by Mark Alpert
She takes another step backward, retreating to the corner of the bomb bay. “Adam, we talked about this. I told you how I felt.”
“I know, I know. But I’m really worried.” I point at the huge cone hanging from the bomb rack. “We’re about to do something so dangerous that it’s almost suicidal. Just getting to the Snake-bots will be risky enough. And who knows what’ll happen once we’ve transferred to those machines?” I flail my Quarter-bot’s arms. The conversation is making me frantic. “I mean, where will we go? And how will we stay in contact with Marshall and Shannon? It’s a little terrifying, don’t you think?”
Amber says nothing at first. She’s probably as confused as I am. After pausing for a couple of seconds, she tilts her Jet-bot’s head. “All right, I get it. You’re worried. But why do you want to share circuits? You haven’t explained that part yet.”
“I need some reassurance. I need to know that we’re a hundred percent committed to each other, so we can tackle this challenge together. And I was hoping you could show your commitment by sharing those memories with me.”
She tilts her head in the other direction. She looks quizzical, perplexed. “I will share them with you. That’s what I promised. But like I told you, I need more time to prepare myself. I thought you were okay with that.”
This isn’t going well. I have to be more direct. “There’s another reason for it. I want to be absolutely sure you’re not hiding anything from me.”
Amber pauses again, this time for almost ten seconds. With no words coming out of her speakers, the other noises in the bomb bay seem to grow louder. The B-2’s engines rumble and whir. The wind whistles beneath the bomb bay doors.
She finally raises her Jet-bot’s arm and points at the bulkhead, specifically at the hole leading to the cockpit. “Zia put you up to this, right? Because she doesn’t trust me?”
“Well, she—”
“What’s her problem? Does she think I’m plotting something? Scheming against her?” Amber hasn’t bothered to switch to her radio. In fact, she raises the volume of her speakers. She wants Zia to hear this. “Is she worried that I’ll try to take her place and become the baddest Pioneer? That I’ll choose the biggest and most powerful Snake-bot for myself? Is that it?”
“No, we’re just—”
“I can’t believe you’re siding with her!” Amber’s voice roars across the bomb bay, and the hollow steel cone vibrates like a bell. Her outrage definitely sounds genuine. “I thought you cared for me!”
Guilt corrodes my wires. I raise my Quarter-bot’s arms in a pleading gesture. “Of course I care for you! I’m just so confused right now. I—”
“How could you do this?” She clenches her hands into fists and smacks them into her Jet-bot’s torso. It’s like she’s trying to demonstrate how much I’ve hurt her. “When I told you about those memories, I thought you understood! I lost my mother in the most horrible way you can lose someone! Do you have any idea how that feels?”
I realize with a start that I do know how it feels. I also lost my mother in a horrible way. She didn’t die, but she removed herself from my life, suddenly and totally. And that’s kind of like a suicide.
I stride toward Amber, holding out my arms. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t—”
“No! Get away from me!” She steps sideways, dodging my Quarter-bot. Then she points again at the hole in the bulkhead. “Go back to Zia! Why don’t you share circuits with her?”
“Amber, please!”
“Get out of my sight! I can’t even stand to look at you!”
I can’t believe how badly I messed this up. Zia was right: I’m spectacularly terrible at relationships. And this fiasco is happening at the worst possible time. The B-2 bomber is approaching our destination.
I turn away from Amber and head back to Zia. We’re less than a hundred miles from the Snake-bots, and the three of us are ready to kill each other.
Chapter
19
At 3:55 a.m., the B-2 is flying on autopilot, just fifty yards above the Pacific Ocean. Amber, Zia, and I stand inside the hollow steel cone, waiting for the bomb bay doors to open. We’re not talking or exchanging radio messages. We’re not even looking at each other.
Because the lower half of the cone is solid steel, the upper half is like the inside of a shot glass. The concave floor is about four feet wide and the surrounding wall leans outward, slanting up to the circular rim of the cone, which is eight feet across. Our footpads are latched to the floor, and our mechanical hands grasp steel bars attached to the inside of the slanting wall. Our heads poke above the cone’s wide, open mouth.
