Attack of the Spider Bots

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Attack of the Spider Bots Page 8

by Robert West


  “Yep,” Ghoulie said proudly. “All the cameras are set up to rotate enough directions so that no part of the yard is hidden.”

  Sol had some ideas of his own that he shared with them — like how to automate the transporter. He then took out a pad of paper and began figuring out a way to organize the takeoff and landing of multiple spaceships from a single port, until the Star-Fighters reminded him that they only had one spaceship.

  “Oh, yes,” he said with a chuckle, “I forgot. Spent too many years organizing trolley schedules, I suppose.”

  He cocked one eye up in puzzlement when he got to the box that was marked Universal Translator. “Uh, does it work?” he asked.

  Ghoulie shrugged and said, “If you bang on it now and then.” Just for show, he did just that — banged it.

  14

  Alien Skyjacking

  Suddenly the tree ship lurched, and the light outside the windows became streaks of color.

  Sol fell back through the cockpit door into the rear compartment, grabbing tables, chairs — anything he could find to slow his fall. But fall he did. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes.

  The compartment seemed to be stretching like it was made out of rubber.

  Sol blinked his eyes again, as if trying to awaken from one of the weirdest dreams in his life. He felt his stomach tumble and roll. He felt dizzy and told himself to calm down. This hallucination couldn’t last long. He swallowed hard and looked out the window.

  A star field had replaced the streaks of light. Several large chunks of ice swept past the window.

  Maybe I’m having a stroke! Mrs. Drummond was right after all. It had been a mistake to come here. Sol slowly picked himself off the floor and looked around.

  One of the ice chunks came very close to the window and was suddenly pulverized in an explosion of white. The ship again lurched and, once more, he began to fall backward. But somehow he spun around and leaped to grab hold of a high ladder.

  How did I do that? he thought as he dangled from the ladder. I’m too old to move like that. Then he looked at his hands. The wrinkles and the age spots were gone.

  The ship jerked again, and he lost his grip on the ladder. He slid across the floor and banged into a wall of lockers. One of the narrow doors sprung open. A mirror on the inside of the door displayed the face of a young man. It was a face he hadn’t seen in over sixty years, but it was definitely his. This is impossible!

  “Secure the ship!” suddenly blared from a hidden speaker. “Secure the ship!” the voice said again.

  Is that one of the children? It sounded like the tallest one — Beamer, wasn’t it? With the ship still knocking about, Sol pulled himself from locker to locker, to window to wall, panel to table, toward the front of the ship. Finally, he opened a door and stared forward in amazement.

  There they were — the three kids — Beamer and . . . uh . . . Scilla — yes — and Ghoulie — that’s right, Ghoulie — such a strange name, Ghoulie. Or was it them? They looked somehow older, like they’d been wearing those uniforms for a long time. Yet this wasn’t the tree ship. These kids were manning sections of a very high-tech ship’s bridge. “What is happening? Where are we?” he asked.

  He saw a viewing screen wrapped around the front of the bridge. It showed a star field with what looked like a large plume of gas straight ahead.

  “Stop playing games, Ensign Parker,” said the captain who looked like the boy he had known as Beamer. “We haven’t identified our exact position yet, but I believe we are somewhere near the Orion Nebula.”

  “A starship; we’re on a starship? But that can’t be!” answered Sol.

  “Ensign, return to your station,” ordered Captain MacIntyre. “We are in the tail of a comet and have no more time for guessing games.”

  Ensign? He called me Ensign. Sol looked down. Yes, he was in uniform — more white than theirs, but certainly not the same clothes he’d worn when he entered the tree house.

  That’s right, he said, remembering. I was in the tree house — the magical one.

  All of a sudden, his bewilderment ended. As if he’d just made the last twist of a Rubik’s Cube, Ensign Parker, a junior officer just out of the academy, suddenly knew who he was and what he had to do. He immediately walked over to the weapons station and began monitoring the sensors.

  Again the ship lurched as a spray of ice crystals filled the front screen. Another large ice crystal skittered off the top of the ship.

