Rat Trap (5 page)

C
HAPTER
N
INE

O
N A
M
ISSION

A good smell filled the air vent leading to the Photonics lab. A food smell. Unexpected. Rat had imagined hot electronics and ozone. Those smells were there, too, but strongly masked by the good smell. She thought it might be corn, but not like any corn she had ever eaten. Corn transformed somehow.

It was a rat-sized vent. Cozy and close. A small flick of her tail touched top, bottom, and sides. Her whiskers brushed along the metal, making a soft
shish.
Her sharp toenails tapped out a steady
click-click-click, click-click-click.

Three beats, not four. Rat kept the weak leg tucked up, sparing it for when it was really needed. Moving along on three legs was awkward at first. It put a diagonal twist into her gait, and the three beats. Now it seemed easy. The half-gravity of Ring 5 helped.

As a rule, Rat avoided the weak-gravity parts of the space station. Scurrying was difficult on the slippery metal. No carpets here! Sniffers never slipped. They had magnetic wheels. Nanny, too. But she did not have to worry about Nanny or sniffers right now. The danger ahead was a more familiar one: a scientist. A scientist to fool, to outwit, to steal from.

The vent branched: The left one led to the living quarters, the other to the lab. The food smell poured out of the left one. It saturated her nose with a pungent, sweet toastiness.

Rat began to drool.

She knuckled the wetness away from the corners of her mouth. Wiped her paws dry on the spyvest. She must not get distracted. She was on a mission. Maybe she should have had a snack before leaving.

How life with the boy had changed her! Acting like a starved rat when she had already eaten once today. Perhaps the routine had not been a good one after all. Rat felt … unfocused … and strangely reluctant to correct that. A dangerous feeling with the investigator coming. She needed her old sharpness back.

Still, she followed the smell to the living quarters instead of heading for the lab. She pressed her eye against the grate. The grate was high up, twice as high as in the boy's room. The door into the lab section was shut tight. The scientist sat at a table with a square pan in front of her. The pan held something yellow as the sun, whose surface heaved and cracked, patterned like sunspots. Rat detected egg and milk and corn and sugar. Raw and cooked.

On a counter along the wall rested a bowl with a coating of pale yellow stuff clinging to it. The raw smells came from the bowl. There was a stove. In the lab, the scientists used stoves to heat things. Rat made the connection. This scientist mixed and cooked her own food, something Rat had never seen before! It smelled better than anything the boy had ever brought from the food machines.

The scientist cut a square from the pan, split it, and slathered it with butter. Rat nearly swooned at the fresh rush of smells. The scientist took a bite, and her cheerful voice spilled out through the crumbs. “Oh, Lordy, Bett, this cornbread is to die for!”

How Rat wanted those crumbs!

Stupid thoughts.

She would never get any. Not from a scientist.

Rat hurried back along the air shaft to the lab.

Rat peered through the grate into the lab. What about the boy? Was he here somewhere? She could not see him. She sniffed. There was too much air in the room to tell for sure: Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. It did not matter. She did not need his help.

A puddle of red light glowed in the center of the darkened room. The dimness reminded her of the Rodengenics lab after hours, when all the scientists had gone away, leaving her alone with the red glow from the
EXIT
sign.

Where did they go and what did it mean, that word
EXIT?
Rat wondered and wondered until the day one of the scientists made a mistake. He brought Rat into his office and set her cage on the windowsill. There, for the first time ever in her whole life, the yellow light of the sun touched her lavender coat. The surprising warmth sank down to her skin and into her bones. A miracle! She had discovered the outdoors and the answer. From that moment she dedicated herself to getting through the door under the burning word that meant freedom.

She would never go back.

The laser would make sure of that.

Time to get it!

The door to the living quarters was still shut tight. Rat pushed the clips off the grate and swung it open to lean out into the lab. Shapes bulked in the dim light far below, round and tall as the boy. Along the floor, thick cables snaked between the deep shadows. She could not see very well. She did not have to. Every detail of this place was mapped in her head. The only unknown here was the machine itself, this LB thing. It was not a robot, she had found out. It had no arms or legs or even a head. It was trapped down there inside the console next to the laser source, immobile and helpless. Unless there were alarms—the diagrams did not say—or it called the scientist.

