“Dash! A heat signal! Close!”
He took a quick look at his mobile tech. Yes, really close. He stood up and scanned the landscape. It was hard to see very far, because stray locusts were still fluttering in the air like snowflakes. But after a few seconds, he spotted it. “There!” he shouted, pointing at the base of a hill several hundred yards away. A large oval object showed against the white. “It has to be an ice crawler!” Dash called to Carly.
He gave the tailpipe one last scrape with his knife and hurried back inside. Carly hit the start button—and the engine made a choking sound and died.
“Try again!” Dash cried. “I thought I got that pipe cleared!”
Again, Carly pressed start. “Come on, come on,” she urged. The engine coughed with a noise like a throat clearing, but the Streak didn’t move. There must still be locusts in the tailpipe.
Dash had to make a fast decision: try again to clear the pipe, or risk the cold and run toward the crawler on foot? What if this crawler was the only one within miles? They might not get another chance.
“We have to get out and run,” he said.
Carly nodded and pushed open the door.
Dash reached behind the seat and grabbed the Talon, and then he too climbed back out into the cold. Although the vortex had dissolved, hundreds of locusts still flittered around in the air. It would have been easy to get lost in this white wilderness. But he could still make out a solid shape through the fluttering, and he made his way toward it, with Carly following. After a few minutes, he pulled his binoculars from their pouch and focused in.
What he saw sent a jolt through him. The oval shape was not an ice crawler.
“Carly!” he yelled into his radio. “It’s the Omega team’s snowmobile up ahead! They’re already here!” He felt a wave of fury—how could he and Carly be losing this race?—but he stamped it down. Not useful to spend energy on anger.
Again he put the binoculars to his eyes. This time he saw what he hadn’t noticed before, because it was white against white: there was a very large ball of snow a short distance away from the snowmobile. He radioed Carly again. “There is a crawler! Their team is right up next to it!”
“Okay,” Carly said. “I hate that they found it first, but it doesn’t really matter. We can both take zero crystals from this one. Let’s get there.”
They plowed on through the drifts as fast as they could. The going was slow, not just because of the cold and wind but also because they were walking uphill. The Omega snowmobile and the crawler stood about halfway up a long, smooth slope that rose to a peak up above them. Dash struggled to control a jaw-cracking shiver. Whoever had designed the protective suits they were wearing had never been on the planet Tundra. These suits might have worked fine on Antarctica, or the frozen Siberian plains. Here, they felt like barely more than a fleece.
Up ahead, through his binoculars, he saw Anna and Ravi getting out of the Cheetah and approaching the locust ball cautiously.
“That ball is huge, all right,” Dash said to Carly. “Their vehicle looks small beside it.”
Carly was looking too. “An elephant would look small beside it,” she said.
They struggled on. They were close now. The wind was like a powerful ocean current they had to struggle against. They leaned forward, forcing themselves on, their boots plunging into deep snow with every step. Dash’s feet were numb. His fingers were too, even inside the thickly padded gloves.
“Look!” cried Carly. “It’s coming out!”
Dash clapped his binocs to his eyes again. Yes—the crawler was eating its way out of the ball of bugs. He stood still and watched as something white rose through the writhing insects like a mushroom pushing up through the snow, shedding clumps and splinters of ice. It didn’t look like any sort of animal Dash recognized—not a bear or ape, not a worm or snake, not a giant lizard or spider or other crawling thing. He couldn’t see if it had a face or even a head. It seemed to be simply a massive grayish-white lump. He saw Anna and Ravi stumble backward, looking at it.
The creature unfolded itself, and Dash could see that its shape kept shifting slightly, bulging out in one spot and then another, the way a balloon does when it’s filled with water.
“It’s sort of like a huge seal,” said Carly, staring.
“Or a giant walrus,” said Dash.
