Final Battle (23 page)

I took the second baby step of my life. And the third. I tottered forward to the office door.

I was desperately hoping one thing. That Luke Daab had not risked raising any questions by being seen in my wheelchair. That he had jumped out almost as soon as he'd left the office.

I opened the door and peeked around the corner.

There it was. My wheelchair. I exhaled with relief.

I wanted to drop the heavy lead belt to be able to walk faster. But if I did, the headache pain would paralyze me. So I pushed ahead. It seemed I could hear every heartbeat as I made agonizingly slow progress.

Then, finally, I reached my wheelchair. I fell backward into it and dropped the picture frame that I had used as a cane.

Now I could move. I lifted my shield briefly. Pain zapped me, and I dropped the shield back into place. That told me Luke Daab hadn't yet released the gas.

I pictured him at the far end of the dome, hooking up the tanks of poisonous gas to the vent system.

I pictured the gas seeping into the air, an invisible killer, making this a dome of death.

I pictured Ashley and the other kids waking up in the morning, stepping outside their sealed dorm and finding all the bodies of the adults—Mom and Rawling among them.

I pictured Luke Daab forcing us to assemble the carbon-dioxide generators. The Manchurian fleet landing. And the Manchurians forcing all of us robot-control kids into slavery.

How much time did I have left to stop the release of the gas?

And what would I do about it? I wondered about rolling through the dome to yell out a warning. However, there were nearly 200 adults under the dome. Some were asleep. Some were working late or the night shift. No way would I be able to alert all of them, especially because Daab would hear me too. All he'd have to do was stun me with his neuron gun. In the confusion, he could slip away and return to the tanks of poisonous gas.

No, I'd have to stop Daab. But I was in a wheelchair. He was fully mobile and had a neuron gun.

Could Ashley help me? No, she was in the dorm. If I woke her and she opened the sealed entrance as the poisonous gas was released, all the kids would die too.

My thoughts spun wildly. What about somehow blocking the vents so that poison gas wouldn't reach anyone? Too many vents.

Wasn't there some way I could stop Luke Daab—and save the lives of all the people on Mars? Not to mention the future possibility of more people who would be able to make Mars their new home?

A minute later the solution hit me.

I turned my wheelchair and pushed hard toward the computer room.

The first thing I did was go to the wall and pull down an oxygen tube. I strapped it to my face. If I ran out of time, I didn't want my own body collapsing from the poisonous gas before I could accomplish my mission.

Second, I connected my spinal plug to a computer transmitter.

I guessed I was down to a minute.

I didn't waste time putting on a helmet. I'd keep my eyes closed and concentrate as much as possible. It was something I'd learned to do in emergencies.

The connection to my robot hit, and with it came that familiar sensation of falling, falling, falling… .

Earlier, Ashley and I had moved our robots back from the surface of Mars to just inside the dome.

When the robot's visual lenses opened, they showed her robot parked beside mine.

I directed the robot to shoot forward.

Now it had to be down to seconds before the gas released.

My robot whirred through the dome. I cornered and hit two techies who were walking slowly, deep in conversation. They bounced off the robot body.

“Hey! Hey!” they shouted in anger.

I kept going. I would apologize to them later.
If
I succeeded in saving their lives along with all the other adults under the dome.

My robot crashed through some plants as I took a shortcut. A scientist yelled at me.

I kept going.

Was it my imagination, or had a green cloud just been released through the vents?

Go, go, go!
I shouted in my mind.

Then I reached it. The place in the dome Daab had punctured earlier. A repair was in place, of course.

Short of a welding torch, there was only one way to break through.

And I had it. The power of a six-foot-tall titanium robot moving at close to 30 miles an hour.

I raised the right arm of the robot and stretched it out horizontally in front of me. Like a spear. I made a fist. I sped up the robot's wheels. And aimed.

The arm of the robot pierced the repair patch at top speed. As the titanium broke through, the robot body slammed into the wall of the dome. As it fell backward, half destroyed, I yelled
Stop!
and severed the connection between the robot and my own brain waves.

Although the video lenses no longer sent information to my brain, I didn't need the visuals of the robot to see if I had succeeded in puncturing the repair patch.

A great
whoosh
hit, as the atmosphere outside the dome began to suck out the air around me. It pulled a ribbon of green—the poisonous gas that had just started to settle downward toward the floor.

And best of all, the horns broke into full scream, sending an unmistakable warning to every person inside the dome to grab a nearby oxygen tube and strap it on.

All they would breathe until the poisonous gas cleared was life-giving oxygen.

CHAPTER 23

I stopped writing in my journal to think about that for a minute. The very thought made me shiver. I wasn't sure if even a guy like Luke Daab deserved that kind of an end.

Then I smiled and continued writing my update.

Mid-afternoon that day, the robots Ashley and I each controlled stood at the base of a great, gleaming copper globe, fully five stories above the surface of the red planet. We were surrounded by all the other robots controlled by the other kids. Even so, with nearly 50 robots in formation gathered at the base, the globe appeared overwhelmingly large.

Behind us were the dome's platform buggies. As many of the scientists and techies who could fit inside were staring upward at the carbon-dioxide generator as well.

Five minutes earlier, the robots had been swarming two half-assembled generators beside this one.

But the time had arrived—and nobody would be working for the rest of the afternoon.

After the equipment had been put aside and the noise from that died down, I could hear only the Martian wind— and the sand it carried, which tapped against the robots' titanium shells.

Dying sunlight bounced off the copper. Already stars were visible above the darkening horizon.

“This is it, Tyce. History.”

“I am glad you are with me, Ashley.”

It just seemed right, to be out here in the robots. And it made room for other people to be in the platform buggies.

Among them were Mom, Dad, and Rawling. None of us wanted to miss this.

Back at the dome, the chief engineer was activating the first carbon-dioxide generator. A little wisp of white cloud left the top of the copper globe. It was surprisingly undramatic.

“That's it?” Ashley's robot said to mine. “How is that going to fill the atmosphere with—?”

Then a great mushroom of white rose higher and higher, growing wider and wider until it filled the sky above us. It would pour out this gas day after day, year after year, along with the five other generators that we'd been working so hard to assemble. And soon enough, the carbon dioxide—trapped by the thin Mars atmosphere that already existed—would begin to trap heat. It was a miracle—the way that it didn't just float off into space. Instead it stayed—and would enable plants to grow. Once plants could grow, they would produce oxygen. In the meantime, it was enough hope for Earth to keep countries from going to war.

“Yeah,” I replied to her robot. “I guess that is it. Think it will work?”

The white cloud above us meant that millions of people currently on Earth would live. And in the centuries to come, millions and millions and millions more would survive—and thrive. It didn't mean all our problems on Mars—or the Earth's problems—were magically over. There were still years of work ahead—through developing new scientific theories that would lead to bigger, better technology; faster ways to move people between Earth and Mars; ways to help them adjust to a new world. But there was hope now for the future of humankind— enough hope to keep the peace. And all of us kids had had a lot to do with generating that hope. It was something we could be proud of.

Now some of the robot-control kids would choose to go back to Earth on the next spaceship, when Earth and Mars lined up in their closest orbits again. Others—like Ashley and me—could choose to stay. To make a place for ourselves and others in this exciting new world. A new world on a beautiful red planet.