They suddenly felt the coursing and crackling of transport beams passing through them. Both teams abruptly disappeared in a haze of static, to reappear on the Grid, still facing each other, but separated now by a distance of a half-mile.
Sark’s Carrier maintained position over the Game Grid, directly above. High, polished walls enclosed the place, and over it floated a number of Recognizers. The walls were marked with giant numerals, strange ciphers, and symbols unintelligible to Flynn, in varieties and combinations of gleaming colors.
“That’s what my User wants too,” Tron told Flynn. Tron was the answer to his dilemma, Flynn felt sure now. If Flynn’s efforts in the laser lab hadn’t made it possible to get the Tron program free of the MCP, maybe there was something he could do here in the System.
A warning buzzer sounded; the race was about to start. “I know,” Flynn answered Tron. Tron and Ram looked at him strangely, wondering how he knew the things he did. There’d been little time to sort things out, but both programs found themselves inclined to trust the peculiar newcomer.
Flynn, for his part, was finding Tron a revelation. He brought much of Alan Bradley into sharp focus. Flynn saw in Tron an absolute stubbornness when he felt he was right, commitment to beliefs, determination to see that justice was served.
The three leaned forward, each of them now gripping a strangely designed set of handlebars. Light circled and swirled around them, resolving itself, as their light-cycles were brought into existence. Flynn held the posture as he’d been taught, pulling his feet up as he felt the vehicle coalesce under and around him. The cycles glowed with power; Tron’s in gold, Flynn’s red, and Ram’s green. Across the arena, the Reds’ cycles had also taken on substance, in blue.
The light-cycles were about nine feet from end to end, two-wheeled, all aerodynamic curves and racing lines from fairing to tail. Their rear wheels were of conventional design, but the front ones were broad, nearly spherical. The rider’s back, once he was hunched down over his handlebars and controls, became part of a smooth, nearly drag-free shape. Flynn mentally reviewed the techniques and fine points of the game, and he and the others revved their engines.
Somewhere above them, Sark touched a control stud. A siren sounded across the arena; the race had begun.
All six cyclists gunned their machines and accelerated away, tucked tightly within their cycles. From the rear of each vehicle, a spume of white force rose like the wake of a speedboat to solidify almost instantly into a partitioning wall coded to the color of the rider’s team; blue for the Elite, each conscript in his individual hue.
Tron, the most experienced combatant, took the lead. Ram and Flynn veered off to the right and left, riding the grid lines of the arena floor precisely, as they must. Their turns were made nearly instantaneously at grid intersections. Off in the distance the Elite did the same, leaving one of their number to race head-on at Tron. The gap between them disappeared with harrowing speed. Tron watched his opposite number grow with his approach and fixed all his attention on his own vehicle and his enemy’s.
Just as it seemed that the two light-cycles, inscribing their walls across the grid, must crash directly into each other, the two riders made lightning turns, Tron’s left and the Elite Warrior’s right, to turn parallel to one another. Off they raced, throwing up barrier-wakes behind them in blue and gold.
In other parts of the arena the remaining four antagonists sped along, bringing more partitioning into being, turning abruptly and maneuvering for their lives as the arena began to fill with the cycles’ mazes of light-walls.
Over Tron’s communicator, Flynn’s voice complimented that first head-on turn: “Nice one!” Tron and his opponent sped across the arena floor, neck and neck. Then began the perilous competition, each trying to box the other in, or get the other to turn at the wrong time and crash into a wall.
Tron’s voice came back over the communicator: “Ram, stay all the way over!”
Ram peeled off from his course in response, the turn coming in an instant, acknowledging, “I’ve got control. Go ahead.”
Tron and the Warrior against whom he was paired zoomed toward one of the clifflike walls that enclosed the arena. Tron maneuvered, and the Elite player found himself trapped between a gold partition and Tron’s cycle, and the barrier it created as it roared along, a second wall of gold.
