Medic slowed her pace, glancing over her shoulder toward her pursuers. “The grubs don’t have any tech, and these old buildings are derelict. There’s machinery and gadgets installed, but none of it is working.”
She put on a burst of speed and tore off, and a long line of grubs pursued her.
“Another way,” she went on, “is to project and calculate based on your current location, or to triangulate, but it takes years of practice to master the accuracy, and if you get it even slightly wrong, you’ll end up deep inside the planet or out in space. The Ark Lord did an amazing job dumping us so close to the grubs from such a vast distance. He truly is a master.”
The stream of grubs came very close to Liam, but the vast majority ignored him. They really seemed entranced by the blue light. Either that or they perceived it as a threat and were trying to eliminate it. However, a few of the grubs spotted Liam and veered toward him, and he bolted, going from zero to thirty-five in two seconds. He circled around, remaining at a safe distance.
“I don’t get it,” Liam said. “I’ve seen wormholes open up in non-tech areas. A graveyard, a lake—”
“Those are carefully adjusted coordinates, approved and bookmarked for tourists,” Medic said. “There are millions of them for your planet alone. You can pick a location at random from the safe list, but you never just guess and make up your own.”
“Safe list?” Liam pressed.
“Planets shift, spaceships move on. Everything in the universe is in a constant state of motion. Planets are tracked and recalibrations made, otherwise the coordinates would be obsolete within seconds.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Armory interrupted over the intercom. “Medic has a nice posse behind her, but the rest just stayed behind and closed the gaps. They’re still surrounding the building. What say we just mow them all down? I have plenty of ammo and can—”
“Don’t you do it!” Medic screamed at him, her blue flashing light suddenly turning red. “The distraction is working! We just need more lights. Don’t you have some flares or something, Armory? Look, Optics is leading a whole load of them away.”
Optics hurried away from the hotel, looking back over his shoulder and shining his bright lights at a few dozen angry grubs behind him. Optics wasn’t so much luring them away as irritating the heck out of them.
“Medic, try screaming again,” Liam said. “I think they liked that.”
She let out a piercing shriek, and sure enough, down by the hotel, masses of the oily black creatures jerked their heads around. But they lost interest the moment she stopped for breath.
“I can’t keep screaming,” she gasped.
A real robot could, Liam thought. Somehow, that notion gave him comfort, proof that parts of them remained untouched by the nanotechnology. “Don’t you have a siren?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped.
“Doesn’t anyone have a way to make a loud, continuous screaming sound?” Liam persisted, drawn to his idea.
“This is hopeless,” Armory said. “We’ll never get to the king this way. There are too many of these things. We don’t have anything that interests or frightens them enough to leave their king unprotected. Where’s Stealth right now?”
The creepy robot had completely disappeared. No doubt she was around somewhere, edging toward the hotel, waiting for a gap so she could scale a wall or drainpipe. In the meantime, she was probably hiding behind whatever was available—a bush, a thin tree, a low wall, an old well, and a myriad of other things on the fringes of the small town. But she’d never penetrate the sea of black bodies.
If I could only create a wormhole, Liam thought, growing more and more frustrated.
Though remnants of technology littered the building where the king hid, it was all dormant, long dead, nothing to get a fix on. His coordinate locking system fluctuated wildly, reminding him of an elusive radio station lurking behind the static, something you couldn’t quite tune into it. Besides, surely he was too close? Whoever heard of a two-hundred-yard wormhole?
He noticed then that the coordinates filling his databanks came in pairs marked “source” and “destination,” which made perfect sense. The source was easy enough. That number would be generated anytime he created a random wormhole—very useful in case he ever ended up in some distant, unknown place. He could just return to the source.
The destination was the difficult part. How was he supposed to figure that?
Then something occurred to him. He’d been so focused on a destination that he’d overlooked the obvious—that he didn’t need one. Wormholes were the same at both ends. He just needed a distraction. All that swirling light! The destination didn’t matter; any random spot in the universe would do. He had plenty of previously visited coordinates on file. A whole library of them! Multiple planets across multiple galaxies, millions of so-called hotspots logged in the data system as volunteered by explorers over many decades, a kind of publicly maintained encyclopedia of the universe. Wikiverse, Liam thought joyfully.
The last entry jolted him. He stared at the readout, unable to believe what he was seeing. Earth? Seriously? And not just Earth, but Brockridge—his home!
Wheels turned in his mind. These were the Ark Lord’s own databanks. Perhaps this was an oversight on his part, or perhaps not; he could just be overly confident that Liam wouldn’t be stupid enough to skip out on the mission. It might even be a test.
“I have an idea,” he shouted, running back toward Hammer and Armory, who stood together on the brow of the hill watching as Medic ran around with her red light flashing on the end of its pole. “I can create a wormhole.”
Hammer spun around. “You can lock onto the king?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, unless you can create a tunnel from here to the king so we can bypass hundreds of guards, I don’t see how a wormhole is going to help.”
Liam grinned to himself. “I think I can make this work. The lightshow is working, but it’s not enough.”
“And a wormhole will help? You think they’ll be interested in a tunnel of light?”
