We raced to the corridor in the central core that led to the docking bay, to discover it was filled with thick, oily, black smoke. The floor was covered with a thin layer of chemical foam, which didn’t affect traction since the floor was a sticky surface to begin with.

  The technician who had spoken to us over the intercom leaned weakly against a wall, coughing spastically. David put a worried hand on his shoulder. “Can’t see in there …,” the man said. “Too much smoke … foam …”

  The air filters were clearly having trouble dealing with so much smoke at once, and the blackness of the hall started to grow.

  “Get back, get back!” David yelled at us between coughs as he struggled to pull himself forward to the dock by feel. Sandy and Brendan and Elaine obeyed, but I kept moving forward. If someone was hurt, maybe I could help. I lifted my shirt front over my mouth. The smoke stung my eyes, making them water.

  I could just barely see David up ahead of me, coughing loudly as he stepped through the waist-deep foam into the docking chamber. I followed him in and could hear the ceiling-mounted foam dispensers’ constant hiss as they tried to smother the flames, which I still couldn’t see.

  David struggled forward another step, and then a blast of foam caught him square on the head, its force driving him to his knees—and under the surface of the foam layer!

  “David!” I shouted, but I could hear no human voice over the alarm Klaxons and the hiss of the extinguishers. David was drowning!

  I stumbled farther into the room, sweeping my hands below the foam line, hoping to come into contact with something—or someone—solid. Foam jets lanced down all around me. I did my best to avoid them—and stay on my feet. Pulling myself through the foam felt like swimming in dense shaving cream.

  At last, my hands closed around something tubular. An arm? I yanked it to the surface only to find I was holding some manner of thick cable. I dropped it and returned to my sweeping. David couldn’t possibly have much time left!

  Luckily, a few steps later my knee hit something solid that didn’t feel like metal. Reaching down, I pulled David up by the shoulders. He was unconscious. I reached my arm under his and across his chest. Much like rescuing a drowning surfer, I “swam” him back out of the room, taking care to keep his head above the level of the foam.

  A few moments later we were back out in the corridor, and clear of the foam and smoke. I laid David down, and he immediately started coughing … a good sign. I was coughing myself and I could barely stand up. Sandy rushed over to support me while Elaine helped David regain consciousness. “What was on fire?” Sandy asked. “Did you see?” I could only shake my head.

  After a time, the alarms stopped and a horde of the small robots rushed into the corridor with hoses attached, sucking up all the leftover foam. The hall was clear now, but still smoky. David staggered to his feet. “Take it easy,” Elaine said to him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” David replied, still coughing slightly. “Is the station okay? That’s the real question.” I had to admire his devotion to Apogee. David turned to me. “That was a pretty stupid thing you did, following me in there.”

  “I know,” I admitted.

  “Thanks,” he said seriously.

  “You’re welcome.”

  We moved down the corridor to the docking chamber. Nothing in here seemed burned. David leaned in through the shuttle door for a peek inside. “Unbelievable,” David moaned as we all craned our necks to look past him at the shuttle’s cockpit.

  The main pilot console was burned black, scorched. The smell of roasted wiring and metal was thick. Not a single light shone anywhere in the cockpit.

  “That’s the navigation computer, as well as the manual backups,” said David. “Someone knew exactly what they were busting up.”

  “They didn’t even try to be sneaky about it,” I added, perplexed.

  “Does this have anything to do with my mother?” Brendan wanted to know, poking in his head.

  “We can’t know, Brendan. Let’s get on the horn to Earth,” David said to the tech. “See how fast they can get another shuttle up here.”

  “Yeah,” Elaine replied from outside, “there’s a problem with that, too.” We exited the shuttle, passed through the air lock, and walked back into the operations center of the Flight Deck, where the docking controls were.

