Let The Red Dust Flow by M. K. Dreysen

Come the weekend, here and there throughout the world, there are little dirt tracks with screaming engines and grinning fools climbing aboard for a hard fast race.

Come the weekends on the next planet over, I kind of suspect that, given time and a little extra energy, racing will follow along. This week's story, dear reader, takes us to one of those nights. The kind where you and a few hundred of your closest gather to sit and scream and grin and...

Let The Red Dust Flow

Lacy fought to see over the crowd; she could hear well enough. They piped the sound into her helmet feed, you had to pay extra for that.

The sound, the roar of the crowd and the engines when the cars passed the stands. Well, whine more like. Lacy had heard that, in the old days, back on Earth, the engines actually did roar.

"It hurt your ears, it did," one of the old guys yelled. "Those big combustion engines, nothing on earth sounded like 'em."

The electric engines here, all four wheels turning scrabbling at the red dust, they had to add sound, Lacy knew. Otherwise the forty-five cars in the race would just have passed the stands by in a red-orange haze and a back-of-the-teeth hum.

Everybody still would have stood and screamed, though. Like they were doing, which was the reason Lacy couldn't see. Nothing but a sea of backs and air maintenance equipment.

Lacy considered jumping. Low gravity... but the crowd had started the wave again.

Which meant everyone jumped in time, an accordion whip into the sky, most of them clearing three meters and then settling back down to the stands. Lacy felt the thrum of the stands through her boots.

A great, quiet, murmur.

"Number eighteen's still in the lead folks..." the commentator informed her. "That's Sylvia Rey, driving for the Rambling Wrecks of..."

Lacy lost track of the commentary in fascination with the dust plume. Each of the cars vanishing into the far turn lifted a rooster's tail behind them.

She thrilled at what the drivers had to be seeing. The cars up front, they wouldn't be catching the gravel that the cars behind them did. But they'd still only just be able to see past the end of the hood.

The heavy stuff had time to come down, but the pack were three laps into the eighty lap race. The haze of finer particles they'd generated for the three laps, and the earlier races, clung now above the track, steady-state material fog all the way up into the darkness where the grandstand lights didn't reach.

The cars carried their own lights into the haze and the darkness where the majority of the race happened, but Lacy could still see the sparkles of reflected light as the pack of cars snaked through the far side turns, left and right and left and right again. From the stands, it almost looked like the cars had just slowed down to nothing.

On her helmet, green dots showed their place on the map, forty-five cars winding and grinding through s-curves, switchbacks, then the final bank onto the long backside straight.

Lacy looked back now to real life, and the glow in the distance across the midfield. When the lead cars exited the banked turn, sped away, the glow stretched with them. Through the silica and quartz backscattering of the headlamps, the lead cars raced up to their best speed through a glitter storm.

She synced computer and naked eye views now; a scattering of green dots sped away, and then there he was, the red dot joining the rest of the pack.

Not last, Lacy breathed. Her brother wasn't last, at least. She thumbed buttons until Greg's speed showed on her display, hanging over the white glow in the distance that went along with it. Two hundred kilometers per hour and rising.

Lacy compared the leader's speed, two-forty. Greg's kept going, he hit two-forty just as the lead cars turned into the back turn entry. A high, steep bank, made to bleed off speed because the half-dozen turns before the final bank and the homestretch were brutal.

Greg, and the rest of the pack, bunched up behind the leaders in the twists; the final turn fed everyone onto the homestretch as a wheels-spinning unit. And then the gravel flew as the mob passed the stands again.

Lacy had to stop herself halfway through the next lap; she'd been holding her breath. At the turns, through the back and the homestretch. "Stop it," Lacy told herself. Easier said than done.

Time for a drink and a snack. Five laps in and many more to go, Lacy reminded herself. Get to the concessions now, while you can.

She kept her helmet on in the climate-controlled concession tent, raised the face shield enough to partake of the drink and the chili dog. While still watching the green dots and the red one chase themselves around the track.

