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[kitt]
Michael Knight had run his mouth again, and that meant I had to defend his honor.
I appreciated his sentiment – I really did – but quite frankly, I was not overly thrilled about the prospect of breaking into Daytona International Speedway after hours, and even less so that we were here because Michael, slightly tipsy on genuine Southern moonshine, had mouthed off to the man whose case we were currently working. I even told my idiot driver as much as he nudged me into a jog down the pit lane to meet our competitor and his eager crew, although my stern words fell on deaf ears. He was too busy gawking at the massive racetrack to listen to me.
I tried again. “Michael,” I said. “May I remind you that antagonizing clients is no way to represent the Foundation.”
“He was talking shit about you, KITT,” Michael replied, as though that would absolve him. “You gonna let him get away with calling you a poser?”
“If I recall,” I accused, “it was you who allowed things to escalate.”
“Look, all I said was you’ve got more guts than his stupid Ford Thunderbird could ever dream of!”
“And then promised to prove it on the superspeedway once it got dark. I’m certainly no expert on the matter, but I am certain that this race is against Foundation regulations. If you and I were to be caught,” I said as I rolled to a halt next to the race car that we would soon be pitted against, “your privileges of our partnership could be revoked.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to not get caught.” A typical Michael response. He punched my auto window button and killed my engine, grinning wickedly at the firesuit-clad man who would be our competition out on the pitch-black asphalt ribbon that was Daytona. “How’s it going, Rush?”
“Mr. Knight, I’ll admit, I doubted how serious you were about this.” Our competitor – and client, I may add – was a spry, broad-shouldered professional race car driver by the name of Rush Johnson who sported a mullet going gray at the temples. My driver and I had been dispatched to Florida to serve as a personal security detail in Rush’s garage in hopes of catching (or, at the very least, deterring) an assassin who apparently wanted him eliminated. Rush Johnson, after all, was the defending NASCAR champion and winner of last year’s Daytona 500, and from what I understood, the life insurance policy tied to his name meant he was worth more dead than alive.
“Well, here I am.” Michael lifted his chin, all bravado. “I make good on my threats, Rush, especially when my driving skill is called into question.”
“And the integrity of your vehicle,” I muttered. Only Michael heard me.
“Big talk for a rookie.” Rush leaned down, bracing his forearms on my windowsill as he regarded my driver with a self-assured air of his own. “I know this place like the back of my hand. The way you’re all slack-jawed tells me this the first time you seen it.”
“I’ve seen plenty of racetracks, and plenty of checkered flags,” Michael said dismissively, then jerked his chin toward the intimidating asphalt oval encircling us. “We gonna settle this, or you gonna sit there yacking at me all night?”
“You don’t like to waste any time, do ya, brother?” Rush stood, slapped my roof, and pointed to the superspeedway with a gloved hand. “Rolling start to a three-lap shootout. One to warm up, two to get a move on. If the wheels don’t fall off this tin can first.”
“I’m right here,” I huffed.
“To make things fair,” he went on, “I’ll drive without headlights, and you won’t touch that turbo boost button. Let’s see how my experience stacks up against your supercar, eh?”
“You,” Michael said, sticking his hand out my window as Rush clasped it, “have got yourself a deal. I go when you go.”
“Hell yeah, brother.” Rush slapped my roof again before loping off to his own machine: a race-prepared Ford Thunderbird with slanted No. 01s slashed across the doors, the very race car that had taken home the trophy in last year’s Daytona 500.
Michael flexed his hands on my steering yoke as our competitor mounted into his race car, blowing through his lips as he glanced to our right where the swell of the grandstands blotted out the light pollution radiating from the skyline. “KITT,” he said in a low voice. “Would you believe me if I told you I set this race up for another reason?”
“Considering you were halfway through that jar of moonshine when you made the promise, no. I would not.”
“Shut up,” he said, but it was all in good humor. “I’m being honest. Do you see what I see?”
“I see two and a half miles of asphalt banked to thirty-one degrees in the turns, two degrees on the backstretch, and eighteen degrees through the front stretch ‘trioval,’” I said, flashing a diagram of the D-shaped superspeedway on my monitor to prove my point. “And grandstands that can hold over one hundred thousand fans. Is there something else you’re looking for?”
“Take a look at the spotter’s deck. There’s someone there.”
Hmm. He was correct. I highlighted the position of the interloper on the diagram of the superspeedway. “You think it’s our sniper, don’t you?”
Michael shrugged as one of Rush’s crewmembers gave the cue to fire up my engine. I fully opened the valves in my exhaust just to emphasize the throatier note of my turbojet engine as my turbines spooled into operation. My hood vibrated as my powerhouse thrummed to life, and I illuminated my foglamps, throwing incandescent white and scanner-red glow over the pit lane and highlighting the matte-gray streaks of tire rubber embedded into the concrete pit boxes. The No. 01 Thunderbird also came alive, shuddering as its engine turned over and caught with a roar.
