Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (32 page)

That was the plan. Vera wasn’t having any of it. She ducked out of my grip, and zoomed out from under cover. Her wings folded down, pointing almost straight behind her, and she spiraled and zigzagged around the deck, with all six hostile mecha trying to shoot her down. They were good shots, but not good enough. They tried to lead her, but she swerved all over the place.

I realized I was peeking over the rim of our shield in a monumentally unsafe manner. I also realized Vera had bought us time. “Ray!”

Ray didn’t need to be told anything. He leaped. Criminy, he could move. It took him seconds to hit the back of the security automaton’s booth, and hit he did. He didn’t bother to slow down, and instead crashed into it, punching the fist holding the control squid through the wood.

I gave it the single breath to do its job that I dared, aimed Archimedes at the booth, and shouted at the top of my lungs, “CEASE FIRE!”

It wasn’t my volume, but the emotion traveled right through my psychic cat. He yowled, and the walkers all froze in place.

Relief flooded me. Remmy, Claire, and I all let out a sigh at the same time. Ray limped back over. Hitting that wooden wall must have bruised even him.

I waved at our loot. “Grab the canisters. We’re making a run for it!”

“No you’re not!” someone shouted.

A hundred boots thudded. Men charged up the main staircase in a row. They all had weapons pointed at us. None of them were guns I recognized, but they looked uncomfortably like portable versions of the heat and sonic weapons the mecha had used.

Vera swooped down right in front of me, only to have someone hold up a familiar looking pistol. Light strobed, and Vera’s ceramic plates closed up. I caught her in both hands as she fell out of the air, deactivated.

Oh, come on. Did everyone have one of those around here?

Remmy threw up her hands. “Wait! Wait! It’s me, Remmy Fawkes! Just wait a second, okay? I can fix this!”

The automaton in the pneumo room must still be sending out signals, because an automaton pushed its way to the front to say, “Remington Fawkes, you are―I am being told you’re not.”

Nobody paid the waffling machine any attention. We all watched Remmy take a couple of steps towards the militia soldiers, her hands still raised. She turned slowly, in full view, and held out her arms. “Give me the cat for a minute.” She kept her voice nice and loud. Nobody would think she was whispering escape plans.

I had no choice but to play along. I unwrapped Archimedes’ tail from my neck, which stung like pulling off a really sticky bandaid. Slowly, letting everyone see what we were doing, I passed him to Remmy.

She looped his tail around her own neck, and as his eyes reopened and he looked around, she pointed my own fluffy black cat weapon at me and commanded, “GO AWAY AND NEVER COME BACK!”

I didn’t feel the slightest compulsion to obey, but the air screamed and wind whipped around us violently. The gale ended as abruptly as it began, and I looked around to see the Red Herring already turning into a dot in the distance.

Whirling back around to face Remmy, I shouted, “What was that?!”

She returned my glare, fury for fury, for nearly a full second. Opening her mouth to retort, she instead hunched forward, retching. Her hands clawed at her own neck, prying Archimedes’ tail away. She pushed him out of her arms, and as I dove to catch him, Remmy collapsed to her knees, dry heaving.

The militia leader stepped forward, followed by a small squad. They kept their weapons pointed straight at us. “Okay, kids. This has been a strange day. We’ll lock you in your bedrooms, and as soon as we’re sure everything is safe, the automatons will decide what to do with you.”

I did not want to hurt these people. I did not want to be shot. I had my hands full of a deactivated Vera and a curled up Archimedes. This was definitely a job for Claire.

Instead, something clanked behind me, something, hissed, and drops of flaming white blazed as they hit militia members. A few of their weapons exploded, the shrapnel scattering blood around the upper steps.

High pitched screams of terror and lower screams of fear roared out of the crowd as it tried to stampede back down the stairway. Remmy pushed herself up to her feet, and grabbed a fistful of my jumpsuit. She glared, eyes bloodshot and full of hate. “What are you doing?
What are you doing?
Stop it!”

I shook my head as fast as I could. “I’m not doing it! I swear!”

Remmy shook me weakly. She was too nauseous to shout, so she rasped and gurgled instead. “I should have known. Only a murdering monster can control Puppeteers.”

“I’m not doing this!” I repeated, my own voice squeaky and shivering. I pushed Vera into a pocket, and with a shaking hand pushed Archimedes’ tail down the back of my jumpsuit. Holding him in both arms, I directed him at the security automaton’s booth and commanded, “Cease fire!”

I was now facing the defense mecha. They obeyed, freezing where they stood. That didn’t even last long enough for me to feel relief. They lurched back into motion, turning to spit more little white balls of flaming death. Screams behind me attested to their aim.

Remmy’s hand hung on my shoulder. No longer accusing, now she begged. “You’re killing people! Stop it, please!”

“It’s not me!” I didn’t have time to argue with her. I yelled, “Stop! Cease fire! Don’t shoot! Deactivate!” and Archimedes yowled my desperation. My efforts threw the rampaging mecha into stop motion, lurching back and forth as they obeyed, then started firing again, then froze, then turned to open up on new targets.

