Double Cross (10 page)

I rolled upward, back toward Phobos, hoping to buy some time.

I didn't even bother trying to get a visual confirmation of my pursuer. Because of Rawling's earlier warning, I didn't need to see what was chasing me to know it was another space torpedo. This was the ultimate test of my pilot skills. Against another pilot.

I knew if I looked, I wouldn't be able to see the other space torpedo anyway. My Hammerhead was hardly longer and wider than a human body. Plus, space torpedoes are painted black, so they're almost impossible to detect visually in space from more than 100 yards away.

Right now, with the other pilot chasing me, I was locked in a whirling dance with another space torpedo 100 miles away, with both of us ducking and bobbing at around 15,000 miles per hour. Not even the best eyes in the universe would be able to watch this dogfight.

No, the only way I could detect the other space torpedo was with heat radar. Tiny as the vent flares were, the heat they produced showed up on radar like mushrooms as big as thunderstorms. Especially in the absolute cold of outer space.

That was good for me, being able to track the other space torpedo as easily as watching a storm cross the sky. But it also meant the pilot of the other torpedo could follow my movement.

And my Hammerhead was the lead torpedo, a sitting duck in the computer target sights of the pilot behind me.

I made a quick decision. I flared all of my vents equally for an instant. I knew my direction wouldn't change. But it would cause a big blast of heat, hopefully blinding the pilot behind me.

An instant later, I shut down all my vents, knowing my Hammerhead was now shooting through the mushroom of heat I'd just created.

I exited the other side of the heat mushroom with no power or flares to give away my presence. To the heat radar of the pilot behind me, my Hammerhead was as black and cold as outer space itself. I was now invisible.

I congratulated myself for my smart move.

Then I panicked. There was no heat mushroom on
my
radar either. The pilot behind me must have done the same thing—shut down all vent flares.

It could mean only one thing. The pilot had guessed my move and taken a directional reading of my flight path just before I shut down my vents.

I knew I was dead. Without vent flares to control the direction of my Hammerhead, I wouldn't be able to change direction until I reactivated them. It would take my computer 30 seconds to run through its preignition checklist. In space warfare, 30 seconds was eternity, because torpedo computers reacted much more quickly than human brains.

In 30 seconds, the computer of the torpedo behind me would figure out my line of travel and shoot me with a laser before I could reactivate and change direction.

Only 20 seconds left.

White flashed over my visual from the other torpedo's target scanner. I was dead center in the laser target controls.

I swallowed hard, preparing myself for the red killer flash that would follow in an instant, blowing my spacecraft to shreds. The explosion of my Hammerhead torpedo would be soundless since you can't hear screams in the vacuum of outer space.

Another white flash hit me instead.

I jumped. The target scanner behind me didn't need confirmation.

A third white flash.

There was still no red laser to superheat the fuel tanks and blow the Hammerhead apart.

I didn't understand. Three times I'd been right in the other pilot's sights. Why hadn't the other pilot fired the laser pulse?

Without warning, my vents reactivated at the 30-second mark. I rolled safely out of the way.

I looped, scanning my heat radar again to find the other space torpedo.

Then my visual and my consciousness melted into black nothingness.

CHAPTER 2

“I don't get it,” I said to Rawling. “The pilot of the other space torp had me dead and let me go. What kind of computer program is that?”

A minute earlier the blackout of all my thoughts had signaled the end of my flight-simulator program. I was brought out of virtual reality and back to my body in a lab room under the dome.

I was still sweating from the effort, and my arm muscles shook from stress. I really looked forward to a glass of water.

Rawling leaned forward to unstrap me. Whenever I connected to the computer through virtual reality, my body was secured on a bed so I couldn't roll loose and break the connection.

“Could you be wrong, Tyce?” Rawling asked. “I know it's almost inconceivable that you might make a mistake, but …”

“Hah-ha,” I said.

Rawling scratched his hair and smiled, the way he always did when he teased me. Over the last month, we had gone beyond the robot body I had learned to control. Rawling was supervising me as I learned the controls of a space torpedo we had nicknamed Hammerhead because it looked so much like the shark I'd seen on Earth DVD-gigaroms.

“Do you think that's been programmed?” I asked. “For the other pilot to show mercy?”

“That would surprise me. Mercy is something human.” Rawling helped me sit up, then handed me a glass of water. He knew I always needed it badly when I exited virtual reality. “You were in a flight-simulation program. The other pilot was simply computer generated. It's not like there was another human linked into the program.”

“It's also human to guess about my heat-vent trick. Which it did. Which in theory it's not supposed to do.”

Instead of asking me what I meant, Rawling raised an eyebrow, something I practiced myself when I knew people weren't looking.

“Heat-vent trick,” I repeated, still sitting on the bed and facing him. I drank deeply from the water before I continued. “At the beginning of the week, when you told me I had only a few days left to get ready for an enemy pilot, I planned to try the heat-vent trick during this flight simulation.”

