Attack of the Spider Bots

by Robert West

  Later that evening, Beamer told his parents about the boy in the trolley car. The funny thing was they spent more time s colding Beamer for going there than they did knocking the kid for stealing Beamer’s wallet. Of course, Beamer didn’t know he was going to Middleton’s skid row. Their response was that he should have left as soon as he realized it. But then, if he had, they wouldn’t have known about the kid living in a trolley car in the middle of winter. Sometimes parents made no sense at all.

  The next thing Beamer knew, his mother was all over the Internet and on the phone trying to find out what to do about that kid — to find out who he was and how to help him. All Beamer could do was roll his eyes. Yep, his mom never did anything halfway.

  The next day, Beamer was in his attic getting things to take over to the tree ship. The attic was a pretty good shortcut to the tree, actually. Beamer could climb out the attic window, skitter across the roof a few steps, and launch onto a tree branch for a quick climb over to the tree ship.

  The problem was that, to get to the attic window, he had to get past . . . the web. Beamer and his family had found the giant web in their attic when they moved in. It was so huge, stretching from the floor all the way up to the apex of the roof, that Beamer’s dad had called in some scientists to investigate it. The attic still looked like the engineering deck of the starship Enterprise, alive with blips and beeps, bubbling chemicals, flashing lights, and twisting, illuminated lines from all the electronic and chemical equipment scientists were using to study the now-famous MacIntyre Web. Nobody’d ever seen the mutant octopod that had supposedly built this two-story silk metropolis. Beamer had named it with the scariest sounding name he could think of at the time — Molgotha.

  Actually, some of the scientists didn’t think the web had been built by a real spider. They thought some person had put it together as a hobby or a joke or a scientific experiment. The trouble with that theory was that the web was made of genuine spider material — DNA positive.

  On the other hand, the web did some things that most spiderwebs didn’t. Beamer had told the scientists that the web seemed to suck up energy. He’d told them that he had caught a glimpse of it through the attic window, glowing hot the moment before the tree ship had warped into one of their adventures. Unfortunately, nobody past puberty believed that their experiences really happened. Well, at least Beamer always got a good laugh. Sometimes he thought he was cut out to be a stand-up comic, except that nothing else he ever said drew any laughs.

  Getting past the web, though, was no laughing matter. Beamer eyed suspiciously the dark corners of the attic, looking for signs of movement or a large flying thread of spider silk. Let’s face it, Molgotha — or whoever built that thing — was one top-gun silk architect. He/she/it or his/her/its descen-dants weren’t going to leave it abandoned forever. Beamer sucked in his breath and scooted slowly beneath the sticky little arch the web made above the floor. All Beamer could do, then, was to hope and pray that a gust of wind wouldn’t make the web billow, or that he wouldn’t accidentally take a breath.

  Having already completed that process, Beamer popped his head out the attic window. In the fall, Beamer had wondered if the tree that held the tree ship would lose leaves like the other trees. After all, this tree had its own ecosystem, its own weather pattern, its own insect population, and its own energy field. There could be a windstorm in the tree while the rest of Murphy Street was as quiet as a tomb. As it turned out, the tree did lose its leaves. It seems that the cycle of life rules, no matter what.

  Trees always seemed so pitiful when they lost their leaves. They went out in a blaze of glory, Beamer had to admit, with all the red, yellow, and purple colors of fall, but then they were left looking like skeletons of their former selves.

  When snow came, though, the picture was totally different. Those naked tree limbs were coated a glistening white with icicles draped all over them. The whole treescape shimmered and twinkled like a magical fairy land — if you believed in such things.

  It was a little tougher working on the tree ship when you were wrapped up like an Eskimo, but Beamer’s mom always insisted he dress warmly. Ghoulie and Scilla got the same lecture from his nanny and her grandmother. Actually, it turned out to be a good thing, because whenever any of them rocked the tree, they’d suddenly be pelted by a load of snow bombs from the branches above.