Dad called her as she ditched the empty dog container. "You have a good view?"

"Hard to do, I'm in the concession tent."

"Get up to the top, when you're finished. We need as good a view as you can get."

Lacy swallowed the question along with the last of the soda. She knew, mostly: every team had a drone hanging over the midfield. But even the best camera suite only did so well. Dad wanted a naked eyeball view of Greg's car.

Last night, he'd made Greg do the same thing for her run. Brother and sister traded effort, especially since Dad didn't want either of them in the pit during a race. "You're the drivers, you don't need to get hurt doing something others can do."

Lacy didn't know any better. Born under one-third gravity; only ever one trip to "home", as Dad still insisted on calling it. So the climb up to the highest riser of the stands was very much still a trudge to the teenaged mind. A trudge of long steps, half jumps, and an occasional panic over whether she'd grab the rail or twist her ankle first.

Halfway there and the drudgery fell away; she almost forgot why she was doing it, bouncing and jumping higher into the sky, closer to the lights perched so high up the poles. When Dad had raced and she and Greg had come, they'd kept Momma company in the stands.

And raced bottom to top, and back down again, as flat out close to flying as the two of them could get without carbon fiber wings and a jet motor for company. Greg's old kid's helmet held a deep scar across the top; she'd been winning coming down, ten and the eleven year old just had to win. Greg had dived and gone head first helmet first into the last rail above Mom's seat.

That memory, others, hiding behind a riser while Greg hunted for her; the stands had been empty of all but the families more often than not. Dad had paid for his hobby, the few times it had paid at all, out of the challenge pots the drivers put together.

Throw in a couple hundred bucks to the winner. The entry fees had only covered the track maintenance for a very long time.

The gate had come in well this weekend, though. Lacy had seen the results when she'd won her junior race the night before. A couple thousand split between Dad and the crew, another thousand from the winner's share for her college fund.

And enough more for Derrisa and Trini, second and third, to put a few hundred in their own pockets. A lot better, Dad had told his kids, than nothing but a smile and beer money.

Enough "a lot better", rumor was, for real money sponsors to be sniffing around. Not that any of them had approached Lacy or Greg. Yet.

Back "home", the top of the stands would have been full of bugs, big moths and tiny mosquitoes in the early fall air fighting for primacy beneath the pressure of the lights. For Lacy and the red planet the silica-quartz dust haze filled the niche. She slowed, caught up again, fascinated on her last few steps as little turbulent twists of the material chased itself up to the heat of the lights.

Efficient as they were, the LED's still threw far more heat than Martian night, enough to generate thermals that lofted and spun the dust.

Lacy followed the punchless dust devils, watched them form and writhe and blow apart again. She remembered going through the turns, the night before, especially the handful before the final turn into the homestretch.

The grand turns, the whole complex from backstretch to homestretch, had been carved one switchback at a time into the face of the crater. On the opposite end, start to backstretch, that big left complex of turns stretched across an empty salt bed, flat and featureless. So the track's designers had filled the turning detail themselves, while leaving straights enough to tempt the desperate to pass.

Green and red dots were coming in now, so she turned and sat and watched. The pack, bunched to stampede by the wall turn's geometry, spilled out onto the homestretch.

Lacy caught her breath. Greg had moved up to twentieth; he'd caught the trick of it, the turns into the backstretch offered the chance if you wanted to take it. He'd accepted now, fifteen laps in, the track's constraints.

She called up the drone's camera, projected it onto her helmet display alongside her eye's view as Greg's car passed the grandstand, flat out and gravel from the leaders scattering across the windshield. When Greg and the rest of the cars passed into the backstretch turn, Lacy patched the video, scant few seconds as it had been, to her father.

"Thanks, kid. You ok up there for a bit?"

"Yeah I'm good." She'd have to be. The last thirty laps or so, the end, Greg would be in or out of it all on his own.