That wasn't quite true. I hadn't planned this trick all by myself. I'd talked to Ashley about it, and together we'd come up with the idea.

“It's a way to make a light explosion in the enemy pilot's radar,” I continued. “Then you coast out of the back side of it with so little power that you can't be tracked by heat radar.”

Next I explained to Rawling how I had done it.

“Pretty good,” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “Except for the 30 seconds you had to wait to reignite the stabilizer vents and get directional power again. I'm very, very surprised that the computer program was able to make an adjustment to let the pilot track you. So let me say this again. Maybe it was a mistake, you thinking you were in the target scanner. I mean, according to this program, the enemy pilot is supposed to destroy you at the first opportunity.”

“Sure,” I said, not convinced. I'd been flashed three times with the target scanner's white laser beam. Maybe once was my imagination but not three times. Was it possible the other pilot had given me three chances instead of blowing me away at the first opportunity? If so, the enemy pilot sounded too human to be computer generated.

Rawling helped me from the bed and into my wheelchair.

“I have a couple of questions,” I said. With my hands, I rocked the wheels back and forth. It was something I did when I was restless, like other people might tap their fingers.

“Fire away,” he said with a grin, like he knew it was a pun on the space-torpedo program I'd just gone through.

“Why a space torpedo?” I asked. “Don't get me wrong. After all those years of working with a robot, this Hammerhead is a lot of fun. And you know I love being in outer space, even if it's just virtual reality. Only …”

“Only what?”

“It seems a waste.”

“Waste?” Rawling repeated.

“I know these virtual-reality computer training programs cost millions and millions of dollars to develop,” I said. “So why would the government spend all this money to train anyone to fly something that doesn't exist?”

Rawling walked past me and shut the door. Then he spoke so quietly that I could barely hear him. “I guess now is as good a time as any to tell you. … Remember when the last shuttle arrived?”

Of course I did. Shuttles arrived from Earth only every three years. They were the lifeblood of the Mars Project, bringing new scientists and technicians and supplies, then returning to Earth with the scientists and techies who had finished their duty. As if that wasn't enough reason for me to remember, my dad was a space pilot, and he'd returned to Mars with the last shuttle. After getting to know him all over again, I'd finally started to like having him around.

“The Hammerhead does exist, Tyce,” Rawling said. “And it arrived with that last shuttle.”

“What! There really is a Hammerhead?” This was great. I could go into space. I could fly at speeds that no human ever flew. I could—

“Don't get too excited.” He spoke so sharply that I blinked. “Sorry.” He sighed. “The responsibilities that come with being director sometimes …”

I waited for him to finish. Suddenly the lines in his face seemed much deeper, and I saw a thicker streak of gray in his hair.

“Tyce, if you don't learn to fly the Hammerhead like it's part of your body, there's a good chance the dome won't exist in another few months.”

CHAPTER 3

“Hello, Mr. Sanders. Hello, Mrs. Sanders.”

I knew that voice.

“Hello, Ashley,” Mom answered. “Tyce is at his computer. Go on in.”

Which meant Ashley would be at my door in a few seconds. I swung my wheelchair away from the computer and toward the door.

“Hello, Tyce,” Ashley said from the doorway with her usual big grin.

“Hey,” I said. She and I usually went up to the dome telescope after supper. But the telescope had been malfunctioning for the last couple of weeks, and the techie in charge hadn't been able to fix it yet. Just as well. The last thing I wanted was to look for a tiny bullet of deadly light that would show the comet getting closer to Mars by 150,000 miles every hour.

“Hey, back,” Ashley said. Then she frowned. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Give me a break,” she said. “I can tell when something's bothering you.”

She pulled up a chair so we were facing each other. It hadn't taken Ashley long to get used to the fact that I was in a wheelchair. “Well, talk to me.”

“If an asteroid was going to hit a planet, how would you stop it?”

She laughed. “That is so 20th century. I mean, all you need to do is watch some of those ancient premillennium movies where everyone on Earth is doomed because of a giant asteroid.”

“And?” I insisted.

“The solution is so simple I can't believe you're asking. Attach a rocket engine to the asteroid and change its orbit. Alter it by a degree or two, and it misses the planet. Or blow it apart with a nuclear weapon. People stopped worrying about asteroids hitting the Earth long before we were born.”

Seeing my face, Ashley stopped laughing. “Tyce, you still look worried.”

Rawling was going to make the announcement the next morning, and I'd already told Mom and Dad at supper, so it was all right to discuss it with Ashley. She knew I worked with the robot and would find it interesting that now I was learning to fly a space torpedo.

“What if the asteroid broke up into hundreds of smaller pieces before you could divert it?” I asked. “What if any of those pieces was big enough to destroy this entire dome? And what if all of those hundreds of pieces were only two months away from hitting us?”

“Then,” she said with total seriousness, “I would start to pray. Very hard.”

“You can start tonight,” I said.