Rookie Sensation
A Tale of the Professional MotorCombat League
By Ian Thomas Healy
Copyright 2011 Ian Thomas Healy
Smashwords Edition
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She was perky, like all modern TV personalities, chosen for her wide smile, blonde hair, and ability to recap horrific collisions and describe mangled, burned, or bullet-ridden corpses without so much as blinking one of her big blue eyes. Sometimes her job was more pleasant, and it was one of those times as she smiled into the camera.
"Tonight, in our ongoing Beneath the Armor series, we're speaking to Ace Vehicles rookie sensation Sketcher Stevens."
The driver squinted beneath the studio lighting. His stomach was queasy and full of butterflies. He wondered if that's how most people felt before the start of an event. Not him, though. All he felt then was the thrill of screaming power plants, the shriek of tires, the patter of bullets on armor plate like rain in July. But in the studio, with three different cameras pointed at him and his face greasy from makeup, he felt like he might throw up.
"Sketcher," said the sportscaster whose name he didn't even know, "Tell us a little bit about what some people would call your meteoric rise to fame."
Fran. That was her name. He was sure of it. Well, pretty sure. Not sure enough to risk saying it and being wrong on national television. He'd never hear the end of it from the other drivers, and it might upset the sponsors. "There ain't, um, there isn't much to tell. I started out in the Southern Minors in a tonner-and-a-half and won a bit."
"Won a bit is being a little modest, isn't it, Sketcher? You're the winningest driver ever to compete in the Southern Minor League, amassing a record twenty-four wins, including two championships, with a total of thirty-one Vehicle Kills. Make no mistake about it, you're clearly a superstar."
He shrugged. "I guess so."
"Not even Linnea Reinert began her career so spectacularly."
"That's not the same thing. It was a different sport twenty years ago. She came from the Wilds. Who knows how many VKs she racked up out there, back when there weren't anybody keeping track. Fifty? A hundred?"
She leaned in closer to him. He could smell her perfume. It smelled expensive. "Are you a better driver than Linnea?"
He snorted. "Nobody's better than her."
"What was it like meeting her for the first time?"
They call him after Jersey Joe Kowalchuk's crash.
It had been the season opener. Everyone in the Minors, hell, everyone in the world had probably watched it. The crash hadn't even been Jersey Joe's fault. A Harada driver had a front wheel shot out from under him at speed. Bad. The Harada car's nose bit asphalt and flew into the air just as Jersey Joe rounded a corner, firing rocket after rocket toward the Syndicated Entertainment two-tonner. The airborne Harada hit him broadside, staving in Jersey Joe's side armor and pinning him against the arena wall.
The Harada's flamethrower tanks ruptured, and the combination of its burning fuel and Jersey Joe's exploding ordnance had meant the medics had to cut him out of the wreckage. The doctors managed to save his life, but without his right arm or leg, one lung, and both eyes, he wouldn't ever drive again.
The next day, an Ace Vehicles scout shows up at Sketcher's practice with a rookie contract offer. He accepts it. Of course he does! It's a chance at the Big Time. That very night, an Ace ten-wheeler arrives to collect his Spitfire and take it and him north, across territory that had once been controlled by rogue cycle gangs before it had been cleaned up by Linnea Reinert and others like her.
The next morning, he's only barely awakened when none other than the MotorCombat Majestrix herself, Linnea Reinert, is standing in front of him, back to him, pointing at the Ace Vehicles coach and yelling at him.
"How could you, Jeff?" She's already half-dressed in her armor and limping from a round she took in the hip in the season opener. "Joe's not even conscious yet and you've already brought in fresh meat?"
"We've got an opening—" said the coach, but Linnea wasn't having any of it.
"And he drives a goddamn firebug. Jeff, I've told you how I feel about those cars. Best way to see drivers die on the arena floor, or cooked in their seats like Joe."
"Linnea--"
"How many of the last ten dead drivers burned, Jeff? Seven? Eight?" She sticks a finger in his face. It's crooked because of the time four seasons back that her hand was mangled in a collision and the surgeons never did get it quite right when they fixed it. "Far as I'm concerned, any team who puts a driver in a firebug is putting spectacle ahead of safety!"
"Excuse me," says Sketcher. "Would it make y'all happy if I just off and shot myself?" He reaches down and yanks Linnea's pistol from its holster before she can move. He doesn't point it right at his temple, but doesn't point it away, either.
Linnea slaps her hand at her holster by rote, well after the moment her pistol is already out of her reach. She glares at him and folds her arms, but he thinks she might be a little impressed. He spins the gun around in his hand and offers it to her butt-first.
She takes it and for a moment he thinks she's going to shoot him, but instead she spins on her heel and stalks off toward the garage.
Coach Gordon claps a hand on Sketcher's shoulder. "She means well, kid. Regardless, welcome to Ace Vehicles."
"We didn't get along so well," said Sketcher. "She was upset about Jersey Joe, and who wouldn't be?"
The sportscaster turned away from Sketcher to mug into a camera. "For those of you who missed it last week, here's the dramatic footage showing the accident that nearly claimed the life of veteran driver Jersey Joe Kowalchuk. If you haven't seen it…" Her eyes sparkled with greedy excitement. "We warn you that it's very graphic."
The studio feed cut to a slow-motion replay. Sketcher looked down at his feet. He'd seen it once; that was plenty. A lot of people were saying that the other driver, who'd died in the initial impact according to post-mortem results, had been the lucky one. Even though he told himself not to watch, his eyes crept upwards to the nearest screen. He was a MotorCombat driver; every second of footage was useful research in improving himself. There was always one more thing to learn.
Linnea had taught him that much his first day.
