Final Battle

by Sigmund Brouwer

  The sensation came.

  And I fell, fell, fell… .

  CHAPTER 11

  At the entrance to the dome, light entered the video lenses of my robot where it was parked. Through the robot, I saw movement everywhere just inside the entrance of the dome. The emergency patch had stopped most of the immediate air loss, but repair crews now had to go outside. Nearby, 10 men and women geared up in space suits carried various pieces of equipment as the inner door of the entrance slid open.

  If you can picture an igloo large enough to fit 10 people, with that short, rounded tunnel sticking out in front, you’ll have a good idea of what the entrance to the dome looks like.

  In our case, there are two large sealed doors to the tunnel. The outer door leads to the surface of the planet. The inner door leads to the inside of the dome. Between those doors is a gap about twice the length of a platform buggy, where one of them was parked.

  As I watched, all 10 crew members climbed the ladder and entered the minidome of the platform buggy. The inner door closed and sealed the dome again.

  The outer door opened. Instantly the warm, moist, oxygen-filled air from the tunnel turned into white, ghostly vapor and escaped into the cold Martian atmosphere. There was no danger to the rest of the dome, of course, because the inner door was still sealed to keep the dome’s air from escaping.

  The platform buggy rolled out onto the surface of the planet.

  As the outer door began to shut again, another crew member, who had already been outside, stepped into the tunnel chamber. He moved slowly because his bulky space suit made him clumsy. When the outer door sealed shut, he hit a button to open the inner door. A brief puff of vapor showed where Martian air was absorbed into the dome air.

  I guessed this crew member had been the first one out there to survey the situation.

  I was curious to know what could have penetrated the dome and caused the leak. So I commanded the robot to roll forward.

  The man kept walking away, so I sped up to get his attention. It didn’t take much extra speed. His space suit slowed him down considerably.

  He didn’t see me so I tapped him on the shoulder with the titanium robot fingers. The crew member tilted his face toward me. I didn’t see it. Space-suit helmets have extremely dark visors.

  “Hello,” I said. “I am Tyce Sanders. What happened out there?”

  The man stopped walking immediately. Now that I had his attention, I waited for him to pull off his helmet. After all, he was in the dome now. He didn’t have to worry about the Martian atmosphere.

  Instead, he did something strange. Still wearing his space suit, he wriggled his right arm free. The empty sleeve of his space suit hung at his side, but his right arm remained against his body inside the space suit, as if he were searching desperately for something.

  “Hello,” I repeated more slowly, just in case he hadn’t understood me the first time. “What happened out there?”

  I never got an answer.

  The man looked at me and then pressed something inside his suit.

  Instantly it seemed like a baseball bat had slammed against the side of my head. Not the robot’s head. But my head. Where I was lying in my body cast in the computer room.

  I screamed at the incredible pain but didn’t hear anything because my helmet blocked all sound.

  I screamed and screamed until, mercifully, the pain inside my brain must have knocked me totally unconscious.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Here’s what’s strange about the hole in the dome,” Dad said the next morning.

  The pain from my headache had been so intense that I hadn’t even woken up until afternoon the day before. And then I’d had to just lie there and rest, until Mom and Dad came to get me.

  Now the three of us—Mom, Dad, and I—were sitting in the small eating area of our minidome. Our minidome, like everyone else’s, had two office-bedrooms with a common living space in the middle. But Mom and Dad weren’t able to use their second room as an office because it had become my bedroom. We didn’t need a kitchen, because we never had anything to cook. Instead, a microwave oven hung on the far wall. It was used to heat nutrient tubes, or nute tubes, as we called them for short. Another door at the back of the living space led to a small bathroom. It wasn’t much. Compared to Earth homes, our minidome had less space in it than two average bedrooms.

  “Head height,” Mom said, sipping on real Earth coffee. I’d brought some back for her, knowing how much she liked it. “No asteroid would come in at that level. I also heard the clean-up crew didn’t find anything inside to show what had hit the dome with such impact. So what could have caused it?”