  “Commander Ives!” shouted the captain. “What is that contraption connected to the comet? It looks like some kind of pod swinging on a long cable.”

  “Well, I may be seeing things,” Ives said with a disbelieving grin, “but if I didn’t know better, I’d say someone is trying to surf the tail of that comet!”

  “Hard to port!” the captain ordered.

  Let’s see, thought the boy within Commander Ives, port means . . . uh, left and — what’s right? — oh, yeah, starboard.

  The commander blinked and fired the thrusters that would propel the ship to the left. Even so, an ice chunk sheered off the ship’s starboard side and hit the place where the pod’s cable was attached to the comet. The pod spun off into space and was caught in the magnetic field of their ship.

  “Ensign,” Lieutenant Bruzelski called, “see if you can get whatever is riding that pod in through the aft air lock.”

  “Aye, aye,” Ensign Parker said and charged out the door.

  Being a Navy man, he knew what aft meant. It was funny. In the memory of his Navy days he seemed older than he was now. How can you be older in a memory?

  Minutes later the ensign was in the very rear of the ship and wearing a space suit. From inside the air lock, he worked one of the ship’s robotic arms to pull in the object.

  The front of the pod was transparent. The creature inside looked basically human, except that it was covered in fur. It also looked unconscious.

  Several minutes later, the door to the bridge opened, and Ensign Parker brought in the creature. Actually, it was the other way around. The alien, holding some kind of weapon, pushed the ensign through the door. The alien could have been a cat, except that it stood upright and had round ears and eyes.

  “He panicked when he saw me,” said Ensign Parker, “and started screeching and hissing like an alley cat. Believe me, though, he’s no kitty cat,” he huffed as he massaged his arms. “It was lucky I was wearing that bulky space suit. It took me a half hour to pull him down from the ceiling.” Then he shrugged and added, “I didn’t see the weapon hidden in his suit until it was too late.”

  The man who was Sol Parker suddenly rolled back into consciousness. That doesn’t sound like me talking. I didn’t even talk that way when I was younger. Maybe it’s how I would talk if I were their age right now. But when was now?

  The creature looked at them like they were monsters. Probably thinks he’s been abducted by aliens, thought the ensign, which, come to think of it, is exactly what’s happened.

  The creature began waving his weapon and talking to them in a language with a lot of words that ended with sss.

  Captain MacIntyre held out his hands in the universal “calm down” gesture and started using hand signals — the “me Tarzan, you Jane” approach. Lieutenant Bruzelski joined the game, throwing in all kinds of weird gestures and expressions. The alien seemed to calm down when they got his name — Weenoh — out of him.

  All at once, Commander Ives slapped himself in the forehead and said, “The universal translator — I forgot all about it.” He wheeled his chair over to it and began adjusting the controls. “Keep him talking.” A wild combination of hand signals and words continued for awhile until Ives gave them all ear phones and they heard the creature’s voice saying, “Dumkoff! Ich liebe an der — ”

  “German — drat it!” Ives griped. He banged the box.

  “Bang Dang,” the alien’s voice now said in Chinese.

  Commander Ives hit the box three more times before they finally heard him say, “
%$#$@&^*^*!” A lot of words in English that we can’t print.

  After some discussion, the Star-Fighters learned that the creature was upset that they had ruined his comet-surfing equipment. He promised that his parents would sue the dickens out of them. It would even be worse, he said, if they didn’t take him home immediately. All of this was said along with a lot of hissing and spitting.

  Ives guessed that he was the equivalent of a teenaged human with a major attitude problem.

  “Where is home?” the captain asked him.

  “It’s that ice-covered moon,” Weenoh said, pointing to the lower left corner of the view screen.

  “Captain!” said Bruzelski, “Do you see what I’m seeing?”

  The Star-Fighters suddenly responded like they’d seen a ghost. The ensign’s eyes widened when he saw a space platform dangling just above and to the right of the moon, like a toy hanging from a string.

  “Yes, Lieutenant, we’re back at the space platform. Change course, Commander Ives, toward that moon,” ordered the captain.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said the commander.

