John found his crowds of supporters in the main cafeteria. He felt like a warlord at the vanguard of an army. All this cheering, banner-waving, and back-slapping — a guy could get used to this!
“Got a chair for you here, John!” shouted Light Bulb (whose name, it seemed, was Fluoron). “Come on through!”
The rest of the cafeteria was already crowded with other students, but instead of the usual neat rows, they were clustered into five huge groups. Tables and chairs had been dragged over so that the groups could sit together. It was like a battlefield, flags and pennants waving, each group crowding around its commander.
Between the groups threaded a few undecided students who hadn’t yet picked a champion, and the very unfortunate few who were too behind on their studies to join in the fun.
Kaal had his crew, John had his crew, Quondass val Haq, Raytanna, and Gredilah had theirs.
Only Mordant Talliver sat alone, picking at his black gooey breakfast, with the ever-loyal G-Vez hovering over his shoulder.
He had packets of Yoko Beans, Astron Crunchies, and Brucko Gums spread out in front of him, which he offered to passers-by. A few students had taken the bait, but they were talking among themselves, not even bothering to wave the Mordant Talliver Holo-Placards he’d given them.
For a second, John considered feeling sorry for Mordant.
Nah.
“Hey, John!” Emmie called from the halfway point between John’s group and Kaal’s. “Good luck in the finals today!” Her Holo-Placard beamed the message GO JOHN GO.
“Thanks, Emmie. Come sit with us,” John offered.
“I’m fine!” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “I’ll just stand here. Don’t want to get in the way . . . Hey, Kaal! Good luck!”
“Thanks, Emmie!” Kaal said with a shy wave.
John saw that the other side of Emmie’s banner read GO KAAL GO. He couldn’t help laughing out loud.
Emmie noticed, shrugged, and gave him a big you-got-me grin. “What can I say? I can’t take sides, can I?”
“Emmie, don’t ever change,” John said, shaking his head in wonder.
“Okay, well, good luck to you both,” Emmie said quickly. “Got to go now. I’ve got, um . . . things to do.” With that, she was gone, bounding out of the cafeteria and leaving John puzzled.
It must be rough, not making it to the final, he thought. Maybe Emmie couldn’t put on her brave face any longer.
The ship’s nutrition system, as advised by Zepp, served John a big bowl of cornflakes. Instantly his fans crowded around him, eager to see what kinds of exotic Earth food he might be eating.
“Can I try one of those?” Xyglurz asked nervously.
“You can have the whole bowl,” John said, pushing away the bowl. “To be honest, I don’t have much of an appetite.”
John didn’t want to say it aloud, but he was feeling sick with nerves. There were only ten minutes left until the semi-final was due to start. As with all the rounds, he had no idea what to expect.
Across the table, Xyglurz was turning a strange metallic green and spitting out chunks of soggy cornflakes.
* * *
The next few minutes passed in a blur.
Before John knew it, he was standing in the main lecture hall once again, looking up at Master Tronic, who was looming above everyone’s heads. All six of the finalist robots had been placed in a line at Master Tronic’s feet.
The stage area had been remodeled overnight. Instead of the usual smooth, flat surface, there was a fifty-foot-wide crater of what appeared to be moon rock. It looked like a bomb had blasted it out.
Is it real, or some sort of solid hologram? John wondered. He could easily believe it had been sliced out of an actual moon with mining lasers, then hoisted aboard the ship.
“Up until now,” Master Tronic was saying (with what John could have sworn was relish), “we have gone easy on the contestants.”
Could have fooled me, John thought.
“Today, that will change!” Master Tronic boomed. “Welcome to the semi-finals, in which we remind ourselves why this is called the Robot WARRIORS contest!”
The crowd became a frenzy of cheers and applause. Master Tronic strode back and forth like a drill sergeant, smacking his metal fist into his hand as he spoke.
“This round is about weapons. This round is about power. This round is about destruction. These six robots are about to face their first real challenge: they must defeat an opponent in one-to-one combat!”
With a low hum, six bland, dumpy-looking robots descended from the gantries above the stage, moving along columns of bright light. Each one came to a gentle rest next to a finalist robot.
