High above, water poured down the sides of the stasis cube. As the ice melted, students goggled. A small flood, bigger with every passing second, began gurgling around their feet.
“What did you do, Tarz?” Lishtig whispered in disbelief.
Emmie didn’t answer. Her face was gray, her navy-blue eyes fixed, unblinking, on the scene before her.
John, too, was unable to take his eyes off the exhibit. The Omega-bots forgotten, he stared as streams of water turned into a continuous rushing fall along the entire length of the stasis cube.
Somewhere in the distance an alarm blared. With a clash of metal, the Omega-bots’ claws released Emmie’s arm. The two machines moved to take new positions farther back from the cube, a short distance from each other. Neither gave any instructions to the students around them.
Still staring wildly, Emmie walked toward the ice, hand stretched out to touch the gushing water.
“No,” she whispered. “This can’t be happening.”
A few feet from her, Kaal hadn’t moved since his warning shout. Like the rest of the class, he seemed to be rooted to the spot.
Water rushed past John’s ankles, threatening to knock him off his feet. He heard a long, blood-chilling shriek that drowned out the sirens in the distance.
What’s going on? he wondered.
Another scream rang out, followed by the sounds of blasts and explosions.
It was a battle cry.
The stasis cube was now less than three-quarters of its original height.
John gasped as freezing water passed his knees. A split second later, he forgot all about the cold: the scene before his eyes was much more chilling.
As they emerged from the ice, the Goran and Subo warriors that had been on the highest ground were now resuming their fight exactly where they had left off.
Most of the soldiers in the bogs below were still trapped but, as John watched, a Goran lunged at the closest Subo.
“Die, Subo!” it howled in triumph. The Subo thrashed its supple body, desperate to escape the ice.
It failed. Caught in the Goran’s pincers, massive wounds opened up along its neck. The enraged Subo twisted in the Goran’s grip, screaming as its laser-horn flickered to life.
A jet of light flashed. The Goran howled as one of its pincers was lopped from its body. The Subo was now free of the ice and able to slither toward its enemy. It closed in for a fresh attack, shrieking.
The cube was now half melted. Water gurgled and swirled around John’s thighs. Jagged blocks of ice swept past.
Across the melting ice, thousands of warriors were coming to life. In the distance, John could see a hill that looked like a command post. He heard a roaring voice giving commands, massively amplified so that every soldier could hear.
“This is General Klort, Commander of the Subo forces. Attack the Goran. Show them no mercy. Kill them. Kill them all!”
A great cheer swelled in the Subo ranks. As if answering their general, devastating charges that had been frozen on high ground for thousands of years began to fall once again upon enemy ranks below. Subo and Goran slid across the ice in killing lust. Explosions burst into life again, splattering the scene with great gobs of mud and broken bodies.
As the ice melted, the roar of battle became deafening. Somewhere, the alarm was still sounding, but John could barely hear it. He watched, fascinated, as lines of laser fire were exchanged for bullets and exploding bombs. Giant pincers met the deadly points of laser-horns.
Here, a Subo went down, squealing under a tank-like Goran, never to get up again. There, a Goran howled its last as it was cut to pieces by laser fire.
John’s eyes moved across the scene. Neither side seemed to be winning. In one place, a Goran line collapsed under the weight of attacking Subo in one place.
For a moment, John thought that might give them the advantage. Then, just mere seconds later, the same happened to a line of Subo soldiers.
There was no order to the chaos: General Klort roared orders, but most of her troops were too bogged down to respond. The entire battle was one vast, bloodthirsty brawl. Kill or be killed. Horrifying in its violence, but at the same time mesmerizing.
“John. Get out of there!”
Lishtig splashed past him, through water mixed with battlefield mud. Beside him, Queelin Temerate slipped and fell. Lishtig caught her by the arm.
Half crawling, half dragging each other, the two students moved away toward the Omega-bots. The students were fleeing.
John heard a whining noise fifty feet to his right. Suddenly, an explosion flung him onto his knees. Choking on the icy mud, he lifted his head as realization flooded through him. This wasn’t a 4-D movie or one of Archivus Major’s amazing replicas.
It was a war.
And it was happening right in front of him.
Most of his classmates had made it to dry ground past the Omega-bots that had restrained Emmie only a few minutes before.
Now, more of the great droids were arriving — hundreds of them buzzed through the air and clanked to a halt in a line at the edge of the battlefield. Quickly, a ring of Omega-bots was forming around the entire exhibit.
John took a step toward the metal guardians of Archivus Major and then stopped. Kaal and Emmie were still standing where he had last seen them, right next to the melting stasis cube. The battle was raging just feet from where they stood. Water was halfway up Emmie’s thighs and as high as Kaal’s knees.
John could see Emmie’s gaped mouth as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing, what she had done. Kaal was simply staring, lost in the action unfolding.
The words of Graximus Greyfore suddenly came back to John: “We will never know how the battle would have ended.”
