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Double Cross
Copyright © 2000 by Sigmund Brouwer. All rights reserved.
Previously published as Mars Diaries Mission 3: Time Bomb and Mars Diaries Mission 4: Hammerhead under ISBNs 0-8423-4306-7 and 0-8423-4307-5.
Double Cross first published in 2009.
Cover illustrations copyright © 1983 by William Hartmann. All rights reserved.
Designed by Mark Anthony Lane II
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
For manufacturing information regarding this product, please call 1-800-323-9400.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brouwer, Sigmund, date.
Double cross / Sigmund Brouwer.
p. cm. — (Robot wars)
This edition combines the contents of Mars diaries, Mission 3, Time bomb and Mars diaries, Mission 4, Hammerhead under title Double cross.
Previously published in 2 vols.
ISBN 978-1-4143-2310-7 (softcover)
I. Title.
PZ7.B79984Dm 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008034381
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Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09
8 7 6 5 4 3 2
THIS SERIES IS DEDICATED
IN MEMORY OF MARTYN GODFREY.
Martyn, you wrote books that reached all of us kids at heart. You wrote them because you really cared. We all miss you.
FROM THE AUTHOR
We live in amazing times! When I first began writing these Mars journals, not even 40 years after our technology allowed us to put men on the moon, the concept of robot control was strictly something I daydreamed about when readers first met Tyce. Since then, science fiction has been science fact. Successful experiments have now been performed on monkeys who are able to use their brains to control robots halfway around the world!
Suddenly it’s not so far-fetched to believe that these adventures could happen for Tyce. Or for you. Or for your children.
With that in mind, I hope you enjoy stepping into a future that could really happen. …
Sigmund Brouwer
Contents
Journal One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Journal Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Science and God
Journal One: Can We Expect Science to Be Our Savior?
Journal Two: Why Do Bad Things Happen?
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
On the side of the cliff, I hung from a thin metal cable. Hundreds of feet below, the jagged red rocks of the Martian valley floor pointed up at me like deadly spears.
The temperature had risen from minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit to a nice, warm minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Wind pushed at my body, making me sway from side to side. But it could have been worse. I could have been stuck in a sandstorm, with grains of sand hitting me at 60 miles an hour, rattling off my titanium shell and blinding me completely.
As it was, I had a good view. On Mars at midday, when the sand isn’t blowing, the sun is blue against a butterscotch-colored sky. The clouds are barely more than stretched-out strings of fog, lighter blue than the sun.
I could look across the entire valley and see the oranges and reds of Martian soil. Nearly 10 miles away, a gigantic dome held all 200 of the scientists and techies who founded the first colony on Mars. Under that dome were oxygen and water and warmth and food, all the things humans need to survive.
Out here? There was no oxygen. No water. No warmth. And no food. My robot body didn’t need any of that.
Of course, those jagged rocks waited for any mistakes. From where I was, it wouldn’t matter much that gravity on Mars is about a third of Earth’s gravity. If my grip on the cable slipped, those rocks would tear through my robot body like daggers. What made it worse was that I had a passenger strapped to my back.
My job was to make it to the bottom of the cliff with both of us undamaged.
At the top, the metal cable was attached to a long spike driven deep into the soil. All 300 feet of the cable dangled from this spike.
I held on to the cable with a gripper in each hand. Each gripper clamped the cable securely with much more power than I could have gotten by using just my fingers.
The trick was to unclamp the gripper in my right hand and hold on with the gripper in my left hand. Then I had to bring my free right hand down and reclamp at a level below my left hand. Once the right-hand grip was secure, I unclamped the left and reclamped it below the right. And so on. It was slow work that took a lot of concentration.
One thing made this easier. My lower body was on wheels, so all I had to do was let myself roll down the cliff. Slowly. Very slowly.
I was halfway down when it happened.
As I leaned against the cliff, my right wheel hit a loose portion of rock. It broke away, clattering down the cliff. My right side swung inward, spinning me sideways. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been clamping the cable with both grippers. But I was holding with only my left.
In panic, I grabbed at the cable with my right hand. Because I was spinning, I missed the cable and jammed my hand into the cliff. This pushed me away from the cliff too hard. For a second, I was like a pendulum. With less gravity on Mars than on Earth, my action shot me six feet away from the side of the cliff and then banged me against rock on the return.
It felt like I’d been slammed with a baseball bat. Keeping my grip on the cable with my left hand, I fought to find the cable with my right. But I was off balance. Especially with a passenger on my back. My wheels began to roll upward on the cliff wall as the weight on my back pulled me upside down and backward.
