Ambush (9 page)
My left hand and wrist hung uselessly.
“How was that?” Dr. Jordan asked Ashley. “Would you like to see more?”
“Please don't shoot him again,” I heard Ashley beg above the pain that seemed to roar in my ears. “Project 3 is in the top drawer of your desk.”
I lifted my head as if it had been jerked by a puppet string. I stared at her in shock that she'd told him. The last thing I'd done with the ant-bot before waking in my own body was scurry from the computer to the edge of the desk and drop in that drawer. Was she betraying me again?
“You're lying to me,” Dr. Jordan told her.
“No, I'm not. Your own office is the last place in the world you'd look.”
Slowly Dr. Jordan moved to his desk. He opened the drawer and bent over to see better. A second later he plucked something out and balanced it on his palm. He looked at it against the light. “It really
is
the ant-bot,” he said, grinning. “Clever. Very clever. Too bad you didn't remain one of us.”
“You've got what you want,” Ashley said. “At least let us join his mom and dad now.”
Dr. Jordan's grin widened. “Hardly. It's time for Tyce's execution. And if they don't release the prisoners on Earth, a half hour later you'll follow. After all, why waste good scientists and techies when I can get rid of the two who have made my life the most miserable over the past week?”
“No!” Ashley shouted. “I told you where to find what you wanted. You have toâ” She stopped shouting as Dr. Jordan pointed the neuron gun at her.
“That's better. Noise gives me such a headache.” Before facing the computer and satellite feed, he spoke to me one more time. “Time to make you a television star. It will be a performance to die for.”
Normally the person contacting Earth sat in a chair in front of the satellite feed, a simple black box with a small video lens.
But Dr. Jordan shoved the chair aside, returned for me, and pushed my wheelchair forward until I was a couple of feet away, staring directly into the eye of the camera.
“This will be so simple,” he said. “You're a sitting duck. Perfect height to catch all the expressions on your face.”
“I feel sorry for you,” I said.
It caught him off guard. “
You
feel sorry for
me
?”
“You think you're winning, but in the end you're going to die too. Because no one lives forever. When it's your turn, you'll have reason to be afraid of dying.”
During the oxygen crisis, I'd finally been able to believe the most important thing a person can learn. Dying doesn't mean the end, so dying isn't the worst thing that can happen to a person. Not when God is waiting.
He sneered. “Spare me that faith nonsense. No one has power over me. I'll do what I want for as long as I want. And that will last for years and years after you've turned to dust.”
Dr. Jordan turned his back on me. He had no reason to worry that I could do anything. Not from my wheelchair. Not unless he fell into my lap.
I had to twist my head to watch him step over to his computer. The satellite feed ran through a program on the computer. If the computer started properly, I truly was dead. I knew I'd need God's help through the last moments of neuron gun torture.
But if the computer wouldn't operate â¦
He snapped on the power button. I was hoping for a sizzle or pop, hoping the paper clip I'd struggled to lay across the power relay inside the computer box would short-circuit the system.
And I got far more than I hoped for.
Instead of a sizzle or pop, the entire computer screen exploded, sending a surge of blue light toward Dr. Jordan's stomach!
I think it was more the surprise than the electrical surge that threw him back.
He staggered toward me with a small yelp. He bumped into my wheelchair and began to fall.
Right across my lap!
What I wanted to do was push forward and fall out of my wheelchair and roll on top of him and somehow wrestle with him until he gave up.
But his weight changed that. He'd locked the brakes on my wheelchair and, braced from going backward, it flipped forward with his weight. Because I was trying to push forward too, it gave extra force.
Dr. Jordan's head hit the edge of the desk with a sickening thump. He tumbled to the floor, groaned once as he flopped a few times, then collapsed completely. Unconscious.
“His neuron gun,” Ashley said after a second of silent disbelief. “Can you get it from him?”
I, too, stared in disbelief. “Won't work for me. Each gun is matched to the fingerprints programmed into it.”
“We've got to do something. Fast. He could wake up any second.”
I stared at Dr. Jordan for another couple of seconds. His glasses had fallen from his face.
“Can you slide your chair this way?” I asked Ashley. “I think I have an idea.”
Ten minutes later, Blaine Steven walked into Dr. Jordan's office.
I couldn't see him. I could only hear his first words to Dr. Jordan. His voice was muffled to me. “I came as soon as possible. What isâ?”
I knew why he'd stopped in surprise because I could picture what he saw.
Ashley was standing near the computer with the busted screen. I was slumped in my wheelchair, my head down, in the robot activation zone of concentration, with the transmitter connected to my neck-plug. And Dr. Jordan sat in the chair where Ashley had been taped to the armrests. Only now Dr. Jordan was the one whose wrists were taped in place, his right hand holding the neuron gun, pointed at the doorway.
“Dr. Jordan!” Steven said. “Your face!” There was a pause. “Your nose!”
I could picture, too, exactly how it appeared to Blaine Steven. Dr. Jordan's nose had been duct-taped shut. That way he couldn't sneeze or snort out a blast of air. Otherwise, the ant-bot would be gone, and there would be no way to force Dr. Jordan to do as he'd been told.
I waited for him to follow the first step of our instructions.
A loud, angry yell reached me.
Step 1. Hit Steven in the legs with the neuron gun. Right on schedule.