Something moved, out beyond the air bubble. I almost thought it was the Red Herring coming back.

Instead, it was something much weirder. A man in a flight suit dropped out of space, landing in a crouch behind the mecha. “Remington Fawkes, you’re coming with me!” he announced in a deep, confident voice.

Then he ran up and hit the first mecha. He didn’t crush it, but he didn’t hurt his hand, either. The blow knocked the walker on its back, leaving him free to charge the second, sending it sprawling with one punch.

“Who’s that?” Claire sounded completely lost.

“My
other
brother,” wheezed Remmy.

There were four other mecha, but Remmy’s brother had cleared a path, and that seemed to be enough. He crossed the distance to us in a sprint, vaulted over our shield, and scooped Ray and Remmy up in one arm, and me and Claire in the other.

“My aetheric fluid!” Remmy squeaked, but Ray had already realized we were leaving. He could only grab two tanks out of four, but he snatched them up and held them while our superpowered savior made a break for it.

“Close your eyes and hold your breath!” he commanded as he ran for the edge of the space station.

There was nothing out there. He was carrying us right into space.

All I could do was take a breath, close my eyes, and try not to think.

We hit something, and went through. Air rushed around us, to be replaced by cold.

Freezing, agonizing cold. My ears hurt. My lungs hurt. Was I going to explode? I’d read all sorts of horrible things about what happened to you in open space.

Cold would kill me first. It seeped through my insulated jumpsuit, numbing my hands, clawing its way up shivering arms and legs.

Air rushed all around me, and I fell, cold but not deadly cold, onto metal.

I opened blurry eyes. Ray and Claire lay next to me. Our rescuer, who’d just flown us through space with no jetpack or spacesuit, leaped up a ladder and into a brightly lit room, carrying Remmy with him.

My ears hurt. They rang horribly. I hoped they weren’t bleeding. I could still hear him say, “Remington, you’re a good pilot. Get us out of here, and make for Io―on the double.”

huddled in a ball, sick and disoriented. Ugh. What had exposure to vacuum done to me? Would I recover? This horrible dizziness felt like… zero gravity. Duh.

Flexing numb fingers, I reached out a hand to Ray. My hand met his, already reaching. We wrapped our fingers together and squeezed, although between the gloves and the lingering chill I couldn’t feel much. It was still nice.

I reached my other hand out to Claire. She still had her eyes tightly shut, breathing slowly. I touched her shoulder, and her eyes peeked open. She stretched her back, extending one arm and yawning like a cat, while her goofy ponytail flapped around the back of her head like a golden brush.

Was I seeing the real Claire? It didn’t matter. She gave my hand a squeeze, and we all let go and started looking around.

From the interior of the ship, Remmy’s voice rang. “I’m not going. There are people dying back there!”

This brother had a deeper voice than Calvin. Smooth, but a little too forceful to be charming. “You are going, and nobody’s dead. I didn’t see any bodies.”

No bodies. I searched my memory. I’d seen blood, but no one motionless. I looked at Ray and Claire. They both shook their heads. I shook mine. As if I needed to feel any dizzier in zero-G, the relief sent a wave of faintness over me.

Remmy had gone quiet the same way I had, and sprang her next question just as I started paying attention again. “They still need our help. They need
your
help, Thompson!”

I couldn’t tell where in the ship Remmy and Thompson were. With the metal walls, and in our little ladder-lined tube, voices seemed to bounce around from everywhere. Thompson’s answer came in the classic ‘frustrated with a foolish child’ scolding tone. “Do you think everyone but you is stupid, Remington? There’s a hundred mechanics on that colony. They’ve already cut the security bot’s communications and power lines. If that doesn’t work, they’ll seal some bulkheads and grease the floor until the walkers fall down, then get around to the deck from a side hatch.”

Another pause, while we all digested that. Weight came back. Me, Ray, and Claire settled down against one wall of the entrance tube that was now a floor. In seconds, I felt downright normal.

Grabbing hold of ladder rungs to pull myself up, I took a cautious step into the next room and called out, “People were hurt. Set on fire. Cut up. If they’re not dead yet, they will be.”

The room looked both familiar and weird. I’d seen it in Calvin’s spaceship, but rearranged. The entrance hatch and bottom of flying saucer had been ‘down’ then. Now it was one side. The door on the other end must have led into the cockpit, but Thompson filled the door and then some.

Gravity wobbled. Thompson grunted in frustration that we still didn’t get it. “Kids, if there’s one thing the automatons are good for, it’s doctors. Nobody’s dead. You know how I know? Because they stole our n-ray projector.”

That didn’t mean anything to me, but my weight stabilized and Remmy continued to say nothing. It must have been an answer for her.

Nobody was dead. Nobody was going to die. That was the important thing. Oh, thank Tesla.

Claire had already recovered enough to coast across the room on her skate-enabled shoes, only to sit herself on a trunk strapped to the wall next to Thompson. She gave him a wan smile, folding her hands on her knee. “You certainly saved us, so thanks for that. We’re the Inscrutable Machine, from Earth. I’m called E-Claire, and that’s Bad Penny and Reviled.”