Ambush
Page 1
You can contact Sigmund Brouwer through his Web site at www.coolreading.com or www.whomadethemoon.com.
Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site for kids at www.tyndale.com/kids.
TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Ambush
Copyright © 2001 by Sigmund Brouwer. All rights reserved.
Previously published as Mars Diaries Mission 5: Sole Survivor and Mars Diaries Mission 6: Moon Racer under ISBNs 0-8423-4308-3 and 0-8423-4309-1.
Ambush first published in 2009.
Cover image copyright © by Digital Vision Ltd. All rights reserved.
Designed by Mark Anthony Lane II
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
For manufacturing information regarding this product, please call 1-800-323-9400.
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brouwer, Sigmund, date.
Ambush / Sigmund Brouwer.
p. cm. — (Robot wars ; bk. 3)
“Previously pub. in 2001 in two vols. under titles: Mars Diaries, Mission 5:
Sole Survivor; and Mars Diaries, Mission 6: Moon Racer.”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-1-4143-2311-4 (softcover)
I. Brouwer, Sigmund, date. Mars diaries. Mission 5, Sole survivor.
II. Brouwer, Sigmund, date. Mars diaries. Mission 6, Moon racer.
III. Title.
PZ7.B79984Am 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2009016770
* * *
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10
7 6 5 4 3 2
THIS SERIES IS DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF MARTYN GODFREY.
Martyn, you wrote books that reached all of
us kids at heart. You wrote them because you
really cared. We all miss you.
FROM THE AUTHOR
We live in amazing times! When I first began writing these Mars journals, not even 40 years after our technology allowed us to put men on the moon, the concept of robot control was strictly something I daydreamed about when readers first met Tyce. Since then, science fiction has been science fact. Successful experiments have now been performed on monkeys who are able to use their brains to control robots halfway around the world!
Suddenly it’s not so far-fetched to believe that these adventures could happen for Tyce. Or for you. Or for your children.
With that in mind, I hope you enjoy stepping into a future that could really happen….
SIGMUND BROUWER
CONTENTS
Journal One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Journal Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Science and God
Journal One: Does God Speak to People?
Journal Two: Will Computers Someday Replace Man?
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
Cave-in!
The wheels of the robot body under my control hummed as the robot sped across the red, packed sands of the flat valley floor toward the hills about five miles from the dome.
Thin Martian wind whistled around me, picking up the grains of sand that the robot wheels sent flying into the air. The sky was butterscotch colored, the sun a perfect circle of blue. Streaks of light blue clouds hung above the distant mountain peaks.
But I wasn’t about to spend any time appreciating the beauty of the Martian landscape.
Not with a cave-in ahead and desperate scientists waiting for whatever rescue attempt was possible. Robot bodies don’t sweat with fear. But if they did, my own fear would have beaded on the shiny surface of the robot’s titanium shell. While I was still in the dome, on a laboratory bed using X-ray waves to direct the robot body, all my thoughts were frantic with terror and worry.
Once before I’d been sent on a rescue mission. A real rescue mission, instead of the usual virtual-reality tests for the robot body that I’d spent years learning to handle as if it were my own body. The first rescue mission had been to search for only one person, lost in the cornfields of the science station’s greenhouse.
This time was just as real. And far more frightening.
Two hours earlier, four people in space suits had walked into a cave to take rock samples. They were searching for traces of ancient water activity and fossil bacteria. According to standard field procedure, they’d sent back their activities on real-time video transmissions beamed directly to the dome. An hour later—only 60 minutes ago—the images and their voices had stopped abruptly, thrown into blackness and drowned out by a horrible rumbling that could only be caused by the collapse of the cave’s ceiling. Now all that remained to give an indication of their location deep inside the rock were the signals thrown by the GPS in each of their space suits, which bounced sound waves off the twin satellites orbiting Mars.
Four signals then beeped steadily, clustered together where the four people had been buried alive.
If the weight of the rock had not crushed them, they had about three days to live. That was as long as their oxygen and water tubes would last.
Back at the dome, a rescue team was being assembled. At best, they would be ready in another hour. Which meant anything and everything I could do quickly with the robot might make a crucial difference in the survival rate of those four people trapped by the cave-in.
Most terrifying of all, one of the GPS signals came from the space suit of my best friend, Rawling McTigre, director of the Mars Project.
