by Holly Hook
At last, after sliding down the final stretch, Matt emerged from the vent and stood. I did the same, finding the theater empty except for the old man, who sat and stared at the now-off holo-screen as if he had just watched whatever movie it played again. The guy didn't even look back at Matt and me. Instead, he had gone deeper into insanity.
“We deserve it,” he whispered to himself over and over.
“Hey,” Matt said. “What's this final plan the Grounders are talking about?”
The old man repeated that same sentence over and over. He was gone. I pulled on Matt's sleeve. “We might not get a straight answer,” I said. “I know how people work.”
“He's not like your parents,” Matt said. “He can tell us what the Grounders are planning.” With each word, he elevated the volume of his voice. Then Matt walked over and stood in front of the empty screen. He gripped the guy's shoulder and lifted him out of the chair, but with some effort. “What are the Grounders going to do to us?”
The old man trembled. “They are saving the planet! They will unleash a wave of death across the world. Those on Mars are lucky!”
“What wave of death?” I asked, joining Matt in standing in front of the screen.
The old man faced me with wide pupils. They looked like pits into terror. “We should be on Mars!” he shouted. “We have done wrong. It is about time they come for us! They have waited for billions of years!”
"Stop talking about Mars," Matt shouted. "Tell us what the Grounders are going to do."
“It's hopeless,” I said to Matt. “We're wasting time. We need to open that storage room, grab a spade, and dig. If we can't convince the radicals out there that they need to work with us, we're going to have to steal their stuff and attack the Great Council before they decide to unleash this plan.”
Matt let go of the guy's shoulder. He slumped in the chair and stared at the wall again. Even if he managed to give us the truth, he'd disguise it in riddles. The guy reminded me of some zealot seeking penance. A cult member, maybe. Matt and I needed to keep an eye on him.
In silence, I pulled Matt out of the room and out into the still-empty Mars Exhibit.
“We've got to do something about that guy,” I said, hating that I was suggesting this.
“I agree,” Matt said. “He's going to get us discovered. I think we should shut him in the office as soon as we get the chance. But first, we have to get into the maintenance room and see what we can find. It won't do us any good to paralyze him right now.”
“It would shut him up,” I said.
“For a few minutes,” Matt said. “He's old. Shocking him too many times might be too much for him. We get the office ready, and then we shock him, and then we drag him in there.”
“Good idea,” I said.
We walked through the Mars Exhibit and the Solar System room and into the little hallway with the gift shop. There was one problem: Matt had put a hole in the glass of the office door with the meteor that still sat on the floor.
“That's not going to hold him,” I said.
“I just realized that,” Matt said. “We might need to put him in the maintenance room, but that would be less comfortable. We'll let the guy out as soon as we're able. We won't keep him in there forever.”
I still didn't even like that idea. The old man was a danger to everyone around him and a possible help to the Grounders. Maybe they liked him, or they'd struck some deal with him. He thought we all deserved to die, after all, because some aliens wanted our home. The attitude should be the other way around. The Grounders should have to leave, not us. Some people were backward. Maybe the guy had that syndrome where people started to care about their captors.
We had to try about twenty different key cards before one made the lock on the maintenance room door click. I wanted to check on the new cylinder outside, but I heard no sounds yet, so I assumed that the occupants hadn't yet gotten out. The thing might still be too hot. No crunching of nanobots floated in, but I wouldn't know for sure until I peeked out of that hole.
At last, the door came open after some pushing from Matt. It seemed that he was getting his strength back. Already, his arm muscles looked a little more defined. He'd look normal in no time. Well, as much as a green boy could. I wondered if there was a cure for the plant cells.
I was getting too optimistic.
The room was dark, but a light turned on automatically as we entered. There was so much equipment in the place that I got overwhelmed just looking at it all. A couple of small forklifts sat on the opposite edge of the room while shovels (bingo!) and power tools rested against a metal cabinet. I didn't know how to use most of this stuff, but it didn't look too hard to figure out. Dad used a lot of this type of thing, but he liked to keep the tools primitive if at all possible. Just eyeing all this stuff made me wish he was here, but he was still captive at the Great Council.
I grabbed an ordinary shovel and saw another problem. “I don't know if I can get through that hole with this,” I said. “You need to put some strength into digging with one of these, and I'm not going to have the leverage while I'm on my stomach.” Dad had to use his feet to drive the shovel into the ground. I had watched him plenty of times.
“I think you're right,” Matt said. “We still need the stuff to support the tunnel. Look around.”
In the end, we found a whole supply of electric saws, a jack (yay!) and those little garden spades that the museum people had used for the sand in the Mars Exhibit. By the time Matt and I finished taking inventory, I was feeling pretty good about our survival chances. Our risk had paid off.
“I'm hungry,” Matt said. “We should eat before we get to work.”
I yawned as incredible fatigue washed over me. “I don't remember when I slept last. It might be a problem.” I hadn't slept for the entire night, and now I must be over twenty-four hours without sleep. Even in my state, I knew that working with power tools like this wasn't a good idea. The room had begun to spin around me, slowly as if it were tilting back and forth. Not good.