  The tech pointed to one of the many monitors in the room. This one was a large map of South America. There was an angry red splotch over Brazil, surrounded by yellow smears and green dots. “If these weather satellites are right, Brazil’s socked in by a major storm.” David pressed a button, and the picture changed to real-time video of Rio’s streets. Rain fell in sheets from a solid gray sky, and wind whipped the trees back and forth. “Everything’s shut down, down there, and the storm has even caused minor damage to Above and Beyond’s launch facilities,” David said, looking at a digital readout below the monitor. “Nothing’s going in or out of there anytime soon.”

  “But my mother!” Brendan blurted.

  “We’ll keep looking, Brendan, but we’ll have to do it with you here,” David replied, rubbing his eyes again. He still sounded calm and poised, but his face was smudged by smoke and he looked very, very tired. I can’t say I blamed him.

  He sighed heavily. “This just gets better and better.”

  Putting It Together

  Later that night, I lay in my hammock, staring at the ceiling (I think it was the ceiling …), trying to put together the events of the day in my mind. The search for Victoria Fogarty was continuing, still without success so far. I could still taste smoke in my throat and could feel the raspiness in my lungs. But I’d cleaned up with some of the large, moist towelettes and was feeling much better, all in all.

  After going over everything for the fiftieth time, I realized I was actually pretty comfortable. Lying down or resting in microgravity really wasn’t too bad—it felt a lot like being on a raft in the middle of a pool, only without the sensation of something holding you up.

  These thoughts actually irked me a little bit because they made me remember how much I would have been enjoying myself if it hadn’t been for the disappearance of Ms. Fogarty. Then I got mad at myself for thinking so selfishly. Imagine what Brendan’s going through, I thought. Hopefully, he was right. Maybe there was a simple explanation for her disappearance. Maybe she woke from her electrical jolt disoriented and wandered somewhere the station’s cameras couldn’t see her—a supply closet, maybe. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. If so, the search team would find her, sooner or later.

  The intercom in the wall next to my bed beeped. I answered it. “Hello?”

  “Tom? Did I wake you up?” It was Sandy. She didn’t sound sleepy at all.

  “No,” I assured her. “Are you all right? Do you want to come over?”

  “I’m fine. I was just wondering … could you actually come over here?”

  I started unwrapping myself from the sleeping bag. “Sure,” I told her. “Be right there.”

  Sandy was only one module over from me, so it wasn’t exactly a long walk. I just pulled on my slippers and stepped out into the hall and through the lock that connected the two inflatable segments. I was alone, of course, but now the silence was eerie, as though we were on a ghost ship. There’s a saboteur on Apogee, I reminded myself. We’re all in danger.

  There were even fewer of the small “Jeeves” robots racing around than usual. “Night” was kind of an arbitrary concept on a space hotel—it was always dark outside. But at certain prescribed hours, computers tinted all the windows to minimize the amount of light coming through the viewports to simulate nighttime. I took the few steps to Sandy’s door and rang her intercom. “Tom?” I heard her ask tentatively.

  “Of course,” I said. “Who else?”

  The door rose up with its customary whoosh and I walked inside. Every light in the room was on. Sandy was halfway up one of the walls, swaddled tightly in her bunk. Her eyes were wide, and she quickly pushed the button to close the door again. “What’s up?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

  I stepped out of my slippers and jumped lightly, letting the lack of gravity allow me to float upward until I stopped myself by grabbing hold of one of the hammock support pegs. I was now able to look Sandy in the eye. “Sandy? What’s going on?”

  “It’s-it’s just weird,” she said haltingly. “I mean, how am I supposed to sleep when there’s a saboteur out there?”

  “How do you know I’m not the saboteur?” I asked gravely.

  She thumped me on the arm, hard. “That’s not funny! I’m serious! If someone hurt Ms. Fogarty, we could be next!”

  “I doubt it,” I assured her. “If a saboteur’s trying to make the hotel look bad, he wouldn’t need to attack more than one high-profile guest. And if he were trying to take over the station, he wouldn’t have attacked Ms. Fogarty at all, but David or one of his crew.”