“I’d bet on it, pal. It’s a lot harder to hit a moving target, though. Especially one going two hundred miles per hour, but let’s keep a lock on them ‘til we know for sure, huh?”
“Of course, Michael. Are we still going to race?”
“Hell yes. I talked you up pretty good – now, we gotta prove it.”
* * *
I strained against Michael’s hands, not unlike a thoroughbred pulling at the bit, my suspension tense as I jigged beneath him. Now that I was out on the superspeedway with the promise of speed just a tap of the throttle away, I was excited, to say the least. I heightened my senses to my driver’s touch, so much that his grip on my steering yoke and his foot on my accelerator became almost painful. I almost forgot to keep a lock on the supposed assassin atop the spotter’s deck when my driver peered at my gauges, taking his tongue between his teeth in focus as he reached up and keyed a sequence into my overhead console, his handsome features splitting into a mischievous grin as he did so. As my CPU processed his request to divert power toward my drivetrain instead of my background processes, I trotted into the third turn of the racetrack, keenly attuned to his instruction as his hand hovered over my drive mode selector.
I cut power to the display. “Michael, we agreed. No turbo boost.”
“Didn’t say anything about Pursuit mode, buddy.” He thumbed the button, and before I had a chance to respond, he sawed on my steering yoke, bringing me down to the track’s apron and back up again, over and over, and I noticed that the No. 01 Thunderbird was doing the same under Rush’s command.
“What on Earth are you doing?”
The track banked slightly to the left again as I jogged out of the fourth turn and headed for the start/finish line at the apex of the trioval. “Warming up your tires, buddy,” Michael cried over the tire noise permeating my cockpit. “Just like the NASCAR guys! Need all the grip we can get before we take the green flag!”
I thought it best not to argue with him about the abuse to my suspension from the seesawing motion and instead focused on making sure my systems were ready to run. They were, of course. Now, I just waited for the snap of green fabric from the crewmember in the flag stand on the front stretch that would signify the start of our three-lap shootout.
And there it was.
Michael knew better than to slam the accelerator all the way to the floor, which would cause turbo-lag as I navigated through my gearbox to pick up the correct gear. Instead, he eased the pedal to the floorboards, allowing me to smoothly shift as my turbines howled. Rush’s No. 01 Thunderbird, meanwhile, harnessed a standard transmission, meaning he had the disadvantage of manually working the gears while I could easily out-shift his latent human reaction time.
Although, as it seemed, my automatic was not the advantage I thought it was.
My speedometer readout flicked into the triple digits as Rush readily paced me heading into the first turn. I must admit, even I was ill-prepared for the feeling of the track abruptly banking away from gravity, and I ran with my doors damn near parallel to the night sky as Michael kept the throttle matted. Even so, I picked up even more speed through the apex of the turn, earning a whoop from my driver as he threw me out of the banking and we thundered onto the relatively flat backstretch.
The racetrack lined up with the skyline. I began to edge ahead of the Thunderbird, whose black and blue livery blended almost perfectly against the backdrop of asphalt and night sky. The bold “DAYTONA USA” lettering on the white wall beside us was unreadable, nothing but a gray smear of paint against a ribbon of white.
One-seventy. One-seventy-nine. One-eighty-two. I almost couldn’t keep up with the acceleration as Michael and I barely claimed the lead before charging into the racetrack’s third turn. I was ready for it this time and settled down over my rear wheels as the air flattened my spoiler against the track, downforce pressing my undercarriage low to the asphalt as I cast turbine-scream against the curved wall and dragged it with me onto the front stretch.
This was, dare I admit, downright exhilarating.
To Michael, too. He was focused, his features accented by hard lines and eyebrows rolled low, peering through my windshield as the checkered start/finish line flashed below us. I barely registered our lap time, but I did not care about numbers right now. All I cared about was the feel of the superspeedway beneath my tires, the rapport of the well-used surface through my suspension, the press of my driver’s hands against my steering yoke and the smooth, experienced work of his foot against the accelerator.
There were times when I could not tell where I ended and Michael began. Times where he and I became one, a single machine with a manmade powerhouse meshed to an organic heart. To my mild shock, his hand fell to my shifter as he threw me into the first turn for our second circuit of the superspeedway, and with a gentle pull, he asked me to gear down; I did, and my RPMs immediately shot to redline, the indicator on my dash flaring bright scarlet as I settled back and summoned more horsepower from reserves I didn’t know I had.
