Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (20 page)

Metal clanked, the sound of ladder rungs being climbed. The woman asked, “First, I must know. You came from the direction we were going. We followed a signal from the Jovians, telling me that a source of charged aetheric fluid could be found there. Then we saw a flash of light, and the Jovians said the source was gone. Do you know anything about that?”

Claire answered. “We sure do, but you didn’t want to go there. Are Puppeteers bright red buglike things that spread red cancerous stuff all over a building and mutate people into goat zombies?”

“Yes.” The man did not sound happy.

“That asteroid was infested, and we blew it up. I’m sorry. We’ll do what we can to help you, but you might as well turn around.”

A brand new voice echoed out of the hatch. It sounded distant, young, female, and impatient. “We haven’t turned around because our engine is busted, and someone won’t give up his precious bug burning pistol so I can build a new ignition system!”

Vera was safe. I looked back up the joined airlocks to see Claire sitting on the edge of the tunnel on their side, kicking her feet. The woman chuckled once, and the man stood up slowly, looking theatrically sour. I knew that expression. I saw a whole lot of it in the supervillain world.

Claire, of course, had on her best sunny smile. “I go by the name E-Claire. That’s Reviled, and our leader with the goggles is Bad Penny. The Conqueror orb is Vera, and the meat puppet is Juliet, but we freed them both. Vera is loyal to Penny, and Juliet is more interested in astronomy than eating people.”

“I am Juno,” the woman introduced.

“The Space Witch!” the little girl’s voice yelled.

“The Herald of the Jovians,” the woman corrected serenely.

The man gave a tug on his fedora, and held his hand out to Claire. “And I’m Calvin Fawkes, Miss E-Claire. They call me the Fabulous Mr. Fawkes.”

“No they don’t!” yelled the little girl again. Claire took his hand anyway, and he leaned down to kiss it.

Her voice bubbly with amusement, Juno said, “And that is Remmy Fawkes, Calvin’s little sister, who is in a terrible temper and could use nothing more than to meet another mechanic right now.”

“I could use―wait, another mechanic? Really? I thought you said they were kids!” Remmy shouted.

I shook my head. What could I say? “Permission to come aboard?”

“You are more than welcome,” Juno said.

Calvin frowned, adding sharply, “The Conqueror drone and the meat puppet stay on your ship. Sorry, little miss, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

Hmmm. Was that fair? Apparently it was, because Juliet chattered happily, “You go on ahead! I need to watch the ship, and Harvey thinks I can teach it to take notes until we can find real pencil and paper.”

Juliet’s cheerful demeanor could give Claire’s superpower a run for its friend-making money. Calvin almost smiled, and clearly had to work not to. “I can trade a notebook and a couple of pencils for your mechanic helping my little sister fix our ship.”

“Sold.” Yeah, like I was going to give up a chance to poke around a flying saucer’s engine anyway!

I shifted Archimedes to my shoulder, and stepped into the airlock. Ray took my waist to hold me steady through the gravity shift, and I let him. He was completely gentlemanly about it, and I did have serious vertigo as my head passed through the barrier and I groped for the ladder rungs.

After that, it was easy. I climbed into a metal room that looked like the inside of an aircraft carrier, and got my first good look at our hosts. Calvin had short light hair under that blue hat, and loose blue pants, button-up shirt, suspenders, and jacket. He looked sleek, even with four leather pistol holsters at his armpits and hips. Juno wore a cream-colored dress that went all the way to the floor but didn’t puff out very far, with a high collar and a tight bodice.

Otherwise, she looked a lot like a slightly older She Who Wots, which is to say she looked like me, ten years from now. Well, I hoped I’d be half that pretty, have half that generous a figure, or move, even stand with that kind of grace. But her face looked like mine, down to a faint scattering of freckles, and her braided pigtails were the exact same shade of brown. Hers reached the middle of her back, and I barely kept mine longer than my shoulders. It still made me feel like I was part of a secret line of super-powered clones.

Calvin held out his hand, which I shook before he could kiss my knuckles. That would have been just too creepy. It didn’t bother him at all, and with a little tug, he walked me back to a set of metal strut staircases. I walked up ahead of him into a much larger room, lit with many unevenly flickering lights.

