Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (21 page)

Remmy waved her wrench dismissively with one hand, not even looking up from splicing the converter into the electrical wires. “Not a danger. You’d have to turn the main transfer loop around to feed back up into the rotor. You can’t do that by accident.”

…but there was, indeed, a self-destruct. Mad science was truly the same everywhere.

A few minutes later, a breathless Remmy wiped her forehead with her wrist, smearing more grease around. “That device on your wrist is incredible. You used it as a wrench, a screwdriver, you clipped wires with it, you extruded wires with it―it makes parts! Please tell me you have another and I can have it. Please. I’ll trade you my brother. He’s really handsome, and I can get rid of his girlfriend while she sleeps, no problem.”

Hee hee. Regretfully, I shook my head and gave my first and most wonderful invention a loving pat. “Sorry, Remmy. There’s only one Machine.”

She took it well, only pouting a little. “Alright, but we have to test the engines right now. Go get back on your stupid Puppeteer ship. Now!” She gave me a push towards the stairs.

Laughing, Ray and I ran down to the airlock room, where Claire hopped to her feet. She’d been talking to Calvin, apparently. Remmy blurted out, “It’s fixed. It’s going to be incredible. Can I ride on their spaceship long enough to see the contrails?”

Calvin took a couple of seconds to respond. He didn’t quite scowl, but his face got very hard and serious. “I will be dead before I let you board a Puppeteer ship, baby sister. Doesn’t matter if the little lady has it under control.”

Remmy groaned, stomped over, and kicked him in the shins. It couldn’t have been too hard, because despite her heavy boots, he only winced. “Fine!” she shouted, “I’ll go watch the power gauges instead. Let’s get moving!”

“Moving where?”

Remmy opened her mouth to answer my question, only to have her expression of exasperation turn into one of confusion. By the time she tilted her head to look up at her brother, she’d swung back around to exasperation. “Where
are
we going? No aetheric fluid, no point in going back to Europa.”

Juno laid a hand on Calvin’s shoulder, answering for him. “The Jovians have provided. Bad Penny’s extraordinary talent is the prize they sent us here to find.”

Calvin and Remmy fell silent as Juno’s brilliant white eyes swept over me. I had a strong feeling I was being railroaded. So strong, Archimedes grumbled on my shoulder.

“Translation?” I asked Remmy, who I trusted more than her goofy brother and his even goofier girlfriend.

“You want to help me fix a broken space station?”

“YES.”

emmy’s spaceship had to slow down, match the space station’s speed, and maneuver in tiny little bursts of lightning from its jets until the struts locked magnetically against the huge, flat top. The Red Herring landed like a dove fluttering onto a branch. I felt both smug and guilty about that at the same time. The technology of this space fish was crazy. Crazy!

I rubbed the back of my head. Mild headache. I half-suspected I’d been overusing my power. It had never been pushed as hard as in the last few days. Crossed fingers it wouldn’t conk out on me, especially since I wasn’t sure how I could help in the first place.

Or, you know, my goggles might be on too tight. Loosening them a notch helped.

From a distance, the space station looked like a giant mutant biplane, with two sets of flat-topped double wings sticking out the side and a gigantic helicopter rotor sticking out the top. Up close, it resembled a floating island, a flat stretch of metal the size of a town, dark and empty and dead.

My phone beeped. Remmy’s voice burst out of Vera. “Can you guys hear this?”

Well, they weren’t too far away, and holding still. I pointed Archimedes at the front of the flying saucer and answered good and loud, “Yes.”

A second of silence, and Remmy’s voice came out again. “Never do that again. Hey, I told you it works. A rotor light well focuses the radio signal―”

Calvin Fawkes’ voice cut in. “You’re wasting the Inscrutable Machine’s time, Remington.”

“She’s a mechanic too, isn’t she? Okay, okay! Bad Penny, it’s bare aether out there. You’ve got a spacesuit, right?”

I looked down at Archimedes on my arm. How was I supposed to answer that question?

Ray had an idea first. “They know Morse code. Can we flash a light at them?”

Next to me, Juliet’s voice said, “We quite certainly can. What would you like to say?”

That would have been great, but Juliet had been in bed sleeping for hours. I kind of didn’t want to look, but I did. A pair of red eyes had opened in the wall next to me. They even had expression, eyebrows and tilted eyelids looking up at me quizzically.

Yikes. Just… yikes.

But at the moment, convenient! “Do you know Morse? Ray could give it to you if you don’t.”

“I am educated in more than just the Natural Sciences, Bad Penny,” the wall-Juliet told me reproachfully.

What did they teach young women those days? It was all good for me! “Send: I do.” There really wasn’t anything else to say.

A light flickered on and off over the deck in front of us. It must have been Red Herring’s giant eye that lit up.

Remmy’s voice crackled out of Vera. “Cool. We’ll go take a look at the central collector, then head back to your ship―”

“OUR ship,” Calvin corrected her.

“Ugh. Whatever. We’ll powwow, see if you have any crazy ideas. You’d better, because that fluid is inert and no amount of crank starting will get a rotor that size charging.”

