Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (23 page)

Pulling her big wrench out, Remmy laid it over her shoulder and finished smugly, “So it’s a good thing I figured out how to kludge together an automaton override.”

This conversation was putting Remmy in a way better mood, so I nudged some more. “We don’t have automatons, either. I’m guessing that’s not the same thing as a robot.”

She snorted in disgust, picking her way over a busted up street vendor stall. “Robots obey humans. Automatons expect humans to obey. The one we’re after won’t make fluid for us willingly, and it will fight when I try to install the override.”

Ray lifted the same broken wooden stall above my head for me to step under, pretending it was as light as a feather for him. With exaggerated blandness, he offered, “Let me hold this for you.”

Grunting in mock frustration, Remmy complained, “He’s just exactly like my brother.”

“I think mad scientists attract a certain kind of boy,” I answered with airy cynicism. It was tempting to wink at Ray, but this ‘no flirting’ rule had to cover us both.

She snickered, and hopped ahead, jumping with both feet over bits of wreckage.

That gave me a minute to look around. We’d passed a dozen shops. Broken windows, tumbled-down stalls, scattered odds and ends as random as teakettles and inkwells—this central hallway had been a marketplace once. I walked across a fallen wooden board reading ‘FONTAINE’S’ in fancy cursive script. Which store had it belonged to? I had no way to tell.

No, wait. It came from that shop over there. The board ended in a mass of char, and a similar line of char burned through the pretty wooden façade into the metal bulkhead underneath. The remaining bits of window had melted edges.

Heat rays. Conquerors had been here.

The lower edge of another store’s window had fused into a lumpy mass, stained black and smeared from condensation. The Conquerors had made a special point of burning something completely.

If Remmy noticed any of this, she showed no sign. Instead, she shouted, “Ah ha!” and beckoned us over to an open metal hatch.

That led us into a wide stairwell, wood-paneled and carpeted, although the carpet crunched under our feet. It hadn’t entirely unfrozen.

Ray touched my elbow, and pointed up at the ceiling. Glass tubes, with occasional brass bindings, ran in rows. “Pneumatic tubes.”

Glee filled me at the sight. “Oh, wow.”

He pointed a thumb behind us. “One of the shops sold typewriters. They are remarkably resistant to explosive decompression.”

“Inkwells. No ballpoint pens, and no electricity,” I added to the tech level evidence file.

The hand that had caught my elbow curled around it, a light touch that I was very, very aware of. It took me a moment to notice him gesture at the walls. “Instead, we have those. You’re the Dark Princess of Science. How do you think they work?”

He really hadn’t seemed to notice he was holding my arm at all. I tried to focus on the topic of discussion instead.

Ray indicated a frosted glass plate on the wall, a squashed dome. Plates like it lit the stairway, letting off a strong white light very like sunlight. My goggles gave me a little protection from bright lights, and I could squint through the glare and make out a slowly turning round shape behind the glass. A gear.

I made a ‘pfft’ noise. “Like I would know. Some kind of energy that conducts through circular motion.”

Ray’s smile settled down to merely curious, instead of his usual playful grin. “They call it aetheric. A quantum machine on a macro scale? Turning subatomic forces into energy, perhaps harvesting the Higgs Field?”

I gave him a lopsided squint, leaning away a little. “Kinda dangerous, isn’t that? Straight from energy to entropy, do not pass go? Meanwhile, you’re eating the fabric of the universe and jamming the basic forces that keep mass together?”

Ray craned his head back, staring up at the ceiling, and theoretically past the ceiling towards the giant rotor above. “You get dangerous static when you run it too fast, correct?”

Hmmm. This got scarier the more I thought about it. “And it’s inefficient. Lots of heat and light, which they take advantage of because blackness of space. They’re really burning up the universe.”

Ray squeezed reassuringly, which not only did not make me less tense, it sent a shiver right up me―and this was him being a total gentleman! He really, seriously did not seem to notice. There wasn’t a hint of a leer. “The universe is large. This is a drop in the ocean, except the ocean is bigger than Jupiter. I admire how they handled the most important inefficiency. There is no artificial gravity. The rotor pushes us away. The bottom of the colony is curved so that no one notices the awkward angles they stand at around the edge.”