“Wanna bet?” he muttered to himself as he stepped through the sludge.
“KAAAAAL!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, fear giving his voice an urgency that caught the Derrilian’s attention, even through the noise of battle.
Kaal turned. Wading more quickly now, John pointed toward Emmie.
Suddenly, Kaal became aware of the danger they were in. Shaking his head, he unfurled his wings, flapping them to help drive him through the muddy water.
They arrived at Emmie at the same time, each reaching out to pull her away.
Eyes fixed on the fight, she struggled against her friends. “My fault,” she whispered. “This is all my fault.”
“No, it’s not!” John yelled. “Come on, we’ve got to get away from here.”
Emmie turned toward him, her face streaked with mud and tears.
“It’s not your fault, Emmie,” John repeated as gently as he could with the battle raging a few yards away. “Just run for it. Please.”
“Let’s go, Tarz. That’s an order!” Kaal shouted. This time, she didn’t struggle. Glancing over her shoulder in horror, she allowed them to drag her over the drenched ground.
“Quickly,” panted John, as they waded through the cold gloop. “The Omega-bots can handle this.” They were close now, the water shallower as they clambered up a low hill. “Just a few more steps, Emmie.”
With a last effort, the three friends hurled themselves toward a gap in the line of metal droids.
Suddenly, there was a fizzing noise and a surge of energy.
Together, they were thrown back.
“What on Earth —” John began. Catching hold of Emmie’s arm once more, he threw himself forward.
And again, a charge of energy threw him back. “Aarrgghhh!” he screamed.
“It’s a force field!” Kaal shouted. “The Omega-bots are acting like fence posts in a ring of force surrounding the battlefield.”
John looked up. On each side of the Omega-bots’ heads, green eyes glowed with power. He put his hand out and yanked it back quickly, his fingertips smarting.
Kaal was right. There was an invisible wall between the tall robots.
John waded over to the closest robot and slammed his fist against its metal casing. “Hey, you!” he yelled. “We’re trapped in here. Let us out.”
The Omega-bot remained perfectly still, and perfectly silent.
“I said —”
“It’s no use, John.”
John looked back to see Kaal pushing against the force field. It hadn’t budged.
“But they’re supposed to be protecting us,” John said.
“No, they’re not,” Emmie cut in, her voice thick with misery. “They’re supposed to protect the exhibits, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. They won’t let anything out.” She paused for a moment, then held out the Comet Creative. “I’m sorry, this is all my fault. I must have pressed the wrong button.”
“It wasn’t you, Emmie,” John replied. “I realized Greyfore must have been up to something just as you pressed the button. Why did he want to keep the Comet Creative a secret? Why give it to a student at all? Looks to me like he planned this. I think he wanted it to happen.”
Emmie looked up at him hopefully. “You mean it wasn’t —”
“I hate to interrupt, but just to remind you, we’re kind of fenced in with two hundred thousand warriors,” Kaal interrupted. “Pretty soon, one of them is going to wonder why they just woke up in a block of ice on a different planet.”
“Good point.” John waved his arms, standing as close to the invisible barrier as he dared.
On the other side of the field, Lishtig’s head turned. John saw his mouth moving, but no sound made it through the invisible barrier between them. The purple-haired student turned back to his classmates, apparently shouting. A few moments later they were running toward their side of the barrier. Lishtig arrived first and began banging his fists against it. When that failed, he, too, tried to attract an Omega-bot’s attention.
“It’s no good, they’re programmed to contain any disaster,” Kaal said, panting. “The Omega-bots will maintain the force field for as long as they can.”
“So, we’re stuck in here?” John tried to keep the terror he felt from his voice.
Kaal nodded. “Unless we can either fix the battlefield or disable the Omega-bots.”
John glanced at the battle. It had taken five specially built Peace Stars to freeze it 30,000 years ago.
He returned his gaze to the unmoving line of Omega-bots. Each was heavily armed and built to fight off anyone or anything trying to interfere with Archivus Major’s exhibits.
John’s shoulders sagged in defeat. “There’s no hope, then?”
“There’s always hope. Emmie, give me the Comet Creative.”
Emmie didn’t reply. Standing stock-still, she stared ahead of her.
John and Kaal followed her gaze.
From the corner of his eye, John saw his classmates beating against the force field with even more urgency. He didn’t move, didn’t even breathe.
A massive Subo warrior had fallen from the ice and was staring at them with its dark, beady eyes. It looked along the line of Omega-bots, then lifted its head to gaze at the sky above. With a snort of angry confusion, it looked back at the three beings who had no business on a Goran-Subo battlefield.
“Who are you? What is this place?” it snarled.
The Subo lowered its laser-horn and began moving forward on short, flipper-like hind legs. John looked around desperately, but there was nowhere to go.
The Subo opened its mouth. “This is Goran trickery. You are enemies of the Subo race,” it growled. “All enemies must die.”