“Take a nap in the office if you need one,” Matt said.
“We can't stop,” I said. If we slept, then the radicals outside would emerge and build their walker in a matter of a couple of hours. Once they took off in that, we'd miss the boat. And worse—the Grounders might find us. We still had the crazy man to deal with, too. “I might just get some energy tabs. Lin stayed awake for three days one time during test week.”
“That's brutal,” Matt said, stuffing a couple of screwdrivers into a bag. “Can you get me some, too?”
“Sure,” I said, stepping out of the maintenance room.
I had to peek outside.
Just one little peek. We hadn't looked in what felt like two hours. A lot could have changed.
I didn't realize that day had turned to night. When I first crawled into the tunnel and under the chair support, I had the light from the Solar System museum and the holographic sun, which made it look like daytime. But when I crawled into the tunnel, I remembered that night had fallen. The thought of crawling towards radicals in the dark was a little unnerving, but I feared them less than the Grounders. Radicals wouldn't attach blobs to my neck that would take over my brain.
Would they?
I had to crawl on my stomach, which I'd had enough of for a lifetime. The reek of smog overtook me, and I spotted the remaining light from the monorail station first. The bulb hung there, illuminating the part of the track that stayed together. Only about a meter away from it, the crater plunged, and my gaze followed the deepening dark down to the cylinder.
And this time, there was movement.
I held my breath, which wasn't difficult in the smog, and let my eyes adjust to the new scene. The twisted metal beams that looked like mangled stick men remained, but this time, other things moved among them. I listened for the mechanical clicking of the mining spider, but it never came.
Instead, monotone voices floated up.
Grounders.
They had ma
de it down into the crater. Now I knew why the spaceport had somewhat emptied out.
I slipped my pollution mask over my face. The air improved, but nothing else did. The Grounders continued to mill about, waiting to greet whoever came out of the cylinder. The top lid remained screwed on, but I couldn't see whether anyone had opened the side hatch.
The monotone voices all droned together as the Grounders spoke among themselves. I couldn't make out any words from up here, but one of them turned on a flash beam and wove it around the crater, showing the twisted magnet rails and other debris. I scooted back as the flash beam rose along the sides of the hole, illuminating the dirt and stone that the landing had carved out.
Why were there so many Grounders here? They knew the radicals were helping them—for now.
Light flashed across my spy hole and vanished, allowing me to scoot forward again. The man propped the flash beam up on some twisted metal—a piece of the museum dome that had fallen into the crater. The light fell on the rest of the bottom.
About three dozen Grounders had crawled down into the pit, including some of the new ones in civilian clothing. I spotted Toni, the vendor, milling around with them. His face was blank. It looked like a mask and not Toni himself. All traces of who he was had vanished.
I wanted to cry.
Not only with the realization that some of these Grounders had been fellow human beings less than an hour ago, but also with the discovery that Matt and I were, despite our best efforts, still trapped.
Chapter Nine
“Matt,” I whispered once I got to the maintenance room.
He looked up from a set of tools. “We're screwed, aren't we?”
“You can say that,” I said. “I figured out where all the Grounders went while we were crawling back through the tunnels.”
Matt let his forehead bang on the cabinet. A couple of screwdrivers bounced. “They're around the cylinder."
“I saw about three dozen of them,” I said. “The guy I used to buy breakfast from is out there.”
He peeled himself from the cabinet, leaving the tools. “They can't stay out there forever,” he said. “We're just going to have to wait.”
“But we can't do that,” I said. I had thoughts of racing back to Space Port Nine, but then I remembered the gas and the fact that we had no masks for that. As soon as one Grounder saw us, we'd get knocked out. I might wake up with a blob attached to my neck—if any part of me would survive something like that. In that case, I might not wake up at all.
“I know you're worried about your parents,” Matt said.
"I don't want my parents to get turned," I said, struggling to hold tears back. "They wouldn't be my parents anymore."
“Do you want to hear what I know about the Grounders?”
I stood there for a second, thinking. “About how those things invaded? Why they invaded? I think we figured that out.”
“No. My dad knew a lot about them. He used to...work beside them, like the crazy old man back in the theater.”
“Oh. The scientists.” I was glad to distract my thoughts from the growing terror, but I also knew that Matt would tell the truth.
“When the Grounders take people over, they wipe their memories,” Matt said. “When my dad still worked here on Earth, he had to refresh the new Grounder scientists on things. He said that it drove him nuts. They didn't keep any of the knowledge from the people they took over. They can control our brains and speak our languages thanks to our contacts, but they can't access what made a person who they used to be.”
“I was afraid of that,” I said.
“What that means is that the Grounders won't extract your parents' memories by attaching to them,” Matt said. “As long as your parents don't tell them what they want to know about Fiona's plan, the Grounders won't take them over. Your mother might know this. Who knows what's on that tablet of hers?”
“You could have told me this earlier,” I said. A flare of anger rose inside of me. The information would have made me feel a lot better.
