And so it came to this, a race to the death. If this didn’t get the adrenaline flowing, Cale Rivera, driver of the chrome-finish Bugatti Veyron revving at the start line, did not know what could. And he loved every second of it. The feel of his gloved hands wrapped around the steering wheel. The unique scent of the terracotta leather interior. The muted echoes of the cheering crowd that penetrated the cabin, whetting his bloodlust. It all reinforced his burning need to come out of the other end alive, to take down anything that hindered his success. Or anyone.
He pushed down once more on the accelerator, and behind him the smooth whir of the eight-liter W16, twin-cam quad-turbocharged engine came alive, roaring under his command. There is a certain bestial satisfaction in the knowledge that the Veyron is the fastest road-legal vehicle to date that only men with big cars and bigger egos appreciate. Cale Rivera was one of these men. His mechanic maestro, Deirdre Samuels, had been tremendously useful at every stage of the car’s reengineering. Months ago she had taken it apart piece by piece, injected her magic upgrades, then stitched it back to pristine perfection.
So perfect were her modifications that the reactive armor plates fitted over the carbon fiber body were invisible to the lay observer. This armor is made from twin Dyneema layers, high-modulus polyethylene fiber composites with a strength-to-weight ratio up to one hundred times greater than steel, sandwiching a middle explosive liner. Upon penetration, a local region of explosive detonates, adding resistance to the oncoming projectile, propelling it away from the site of impact, and raising its effective jet velocity. Injected into the carbon fiber body is a custom-made D3O gel filling, a soft, pliable polymer that instantly hardens on impact, absorbing kinetic energy and protecting the inner body from the explosive force of the outer armor and any shrapnel that succeeds in penetrating the armor. And all still keeping with the car’s sleek and smooth veneer.
Through the aluminum oxynitride glass windscreen Cale saw the red lights flash yellow; in another second the race would begin, and all hell would rain loose when the combatants flaunted their weapons for the crowd’s gawking pleasure. He, too, was eager to see what the competition brought. Whatever the case, one thing was certain: not even .50 caliber bullets – ammunition that could cut right through an airplane, given it succeeded in hitting in the first place – were going to find their way through the glass.
The lights flared green. Even before he consciously registered the change, his foot had rammed the accelerator into the car. The Veyron shot from zero to sixty in 3.43 seconds, scorching the auxiliary-supported run-flat tires on the tarmac and slamming Cale’s body into the seat with the mounting g-force. Spectators would only remember a silver bullet searing through the racetrack.
The first turn was fast approaching. Perfect. An opportunity to flaunt the car’s hidden artillery. The crowd would go wild when they saw it, and it was for their unanimous roar of approval that Cale thirsted. For as effective defensive mechanisms all aspects of the armor were, they were invisible to onlookers, at least until they saw them repel even 7.92 mm anti-tank ammunition. Spectators in their testosterone-doped bloodlust only engaged with the armory, and Cale always aimed to please the masses. From the front, in between the headlights, the grill retracted. Inching slowly out of the space was a black, metallic tube. The Bugatti swerved to the right. Suddenly two flashes burst from the tube, the second roughly half a second after the first, and two masses shot out, trails of smoke chasing after them, like comet tails. The spheres bounced on the floor once, twice – the leftmost one managed a third – before both exploded in a brilliant flare of light, heat and sound in front of the barrier that shielded the spectators. Over the screech of the tires on the tarmac and the purr of the engine from behind, Cale heard the stadium erupt with life. He’d had a similar reaction himself when he installed the modified, fully automated XM307 grenade launcher in the front boot.
White movement in both side mirrors. The walls all along the straight were closing in, and Cale had an idea the hydraulics that powered them would crumple his precious like paper. Not today, he thought. Grinning, he slammed the accelerator. His fist flew to the large circular button in front of the hand brake in one swift bang. The centercaps on all four wheels popped out, and a point protruded from where each had been. It was spinning (at a rate of two thousand four hundred revolutions per minute), lengthening and widening at the base. These were polycrystalline diamond drill bits that borrowed the wheels’ movement as their own and were very, very sharp.
The Veyron was fast; most of its body had cleared the closing walls. Still, part of the rear was within the ‘clamping zone’, as it were. A force rammed Cale’s body forward, and for a shuddering second Cale felt his heart drop; the drill bits had clipped, clean, through the final inch of the closing metal walls, and he had felt it.
Heart racing. Pupils dilating. Ventilation accelerating. The adrenaline was kicking into high gear, and so was he. The exit was now in plain sight. It was a ramp pointing to the ceiling of a wide, open space. The crowd cheered him on, on, ever faster. At the last moment, he activated the fuel release. A black discharge from the Bugatti’s rear smeared over the ground. And in the space of a second, he emptied about ten percent of his tank. More than enough left for the battle, and plenty for his current plan. And then he was airborne.
To the audience, there was no difference between when the front wheels hit the ramp and when the rear wheels left it. The silver bullet was in the air before they registered the pool of black sludge it left in its wake, sliding downward like a grotesque waterfall with gravity’s pull.
The Veyron landed with a powerful thud that propelled the audience into another wave of excitement. Cale pulled the handbrake, swung the steering wheel as far right as it could go, and forced down on the accelerator. In a fraction of a second, the car’s rear completed a full one-eighty degree arc, front wheels pivots. In a perfect semicircle, red dust from the arena exploded in angry columns, swirling in a vortex above the car. The headlights flared alive with full, blinding white light, facing the ramp from which the car had come. And then as quickly as they came, they vanished, replaced instead by twin emerald beams ascended the wall, leaving two clean, converging trails of cleaved metal. These were neodymium-YAG lasers – industrial strength cutting lasers, rated at two kilowatts each – powered by a separate, dedicated power generator housed beside the engine, and controlled manually by a simple control panel on the steering wheel. They had converged to one point by the time they reached the top of the ramp. The oil slick burst into flames when they did.
Cale deactivated the lasers. Sitting, facing the only entrance into the arena, he waited for his opponent’s arrival, thumb hovering over the grenade launcher activator. He was grinning – it was a smile more scary than humorous. Even if his opponent succeeded in clearing the ramp without the oil slick causing a sudden loss of traction, making a reverse landing on the car’s roof more probable than not; even if the heat of the fire didn’t quite reach the fuel tank, and a one-hit K.O. explosion that he oh so strongly hoped for didn’t happen; even if by some stroke of a miracle his only competition made it into the arena unscathed, its wheels would still be coated with burning petrol, melting the rubber to useless puddles, and he would be waiting. Waiting for the kill.