The crawler suddenly heaved its front part up from the ground, revealing a grayish underside. Dash focused in closer, toward a spot where there was a white flutter of locusts, and something moving within it. It was a mouth—a hole in the crawler’s skin. It opened and closed as if controlled by a drawstring. Open, it sucked in a thick stream of snow locusts. Closed, it shrank to a puckered bump, and bits of chewed locust dribbled down from it.
“Does it have legs?” Carly said to Dash.
“I can’t tell,” he called back. He couldn’t take his eyes from that horrible mouth, growing wide and shrinking down. He glimpsed flashing, knifelike teeth within it.
After several seconds, he saw that the eating was slowing, and the ice crawler seemed to be growing shorter and wider, bulging out sideways. The mouth stopped moving, and the crawler lowered its front half slowly, until it spread out like a huge slug on the ground and lay still. That’s the coma, Dash thought—the deep after-dinner sleep.
They were only about fifty feet away now. Dash raised both arms and waved, hoping Anna would wait until they got there so they could all approach the crawler together.
But Anna had other ideas. She held the Talon with both hands. She got up close to the crawler. Hesitantly, she touched its side with her foot.
It shuddered, like a great mound of Jell-O.
“She’s going to do the extraction,” Dash called over the radio.
“I know,” said Carly. “So are we, if she doesn’t chase the thing away.”
Anna stood beside the creature. Its body rose in front of her like a hill. She raised the Talon.
Dash held his breath. Would it rear up at her touch and attack?
But it didn’t move, and Anna seemed to gain confidence. Ravi was close behind her now, ready to help if necessary.
“Here she goes,” said Dash.
Anna steadied herself, raised the Talon, and brought the spike down with great speed, scraping it along the ice crawler’s flesh. Dash cringed. He was sure she did it much harder than she needed to. Chris had said that it would take hardly more than a scratch to do it and that the crawler might not even notice.
But this one did notice. The big body twitched, and the crawler made a sound—a low, sad moan, like the moo of a cow.
Anna jumped back. She and Ravi started toward their Cheetah, and Anna turned to flash a triumphant look straight at Dash. It said We did it. We beat you.
Then came another sound, much louder. It came from the top of the peak, and it was so tremendous that Dash felt the ground shake beneath his feet. It was a bellow, a huge, rumbling roar. He saw Anna look up, and he looked up too, and at once, he understood that the ice crawler Anna had stabbed was not really that huge at all.
It was a baby.
And that had to be its mother, up above. She was beyond enormous.
Anna and Ravi froze in horror for a second. The immense crawler moved toward them. They raced to the Cheetah, and Dash heard the scream of its engine as it sped away.
Carly’s voice, very quiet, came through the transmitter. “What do we do?”
Dash’s first thought was to go for it. They might not find other crawlers. It could be that Anna hadn’t got the zero crystals, even though she had tried. If that were true and he and Carly didn’t get crystals from this crawler, the Tundra mission would be a failure. And that meant their entire mission would be a failure.
But then he saw the mother crawler coming over the crest of the hill. With remarkable speed, she slid down toward her calf. Dash could see her tail now, T-shaped like a whale’s, slapping against the snow behind her. Just as she reached her baby, she seemed to notice Dash and C
arly standing there in the snow a few dozen feet away. Her huge sides rippled in and out. Her body seemed to swell forward.
“She’s coming at us,” Dash said.
“She’s going to see us,” Carly said. “If those red eyes can see.”
And sure enough, the creature turned toward them and began surging in their direction, picking up speed. There was not a moment to spare.
“Back to the Streak!” Dash yelled.
They turned and ran.
Piper sat in her air chair in the Light Blade training room, watching SUMI update the tension levels of some of the workout machines. A swarm of ZRKs buzzed around her, oiling and dusting and polishing. Piper was in a fury of impatience. Now that she knew Gabe could communicate with her, she couldn’t wait for SUMI’s recharging sessions. The next one was still forty minutes away. Piper was sure she was going to die of suspense.
