Tron Legacy the Junior Novel - Alice Alfonsi [24]
They scanned the rugged peak that rose above the Sea of Simulation like an island in an ocean. Soon the recognizer reappeared. The craft was approaching their ship!
The deck under their feet suddenly shuddered. Sam watched a bright tractor beam reach out from the recognizer. It caught the solar sailer’s plasma stream and bent it to alter their course. Now their ship was headed for an island Sam had seen out of the corner of his eye a few moments before.
Quorra grabbed Sam’s arm and dragged him down to the cargo hold. Sam peered through a porthole. The sails were retracting. The ship was preparing to dock.
“What happened?” Sam asked.
“A new course,” his dad said, coming to join them.
The sailer entered a mammoth cave in the face of the mountainside. The cargo bay was plunged into darkness. Sam stared as sheer rock walls slid past the window. Then he heard Quorra gasp.
In the darkness, the cargo containers began to glow, and Sam could make out their contents. The containers were packed with programs. Thousands of them. Frozen. Inert. Locked inside some sort of electronic trance. They were stacked one on top of the other.
“What is this?” Quorra asked.
“Clu can’t create programs,” Kevin explained. “He can only destroy or repurpose them.”
“Repurpose them for what?” Quorra asked in alarm.
“Look here,” Sam called from the porthole. He had just seen the answer to Quorra’s question.
The ship had entered a massive underground facility in the heart of the mountain. The cave was filled with Sentries and Black Guardsmen. Soldier programs stood in rigid ranks. All wore identical uniforms and carried war discs on their backs.
Another sprawling sector held thousands of armored tanks. They were larger than the tanks in the Tron game. All of them had rotating turrets with two cannons mounted on their beetle black hulls.
“Clu is building an invasion army,” Sam said grimly.
And it wasn’t hard for him to guess which world Clu was planning to invade.
SAM, KEVIN, AND QUORRA SLIPPED OUT of the cargo bay after their ship docked. The automatic loaders began working on the towed container, which gave them a chance to escape. Whatever had pulled them in here did not yet know of their existence.
Or so they thought.
As soon as they stepped onto the dock, Sam spotted trouble.
Rinzler was striding down the dock. Behind him, Clu’s throne ship hovered like a vulture eager to dive on its prey.
Rinzler homed in on Quorra, his pace increasing. She gasped. Fear momentarily shadowed her features. Then a quiet calm came over her as she accepted her fate. Sam stepped forward to face him. Meanwhile, Quorra detached her disc and handed it to Kevin.
“They can’t know you’re here,” she said calmly, and then she whispered, “good-bye.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Kevin said.
But Quorra took off. With preternatural speed, she bolted and then leaped on top of the cargo crates. Rinzler followed. But Quorra moved so fast Rinzler couldn’t catch her.
Jumping from crate to crate, Quorra headed for the throne ship. When she hit the access ladder on the ship’s outer skin, she climbed the rungs to reach the airship’s upper deck. Then she shattered the ladder with her baton so Rinzler couldn’t follow.
When he saw that the ladder had shattered, Rinzler paused—but just for a moment. Then the enforcer drew the disc from his back and split it.
He leaped onto the hull of the rectifier. With a metallic clang, he plunged the discs into the vessel’s hull. Using the disc’s sharp edges the way a mountaineer would use spikes, he climbed all the way up to the bridge.
Sam watched helplessly as Rinzler overtook Quorra.
“We can’t just let her go!” Sam cried as Quorra was dragged into the rectifier.
“We have no other choice,” Kevin said. “Come on!”
Sam followed his father to the end of the docking bay. They were in the off-loading zone now. Programs awaiting processing were stacked like fireplace logs.
Sam watched while a huge, spinning