  Dad grinned. “It’s obvious Tyce got his brains from you.”

  She kissed his cheek. “And his good looks from you.”

  “Please,” I said, from the horizontal discomfort of my wheelchair. “I feel lousy enough in this body cast. Then to have you two mooning over each other like high school sweethearts …”

  They both laughed. They knew I didn’t mind that much.

  Dad took a slurp of his coffee. “Rawling tells me the hole was a perfect circle.”

  “Not an accident?” I said.

  Dad shook his head. “An explosive device is Rawling’s best guess.”

  “But who would do it?”

  “That’s another weird thing. The dome’s mainframe automatically keeps a time log. It doesn’t appear that anyone left the dome. It’s like someone had been camping out there, waiting to somehow punch the hole.” Dad paused. “That’s why Rawling would like to send you and Ashley out there to look around.”

  He grinned at the frown on my face. “Don’t worry. Rawling can wait until after your body cast is removed.”

  “You’re not going to like what you see, Tyce,” Rawling said gently, a couple of hours after breakfast. “Over eight months your muscles will have wasted away.”

  I lay face-down on a cot in the small, sterile, square medical room. A zipper down the back and one on each side held the body cast together.

  “Didn’t have much on my legs to begin with,” I answered. “And I’ll close my eyes if I don’t like the rest of what I see.” Although my words were brave, my stomach had the willies.

  “I’m also saying that without healthy muscles, you can’t expect to roll off this bed and walk out the door. It’s going to take some work before you find out if the operation was completely successful.”

  Different doctors had already warned me a dozen times that it would take a lot of painful physical therapy and endless hours of exercise. That didn’t matter. If I could walk, I’d gladly pay that price a million times over.

  “I’m ready, Rawling. Please, please, please, just unzip this stupid thing. I want out.”

  I heard him unzip the left side of the body cast. He spoke casually. “Ashley says she found you in the computer lab yesterday. Screaming. And then you passed out, and she couldn’t wake you up for several hours. Plus, your robot was abandoned at the entrance to the dome. Care to tell me about it?”

  I took a deep breath. “It was a bad headache that disconnected me. Don’t tell Mom or Dad. I don’t want them worried. I’m sure the headaches will go away.”

  Another zip. “Headaches? You’ve had more than one? Tell me as your doctor, not as a friend you don’t want to worry.”

  I told him. All of it.

  He unzipped the final panel of the body cast. “Have you had trouble with your vision?”

  “No,” I said. “Just headaches.”

  “At least that probably eliminates a tumor or something really bad. Let’s look into it once we get this done.” He lifted off the back and both sides of the body cast. Cool air hit my skin. I felt him place something over the middle of my body.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “A towel. It’s very encouraging that you felt it. It confirms that the splicing of your spinal nerves was successful.”

  I wanted to sing with joy—or, even better, dance. But
I figured that would take a while. If it was possible …

  “Keep the towel in place while I roll you over and off the front piece of the body cast,” Rawling said. “Then I’ll help you sit.”

  I was about to answer when someone knocked loudly on the door.

  “Hang on,” Rawling called. “Two minutes.”

  “It’s me,” a voice said. My dad’s voice.

  “Want him in?” Rawling asked.

  “Sure. As soon as you have me sitting.”

  That took another minute.

  And that’s how Dad found me. On a chair. Sitting. Wrapped in a towel around my midsection. With a blanket around me to keep me warm.

  “Toothpick, huh,” I said to them both. I opened my blanket and looked down at my body. After eight months in a cast, I was just skin and bones.

  “Wiggle your toes,” Rawling said.

  I was scared. What if only my toes worked? I wiggled them. They moved. But I wasn’t surprised at that. They’d moved when I was in the body cast. Without waiting for instruction from Rawling, I tried to swing my legs at the knees.