This was an engine room, alright. Lightning arced inside big glass tubes. Pipes came out of the ceiling and the walls, and a metal drum the size of a compact car had been broken open in the middle of the room, exposing its parts. Next to what had to be the engine stood a girl even younger than me. I had to guess eleven. She had pigtails too, but not braided. They came off the top of her head, and were even longer than Juno’s, all the way down to her hips. Like her brother’s, her hair was blond, although it had plenty of grease stains. She had no shortage of grease stains anywhere, and all the skin I could see shone with sweat. This looked like hard work for a little kid.

Calvin laid his hand on her head between her pigtails, and gave them an affectionate ruffle. “My baby sister Remington. Don’t be fooled, she’s a girl. I make her keep her hair long so you can tell.”

I gave Remmy an agonized ‘Seriously?’ look, so she would know I understood how she felt. If I’d been Calvin’s little sister, I’d have hit him with that wrench she carried.

He did have a little bit of a point. She had slightly less curves than me, which is to say none whatsoever, and she wore canvas pants that couldn’t be called tight because they were weighed down by pockets full of tools. Her loose white shirt’s frills were completely ruined with grease stains. Her aviator goggles, leather and brass and almost exactly like mine, hid some of the softness of her face. She did wear either a huge belt or the universe’s only khaki corset around her middle, so that was technically feminine.

There still was no excuse for introducing his sister to a stranger like that. She growled at him, but I stuck out my own hand. “I’m Bad Penny. It’s kind of a title, like Fabulous Mr. Fawkes, except people really do call me that.”

“Ha!” she shouted, grabbing my hand and shaking it. Ice broken!

We turned our backs on the older brother, and I stepped over a few pipes, pistons, or axles (I wasn’t sure) on the floor to examine the guts of the engine. An axle came down from the ceiling, where behind smoked glass a propeller, or maybe a windmill, turned slowly. The propeller glowed so bright that even through the dark glass it hurt to look at, and lit up the whole room. That attached, with a lot of cables and twisty tubes of water, to a device that was mostly a really thin tube containing something that glowed more gently. The open side of the engine connected that mysterious center pillar with what looked like a rusty carburetor and alternator of all things, with the alternator hooked to electrical cables that disappeared into another pipe running out towards the side of the ship. Actually, the carburetor and the central pillar weren’t quite connected. A gap and some silver cap connectors that didn’t attach to anything lay between the two.

And that was as far as I got. This somehow ran a car engine to make electricity, when it was working. Everything else was a mystery.

I knew one other thing. This was mad science tech, running on principles nobody on Earth had discovered yet.

“You keep this thing running?” The girl was younger than me!

She straightened, laid her wrench against her shoulder and declared proudly, “I
built
it.”

Seconds later, she deflated, leaning forward to look at the gap with me and add in a more confidential tone, “Okay, I assembled the parts, but I’m the one who figured out how to kludge an aetheric rotor together with an alternator.”

Mentally, I crossed my fingers. Oh Mightily Deceased Tesla, please don’t let me sound like an ignorant goober asking this next question. “So what’s wrong with it?”

“This,” she snarled, pinching her nose in disgust. She scooped an object off a rack. It looked kind of like an oversized spark plug, the size of my forearm with a little blue crystal on one end and a marble sized glass ball on the other containing a ball-bearing-sized drop of that glowy stuff. I didn’t know what it did, but I knew the end with the crystal shouldn’t look saggy and half-melted.

Okay, figure it out, Penny. However it worked, it connected the central pillar to the carburetor, which meant it took the power from the pillar and made the carburetor spin.

Hooray! With that knowledge and several years of training, I might be able to help Remmy out.

She went on complaining as if how it all worked was obvious. “Unless you can fix it, we’re going to sit here for a week before my brother gives up his precious flame gun so I can kludge it in as an igniter. We’ll still be hobbled, but at least we’ll get home at a decent speed. Except now he’s seen your spaceship, I bet he thinks you can tow us. He has no concept.” She rolled her eyes in disgust.

Feeling like a heel, I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can help. My superpower doesn’t repair machines; it only makes new ones. We don’t even use this technology back on Earth.”

Her mouth hung open. “You’re seriously from Earth?”