Rat must work very fast.

Kicking off with her good hind leg, Rat leaped. She soared several feet to the top of a big pipe. She scurried along it, then dropped over the edge. The slow-motion fall landed her lightly on the console next to the lid of the laser source.

The lid was sealed with a simple number-coded electronic lock. Good. She did not have to waste time trying to hack passwords. Using the screwdriver, she pried open a tiny crack where the lock casing met the lid. She slid a hair-thin copper wire from the spyvest, then wiggled it into the crack. Recalling the diagram of the lock's circuit board, she moved the wire along the electronics inside the casing. A little tingle of static electricity fluffed her hairs, then—
sizzle, pop
—the lock clicked open.

Rat grasped the handle and lifted, but the lid was too heavy for the weak leg.

Job for a lever.

Rat worked the tip of the screwdriver under the lid. She leaned her weight on it—

“BOO!”

Rat sprang upward.
Thump.
She hit the ceiling.
Bump.
A thin pipe smacked her belly. Even as her tail curled around the pipe to steady her, her mind sorted the surprise: not the scientist's voice, the machine's.

A blazing line of light scanned across her.

“You are lavender. You are wearing a cloth tube. That is not normal for a rat.” The console hummed and the red glow in the room brightened. “You are not a normal rat. You are a modified.”

Rat jumped over to the big pipe and ran.

“Wait! Don't go! LB misses Jeff. He promised to visit, but hasn't. And Bett is napping. LB is bored.”

Rat turned abruptly. It was too late for running away. The machine had seen her. It might tell the scientist. It might tell the investigator. It must be destroyed.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

T
HEM

Jeff hesitated to return to Rat. Maybe if he found something useful for her spyvest, she wouldn't be so upset by the bad news about the laser. She mentioned spider wire, strong as steel, but so thin a hundred yards of it fit on a spool the size of an aspirin. The repair shop was the only place he might find something like that, but he dreaded going there. The repair crew blamed him for ruining Nanny. Still, he'd rather face them than Rat's anger. Besides, he
ought
to go there. Their routine was in a shambles. They'd missed the second check on Nanny. He'd better make sure it was still dead.

Jeff set the elevator going. As it neared Ring 3, the grip of the artificial gravity loosened quite a lot. His feet seemed to lift off the soles of his boots, almost floating. He swayed and grabbed the handrail. Not much was left of Ring 3 except the repair shop. Most of it had vaporized long ago in the solar wind or been salvaged to use in making other rings. From outside the space station, it looked like the skeleton of a doughnut, just hoops of metal scaffolding like the kind construction crews put up around skyscrapers.

But the repair shop was kept intact because the very weak gravity made it easy to work on heavy equipment. Mechanics could lift thousands of pounds of machinery with their bare hands! Jeff could pick up Nanny with a pinkie, if he ever dared to touch it.

Jeff waddled out in the direction of the repair shop using a kind of wide-legged rolling walk that felt like marching across a water-bed mattress.

“Well, if it isn't the great robot hunter,” the captain's voice boomed behind Jeff.

Jeff turned, and there he was, a great jiggle of silver-coated fatness rolling along the corridor, nearly filling it. What bad luck, meeting him here! He'll yell at me again.…

“Don't cringe like that. Can't you see I'm smiling?” The captain came up to Jeff. He
was
smiling, a tiny one in a red face glistening with a sheen of sweat. His breath came a little hard, even though moving in this low gravity ought to be easy—even for a fat person. “Here for the test, huh?”

“What test?”

“Nanny. The chief's rigged up a robot defibrillator to zap Nanny's brain like they do for heart-attack victims. Too risky to try before, but now we've got nothing to lose.”

Jeff did! Rat did! The last thing they needed was Nanny back in action. “How come it's okay now?”

The captain narrowed his eyes. “Don't tell me you haven't heard the news?”

Jeff guessed what news but decided to play dumb. He wasn't sure if Dad was supposed to know it or not. “News?”