My cameras are above the rim, so I can see the walls of the bomb bay. If I look up, I can also see the four thick cables that hold the cone in place, each attached to the rim by an automated clamp that looks like a steel claw. But because we’re all facing outward, I can’t see Amber or Zia, and they can’t see me either. And under the present circumstances, that’s fortunate. There’s so much anger and suspicion sparking in our circuits that anything could set us off.
If we were smarter, we’d talk it through. We’d make an attempt to work out our differences. But neither Amber nor Zia will open a radio channel with me, and I seriously doubt they’re communicating privately with each other. Maybe, if we had more time, we could figure out a solution, but the B-2 has less than an hour’s worth of fuel left in its tanks. And then there’s the deadline at 6:00 a.m., of course. If we don’t transfer to the Snake-bots by then, our minds will dissolve into random data. We won’t even be able to hate each other anymore.
With nothing else to do, I link my Quarter-bot wirelessly to the bomber’s electronic controls. I check the plane’s altitude and speed as it follows its programmed course, flying low and slow over the Pacific. We’re just ten miles away from the drop point.
At 3:56 a.m., the motors in the bomb bay start to whine. The doors below us swing downward, opening beneath the cone’s tip. I angle my Quarter-bot’s head over the rim of the cone and point my cameras straight down. I can’t see much through the open doors, even when I switch my cameras to the infrared range. The ocean is cold and black and endless. But my acoustic sensor picks up the noise of the waves, the low swells rolling across the vast waters.
The bomber bounces on a strong wind gusting over the waves. The cone sways on its cables, but after several seconds, it returns to its vertical alignment, its massive tip pointing directly at the ocean. Then, at precisely 3:57 a.m., the B-2 sends an electronic signal through the cables to the automated clamps. The steel claws spring open, releasing the cone’s rim.
Then we fall.
The cone plummets toward the water. I hear the rush of air around us as we accelerate downward, and my sensors detect the sudden weightlessness, the abrupt removal of the force of gravity on my Quarter-bot. I point my cameras up at the silhouette of the B-2, which is streaking west, still flying on autopilot. It looks like a jagged black triangle, blotting out the stars above it.
After three seconds, we hit the ocean at almost seventy miles per hour. I sense the impact and deceleration as the cone dives into the Pacific, its heavy tip piercing the surface and its slanting steel walls sliding into the water. I have a tenth of a second to lower my head and brace my Quarter-bot. Then the cone plunges completely below the surface and the cold seawater rushes over the rim and deluges our machines.
I close both of my hands around the steel bar, tightening my grip on the handhold. The swirling torrent lashes our robots, trying to rip us out of the cone, but we hang on to the structure as the seawater floods into it. Once the water surrounds us, the turbulence subsides. The cone, slowed by drag forces, sinks at a leisurely speed, only seven miles per hour, and we descend peacefully inside it. In half a minute, we’re more than a hundred yards below the surface.
I point my cameras up again and see nothing but cold darkness. But then I turn on my sonar, whic
h sends sound waves into the surrounding water and listens for echoes. The device analyzes the returning waves and creates three-dimensional images of the objects that the sound bounced against. Now I can picture Amber’s Jet-bot and Zia’s War-bot, both clinging to the inside of the cone, just like me. The echoes delineate their robots in such detail that I can see all the nicks and new welds in their armor.
The sound waves also travel upward from the mouth of the cone and bounce against all the sea life above us. I see a school of bluefin tuna, dozens of fish swimming in a diamond-shaped cluster. There’s a school of manta rays too and several sharks and sailfish and marlins. The fish get scarcer after we sink more than two hundred yards down, but I spot a few squid and swordfish swimming past. And when we reach a depth of four hundred yards, I glimpse an enormous sperm whale in the distance.
It’s such an amazing sight that I have to share it with Amber and Zia. I open a radio channel in the low-frequency band, which is good for undersea communications, and send a message to both of them.