“This,” said Master Tronic, rapping his metal knuckles against the helmet-like head of one of the robots, “is a B-class. I designed and built these robots myself. They have only one function, and that is to be beaten up.”
The audience laughed and cheered with excitement.
They can’t wait for this to start, John thought. His palms were sweating.
“But that doesn’t mean it will be easy!” Master Tronic warned. “Each B-class is built to take a lot of punishment, and they remember everything. The more damage you are able to do to them, the more points you will get. But if you manage to damage your own robots, you will lose points.”
John looked hard at the squat, barrel-bodied B-class robots. They reminded him of the dummies that martial artists use for practicing kicks and punches.
Master Tronic spread his arms wide. “Each contestant has sixty seconds to attack their B-class opponent,” he said. “The robots that do the most damage will go through to the grand final, to face off against one another. As for the others, there is always . . . the Junkyard!”
“Junkyard!” some of the older students yelled, pumping their fists in the air. “Junkyard! Junkyard!”
“Shall we see which of our contestants is up first?” asked Master Tronic.
“YES!” roared the crowd.
John took a deep breath.
Master Tronic opened a panel in his arm, revealing a screen. Characters flickered randomly on it.
“The first robot into the Crater of Destruction is . . . Laserdon!”
Spotlights picked out Kaal in the crowd. He made his way to the front of the stage, looking nervous but determined.
Behind him, John could hear some students asking why the robot was called Laserdon, and John realized he didn’t know, either. I guess this is the round where we find out, he thought.
The first B-class waddled into the middle of the crater. With Laserdon perched on his arm, Kaal crouched at the crater’s edge. His whole body seemed tense as he waited for the signal to begin.
A soft, synthetic female voice echoed across the crater: “Three. Two. One.”
A buzzer sounded. The timer began to count down.
Laserdon’s eyes burned with brilliant light. It spread its wings and soared into the air. Kaal hung back, controlling it with his remote pad, sending it in a wide swooping circle around the B-class.
Laserdon’s head turned, tracking its target like a hawk.
John watched, completely transfixed, and a little in awe of Kaal’s majestic robot. From Laserdon’s eyes came two parallel beams of sizzling light. The lights sliced into the B-class robot’s casing, and as Laserdon veered around it, they opened it up like a tin can.
The B-class joggled around in one spot, as if something deep inside it had gone wrong.
Laserdon completed its circle. Then the beams vanished. The upper half of the B-class fell off with a clatter, revealing its tangled wire innards.
Laserdon swept in for the kill and sent a fresh blast of double lasers into the robot’s exposed core. There was a flare of blue light like an arc welder, the smell of burning circuits, and an abrupt bang.
The smoking, blackened shell of the B-class toppled over and lay still.
Master Tronic came over and carefully extracted a little black box from the robot’s remains.
Kaal looked at it with a worried expression. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I think I might have broken your robot.”
The hall exploded with cheers.
John heard someone nearby saying, “They give points based on damage, right? So how many points do you get for blowing it up completely?”
No one seemed to know.
Next up was Charly, the robotic jellyfish. Raytanna had built it to respond to voice commands, but when she started yelling, “Strangle it! Use your tentacles!” in her squeaky voice, the audience burst out laughing. That made Raytanna upset. The more everyone laughed, the more frustrated and angry Raytanna was.
Charly wrapped three of its tentacles around the B-class, squeezing with all its strength. The B-class struggled and exuded a groan of tortured metal, but John didn’t think it looked badly damaged at all.
You can’t strangle something that doesn’t breathe, he thought. Big mistake, Raytanna.
Raytanna seemed to realize this at the same time as John — but with only twenty seconds left on the clock.
“Charly! Supernova mode!” she shrieked, jumping up and down.
The roars of laughter from the audience changed to oohs of appreciation, as Charly flared up with a sudden surge of energy. A miniature sunburst of rays blasted from the robot, searing and blackening the B-class all over. Smoke began to curl from the crater.
And then the buzzer rang.
Time was up.
John felt sorry for Raytanna as she trudged back to her seat, shoulders sagging.
She lost this round and she knows it! Maybe Super-Rover is in with a chance, after all. . . .
But then John saw Quondass val Haq stomping up to the crater, getting his heavy-duty drill robot, Rocky, ready to attack the next B-class.