  At the moment, the tree ship had its own layer of snow frosting with icicles hanging all over it like Christmas decorations. “How’s it going up there?” he yelled at Ghoulie through the attic window.

  Ghoulie winced as an icicle drop fell into his eye. He wiped it off and went back to tucking wires into the instrument panel. “How should I know?” he shouted back irritably. He was supposed to be making a universal translator, but that wasn’t easy to do when you didn’t have all that good a grip on your own language.

  Beamer snickered to himself. Nobody could juggle numbers and electrons around better than Ghoulie, but, at the moment, he wasn’t on the best of terms with verbs and adjectives. Oh, he could talk circles around anyone and used words big enough to strangle a normal person’s brain, but diagramming sentences in English class drove him nuts.

  “D’ ya’ll need any help?” yelled Scilla as she swung up onto the trunk where it crossed into her yard.

  “No, I think I’ve almost got it,” Ghoulie shouted. “Okay . . . it’s finished . . . I think,” Ghoulie said with a shrug. “At least it’s as finished as I can make it.” All he’d done was load word processing and voice recognition software into the ship’s computer and attach a microphone and a speaker. Just reading English was going to be a stretch. “Universal” it was not. All Ghoulie could hope for was that when they and the ship warped into one of their adventures, it would work just as well as everything else did. Let’s face it: in the real world, a plywood ship in a tree had little chance of making light speed. In fact, it was right in the middle of that thought that Ghoulie’s stomach dropped, his eyes blurred, and his ears filled with a whoosh.

  5

  Siege on Bot World

  Up in the attic, Beamer saw a yellowish white light in the corner of his vision. He whirled around to see the web glowing like . . . like — he couldn’t think of anything it was like — maybe fairy dust. All he knew was that it meant the ship was taking off, and he wasn’t on it!

  “Wait!” he yelled as he scrambled out the window and fell in a roll down the roof to the tree. He clamored along the branches, jostling snow clods into pelting him with every frantic movement.

  It momentarily occurred to him that he might see what the tree ship looked like when it warped away. Of course, if the whole experience is only in my head, the tree ship isn’t really going anywhere — or is it? Maybe the ship took them into another dimension. Whatever it was, Beamer wanted to be in the ship, not watching it. “Wait!” he shouted with even more urgency.

  Ghoulie looked out the cockpit window. The sky was now black with tiny sparkling dots. He looked down and noticed that he was wearing a red, yellow, and blue uniform with brass buttons. He’d gotten a promotion since their last jump — all the way to Captain.

  The captain’s eyes flared wide when he saw, directly in front of the ship, what looked like a large battleship floating sideways in space.

  Ghoulie suddenly realized that Beamer and Scilla were nowhere to be seen. They’d been working outside the ship when it jumped. Fighting a growing sense of panic, he leaped from his seat and ran to the back of the ship. It took a strangely long time to get there. For one thing, the ship was growing longer right before his eyes. He knew that the bridge always seemed bigger than their little plywood cock-pit, but he’d never been outside the bridge before. The ship didn’t grow to be as big as Darth Vader’s star destroyer, but it wasn’t far from being as big as the Millennium Falcon or Princess Amidala’s Naboo Royal Cruiser.

  “Bruzelski . . . MacIntyre! Where are you?” Captain Ives shouted into his communicator. “Report! Report!” he yelled again as he
ran from compartment to compartment.

  He got a blast of static and then heard, “We’re coming in now, Captain. Opening air-lock door.”

  The captain then saw them outside the window, wearing bulky white suits and floating in space like birthday balloons. He sighed in relief as he watched them enter the air lock and saw the robotic arm next to them retract back into its compartment.

  Minutes later, they were all together in the ship’s bridge, staring at a space battleship on their view screen. Actually, it was bigger than a battleship. As they drew closer they began to see tall buildings and needle spires growing out of its smooth, dark surface.

  “It’s a floating city!” exclaimed Commander MacIntyre.

  “Not a favorite vacation spot, I think,” said the captain wryly as he saw gashes and rubble where building walls should be.