Amory broke in. “Maybe he thinks they’ll run right into it and end up on some distant airless moon.”
Liam shook his head. “I remember the Ark Lord said they were attracted by high-pitched squeals. They seemed to like Medic’s scream. We need one that doesn’t ever stop, and I know just the thing. Wait here . . .”
“Runner,” came the worried voice of Medic as she jogged toward the group. Her followers finally seemed to have given up on her and were rejoining the masses in the streets. Even Optics’ posse had turned away. Plan B, the lightshow distraction, was officially a bust.
Plan C it is, Liam thought grimly as he sprinted down the slope toward the main building. Operation Noise.
He spotted Stealth out of the corner of his eye as he shot past an old wagon with three out of four wheels intact and the fourth lying half buried in the dirt. Stealth lurked there, unseen by the grubs, but Liam’s brazen approach was instantly spotted by every grub in town. Eyes turned to him, whiskers twitched, and a unified growl filled the air.
He stopped. Grubs hissed and bent forward, baring fangs. Though some distance away, they lashed out with their tongues, flashes of light filling the night sky.
“Easy, boys,” Liam murmured.
He grabbed the coordinates for Brockridge, Earth. There were actually quite a few similar sets of numbers, each with a notation added by the Ark Lord, a kind of mental memo: “Mile above Liam house,” and “Liam bedroom,” and “Liam, friend’s house, pickup point.” The most recent was “Gorvian mission target, fuzzy lock point, guestimate only.”
He selected the numbers for his friend’s house . . . and paused. This could potentially be very dangerous for Ant and Madison, indeed for the whole of Brockridge if grubs poured into the wormhole and headed to Earth.
But he needed his friends, and he was far enough away from the grubs that he could deactivate it at any moment.
He took a deep breath and activated the generator. As the tunnel flared into life, the grubs flinched and backed up.
“I need your help, guys,” Liam murmured, watching the grubs and getting ready to pull the plug just in case. But though attracted by the light, they stayed well clear.
“What do you want us to do?” Hammer said, his voice loud over the intercom.
Liam shook his head. “Not you. I’m talking about my friends back home.”
If there was ever a need for Ant’s ingenuity and Madison’s sleep writing powers, it was now.
Chapter 6
Although he would never admit it, Ant enjoyed spending time with Madison. He would have enjoyed it more if the situation weren’t so serious. As it was, they moped around the entire afternoon in the vain hope Liam would return early from his mission.
He didn’t.
“Well, this is getting us nowhere,” Madison said at last, getting up from the sofa halfway through the movie. They’d found Cowboys and Aliens on demand, and while it boasted a fabulous blend of space tech and Wild West gunslingers, somehow it failed to take their minds off their poor robotized friend. “I’m going to head home for a while and come back later. Okay? Can Barton drive me?”
“Sure.”
She nodded and sighed. “I feel like there’s something we should be doing to help, but I can’t figure out what.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Ant said, hitting pause on the remote. “Liam’s on his own.”
She stared at him while absently pulling her hair back as though putting it in a ponytail. Then she let it go and whispered, “What if he doesn’t come back? I mean . . . what if this theory about seeing himself alive in the future is flawed somehow?”
“In what way?”
“Well, what if he gets cocky and goes barreling into battle, and these time grub things zap him?”
Ant frowned. “That can’t happen. Liam saw himself in—”
“Yes, we know that, but what if the future can be changed? What if the future isn’t as set in stone as the Ark Lord thinks?”
“Are you talking about alternating timelines? Changes to the past causing reality to branch off in order to prevent a calamitous paradox?”
Madison squinted at him, then nodded. “Like in Back to the Future when Marty returns to the present only to find that everything’s different, because he made a change to the past and caused reality to split in two, and he branched off on one path while the original stayed the same.”
“That was Back to the Future Part II,” Ant corrected her.
She ignored him. “What if Liam only saw a possible future, but he actually dies in this reality?”
In fact, this notion had been gnawing at Ant the whole time. Now that Madison had voiced the same concern, his anxiety tripled. But he took an opposing position on the subject. “I don’t buy that. I don’t think it’s possible to go back and change the past in any significant way—you know, like killing Hitler while he was young and that sort of thing—but I also don’t believe in bunches of alternate timelines. I think if Liam saw himself in the future, then that’s as good as happened already, set in stone and impossible to change.”
He liked the sound of his own argument.
“But we don’t know,” Madison said, wringing her hands. “What if—”
“There’s no point worrying about it,” he said tightly. “There’s nothing we can do, Maddy. We can’t go where he is. We have no idea what’s going on right now.”
“I won’t sleep tonight thinking about him,” Madison said, her voice wavering. “His mom and dad think he’s staying the night here, and if he doesn’t come back, we’re going to have to explain that somehow.” She sighed and shook her head. “I wish there was some way of knowing he was okay.”
As she headed toward the door, an idea popped into Ant’s mind. He was so struck by it that he barely heard what Madison said from the doorway. He blinked at her. “Huh?”
“I asked if you were taking me home.”
“Oh, right, yeah.” Ant got up and, leaving the TV switched on and the movie paused, ushered Madison out into the hallway and turned to pull the door shut. Leading the way along the hall, he said nothing about his idea until they were both sitting in the back of the limousine. Even then he was cagey. “There’s something we can do.”
