Counterattack (6 page)

Nate paused. “I wasn't really doing it for the money. More to be left alone. He promised me he didn't mean you any harm, and I decided to take his word for it. I think I decided to believe him to make it easier on me. But I was just fooling myself. I mean, why does someone like him want to go to all the trouble to kidnap you guys?”

I could guess. It had something to do with robot control. But that wasn't something I wanted Nate to know.

“So instead of bringing you to him for whatever reasons he had in mind, I'm now promising to keep you away from him. That might answer all your questions. But only lead to more.”

“Like how did the general know all of this?” Ashley said. “And what does he want with us?”

“You said he showed up yesterday,” I added. “It wasn't until today that my dad got us out.”

Ashley nodded. “Tyce, it was only a half hour before you got out of your cell that I was called down and released. How could anyone have known a full day earlier all of this was going to happen?”

I still didn't even know who my dad had taken hostage and how he'd managed to do it. I wished I hadn't ruined Dad's note by falling in the water.

“Tyce?” Ashley prompted me.

I sure wasn't going to let Nate know what Ashley and I needed to do. Dad had stressed the importance of keeping it secret. Even though Nate was now helping us, it still didn't seem smart to trust him. Not until I knew how much of what he told us was the truth.

I found my voice. “I guess when we know who sent the general, we'll have all the answers.”

“Not
all
the answers,” Nate corrected me. “Because now you owe me some. Who are you two that my commander wants you so badly? What's with the stuff in the boat? Those robot contraptions? And why were you taken to this high-secrecy Combat Force prison in the Everglades?”

“Ashley,” I said, “Dad told me we had some money cards. Did you imprint them?”

“Yes. At least mine. Yours was already imprinted. I think they used a thumbprint from a cup you had handled in prison.”

That was good. Although I'd never used a money card on Mars, I knew how they worked. There was a special hologram place on the card that would hold only one thumbprint. Computers at banks, money machines, or store cash registers compared the thumbprint of the card with the thumbprint of the person with the card. If both prints matched, the transaction went through. If they didn't match, the reading machine immediately destroyed the card. This meant Ashley and I were safe from Nate. He couldn't just take our money cards and get rid of us. He needed Ashley and me to get the money.

“You're not answering my questions,” Nate said firmly.

“I'd like to trade you something else instead,” I answered. After all, Dad had said we had unlimited use of the money cards.

“What's that?”

As the darkness fell upon us, I gave Nate my best smile as I made my offer. “How much money will it take for you to help us get where we need to go?”

“Where would that be?”

I coughed. “Ashley?”

She gave Nate a weak grin. “We, uh, can't tell you. Yet.”

CHAPTER 12

Nate stared at the campfire. Ashley had fallen asleep in her sleeping bag. I sat to the side in my wheelchair.

I couldn't sleep. My arm itched, and there was a big lump on the surface of my skin. Nate told me it must be from the mosquito bite. I told him the mosquito had bitten me higher on my arm than that. When he laughed at me, I didn't bother going into detail about how that old man in the prison had jabbed my arm.

I watched the fire flicker beyond my toes. Nate had made sure to keep the fire as small as possible so it couldn't be spotted by military pursuers. Suddenly, surrounded by the hum of mosquitoes, I felt lonely and afraid. It was a different kind of fear than I'd felt when all those crises had happened under the dome on Mars—the oxygen leak, the hostile takeover of the dome, and when Dad, Director Rawling, and I had almost been blown up by a black box under our platform buggy. I'd been on Mars—a world I knew well—then. Now I was on Earth, an alien place for me. Dad was in a military prison. And Mom and Rawling, the only other two adults I could count on, were 50 million miles away.

Yet now there was so much for Ashley and me to do. She'd spent most of her life in something she called the Institute, where she'd received her robot training along with 23 other kids her age. She'd only been able to tell Dad and me a few things about it during the trip from Mars to Earth, and we had intended to wait for a secure Internet link to try to use those clues. But would that be enough for us to find it?

I wanted to start keyboarding my thoughts.

Starting tomorrow, we have only five days left of our countdown. If we find out where the Institute is, will that be enough time to reach it?

Even if we find the place in time, what then? How can we get in, if it's surrounded by guards? How exactly are we supposed to go about exposing it to the world through the media?

And what if we can't trust Nate? What will happen to Dad if we fail?

On Mars, I'd learned the habit of keeping a journal. I'd found it helped me sort my thoughts. I had the comp-board with me, and it was tempting to add to my journal now. Especially because I could analyze all the angles once they were written down. But I didn't want Nate to be tempted to take the comp-board from me and read the journal to learn more about Ashley and me. He already knew we were worth big bucks if he delivered us to his former commander. If he found out how much more we were worth as experimental technology, he might decide to change his mind about helping us.

Without a way to get my thoughts down in my journal, it felt like my head was filled with rolling marbles.

I sighed and looked up at the stars. They didn't look as clear from Earth as from Mars. Logically I knew why, of course. Earth's atmosphere distorted the light waves. But logic didn't take away my sense of awe at the beauty of the stars as they seemed to twinkle.

I thought of all I had seen on my first day on Earth outside the prison. How incredible it was to see everything that lived out in the open. On Mars, nothing lived outside the dome. Without that little man-made bubble of air and moisture for protection, life couldn't exist. But here on Earth …

“Kid?” Nate said, appearing concerned. “You all right?”

“Sure,” I said, hiding my worries.

