Junior struggled to control the slide, but the fresh, rust-colored mud was painfully slick. His opponent took the opportunity to pull ahead on the narrow track, spraying mud and metallic smelling water in a great fan behind him.
The glow of the single unbroken tail light on the lead vehicle burned in Junior's eye and filled his mind with thoughts of defeat.
Resolved, he shifted to a lower gear and steered for the embankment that marked the left edge of the mud track. There was nothing in the rules about staying off the sides, and the dryer ground better suited his balding tires. He quickly began to close the distance.
The roar of his modified engine tipped off the lead driver, who began to shift in his padded vinyl seat and adjust his one-handed grip on the dented aluminum bat.
Junior took note of this, and tested the strength of the duct tape which fastened the foam-padded Honda fender to his right arm. It wouldn't be the first time Buck had tried to bash him for getting too close during one of their races, but it would be the first time it didn't work, Junior thought to himself.
As he took the inside and passed the other driver, Junior felt the bone-numbing blows against his arm. If he hadn't been so intent on smashing Junior, Buck's larger engine and thick, knobby tires would have possibly allowed him to maintain the lead through the left turn.
Instead, he was now treated to the view of Junior's LED tail lights as they winked past him.
Junior shook the circulation back into his battered arm and smiled.
He could better appreciate the simple beauty of the deep brown sky against the jagged landscape with his view unobstructed by another racer.
His long, light hair (cut short on top to not interfere with his vision) whipped behind him as he increased his lead.
Buck's curses faded behind him and were gradually lost to distance and the roar of his vehicle.
As Junior pulled past the twin mounds of junk that marked the finish line, his best friend Dank looked up from his monitor screen and gave the "thumbs up" signal.
Dank was shorter than Junior, with dark skin the color of fresh instant caf and perpetually curly black hair cut short, but still thick, against his head.
The modifications the two had spent the following night making had managed to squeeze a few more horsepower out of the aging engine without doing any lasting damage, so Dank was about as happy as he ever got.
As the small crowd began to disperse, Junior stepped down from his mower and began to look over it for damage. There were a few new dents but nothing disfiguring or, more importantly, speed reducing.
He was happy. The simple joy of taking a machine and making it better showed on his face as well as Dank's.
Buck, on the other hand, was not happy, and Buck was not a man who wasted a lot of energy trying to conceal his feelings.
He hopped off his mower and stormed over to look at Junior's ride.
"What is all this?" he demanded. "You got wires and cables all over this hunk. You cheated!"
"Now, calm down, Buck," Junior began to appease,"Dank 'n me just put some monitoring in place to watch the heat 's all."
"Yer a liar and a cheat and you know it!"
Dank stepped up and attempted to show Buck the monitor filled with readings and performance graphs but, like most of the settlers who dwelled in Impact, Buck had no interest in computers or, sadly, progress.
Instead, Buck punched Junior in the mouth, hard.
Junior fell, staining the seat of his overalls with the thick, rusty mud. He reached up and wiped a trickle of blood from under his busted lip.
"Buck, I ain't a cheat," Junior stood up slowly. "You beat me every week for the past six months. You're a sore loser."
"Boy, our people got a history of losing poorly. Ain't no reason to change our ways now."
Dank again tried to clarify, “Buck, we modified the fuel intake valves and rewired some of the electronics to improve the fuel efficiency is all. None of the changes violate league rules for mower racin'. The wires just let me watch the engine on this screen during the race to make sure Junior didn't blow up."
Buck seemed unconvinced but slightly intimidated by 'tech talk'. Dank had that effect on most of the locals.
"All I know is that rusty Dodge-Kyocera could never beat my Sony-John Deere without cheatin'," Buck persisted.
"I ain't a cheat, Buck. 'Sides . . . You can always try again next week," Junior attempted, unsuccessfully, to put on a friendly smile past his busted lip.
Buck glowered,"You might want to pick up a thicker fender shield for next week, boy." He ambled back to his mower and started it up, spraying mud as he tore off into the depths of the scrap yard.
Dank grinned under his dark crop of hair. "You were flying, man! Did you see the look on Buck's face when you passed him?"
"I was busy at the time trying to not get my skull caved in," Junior winced as he touched the spreading bruise on his face,"I should have kept my guard up longer."
"Don't take it personally. As we win more races, expect that kind of response." Dank turned back to his screen. As he reviewed the data, he slapped the side of the device to correct an occasional screen flicker.
"Thanks for your help. This heap never could've beat Buck without those mods you dreamed up."
"No problem, Junior," Dank didn't glance up,"Expect a better performance after I go over these figures again."
Junior climbed back on his mower, started the engine, and headed back toward the shed.
Chapter One Interlude
File: Datanet Core Server Gamma Delta Eleven, Galactic History, Era: Modern -300, Index War of Succession, Aftermath
After the Benevolent States United joined together the various national and religious factions of Earth Prime to achieve the idyllic world order Faithful citizens have grown to embrace, there were some detractors. Faced with the necessary progress-oriented regulations on fuel consumption and resource management, the residents of the South Eastern region of the American mother continent grew discontent. Their feelings of distrust for the newly formed World Government festered and became hatred. They tried to dissolve themselves from the union.