“We were busy surviving,” Matt said.
“True,” I said. “That doesn't mean that the Grounders won't torture my parents. That Great Council guy told my mother that they'd take the information they needed from them.”
“I don't know if Grounders torture,” Matt said. “They don't have a sense of revenge.”
“They want to kill us all,” I said. “I'd call that revenge. But for what?” I realized that what I said didn't make any sense. We hadn't done anything to the Grounders. Well, as a species. They had come here and started pushing us aside to make room. If anyone should take revenge, it should be us.
Matt sighed like he wanted to say something, but he held back for a bit. “We'll need to wait in here, either way,” Matt said. “Once the radicals get out of the cylinder and join the Grounders, we might be able to get in and see what supplies we can find. If there are any nanobots left over, we can build another walker for us. Then we can head over to the Great Council.”
“You sound hopeful,” I said.
“It's possible,” Matt said. “I believe you when you said that we might starve first, though.”
“We have food for over a week,” I said. “The radicals should be out of that crater by then. I don't think they came out yet.”
“We have to stay here,” Matt said. “I don't think any gas pipes out into this room, but it does in the Mars Exhibit.”
“The old man,” I reminded. The room spun again. I needed sleep. It looked like I wouldn't have a choice now. We had all these things to do, and a growing part of me wanted to crash right here on this floor. It wasn't like I had a choice. The universe had given me a chance to rest, and I had better take it.
It wasn't like I could do anything else.
Matt and I were both too exhausted to go and shock the old man. He seemed to be behaving, watching his movies. Just to be sure, Matt went to check on him. He walked through the Mars exhibit, leaving me alone for a bit.
It was creepy with him gone. The planets continued to orbit the fake sun as if everything were all right. The museum people had made Earth look very green, unlike the murky browns and reds that made up the planet's land mass now. Grounders hadn't designed that part, then.
But Matt returned. “Our friend is sleeping in front of his movie,” he said. “We should go get some rest. There's nothing we can do right now. Maybe by the time morning gets here, those Grounders will be gone.”
He was right. All we had was a knife and an electric baton. It would do little good against three dozen Grounders. If we still had the heat gun, we could take out all of them from above. I could roast every single one of them, including the one that had erased Toni. There might be a heat gun or two inside the cylinder, getting made, but that didn't do us any good.
So Matt and I retreated to the gift shop. The first thing Matt did was gather up the Mars T-shirts and throw them under the desk. I didn't blame him, because I didn't want to look at them, either. We made twin mats out of Venus T-shirts and folded up some Saturn and Jupiter shirts to use as pillows. I was so tired that I didn't care if Grounders found us lying here in the gift shop. We figured that if they were on their way, the old man would run around screaming. That would wake us in no time.
My nightmares filled with Grounder tentacles and a black-robed man who looked like the Grim Reaper.
* * * * *
When I woke sometime later, I had no idea what time it was. The lighting in this place never changed. Instead, I found myself looking at the ceiling of the Solar System Museum gift shop. T-shirts of Neptune hung on the wall beside me. I needed a shower. Wasn't there one inside the maintenance room in case of chemical exposure?
To my relief, there was. After checking the theater to find the old man still sleeping in his chair (and yes, he was breathing) and spotting no one else in the museum, I went into the maintenance room and pushed a chair up against the door. I didn't want anyone barging in.
All I had was some industrial
soap, but it got the job done. I smelled and felt better when I stepped out of the shower and found Matt getting around when I returned to the gift shop. We still had to check and see how many Grounders were outside, and whether or not the radicals had emerged, but getting clean had taken priority. At least, in my world, it had.
Matt went inside and showered, while I crawled through our makeshift hole. The faint daylight filtered through the wreckage now, though it was tinted green and yellow, and I had to pull my pollution mask over my face. The air inside the museum was mostly fresh, but I wasn't going to take the risk of coughing and giving away my position.
Crap.
I could see more clearly now, but that only made things worse. The same three dozen Grounders stood in the crater, milling around and speaking with each other in low voices. At least, I thought it was the same three dozen Grounders. Most were Task Force people, but Toni was still down there, standing at the side of the crater among twisted pieces of magnet rail. The cylinder remained as it had the night before, unopened as if the occupants were scared of the Grounders. I saw no signs of nanobots scurrying around the crater, no swarms of little dust specks. Even from up here, I should have noticed something, but even after studying the shadows, it was evident that they weren't out and about.
It was strange. None of these Grounders had a pulse cannon. The occupants could easily roast a whole bunch of them with heat guns if they wanted, or they could drop some of that black vapor. It would smother all of the Grounders in no time, gathering on the bottom of the crater.
That was if the people inside the cylinder were against the Grounders. Maybe Fiona had taken back her operation and started to send us help. The flow of radicals might have stopped, and Celeste was the only one walking around right now. Total confusion stole over me.
But if they were radicals, why hadn't they come out yet?
I went back and told Matt the news. He was just coming out of the maintenance room, wearing a Saturn T-shirt today. At least this place had clean clothing.