  “Not unless you’re into digging through ruins,” said Officer Bruzelski.

  “Man! I hope we haven’t dropped into the middle of a war,” grumbled MacIntyre. “I’m fresh out of bravery pills.”

  “What do you think, Commander?” Captain Ives asked. “Warfare or a friendly visit from the neighborhood asteroid field?” Impact craters covered the surface of the space platform like it had been a shooting gallery. Through the craters, he could see a trash heap of what had once been buildings and streets beneath the surface. Whether the damage was from exploding bombs or just big rocks, the captain couldn’t tell.

  “Either way, she’s totally gutted,” said MacIntyre. “If she’d been on the sea instead of in space, she’d have sunk faster than the Titanic.”

  “Yeah,” chimed in Bruzelski, “and probably crashed right into that planet.”

  In the lower left corner of the screen was an angry-looking planet. Not a very pleasant place, thought the commander. What he could see of the orange and black surface was pockmarked with erupting volcanoes. No question about it: only guys with pitch forks and red horns would feel comfortable down there.

  “If it were to sink out of orbit, it wouldn’t be to the planet,” Captain Ives corrected them. “According to my readings, the floating city is following a cockeyed orbit around that ice-sheeted moon just above us.”

  Sure enough, just at the top of their view screen was the edge of a blue-white moon.

  “How does a planet on fire get a frozen moon?” asked Bruzelski.

  “’Who knows? Maybe it’s the hot planet’s lollipop,” quipped the commander, getting groans from the others in response. His expression suddenly morphed to high anxiety, and his fingers flew over his panel. “Captain, controls are no longer responding!” he shouted.

  They flinched in unison as the speakers squawked with gibberish. “Hey!” yelled Bruzelski as she banged on the universal translator. Now they heard an automated voice speaking in another language, this one more familiar. “Whaddya think, maybe French?” she asked.

  The captain came over and banged on the box several more times before they heard the announcement in English — well, English with an Australian accent.

  The message, with lots of static and dropouts, announced: “G’day, mates. You are approaching terminal 847B. All attendants prepare for landing.”

  “Please stow your trays and return your seats to their up-right position,” Bruzelski said with a crooked smile as she held a mock microphone. “I guess it thinks we’re the morning flight out of Chattanooga.”

  A moment later, the ship’s engines shut off. “Uh . . . Captain — ” the commander said with a gulp.

  “MacIntyre,” shouted the captain. “Reverse thrusters!”

  The commander punched all the right dials and entered the proper commands, but —

  “No response, Captain. They’ve got us in their tractor beam!” He gulped so hard he almost swallowed his Adam’s apple as the floating, ruined city grew larger in their view screen.

  “Officer Bruzelski,” Captain Ives ordered. “Open all frequencies!”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” she said as she adjusted her controls.

  “Attention, space platform,” announced the captain as if he were a TV announcer. “We do not wish to land at this time. We are just passing through.” He paused and then added, “Nice to see you, though . . . uh, hope you are doing well. Feel free to drop by when you are in our . . . uh . . . sector of the galaxy.” He winced and gave the others a “whatever” shrug.

  The only answer was more static.

  The captain could see sets of trams and monorail trains skimming across the surface as they drew closer to the floating city . . . and robots — lots of robots. The problem was he couldn’t see any people.

  It reminded the Ghoulie within the captain of Solomon Parker’s train set, except that the space platform wasn’t a toy and looked a lot more dangerous. Unfortunately, there was not a tree branch to be seen. They were lost in space!

  Moments later — without so much as a bump — they were on the surface of the space platform. “Well, at least some things in this place work,” said Bruzelski.

  “Welcome to the International Peace Station,” announced the speaker. “Please exit in an orderly manner and enjoy your visit.”

  “Some peace,” said the captain. “Let’s just hope they can’t open the door remotely. I’d just as soon stay in an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.”

  Suddenly, machines near them on the platform started coming to life. Some ground immediately to a halt; others cast off showers of sparks; and still others took twisted courses toward their ship.