The cable twisted more. Still I tried to find a grip with my right hand.
Nothing.
Then …
Snap. The buckle keeping the passenger on my back opened, and suddenly I had no passenger.
“Rawling!” I shouted as I watched the downward tumble of arms and legs. “Rawling!”
Seconds later
, there was an explosion of dust as the body smashed into the rocks.
I had failed my mission.
CHAPTER 2
I woke up blindfolded and on my back on a narrow medical bed in the computer laboratory.
“Rawling!” I called again. It had taken nearly half an hour to climb to the bottom of the cliff. And another 20 minutes to get back to the dome. Then a few minutes to get inside and park Bruce, the robot body, where it needed to be charged. “Rawling!”
Here in the lab I wore a headset too, so I couldn’t hear anything, not even my own voice as I shouted. My arms and legs were strapped to the bed so I couldn’t move. I was helpless until Rawling McTigre reached me. He was a doctor and a scientist who worked with me on my virtual-reality missions.
It took a few seconds. He lifted the blindfold, and I blinked against the lights. Next came my headset. We did all of this because it was important that nothing distracted my mind from operating the robot body.
“Thanks,” I said, glad I could see and hear through my own eyes and ears now. Not being able to do that was one of the things I didn’t like about being hooked up through virtual reality to a robot. But the advantages were great, especially to a kid who was unable to use his legs. Something had gone wrong during an operation on my spine when I was too young to remember, so now I was in a wheelchair. Yet because of that and a computer link in my spine, I was the only one who could explore the planet of Mars in a robot’s body.
“You all right, Tyce?” Rawling asked, concern on his face. “The signal was clear, and I got a video feed of everything that happened.”
“I’m all right,” I said. “But I’m afraid if this hadn’t been a test run, someone on Bruce’s back would be very dead right now. That crash-test dummy you rigged really did become a crash test.”
When the robot body had rolled to the base of the cliff, I’d found the dummy. It was—or had been—the weight of a human. But in the fall, the legs and arms had ripped off, and the jagged rocks had speared the body portion. I shuddered to think of what those rocks would have done to a real person.
“Mistakes are not always a bad thing,” Rawling said as he unstrapped me and helped me sit up. “From what I can tell, the dummy was positioned too high. We need to strap it lower, closer to the center of gravity.”
“One other thing,” I said.
Rawling arched an eyebrow, the way he always did when he wanted to ask a question. He’d been a quarterback for a university back on Earth when he was younger, and his wide shoulders showed it. Now his short, dark hair was streaked with gray. One of two medical doctors under the dome, he’d also recently been appointed replacement director of the Mars Project. It might sound strange to say that though he was in his mid-40s and I was only 14 (in Earth years), Rawling was a great friend. After all, until a month ago I’d been the only kid under the dome, so I didn’t expect friends my age. Also, Rawling had worked with me for hours every day since I was eight, training me in a virtual-reality program to control a robot body as if it were my own.
“You don’t need to worry about the strap,” I continued. “That’s not why the dummy fell away from me.”
He arched his eyebrow again.
“It’s the buckle,” I said. I pictured how it had opened. “While I was swinging, it banged into a piece of rock. That’s what released it. You need some sort of safety guard on it.”
“Good point,” Rawling said. “Very good point. I’ll get one of the techies to make the changes right away.”
What was his rush? I wondered. Today was supposed to be a normal school day for me, and Rawling had asked me to take time off to learn cliff climbing. “Rawling?”
“Yes?” He lifted my legs off the bed and helped me into my nearby wheelchair.
“Why are we doing this?” I asked. “I mean, you don’t expect that someday I’ll actually have to lug someone down a cliff?”
Rawling didn’t answer. Instead, he walked over to the computer and the transmitter and began to shut down the power.
“Rawling?”
He finally turned to me. “Tyce Sanders,” he said in a strange tone, “meet me in my office in five minutes.”
CHAPTER 3
Until recently, the director’s office had belonged to someone else. In the month since Rawling had taken over as director, he’d been so busy that he hadn’t made any changes yet. The framed paintings of Earth scenes, like sunsets and mountains, still hung on the walls. Blaine Steven, the former director, had spent a lot of the government’s money to get those luxuries included in the cargo shipped to Mars. But even a director didn’t get bookshelves and real books. Cargo was too expensive. If people wanted books, they read them on DVD-gigarom.
Usually I admired the framed paintings because no one else in the dome had them. This time, however, my attention was on Rawling.
“Tyce,” Rawling said from behind his desk, “I don’t want to believe what I think I’m seeing.”
