The Softwire: Betrayal on Orbis 2 (6 page)

The pace of the bidding increased, and I scanned the area around me for any sort of computer terminal. All I found was a small blinking key plate on the wall behind the stage.
It’s a start,
I thought, and slunk toward it as far as the rope would allow. I pushed into the device and immediately sensed something was wrong. My ears burned hot, and the inside of whatever computer I had just pushed into was dense with a thick, green fog of static electricity. Normally, a cool rush of current surges across my skin and the colors inside the computer brighten with an enhanced sense of clarity. But not this time. Security devices were mounted on top of more security devices, and everything looked as if it was patched together, piece by piece.

I pushed in farther and turned down a corridor, looking for anything familiar. The dataway opened into a long, thin hallway that was at least a thousand times taller than any computer I’ve ever been inside. Way up, through the thick, crackling soup of data, I saw something floating above me. The hallway darkened as someone bellowed, “Who is in my computer?”

I thought my head was going to crack open, literally. I yanked myself out of the computer and staggered back, bumping into Max with my hands clamped around my skull.

“JT, what’s wrong?” she asked as an alien with pitch-black eyes and cracked copper skin stood up from the top railing.

“One million yornaling crystals for the Softwire,” he announced, flinging back his cape and motioning with his gloved hand to one of his entourage. The alien placed his hands on his hips and stared at everyone below, as if challenging them to outbid him. But no one else in the room bid again. My head was still pounding. The stage was spinning underneath my feet.
What was happening?

“The generous SenniUg has offered one million yornaling crystals for the Softwire. A moment, please,” the buglike alien shouted to the crowd, then leaned in toward Weegin. He whispered frantically, occasionally glancing over his shoulder at me.

“JT, snap out of it,” Max said. “We have to get the light rope off Weegin’s belt.”

But Weegin took care of that. He removed the blue crystal from his hip and chomped down on it. When the crystal was crushed between Weegin’s teeth, the light rope released each of us from its grip.

“Deal!” Weegin shouted up at the black-eyed alien, and stepped toward me, grabbing me by the shoulder.

“No!” Ketheria cried, but Weegin pushed her away.

“If you have any ideas, Switzer, I would really like to hear them right now,” Max said, but Switzer didn’t move. He looked to the other kids, but they were waiting for him.

The aliens shouted and chanted. One alien bounced up and down on his chair while another howled at the ceiling. Why all the commotion? What did it matter that this alien had just purchased me? Who was he?

“He is a very bad person,” Ketheria said.

SenniUg strode across the balconies on the third floor toward the stairs. I looked at the doorway, but the stage was surrounded by at least thirty aliens, maybe more. Two aliens who had been seated with SenniUg earlier stomped toward the stage. One, sporting a scar that circled his knobby, bald head, handed Weegin a metal case. Weegin smiled and grabbed at the case. It secreted a blue gel that molded around Weegin’s fist.

“JT, what are we going to do?” Theodore said.

“You are going to do nothing,” Weegin snapped.

I leaned toward Max. “The computer here is no help to us. I tried. We have to make a run for it. You grab a person and —”

“Who is in my computer!”

I fell to my knees and squeezed my skull to keep my brain from spilling out of my ears.
Who was saying that?

“JT!” my sister screamed.

What happened next was such a blur that it’s hard to describe. The building shook with the tremor of an explosion. The far concrete wall cracked under the pressure, and the explosion was followed by another brain-melting scream. I pulled my head to my knees, trying to hide from the voice tearing at my brain.

“Do you hear that?” I shouted.

“Who doesn’t? This place is gonna blow up,” Theodore panicked.

“Not that,” I said. “The voice.”

“What voice?” Max said.

The arena rumbled again. In the middle of all of this I heard the words:
Who dares enter my computer?

I looked around, but no one else seemed to notice the strange voice.

Show yourself, intruder.

The walls of the cavern shook once more. This time the stone behind the stage cracked. Water sprayed through the opening.

“The tank has been breached,” the insectlike alien screamed, and bolted for the stage. When the water hit the alien, he screamed as if it was burning his skin.

Another blow. I didn’t think the room could take much more.

“Move,” Theodore screamed when the wall behind us came crashing down. Water gushed toward every corner. The aliens tried to scramble to higher ground, but once the water caught hold of them, it seemed to suck the life from their bodies.

I jumped to the other side of the stage, but Weegin was not as lucky. A piece of the stone wall struck him, pinning him to the ground. He screamed out in pain as the water rose around the stage.

“The tank. The tank will flood Core City!” someone shouted.

“This way!” another shouted.

SenniUg, the alien who had tried to buy me, was now on the lower level. He maneuvered through the water toward us.

“Hurry,” I shouted. “Head for the stairs.”

“Don’t touch the water!” Max yelled.

“Nugget!” Ketheria screamed, searching the stage for her friend.

The little guy was kneeling next to his unconscious father, too frightened to move. He whimpered and stroked Weegin’s forehead with his big hand.

“Choo, choo,” he said as Ketheria knelt next to him.

“We have to help Weegin,” Ketheria begged.

“No, we don’t,” Switzer replied.

“Nugget, come with us,” Ketheria urged the alien.

The little runt looked up at my sister. He would not leave his father. Even though the vile creature had never showed him a single tender moment, he would not go. Instead Nugget tried to pull Weegin from under the rubble. Ketheria began to help him.

“We can’t,” I said. “Weegin’s fate on Orbis 1 would be far worse than the fate he will suffer here. Trust me.”

Two of SenniUg’s goons reached the stage, and one grabbed me by the shoulder. Max wheeled around with both fists clenched, catching one alien across the chin and knocking him back into the other one. They both fell into the rising water.