Tron’s opponent couldn’t slow or stop; once begun, the game was continued at speed. By keeping just ahead of him, Tron contained any effort that the Elite might make to turn, chuting him toward the arena wall. An instant later the Red’s cycle crashed into it with such a tremendous liberation of energy as Warrior and cycle de-rezzed, that a segment of the arena wall itself also de-rezzed. Instantly, the wall that had been generated by the Elite Warrior faded from existence.
Flynn was alongside an opponent, bent low on the handlebars as the fairing’s slipstream tore at him. He grinned into the blast; he’d always enjoyed motorcycles. The bike he rode now was superior to anything he’d ever ridden, its responses immediate, its speed breathtaking. No machine in that Other World could have duplicated its performance.
They made a turn together, swinging the balloonlike front tires in vector changes at the intersections of the grid lines. Flynn eluded impact with one of his antagonist’s barriers, then another, and saw a third ride up directly before them both, all in moments. The arena had become a labyrinth where split-second decisions and constant attention were required to keep from colliding with something; the enemy’s maneuvers were an unceasing threat. The need for turns grew more frequent as the teams sectioned and subsectioned the gridded floor. It was becoming impossible to tell whether another barrier or an open stretch lay around the next turn. Memory was some help, but the mazework thrown up behind the five remaining cycles was complicated and fast-growing, and there was little time to study it. Instinct and training and reflexes came to the fore.
Flynn avoided a second attempt by his opponent to kill him. He found himself screaming straight at the arena wall where the first Red Warrior had smashed up. The gap left by that impact had not yet rezzed back up; an opening in the wall remained, narrow and jagged-edged. Kevin Flynn, with no idea what might obstruct him in the gap, or what might lie beyond, nevertheless saw any opportunity for escape as a good one. The only certain way to die would be to remain prisoner in the Training Complex. Given that, Flynn was willing to risk just about anything, including the possibility of frying himself like a bug in another of those force fields.
“This is it!” he shouted into his communicator. Ram and Tron heard, but couldn’t comprehend. “Come on!” Flynn urged, aiming for the opening, leaving a curtain of red light behind him as he went. An Elite swooped in at him for the kill, and Ram and Tron headed his way to see what his plan was.
The arena wall sped at Flynn and his enemy, the gap growing. The Red finally saw that Flynn had no intention of turning, and made a last-second attempt to save himself. But he’d waited too long, and hit the wall with terrific velocity just as Flynn shot the gap in the arena’s side. The impact de-rezzed more of the wall.
Sark, watching from above, ranted, outraged. He’d thought to see the User perish in collision with the wall, ridding him of that problem for good. But this:
Below, Tron and Ram still dueled the remaining Red. Tron had seen Flynn’s exit and been shocked by it. The MCP, he decided, must be hoarding more of the System’s power than ever, so much so that even the re-rezzing of the Grid had been impaired. And, thrilling to the idea of freedom, he asked himself,
Ram had seen and heard too, and now he swung his machine hard, boxing the last Warrior, forcing him to hold a grid line. The Warrior hit a red barrier at full speed, evaporating in a caldronous de-rezzing.
Ram changed course, swung in parallel to Tron, and then they shot along side by side. “What do you think?” Ram asked over the communicator, terse with hope.
Tron knew exuberance, the chance to run freely and independently once more. “Do it!” he yelled into his mike. The pair made for the gap.
Sirens rent the air of the Training Complex. A gargantuan voice echoed across it, “WARRIORS MUST STAY WITHIN THEIR UNITS. REPEAT: ALL WARRIORS MUST STAY WITHIN THEIR UNITS. WARNING. WARNING.” It became muted with distance as they ignored it and roared on.
Sark uttered a taut exclamation. The programs were emulating the User! His worst fears had been made real; not only had the User defied traditional constraints, but he’d gotten other programs to follow his lead. And worst of all, Tron was among them. Once more, Sark exhorted his Recognizers.
The Recos swooped in as Ram and Tron blurred toward the waiting gap. One descended on them with