I went straight from feeling embarrassed that I couldn’t help to embarrassed that she was impressed over nothing. I blew the question off with a shrug. “A lot of people are.”

Remmy’s voice squeaked in disbelief. “How fast does that Puppeteer ship go?”

Okay, this I could legitimately be proud of. “Pretty fast. We expected to reach Jupiter in a few more hours.”

Remmy slammed the melted igniter back on the shelf, making a loud clang, then shook her wrench at the ceiling. “At least when we run out of food, we can take your ship back and not starve. My idiot brother’s going to leave my poor baby a scuttled space hulk.” Turning around, she stomped over to the engine, sat on one of the flatter parts of the housing, pulled her knees up, and wrapped her arms around them.

That wasn’t theater. From that glare, I thought she might cry. Calvin must be one stubborn guy.

In a much lower voice, she muttered, “Maybe we can salvage the rotor when we leave.”

I had to do
something
for her. Could I build another igniter? I stared at the spark plug shaped device. Come on, power!

Zip.

Now I felt helpless. I stared at the taunting gap between two different kinds of engine. Maybe my power could do the same thing?

It looked so inefficient. She had one kind of power, and had to go through two conversions to get electricity. It could be so much easier.

I had it. The picture appeared in my head. I hadn’t drifted off into madness yet, so too much thinking would scare the inspiration off.

Those big vacuum tube things on the walls. “Can you spare one of these?”

Remmy looked up, now confused and quizzical. “Sure.”

I yanked one out, feeling the heat through my gloved hand, but not enough to burn. Twisting the Machine off my wrist, I waved it around until it started moving, then laid it over the tube. “Eat.”

I left the Machine on the rack, chomping down the vacuum tube and growing glass plates. Running around the room, I grabbed a few caps like I’d seen in the central engine, some wires, and the broken igniter. Dumping them in a heap, I let the Machine eat those, too.

Then I… had to stop looking for words, or I would lose this. “Remake the tube, drain it to vacuum, and insert the aetheric fluid,” I told the Machine. Even that was too much attention. I let go, only vaguely watching myself punch holes in caps, thread wires, and order the Machine to make new parts smaller or bigger than the originals.

Done. It was safe to think again. I clasped the now glowing Machine back around my wrist, and held up my invention. It looked like another oversized vacuum tube, with a wire running all the way through it, another wire running partly through, metal caps on the ends with prongs sticking out, and a faint mist filling the bulb.

I jumped when I noticed Remmy standing next to me. She pulled up her goggles and gaped at what I’d made. “That’s aetheric charge input, and alternating current output. It’s a direct converter. There’s no way.”

“We won’t know until we try.”

She nodded, and fished tools out of her pockets. Okay, one looked like a voltmeter, and she fastened the clamps on the electrical end. That made sense. The other looked like a glowing thermometer.

She pressed the thermometer against one of the knobs on the base of my converter. The voltmeter’s dial shot up.

“AAAAAH!” Remmy yelled, throwing her arms up in the air and running around the engine room in a circle. Her superpower must have been not tripping over things, because I’d have broken my neck with all these pipes around.

When she got back to me, she yanked the converter out of my hands and climbed over the engine housing. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll replace the main alternator, and move its igniter back to the maneuvering jet. I want this baby powering the thrust engines. Come help me get this out!”

Her wrench untwisted some bolts, and she kicked another section of engine housing off, revealing an even bigger carburetor. Sure enough, this one had an igniter in place.

She expected me to help her lift a car engine? I’d break my back! Fortunately, I had options.

“Minion! Grunt work!”

In a flash, Ray bounded up the stairs. Bowing floridly, he tipped his hat and asked, “What does the Queen of Darkness command?” Having a good-looking boy in black at my beck and call would never grow old.

I pointed at the heavy carburetor. “Help us lift this out of the way.”

“Certainly.” Remmy had just enough time to finish unfastening some bolts before Ray reached down and picked up the carburetor in one hand, like it was a suitcase.

Ha! What were superpowers for, if not showing off?

I was pretty sure I could get the igniter out and move it myself, but as I stepped forward something occurred to me. ‘Pretty sure’ might not be enough. Keeping my tone light, I asked, “Where’s the self-destruct on this thing? I don’t want to hit it by accident.”