Final Battle (8 page)

“Can you untie my hands so I can go to the bathroom?” This was Ashley's voice.

“Bathroom. Again?” said an annoyed voice.

I immediately guessed she'd been trying to get away from them often to open the locket and see if I was operating the ant-bot yet. This time I'd be there.

“I drank a lot of water. And like I keep telling you, it's not like I can jump out the window. Airplane bathrooms don't have windows. And you don't see me wearing a parachute.”

They were flying.

Not good news. Every hour meant she could be another 500 or 600 miles farther away. In any direction.

There was good news, however. Back on the Combat Force base, computer experts were attempting to locate the ant-bot by tracking its satellite signal to the computer receiver on base. They needed three different satellites to link up and triangulate in order to locate the ant-bot's latitude and longitude and altitude. Because this triangulation wasn't instant, I needed to stay connected to the ant-bot.

“Don't bother arguing with her,” another deeper voice said. “What's the big deal?”

“I don't trust her,” the first voice answered. “Someone in her position should be more afraid. It's like she knows something we don't.”

“We're untouchable,” the second voice said. “No one is going to find us. Relax. Untie her hands.”

I felt more movement as Ashley rose from her seat. At least that was my guess. Stuck inside her locket, I didn't have much to go on.

A minute later light hit me, so bright that I nearly fell backward.

“Tyce?”

Ashley's gigantic face blocked much of the light. Her nose looked like a mountain to me.

“Ashley!” I shouted as loud as the ant-bot would permit. Once she'd visited me with the ant-bot. She'd crawled close to my ear and spoken in the middle of the night. This was before I knew the ant-bot existed, and I'd wondered if God was speaking out loud to me. Ashley had enjoyed scaring me with a voice from out of nowhere.

“Tyce?” She lifted the locket toward her ear.

“Ashley!” My voice sounded very tiny and tinny. I hoped she could hear me above the airplane noise. “Ashley!”

“Finally,” she said. “I've tried a dozen times!”

She held the locket so close to her ear that I could have reached up and grabbed one of her hairs. Only to me, controlling the ant-bot, it would have been like grabbing a thick, thick rope.

“They weren't my parents,” she said. “They were actors.”

“I know,” I answered. “And I found out the doctor who supplied the false DNA test has disappeared. This was a well-planned kidnapping.”

“Well planned is right,” she added. “And planned right inside the military by World United Federation Combat Force soldiers. I'm on one of their jets right now. The sun is coming through the right-hand windows.”

World United Federation Combat Force soldiers.
So there
were
even more traitors in the military than I'd thought. And that meant …

“Good-bye!” I shouted into Ashley's ear. There was no time to explain.

In my mind, I gave the
“Stop!”
command.

And just like that, I ended robot control.

Leaving Ashley all alone on an airplane headed away from safety at hundreds of miles per hour.

CHAPTER 13

Fifteen minutes later I faced Cannon and Nate. Outside. Near the runway of the Combat Force base. With jets taking off and their engines howling.

“What's going on?” Cannon said loudly. “I thought you said you could find Ashley with that miniature robot.” His last words ended with a shout, as he tried to make himself heard above the jet engines.

I pointed at the jet. “She's in one like that!” I shouted back. “And I needed to talk to you about it where no one could overhear us with electronic bugging devices.”

“What!” Wind whipped at my hair and the general's clothes. Nate, like a solid rock, seemed untouched.

“I said I want to make sure no one can hear us!”

“I can't hear you!”

“Exactly!”

“What!” he shouted.

Finally the jet left the runway. Seconds later the noise began to recede.

“I wanted to be at a place where no one could overhear us with electronic surveillance equipment. Ashley says she was kidnapped by Combat Force soldiers.”

“You made contact!” This from the general.

Nate had no expression. He just stood motionless, listening to our conversation.

“She's in a military jet.” I told them what had happened.

“And you immediately left her—” Cannon frowned as he hesitated and thought it through—“because if someone in the Combat Force had taken her, that means someone high up must have ordered the operation. And that higher-up is working for the Terratakers. So if the triangulation was successful, and we learned Ashley's location and sent in soldiers to rescue her, then word of that would have reached the traitor, and he would be in a position to have his soldiers search for the antbot and move Ashley again before our soldiers arrived.”

“Exactly,” I said.

The general's frown deepened. “That fits. The fake reports are easy to deliver if someone on the inside wanted it that way. And the only way our surveillance could have lost her is if they let it happen. That's the trouble with a military organization with hundreds of thousands of soldiers who come from hundreds of different countries across the world. The strength of the structure is diversity. But that also leads to its weakness. More difficult to control. There are 60 generals of my rank. Any one of them could have his own power base to run a secret military operation. So all it takes is one general to believe in the Terrataker cause for something like this to happen.”

“What next?” I asked.

“You're going to have to find her without the triangulation,” Cannon said. “Which means we need to hope and pray that she stays alive long enough to tell you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why hope and pray?” Cannon gave me a strange look. He knew what I believed about God.

“Sorry. I meant why kidnap her. She's just one of the robot controllers. There are all the other pods full of control kids. But they took only her.”

“I wish I could answer that,” Cannon said. “But at least all the others are safe. Can you imagine if the Manchurians got the Terratakers to regain control of them too?”

“In the meantime,” Nate put in, “we've got to keep Tyce safe. If we can't trust our own people, who's to say he won't be kidnapped next?”

“Impossible.” But Cannon's tone told us he didn't really believe it to be impossible.

“Sir, a faked doctor report and dropped surveillance. I think there's enough of a hidden organization within the Combat Force to make anything happen.”

