Slowly I rolled to the shadows at the edge of the last minidome and peered around the corner.
The robot stood in front of the locked room that held the Hammerhead. One of its sleek titanium arms reached toward the door handle. The titanium fingers gripped the handle and sheared it off.
I gasped quietly. I could tell this new robot had strength that doubled or tripled my own robot’s.
The door swung open.
At this time of night, I knew the robot meant to damage the Hammerhead. But what could I do? If I went to get help, what might the robot do in the few minutes I was gone?
And yet there was no way I could sneak up on it. Not if it had infrared sensors like my own robot.
I leaped to a decision and rolled my wheelchair forward.
The robot must have sensed my body heat. Halfway across the short space between the storage area and the minidomes, it turned toward me. Even in the dim light, its silver skin gleamed.
“No closer,” it said quietly.
I had expected the odd monotone of synthetic vocal cords, like on my robot. But this one sounded very human.
I did not stop.
“Human, you are in peril of your life.”
I still did not stop.
“Turn around, human.”
I finally did stop, but I didn’t turn around. I was only a few feet from the robot. Like mine, it was the height of a full-grown man, so I had to lean my head back to see straight into its forward video lens.
“Leave the Hammerhead alone,” I told it, “or I will disable you.”
I knew where to disable the robot. Or at least I hoped I knew where. Although it was a second-generation robot, I doubted the power source would be much different than mine—at the back, near the connection to its wheels. A simple tug on a main wire would disconnect the power from the robot’s battery pack.
“Go away,” it said.
Instead, I closed the short distance between us.
In one swift move, the robot’s left hand reached out and grabbed my throat. The titanium fingers tightened slightly, enough to keep me from speaking but not enough to choke me completely. I knew it had the strength to rip my head from my body.
This was my gamble. That I had it figured out right. That only one person under this dome was young enough to have had an operation to let her handle this robot by remote. If I was wrong, the robot hand around my throat would squeeze the life out of me.
“Human, this is your last chance. Blink twice to tell me you will leave.”
I blinked twice.
The robot hand dropped from my throat.
I was able to speak again. “I will leave, but only if you agree to meet me at the telescope. In five minutes.”
“Not possible, human.”
“Knock off this ‘human’ stuff,” I said. “You know my name. Just like I know yours.”
Its hand reached for my throat again. I put up my arms, one on each side of my throat, so that its fingers couldn’t reach all the way around.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know what your game is. But if you want to stop me from disconnecting your power, you’re going to have to kill me. And if you decide not to kill me, meet me at the telescope in five minutes.” I continued to stare into the unblinking eye of the video lens.
Finally that large titanium hand with its powerful, deadly fingers dropped.
In an instant, I rolled behind the robot and yanked loose its power cord.
CHAPTER 14
“Hello, Ashley,” I said in a reserved tone when I rolled the final few feet onto the platform. “Nice that we could meet.”
So it had been her handling the robot.
She sat on the bench at the side of the telescope and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. Shadows hid her face. Above us, through the small, clear-glass bubble, a million stars sprinkled the universe. Below us, the main level of the dome was completely quiet.
“Hello, Tyce. I expected you’d try to talk to me a lot earlier. Like maybe right after we finished the flight-simulator program.”
“Like right after I blew your torpedo into tiny bits of space garbage.”
“Something like that.” Ashley let out a long breath. “You knew back then, didn’t you? When you told me that you were going to try blasting the moon as a way to get the other pilot?”
“No. When I told you that, I was only guessing. I only knew for sure when the other pilot stopped following and waited for Phobos to explode. You’re the only person who could have known I was going to try it. Just like you’re the only person who knew I was going to try the heat-vent trick the time before. Only in the first combat mission, I still trusted you.”
I moved beside her and pointed at a small pack on her back. “The new computer remote?”
She nodded. “Wired into my plug. I can go anywhere with it.”
“How handy. I guess I’m using ancient technology. I need to be strapped to a bed.” I rolled away from her and stared up at the cold stars.
“How did you figure it out?” Ashley asked.
I didn’t answer. I was too sad. Too bitter.
I did, however, have a long list of reasons. A while back, she’d asked if I was ready to go to Jupiter. She was half joking, but how could she have known unless she already knew about the Hammerhead? Then there was the fact that in my first combat mission, the other pilot knew I’d come out of a heat mushroom invisible, with no power. Discovering there was another robot, though, had made me first wonder about her. No one else at the dome could have been young enough for a plug implant. By the time a person is more than five years old, the spine and nervous system have grown too much to make the biological implant work.
“How?” I asked her.
She knew what I meant.
“Dr. Jordan.” She stopped, then started again. “I mean, my father. He designed the program. It was no problem for him to access the mainframe computer and plug me into it during the times you were scheduled for flight-simulation combat operations.”
“Why? Why keep it a secret?”
“I wish I could tell you why I’m here,” Ashley said, “but I can’t.”
That wasn’t the question I was asking. But since she took it that way, I continued. “Why are you practicing in a second-generation robot? Why is it such a secret? Who is forcing you to keep it a secret? We could have been working together every day.”