I nibbled on my lower lip for a moment, then asked quietly, “You know this is all gibberish, right? We don’t know what we’re talking about.”

He turned his face to me, blue eyes gleaming mischievously and his grin as toothy as a wolf’s. “That’s what makes it so much fun.”

I bumped my shoulder against his, leaning against him long enough to laugh, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

We walked a few steps like that before a sudden urge made me peek back over my shoulder. Juliet padded behind us on silent, bare feet, with Vera by her shoulder, both watching me and Ray curiously. I swear Juliet was actually drawing our little moment.

Ray saw it too, gave my elbow one more squeeze, and whispered, “In space, no one can give you privacy.”

I snorted, and hurried to catch up with Remmy.

We’d found something, but it was hard to tell what. The staircase had given way to a hallway, and the lights went out before it opened into a very large room.

There’d been a lot less clutter on the stairs, but there were still a few bottles and shoes scattered around. I watched the shadows around my feet carefully as I stepped into the darkness.

Then Vera floated past me and let out a pink flash. The lights all turned on at once―a bit muted, but on.

What a mess.

This chamber had been ground zero of a war. A giant machine of tubes and slots dominated the center, or at least what I could make of it. That nasty red Puppeteer goo had covered most of it in a web. There wasn’t much red left. Grey and black were the dominant themes of the burned out hulk. Something had run on rails in circles around the floor, but now there were only chunks of metal, a lot of them gears.

Was that a…? No, it wasn’t a human body. A mannequin arm stuck out of a cyst of Puppeteer goo on the floor. A big, blackened hole cut right through the middle of that growth and into the room below.

Even though they looked dead, Remmy walked well around the Puppeteer lumps. I copied her. Vera showed no such inhibitions, floating out ahead and silently studying the gooped up machine that dominated the room.

Despite her caution, the pneumo machine attracted Remmy like a magnet. She stepped up into arm’s reach of a bare metal portion, studying the ceiling, and all the tubes. Her voice uncharacteristically soft, she said, “I heard this was how they got in. Some meat puppets pretended to be human long enough to reach the mailroom, and then the Puppeteers came out and got into the pneumatic tubes. They came out everywhere, infecting people. And then the Conquerors showed up.”

The word made me look around. A chunk of cloudy glass I’d seen became more important. I circled back to a crystal ball split into three pieces. Crouching down, I scooped the parts together to make most of a sphere. I picked it up…

…and immediately put it back down again. Too heavy! The orb was bigger than my head, but there was no question of its identity. This was a broken Conqueror orb. It even had a visible pupil, and some chunks of ceramic scattered around that had been part of its shell.

The fight had not been one-sided.

Remmy was thinking about the same thing in another direction. She pointed at Vera. “How did you control a Conqueror?”

I stood back up, looking around for more dead orbs. With all this clutter, there might be more, but I couldn’t see them. Most likely they would be under the burnt out Puppeteers who killed them, right?

With my mind half on that, I answered, “I don’t. Vera is under her own control. She just likes me. She’s not an actual Conqueror orb, anyway. She’s a fake I built.”

“Oh.” Before I could parse the emotions in that one word, Remmy scrunched up her face and gave a grey shell a kick, crumbling it into dust. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Did you live here?” Ray asked. I looked back. He was in the middle of prying open the mannequin arm.

Remmy scowled now. She stuck her hands in her pockets, which didn’t work very well with her oversized wrench still in one hand. “I lived everywhere. Calvin and Thompson couldn’t get along, and Dad was sick. Only the automatons could really take care of him, but they always faulted us on something. We were here when the Puppeteers came. They’d already tried a direct invasion, but with Dad’s guns, we fought them off. Once the meat puppets got in here, there was no hope. Calvin got me out right as the Conquerors arrived. I got to see the power cut out through the window.”

Yikes. Not a happy childhood. I was going to let that drop, but Ray seemed interested, if very serious. “Where did they come from?”

Remmy looked sour-faced, and I was a little surprised that she answered. “Kalyke. The founders came to Jupiter from Kalyke, and said no one was ever allowed to go back. Then one day when I was little, the moon turned red and Puppeteers came swarming out.”

“There you are! Where have you been? I had a whole joke prepared about freezing things off, and it’s quite spoiled now.”