  “He or she,” Sandy interjected. “We don’t know the saboteur is a man, necessarily.”

  “Okay, but do you see what I’m saying?”

  “I guess.” Sandy sighed. “But none of this is making me feel any better,” she said. I didn’t have an answer for her. I wasn’t feeling any better either.

  Abruptly, the door whooshed open again, and both Sandy and I jumped a little. She hadn’t hit the button on her wall panel, and I wasn’t anywhere near it—who else could be coming in?

  We got our answer as a little housekeeping robot whirred in, carrying a small stack of plastic-wrapped, moist towelettes for Sandy’s bathroom. She burrowed further into her bunk. “Okay, that’s just creepy,” she said, “just knowing that I could be sleeping and one of those things could come into my room and I’d never know it….”

  She trailed off as I watched the robot roll to the sink to deposit its payload of towels. Before it could, though, it stopped, and I could hear clicking sounds coming from inside it. The small antenna jutting from its top glowed blue as it received signals from a central command. Its message received, the little robot deposited the towels and headed back out the door, which closed behind it.

  Sandy shuddered again. “Brrr … I wish I knew how to lock those things out!”

  Her voice seemed to be coming from farther and farther away. I stared without seeing at the towels stacked on the sink. My brain was working, possibilities turning over and over, pieces clicking into place. When I get going like that, the entire world disappears around me. It’s a strange, amazing feeling, like you’re traveling to an entirely other place that no one else can find but you.

  “Tom? Tom?” Sandy asked more and more urgently, her voice becoming louder and louder. She snapped her fingers in front of my face. I turned and smiled at her. “What happened? Where did you go?”

  “We have to find David, right away,” I said excitedly.

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said, turning myself over to point at the floor. I pushed off the support post and drifted down to the ground and my slippers. “I just figured out what happened to Ms. Fogarty!”

  Kidnapping by Remote Control

  “I’ve totally got the how figured out, I’m just not sure of the why … or the who that was behind it….”

  David Wong yawned and tucked his shirt in as we walked down the quiet corridor. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark crescents under his eyes. He hadn’t even tried to sleep; he was waiting by the intercom for any word that might come in from the search party when Sandy and I came calling with my urgent discovery. I felt bad bothering him, but knew he wanted to find Ms. Fogarty as bad as anyone. “Then let’s start with the how,” he said.

  We arrived at a door marked MECHANICAL DISPATCH, and David used his key card to get us inside. The room was filled with robots—the small ones we had seen so many of, and the taller ones that carried larger quantities of supplies in their chest cavities. Some were on workbenches, awaiting repair, while most of the rest were lined up before various doors, ready to be called into action.

  I walked over to one of the taller robots standing quietly on the floor, and reached up to touch its signal antenna. “All of these are wired into the main power grid of the hotel, right?”

  “Yeah,” David said, a touch of worry in his voice. “Hey, don’t touch the—”

  My finger brushed the top of the antenna, and an electrical jolt went through me, knocking me flat on my butt. It wasn’t a powerful burst, but it was enough to surprise me and set my heart racing. “That’s a pretty good zap!” I exclaimed.

  “But not enough to shock Ms. Fogarty into unconsciousness,” Sandy said, frowning.

  “All of our robots are programmed to carry a maximum load of energy when on duty,” David pointed out. “Accidental contact with one of our housekeepers shouldn’t knock out anyone.”

  I raised a finger. “Not when they’re operating normally,” I said. “The robots receive their signals and their communications through these antennae, right?”

  David scratched his head, messing up his hair even further. “Sure. Radio waves.”

  “Right! And theoretically, someone with a transmitter could tap into that frequency and deliver his or her own orders to any particular robot!”

  Sandy’s eyes lit up. “Someone reprogrammed one of these bigger robots to carry more electricity than usual, sent it to Ms. Fogarty’s room, and had it knock her out!”