“Thanks,” I told her, then turned to my sister. “C’mon, Ketheria. Now is our only chance!” I said. More and more aliens rushed the stairs, and fewer of them seemed to care about us anymore.

My sister stood up as Switzer disabled the last alien with the remnants of a chair. Nugget knelt down next to his father again. He looked up at Ketheria.

“I find you,” he mumbled. “Nugget . . . stay.”

Ketheria swallowed hard, but she could not hold back her tears. Her eyes welled up as she scratched Nugget under the chin.

“Now, Ketheria!” I shouted, grabbing my sister.

We pushed our way to the stairs as the room shook once more and a wave of water and debris washed away SenniUg and the others.

After SenniUg and his trolls disappeared, little effort was made to stop us. I think everyone was too busy trying to save their own lives at that point. Max stormed through the debris, screaming at anyone who stepped in her way. The large, fleshy humanoid that guarded the door sat slumped in the corner, unconscious and bleeding from his head. A thick chunk of stone lay at his feet, and his alien parasites were gone.

Ketheria kept looking back and crying out for Nugget.

“You have to take her, JT,” Theodore said, and I hoisted her up into my arms. This only made her cry louder.

“Don’t, Ketheria,” I told her. “You’re making it harder. You’re too heavy.”

We had never been separated before our arrival on Orbis. All two hundred of us lived together on that seed-ship before the Trading Council divided us up. Until then we had never experienced the pain we felt when they took the other kids away. But things were different now. Ketheria
knew,
and I think she feared never seeing Nugget again.

I stayed close to Max as she navigated through every shortcut, every twist and turn, and found the only dry way out of there. Theodore adjusted our direction a couple of times. His counting had come in handy.
But what do we do now?
I looked back and wondered if I would have left this way with SenniUg. If something hadn’t started destroying the building, would I be leaving without my friends? And who was that screaming back there, anyway? Or rather
what
was that? It was like no computer I had ever entered before.

Once outside, Theodore said, “I think you should contact Vairocina, JT.”

Switzer snorted, but he looked too tired to make fun of me.

“Let’s get a little farther away first,” I said.

“But I’m tired,” Grace complained.

There was a lot of commotion in Core City. People were running, and an alarm wailed in the distance. It wasn’t Magna, that’s for sure. Core City was a small, crude metropolis bursting with activity. Trams loaded with aliens or the same battered crates I had seen at the spaceport raced from building to building. I walked past dingy trading chambers, but there were no toonbas for sale, no glowglobes, not a single place that looked like the Earth News Café. Instead, the shops were packed with tools and contraptions and things that could only have been used as weapons.

I was forced to squeeze against the wall as a transport shut tle floated down the street and then up and over a building. It carried more of those battered crates. An alien was yelling at me, but all the beeping, shouting, and roaring engines made it impossible for me to hear him.

“What’s he saying?” Max shouted.

Across a tram channel cut into the ground, I saw a concrete platform. It was dark, and no one was around it.

“Over there,” I said, pointing toward it.

We scurried across the channel and huddled under the shelter.

“Vairocina?”

“Are you kidding me?” Switzer scoffed. “We need to keep moving. Are you gonna believe this freak after he talks to some
malf
voice in his head?”

“Keep quiet,” Max scolded him.

For the longest time, the Trading Council and the Keepers hadn’t believed that Vairocina was real either. They argued fiercely over her existence, pointing fingers (or whatever they had) and accusing each other of sabotaging the central computer.

“Vairocina?” I said.

“Yes, Johnny Turnbull.” Vairocina’s voice echoed in my head.

“How are you?”

“I am exactly the same as I was last time we spoke,” replied the little girl. For an eternity she had isolated herself inside some sort of computer, so it was going to take a while for her to get used to communicating with other people again.

“Does anyone believe this dumbwire?” Switzer said, raising his arms in the air. “You’re just talking to yourself.” Switzer mocked me like he had on the
Renaissance
when he wouldn’t believe I could speak to Mother, the ship’s computer.

“Ignore him, Vairocina. He’s as dumb as he looks,” I said.

“Dumber,” Max added. Theodore snickered. Switzer took a step toward Theodore.

“Do you find something funny, split-screen?” he said to Theodore, who got very quiet. I rolled my eyes. It was getting old. Sometimes I wished Theodore would stand up to the bully.

“Maybe this will help,” Vairocina offered.

In front of me, the air bent and distorted, pulling colors from everything around us. A form began to take shape.

“How’s this?” Vairocina asked, now floating in the air in front me, no more than twenty centimeters tall. She was a six-year-old girl who looked a little like Ketheria, with her long brown hair, only Vairocina’s was lighter and did not move the same way. If you looked very close, you could even see little streams of computer code running under Varocina’s skin.

Everyone circled her.

“Wow!”

“Amazing!”

“See?” Max said, scrunching her face at Switzer.

“How did you do that?” I asked Vairocina.

“It is simple, really. I used the same program that the Trading Council members use to project their images as 3-D holograms,” Vairocina said.

Max poked Vairocina, but her finger went right through her image.

“I cannot manipulate solid objects as they can since I have no real physical form anymore,” Vairocina added.

“But this works,” I told her. “I like it.”

Everyone stared. They all knew about the computer virus that had wreaked havoc on Orbis, but they had never
seen
her before. Only I saw Vairocina when I pushed into the central computer.

“That’s it? That’s what was causing all those problems?” Switzer said mockingly.

“I was not the cause of all . . .” she started to argue.

“Vairocina, don’t bother. Listen to me. We’re in trouble. I need your help.”

“Certainly, I’ll contact the Keepers.”

“Don’t call the Keepers!” Switzer demanded.