She tried to focus her mind. The ZRKs distracted her, fluttering their tiny polishing rags, twittering and chattering in their squeaky, birdlike way. Such strange little creatures, no bigger than golf balls and yet capable of doing so many useful tasks…
And thinking about strange creatures made her think about Tundra, and that made her long to know what kinds of creatures were down there and how her team was doing—she couldn’t stand not knowing! They’d be tromping around on Tundra right now! And how were things going back on the Cloud Leopard, her ship that she missed so much? How was their dog, Rocket? She yanked the control stick of the air chair, sped up toward the ceiling, and zoomed around in furious circles. It was awful not to know.
The ZRKs seemed to sense that she was upset. A bunch of them swarmed up and surrounded her air chair, tapping it all over, chattering like mad, trying to fix her. “I’m fine, I’m fine!” Piper protested, batting at them, but one of them buzzed in her ear and another one tangled itself in her hair until she screamed, “Get away!” and they finally flew off.
She had to calm herself. Being upset only made things worse; she knew that. So she parked her air chair by the Alien Commando Warships video game and was about to start playing it for the thousandth incredibly boring time, when she heard something that made her hand fly off the joystick.
It was Gabriel’s voice.
She whipped around. She saw that SUMI, who had been humming along busily just a moment before, was frozen mid-action. Gabe’s voice was coming through her.
“Speed Devil here. Come in, Petunia. Are you there?”
Piper sped to SUMI. “I’m here!” she whispered.
“Took over SUMI’s system,” said Gabe. “No time to wait for recharging. Need to give you instructions.”
“I’m ready!”
“Okay. Right now, I’m scanning SUMI’s code to find the bit that unlocks the door. Stand by.”
Piper stood by—or rather, sat by. Her heart was going fast—she measured her heart rate, just to have something to do. Pulse of ninety-one. Super fast. She was about to get out of here!
She heard Gabe muttering to himself. “If this is…but then where’s…hmmm.” He spoke again. “Pretty dense piece of programming here,” he said. “But I think I’ve got it. This should open the door.”
“Tell me!”
“But wait, Piper. I have to explain the plan for when you get out of the training room.”
Piper couldn’t bear to wait. “I want to try the door!” she said. “Right now! Give me the numbers. I have to see if it works, I’ll just open the door and close it right up again. Then you can tell me the rest.”
“You’re sure no one’s out in the hall?”
“I’m sure! Lunch isn’t for another half hour at least!”
“Okay. Try this: on the console, press zero-zero and then a capital T-R and then enter three-star-eight-star-nine-six-four.”
Piper hovered over the blinking lights of the SUMI control panel. She followed Gabe’s directions. Press here, press there, enter numbers. Then she zipped to the door and waited. A few clicks sounded from the lock mechanism. Then a sort of clunk. Then nothing.
She waited.
The door stayed closed. “It didn’t work!” she told him.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll keep trying. Back to you soon.”
—
In the training room with STEAM by his side, Gabe roamed through the intricacies of SUMI’s brain. Whoever had written these programs had been a weird kind of genius, he thought. He kept running into complex loops and clever cryptics. It was a real puzzle. Huddling over the screen was giving him a pain in the neck, but he had to keep at it. The Tundra team would be ready for pickup around one thirty, unless they were delayed. To be safe, he’d tell Piper to be ready for rescue at one. He could surely have the Cloud Cat back in time for the Tundra pickup.
Behind him came the sound of footsteps. He was startled for a moment, and then relaxed. It wasn’t the thump of human feet. It was the tap-tap of dog feet. Rocket came up alongside him and pressed his head against Gabe’s leg.
“Hi, boy,” Gabe said. “What’s going on?”
Rocket looked up at him with his shining brown eyes. He gave a couple of quick little barks, like questions.
Gabe scratched Rocket’s ears. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll play with you. But I have to get this job done first. Can you wait about five minutes?”
Rocket sighed and lay down on the floor.
