“Then you had to get Eric out of Kosmodrome 2,” said George. “When he confronted you about Artemis because he realized that it had already started, you had to get rid of him, so you made it look like he was being retired.”
“And,” chimed in Annie, “I bet you made sure we got places in the astronaut training scheme!”
“Yes, yes, yes,” sighed Merak. “Though I do feel that including you on the program proved to be an error—one that I took steps to rectify with a little accident.” He sniggered.
“But hang on,” interrupted Annie, not only angry to have her suspicions about the plane “accident” confirmed, but also suddenly remembering what George had said. “What’s this got to do with George’s parents? And my mom? And where is Rika Dur?”
“He won’t tell me,” said George. “He’s holding them somewhere. But my mom and dad never went to an island to farm, just like your mom never went on any concert tour. It was just his way of kidnapping them so that no one tried to look for them. He even sent us messages from them himself! But I don’t know where they are now.”
“Argh!” cried Annie, realizing. “Noooo!”
“What?” asked George.
“The boxes!” said Annie. “There are boxes in a hospital block in Kosmodrome 2 with people in them! They’re in suspended animation—they’re alive but they are fast asleep! And he’s sending them to space! It must be your family, George—and my mom! It is, isn’t it?”
“Oh, well done,” crowed Merak. “Quite right. Your families are safely tucked up in those lovely custom-made boxes where they will remain ‘asleep’ until the spacecraft they are on reaches Europa.”
“I don’t believe it,” said George slowly.
“Believe it,” said Merak. “It’s not just the other trainees that I’m sending out to Europa. Just in case the live astronauts don’t make it, I’ve taken the precaution of sending some sleeping ones.”
“But our parents didn’t choose to go into space!” said George furiously. “They didn’t want to leave Earth—so why did you kidnap them and put them to sleep? You said you wanted volunteers!”
“They did volunteer,” said Merak casually. “Sort of. When I explained to them the other options …”
“You are horrible,” said George slowly. He felt numb with fear.
“What about Mars?” asked Annie bravely. Suddenly Mars didn’t sound too far away. If her family and George’s got sent to Mars, there was a chance they could get them back.
“Oh, we will get to Mars!” said Merak. “We’re just going the long way around.”
“I knew it!” said Annie. “I knew there was even more to this plan than we realized.”
“So true!” said Merak. “Life from the oceans and life—human and synthetic—is what interests me … so I want the blue planets.” He sniggered. “I want the blue moon, I want the red planets, the gray ones, the stripy ones, the upside-down ones. Frankly, I want them all.” Around him, more and more robots were appearing, until battalions of the shadowy figures were lining up. For the moment they were still semitransparent as the quantum teleporter did its work in sending them out to space.
But George and Annie could see that in just a few moments’ time, when the robots had finished their teleportation to Europa, they would be completely outnumbered. Glancing behind them, they saw no sign of Cosmos’s doorway. Was this it? Was this their final journey into space?
Just then, Annie noticed something very interesting behind Alioth Merak. Their old enemy and his horde of rapidly teleporting robots were all facing George and Annie, paying no attention to what was happening behind their backs. But Annie had seen that some of the robots that had fallen into the hole earlier must have dropped their portable heat sources before they fell. At different locations around the ice hole, heat machines lay on the surface and continued to melt the thick ice, perilously close to where the robot army was standing. Once the full weight of the robots arrived from Earth, Annie reckoned the ice wouldn’t hold firm under them for much longer.
“Keep him focused on you,” Annie murmured to George. “And walk very slowly backward, with me.”
“You promised you would let our families go if I went through the QT!” said George bravely. He and Annie took a baby step back. George hoped his statement would give Merak something to get stuck into. “You can’t take revenge on our families. They’re completely innocent.”
As he spoke, both friends took another millistep backward, slightly further away from the rapidly enlarging ice hole.
“So sweet,” murmured Merak as his robots became solid forms around him. “Revenge, that is. Not you. I don’t want you to think this was all about you—it really wasn’t. You’re just not that important to me.”
“It was about getting control of Kosmodrome 2,” guessed Annie. “So that you would be in charge of all the space missions in the Solar System.”
“Exactly,” cried Merak, oblivious to the enlarging gulf behind him and his robots. “Only I could be trusted with such an important job. All the rest of the work I’ve done here has been clearing debris out of the way—such as your father! He had to go. He would never have allowed Mission Artemis to happen in the way I wanted. He would never have agreed to send children into space or allow me to put unsuspecting people to sleep. I had to get rid of him—and once I had done that, I had to use everything at my disposal to act fast, before anyone uncovered my plans.”
“Too bad we spoiled it all for you—again,” said Annie casually, not sounding sorry at all.
Her tone was not lost on Merak. It clearly irked him. “Enough of this chatter!” Even through the voice transmitter, they could hear his rage. “My robots have now arrived.” Around him, the extra-heavy robots had fully emerged, their metal boots firmly planted on the icy crust beneath them. “Robots, seize them … !”
