don’t I leave a message on Robo, I can type the message into his memory and then when he finds Wolfe he can talk to him,’ he laughed out load ‘That will freak him out!’
Mars jumped to it and beckoned his fully repaired robotic dog from his resting place, his electric charge cable held him back for a few seconds as it stretched until the coil shot like an elastic band against the wall. The fun loving metal creature came bouncing over and knocked him over from his crouched position. Cappella laughed, and Sweeney scurried over to join in the fun, squawking away as he played with the two of them. Eventually once the wrestling had finished, Mars managed to sit Robo down and unlocked his control panel on the rear of his head. Quickly Mars typed in the message he wanted Robo to relay to his father and then he selected his fathers picture profile as the command to activate the communication. He pressed OK on the menu and everything was set.
Mars brought Robo back over to the charger located on the wall. ‘Sit boy,’ he said, and then plugged the power plug into the middle of his back. He stroked the dog and then said, ‘Stay, and wait for Wolfe to come home.’ As he backed away he admired last nights handy work. He had rummaged around in a storeroom and found advanced space parts for a robotic dog. Robo’s newly fitted legs worked a treat. They looked better than his first pair, and were fitted with small compact boosters for space flight. They might come in handy one day.
Halley gathered there belongings together to leave their makeshift home. Looking over her shoulder she saw Robo's eyes glowing in the dark as she closed the door behind her. It was well after six o’clock and they were running late.
Wolfe sank to his knees in the quarantine office, his temples throbbed with a headache from hell. He was feeling the pressure from his family’s exposure to danger and not handling it well. He groaned, slid down the back of the door and became motionless for a few moments. From where he was sat he could make out Mars’s unmade bed, around it lay a burger wrapper and a milkshake container from last nights meal. His stomach rumbled, and for the first time in over a day, his thoughts turned to food. He closed his eyes and imagined meatballs and pasta for breakfast. It was not conventional, but it was one of his favourite dishes, and he was starving. He could feel his stomach now rumbled for food.
After what seemed like an age Wolfe wearily got to his feet and walked over to Mars’s bed to sit on it. The bedding was slightly warm as he placed his hand inside the sheets and for a moment wished he could drift off to sleep. He could not, there would be time later if they escaped.
Wolfe focused on the brown bags in front of him, stood and picked up the nearest. Inside was some garlic bread. ‘Yuck! There’s nothing worse than cold garlic.’ he quickly moved onto the next bag where he found some pesto pasta left in the bottom of a container, ‘Pesto was pleasant warm or cold,’ he thought. Impatiently he rummaged around the rest of the bags, but there was nothing left in them. As his disappointment was growing, out of the corner of his eye he spied a pizza box on the other table. He pulled up a seat, reached for the box, and then shook it. To his pleasure there was a large slice sliding around within it. ‘Beggars can not be choosers.’ he said before tucking into his thrown together meal. As he tasted the pesto and tried to enjoy the mushroom and ham pizza the food stuck in his throat, in all his life he had never disliked a meal so much. He put his head in his hands and pulled his hair in despair, his meal had turned into a sour taste for revenge. Where were his family? Had Gonzalo taken them? How could he contact them, without his Community card? He could not use the com's communicator because his signature and account would be monitored. It could take him hours to track them down, and if Gonzalo had them prisoner, how could he single handedly rescue them? His head started to swim with endless possibilities, he closed his eyes to try and think straight, it was now 7.00am and time was running out.
Wolfe walked over to the com's monitor and stared at it for a few moments, if he dare send a message to Halley he could get them to meet him at the space ship, perhaps his account would not be monitored. He touched the monitor, and the screen came alive. He paused and rubbed his chin with his left hand, it was a enormous gamble, and he knew it could end in failure. In desperation he reached out again to touch it for a second time, should he login to his account? His finger in slow motion reached out to go online. Suddenly Robo intervened by barking from the corner of the room, Wolfe had been inadvertently been rescued from his torment, his hand dropped to his side.