Using salvaged or discontinued military equipment and archaic hunting rifles (see notation on "Hunting", "Dangerously Destructive Primitive Beliefs" and "Gun Ownership - The Description of Evil for the Faithful"), they briefly blockaded key ports and cut off communications to and from their region.
With the strategic (and merciful) nuclear strike on
Faced with hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war from all areas from ancient Arkansas to Florida, the new government, as always just and kind, felt the need to treat the prisoners (given mass life sentences for high treason) with as much kindness as possible. It should also be noted that housing these prisoners would have certainly bankrupted the fledgling but well-intentioned government -- long may They reign.
Towards that end, whole communities of prisoners were loaded into long-haul, one-way shuttles and auto piloted to a small planet (named EcoHope 11) which had been used as an extra-solar dumping ground for one hundred and fifty years -- ever since the last Earth Prime-based landfill reached capacity.
There, the survivors (granted most kindly with survival supplies by the Benevolent States United) established new communities and live rich and fulfilling lives.
The oldest of these communities is called "Impact." It sits just outside the target crater for the regular deposits of waste material from Earth Prime.
Though there has been little contact with the generations following the initial prisoner transport, it is a widely accepted Truth that the residents prefer a life among the debris to the enlightened existence of those of us who remain under the watchful and protective gaze of the Benevolent States United. It is theorized that there is, perhaps, some genetic anomaly which has manifested itself in their irrational beliefs.
The residents of EcoHope 11 are widely considered by the Faithful citizens of Earth Prime with pity. The official stance of the Benevolent States United is that their reintegration into society would be welcome with open arms . . . were it not for their obvious negative influence on the happiness of the Faithful.
"Get a load of this bullshit, Junior," Dank gestured at the Datanet feed on his screen."That ain't how it went down at all."
Junior glanced over the text. "You figgered out how to modify that file, yet?"
"Nope. We can read it from EcoHope 11 but we can't change it. They got our feed locked down to deny us any influence on the Datanet or contact with Earth Prime. Bastards."
"You dug up anything we can use? Some new drive train mod or anything?" Junior tried to change the subject.
"Anything regarding carbon fuels is locked down in the archive area. Earth Prime switched to all Fusion and Solar energy over a hundred years ago." He pulled up an image of a beautiful racetrack filled with soft-sided remote-controlled cars topped with aerodynamic solar collectors.
"The racing on Earth Prime is totally silent. No motor noise, no crowd noise, even the tire noise is gone since these cars only touch the track at the beginning and end of the race."
"That ain't right," Junior shook his head. "The noise is part of the fun!"
"I git the feelin' that fun is in shorter supply on Earth Prime than landfill space."
As if to punctuate his remark, the loud crash of a trash rocket echoed through the tiny shed the two had claimed to house and work on their racing mower. On a planet without grass, racing was about all the use anyone could find for the occasional busted mower that arrived in a space fill shipment.
"Sounds like it's time for us to get to work, Dank." Junior opened the door to the shed and a thick cloud of dust poured in. "Hopefully this time the 'chutes on the rocket fired or we'll be left digging through slag again."
"Ain't no use for slag, that's the truth."
While poor in most natural resources, EcoHope 11 was extremely rich in metals of all kinds after over a century of discarded items from Earth Prime being dumped on it.
Knowing they were at least 24 Earth-hours from the next drop, the two casually walked and crawled and skidded into the crater to begin digging through the most recent crash site.
The rocket had split open without exploding, as it was designed to do, and had spilled a mountain of discarded appliances, electronics, personal items and larger, more difficult to identify items still mostly hidden by the clouds of dust.
Junior and Dank had worked in the crater for almost six years, both having finished school at the age of sixteen.
Dank enjoyed the job for the thrill of finding "new" gadgets, especially electronic ones.
Junior couldn't abide a career that kept him inside all day.
They quickly located the beacon-enabled "Care" package from the BSU and tagged it for crane retrieval. The medicines and food inside would help meet the needs of the community until the next monthly shipment.
Then they set about the task of gathering the items on the checklists provided by the engineering group.
The school needed a new compressor for the air recycler. The hospital was looking for cloth for sheets, cleaning cloths and curtains. The command center needed an upgraded computer, an item Dank knew they could find pretty easily given the condition of the old computer.
As the dust slowly began to settle, Junior climbed a larger pile of debris to get a look at something that glinted in the sallow light of the EcoHope solar body.
Wiping the object "clean" with his grease stained work shirt (complete with the name tag of some unknown Earth Primer named "William") what he revealed struck him with a profound vision of amazing possibilities.
This vision, in turn, grabbed Junior by the heart and shook him like a pile rat shakes a wounded field monkey.
The large slightly curved sheet of metal was painted a glossy black. It seemed almost liquid with its rich clear-coated finish and gentle, impact-blunting curves. There were two less glossy, metal brackets near the top in the back, which would be useful for joining the device to other equipment he and Dank had been hoarding.
All these details were nice, but the part that triggered the vision was right in the center, staring him in the face.
In impossibly shiny gold-flecked paint in the middle of the black background was the image of a glorious bird made of flames.
It seemed to move when Junior moved, its single black eye following his gaze.
"Dank!" Junior yelled, "I just found what we been missin' on the Beater."