  I felt stabs of pain. Water filled my eyes. But not from the pain. “Did you see that?” I almost yelled.

  “It wasn’t a breeze, was it?” Rawling answered. “Your feet actually swung a little.”

  “Yes,” I said. I did it again. They moved only a fraction of an inch, but they moved. My legs work!

  Rawling cleared his throat a couple of times and looked at my dad.

  I saw my dad swallow hard, as if he were trying to say something. Then I realized he, too, was fighting tears.

  “I think,” Rawling said, his voice shaky, “that the operation was successful. But that doesn’t mean you can walk. Yet. Build up the muscles with exercise and go slow. Then you can learn to walk.”

  You can walk. What a sweet, sweet phrase. After a lifetime in a wheelchair, I could hardly believe it. I turned to Dad with a big smile.

  Dad’s face, however, was troubled.

  “Dad?” I said quietly, not understanding his reaction to the news that I could walk. Really walk! Didn’t he want me to be able to walk? Or was something else bothering him?

  “Tyce, I’m so … happy for you … for all of us. What great news!” he exclaimed finally. “I wish I could wait and let us all celebrate a while longer,” he said slowly and sadly. “But I just found out that we’ve lost all communication with Earth. The techie guys came and told me since they couldn’t find you.”

  “All communication? Impossible.” This came from Rawling.

  “They said the dome’s mainframe computer is malfunctioning,” Dad answered.

  “The hard drive can’t be down,” Rawling argued. “The rest of the dome is running fine. And we’ve got two backup mainframes.”

  “Rawling,” Dad answered patiently, “all I know is what the computer techies told me. Some virus has wiped out all the software in the communications segment of the hard drive. We can’t reach Earth. Earth can’t reach us.”

  “We’ve got backup software. They can reinstall it,” Rawling insisted.

  Dad shook his head. “It has disappeared. And with no link to Earth, there’s no way to download another copy.”

  The room went silent as we thought about what that meant.

  Rawling closed his eyes. “No communication with Earth. The Manchurian fleet approaches. How much worse can this get?”

  Dad coughed.

  Rawling opened his eyes and stared at him. “You’re telling me this can get worse?”

  “The surface-to-space missile system that arrived with us. We haven’t had time to put it in place, of course. But I don’t know if it will do any good. All the trigger devices are gone.”

  “Gone? Impossible. We’ve had that equipment securely locked down. And under video surveillance.”

  “That’s just it, Rawling. While you’ve been in here with Tyce, I asked to review the video surveillance from the minute the equipment was being unloaded up until now. No one has been near it here on Mars. It looks like the trigger devices were missing before I even brought the stuff down on the shuttle. But how could that be? Our last message from Earth confirmed that the trigger devices had been sent with the equipment.”

  “So you’re telling me the impossible.” Rawling rubbed his face. “Someone stole them in the six months of travel between Earth and Mars. In outer space. On an unmanned ship.”

  Dad nodded. “That’s about it. And now we’ve got a hostile Manchurian space fleet approaching, no communication with Earth, and no weapons to protect us.” He gave me a weak smile. “But at least Tyce should be able to walk soon.”

  I’m not sure it was much of a consolation if Mars was going to be invaded.

  CHAPTER 13

  Butterscotch sky. Blue sun edging over the outline of distant mountains. It was still morning, so wisps of blue cloud still appeared in the sky. They’d disappear when the day became warmer.

  There was no oxygen, and a wind of 80 miles an hour rattled sand against the titanium of our robots. It was minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

  That’s what it was like outside the Mars Dome as I rolled my robot body across the packed red soil with Ashley’s robot beside it.

  It was around 11 o’clock. Only an hour had passed since Dad had shared his grim news.

  Inside the dome, Ashley and I were hooked to the computers. As were all the other kids who controlled robots. They had sent their robots to the first carbon-dioxide generator site, a half mile away from the dome, to unpack the crates that held the equipment. This had been the first equipment unloaded by shuttle from the unmanned spaceships above us in orbit.

