Antigravel Omnibus 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Castor is the fastest driver for about a thousand light years around, and now he has to throw the race for a spoiled fat kid. He revs his antigrav bike and makes some extra dust for the fans to enjoy. There aren’t few of them, every eye in the solar system is fixed on the race broadcast. Not because they’re so anxious to see who wins, but rather to have an extra second or so of warning in case something goes wrong. He drives up a hill and turns back to locate his opponent. He lifts his helmet’s visor and covers his eyes from the scorching sun.

He sees him struggling to get his fat a*s past some narrow rocks, but he is soon about to catch up. Castor turns around towards the finish line and accelerates. The fat kid isn’t stupid. Castor has to give him a good challenge, make him sweat for the win. If it’s possible, they had instructed, he should let it get toe-to-toe right before the finish line. They’d given the fat kid the best bike there was, bought from those alien traders that demanded p*****t in pounds of flesh. They had installed an AI that made it impossible to make a mistake, which was of course banned from racing. Everyone just looked the other way when it came to that particular family.

Castor picks up speed and turns to a rock formation that provides a ramp for a nice jump, but reduces his lap time severely. The rocky, dry moon that this race track is on provides excellent grounds for showmanship. Barely 0.2 g, you can perform the most impressive jumps and spins in the air. The crowd, gathered in a remote part on their bleachers in a strategic part of the track, stands up and roars for him. Castor brakes a little and the fat kid finally catches up to him, whooshing past at enormous speed. The crowd doesn’t hide their disappointment at that.

Castor makes it hard for the fat kid. He overtakes him a couple of times, and cuts him off at a couple of bends, gets millimetres away from touching his bike and causing a crash. The highlight reel shows the near misses to everyone. It’s an excellent show for the fans, but most importantly, for the fat kid. In reality, he is always in complete control and could have him eat his dust at any given time. He gets angry. Who’s he to stroll over in his own sport, in his own domain, and force him to give away his victory? Had the spoiled kid ever worked tirelessly for decades to become the number one champion at something? Maybe it would be good for him if Castor taught him a lesson. Maybe, a slap in the face like that, would show that you can’t just win against Castor, you’d have to work really hard at it. Life lessons and stuff. Wouldn’t he rule over all of them in a standard year anyway, his Royal Highness, Alexander Diairetis?

He shakes his helmeted head. Get serious, Castor. You know that there’s no way to educate that fat kid. Who are you to teach him humility, when others have spent their entire lives teaching him the exact opposite? He decides he’ll give him a good win, an adrenaline rush to remember. He accelerates at the final bend of the track and takes it lousily, the fat kid running in parallel, staring at Castor all the time instead of the road.

That’s how you get yourself killed, asshole.

On the final stretch the bikes rev and glow brilliant blue light, the fans scream at the top of their lungs, the finish line is on the horizon. Faster, foot on the pedal, their places infinitesimally close, the fat kid glares at him angrily, his bike catches up, rocks blast away as they hurtle past, faster, BOOM, they both break the sound barrier, the shockwave sweeps the ground behind them, faster, the bikes vibrate at their endurance limit, the finish line is coming close, one thousand, seven hundred, five hundred metres, the crowd is ecstatic, the commentator stands up to announce the predestined winner and… The fat kid loses control of his bike and crashes on the ground. Castor has fractions of a second for his superhuman reflexes to register what happens. The first snapshot simply allows him to see the fat kid smashing through a rock and slamming into the crowd. The second snapshot allows him to brake hard, but momentum equals mass times f*****g speed. It’s physically impossible for him to halt before the finish line. Castor shuts his eyes and comes to a stop. He doesn’t dare open them. Maybe he miscalculated and he’s come to a standstill before the finish line. Maybe the b****y moon moved out of the way. The silence is deafening. Tens of thousands of fans who had been tearing their vocal cords off mere moments ago are holding their breath. The wind rushes through the rocks, picking up dust as it always does. He knows, that he has won the race. Castor gulps and forces one eyelid open.

The fat kid stands up, tosses his helmet on a spectator’s head, steps on a couple more so he can get free of the mass of blood and gore that has absorbed his crash. He looks up at the monitor for the race’s result, sees Castor’s name as winner. Nobody is celebrating about that. For a moment he seems like he’ll accept his loss. Maybe, just maybe, it will be an excellent life-lesson in humility. Then, he starts hammering his fists on his knees like an overgrown baby who dropped his pacifier. He gets even redder than his normal skin tone, then he glows, and then they all die.

The member of the Diairetis royal family who has just lost the race, starts a chain reaction with his rage from a single tiny Higgs field. The boson tunnels from the pseudovacuum into normal vacuum, an asymmetry which starts a catastrophic vacuum decay. The sphere of death spreads out at the speed of light, simplifying all the matter it encounters into simpler and simpler elements, moving down the periodic table step by step till it reaches the most basic one, Hydrogen. It also leaves behind some new unfathomable rules of chemistry.

The black sphere vanishes the moon, Castor, the bikes and the spectators before anything can register in their eyes. In 1.2 seconds, it consumes the gas giant in which they were in orbit of. In four minutes it consumes the next planet, in six, the one after that, and in ten minutes it extinguishes the star, plunging that solar system into darkness.