“Good job, KITT,” Michael murmured. I felt the vibration of his words more than I heard them. My RPMs began to ping off my rev limiter, but he was already ahead of it – he pushed my shifter back into Drive, and I geared up once more with a sharp downward pitch of my engine before it swelled back toward redline. The sheer G-forces of my speed coupled with the absurdly banked turn pressed Michael hard into my seat; I was keenly aware of his body heat against the seatback as I enveloped him in an embrace of unadulterated power.
Back through the third and fourth turns. I felt as though the earth pivoted on an axis directly beneath my chassis. I assumed wide-open-throttle as we galloped past the grandstands. I had lost track of our competitor, but I didn’t care. Not when Michael coaxed me into a lower gear once again. Not when my turbines sang within my engine bay with the pure thrill of going fast. Not when Michael’s hand rested on my shift lever, putting me completely at his mercy as my tachometer flared crimson again and again against the rev limiter, begging, pleading for release.
“Come with it, pal,” my driver told me as I shot through the second turn. “Everything you got, now.”
Everything I had? Was I not already throwing it at him? I dug a little deeper, found an extra ounce of horsepower, another mile-per-hour, my transmission ready to grab another gear once he gave me permission. And there it was, that dark Thunderbird, but I saw its rear quarter panel instead of its front.
I was losing.
“Michael,” I practically begged, in as breathless a voice as I could synthesize, “Don’t hold me back. Please!”
“Not yet, buddy,” he said, and my engine whined and my chassis shook with the need to go faster, but I’d topped out and needed another gear to get up to speed again. What was he doing? I was going to blow my engine if I kept it at redline for much longer! And yet, I wasn’t willing to back off the throttle on my own, though my programming had begun to flare a warning at me that told me I needed to assume AUTO CRUISE before I was dealt irreparable mechanical damage.
No. Let my alerts scream.
This was intoxicating.
The thrum of my RPMs, the desperate whistle of my turbojet engine, the churning of my driveshaft and the meshing of my gears in my rear differential, nothing but an endless asphalt oval beneath me and an endless sky above …
Turn Three. I was still behind. Michael still wouldn’t let me go. Turn Four. I came up on the Thunderbird’s bumper as Michael put us into a bumper lock, falling into its slipstream as the solid wall of air split over the Ford’s body and cascaded over mine. “Come with it, KITT. Gotta time this just right,” Michael told me again, though I couldn’t place meaning to his words.
And then …
He abruptly tossed me out of the slipstream, swinging me close to the wall as we shot toward the start/finish line. In the same motion, he dropped his hand onto my shifter, clenched it in a fist, and thrust me back into Drive.
I cried out.
My intakes rattled with relief as I found force I didn’t know I had, then began to pick up more and more speed. Two-thirteen. Two-thirty-five. Two-seventy. I reveled in my own power, my Alpha circuitry alight with the sensation of my driver’s expert hands keeping me in check –
He kicked the brake.
My rear tires locked. Rubber screeched. I fell in beside the No. 01 Thunderbird.
Atop the grandstands, something flashed.
A split second later, a bullet ricocheted off my hide.
“I fuckin’ knew it,” Michael snapped as he reined me in. “KITT, get a message to track security. Send ‘em to the grandstand gates before that sniper gets away!”
I did. Reluctantly, I settled into a fast lope, then a jog, matching Rush’s speed as he pulled his race car to the inside of the first turn. Once I was certain that the sniper knew they had been compromised and was not prepared to take a second shot, I allowed Michael to bring me to a halt next to the No. 01 Thunderbird, though I still kept my scanners tuned high as my driver leaned on my door and entered the humid Floridian night.
“What the hell was that?” Rush’s voice was strained as he extracted himself from his own machine, perched on the windowsill.
“That,” Michael said, jerking a thumb at the grandstands, “was your assassin.”
“Not that,” Rush said, nodding to me instead. “Your car, brother! Why’d you back off right at the end there? I was wrong about your Trans Am! Goddamn, I’m sorry I ever said anything bad about it. That is – you had to have broken a Daytona record. Or five.”
“I backed off so you wouldn’t get shot!”
“Forget that, Knight – I would’ve gladly died and gone to heaven after seeing that hot machine of yours do what it just did!” Rush ran a hand through his sweat-slicked mullet, then corrected himself. “Sorry, brother. KITT’s not an ‘it.’ You gotta – my God, you gotta get out there and make a few more passes. If you can run that fast without the turbo boost, let’s see what you two can do with it. Holy shit.”
Michael crossed his leather-clad arms and slowly spun back toward me. “Well, KITT?” he asked. “Think you got another lap or two in you?”
“Michael,” I panted, slashing my scanner at my driver, noticing for the first time that my chassis shuddered with effort and that my driveline still hummed with the aftershocks of our run. “I would like nothing more.”
-END-