  They continued to toss questions at the young fur ball as the blue-white moon grew in the view screen. Weenoh relaxed and started chatting away. They learned that surfing a comet wasn’t unusual for the teenagers of his home. Comets were fairly common in this sector of this solar system. The people had personal force fields that allowed them to bounce off the flying boulders.

  As they skimmed down into the moon’s atmosphere, alarms began to sound. A shadow suddenly enveloped the ship.

  “Ready with those weapons, Ensign?” asked the captain.

  “Wait a minute,” said Bruzelski. “It’s just a white bird.”

  “A very large bird,” echoed Commander Ives. Then another one whisked by.

  When a third giant bird joined them, Weenoh’s eyes grew into oblong saucers, and his hissing sounds were translated into words like “dead meat” and “crow bait.”

  “Get us out of here, Commander Ives,” the captain ordered.

  “Battle stations!” he said as an alarm wailed. “Parker, we don’t want to shoot unless we have to.”

  Ives took the ship into a steep corkscrew dive. The birds, however, dived right along with them.

  Ghoulie the kid scanned his memory of movie scenes for defensive ideas. A canyon — that’s what I need. I can weave through and make the birds crash into the canyon walls.

  But all he could see were a bunch of icy buttes on the surface, bumping up into the sky like so many frozen smoke stacks. The commander shrugged and began weaving around and through them.

  “Oooh,” Bruzelski warbled as she began to wobble with dizziness. The captain grabbed a table but still kept weaving around.

  Unfortunately, Ives rounded one butte to see a frozen ice shelf hanging between two buttes dead ahead. He sent the ship into another dive to avoid the shelf but ended up plowing into the snow-bound turf.

  “Aiiiiiiiiiii” yelled everyone onboard like a heavy-metal band. Weenoh dived for the floor, letting his weapon careen across the room.

  One bird crashed into the shelf with an ear-shattering screech, but the other was still coming! Visions of becoming a birdie snack swirled through the commander’s mind as the ship skidded sideways through the snow. An ice cave suddenly loomed in the path of their slide. Ives slammed his eyes shut as the ship skimmed between huge icicles that guarded the entrance like giant teeth.

  15

  Escape from Ice Planet Zero

  At that moment Commander Ives considered the possibility that the cave might not be a cave. He’d seen that in a movie somewhere. In the meantime, though, the remaining bird was trying to reach them through the barrier of ice “teeth.”

  The noise of its squawking was almost as scary as the fact that its claws and beak were getting awfully close. Ives wiped sweat off his brow. How can a guy sweat when he’s surrounded by ice?

  Suddenly, one of those giant icicles fell, spearing a beak and a claw at the same time. The resulting screech was off the decibel chart! Bruzelski switched off the speakers to rescue their ears. Still squawking bloody murder, the bird flapped its wings, shaking more icicles into falling, and flew away.

  “Commander Ives,” shouted the captain, “get us out of here before some other life form thinks we’re below it on the food chain.”

  Commander Ives fired the thrusters, and they shot out of the cave. He shifted the monitor for one last look at the cave. What was that — a tongue licking out after them? Ives shook his head and blinked. It couldn’t be, could it?

  “Ives, watch where you’re going,” shouted the lieutenant. The commander switched his view in time to “shoot the gap” between two buttes.

  “Keep a wary eye out for those bird things,” ordered the captain, “and keep closer to the surface.” He picked up Weenoh’s weapon. It looked more like a cell phone than a gun. Then he turned to their unwilling visitor. “Weenoh, if you want us to take you home, you’ll need to update our guidance system.”

  Weenoh just shrugged his furry shoulders and pointed ahead and to the right.

  “That’s what I like — precision,” muttered Commander Ives, turning the ship in line with Weenoh’s finger.

  “Hey, take a look — civilization!” exclaimed Ensign Parker, pointing toward a building that looked like several igloos all patched together. “What is that?” he asked their passenger.

  “Fish farm,” Weenoh said. “There are many underground lakes where fish have survived the ice age.”