“You’re seeing me,” I said with a grin. He seemed so serious that I wanted to lighten him up. “What’s hard to believe about that? You called for me five minutes ago, and here I am.”
“Very funny,” he said. No grin. “Let me get you a microphone and a crowd so they can throw tomatoes at you.”
“Tomatoes?”
As the only human ever born on Mars, I’d never been to Earth. But I knew tomatoes were something people on Earth grew and ate. I’d seen photos of them on my digital encyclopedia, but I’d never tasted them. And I sure couldn’t figure out why people would throw them at me.
“It’s an old Earth thing,” Rawling explained, obviously wishing he hadn’t started this. “When they don’t like a comedian or an actor, they throw rotten vegetables at him.”
“Hmm,” I said. “You sure tomatoes are vegetables? Some people argue that—”
“Not now. Please, not now.” Rawling stood and walked around his desk to where I sat in my wheelchair. “These are digital photos from the satellite,” he said, waving sheets of paper at me. Rawling meant the communications satellite that circled Mars. “If I’m seeing what I believe I’m seeing, you’ve got to promise to keep this absolutely secret. I’ll be making a public report as soon as possible, but until then …” He handed the photographs to me.
I studied them. Mars has nearly zero cloud cover, so unless a gigantic sandstorm is brewing, the satellite takes very clear photographs. They are sent by radio transmission to a computer here under the dome, then digitally translated into printouts of photos of the planet’s surface.
What I saw in the photographs were different shots of a valley. In real life, the soil would be red and brown and orange. The black-and-white digital printouts just showed different shades of gray. The satellite had provided long shots and closeup shots, all taken from directly overhead, some five miles above the surface of the planet.
“Wow,” I said. “Rocks and more rocks. This looks so scary I don’t think my heart can take it.”
Rawling sighed and squatted beside my wheelchair. “That,” he said, pointing to a square black rock in the center of one of the close-up photos, “is what’s truly scary.”
Sensing he’d had enough of my joking around, I didn’t make any more dumb remarks.
“Notice how absolutely smooth and square that rock is,” Rawling said.
Now that he mentioned it, I could see it was.
“You can’t tell from the photo, but it’s about the size of this office,” he continued. “Now keep looking. You’ll see several more.”
He was right. In the jumble of boulders in the valley, I counted four more of those strangely smooth, strangely square gigantic rocks. “You’ve got me interested,” I said. “What are they? How did they get there?”
“Not so fast,” Rawling said firmly. He paced for a few seconds, then stopped. “First question: why haven’t we seen them before? I mean, our satellite has been circling Mars ever since the dome was established almost 15 Earth years ago. Suddenly this.”
&nbs
p; I thought of yesterday’s big event. A rumble had shaken the dome. It felt like an earthquake—marsquake—had occurred miles and miles away. Or like an asteroid had banged into Mars. Although no damage had been done, it had rattled things briefly, and it was all anyone could talk about—scientists in their labs, techies running the experiments for the scientists, me, Mom, Dad, and my new friend, Ashley Jordan.
“First answer,” I guessed. “It has something to do with that explosion we felt yesterday.”
“Exactly. There’s a lot of soil now exposed to the surface that wasn’t there before yesterday. In other words, those square black things were buried.”
“I give up,” I said. “What are they? How did they get there?”
Rawling shook his head. “All I can tell you is I’m nearly certain those black things aren’t a natural part of Mars.”
“They couldn’t have come from Earth,” I reasoned. “Otherwise we’d know about them already, right? I mean, the Mars Project is the first time anyone from Earth has landed on Mars. And if no one from Earth put them there …” I stopped, too afraid to say what I was thinking: If no one from Earth had put them there, who had done it?
Rawling read my mind. He nodded. “Now you understand why I don’t want to believe what I think I’m seeing.”
“Now I understand,” I answered.
“Which is why I called you here,” he said slowly as if he wished he hadn’t had to call me into his office.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Tyce, you can say no if you don’t want to do it.”
“No to what?”
“It’s absolutely imperative that we take a closer look at those things. The trouble is, it won’t be as easy as a practice run. Not considering where we need to go.”
That’s when Rawling went over his plan with me, step by step.
CHAPTER 4
“Why is there something instead of nothing?” Ashley asked me, hand on her right hip in her trademark pose.
I’d promised Rawling I’d return to work with him after talking through his plan with my mom, Kristy, a leading plant biologist, and my dad, Chase, an interplanetary pilot. But first I’d wheeled across half of the dome to return to where Ashley and I had been studying some math questions.
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