But as Merak gave the command, two things happened at once. First of all, he himself seemed to be teleporting in reverse. Much more quickly than he had arrived, he started vanishing into thin air in front of them. As he did so, the robot army tried to take a step forward in unison, but was immediately flung into confusion. Those on the back row had slithered backward as the ice gave way beneath them. As they fell, they reached forward to try to hold on to the robot in front to stop themselves from disappearing into the subterranean sea. But their actions caused a domino effect as the rows of robots dragged each other into the rapidly widening hole beneath them.
As they fell, Annie and George moved swiftly backward to avoid following them. They didn’t think they would be able to move fast enough; the ice seemed to be crumbling away as the robots thrashed and struggled. Suspended now above the surface of Europa was the half-translucent form of Merak. It was a terrifying sight!
But as the two junior astronauts reversed as rapidly as they could, they felt a hand grab them and pull them backward. They just had time to register that they were being hauled back through the doorway to Earth, which had opened again behind their backs. As they stumbled through the portal, the last thing they heard was a scream of horror from the suspended semitransparent form of Merak as his robots dived to their end in the murky oceans beneath the ice.
Then the doorway to Earth slammed shut.
The two friends collapsed backward onto the floor of Eric’s office, landing at Leonia’s feet. Annie was the first to jump up. She tried to rip off her space helmet but the old-fashioned version was much harder to release. George was quicker to get out of his heavily weighted space costume. As he undid the helmet and slid it off his head, he realized he could still hear Merak’s unearthly screaming.
“How come I can still hear him?” he mumbled.
“Because he’s half here—and he’s half there,” said Leonia, beaming from ear to ear. “I started to quantum teleport him while you were still on Europa. I did it while Cosmos closed the doorway. So he’s at least sixty-five percent returned to Mission Control right now… .”
“But how?” asked George. “How did you k
now what to do? And why didn’t you just leave him out there? Why did you have to bring him back?”
“I thought we might need him,” said Leonia quietly.
“Did you know that the robots would fall through the hole and into the pond?” George asked Annie, helping her to pull off the old space helmet.
“I thought it was our only hope!” said Annie, emerging, blinking and a little dizzy from the vintage space suit.
“Um, you guys,” a voice broke in.
“Leo!” said Annie, hugging her. “Thank you! You got us out of there! It was amazing! What you just did saved our lives! And I think we beat him. All we need to do now is find out where the other trainees are, and our families—and get them resuscitated. And then we’re all good!”
“Yeah, that’s all very well,” said Leonia urgently. “But you seem to have forgotten something else.”
“What’s that?” said George, looking perplexed.
“Artemis,” said Leonia. “I think your intervention has caused Merak to accelerate his plans. It looks like the spacecraft launch is set to go. It’s leaving. And we don’t know how to make it stop!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Mission Control!” said George. “Now!”
The three of them ran out of the room, only pausing to gather up Cosmos as they ran into the huge room with its banks of screens and monitors. The last time George had seen this room, it had been stuffed full of robots. This time, it was very nearly empty.
“Did all the robots go into space?” asked Annie as they surveyed the abandoned room.
“Not quite,” said George. “They left someone behind.”
Boltzmann Brian was standing near the cone of light, which still shone as brightly as when it had transported George to Europa. “Take me!” he seemed to be pleading. “Please let me go with the other robots! Don’t leave me here alone!”
But the only figure other than Boltzmann in the room didn’t care about Boltzmann’s emotional appeals. In the center of the cone of light, the 65 percent of Alioth Merak that Leonia had forced to return to Earth twisted and turned, gnashing its teeth and screaming in horror.
“I’m entangled!” the hideous apparition yelled. “I can’t go forward, I can’t go back! I’m half on Earth—”
“More than that, actually,” supplied George helpfully. “Only thirty-five percent of you remains on Europa! That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t!” howled Merak. “Bring me back! I demand that you complete the transfer.”
Leonia, meanwhile, was typing rapidly on one of the computers. As she did so, the pictures on the screens changed. Instead of a view of Europa, with robots sliding helplessly into an ice hole filled with a dark swirling liquid, the image changed to show a launchpad with a spacecraft preparing for takeoff.
“It’s the one I saw!” cried Annie. “That’s here, at Kosmodrome 2! That’s Artemis! How long until takeoff?”
“It’s running final checks now!” said Leonia.
“We must be able to stop it,” said Annie, gazing at the huge screens, which now showed nothing but the launch preparations. One of the screens was streaming from the inside of the spaceship.
“Look!” said Annie. Robots were lumbering on board, loading the long rectangular boxes Annie had seen in another part of Kosmodrome 2 onto the ship. “Oh no!” she breathed, her heart breaking. “Those boxes might be our families! George! George! We must stop the ship from leaving!”
“OMG!” said George. “Is that my family?” His eyes filled with tears as he saw two smaller boxes being loaded. “My little sisters … it can’t be! It just can’t be!”
“And look!” said Annie desperately. “There are live astronauts on board as well.” The camera changed view and showed a row of kids in space suits, strapped into their seats, their heads lolling as though they were drugged. “That must be what Merak meant—he’s kept all the trainees here and now they’re on Artemis. He’s sending them to space, to found a colony on the blue moon! We’ve got to stop them!”