That’s what hurt the worst. She’d been here a couple of months. We’d become friends. Great friends. All along she’d let me talk about my robot. When we’d first met, I’d been in the robot body, and she’d pretended not to know how it worked. I wondered how much else of our friendship was a lie.
Tears shimmered in her eyes. “I can’t answer any of those questions.” She let out another breath.
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
Ashley hesitated a long time. “Won’t.”
“I was dumb to think we were friends,” I said angrily.
“Tyce, I can’t tell you. It would hurt too many others. Even that is saying too much. I don’t know how to make you understand that.”
I felt so betrayed that I wanted to lash out at her. But I couldn’t turn in my wheelchair and swing a fist at her. So I turned my head and used words. “You’ve talked to me for hours about how important your faith is to you. I guess it’s the kind of faith that lets you do whatever you want to other people.”
Ashley had once given me one of her silver earrings. In the shape of a cross. It hung around my neck on a thin, silver chain. I lifted it off my neck and held it out. “Take this back,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
I got a gasp of pain from her, and I still didn’t stop. “That was cheap, you know, what you did in that first combat mission, setting me up with the heat-vent trick. You could have at least made the combat missions a fair fight.”
I threw the silver chain and cross at her. She caught it and stared at it.
“I didn’t blow you up in that first combat,”
Ashley said quietly. “I had a chance but didn’t. Remember?”
“All I remember,” I said, gritting my teeth, “is that we talked about the heat-vent trick and you used it against me. Let me repeat: I was set up.”
“Like you did when you set me up on the second combat mission? Why else tell me you were going to blow up Phobos, then fake it during flight simulation?”
“I only did that,” I said, “because I wondered if you were the other pilot. It proved you were. And it proved you are a backstabbing liar.”
I heard a muffled sound. It took a second to figure it out.
Ashley was crying. She held her face in her hands and choked back the sobs. Her shoulders heaved. Her words came out in ragged gasps. “I had to win so I’d be the test pilot tomorrow. You didn’t know it was a contest, and …”
She had to fight for breath, but her tears didn’t make me feel sorry for her. Because of one simple thing. What I’d seen only minutes earlier down on the main level.
“When you didn’t win, you decided to wreck the Hammerhead so I couldn’t fly. That’s why you sent your robot there. To spoil what you couldn’t have.”
Ashley spoke as if she were now gritting her teeth in great pain. “You … don’t … understand. …”
“Then make me understand.” I said coldly, facing her again.
“I needed to be the pilot. Because I know why they want it tested. And I have to stop them.”
“Stop them?” I demanded. “Who? What needs to be stopped?”
“Tyce—”
A voice from below interrupted us. “Ashley? Ashley?”
Dr. Jordan. Her father. Calling softly so the scientists and techies wouldn’t be disturbed.
Ashley sat upright, as if she’d been shot. “He can’t know we’ve talked!”
“Make me understand,” I said, “or I’ll call him up here right now.”
She walked the short space between us. Dropping to her knees at the side of my wheelchair, she pleaded, “Please help me. Telling you what I know could cost me my life.”
“No,” I said. “You made the problem. You deal with it.”
His voice drifted up to us again. “Ashley? Ashley?”
She gripped my arm. I pulled it away.
“Tyce, please. Yes, call him up here. But let me get away first so I’ll have time to reconnect the power supply to the robot. He can’t know I moved it. This is a life-or-death thing.”
“Ashley?” her father continued to call. “Ashley?”
She gripped my arm again.
“I think I’ll let him keep wandering until he finds the robot,” I said. “Unless you have a few things you’d like to tell me.”
“There’s a simple glitch in the programming of the telescope’s computer. You can fix it easily. Only don’t let anyone know you’ve fixed it, because then Dr. Jordan will realize I’ve told you. Fix it, then look for the comet. If you don’t see it, miss your targets tomorrow on the test run. That’s why I wanted to be the pilot. Hitting those targets will kill millions on Earth. Believe me. Millions. And they’re set up to do that on this mission.”
How does she know this? Why didn’t she tell me earlier? “Give me one good reason to believe you,” I said.
There was a long silence. When Ashley finally spoke again, it was as if someone had pulled a noose tightly around her throat. “Remember I told you I grew up in Denver.”
Yes, I remembered. Asking her about the tornado was just one more clue that she’d lied to me.
“I didn’t,” she whispered. “That’s what I’m supposed to tell everyone. Just like I’m supposed to tell everyone that Dr. Jordan is a quantum physicist. He’s not. He’s an expert in artificial intelligence. And more.”
“More?”
Ashley ignored my question. “When I met you, I just wanted to be friends. I should have known from the beginning all of this would happen.”
Everything she told me just led to more questions. “I still haven’t heard a good reason to believe you,” I said.
“Please. Give me a chance to get back down to the main level,” she said softly. “Then call him up here. Delay him as long as you can so I can move the robot. There are others. Like us. And we are their only hope.”
She placed the silver chain and cross on my lap.