There was no question what the audience thought of his chances — as last year’s champion, Quondass had the largest fan base of them all, and they led a boom-boom-crash chant that shook the floor under John’s feet.
The round began.
Rocky’s gleaming drill began to spin, faster and faster, whirring in a blur. Quondass playfully backed Rocky up, charged forward, and then hesitated. He turned to the audience, like a gladiator asking the Roman Emperor what the fate of a defeated opponent should be.
The audience was fired up, and everyone roared, “Finish him!”
Rocky’s powerful caterpillar tracks churned and the robot shot forward. The drill ground deep into the side of the B-class, tearing away slices of its casing like pencil shavings.
Quondass val Haq punched the air, Rocky snarled and the drill bit deep, the audience whooped and hollered —
And then the drill got stuck.
A grinding screech came from the hapless robot. Quondass wrestled with his remote control, but smoke was already beginning to seethe from beneath Rocky’s plating.
The drill bit was stuck fast in the B-class and couldn’t turn, and the engine was starting to overload.
It’s just like that time Dad’s drill got stuck in the wall and tripped the circuit breaker, John thought. Except by the looks of it, Rocky didn’t have a circuit breaker. Flames had begun leaping from its back.
The timer buzzed, and Master Tronic quickly ran forward with a fire extinguisher.
Once Quondass had sadly removed Rocky’s smoldering remains from the crater, it was Gredilah’s turn. Her robot, Fop, shuffled forward, looking absurdly toy-like, its huge grinning head tracking from side to side.
“Hope you put fresh batteries in that thing,” John muttered under his breath.
Fop turned out to be just about as dangerous as a toy robot. It stayed far back, firing hissing sprays of sparkling light that seemed to do only a tiny amount of damage. Once or twice the B-class wobbled dramatically and its eyes flashed red, but when the final buzzer sounded, it looked almost completely unhurt.
I guess she built her robot for show, not for fighting, John thought.
Now there were only two contestants left: John and Mordant.
John sat, every muscle tense, waiting to hear who would go next. He could feel Mordant’s gaze on him from three rows over, willing him to fail.
“Next contestant: John Riley!”
John’s crowd of followers slapped his back and cheered him as he stood up. He stepped up to the stage, grasping his remote control tightly in both hands. His heart was pounding as he lifted Super-Rover and set him down at the crater’s edge.
Then he heard the voice counting down.
“Three . . .”
Everything and everyone else in the room seemed to fade away. The cheers became a distant roar, like waves on the sea. John’s world shrank to include only him, Super-Rover, and the B-class in front of him.
“Two . . .”
There could be no mercy. He had to destroy it, tear it to little pieces, or everything was lost.
“One!”
John pressed a control button. Super-Rover crouched, ready to spring. A low growl came from his throat. He no longer looked cute.
The buzzer sounded.
Super-Rover bounded in, instantly on the attack. The beronzium teeth went to work on the B-class, tearing and ripping and shredding the metal.
A section of the B-class came loose and John controlled Super-Rover to grab it between his teeth, causing him tug it free like a terrier pulling on a chew toy. He gave the exposed machinery beneath a whack with the razor-sharp tail for good measure. Severed wires sparked and fizzed, and oil spurted out in a black mess.
Fifteen seconds had passed, and the B-class was already looking ragged. Feeling confident now, John sent Super-Rover to chew on the robot’s other leg. The teeth chomped down hard, sinking deep — and he could see, as Super-Rover’s jaws opened again, that some had been torn out!
John fought to stay calm. It’s okay, he told himself. Don’t panic, he’s not too badly hurt. He still has most of his teeth. And there’s always the tail to fall back on.
Super-Rover bit again, clamping on tight. John waggled a control. The robot shook the B-class without letting go, pulling it crashing down onto its side. John saw that the robot’s underside was hardly armored at all, and excitedly he controlled Super-Rover to tear and bite at it, lashing and lashing with its tail.
When the buzzer finally sounded, it was like an alarm clock, waking him up from a very long dream.
The crowd was chanting his name. The mangled wreck of the B-class lay at his feet. Poor Super-Rover wasn’t looking much better, with half his teeth missing and a grinding sound coming from his back legs.