The next forty laps or so, though, that's why she and her camera sat where they did.

All-electric cars, dirt surface, Greg didn't need to pit for the race. In principle. Most of the pack would anyway. They'd lose steering on the bumps, catch too much dust somewhere. Three-quarters or so of the pack would find themselves down a lap or more and out of the running.

Finishing well meant not pitting. Which meant all eyes on the car.

The big stretches back and home meant Greg could tune the car, a little, if he needed to. So Lacy and her father watched each lap. For vibration Greg didn't see or didn't acknowledge. For wheels out of alignment, back end just that little bit out of track of the front end.

"Trim the back end a bit," Lacy reported on lap twenty-three. "To Greg's left, call it half a degree." And then, "Yep, he's clean," on lap twenty-four.

Lap thirty-eight, she called a shock on the rear end. They were electro-mechanical, physical force translating to a little more power to the batteries on the good side; all Greg had to do was dial a little more "firmness" and the computer did the translation to calm down the bad side bounce. Enough so that the bounce that had lifted the passenger rear tire clear more often than not in the ruts smoothed out on lap thirty-nine.

Forty-one laps down and Lacy started to let her mind wander. Little things and... but no. "Dad, the front wheels... driver's front is out both ways, pointing top and turn to midfield." Toe and camber.

Forty-five. "Dad, camber's closer but toe's still..."

"Give him another shot at it," Dad called.

Forty-nine. "Still out at toe, Dad. And there's a little vibration." She'd called the shocks, as well, but they'd taken up only a little of whatever jounce and jiggle had come into play. Only so much they could do without taking power from the engine.

And Greg had come up to fifteenth.

Lacy's race had paid the podium, the top three. Greg's paid one through ten, the difference between junior racers and unrestricted adults and the far larger Saturday night crowd. One more year and who'd Dad find to sit in the stands when the two of them raced against each other?

Summer races, anyway, she reminded herself. Semester break and time and races enough to earn the fall and spring tuition. Greg could, just about, pay for next year's worth of pilot certifications with two in the money finishes.

He'd finished number eight his first weekend back. A little bit, or a lot, of luck, as it turned out. No finish, no finish, twenty-fourth, twelfth.

Tonight was the last weekend race before Greg had to head back to the land of oxy-methane ratios and turbo props and gauzy landers hunting across kilometers of "asteroid" flagged into Martian red dirt for a decent shot at landing.

"Lacy, call it." Lap fifty coming up, Greg called directly to his sister for the first time.

"Yep, you've got the view, sweetie," Dad echoed.

"How's it feel?" she asked.

"Loose and hot," Greg answered. Which, thanks brother, two-thirds home on a dirt track and the four-wheel grasping beast he sat in the belly of always felt loose, like she wanted nothing more than to throw you for the sky and bury herself in the next available dust mound.

"Go for it, Greg."

She almost felt the grin coming back to her over the line. Grins, 'cause Dad was just as caught up now as the kids were.

Twenty laps to go, ten, and now the vibration was no question jarring the front end of the car on every ridge and hole. Even on the straights, Greg fought the wheel, hard left and right, back and forth and nothing but corrections now, no nice easy center the car didn't have it.

It held together. Fifteenth fourteenth all the way to tenth and the money on the last lap. Greg buried the throttle open, the eleventh place car tried to catch him but spun out at the last turn and took half a dozen close packed followers with him.

Greg left it wide open across the finish line. And the front end came apart just a hundred meters later.

Lacy got there first, as Greg pulled himself free of the egg, the titanium-carbon-fiber life-support cage that had rolled free as the rest of the car tore itself apart. "Well, you paid for next semester," she told the grinning maniac she'd been born a year after.

Then she pointed at the car, the one Lacy had been set to inherit for her unrestricted races next year.

What was left of it, anyway. "Next year? You're splitting your winnings with me."

Greg nodded sheepish agreement as Dad pulled up in the pit truck.