“Shut up,” Dr. Jordan told Steven. Dr. Jordan's voice was loud to me. Very loud. “And do exactly as I say. Ashley is going to tape your hands together. Let her do it, or I'll be forced to fire another shot.”
“That's a ⦠that's a ⦔
“Yes,” Dr. Jordan said. “It's a neuron gun.”
“But. . . but ⦔
I wasn't surprised Blaine Steven sounded muffled to me or that Dr. Jordan's voice was loud and echoed weirdly. I was, after all, in Dr. Jordan's sinuses. That's right. Up his nose.
Seconds later I heard Ashley. “It's done, Tyce. He's taped. Wrists and ankles.”
Good.
Dr. Jordan was taped in his chair. Steven was sitting on the floor, also taped and helpless. They couldn't do anything to Ashley now.
“Give me the computer code that disables all the neuron guns,” Dr. Jordan said to Steven. “If you do, I'll send Ashley to your office, where she'll enter the code. And then you'll be safe.”
“Have you lost your mind?” came Steven's voice. I imagined his face growing red with rage underneath his thick gray hair.
“Give me the code,” Dr. Jordan said, “or I'll have to shoot again.”
“Jordan,” Steven said, “if I disable your gun, all the neuron guns under the dome will be disabled. What's gotten into you?”
Ashley giggled. “That's a better question than you know.”
If the ant-bot inside Dr. Jordan's nose had been capable of giggling, I'd have done it too.
Ashley continued to speak. “Tyce, give Dr. Jordan a reminder of why he should obey us.”
I did. Reaching out a robot arm, I pounded once inside the darkness.
Dr. Jordan moaned.
While Dr. Jordan had been unconscious, Ashley had moved her chair close enough to me so I could rip the tape off her wrists. I'd helped her as much as I could to move him into the chair, and she had quickly taped Dr. Jordan's wrists together, then taken the ant-bot and placed it on his upper lip.
I'd plugged in with the mini-transmitter and, in control of the ant-bot, had gone straight up Dr. Jordan's nose, past the nose hairs that seemed like fence posts. Then Ashley had taped his nose so he couldn't blow me out.
Let me be the first to say that the inside of someone's nose is as gooey and slimy as you can imagine. But I hadn't been able to think of anything nearly as effective. I'd traveled as far up his nose as possible, then waited for him to wake.
Minutes later, when he finally grunted himself back to consciousness, Ashley had informed him of his situation. From inside the nasal passage, the ant-bot's audio sensors had let me hear her threaten him.
“It's very elementary, Dr. Jordan. If the ant-bot goes up any farther, it can penetrate your brain. You don't want that, do you? Tyce, let him know you've got the ant-bot in there.”
That's when I'd done it the first time. Begun hammering the sensitive tissue of his sinus passage with both robot arms. He'd understood the message.
Then Ashley had given him the rest of his instructions, beginning with a call to bring in Blaine Steven.
It had taken only one hit on the inside of his nasal passage to convince Dr. Jordan he needed to follow the rest of the instructions.
I heard another yelp. This one from Blaine Steven again. As instructed earlier, Dr. Jordan must have shot him in the shoulder. Briefly I felt sorry for Steven. I knew what it felt like to be hit by a neuron gun.
“Now do you understand I'm serious?” I heard Dr. Jordan ask. “Give me the code to disable the guns.”
“Yes! Yes!” Steven whined. “I understand. You can have the code.”
He gave us the right one, the first time.
Which made the next part a lot easier.
“Hello,” I said to Dad. “Can you hear me?”
His head spun up and down and side to side, just like I'd done when I'd first heard the ant-bot's voice. I wished I could see his expression. But I was controlling the ant-bot, perched on his shoulder, lighter than a fly. And with only two lights burning in the entire large meeting room, I was nearly invisible on his jumpsuit. I was far too close to see his face.
“Can you hear me?” I repeated. From Dr. Jordan's office, it had taken half an hour to reach the meeting room with the ant-bot. I'd gotten lost twice. Going down corridors that seem two miles wide is a confusing thing.
“I can hear you,” he whispered with hesitation. “Unless I'm losing my mind. But who are
you
?”
In any other situation, I'd have been tempted to have fun with this. But I resisted. I was certain the hostages would all be safe soon enough, but I knew too well that Rawling was still stuck under tons of rock. The sooner the scientists and techies took control of the dome, the sooner the rescue attempt could begin.
“The guards can't stop you now,” I said. “Their guns won't work.”
Again, Dad's head spun from side to side. “Is this some ventriloquist joke? Who's playing games?”
“Dad,” I said, “it's Tyce. Really. I'd tell you where I am, but I'm afraid you'd knock me off as you look for me.”
“Tyce?” he asked. “Tyce?”
Before I could answer, Mom's voice interrupted. “Honey, quit mumbling. You'll wake the others around us.”
Dad said nothing. I could guess what was going through his mind. If he told Mom he was answering some voice that came to him from the darkness, she'd think he'd suddenly gone crazy.
“I'm real,” I told Dad, and then I used the words he always said to me. “Trust me.”
“Did you hear that?” he asked Mom. “It's a voice!”
“You're dreaming. Go back to sleep.” She patted his back and nearly knocked me off his shoulder.
Time to get serious, before the ant-bot was hurt.