Counterattack Read Free Page B

Earth!
    â€œWe’ll get through this,” Ashley promised through the robot’s speakers. “In less than a week, you’ll see your dad again. We’ll make sure of it.”
    I suddenly realized why she was trying to reassure me. Because I suddenly realized I was crying, and the sound of it must have reached her. She didn’t know I wasn’t crying because of my dad. But because of how beautiful God’s creation was. Earth!
    â€œA-Ashley,” I stuttered, “I … I …” I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t find any words to express what it felt like to be outside, under the blue sky of Earth, for the first time in my life. Instead, I turned my eyes to the sky and thought, Wow, God. Thanks.
    â€œHang on,” Ashley said. “I’ll have you with me right away. I’m here. At the edge of the runway. In this boat.”
    I noticed for the first time that the trees in front of me weren’t a solid wall. In the gap, I saw a large boat. With what looked like a giant fan mounted on the back. At the front of it stood a man, his hands on a steering wheel. At the back was a canvas roof propped by four poles, one in each corner.
    â€œAirboat,” Ashley said, reading the question in my mind. “For riding the top of the shallow water of the Everglades.”
    I remembered what the old man had said in Dad’s prison cell. “Sending them out into the swamps of the Everglades will kill them as surely as any military command.”
    We were going out there? Into all those trees and plants and among all those strange noises of all that hidden, buzzing life? On water?
    Suddenly the familiar, barren, frozen desert of the Martian landscape seemed like a very safe home.

CHAPTER 5
    A heavy rumbling noise came from the airboat’s motor.
    The robot rolled up a ramp onto the boat. Below the ramp was dark water that smelled strange to my accustomed-to-Mars nostrils.
    Water! The boat rested in a channel hundreds of yards long that finally disappeared in the distance among the trees and vegetation.
    I could hardly comprehend so much water out in the open. On Mars, water was as precious as electricity and oxygen, and it was guarded and recycled as if our lives depended on it. Which, of course, they did.
    Yet here was water, in the open, and more of it than I’d seen in my entire life. I might have stopped to stare with an open jaw, but the robot reached the top of the ramp and rolled into the boat.
    The 20 soldiers with the neuron rifles remained at the edge of the parking lot until we had boarded. Then they lowered their rifles and turned to leave, walking in tight formation in their black uniforms.
    The soldier behind the wheel at the front of the boat wore an identical uniform and had the standard, clipped-short hair. His tan face showed no expression. Nor did he say anything.
    I ignored him in return. My attention was on Ashley.
    She sat at the back of the boat, propped by seat cushions to stay upright, since her own body was basically helpless as she controlled the robot. She wore a blindfold and a headset. Around the waist of her military jumpsuit was a robot pack, which is a mini-transmitter. It was the “bot-pack” that made my rescue possible. All my life on Mars, I’d worked in a laboratory under the dome, hooked into a large computer system that was definitely not portable. When Ashley had arrived on Mars, she’d brought the next generation of robot-control technology—the bot-pack, a mobile robot-control package that hung on a belt.
    â€œWelcome, Martian,” the robot said to me.
    Good old Ashley. Making a joke about my origins. “Hello, earthling,” I fired back.
    It was weird. Ashley was only a couple of steps away from me, under the shade of the canvas roof. Yet she wasn’t seeing me with her eyes but through the robot’s video lenses. She didn’t speak to me with her voice but through the robot’s