Oh man, use your sonar to check out the whale! It’s a quarter mile to the west and a hundred yards above us.
Amber doesn’t reply, but Zia transmits a message on the same channel.
Nice wildlife spotting, Mr. National Geographic. But can we talk for a minute about this steel tub we’re in? Why didn’t your ex-girlfriend weld a lid on top of this cone? Wouldn’t we be better off in a watertight compartment?
Now Amber replies. She can’t resist Zia’s challenge.
Don’t you feel the water pressure? You do have pressure sensors in your War-bot’s armor, don’t you?
I check my own pressure sensors before Zia can check hers.
Whoa, it’s already up to six hundred pounds per square inch.
Yeah, I’m getting the same readings as Armstrong. Zia’s voice over the radio is needling, belligerent. That’s the point I’m trying to make. If we were inside a submarine or any other kind of watertight vessel, we wouldn’t have all this pressure on our armor.
Use your electronic brain, Zia. At this depth, a submarine would crumple like a soda can. But our robots were designed to withstand explosions, so their armor can handle this kind of pressure. And by the way, you should lower those armored caps over your camera lenses now. That’s why I made them.
Zia stops arguing. She may be belligerent, but she isn’t stupid. On my sonar, I see her War-bot’s hand rise to her turret and lower the caps over her lenses. Amber and I do the same, almost simultaneously, and I see an opportunity to make peace with her.
You did an amazing job, Amber. You really thought of everything. I don’t know how we would’ve gotten through this without your—
Shut up, Adam. You’re wasting your batteries.
A wave of anger and hurt swells inside my circuits, building up pressure like the seawater above me. I prepare a furious response, composing a stream of insults that’ll attack Amber in dozens of ways. I’m going to send her a hundred radio messages at once and reduce her Jet-bot to a quivering wreck.
But in the end, I don’t send her any messages at all. I close the radio channel and turn off my transmitter. Although I hate Amber right now, I’m even angrier at myself. I was so stupid to fall for her.
Meanwhile, the cone continues sinking. We descend more than a thousand yards into the Pacific’s midnight zone, a layer of seawater so deep that sunlight never touches it. I see no fish here and only one very strange-looking squid. It has thin diaphanous membranes connecting its tentacles, making it look like a floating umbrella.
After twenty minutes we reach a depth of two miles, and the water pressure climbs to five thousand pounds per square inch. My Quarter-bot doesn’t crumple, but some sections of my armor start to bend under the pressure. The steel in my torso creaks and groans. I clench my hands into fists to stop my fingers from warping. And still, we keep descending. There’s another mile to go.
Finally, after half an hour, the cone hits the seabed. Its heavy tip sinks deep into a layer of mud, and the impact jostles our robots. We’re more than three miles below the surface of the Pacific, in the near-freezing abyssal zone. The water pressure on my armor is three and a half tons per square inch.
I raise my Quarter-bot’s head over the rim of the cone so I can use my sonar to view the ocean floor. It’s an immense plain with a muddy surface composed of all the waste matter and dead organisms that have drifted down from the rest of the Pacific. But it’s not completely barren. Here and there I spot starfish and sea urchins and long, bristly worms.
Then I receive another nasty message from Amber: There’s no time for sightseeing, Adam! We’re ready to start drilling! Get your head down!
I pull back inside the cone and lean my Quarter-bot against the slanting wall. Amber and Zia also press their robots to the inside of the cone, attaching themselves firmly to the structure. Then Amber sends a wireless signal to the motors inside the cone’s tip. The mechanism extends the drill bits and starts rotating them at high speed. Their tungsten carbide teeth carve into the soft mud of the seabed.
At the same time, the motors open several vents in the steel floor inside the cone, where our robots’ feet are latched. A pump sucks seawater into these vents and shoots it down to the drill bits at the cone’s tip. The near-freezing water cools the drill and also blasts the mud out of the borehole it’s digging. Tons of sediment spray upward, showering the seabed all around us, and the steel cone slides down into the hole. Its enormous weight pushes the cone’s tip deeper, and the drill tears into the denser layer of mud below.