He tried to follow John out of the crater, but his legs were moving jerkily and wouldn’t carry him. John had to pick him up and hurry back to his place.
A horrible thought crept into his mind and wouldn’t go away: I pushed him too far, and now he’s broken. . . .
“Final contestant: Mordant Talliver!” boomed Master Tronic.
As Mordant took the stage, John saw that he wasn’t sneering at the audience. He looked deadly serious — and maybe even a tiny bit nervous.
Mordant set IFI down and stood waiting for the signal, his eyes narrowed in deep concentration.
He’s so determined to make it through to the final, John thought. How’s this all going to end? Mordant against Kaal? Kaal against me? His stomach churned with nerves just thinking about it.
The battle began. IFI’s eight arms extended from its middle, and it began to spin around on the spot.
At the ends of those arms, needle guns opened fire, peppering the B-class with high-velocity shot. John instantly saw what Mordant was doing. By keeping IFI spinning, every one of its guns got a chance to fire in turn. Constant bombardment.
“Smart,” John said to himself. Mordant might be a jerk, but John had to admit that his robot was pretty slick.
Next, needler bullets ripped into the B-class’s body. They didn’t do a lot of damage individually, but taken all together, they were shredding it like buckshot. It soon looked more perforated than the edge of a postage stamp. Bits of armor were pinging off the hull and a spreading puddle of oil was beginning to form beneath it.
By the time the final buzzer sounded, the B-class looked like it had been put through a waste disposal shredder. One of its legs was gone, and pieces were hanging off by single cables.
John couldn’t guess where he stood in the ranking now. Kaal seemed like the obvious front runner — but who had taken the all-important second place?
“You did great!” his fans assured him excitedly. “You’re through to the final, we’d bet on it!”
“Thanks,” he said, crossing his fingers. Then a hush fell over the hall as Master Tronic took to the stage again.
“Will the semi-finalists please line up at the front of the stage?”
The six students obediently trooped up in front of the audience.
The B-class robots came waddling out and stood next to them, except for the one Laserdon had completely destroyed. Instead, Master Tronic carefully put its black box down next to Kaal.
“The scores will now be announced, in reverse order.”
John suddenly realized the B-class robots’ placement on the stage was so that they could announce the scores themselves.
“CHARLY: THIRTEEN POINTS.”
“I was afraid of that,” said Raytanna with a sigh. “Not enough compensation for the gravometric tolerance inverters. That’s pretty obvious in hindsight.”
“FOP: TWENTY-ONE POINTS.”
Gredilah didn’t say anything. She just muttered something unintelligible.
“ROCKY: FIFTY-NINE POINTS.”
Quondass val Haq shook a scaly fist in the air, smiling despite his defeat.
“I was bored with winning anyway!” he joked. Loud cheers erupted immediately from the crowd.
“SUPER-ROVER: EIGHTY-SEVEN POINTS.”
Gasps rang out. John felt as if the stage was giving way beneath him.
Third place. After everything I’ve been through, I only got to lousy third place. I was so close, I nearly made it! But now Mordant’s going to . . .
“IFI: EIGHTY-SEVEN POINTS.”
John’s jaw dropped.
NOT third place! Tied for second!
The crowd went absolutely crazy.
“LASERDON: ONE HUNDRED POINTS,” grated the metallic voice from the black box.
Master Tronic had to hold up his hands for calm. Students were jumping up and down on the spot, hugging each other, waving their arms, and howling at the top of their voices.
“It seems we have three finalists!” Master Tronic roared. “Congratulations to each one of you! You must now prepare yourselves for this evening’s grand finale. You have six hours to tune up your robots in any way you see fit. You may repair any damage, reprogram any circuits, and strengthen any special abilities. And if you wish to add any last-minute surprises, now is the time to do it!”
“Oh, I will,” Mordant Talliver whispered, loud enough for John to hear. “You can bet on it.”
As the applause washed over him, John looked down at his battered robot.
He wondered if Super-Rover had any chance at all. Half its teeth were missing and its back legs looked badly out of alignment.
In six hours, whether it was ready or not, that robot was going up against both IFI and Laserdon.
Now John needed to work like he’d never worked before, or Super-Rover wouldn’t even last for six seconds. . . .