Robo who was overjoyed to see Wolfe began barking like a crazed animal, his eyes glowed red in the dark corner of the room. Suddenly he jumped up and began to fight with his charging cable which was restricting him again like a leash, the dog spun around in circles until he eventually grabbed the cable to yank it free. He was fully charged and full of energy. Robo turned and ran towards Wolfe gaining speed as he approached, the dog pounced and with his new more powerful legs took Wolfe by surprise and knocked him over.
Wolfe saw the warning colour of the dog’s eyes and patted him on the head; suddenly Robo opened his mouth slightly and a message in a computer generated robotic pitch it said. ‘WE ARE GOING 2 THE LABS WITH HALLEY WILL YOU COME AND MEET US.’ The dog’s eyes turned to grey, his mouth closed as he sat at Wolfe’s side. Now he knew his family were safe and that they were not captive, he was a relieved man and even more importantly he could reach them with a message via Robo. Then they could be instructed to escape. He knew that time was against them. They only had two hours to disappear off the radar of the station, which gave them the smallest of margins in case anything went wrong. The engineer frantically typed into Robo a new message for Halley to read and then sent the dog on his way to the Labs in the ECO zone. If they received the message in the next ten minutes, they should have enough time to carry out their duties before making it back ready for their getaway. Wolfe composed himself and made his way back to ready the getaway craft. After all there was still a crucial question about making the ship fly, anxiously he wondered if he could actually pull this off. Had he made the right choice or should they have tried to escape another way?
Mars helped his mum gather bags of seeds and plants from certain germinating rooms, at the labs restricted zone. Halley and Ariel had used them to monitor and record the different variations of plant life from the recovered space ship. They had researched that some of the plants could produce food like wheat and barley; the root vegetables were like potatoes and carrots indeed a lot of the plants had characteristics of edible plant life on Earth. This proved that there were other planets able to sustain human life elsewhere in the universe. She only wished they could have had more time to complete the study and shared the info with MSE. Now all the plants would have to be destroyed. Although the secret computer records would show all the statistics, apart from the most critical tests about the edibility for human consumption. This part of the study had only just started at Expresso, where Giuseppe would prepare Italian food with substitute alien grain and vegetables, all seamed fine for their pallet.
Mars called Capella, and she helped him to place the final set of plants inside the incinerator, they closed the doors and then hit the red button. Instantly the glow of fire could be seen through the very small glass window of the metal unit, a few seconds later all the evidence from the nursery’s had gone.
Soon the Labs lay empty and sterile. Mars watched his mother press the self-clean button on the last unit. All that was left was a few bags of sample seeds that combined to fill one field bag.
‘A whole new world of plant life in a sack,’ Halley said, regrettably to her children. Then she returned to her office to save valuable data onto a small compact storage drive. When she had finished, she remembered Mars’s personal items recovered from the spacecraft. She opened the lab secure room and gathered all the items together; they had never been able to take any information from the disks, which were totally incompatible with the computers on the station. Mars was too young to remember these, but perhaps it would be a excellent idea to give the
m back, it may help him in some way to think of his past and who he truly was. She called him into the secure room and offered him a bag, Mars reached out and took it from his mum and looked inside. In the bottom was a wallet of thin silver disks, like the one offered to him by the stranger. He reached in and picked the object up, instinctively he placed one into his console before returning it to his pocket. An odd feeling came over him as he became light headed. Mars bent down in the doorway to place the bag on its side before steadying himself on the labs wall. In the distance he could hear a number of load voices shouting. He looked around the doorway to see his trusted loyal dog breaking through the ranks of remaining IGE staff. The bionic pet came racing towards him as it sensed his presence. ‘What are you doing here, boy?’ he asked as he brought the dog into the back of the labs and called for Halley to see the unexpected guest.
Halley directed her family into the back office; she quickly closed the door and locked it so no one could enter. ‘How has Robo managed to find his way here?’ she wondered as she looked thoughtfully at