Operation Inferno (18 page)

Ethan set a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he told him. “We made it.”

Emma took off her helmet as well. She uncoiled her braid from around her neck and inhaled deeply. She then got out a pen flashlight and played its light over the tunnel.

LEVEL XXXVII
had been stenciled on the rusted steel wall.

“We’re in the right place,” Ethan said. Oliver spun around, then turned left. “I memorized the blueprints. The robot control room is this way.”

   21   
QUIET, NOT QUITE

T
HEY ALL GOT OUT ONE OF THEIR WEAPONS
. Emma picked up her handheld welder. Ethan hefted his rivet gun. Oliver had one of the electromagnetic grenade canisters.

“There’s a junction a hundred feet ahead,” Emma said. “We turn right, go two hundred more feet, and then the door we want is on the right.” She flashed Oliver a look. “You’re not the only one who memorized the blueprints of this place.”

“Sort out who’s the bigger brainiac later, please,” Ethan whispered. “Let’s move fast
and
quietly.”

Oliver and Emma nodded and followed him.

So far, so good. No robots. Funny … but Ethan hadn’t even heard the machine clanging they’d heard before down here. Maybe it was just a lucky break.

He and Emma both suddenly stopped.

Ethan had a weird ringing in his skull. It was the same thing he’d felt in New Taos. Emma put two fingers on her forehead as if she was in pain.

He shook off the odd sensation and motioned Emma and Oliver to keep moving.

That ringing had to be some computer communication he and his sister were picking up. There’d been a complex network of mechanical minds in New Taos. He bet there was something like that going on down here. Ethan wouldn’t underestimate the intelligence of these maintenance ’bots.

They got to the intersection, and Ethan let Emma and Oliver fall against one wall, then signaled a halt with his raised fist.

He carefully peered around the corner.

And froze.

Peering back at him with their three-camera-lens eyes were four robots, each the ten-foot-tall, quarter-ton variety. One held a parabolic antenna with a wire
from it plugged into its head. The antenna had been hammered together from squished tin cans.

They weren’t moving, though. Not a single gear whirled. Not one diode flashed.

Ethan’s heart started beating again. Maybe they were in some sort of sleep mode?

He’d have to find another way around.

He started to pull back … when his elbow popped.

The robot with the antenna instantly pointed the device in Ethan’s direction. In its other hand, it held an air horn—which it used. A blaring foghorn note filled the air!

The other robots woke up and surged forward, pulling out
their own
weapons: a whirling chain saw, a length of electrified chain, and a hundred-pound sledgehammer!

Plans of action raced through Ethan’s brain: split up, run, distract the ’bots so Emma and Oliver could get away, try to reason with the mechanical men, fight!

Except one.

“The grenade!” Ethan cried to Oliver.

Oliver was ready. The canister whistled over Ethan’s head. It hit the robot with the chain saw, and the grenade clattered to the deck.

There was a flash of light and a rapid strobe from Dr. Irving’s device.

Sparks washed over the robots and along the steel walls, ceiling, and deck. The mechanical creatures seized and toppled over onto each other in a heap.

The ringing in Ethan’s skull spiked and vanished.

“That got ’em,” Emma said, and leaped over the inert robots. “Come on, hurry. They’re all going to know where we are now.”

Ethan ran after her. She was right.

He dropped his rivet gun and pulled out his grenade.

As they sprinted, Emma’s and Oliver’s flashlights made crazy dancing patterns on the walls.

One pattern stayed. A long line of shadows ahead that got closer and closer.

Four more robots entered the tunnel a hundred feet ahead of them.

Emma skidded to a halt at the door on her right. “This is it!”

Ethan
had
to use his grenade—or they’d be flattened. But how close was
too
close to the robot control room? If he overloaded the computers inside, this mission was over.

He hucked the grenade as far as he could. Staying alive for the next five minutes was the priority.

The grenade bounced and rolled into the oncoming blitz of robots.

A brilliant flash painted the sharp, shadowy outlines of the enemy pack onto the walls.

The ’bots screeched to a grinding halt. Dead.

Emma and Oliver got the door open.

“Oliver, stay here,” Ethan said. “Keep your eyes and ears peeled.”

Oliver’s eyes widened, half panicked now. He obeyed, though, and stayed behind as Ethan and Emma rushed into the room.