  The harsh Martian environment was the reason for the robots. Robots could work outside more easily and faster than humans in space suits. There was far less danger too. A hole in a space suit could mean death for a human. In fact, without the strength of the titanium robots and their ability to work outside, it would have been nearly impossible to assemble the generators. Engineers calculated it would have otherwise taken thousands of human workers, and the dome couldn’t sustain all those people.

  “I hope we find something that will help Rawling,” Ashley’s robot said to mine. We were hooked up by wireless audio. “Everyone is pretty nervous about the Manchurian space fleet.”

  “Maybe not everyone,” I answered. Ashley and I were directing our robots to the repaired puncture of the dome. “Perhaps someone is helping them from this end.”

  That was the reason for the communications breakdown. As we had found out this afternoon, someone under the dome had introduced the virus to wipe out the communications software on the mainframe. And that same person had stolen the backup disks. The same person who had found a way to get outside the dome and somehow put a small hole in it? But who? There were 200 scientists and techies, plus another 50 robot-control kids.

  We rolled our robots around the outer edge of the dome.

  “Here it is,” I said, pointing at the patch.

  The dome towered high above our robots, gleaming black in the weak sunlight.

  “Another thing I don’t get,” Ashley said, “is why. If Rawling is right and someone somehow got out of the dome to do this, what would it gain him or her? I mean, the emergency patch was in place in less than five minutes. And why try to harm the dome if you have to live in it too?”

  I didn’t have an answer, so I couldn’t give her one. Instead I searched the ground with the visual signals sent to my brain through the robot’s video lenses.

  All I saw were footsteps. Dozens and dozens. Which made sense. This was where the repair crew had spent hours putting the permanent patch in place. If one person had once stood here and done something at head height to cause the hole, his or her footprints were long destroyed.

  “Where are you going?” Ashley asked as I directed my robot to begin rolling away from the dome.

  “Just wondering if I can see anything better from a distance,” I answered. “I—”

  “You
what?”

  “Come here!”

  Ashley’s robot rolled to meet mine. We were less than 20 human steps away from the wall of the dome.

  “Look at these tracks,” I said.

  “Tire tracks. It’s where the platform buggy stopped. And here’s where everyone climbed down.”

  “Yes. But what about those footprints there?” My robot arm pointed away from the dome at a single set of footprints. “See? The footprints end at the edge of the platform buggy tire tracks. That means the footprints were there first. And the tire tracks ran them over after. And there’s something else.”

  “The footprints are walking toward the dome.”

  “Exactly,” I told Ashley. “And it’s the only set of footprints. So where did this person come from?”

  “That should be easy to answer. We just track the footprints backward.”

  We found the answer two miles away. Over a hill. Hidden from the dome.

  When we found the answer, we didn’t bother wasting any time. We disconnected immediately, leaving the robots near what we had found.

  Back in the computer lab, we took off our helmets and helped each other disconnect.

  Ashley helped me into my wheelchair since my legs were still so weak. Usually I insisted on pushing myself. Not this time.

  She raced my wheelchair forward, from the computer lab toward Rawling’s office.

  We had to talk to him as soon as possible.

  CHAPTER 14

  Forty-five minutes later, Mom, Dad, and Rawling stood behind my wheelchair in Rawling’s office. Ashley sat beside me. The lights were dim, and a large TV screen was flickering.

  “Ready?” Rawling asked.

  He must have taken our silence as a yes since he hit a button on his remote. The screen darkened briefly. Then it showed the eerie reds and oranges of the Martian landscape.

  I knew what we would see. This visual input had just been recorded through my robot’s computer. Because the robot was on wheels, it was a steady image. It showed the footprints that Ashley and I had followed. It showed the hill we had first climbed and then descended. And, on the other side, hidden beneath an outcropping, it showed what we had found.