My attention suddenly diverted, I looked back at Juliet. Even on her warped face, her anger did not look convincing. She stared intently at the gooed-up machine for a few seconds, then rolled all four of her eyes. “I shall not tell them that, Harvey. Why must you be so hard on yourself?”

Remmy had started backing towards the far exit, but I lifted a hand to her and mouthed, “It’s okay.”

She accepted that, barely. She stood there and joined me, Ray, and even Vera as we all watched Juliet. The four-eyed, goat-horned young woman stood listening to her phantom friend for awhile, and then turned to look at us. Primly, she explained, “The Puppeteers had already made contact with those dreadful doctors at the clinic, but Harvey prevented them from ever―yes you did, Harvey, that is exactly what you said―coming back. Unfortunately, the Puppeteers are quite interested in distance-independent gate travel, and caught humans activating a gate recently. Having learned the location of that gate, they came to our solar system and…” She paused for a second. Unable to hear Harvey’s side of the conversation, I couldn’t even guess why.

She picked up again quickly. “In any case, you’ve seen what they do. It was beyond Harvey’s abilities to save us a second time.” She shot the empty spot where Harvey must have been sitting a stubborn look, and finished, “The Conquerors followed the Puppeteers, and arrived in time to stop the invasion at Jupiter.”

Then with no Puppeteers to fight, the Conquerors attacked Earth anyway. I knew that. Only to have their own Orb of the Heavens stolen, or something. I had superhero parents who were there, and they kept the details secret from me!

Here was a chance to dig up some of those secrets. Ray pounced like a tiger on that chance, asking, “Does Harvey know who the Conquerors are?” He sounded eager, hungry. This was a secret so big, I didn’t think any human knew the answer.

We weren’t about to find out. I knew that when Juliet lectured Harvey, “Your guesses are superior to most scientific facts.” Looking back at us, she relayed, “There are no Conquerors. They’re long dead, murdered by their own machines, who now move in and destroy the ability of innocent worlds to resist, then wait for commands that never come. It’s still better than being turned into meat puppets.”

Juliet’s eyes turned shiny, and she flashed a sudden smile at Harvey’s presumed location. “Thank you for saving me from that. I love you more than there are words to express.”

A red eye turned to me, and suddenly Juliet straightened, clearing her throat and rearranging her papers. Remmy took that as a signal to turn and stomp towards the double doors across the mailroom, declaring loudly, “That was freaky, and we’re leaving now.”

I fell in next to Ray, and gave him a little bitty smile. That had been kinda grim, but we’d learned things no other human knew. He gave me the exact same smile back.

It had been really cool, and for once I was kinda glad Claire hadn’t been here.

The lights were still out in most of the following hallway, but picked up normally a ways down. Remmy stood in the center, turning around in circles and pointing in various directions, muttering, “And that is…”

Then she swept off again, faster now. I had to hurry just to keep up with her. If she was putting distance between us and the mailroom, I couldn’t blame her.

She stopped at a sealed hatch, gave a tug at the wheel, but couldn’t open it. Knocking on the metal with her knuckles, she turned to Ray. “If you’re so strong…” Ray gave the wheel a twist. Metal groaned, and the door popped open. “…thanks.”

The wood and carpeting stopped on the other side. A metal staircase like I’d expect in a naval vessel led us down. The fighting had been much worse here. Holes had been melted in some of the walls, and we had to skirt past damp, blackened lumps that must have been ex-Puppeteer monsters. I didn’t see any Conqueror orbs, but I saw sparkly dust and smashed sections of ceramic. There might be a pile of broken orbs at the bottom of this spiral staircase.

I didn’t get to find out. We reached one level, and Remmy yelled, “Ah-ha!” again. The door she pointed through had been melted off its hinges. So was the one down the hall.

There was nowhere to step that didn’t have us touching burned-out Puppeteer goo, but Vera floated ahead of us, studying everything. She didn’t react to anything as a threat, so I had to assume it was all dead.

The room on the other side wasn’t as big as the mailroom, but it had a similar design. Rails on the floor ran between five machines, and the central machine hooked up to a big copper pipe coming out of the ceiling. Well, not a pipe exactly, but a long row of gears pressed so close to each other, they looked like a pipe. Oh, criminy. This whole setup was unshielded. Whatever aetheric charge was, if you worked in this room, you were exposed to it directly.