In short, I think you two make quite a team. Nobody else caught my eye today, but you two did. And now that I work at the Race School in Tasmania…’
    Jason felt his heart beating faster. ‘Yes…’
    ‘Master Chaser,’ Syracuse said. ‘Would you and your brother like to come and study at the International Race School under my supervision?’
    Jason’s eyes went wide.
    He spun to face his mother. Her eyes were tearing up.
    He looked at his dad. His mouth had fallen open.
    He turned to the Bug. The Bug’s face was a mask. He slowly kicked back his chair and came over to Jason, stood on his tiptoes and whispered something in Jason’s ear.
    Jason smiled.
    ‘What did he say?’ Syracuse asked.
    Jason said, ‘He says your race computer must be broken. His race-plan was perfect. Then he said, “When do we leave?”’

PART II: RACE SCHOOL

    CHAPTER ONE

    THE INTERNATIONAL RACE SCHOOL
    HOBART, TASMANIA
    Dangling off the bottom of Australia is a large island shaped like an upside-down triangle
    Once known by the far more intimidating name of Van Dieman’s Land, it is now simply called Tasmania.
    It is a rugged land, tough and forbidding. It features jagged coastal cliffs, ancient rainforests and a winding network of long open highways. Dotted around its many peninsulas are the grim sandstone remains of British prisons built in the 19th century - Port Arthur, Sarah Island. Names you didn’t want to hear if you were a 19th century criminal.
    Once Tasmania was the end of the world. Now, it was just a pleasant two-hour hover-liner cruise from Sydney.
Jason Chaser stood on the deck of the liner as it sailed up the Derwent River, and beheld modern Hobart.
    With its elegant mix of the very old and the very new, Hobart had become one of the world’s hippest cities. Two-hundred-year-old sandstone warehouses blended beautifully with modern silver-and-glass skyscrapers and swooping titanium bridges over the river.
    Through a quirk of fate, the entire island was owned by the International Race School, making it the single largest privately owned plot of land in the world.
    Back in the early 2000s, the Australian state of Tasmania had been in decline, its population both aging and dwindling. When the population fell below 50,000 people, the Australian Government took the extraordinary step of privatising the entire island. Tasmania was bought by an oil-and-gas company that never saw hover technology coming. In the liquidator’s sale of the dead company’s assets, the island-state was bought by Harold T. Youngman, the leader of a strange group of people who planned to create a school for the nascent sport of hover car racing.
    The rest, as they say, was history.
    As desert boys, Jason and the Bug had never seen anything like the east coast of Australia.
    Their cruise liner had swept past Sydney on its way to Tasmania. Just off Sydney, stretching down the Pacific coastline, they’d seen the famous Eight Dams - a simply amazing feat of mass-scale construction. A few years ago, engineers had literally held back the Pacific Ocean while they built eight massive hydro-electric dams a few miles out from the coast.
    The eight waterfalls that now streamed majestically down the faces of the dams provided an endless supply of clean power with an added bonus: the waterfalls were the second