by Israel Keats
Spec floated over to him. “They wanted to know why I was across the station with an escaped prisoner. It took me a while to explain.”
“What did you say?”
“I told them you had escaped on your own and I was tracking you,” Spec explained. “I said I had just caught up with you when they barged in.”
“They believed you, huh? Good job.” I didn’t know robots could lie, but I’m glad you’re all right. He hurried past her into the next room.
“No,” Spec said, following. “They reassigned me to a different zone, but I slipped away and came back here. And they assigned a new guard to this room.” Lobo saw another robot like Spec lying on the floor. “I had to . . . take care of my replacement,” she explained.
“So, you have a laser blaster?” She must. Even if she wasn’t the one to capture me, she’s that model of robot.
“Of course. I am a military robot.”
“You’re going to be in trouble with your bosses,” he said.
“Only if they catch me. But they will not, because the two of us are going straight to the control room to call up someone from your space station to come get us.”
“We can’t. I mean, not right away. I’ve been playing the game wrong.”
“Playing?” Spec said in confusion. “Game? You keep saying that.”
“I mean, uh, I just remembered my crew was taken too. I should rescue them from the clutches of these snake-faced dudes.”
“We need to escape as soon as we can,” Spec argued. “If we get caught . . .”
“I know, but I have to do this,” he said. There’s no way I can beat the game without rescuing my crew. “Can you let me know when it’s safe to leave this room? Like you did last time?”
“Yes.” Spec ducked out the room and returned a moment later.
“Leave now! Five, four, three . . .”
“Stay close.” He bolted out and crouched behind a post. Spec zoomed behind him a moment later.
“I need to check these other rooms,” he whispered to her. “In case members of my crew are in any of them.”
“It is too risky. We should find the control room and arrange our escape,” Spec insisted.
“I can’t leave my team behind!”
“I am taking big risks to help you,” Spec told him. “If I am caught with you a second time, they will not simply ask questions.”
“What’ll they do?” Lobo put a finger to his temple. “Can they port in and suck your memory?”
“Yes,” Spec said. “And then they would remove my processing core and put it in permanent storage.”
Lobo pictured his brain in a jar, like in a sci-fi movie. “That does sound rough,” he admitted. “You don’t have to take that risk to help me.”
“I am not doing it for you,” Spec reminded him. “I am doing it so I can escape too. Besides, I have already exposed myself. My only chance now is to leave with you.”
“I get it.” So I have to rescue you too? Why don’t I just save the entire galaxy while I’m at it?
“Anyway, I can tell you that your crew members are not in the nearby rooms. We separated you and the other team leader. We kept you far from the others so you couldn’t plan an escape together.”
“Because you were one of the robots that captured us,” he said. I need to know for sure.
“Yes. And it was my idea to keep you from the others so you couldn’t plan together. But my real purpose was to get you to a less-secure area so we could escape together.”
“Are you sure that none of my team are in these other rooms?”
“Yes.”
But now I don’t know if I can trust you. You didn’t tell me about the others. You didn’t tell me you helped kidnap me.
“I’m going to check them anyway,” he decided.
“You might walk in on an Orionan and get disanimated. And if you get caught again, you may never escape.”
“It’s a chance I have to take,” he said.
The robot made a groaning noise.
Lobo’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. That wasn’t some sonic signal, he thought. She really is groaning. Can robots get annoyed?
“I just unlocked all the doors,” said Spec.
Oh. Guess I was wrong. She wasn’t complaining. She was helping.
As before, there were guards marching back and forth along either side of the hall. A third guard entered and exited each of the four rooms. That one still had the egg-shaped object in its hand.
Lobo entered a room immediately after that guard left. It was filled with cabinets, but nothing of interest was in them. As he slipped out, he narrowly missed walking into the guard patrolling that hallway.
“I told you,” Spec hissed. “This is unnecessarily risky.”
Lobo grunted and hurried into the next room. The guard checking rooms was now at the other end of the hall.
He found a high table and what looked like food vending machines—those same hard biscuits were in there too. This must have been some kind of alien break room. He shook the machine and something clattered in a small slot. Reaching into the slot, he found a flat, rounded rectangle. He guessed it was an Orionan coin. He plugged it into the machine and bought a biscuit. Two fell.
“Are you going to have a snack?” Spec asked in disbelief.
“I’m not going to eat this garbage. But it’s the closest thing I have to a weapon.”
He put the biscuits in his pocket and slipped out again. This time he got lucky. The guard patrolling this side of the room had its back turned.
There was only one more room to check, directly across the hall. He sprinted across and entered. The patrol guard was standing with its back to the door, but as Lobo entered it wheeled around.
Chapter 9
There was a zapping sound, and the alien collapsed to the floor.
Lobo glanced over his shoulder to see Spec hovering behind him. A panel on her front had slid open, and the barrel of her laser blaster was sticking out.
“I told you there were no prisoners in these rooms,” she said. “Now we have to leave before the other guards raise the alarm.”
