Disqualification Tablet, Chapter One

A mighty chorus ranging from the bass baritone of moon-buster reactor-cores to the imminent whine of throttling nitro rose from the ranks arrayed in infinite diversity along the staggered start of Disqualification Tablet, each among them poised to raise its revving reverbs to blasts of acceleration. Some were vehicular robots whose mechanical minds required no interface with a living driver, others were beings of flesh and blood piloting craft which they personally owned, while others still were fusions of the technological and organic as bizarre in their realization as Mile Hunts or even stranger yet. Amidst this panoply sat Joe, ready at the gearstick with Flashtease beside him, while in nearby starting-positions doubtless waited the rivals and grudge-bearing aggressors and unlikely potential allies they had managed to make on their journey from the car park and back.

Beyond the radiators of the foremost line, one of the two comparatively narrow edges of Disqualification Tablet dropped away abruptly into bottomless universe. The track however continued past this and soon enough quit the horizontal plane, such that Joe could see before him mind-boggling preliminary squiggles of the gravity-defying course he was to run. At the gateway to this interstellar insanity, facing the throbbing lines of roadsters and rods, Petunia’s pretty figure was planted.

She whipped off her pink scarf and raised it high. The packed stands lining the runway gave up a mass raucous holler. Petunia held until this had sunk to an expectant hush, and there was nothing but raring engine-song. Then she threw back her shoulders and head, and thrust both fists far past the hem of her skirts.

Henceforth the world around and above Petunia was blown away in torrents. Her hair and the scarf in her hand streamed back as body after body boomed by, etching her allegiance on a hundred rear-view mirrors. But when she caught out of the corner of her eye a glimmer of red among these onrushing legions, Petunia turned gleefully into the multi-layered whirlwind of her own petticoats to point her logo at the tail-end runners instead, as she traced the progress of the one pair of rocket-boosters carrying her champions and allowed her heart to pulse after them.

Some flying, some skimming above the course and some thundering along it on wheels, the racers were a competitive clump flank-to-flank all barging for the lead as they climbed higher and higher up the first incline, the metalwork beneath them a mere strip suspended over the stars. Ahead the hill crested and fell to a near-perpendicular gradient. The lusty and inexperienced scrambled to be first over, only to hit the brow as if it were a ramp and careen into the void. Joe instead hugged the roadway, clinging to the treacherous dip as it rolled beneath his chassis and he and the other more seasoned contestants plummeted together.

Star-systems at which seconds ago Joe’s headlamps had been aiming suddenly shot upward out of view, and a realm of new ones dawned vertiginously at the bottom of the nosedive. Between Joe and this astral gulf was nothing but the slender strand of the course to come, looking impossibly thin and far-below as it stretched across the scintilla, but our hero muscled his racer on and within the passage of a breath was coursing this lower plane with the steep slope behind. Presently the track began to tilt obliquely, tipping the horde through forty-five degrees for a series of corkscrew turns which demanded every iota of momentum hitherto built. More swerves and chicanes ensued, such that soon it was impossible for anyone to determine where they were in relation to Disqualification Tablet, until the first loop-the-loop when Joe, pushing his motor to maximum output to ride out this harrowing three-sixty, perceived while he was upside-down the rectangular planetoid directly beneath. It was farther off than he could have imagined, resembling a hardback book standing on its page-ends, and always the course in its fantastic whirls and curls winding through space and back to it again.

The speeding gladiators began to pace themselves and part as they made their return to the Tablet. As Joe powered duly on he overtook the sleek shape of Mini-Flash Splitsville’s black-and-chrome chariot, and glimpsed the girl’s sliver-blue hair as she receded in his wing-mirrors. Flashtease gave a great whoop. “That’ll fix her!” he exclaimed. “Going around acting like she’s so good at this! Not bad for our first time!”

Joe had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t going to prove quite as easy as it appeared, but he held onto their lead while Flashtease kept up a merry commentary on who looked fashionable now. The immense wall of Disqualification Tablet was looming, and one of its hugest round holes yawned above heads and hoods. Into this black circumference the speedsters plunged, following the trail, and thus through a smooth cylindrical tubule loftier than any cathedral ceiling they traversed the planetary axis and cut via the shortest route from day to night.

For the contest so far had been daubed in the dim dying glow of a red giant sun, but now the competitors were striving in the shadow of that centillions-tall slab. Each vehicle hit its photonic high-beams to pierce the blackness, picking out twists and turns on the road directly ahead, and thus the race rumbled on in grim determined silence as though precious time were to be wrested from this journey through the dark. Presently came another circular opening on the planetoid’s face, and another tunnel, and then the competitors were blasting back into Acheldama’s light again.

As Joe and Flashtease rounded their first bend on this new dayside stretch, the latter’s jaw dropped. There before them was a very familiar pair of blazing black tailfins, and the back of a very familiar silver-blue head.

“But she never passed us!” cried the dismayed one. “How did she get in front?”

“That is a question well worth asking, my friend,” Joe responded. “We – ”

But the heroes had other troubles, as a sudden aggressive bump on their right-hand flank sent them veering to the border of the left embankment and almost past it and out of the race. It was the little Solidity girl, in a one-seater painted the same violent yellow as her tutu and which boasted giant whirring butterfly wings, prodigious sisters to the ones she wore on her back. Even as Joe wrestled with the steering-wheel to regain the safety of the gulley she was swinging greedily away from him to the limits of the upper right, taking her run-up for another vicious shunt.

END OF CHAPTER ONE