“You want to tell me about all this gear you have? Those things look like robots and …”

“Robots?” I forced myself to laugh. “You don't see any equipment to run them, do you?”

It made me glad I hadn't made him curious about any information in my comp-board. Before Nate could say anything else, a loud, groaning roar echoed from out of the darkness.

“Relax,” Nate said. The fire's tiny glow must have been enough light for him to see me flinch. “Male gator. Letting the world know he's here.”

“Oh.”

“He'll mind his own business,” said Nate. “We're fine here.”

“Oh.”

“You're interesting to watch.” Nate chuckled. “You look around as if the world is one giant candy store. And I agree. It's unbelievably amazing. But because most people see it every day, they take it for granted. Living in the swamp, I had to learn all over again how incredible the process of life and ecology is.”

I almost blurted out that I had never seen it before. Even so, it seemed difficult to think that people would take all of this for granted.

I nodded. I, too, had come to understand that there's more to life than what a person can see or hear or touch.

I wanted to be able to trust Nate completely. But Dad had said to trust no one. I finally asked one of the questions that had been bugging me. “Why did you decide to live alone in the swamp?”

“Tell you what,” Nate said, grinning, “I'll tell you where I came from if you tell me where you came from.”

“Can't,” I said after a few seconds.

“Wish you could,” he said, “but you're old enough to decide who you can trust.”

The alligator in the nearby swamp roared again. A few minutes of silence passed.

“Good night, kid from nowhere,” Wild Man finally said.

I did feel like a kid from nowhere. Like an alien on Earth. In a wheelchair, when most people could walk. With a spinal plug that made me even more of a freak. I knew Nate had been joking, but it still hit too close to the truth. I didn't answer him.

He must have felt my coldness in the silence between us, but he spoke kindly. “You already told me you don't need help getting into your sleeping bag. So I'll wake you in plenty of time tomorrow morning.”

He crawled into his own sleeping bag.

And left me alone in my wheelchair, staring at the fire, feeling very alone.

CHAPTER 13

The smell of the fire woke me up just before dawn. Along with another interesting smell.

“Eat quickly,” Nate said from where he was crouched beside the fire on our miniature island in the middle of the Everglades. “We've got about two hours to reach our meeting point.”

I was still in my sleeping bag. The night before Nate had given me a pair of blue pants. He called them jeans. I also wore a T-shirt and a sweater.

I let Nate help me out of the sleeping bag into my wheelchair, impressed all over again at how powerful he was.

Nate went back to the fire, then handed me a green bowl filled with brown liquid. I wasn't familiar with the smooth hard material.
Plastic?

He grinned at the puzzlement on my face. “Turtle soup. Remember? Slurp it right from the shell.”

I nodded and took a taste. A strange texture and rather drippy. But not bad. Nate's version of Earth food was much better than the nute tubes on Mars.

Nate noticed Ashley had awakened as well. He handed her a bowl. She ate it from her sleeping bag.

“Hmmm,” she said, after a slurp.

“Finish it quick and get ready to go,” he told her. “The sooner we leave, the sooner we arrive.”

“Where?” I asked. The sky was getting brighter, and I shivered in my sleeping bag in the predawn cold. Already the sounds of birds filled the air. As if they were happy to be alive. I couldn't blame them. Earth was fascinating.

“It's no coincidence that I chose this route away from the base,” Nate put in. “It was the direction that put us closest to the interstate. I've got a friend who handles a mag-strip truck on the north-south route. He usually brings me supplies once every two weeks, and I meet him at a truck stop on the highway on the outer limits of the Everglades. After my excommander showed up the other day, I called this friend and set up a meeting with him for today. Just in case I needed to get away from this area quickly.”

No coincidence?
It seemed like too much of a coincidence. I was immediately suspicious. “How did you know you'd need him?”

Nate smiled grimly. “When I was running operations, I always set up a fallback plan in case anything went wrong. The way it looks now, not only is my ex-commander going to be looking for me after not showing up with you two, but so are the Combat Force people we escaped yesterday. To me, this definitely qualifies as something going wrong.”

A little under two hours later, Nate let the swamp boat glide to a stop at the edge of some trees.

As the motor died, I heard a strange whooshing rumble on the other side of the trees. The thick green underbrush did not let me see more than 10 feet ahead, so I couldn't tell what was making the noise.

“He'll have parked his trailer as close to the path as possible,” Nate said as he jumped from the boat and tied the rope to a tree. “That's how he does it when he delivers my supplies. So I'll make a couple of trips. I'll bring up our equipment first, then come back for you guys.”

“Um, sure,” I said. We didn't have much choice except to trust him. The alternative was to try to move by ourselves, which would be next to impossible. For two reasons. One, I was in my wheelchair, which could not roll through swampland. And two, Ashley and I didn't really know where we were going. Yet.

Nate jumped back on the swamp boat and rolled each robot forward. He jumped off the boat and reached up for the upper body of the first titanium robot. He tilted it forward across his shoulder.

“At least these things are light enough to carry. But they're going to be a pain to travel with,” he said. “I have a feeling they're the reason I was offered so much money for you. Sure you don't want to tell me about them?”

I shook my head. As did Ashley.

“Remember,” I said. Ashley and I had talked with him earlier about our money cards and the unlimited funds. We weren't in danger that he'd steal them from us, because he didn't have the identity prints to use them. “When you get us where we need to go, you will get your million.”

He grinned. “I remember. Of course, you still haven't told me where you need to go.”