Then she ran.
CHAPTER 15
Dr. Jordan reached the telescope platform five minutes later. He scowled down at me.
I hadn’t seen much of him since he’d arrived on the last shuttle. Just glimpses as he hurried from one minidome to another.
His face was round, like his gold-rimmed glasses. His goatee was round too, and his nose was turned up at the end, showing the dark of his nostrils as two more circles.
To me, the strange thing was that Ashley didn’t look anything at all like him. Ashley hated talking about her family. All she’d ever said was that her father and mother had divorced. Maybe Ashley looked a lot more like her mother. Or maybe Ashley was even adopted. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem like Ashley was able to get along with her father like a friend, which was sad. I was lucky with my parents.
“Is Ashley here?” Dr. Jordan demanded.
I thought it was a dumb question from a scientist who was supposed to be so smart. What did he think—that she was hiding beneath my wheelchair? “I heard you calling for her,” I said. “I was just wondering if she was okay.”
His impatience with me turned his scowling mouth into a tight little circle. I wondered if he knew that about himself—that his face was a bunch of little circles within a larger circle.
“Unless she stepped out of the dome in the middle of the night, of course she’s okay.”
“But you’re looking for her.”
“That’s her business and mine.”
“Well,” I said, “I was just wondering if I could help.”
“I doubt it,” Dr. Jordan snapped. Then his irritation turned to brief puzzlement. “What are you doing up here, anyway? You should be getting rest. Tomorrow’s your real test run in the Hammerhead.”
“I couldn’t sleep. So I came up here to look at the stars.”
“The telescope isn’t functioning.”
I pointed to the clear glass of the dome above us. “But my eyes work. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The Martian night sky.”
“Beauty is only something attributed by sentimental humans,” he hissed. “Those stars are simply big balls of hydrogen fusing into helium, throwing off light and heat in the process. What you are looking at is physics. Beauty isn’t measurable, so it doesn’t exist.”
“Oh.”
“Good night,” he said curtly. “Don’t waste my time again. And I advise you to get some sleep.”
Sleep?
No. If Ashley was right about the telescope, it wouldn’t be difficult to find out. The telescope was computer driven, with a small screen and keyboard beside the eyepiece. Viewers keyboarded coordinates or the names of stars, planets, or constellations, and the telescope, when it was working, would track the specified object.
Rawling had long ago given me a password to let me enter the system. I knew the basics of computer programming. I entered the system and did some minor hacking. It took some very simple programming and less than five minutes to make the tracking systems operational again. Then the telescope hummed on its gears as it swung into action.
A half hour later, I was back on the telescope platform with Dad beside me. His face was pressed against the eyepiece. His hair stuck out in all directions, but at four in the morning, a person should not be expected to look his best.
Dad sat back from the eyepiece and turned toward me. “I don’t see anything. Where’s this great astronomical discovery you promised?”
“My point exactly.”
“Tyce, when you woke me up and insisted I come up here, I didn’t complain. Sure, I had some questions about why you were out of our minidome at this time of night, but when you refused to answer, I trusted you had a good reaso
n. So here I am. Awake when I should be asleep. And you’re telling me your great astronomical discovery is nothing?”
“Yes,” I said. “In one way, that’s the best news you could get.”
“Sure,” Dad said, but I knew he didn’t mean it. “I’m going back to bed before I get mad. Tomorrow we’re going to discuss this. When I’ll be awake enough to enjoy being mad at you.”
“Listen to me. Don’t you find it surprising that the telescope is working again?”
He shrugged. “Not really. I assumed that one of the techies fixed it today.”
“No,” I said. “I did. Half an hour ago. All it took was some simple rewriting of the computer code.”
I wondered why the techies hadn’t been able to figure it out. And why Ashley knew about the computer error. But I’d worry about all of that later. Especially with what I was about to tell Dad.
“So you fixed it.” Dad yawned. “Is that such a big deal that you pull me out of bed?”
“If I waited until morning,” I said, “you wouldn’t have been able to use the telescope during the daylight. I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow night to show you.”
He snorted. “Might as well use it during the day. Doesn’t make much difference if you’re not seeing anything spectacular during the night.”
“I’ve got the coordinates of the telescope set up to where the Earth scientists tell us the killer comet is sweeping past Jupiter.”
Dad frowned at me, then leaned forward again into the eyepiece of the telescope. He spent 30 seconds squinting. He leaned back. “I don’t see it. You sure you have the right coordinates?”
“I triple-checked,” I answered.
“But there’s no comet.”
“And that,” I said, “is my big discovery. There is no comet.” Some of my trust in Ashley was coming back. If only I could ask her more questions.
“No comet? That doesn’t make sense.”
“The telescope wasn’t working,” I said. “Almost as if somebody wanted us to believe there was a comet and didn’t want us to be able to check it out for ourselves.”
Dad took a quick look through the eyepiece again. He spoke as he stared out into space. “But why would someone want everyone to believe a deadly comet threatened to hit Mars?”
Double Cross Page 11