Chapter 41: Dunes
The ramming truck had already locked into its path whether Proxy wanted that or not.
[ Overdrive ]
The truck surged forward, the speed breaking through the engine limits in a hard boost. The seat shoved itself against his spine, and the distance between his rear and the ex-boxer’s truck widened by three meters before he had even finished noticing that the ability had taken hold.
The heavy truck’s swing cut through the vacuum he had just left.
It struck Proxy’s truck rear slightly, almost a scratch.
The force shoved the rear sideways by a foot, and then the truck straightened on its own, while in the mirror the ex-boxer’s truck forced its overdone momentum left into open space, almost overturning before the driver hauled it back into a forward line.
Overdrive lasted five seconds. When it ended, the engine went back to its normal output.
EMP Pulse and Brace were still available. Overdrive would be on cooldown for a while. He set that aside and kept his eyes on the road.
The desert was still flat, though not for much longer.
By then the start line had broken properly, the wall of twenty-four vehicles spread into a field of single trucks at different speeds, and there was finally room to see what lay ahead.
What he saw was the horizon rising, or rather, what had been pale flat ground was gathering itself into large packed waves in a shade of sand that suggested the corporation had not been careful when they designed the course.
The size of them, the density, and the way they pressed close together all made it clear they were an obstacle, which is to say built on purpose to be a problem for whoever had to drive through them.
Of course they had.
He rode the first dune at a diagonal instead of straight on, choosing the direction that kept the tires on firmer crust during the climb rather than the direct line up, which would have been faster going up and would have cost him everything on the loose ground at the top.
The truck leaned into the slope and kept course. The dune came up and gave him half a second of height, enough to see the race spread below in the gaps between the sand walls, trucks at different points of progress and trouble, and then the front wheels dropped and the descent began.
The descent wasn’t shy on momentum. He held the wheel at a steady form and let the truck’s weight carry them down instead of fighting the slope, because the slope would win and fighting it would only waste time.
At the base, the tires found solid crust and the truck leveled.
There was a vehicle stopped in the trough between the first dune and the second. It had come in at the wrong way and caught its front right wheel in a soft pocket of sand, pinning the chassis sideways against the dune bank.
The driver was revving. The wheel was finding nothing to push against, which is a very honest sort of problem.
He went left of it and took the next rise.
The gaps between the dunes narrowed as the ground thickened. A truck appeared behind him, closing with the feel of rising speed rather than steady speed.
[ EMP Pulse ]
It discharged backward from the truck without any feeling he could identify from inside the cab, no recoil, nothing he could hear, and the truck behind him coasted at once.
The engine stalled and came back across three seconds, whatever the driver had been cycling cut off before it could finish. The truck dropped back to distance and stayed there.
The gap narrowed further and a truck to his left drifted right, its movements not keeping up with the terrain, and the side panel hit his door with real force.
The kind of force that tried to push him into the dune wall on the right.
[ Brace ]
Proxy’s truck stood like a boulder. The chassis took the impact through the reinforcement instead of letting it reach the steering, and the truck on his left took the rebound of its own hit the other way, into the loose sand at the dune, losing speed while it recovered.
Proxy came up the side of the next dune.
At the top he checked the mirror.
Three lengths back, in the gaps below, the ex-boxer’s heavy truck was moving at a slow pace. For a man that looked reckless, his strategy was fairly conservative, to take the race slowly and steady and not try to rush for the lead in the first stage.
In the starting line, the man had announced his intentions from an open window and found his own openness mildly amusing. He hadn’t been wrong about having them.
The top of the dune gave Proxy the wider view before the descent took it away.
Sand in every direction, narrow gaps cut through the sand, and farther into the dune field, farther ahead than Proxy currently was by a distance that was significant, the pale chassis of a small round truck with oversized headlights moved through the sand drift and the distance.
He found it before he decided to look for it. That was simply how his attention moved now.
She was ahead. Boost had put her at the lead of the race entirely, which matched the stat window she’d shown him in the garage and matched the way she’d said "If" at him there, as though the word were a formality she was willing to let him keep.
Her truck was moving fast.
Another truck near her was moving fast too, and in a way that made it obvious the driver wasn’t satisfied on staying at second place.
Then his front wheels went over the top and the descent took the view away.
Sand replaced it, then the slope, then the base of the dune coming up fast, and he came down and the truck leveled in the trough, and the wide view above the sand was gone.
Behind him, the ex-boxer’s heavy truck passed by the same dune he had just left.
Still slow, still steady.
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