  “Ice age? Do you mean your home wasn’t always an ice world?” asked Bruzelski.

  “Of course,” Weenoh said, rolling his eyes at what he apparently thought was a stupid question. “Our world was once covered with plants and animals. But that was many thousand eolsss ago.”

  The translator didn’t know what to do with the word eolsss.

  Young Ensign Parker suddenly appeared next to the commander. “Commander Ives, do you realize how many years he’s talking about?” he asked in a hushed voice. “My instruments indicate that the planet their moon circles has a very large orbit around its sun.”

  Ives glanced at the numbers and his eyes grew large. “I wondered how that moon could be so cold next to a super-heated planet and with such a big sun in the sky.”

  “Me too,” said Parker. “That big sun is actually very, very far away!”

  “Which means that it’s not your everyday red star,” the commander added.

  “Nope, not even a red giant,” said the ensign. “It’s a one-in-a-billion red supergiant!”

  Giant as in colossal, Ghoulie exclaimed in his head. It was hard enough to visualize a giant star. Those were big enough to swallow earth’s sun and the inner planets almost up to earth without so much as a belch. That’s a waistline of nearly 300 million miles! But a supergiant could be big enough to swallow the solar system all the way to Jupiter!

  “According to my calculations,” said the commander as his hands flew over the instrument panel, “one orbit of this planet and its moon takes a little more than a thousand earth years!”

  “That’s my home straight ahead,” Weenoh suddenly interrupted them through the translator box.

  Looks of amazement were on every face. Ahead of them was a city. A large palace with towers built upon towers dominated the center. Around it were buildings of every size and shape — all made of ice. There were ice Castles, domed buildings, and ice skyscrapers with soaring spires that pierced the clouds. But they weren’t all white like you might expect. Most were multicolored and semi-transparent. Add to these the nearly transparent ribbons that swirled around and through all these buildings and you had a crystal city right out of a fairy tale.

  Suddenly, two fireballs streaked by on either side of the ship. The words, “Ichnesss basiness speeleepluss comoraotoss maronuss,” blared in their communications system. Two speedy aircraft were on either side of their ship.

  Never fails. Somebody always has to get huffy, thought
the commander.

  “Redirect the signal through the translator,” said the captain, and Lieutenant Bruzelski made the adjustments.

  “Please identify,” said a voice in the speaker. “Passage over the city is restricted.”

  Captain MacIntyre looked at Weenoh and said, “We are visitors, returning one of your citizens to his home. We mean you no harm. I am turning the communicator over to your citizen who will identify our destination for you.”

  The captain handed his communicator to Weenoh and nodded for him to speak.

  He spoke words they could not understand, but the translator picked up, “I am Weenoh of the house of Sereniusss in sector 5C northwest.”

  “Safe passage is granted,” said the voice through the translator after a moment’s pause. “But follow our lead so that we may monitor air traffic for you.”

  “Nothing like a friendly little escort,” said Commander Ives, not really believing there was anything friendly about it. Still his eyes grew large as they flew above freeways crammed with motorized snow sleds and other sleek vehicles.

  “It’s amazing how you adapted to the change in climate,” Ensign Parker said to their visitor.

  “Our teachers say that our civilization almost collapsed when waves of panic drove people to riot and revolt.”

  “I can imagine,” said Parker. “How did your people manage to survive?”

  “New leaders grew up who drew upon faith that God had not abandoned them and would provide a way,” said Weenoh. “I had a test on ancient history two days ago, and I’m pretty sure I aced it. Anyway, driven by that faith, ‘ people in every profession poured all their resources into adapting their civilization for a colder climate.’ That’s a quote. I’m sure I got it right. We found new energy sources and improved the older ones. I put in more details about that for extra credit.”

  “But the lakes and rivers and forests — all the animals — it must have been hard to give them up,” said the Lieutenant.

  “Yes, we have books and movies and songs and poems about such things. But our forefathers finally accepted the belief that God was leading them to a new dream. We have plenty of wildlife. It’s just a different kind of wildlife. We have beautiful buildings. They’re just made differently.”

 

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