The space was tiny, no bigger than a glorified closet. Covering the walls were pinned-up schematics of various types of maintenance robots. There were the big mono-wheeled ones, smaller ones with four wheels, and even a plum-sized one with suckers for hands and feet.

On the far side of the closet were a desk, a computer terminal, and a chair.

Emma and Ethan raced for the computer.

Ethan got there first, sat, and hit the
ON
switch.

It took four heartbeats for the screen to warm up and the cursor to appear. The keyboard was covered with dust and mummified mouse droppings.

“I hear grinding,” Oliver hissed in a low whisper. “Coming down the tunnel!”

On the computer screen the following flashed:

“Hurry,” Emma told him. She got out her grenade—the
last
grenade.

“More incoming,” Oliver said, his voice a mere squeak of fear. “I hear them coming from
both
sides.…”

Ethan pounded on the keyboard, typing as fast as he could. Dr. Irving’s code was ALLQUIETONTHEWESTERNFRONT. He’d told Ethan his level-five authorization code was the title of a very old book, a very good one, and one that Ethan should read someday.

Ethan would very much like that—
if
he lived that long.

The computer screen blanked and then:

Emma bent closer. “I bet you mistyped
quite
instead of Q-U-I-E-T. You were always doing that on your school reports.”

“I can
see
them,” Oliver said, all emotion drained from his voice he was so scared. “There are sooo many, Ethan.”

Emma turned and cocked her arm to huck her grenade.

Ethan focused. How could a typo kill you?!

He tried again … as carefully as he could … as fast as he
dared
.

ALLQUIETONTHEWESTERNFRONT

He held his breath.

Robots rolled to a stop outside the room, crowding each other and peering in. One dropped its chain saw and set a light hand on Oliver’s head as if patting a little kid.

Oliver’s knees wobbled, but he remained standing.

“Excuse us, sirs,” a robot asked. “Are you in need of any assistance?”

Ethan almost fell out of his chair. “I think,” he said to the robots, “a little bit, yes, if you don’t mind.”

   22   
BENCHED

I
T FELT LIKE OLD TIMES WHEN
E
THAN HAD STUDIED
all the plays before a school soccer game.

This game, though, was much, much bigger with thousands of players on either side. And winning wasn’t about breaking records or taking home a championship trophy. It was about the continued existence of the human race, and maybe the freedom of a dozen other intelligent species on other distant worlds.

He stood in the flight bay by a cart used to service their I.C.E.s. On the top of the cart was a flattened map
of the Yucatán Peninsula. The map had lines, circles, and arrows drawn over it.

This was Ethan and the colonel’s joint plan of attack.

It showed how their new robotic forces would move over the terrain and strike the Ch’zar forces—with the sole purpose of distracting them, so Ethan’s team would make it to the beanstalk elevator and blow the thing up (or in this case,
down
).

Simple. Just like making a soccer goal across an incredibly well-defended field.

More reassuring than any plan, though, were his sister and friends.

Standing around the cart and going over the last details with him were Madison, Emma, and Felix. They were the three people he trusted most in the world.

He couldn’t do this without them.

“One more load to go,” Emma said, and nodded across the flight deck.

“Don’t they all freak you out?” Madison whispered to Ethan.

Ethan looked as the last of the maintenance robots had lined themselves in a neat rectangle, ten by one hundred units strong. Three thousand camera eyes focused and refocused and stared straight back at Ethan.
The robots were totally motionless, but not inert. They were ready for action, listening intently for his next order.

“It’s the creepy cameras they have for eyes,” Ethan told Madison. “I get the feeling these robots were never meant to interact much with the base’s people. So no one cared how they looked.”

Felix folded his big arms over his chest. “I still don’t trust them,” he said. “They try to kill us one minute, then they’re ready to lay down their lives for us the next.”

“It’s binary, zeroes and ones, for them,” Ethan said.

He reached out with his mind, imagined he could feel the computer code—little ons and offs, white and black dots all flitting across their microprocessor brains.

“They think in absolute terms: friend or foe,” Ethan continued. “We had the
friend
code. So, we’re friends.”

“More than that,” Emma added with supreme confidence. “We’re their masters.”

Felix was right, though. It was strange to see the robots so ultraobedient. What if something went wrong in their computer minds? Electronic glitches happened all the time. Look what happened to the robots in New Taos, trying to repair a city for humans that were long dead.