“Well you're the only one who hasn't!” The smile disappeared. Now the captain looked normal—pinched and grumpy. “So much for surprising that rat.”

So that was the plan! In a flash, Jeff played the scene: He and Rat, ignorant, maybe having a snack, maybe even liverwurst! Then the knock on the door, the investigator and his sniffers barging in. His knees went weak. Of course, in the low-g, it didn't show. What if Dad had never found out?

“Well, what's done is done. From what I understand, if that rat really is alive, it's probably been listening in on the chats.” The captain laughed, a sharp, brief bark of amusement at the scientists. “They tell me it's lavender. Imagine that! But you knew that already, didn't you?”

The captain fixed his sharp, too-close-together eyes on Jeff. Was he trying to trap him? “I never got a good look. I thought it was gray …”

“Whatever. The important thing is that you may have saved it. Even as badly hurt as you said it was, those scientists think their rat could survive. And they're so grateful, they're going to pay for the repairs to Nanny—or buy me a new prowler, if it comes to that.” The captain dropped a big, hot hand onto Jeff's shoulder. “You're a hero, boy! And you're out of the doghouse with me.”

The sharp thump of congratulations loosened a cascade of pronouns in Jeff's head: they, those, their. All plurals! Of course! How stupid not to see it sooner! The investigator wasn't a
he
, he was a
them.
Part of a team of scientists. Killing him wouldn't solve Rat's problem at all. It would just prove she was on the space station—who else would kill the investigator?—and then more scientists would come, probably to kill her this time.

At last Jeff could tell Rat that there was something wrong with her plan besides the shooting, something so flawed that she would have to give up the idea entirely.

Thank you, Captain!

“Let's go,” the captain said. “We don't want to miss that test.”

Jeff wanted to. He wanted to hurry back to the room and tell Rat what he had figured out. But the captain's big hand on his back swept him along.

The main part of the repair shop looked like a huge warehouse. This was where the crew worked on the heavy equipment. New frame sections for the space station arched overhead like honeycombed rainbows. The big machines and cranes and automated tools were silent. Nobody was at work.

Around the outside of the main room were smaller repair cubbies. Nanny was in #3-A. The repair crew had crowded around the door to watch the test. At a sharp word from the captain, the dozen or so men and women parted to let them in.

Nanny was on the floor. Jeff nearly walked into it. With a whine of motors, Nanny came to life.

“Here is that naughty boy.” The gripper arms extended, pincers open. They waved up and down. “He must be punished for breaking Nanny.”

It was his worst nightmare coming true: Nanny awake. Hating him. Looking for revenge!

Jeff freaked. “No! Stay away! Leave me alone!”

He stumbled backward, smack into the captain. The effect was like hitting a super-accelerator panel in the Zero-G room. Jeff bounced off and, half-floating, careened into the repair crew like a cue ball into a rack of pool balls. There was a great tear of Velcro. People wobbled and bumped. A few laughed, but most were too busy trying to get their Velcro boots back on the floor.

“Somebody stop it!” Jeff fought off hands that reached for him. “Don't let it get me.”

“Hey, knock it off, chief,” a woman said, stepping between Jeff and the robot. “The kid's really scared.”

“Give me that thing.” The captain took a small box from the chief's hand. A remote control! The captain twisted the knob to
OFF.
The gripper arms sagged. The motors went silent.

A hot rush of embarrassment replaced Jeff's panic. The body was headless. He could see into the open hole at the top. The new O-ring glistened in the collar seal. Nanny's head was still on the bench, nested in the wires, the eye still dark. The chief had played a cruel joke on him.

“Just a bit of fun, Captain,” the chief said, imitating Nanny's voice.

The captain did not look amused as he turned on Jeff. “That was a bit over the top, don't you think? Nanny never really hurt you.”

“It did! It hit me with its grippers. See!” Jeff lifted his shirt.

The captain stared at the fading green bruises over Jeff's ribs, then his gaze shifted to contemplate Nanny's dark eye. “Maybe we'd better skip this test.”