“Hold on a sec.” Lobo searched the guard’s unconscious body. He took the egg shaped tool from its hand.
“Is this some kind of a weapon?”
“No. It is a master key. It opens doors using sonic signals that are outside of your human hearing range.”
“I get it now.” The creature kept checking on locked rooms. That’s why it always had this thing out. Very useful, he thought, and put it in his pocket.
“Solo_Lobo,” Spec said impatiently.
“I know, I know. We have to get out of here.” He stood up and cracked the door, peered out, then ran and ducked behind a post. He zipped from post to post as he had before, Spec staying right behind him.
The guard coming down the hall noticed the open door and walked over to investigate. It peered inside and made a low squeaky noise. The other guard stopped and looked.
With both of the remaining aliens distracted and looking away from him, Lobo sprinted past them into the hallway. He saw the light he’d shattered earlier. It left a narrow path of darkness for him to sneak past the two guards. He reached the aerovator dock, which was empty. Behind him were squeals of alien chatter and footsteps.
He anxiously pressed at the call button and entered the first set of doors that opened. Spec slipped in behind him.
“I suggest—” she started, but he’d already punched the button for the observatory.
“Remember that was where you got trapped.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“And since they now know you escaped, they are likely to send guards there at once.”
“Then we’ll have to beat them there. Anchor yourself.”
It was too late. The aerovator capsule kicked into high speed, and Spec whipped across and smacked against the rear wall. “I hate these things,” she said.
“I didn’t know robots could hate things.”
<
br /> If Spec could glare, he was sure she would right now. But she did chirp a few annoyed beeps at him. “I have a highly-evolved cybernetic intelligence, capable of thoughts and feelings.”
“Gotcha,” he said.
The car arrived at the observatory. Lobo stood to the side, watched as the door opened to make sure the coast was clear, and then exited the aerovator capsule. He went straight to the puny trashcan he’d tried to hide behind earlier. He kicked it over, spilling a mysterious pile of contents.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting this!” Grinning, he held up the mapping device. “I hid it just before those alien guys got off the aerovator.” He tapped the screen. “The whole map is still here.”
I’m back where I left off, but still have a lot to do, he thought. And I only have one life to do it with.
“Your decision to come here did give us a tactical advantage,” the robot admitted.
“On Earth we say, ‘You were right and I was wrong.’ ”
She made that groaning sound again. This time there were no doors to unlock.
“Let’s go,” he said, walking toward the aerovators. But one of the doors chimed before they got there.
“Not again!” Spec said.
Lobo remembered the biscuits. He reached into his pocket, grabbed one, and hurled it straight up with all his might, taking out another ceiling light in a flash. The doors hissed open. He stormed into the darkness, crashing into aliens on their way out of the aerovator car. He shoved them aside, stepped into the capsule, and pushed the button to close the door. Spec zipped in just before the door closed.
“Seems like those disanimators don’t work in the dark,” he said.
“A fortunate discovery,” Spec agreed. “But the station will now be on high alert.”
“Hey, you’re the one who zapped a guy back there.”
“Yes, but I would still like to get one step ahead of their guards.”
“We are. Where do we go now?”
“Press the yellow button,” Spec instructed. Lobo found a big yellow octagon and pushed.
“Hang on,” he added, but Spec had remembered this time. The capsule took off, winding through a shaft that curled and curved. At last it arrived with the familiar chime. The doors hissed open, and he was nearly stampeded by a horde of aliens getting in the capsule. He dropped and rolled out of the way.
I would be gone in a heartbeat if those things looked past their own noses. Not that they technically have noses.
He crawled to a small gap between aerovator doors and looked out to see a long corkscrew-shaped ramp, wide as a city block. The ramp was packed with cubbies and kiosks like a hallway in a shopping mall or airport. Here and there were passageways angling off like spokes on a wheel, leading to different parts of the station.
“This is the hub,” Spec explained. “You can access most of the space station from here.”
“So it’s like downtown Alienville,” Lobo said. A mass of aliens coursed along, spilling in and out of hallways, pausing at the windows of kiosks, all of them marching forward without dawdling.
Not one guy just hanging out or taking a break, he noticed. Is this what humankind will evolve into? A bunch of people so busy doing stuff that they never really do anything?
“I know at least one of your companions is being held in the storage facility,” Spec said. “You can access it one tier up on the opposite side of the hub.”
“How am I going to get there? There are a million of these guys walking all over the place. And there’s no pattern to how they move.”
“The aliens can’t see very well in the dark,” she reminded him. “Perhaps you can disable the lights to safely make it to the other end of the hallway.”
“Good idea.” He reached for the last rock-hard biscuit in his pocket and looked up. There were lights all along the ramp.
That’s not gonna work, he realized, leaving the biscuit in his pocket. I’d have to take out a lot of lights. Even if I could do it, I would call a lot of attention to myself.
“How do I disable the lights?” he asked Spec.
“Be ready to run,” the robot answered.