“Send: Roger.” While the lights flashed, I stepped up to the gill slit/airlock. Hoo boy. Here was the hard part. Ray said these things worked, but they did not look inviting.

Appreciating the chance to stall a few more seconds, I called over, “Vera, can you push me around out there, keep me from floating off in zero g?”

She drifted over next to my shoulder. That was a yes in my book!

Here goes, Penny. I scooped a rolled up fleshy red bat thing out of a pouch, unwound it, and held it up to the back of my neck.

Gritting my teeth, I resisted the urge to squeal as it clamped down. Wings writhed and shifted, spreading farther and surrounding my neck like a membranous collar. The blobby body pressed flush to my spine. Inside that mass, something thumped in time to my heartbeat.

I grimaced back at Ray and Claire. They both gave me thumbs up. Only Claire looked worried.

I stepped into the airlock, with Vera touching my shoulder with one tiny hand. The flap behind me closed. The flap in front opened, puffing out air, but Vera’s surprisingly strong touch kept me in place.

Man, it was cold. Uncomfortably cold, but not painfully cold. I’d also been breathing automatically, and while the breath wasn’t reaching my mouth or nose, it felt normal.

“HA! Ha ha ha HA!” Who cared how creepy this was? I was standing around in the void of space, thanks to my custom mad science bio-spacesuit!

I couldn’t hear anything except my own breathing and pulse, but a flicker of movement showed the bottom hatch of the flying saucer open. Remmy climbed awkwardly down the extendable ladder, holding onto a big toolbox, until her boots hit the metal surface and locked on. Had to be magnets.

Her spacesuit went the opposite direction of mine. It looked like a diving suit, and was padded so fat I was amazed she could move in it.

Move she did, waddling over to the base of the colossal propeller shaft. I pointed, and Vera pushed me over.

Someone had done a number on this thing. All the casing had come off, and a bunch of gears on one side had visibly melted. As Remmy and I bent over the mess, Vera helpfully lit up her head, shining a flashlight beam as Remmy pointed at the ends of a couple of glass tubes. Thumping around to the other side, she pointed at two more tubes. They were kinda like the flowing tubes in her spaceship, but dull grey and as thick as logs.

Setting down her toolbox, she pulled out a little glowing stethoscope thing and touched that to the clamps on the ends of those tubes. Nothing happened, which was probably the point. She shrugged at me, and spread her hands.

All I could do was shake my head. My superpower gave me nothing. At least the headache had gone away.

Prying up one of her feet, she gave a big copper gear a kick, and packed her glowing thermometer away. I winced a bit at the kick. This thing didn’t need to get even more broken. I needn’t have worried, because it had a solid axle and wasn’t hooked into any other gears.

Well, I mean, it wasn’t hooked into any other gears in a physical sense. It was obviously aligned with the next gear up. They just weren’t pushing each other with regular old kinetic energy. I could follow the whole chain right up to the top. Someone had used ordinary gears to transfer some other kind of power. It was a cute arrangement, and actually very simple. Mystery Power fed in from the huge central shaft, and half this engine was the escapements required to keep it under control.

A clever break point at the top had a gear that could be easily detached, allowing the system to be unlinked, or even reversed. Four gears off the central cog started the chain that led to clamps attaching to the fluid cells. I had no idea how those worked, sure, but did I have to?

This was the most beautiful, perfect example of mad science I’d ever heard of. Someone had uncovered a physical process science wouldn’t understand for centuries, and jury rigged a system for using it with very low tech. The ‘charged aetheric fluid’ could be anything. It didn’t matter.

Remmy’s complaint was that the ‘fluid’ wasn’t ‘charged.’ The system fed in one end and out the other. They were batteries, right? It was like jumpstarting a car.

And Remmy had already told me how to do that.

I reached into the top of the machine. Vera, the darling, held my shoulders tight, bracing me as I twisted the break point gear around so it attached back to the rotor, not the main engine.

Remmy grabbed my arm with both of hers, tugging on me and shaking her head with a look of bug-eyed horror. I could feel a faint vibration through my arm as her mouth moved, but what she was yelling I didn’t know.

Specifically, anyway. In general, I knew. She was warning me not to set off the self-destruct. I nodded as reassuringly as I could and waved her away.

Very slowly, very reluctantly, she let go. I lined up the gear, so the power coming in one side would just push back into the other.

For awhile, nothing happened. The whole system was practically dead.

‘Practically’ was the word I was counting on.

I stared up at the dark shape of the giant rotor. It didn’t look like it was moving, until it blocked a star it hadn’t blocked before. Then another. Was it… yes. Now I could see it moving, if barely.

This was working. Okay, I might not have much time. I had to jam open the escapements. I beckoned at Remmy and her box, but when she didn’t understand, I pulled lose one of the melted gears and wedged it into place.

Remmy was one brave eleven year old. White faced in terror, sure I’d just started a bomb that would kill us all, she figured out what I was doing and pulled wrenches out of her box, wedging open the other stops with me.

Down at the bottom of the two intact tubes, clamps hooked into pipes, power lines of some kind. Didn’t know how they worked, didn’t care. I twisted them free. Then I took the clamps off the top.