“You're right.” Cannon sighed. “But it's absolutely crucial that Tyce faces the ethics committee this afternoon. And does the interview with Ms. Borris this evening. But now that Ashley's been kidnapped and we don't know what the Terratakers are up to, it's important for Tyce to handle the robot on the Moon today to help us find those kids as soon as possible. Any suggestions on how to do all of those things within a short time frame, Nate?”

“I have an idea,” I said.

Both of them looked at me.

“How long would it take to get me into space?”

CHAPTER 14

This is what it would be like to walk on the Moon
, I thought in awe, four hours later as my robot rolled forward on the Moon's dusty-looking surface.

The first thing I noticed was the sky. Mars, where I was born, has some atmosphere. The Moon has none. Because of it, the sky was jet-black. It seemed like a blanket I could reach up and pull around me, with tiny white holes burned through the blanket by starlight.

And it was very quiet. With no air to transmit sounds, my robot's audio didn't even pick up the slight squeaks that usually happened as the titanium arms moved back and forth. There was no soft squishing sound as the robot wheels sank into the soil.

But it wasn't really soil. And, at extremely low gravity, the robot didn't sink far.

The surface of the Moon isn't like loose dirt you might walk through in bare feet on Earth. It's like gray baby powder, a talcum of the softest dust you might ever run through your fingers.

However, a half inch below the surface it felt like cement. Without air molecules to separate the dust molecules, the weight of my robot on the narrow wheels—even with the lower gravity—was enough to compact the dust. It would be the same for you walking on the Moon. You would sink that half inch in the powder and leave behind perfect footprints that would forever remain preserved, with the sharp edges of your tread never blurred by wind or water.

What I loved the most about moving across the surface of the Moon were the patterns of dust from my spinning wheels. With no air and no wind to affect it, the kicked-up powder slowly, slowly fell in perfect semicircles away from my wheels.

I could have rolled forward for miles and miles, enjoying the peace around me.

But I had a job to do.

Ahead was the low, flat building that I had seen on the slide show in the Combat Force jet with General Cannon. Parked outside, just like the photos I'd seen, were platform buggies that moved supplies in and out of the building.

I had my instructions. Get the robot body beneath a platform buggy. Secure it in place on an axle. And wait until the platform buggy brought the robot body inside.

Which I did. Successfully. Ten minutes later, my robot was hidden beneath the platform buggy.

But that was only the beginning.

When I finished, I called
“Stop!”
and all the sights and sounds and sensations delivered to me by the robot's video and audio outputs faded away. An instant later I saw the darkness of the blindfold over my own eyes and heard the silence of the headset in my own ears.

Because in that instant, my mind had traveled 125,000 miles from the Moon to where I was currently. Hung in a small space station in orbit halfway between the Moon and New York City.

And while I wouldn't be leaving the space station for the next while, I'd be bouncing back and forth to a lot of different places with different robots.

CHAPTER 15

Ten minutes later—with just enough time on the small space station to say hello to Nate and go for a bathroom and water break—and another 125,000 miles below, I began to speak through a second robot body in New York City to the ethics committee of the World United Federation.

Seven vice governors sat behind a long, narrow table, each with a brass-engraved nameplate resting directly in front. Beside each nameplate was a comp-board.

All of the men looked as gray as the surface of the Moon. And just as old. They appeared so similar that it was hard for me to distinguish between them. They all wore gray suits and had gray hair and gray beards. And their expressions were gray—no smiles, no frowns. Just wrinkles that seemed carved into their gray skin.

They stared at my robot, so it felt like they were staring at me.

My robot faced the long, narrow table.

“How much longer do we have to wait for the robot to start talking?” one hoarse voice said. This came from a man who sat behind the nameplate marked
Vice Governor Patterson.

“Frankly,” another vice governor named Calvin answered in an equally worn-out voice, “I think this is all hogwash.”

Hogwash? These men washed hogs? They were vice governors, which was the position just below supreme governor. From the world's 200 vice governors, the supreme governor was elected every four years. If the other 193 were like these stuffy-looking old men, the world was in big trouble.

“I agree,” Vice Governor Armitage said. “It's nonsense. Probably some Hollywood stunt to promote a new movie. Trying to tell us the boy is in orbit and will hook up to this robot anytime now.”

Oh
, I realized,
hogwash is nonsense.
Earth expressions were weird.

“If he does start talking, I'm going to have a difficult time believing it's him,” Armitage said. “It looks like a praying mantis.”

I knew I should speak to let them know I'd arrived, but I was curious to know which way this meeting might go. Armitage's comment didn't surprise me or hurt my feelings. The robot's upper body did look like a praying mantis. It was stick-like, with a short, thick, hollow pole that stuck upward from an axle at the bottom that connected two wheels. At the upper end of the pole were a head and a crosspiece, to which the arms were attached. Four video lenses served as eyes, and three tiny microphones, attached to the underside of the video lens, played the role of ears, taking in sound. A speaker on the underside of the video lens that faced forward produced sound and allowed me to make my voice heard.

The computer drive of the robot was well protected within the hollow titanium pole that served as the robot's upper body. A short antenna plug-in at the back of the pole took signals to and from my brain.

Another vice governor—Michaels, from what it said on his nameplate—moved out from behind the table and shuffled toward the robot. He peered directly into my video lens. I could see the veins in his yellowing eyeballs.

The old man tapped the robot's forward video lens.

“Ouch,” I said.

Michaels jumped backward, nearly falling.

Instantly the murmuring at the table stopped. Michaels inched away until he reached the table, as if he were afraid I would attack him.

“Hello,” I said through the robot's audio. “I am Tyce Sanders. I am controlling this robot. General Jeb McNamee said you might be interested in speaking with me.”

“We want to speak with Tyce Sanders,” Armitage said.

“Not a robot.”

“I wish I could,” I answered. “But—”