CHAPTER 2
Fast as my robot body moved toward the site of the cave-in, back in the dome my body was totally motionless in the computer lab room.
As usual, I was on my back on a narrow medical bed in the computer laboratory. I wore a snug jumpsuit in military navy blue. My head was propped on a large pillow so the plug at the bottom of my neck didn’t press on the bed. This plug had been spliced into my spine when I was barely more than a baby, so the thousands of microfibers of bioplastic material had grown and intertwined with my nerve
endings as my own body had grown. Each microfiber had a core to transmit tiny impulses of electricity out through the plug into another plug linked into an antenna sewn into the jumpsuit. Across the room a receiver transmitted signals between the bodysuit antenna and the robot’s computer drive. It worked just like the remote control of a TV, with two differences: Television remotes used infrared and were very limited in distance. This receiver used X-ray waves and had a 100-mile range.
As for handling the robot body, it wasn’t much different from the sophisticated virtual-reality computer games that Earth kids had been able to play for decades.
In virtual reality, you put on a surround-sight helmet that gives you a 3-D view of a scene in a computer program. The helmet is wired so when you turn your head, it directs the computer program to shift the scene as if you were there in real life. Sounds come in like real sounds. Because you’re wearing a wired jacket and gloves, the arms and hands you see in your surround-sight picture move wherever you move your own arms and hands.
With me, the only difference is that the wiring reaches my brain directly through my spine. And I control a real robot, not one in virtual reality. From all my years of training in a computer simulation program, my mind knows all the muscle moves it takes to handle the virtual-reality controls. Handling the robot is no different, except instead of actually moving my muscles, I imagine I’m moving the muscles. My brain sends the proper nerve impulses to the robot, and it moves the way I made the robot move in the virtual-reality computer program.
The robot has heat sensors that detect infrared, so I can see in total darkness. The video lenses’ telescoping is powerful enough that I can recognize a person’s face from five miles away. But I can also zoom in close on something nearby and look at it as if I were using a microscope.
I can amplify hearing and pick up sounds at higher and lower levels than human hearing. The titanium robot has fibers wired into it that let me feel dust falling on it if I want to concentrate on that minute level. It also lets me speak just as if I were using a microphone.
It can’t smell or taste, however. But one of the fingers is wired to perform material testing. All I need are a couple of specks of the material, and this finger will heat up, burn the material, and analyze the contents.
It’s strong, too. The titanium hands can grip a steel bar and bend it.
And it’s fast. Its wheels can move three times faster than any human can sprint.
As I neared the hills at the end of the valley, I hoped everything the robot could do would be enough.
But that hope ended when I saw the tons of dark red rubble that blocked the cave entrance.
CHAPTER 3
“Dad,” I said into the robot’s microphone, knowing my voice would reach my father in the dome.
“Tyce?”
“I am here,” I said, my words drawn out and tinny-sounding through the robot’s sound system.
“And?” he asked.
Most of the slope of the rocky hill was dull red, with jumbles of rounded rocks resting where they had been undisturbed for centuries. Directly in front of me, a lopsided heap of rock, twice the height of a man, was a much brighter red. This rock was in a new position, unweathered by the dust storms that covered Mars every spring.
“It does not look good,” I answered. “The entrance to the cave is totally blocked.” I couldn’t help thinking, Every minute that passes is one minute less for Rawling and the other three trapped inside.
“What’s your infrared tell you?”
The robot was capable of seeing on infrared wavelengths, which was a really weird way of looking at the world. It could show me temperatures of different objects, so I didn’t need light waves.
I switched to infrared. It was minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and the side of the hills showed up in my vision as a deep, deep blue. The rubble of the collapsed cave was slightly less blue because some heat had been generated from the kinetic force of the cave-in.
Two incredibly bright pinpoints appeared halfway into the hill, with halos around the pinpoints that went from white to red to orange to blue the farther they were from the pinpoints of heat at the center. To me, it looked like candle flames I’d once seen when testing the infrared spectrum, with the air getting cooler the farther it was from the candle.
I described this to Dad. All I could think of was that the bright heat was the remnant of an explosion. But this expedition hadn’t taken explosives.
“Doesn’t make sense to me either,” Dad said when I finished telling him about it. “What about the important indicator?”