“Good dog,” said Gabriel. He went back to studying SUMI’s programming. In several places, he saw the word trngrm, which must mean “training room.” He also saw the word lock here and there. If he could just figure out what this line meant and how it connected to that line…
He worked at it a few minutes longer and came up with three possibilities. He couldn’t tell which—if any—might be right.
He spoke into the transmitter. “Petunia, are you still there?” I have new codes for you to try.”
“Ready,” Piper spoke into the transmitter. She was on fire with eagerness.
Gabriel read out the string of numbers and letters and symbols. Piper entered them on SUMI’s console. As before, the door’s lock made a couple of clicking sounds but stayed firmly closed.
“Okay, here’s the second one,” said Gabriel.
Piper’s finger was poised over the keyboard. But at that moment, there was a knock at the training room door. Rap-rappa-rap-rap. The mealtime knock. But it wasn’t lunchtime, was it? Piper checked the clock—she was right. Why were they bringing lunch early?
Piper froze. A voice called, “SUMI! Where are you? Open up!”
It was Siena’s voice.
Piper whispered frantically to Gabriel. “Wait! Don’t say anything.”
“Why—”
“Ssshh!” Piper hissed.
Again came the knock on the door. “SUMI!” This time it was Niko’s voice.
SUMI, nonoperational for the moment, didn’t respond.
Piper held her breath. Go away, go away, she said silently.
Many seconds went by. At last, the knocks and the voices stopped. Piper waited a few more seconds. “Okay,” she said to Gabriel. “I think they’ve left.”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Early lunch, for some reason. Now tell me!”
He read her the second code.
She tried it out. Click. Click. Clatter-clatter. She heard the lock snap open.
She didn’t open the door, though. What if Niko and Siena were still out there? She dashed back to the console and whispered, “It worked.”
Gabe cheered, but quietly. They had to be careful now and work fast. “Okay, Piper,” he said. “First, lock the door again so no one knows you can open it. Just run the same code, only backward.”
Piper did this, and she heard the lock clunk into place.
“Done.”
Gabe went on. “Here’s the main thing: timing is going to be crucial. You have to get out without being seen by SUMI or anyone else. You have to get yourself to the Light Blade engine room. And you have to be there by thirteen
hundred hours. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Then what?”
“Then you wait. At exactly thirteen hundred hours, I will be there in the Cloud Cat. You’ll be able to see me from the rear window. As soon as you do, open the outer landing dock door. That should be easy—it looks like it should work the same way as the one on the Cloud Leopard. I’ll be there with the transport ship.”
“Okay,” Piper said.
“When you hear me come in,” Gabe went on, “open the inner door. After that, you just hop in and I take you back home.”
Piper said, “Yaaaay!” Excitement surged through her. Her voice rose to a happy shout. “I’ll be there!”
“See you soon,” said Gabe, and he disconnected.
SUMI jerked awkwardly once or twice. “Temporary malfunction,” she said. “Running program check.”
Piper looked at the clock again. She had thirty-seven minutes to wait before she could make her break for freedom.
Slipping in the snow, tumbling down and rising again in an instant, slapping waist-high drifts out of their way, Dash and Carly ran for the Streak. The ice crawler, made for snow travel, came after them. It was fifty feet away, forty feet, closer and closer.
The Streak was just ahead now. They reached it, flung the doors open, and jumped in. Carly hit the start button—and the engine made a choking sound and died.
“Try again!” Dash cried. “I got that pipe cleared!”
Outside, the ice crawler came closer, humping up and thinning out, like a strange sort of whale dipping and rising through a vast white sea. It slithered forward, not with the smooth glide of a snake but by bulging and stretching, hauling itself across the snow at a speed amazingly fast for such a great monstrous blob of a thing.
Again, Carly pressed start. “Come on, come on,” she urged. The engine coughed, but still the Streak didn’t move.
And then the ice crawler was upon them, right beside the passenger window. It swelled itself up into a great wobbly mound, thirty feet tall at least, with its tail thrashing and its mouth gaping. Its shadow fell across the Streak and darkened the light inside.
Escape the Vortex Page 6