In less than a minute, the entire cone is underground. In two minutes, we’re fifteen feet below the ocean floor. The drill keeps blasting the mud upward, but now most of the sediment is falling back down into the open mouth of the cone and settling around our footpads. Five minutes later, we’re sixty feet underground, and the cone is full of porous sludge that envelops and buries our robots. The mud pins my Quarter-bot against the inside of the cone. I can’t move my arms or legs or head. But the drill keeps turning and we keep burrowing deeper.
I adjust my sonar so it can send and receive sound waves underground. It allows me to view Amber and Zia, who are stuck in the same position as I am, pressed by tons of mud against the inside of the cone. I can also view the layers of sediment above us, as well as the borehole we just carved through them. I’m shocked to see that the borehole is already collapsing, only minutes after we drilled it. The muddy walls of the shaft are caving in, plugging the hole in the seabed and dumping more sediment on top of us.
Dread chills my wires. Although we can keep drilling downward, we can’t drill back up to the surface. The cone is much too heavy for that. Our escape route is blocked. There’s no going back. If we can’t find the Snake-bots, or if we can’t transfer our software to them, then our robots will be buried in this muck forever.
After twenty minutes, we’re three hundred feet below the seabed, and the noise from the drill gets louder and sharper. We’ve dug through all the sediment at the bottom of the ocean, and the drill bits are now cutting through the hard bedrock beneath. The tungsten carbide teeth slash at the rock. They shave off slivers and chips that ping against the outside of the cone.
Our downward progress slows to a crawl, and the drill starts to drain more power from its batteries. They’re going to run out of charge in less than half an hour. The only question is whether the drill will break first. The drill bits whine as they rip into the bedrock. The motors clank and rattle under the strain.
Worst of all, I can’t use my sonar to see if we’re approaching the Snake-bots. My position inside the cone makes it difficult to send sound waves into the ground beneath us, because the cone’s slanting wall is in the way. And because I can’t detect echoes from any objects below us, I can’t search for Sigma’s machines. We’re relying on the Air Force’s map to guide us toward the Snake-bots, but now that we’re underground, it�
�s hard to pinpoint our own position. There’s a good chance we’ll burrow right past the machines. That would be a pretty pathetic end to our adventures.
And then, after another twenty minutes, the drill lets out a shriek of mechanical agony. The drill bits stop turning, the motors stop humming, and all the machinery inside the cone screeches to a halt. The underground world goes silent. My acoustic sensor picks up nothing except the groaning of my own armor.
If the drill won’t restart, we’re finished. We’re dead. We’ve buried ourselves in our graves.
I boost the power of my radio transmitter so its signals can penetrate the thick mud around my Quarter-bot. Radio waves can’t travel very far underground, but Amber’s and Zia’s antennas are only a few feet from mine. What happened to the drill? Did something break?
Amber answers: No, nothing broke. The drill ran into something it can’t cut through.
I thought you said it could cut through the bedrock?
It can. But the drill bits just hit something harder. She’s silent for a moment, deliberately leaving me in suspense. Can you figure out what it is? Want to take a guess?
Her voice isn’t mean or nasty anymore. It reminds me of the Amber I fell for, the sunny, confident girl from Oklahoma, ready for any challenge and afraid of nothing. In a millisecond, I know what the drill ran into.
Are you sure?
Absolutely. We’re sitting right on top of a Snake-bot.
Chapter
20
I can’t believe it. It’s a freakin’ miracle. My circuits pulse with relief.
I send Amber another message. Which Snake-bot did we hit? We’re only four hundred feet below the seabed, so it has to be the uppermost one, right?
Yeah, this Snake-bot is nearly horizontal and about a hundred feet above the other five. And we hit the machine only thirty feet from its front end, where its primary antenna is. Not bad, huh? I’m a pretty decent navigator, if I may say so myself.