She sailed out into the middle of the ramp. Nobody noticed her at first: just another Orionan robot on an Orionan space station. But then she started to sputter and spin. She hummed and rattled. It sounded like her motor was glitching. Her blaster emerged and fired four times, each taking out a dozen lights and plunging part of the ramp in darkness.
Lobo ran.
Chapter 10
Lobo darted to the rear wall, away from the railing. The aliens had all stopped to look at the malfunctioning robot. He jogged behind them with quiet steps.
They’re so quiet, he thought. Shouldn’t they be shouting in surprise? Asking each other what’s going on? Yelling for help? What’s wrong with them?
He crouched in a corner. An Orionan rolled by on some kind of strange motorized scooter. The deck of the scooter was narrow in the front and wide in the back, and the back was lined with metallic canisters. Then Lobo noticed the scooter was floating a couple of inches above the station floor.
I wish I had a hover scooter. Score another one for alien tech.
After the scooter passed he hurried to the next wing. When he glanced back, he could see the aliens had forgotten the distraction and were moving on. Spec was gone too. He didn’t see what had happened to her.
That little robot was brave, he thought. But there’s no way to help her without walking into a nest of aliens, so I’d better focus on rescuing my crew right now.
He continued down the hallway, darting from post to post. This area didn’t seem to have a lot of traffic, and it also didn’t seem to be a high-security place like the room he’d trashed earlier. But Spec had told him that at least one of his companions was here, so he was sure he’d run into guards sooner or later.
He came to a gate, which was locked. He pulled the master key from his pocket and waved it. The device made a low humming noise and hissed open. He stepped sideways and peered around the edge. Straight ahead were two guards watching the open gate. They jabbered at each other in their alien language.
They’re wondering why the gate opened, he guessed. One of them walked over, stepped through the gate, and looked down the hall, but didn’t look his way. The alien walked back in and the gate hissed closed.
It’s no use opening the door if I can’t get in without being seen, Lobo thought. He put the device back in his pocket. He heard a rumbling behind him and turned. Another alien was rolling up on a delivery scooter. Fortunately the alien was looking back at the crates loaded on the scooter’s deck, or Lobo would have been seen and disanimated.
That’s right. Spec said this was the storage facility.
The gate hissed open again. The doors opened, and the alien guards waved the scooter in. Lobo had the five seconds he needed to slip inside and hide. He crouched behind a stack of crates and looked around.
Past the guards were towers of crates. Each crate had about twenty sides, like the dice in old role-playing games.
I wonder if they need to guard supplies from other aliens. They seem so well-behaved.
To lift the boxes and stack them onto a tower, the alien on the scooter used a device that had a long bar with a handle on one end and a ring on the other. It looked like the old metal detectors Lobo had once seen in a history lecture.
Lobo tested one of the crates he was hiding behind. He could barely budge it. But the alien was heaving the same-sized crates around easily.
That tool must create a low gravity field around an object so it can be moved. Score a hundred points for alien tech.
The alien finished storing the crates, hung the wand on a rack, and cruised away.
The two guards were patrolling the front of the room, weaving in and out of the crates. And that was the guards he could see—there could be others he couldn’t. Lobo reached for a biscuit, thinking he would take out another light, but when he looked up he
saw the lights in this room were tucked into the ceiling and protected by thick glass. Instead he climbed a shorter tower of crates. From there he leaped to a higher one, grasping the edge with his fingertips and scrambling up. The guards didn’t notice. He reached a third tower by leaping to the side and climbing a post.
From there he could see the entire room. It was shaped like a pentagon, with four walls and the fifth side open to the hallway. There were doors in three of the four walls.
There’s a human in at least one of those rooms, he thought. But which one?
None of the doors would be easy to get to. One of the guards always seemed to be watching every door. When one turned away from a door, another started marching toward it.
As he scanned the room, Lobo realized the wand’s rack was out of sight of the guards. He leaped to the top of another tower, then another. He was as close as he could get to the gravity wand, but it was too far to jump. He would have to drop to the floor and would surely be seen. He glanced up and noticed a dangling chain between him and the tower.
That’s good luck, he said to himself. No—not luck. Design. I’m in a game, and they have to give me a way to win. I’m so into this game that I forget I’m playing one.
He leaped for the chain, grasped it, and swung over to the post. Still dangling from the chain, he grabbed the wand from its hook and used his feet to kick off the wall and swing back to the crates.
Once he was safely out of sight, he inspected the wand. There was a button on the barrel. He aimed it and pressed the button with his thumb. A tower several feet away shifted. Lobo swung the wand sideways, and the tower’s top crate crashed to the floor.
One of the guards paused and said something in alien language. The other guards came to investigate. Lobo leaped to another tower, then scrambled down. He saw a clear path between the towers of crates and one of the doors. He ran over, tucking the gravity wand under his elbow so he could grab his master key and wave it at the door.
The room was the size and shape of the cell he’d been kept in, but there were no humans here. He groaned. Come on. Seriously?
Behind a high, narrow table was a wall panel. He opened it and saw a column of switches. I wonder what these do. Only one way to find out.