Her eyes widened. “Like what?”
Aware that Barton was probably listening, Ant spoke in riddles. This was one thing he didn’t want even his driver to know too much about. “We can find out if his chances of coming back have altered.”
He winked at her and leaned back in his seat, watching as a puzzled expression crossed her face. She said nothing more, apparently understanding the conversation should wait until they were alone again.
When Barton pulled up outside Madison’s house, Ant said loudly, “Wait down by the lake, okay?”
If the driver was put out at the request, he showed nothing in his expression. Ant could see him in the rearview mirror, and he looked stonily ahead, a quick nod the only indication he’d heard.
When the car moved on down the lane, Ant turned to Madison and pointed to a patch of grass near the hedge at the foot of the lawn. “The time wand. Sorry, the echo wand, as it’s really called.”
“Echo projector,” Madison corrected him. She looked wary. “How will that help?”
“I can look into my future and see if Liam’s around.”
“I thought you didn’t want to see into your future.”
“I don’t have to go far. Just a few days, really. If Liam’s back safe and sound, then we’ll know and can sleep easily tonight.”
They stared at each other. Madison’s eyes were wide and hopeful, and she tentatively reached for his hand. “Ant, that might just work. I mean, it’s worth a shot. You’ll only see yourself and what’s around you, but that should be enough. Even if Liam’s not actually there with you, you’ll know if he’s still missing or not.”
“Yeah, if he’s still missing in action, I’ll be a mess,” Ant agreed. “It should be pretty clear just by what I’m doing, how I’m looking. Or Liam might be right there by my side, goofing off as usual, and then it’ll be really clear.”
Madison hurried off to find a trowel. The box wasn’t deep underground, and its location was obvious—a paving slab sitting atop a small mound of dirt as though a beloved pet had been put to rest. Ant had the hole dug out in less than two minutes, and he pulled the wooden box clear and brushed the dirt off.
Inside lay the time wand, a device that allowed the user to glimpse the past and future. Neither Ant nor Madison had had a chance to use it yet, because Liam had monopolized the thing and then announced it needed to be buried. “Knowing the future is dangerous,” he’d said.
Only right now we need to know, Ant thought. Madison was right. If they had any hopes of sleeping through the night and coping with Monday school, they had to know for sure that Liam would be back safely at some point. The uncertainty would drive them crazy otherwise.
“We need power,” Ant said, holding aloft the silver-colored penlike object with a degree of awe. “A big battery, or—”
“You don’t have your expensive portable generator in the trunk?”
Ant snorted. “Like Barton’s gonna cart that thing around everywhere. No, we need to find something here, in your house.” He turned to see her mom’s car parked in the driveway. “Think we can steal a few amps from that?”
“You’d better not drain the battery,” Madison warned. “She’ll be mad if she comes out tomorrow and can’t start the thing.”
“We’ll just steal a bit of juice,” Ant assured her. “One quick trip. Come on.”
Feeling a little like U.S. Marines on a mission, Ant hurried to the car and ducked down behind it, peering through the side windows at the house.
Annoyingly, Madison sauntered over at a leisurely pace. “They’re out. Mom and Dad took Cody to the state park.”
“What for?”
/> “Afternoon bike ride. I think they were going to grab dinner on the way home. Anyway, we’re safe—as long as we don’t run the battery down.”
They got busy. Madison fetched the car keys from the kitchen, and just to be safe, she started the car so the battery could keep charging while they were draining it. Popping the hood, she peered with distaste at the oily engine.
Ant stepped closer, holding up the time wand. Suddenly nervous, he paused and tried to decide how far forward to go. When the wand powered up, the slender dial would turn to its current position in his lifeline. Hopefully it wouldn’t be way over toward the end, indicating his days on this planet were nearly over. How awful to learn such a dire truth! This was exactly why he and Madison had agreed not to use it.
As he leaned over the rumbling engine and moved the wand closer to the battery, a faint blue light illuminated around the dial almost in anticipation of being touched to the positive terminal.
At that moment, Madison yanked his arm back. The light went out, and the dial ceased its motion. “What are you doing?” Ant asked.
She gripped his wrist tight, her face a shade paler than normal. “Sorry, I just—We agreed not to look into the future. What if . . . what if you look a week ahead and Liam’s not around? What if we’re at his funeral? How are we going to—?” She broke off.
Gently extracting himself from her grasp, he let the wand fall to his side. “If we don’t look, we’ll spend the next few days worrying anyway. At least this way we have a chance to see him back home, alive and well, and then we’ll be happy to wait and can sleep at night knowing he’s coming back.”
“And what if the future we see here is different to the one that actually happens?” she insisted. “We don’t know how this works. We might see him alive and well, but then he might go and get killed, and then the future we know could change.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You’re overthinking it, Maddy. Let’s just get this done.”
She wrung her hands as he lifted the wand again. He waited a moment, giving her a chance to stop him, but she did nothing this time, so he moved the wand closer to the battery. The dial lit up again in faint blue light.
Nanobot Warriors Page 4