  I nodded. “And then, I’m guessing, they had the robot put Ms. Fogarty in its storage compartment and take her to some hiding place. I just don’t know where.”

  Sandy’s face flushed with excitement as she followed my line of thinking. “I bet a robot ruined the shuttle’s computer too! Maybe even the same robot, to cut down on the chances of the criminal being discovered!”

  I held my hand up for a high five, and Sandy smacked it.

  David walked around the little robot in a tight circle, as though seeing it in a new way. “Okay, it’s possible. But who would do it?”

  “Well,” I confessed, “that’s the why, and the part I’m not sure about. I guess anyone on your staff with a knowledge of how the robots work could have done it.”

  David shook his head, unsure. “That’s a lot of people, and most of them have worked for Above and Beyond for a long time. Everyone goes through a pretty strict screening before they join the company or the project.” He sighed. “Now we have to think—where could Ms. Fogarty be that we haven’t already looked? The robot didn’t bring her back here, obviously.”

  There was a sudden chorus of beeps in the room, as all of the robots seemed to hear the same message at the same time. It startled all of us, and Sandy even grabbed on to my sleeve, worried that maybe the robots had gone haywire again. They started to jabber to one another, trading information and statements until they seemed to come to a decision, and four of the smaller robots started right toward us!

  We backed up a few steps as the “housekeepers” advanced, their antennae flashing. Just before they got to us, however, they split into pairs, two exiting a door to our left, two going out a door to our right. Even though they were gone, I could tell we all were still nervous, each thinking the same thought: Had a saboteur suddenly taken over those four robots?

  David, apparently, knew we were all thinking in sync too. “Lets not get too worried just yet,” he said, moving to the intercom. “Wong to all Apogee personnel,” he said into it. “Did someone just order a late-night snack?”

  “Ryan here, Dave,” a voice came back. “We just sent down for some sandwiches. Can we get you one?”

  “No thanks, I was just checking. Housekeepers are on their way to the galley to get your grub. Enjoy your bite.” He snapped the intercom off and turned back to us, sighing in relief. “Okay, no problem there. Guess you’ve got me spooked, now.”

  We all laughed a little, the tension easing slightly.

  “I suppose the first thing we should do is shut down all the robot personnel for the time being. That’ll make for a tired human crew, as we’ll all be doing jobs the robots normally would, but better safe than sorry,” he said.

  “Would that even work?” Sandy wanted to know, her voice tinged with worry. “I mean, if someone has a remote control that can reprogram the robots, they could probably also turn the robots on and off, right?”

  David’s face scrunched up as though he smelled something unpleasant, then he relaxed into a resigned smile. “That’s a very good point.”

  I drummed my fingers on a workbench, still stuck on wondering who might have ordered a robot to hurt Ms. Fogarty. My thoughts turned immediately to Elaine Kaufman. The travel writer had a motive, namely making Apogee look bad both for her article, and for Foger. But I couldn’t picture her having the technological knowledge necessary to pull off “hijacking” a housekeeping robot. Ms. Kaufman couldn’t figure out a way past the key card system into that restricted corridor.

  And then there was Dr. Gorinsky, but there wasn’t anything unusual about him, except he’d been in sick bay most of the day, and …

  And …

  “Hey,” I blurted to Sandy as soon as I had the thought. “Do you remember how Dr. Gorinsky kept trying to avoid Ms. Fogarty, and how she swore she’d met him before?”

  Sandy nodded. “Yeah, she brought it up twice, and both times he acted like he couldn’t change the subject fast enough!”

  David looked at us as if we’d lost our minds. “The man’s got a résumé as long as your arm…. He’s one of the most respected scientists in the world! Do you really think he’s hiding something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, already heading for the door and pointing myself toward sick bay. “But I think it’s worth asking him a few questions!”

  The Good Doctor

  The three of us raced to the infirmary. All of the beds were unoccupied, and the medical tech on duty was making notes on a chart.

  “Dr. Gorinsky,” David said breathlessly. “Is he here?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10