  “Let’s not panic now,” ordered the captain, “but I suggest we put weapons on standby.”

  “Actually, I don’t think we’re under attack, sir,” said Bruzelski. See that? It looks like a fuel line. And those robots over there look like they’re holding wrenches.”

  “Well, they might not be intentionally hostile,” said the captain, “but they are not exactly in tip-top shape.” He definitely had that right.

  Robots approached the ship, some limping on broken limbs, others spinning in circles on tracks instead of wheels. There were even some that looked fairly functional but just marched back and forth like tin soldiers. Every once in awhile, one stopped, as if its battery had run down. Then the ones behind it crashed into it and fell.

  It would have been funny — like a tin-man version of the Keystone Cops — if the Star-Fighters had been watching it on TV instead of worrying that those walking cans might bang a hole in their ship.

  “Duck!!” Bruzelski suddenly yelled as she hit the deck. A flying-saucer-shaped machine about the size of a serving plate zipped by. It had little eyes that peered menacingly at them. Another one suddenly spun into a dive and skimmed across the hull of the tree ship in a shower of sparks.

  “Just what we need, kamikaze robots,” grumbled MacIntyre. Officer Bruzelski picked herself up from the floor in time to hear something scratching at the window. Out the window, she could see what looked to be spiders about the size of her hand scrambling all over the hull. “Hey y’all,” she said with a gulp, “we’ve got bugs — big ones with metal legs.”

  Actually, Scilla found them kind of cute, with their little bodies tilting up, down, and around mechanically, sputtering out oil and whirling their foot pads around to clean and polish their ship. It was particularly funny how they could squish down to the smallest size to clean in the cracks.

  Then Officer Bruzelski heard the intruder alarm sounding within their ship. “Someone’s triggered the air lock!” she cried as she jumped up and ran toward the bridge door. But she never got there. Squeezing out from beneath the door was a seemingly endless stream of spider bots!

  6

  Hide and Seek

  “Help! Captain! We’re being boarded!” cried Bruzelski as she began to swat the mechanical bugs. The good news was that the little buggers didn’t squish into bug juice when she trounced on them. The bad news was that more spider bots kept coming.

  Commander MacIntyre once again tried to fire the thrusters. “Still nothing, Captain,” he sho
uted as he swiped a couple of the metal bugs off of his control panel.

  The spider bots didn’t look like they were trying to harm anybody. In fact, the control panel was shining and clean after they crawled across. Places on the floor were also showing a nice polish.

  “Hey y’all, look at my hand,” Bruzelski shouted as she shook a spider bot off. “It polished my nails!”

  But just when they were ready to laugh, they noticed a wobbling spider bot moving across a wall, cutting out a slice as it moved. “Uh, oh, some of these guys are out of wack too. Stop that!” cried Bruzelski, taking a broom to the malfunctioning arachnid. “Yipe!” she yelped as another one scrambled across her shoe, shaving off the front edge just in front of her toe. Then it scrambled across a table and cut a groove across the top. “Captain, these guys have lasers. We’d better do something quick, or we’re going to get sliced up like pastrami.”

  “MacIntyre, open fire!” ordered the captain.

  “At what, the spider bots?” asked the frustrated commander.

  “No . . . at everything outside!” Captain Ives yelled. “We have to deactivate the tractor beam that pulled us onto the space platform.

  The control transmitter has to be out there somewhere!”

  The commander shrugged and started shooting all the ship’s weapons at once, including the veton depth charges and the stickeyon emissions. With the gravitation field of the space platform no longer functioning, the stickeyon emission traveled much farther than usual. That sticky substance must have gummed up a rotating radio control transmitter because everything ground to a stop, including the spider bots. Even better, whatever was pinning the ship to that platform was also shut off.

  “We’re on our own power!” cried MacIntyre. He gunned the thrusters, and they took off.

  They were no sooner back in space than they suddenly found themselves back in the tree.