“But how?” said George. He had joined Leonia at the computer monitor. “How do you stop a space launch?”
“There must be a way,” said Leonia determinedly. “It has to be possible to cancel it.” She tapped away at the keyboard, but came up against a stop sign. “There’s a code,” she said. “We need to input a code to change the launch protocol.”
“Tell us that code,” Annie shouted at the three-quarters form of Alioth Merak. “What do we have to input to stop the launch?”
“Bring me back to Earth,” entreated Merak. “It’s the only way you will stop Artemis from leaving… .”
“T minus five,” the automated countdown read, meaning there were now only five minutes until the spaceship launched.
“We can’t!” said George. “We can’t bring him back—can we? It’s too dangerous!”
“If we don’t,” said Annie, “we can’t stop the ship!”
“Rescue me … ,” said Merak, who was getting fainter and fainter. “If you want to stop the ship, you have to bring me back to Earth! It’s the only way… .”
But Merak’s own technology had let him down. The quantum teleporter, already overused far beyond his projections, had decided to put itself out of service—permanently. With a gargling scream of horror, Merak disappeared entirely as the quantum teleporter distributed all the molecules of him randomly around all the locations where he had ever been.
He was gone.
“What now?” said George in shock. He would never have thought he would be sorry to see the end of Alioth Merak, but the fact was that he had vanished, taking with them their last chance of stopping the spacecraft Artemis. Soon it would be leaving for Europa, with his and Annie’s family on board, and also the other kids from the final week of the astronaut training process.
“We’ve lost,” said Annie dully. Her mind was whirring with thoughts—if Artemis launched, could they open Cosmos’s portal on the ship itself and bring everyone back through the portal? It was notoriously hard to open a space portal on a moving object—Cosmos wasn’t the greatest at pinpoint accuracy for his portals when the place they were trying to reach was in rapid motion itself. She wasn’t sure whether they would manage it, or whether the portal might just dump her and George outside the spacecraft, to drift around in deep space while Artemis powered away from them at enormous speed.
Would they have to wait until Artemis landed on Europa in order to try and recover their loved ones and the other kids from the training program? Would Cosmos be able to transport so many people? The quantum teleporter obviously wouldn’t work safely for human beings, so they wouldn’t be able to risk mounting a rescue operation using that.
“We’ve lost them,” repeated Annie. Even Leonia had stopped frantically typing on the computer.
“Excuse me,” Cosmos piped up. “But I don’t think you have.”
“Really?” Annie gave a start. “You can stop the launch?”
“Er, no,” said the supercomputer. “Sadly not. I had my information banks wiped. I think someone suspected that my loyalties might not be to her or him entirely.”
“So … can we ask Tablet Cosmos then?” Leonia ventured.
Cosmos made a funny sort of noise, rather like a sniff, and said haughtily, “That upstart fried its own operating system after Alioth Merak tried to use it for something far beyond its limited capabilities.”
“Oh, no!” said George, also reeling with the shock of the situation.
“I think you are forgetting something,” said Cosmos politely.
“Which is?” said Annie.
“I sent you the activation code for the launch commands already,” said Cosmos. “Predicting that there would be some kind of hostile event, and that at some point I would be required to forfeit all the security information I possessed, I took the precaution of sending you the code before my system was cleared.”
“You did?” said Annie.
“In a ‘family’ mess
age,” said Cosmos. “It’s a very simple code—you just have to transpose each letter of the alphabet with its numerical value.”
Annie dug around in her pocket and pulled out the scrunched piece of paper. “Here it is!”
“Read it out!” said Leonia.
“You do it,” said Annie rapidly. “You’ll be faster.”
“And the cow jumped over the Moon!” said Leonia, with a sideways glance at Annie.
“No, you have to do it in numbers,” said Annie. “A is one and so on.”
“Okay,” said Leonia, scribbling down an alphabet rapidly. “Try this 114420853152310211316541522518208513151514.”
“OMG, that was fast!” said George. “I’m still on ‘cow’!”
“Ha!” said Annie as Leonia typed in the code and the computer accepted it, activating a command screen. “Who says girls aren’t good at code?”
“What do you want me to do now?” asked Leonia urgently.
“Cancel the launch!” said Annie. “Shut it down!”
“That option isn’t here,” said Leonia, peering at the screen. “But I can delay it.”
“Do it!” said Annie.
Leonia selected the right command and they saw a message flash up on the screen: LAUNCH DELAY THIRTY MINUTES.
George felt like he let out a breath for the first time in hours. He was so relieved that, for now at least, the spacecraft wasn’t able to leave before they had a chance to get there and unload his family and the other kids.
“We have to go!” he said. He turned to Leonia. “Can you try to get ahold of Annie’s dad through Cosmos?” he asked. “I’m sure he could tell us how to halt the launch for longer.”
“I’ve already tried that!” Leonia said sadly. “Unfortunately I think that there must be some kind of blocking device around the facility to stop anyone calling him. I can’t get through at all! But I will keep on trying, of course.” Her brow knitted. “I do not like to fail,” she muttered.
“Then we are on our own. And we don’t have much time,” said Annie. “How are we going to do this?”
George and the Blue Moon Page 20