I knew what he meant because we’d talked about it earlier. The important indicator was 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of a living human. This should show up as orange somewhere in the deep blue of the ice-cold rocks. If the space suits had been ripped by falling rocks, the orange would look like bleeding air.
“Negative,” I said. “Looks like the space suits are intact.”
“Let’s pray that’s what it is.”
Dad didn’t say what I couldn’t help but fear. Either the space suits were holding their body heat, or there was too much rock between them and me for any infrared to make it through. If it was the second option, we might never reach them.
“Can you quickly beam me some video?” Dad said. “That will give the rescue team a good idea of the equipment they’ll need. Then go climb the hill and try infrared from a different angle.”
What I really wanted to do was panic. I wanted to roll forward to the edge of the pile of rock rubble and begin pulling rocks off as fast as I could. I wanted to shout for Rawling.
But I knew we’d all have to work together—and fast—for the scientists to survive. So I adjusted the robot’s focus to allow its front video lens to survey the site.
I started with a wide angle, sweeping from the top of the hill. In the background there was a flash of the Martian sky. My video picked up the rocks and the small shadows behind the rocks. I zoomed in closer on the cave-in site, confident the robot’s computer drive was translating the images in digital form and relaying them back to the computer at the dome.
Just then Dad’s voice came through loudly. “What’s going on here?” he asked sternly. I’d never heard him so angry.
“I am sending you a video feed,” I said, puzzled. “Is it not clear enough?”
“I demand an explanation for this!” he said as if he hadn’t bothered listening to my reply.
Why was he so upset? I was doing exactly what he’d asked. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”
“This is ridiculous,” he blurted in my audio. “You can’t walk in here with weapons and—”
There was a thud and a low groan.
My audio cut out.
Weapons? Had he been talking to someone in the computer lab? But weapons … ?
“Dad!” I shouted. “Dad!”
No answer.
What was happening at the dome? I pictured the computer lab. My body was on the bed, strapped in. I wore a blindfold and headset to keep any noise from distracting me. My wheelchair was beside the bed. If I shouted the mental command to take me away from the robot, I would return to consciousness there in total helplessness, unable to free myself from the straps, unable to see or hear a thing until someone released me. If someone else instead of my dad was now in the lab, armed and willing to do damage …
I was just lying there with no way to protect myself. Yet this robot was too far away from the dome. It would take 20 minutes to get it back and another 10 minutes to make it through the air locks at the dome entrance. Even if I made it back in time to protect my body with the robot, all they would have to do in the lab was disconnect the computer, and the robot would be disabled.
And was I willing to take that long gamble and leave the cave-in with four people buried and in desperate need of help?
“Dad?” I tried again. I hoped this had been my imagination. “Dad? Dad?”
“Knock it off, kid,” a strange voic
e replied.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where’s my dad?” This was totally weird, like being in two places at once and helpless in both. “What’s happening there?”
Without warning, it seemed like a bomb exploded in my brain. The red sand of the Martian valley fell away from me as instant and total blackness descended.
CHAPTER 4
I woke with a headache, as if someone had been pounding pieces of glass into my brain. While I was at the cave-in site, one of the goons must have simply clicked the Off switch to bring me back from the robot body.
This, too, had happened once before when I’d been suddenly disconnected from the robot computer. That other time, however, Rawling had been in the computer lab. He’d taken off my headset and blindfold before I woke. Now, though, I was totally cut off from sight and sound. I felt the fabric of the bed against my fingers.
I nearly blurted out the first question that came to me. Who’s there? I wanted to ask.
Where’s my dad? I wanted to continue. What have you done? Get me out of the straps and the blindfold and the headset.
But I resisted all of what I wanted to say.
Helpless as I was, I had only two weapons. The first was surprise. So I didn’t move. I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
While I waited, I used my most important weapon. I prayed. With the crises I’d been through lately on Mars—first an oxygen leak; then a techie attacked by unknown creatures; the opening of some strange black boxes; and most recently, the discovery that my virtual-reality Hammerhead torpedo was real—I’d come to believe in God. I had discovered that gave me a lot of unexpected peace, even when things looked really bad.
As they did for me and my dad.
The suspense in my total silence and darkness was horrible. Someone could be standing directly above me with one of the weapons I’d heard my dad mention. Someone could have that weapon pointed at me, finger on the trigger, about to squeeze. Or it could be a knife … or …
I waited, heartbeat by heartbeat, with my head throbbing in agony.