"All right, you can drive," says a grudging Linnea. They've played Follow-the-Leader all through the Ace Vehicles Arena, whipping through narrow gaps and flying over bridges. Sketcher hung on her tail the entire time and not once could she shake him. "But can you fight?"
"That's what my trophies say," he says.
She snorts. "Trophies don't mean a goddamn thing to a bullet or a rocket, and one of them is all it takes."
"So what do you have in mind? A friendly little one-on-one action?" He makes it sound flirty. She's kind of hot, for being old. He's half her age. He could easily be her son.
"Don't be a prick," she says. "Straight-up fight. Coaching staff declares the winner based upon virtual damage. Paint rounds only."
He smiles. "Spitfire doesn't use bullets. What does that leave me, bad language?"
"We loaded you with a dyed, non-reactive fluid," says a technician. "Best we can manage."
"What about the smoke?"
"What about the smoke?" Linnea repeats.
"Flamethrowers make a lot of smoke," he says. "Plus there's my flaming oil dropper and the smoke dischargers. I like a dirty arena to fight in."
"We can allow the smoke dischargers in practice," says the technician, "but that's all. No live ammo."
"Fine, then," says Sketcher. He bows, chivalrous and Southern, to Linnea. "After you, ma'am."
Her custom pickup, the Shetland Express, is low and wide, like the custom sport trucks of the previous century. The barrel of a machine gun protrudes from the turret offset to the right on the roof.
Spitfire is a smaller car, but more bulbous due to the requirements of carrying large tanks for the fuel-hungry flamethrowers, thoughtfully provided by Sketcher's sponsor, First Law Thermodynamics. In his entire career, the heavy armor around those tanks has only been breached three times, and only caught fire once.
The cabin has taken more damage than that, but he's a good old Southern boy, and if there ain't bone sticking out his skin, it don't hurt.
Spitfire's skin is pitted, scarred, and scorched. Sketcher always instructed his crew to repair the armor but otherwise leave the car looking as beat-up as possible. He wanted it to look mean, like a survivor.
Linnea fires up the Express' power plant. "We'll start at opposite ends of the training bay. Confirmed VK for the win. Go."
The two vehicles, car and truck, head to the far edges of the training bay, which once housed a professional football team before the Big Spinout. Linnea flashes her lights at him once, and it's on.
The Express accelerates faster than Spitfire, and it's only a few seconds before paintballs start to spatter against Sketcher's armor as Linnea tests her range. He waits, patient, knowing how much damage Spitfire can soak up, even if it's not real. He steers his car into a large curve, triggering smoke dischargers to dirty things up as he crosses the Express' bow. The smoke is thick and black, like a cloud of toner, and obscures both his and Linnea's vision.
He knows she won't fall prey to most of his tricks. She's too experienced for that. But there might be one thing she hasn't seen, something he's practiced hundreds of times. He keeps pumping out smoke until his dischargers are empty. Even with the sodium arc overhead lighting, a gloom settles over the arena like twilight.
Her halogen lights cut through the smoke, including one he hadn't known was mounted in her turret. It sweeps across him for a moment and he hears the blat of paintballs expending themselves. Then he's past her.
She powerslides around in pursuit. The Express already accelerates faster than Spitfire, but he lays off the pedal, letting her catch up. In a real duel, he might douse the pavement behind him with a phosphorous-petroleum slurry that would ignite after being exposed to the air. But she knows he can't do that here.
He's counting on her to know that.
When Sketcher was a kid, he'd had an antique plastic trike called a Big Wheel that had a handle to lock one of the rear wheels and make it spin out. He's put something similar on Spitfire. He spins the wheel hard with one hand and kicks the rear wheel lock. He draws his pistol and drops his window.
If it works, it'll be stupendous.
The Express rolls out of the smoke. He can see Linnea's eyes widen as she realizes Spitfire isn't where she expected it to be. She turns hard, giving him a perfect shot at her driver's side window.
He empties his pistol. Paintballs—even in hand weapons!—splatter in a tight grouping on her window. If he'd had live, armor-piercing ammo, she'd be dead.
The Express screeches to a halt. A moment later, the door is flung open and Linnea's angry helmet bounces across the tarmac. Her face is red with fury as she stomps over to him.
A tech posted the footage of him taking down Linnea in practice. It went viral within two days. All of a sudden he was an overnight celebrity. People were already talking about him becoming the new captain of the Ace team. People were hinting that Linnea might have overstayed her welcome in her twentieth season.
"How does it feel to be the success story you are?" The sportscaster licked her lips subtly. Before they'd set up to tape the interview, she'd been a lot less subtle about inviting him to her private dressing room afterward. From the whispered conversations and knowing glances he'd seen from the crew, he gathered that this wasn't an unusual occurrence with her.
"I don't think I'm all that special, really. I'm just a battle driver for Ace Vehicles." That was good. Get the sponsor's name into the interview. "Just part of a team."
"Did you know that maneuver you used in practice has already been named 'The Sketcher'? Did you know it's been done now in three separate minor league events?"
"N-no," he stammered. He hadn't ever expected it to blow up the way it had. "Did the, uh, the drivers get hurt?"
"As I understand it, two were injured and one was killed." She brightened up. "But that's just a risk MotorCombat competitors take every time they slip behind the wheel, right, viewers?" She smiled, eyes all sparkling and augmented bosoms heaving. Oh, she was good, this sports reporter. "That's all the time we have for this segment. Thanks for tuning in. Up next: she's a mechanic with a vision of the return of internal combustion, and he's her fraternal twin and a MotorCombat driver for the Hoya Cartel. Kris Stratton talks to Olivia and Oscar Jimenez."
The lights on the cameras turned off and the sportscaster smiled at him from behind lowered eyelids. "Well, handsome, shall we continue this interview in a more… intimate setting?"