Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (33 page)

He nodded, his irritation melting in the face of Claire’s friendly gratitude. “Yeah, I know. My little brother sent me a message on that crazy super radio Remington built. He didn’t ask me to show up, but rescuing people seems to be my job. They call me Chief Fawkes.”

Huh. Had we stumbled on the local superhero?

Claire flashed him her coy grin. “Do they really call you that, or is this another Fabulous Mr. Fawkes thing?”

“They call me that because I hit them if they don’t.” No smile. Yikes.

I would have drowned in the awkward moment. Claire leaned back on the box and smiled as if he’d made the friendliest joke in the world. “Then thanks for the rescue, Chief Fawkes. Would that make you leader of the Jets we’ve heard so much about?”

“Some of those Jets are back there on Callisto getting shot at,” Remmy’s voice cut in from the room beyond Chief Fawkes. Yes, that had to be the cockpit.

“They decided to become Rotors. They’re not my problem anymore.” An angry sneer flashed across Chief Fawkes’ face. That cold voice held no trace of joke. He meant it.

I erased the mental checkmark next to ‘local superhero.’

Again, Claire smoothed over the awkward moment by pretending it wasn’t there. She leaned forward again, and I knew she wasn’t faking this eagerness. We were getting to her favorite topic. “How did you get us here without a spacesuit?” For her, this was delicate and roundabout.

Fortunately, everyone loves to brag. Chief Fawkes’s grin came right back as he looked down at the admiring starry-eyed teenager. “Superpowers run in the family. I got three kids worth of the physical stuff. Remington got three kids worth of the mental stuff. Calvin got three kids worth of meddling.” He leaned through the door. From here, I couldn’t see him messing with Remmy’s hair, but her annoyed squeal was diagnostic.

“So you can breathe in space? How do you maneuver? I saw you hit those robots, so I know you’ve got super strength. If you have that many powers, I bet you have more, right?” Claire’s eyes gleamed with the feral hunger of a geek in her element. Ray had wandered up the room about halfway, holding onto a cabinet handle and listening.

I was interested, but not as obsessively as my best friends. My eyes were on his flying saucer. Calvin’s ship had a lot of clutter. Thompson’s was clean, with everything either strapped to or bolted into the walls. Those were metal. A ladder next to a small elevator accommodated the fact that most of the ship was up or down, and the chairs against the walls were padded with multicolored scaly leather. The place looked businesslike, more like a modern spacecraft built by people who couldn’t depend on flashes of super-technology.

Thompson ‘Chief’ Fawkes looked a lot like his brother, but bigger and blockier. Like Calvin and Remmy, he had hair somewhere in the ‘dirty blond’ range, although he kept his almost buzz-cut short. The stiff, shiny leather flight suit did not hide how muscular he was. He kind of reminded me of the dockhands at the port, but with a more squared-off jawline and a terrible need to shave. I wanted so bad to write him off as a meathead, but he’d come up with a way to deal with those rogue mecha in seconds. Just because he was big didn’t make him stupid.

It didn’t make him mean, either. He shut the door to the cockpit, and walked along the wall, pulling open hatches to reveal bunk beds and plush leather chairs. “It’s more like I can hold my breath forever. You kids aren’t Fawkes, so you must feel like freeze-dried jerky right about now. Take a rest, and you’ll be okay by the time we get to Io.”

I took a chair. It had firm cushions, but so thick, I felt like I sank into them anyway. Claire flounced into the chair next to me, and Ray hopped up into a bunk bed above us, laying himself flat and peering over the edge. Looking up at his slyly amused face made me notice the buckles hanging from the edge of the bed. The chairs had seatbelts as well. Absolutely everything could be strapped down in this ship!

Claire refused to be swayed from her greatest love, blasting Chief Fawkes with her ‘eager and curious’ smile. “So, you’re semi-oxygen independent. Sounds like good internal recycling. You must eat several times what non-powered people do. And you can fly, right? Nobody just leaps out into space and hopes they’re pointed in the right direction.” She leaned way forward in her seat, hands clutching the edge and her huge glasses magnifying her eyes.

“Good enough for space. Don’t ask me to show you while we’re under thrust.” A moment’s pause, and he added in a completely failed attempt at casual, “You should see Remington try to fly.”

Sheesh, Remmy had two bad cases of big brother. The door to the cockpit opened long enough for her to shoot a glare at him through it. “You may float like a butterfly, but your rust heap spaceship leaks air.”

Thompson and Remmy gave each other hard looks for a couple of seconds. He broke the staring match to walk over to the entrance tunnel on the far wall, haul back his fist, and punch the hatch just out of sight. The clang of bent metal exploded through the ship, making me wince. My ears were already sore from the trip through vacuum.

Remmy’s face disappeared. Three seconds later she yelled, “Yeah, that fixed it,” and slammed the cockpit door closed.

We all stayed very quiet as Chief Fawkes climbed the ladder to the flying saucer’s next level, and before any of us figured out what we would do without him, he climbed right back down. He returned with a bundle under one arm, and as soon as his boots hit the floor, he tossed packages at us. We all fielded our light paper-wrapped package, although I fumbled a bit. When he tossed drink bottles straight at our heads―well, Ray’s hand darted out and grabbed all three, one after the other, and handed down mine and Claire’s delicately.

He still had a fourth packet and bottle, and after telling us, “Eat. You’ll be starving after all that action,” he pulled open the cockpit door and stepped inside. I got a brief impression of a room composed entirely of dials and switches before he closed the door behind him.

Wrinkling my nose suspiciously, I unwrapped this supposed food. So far, I had not enjoyed a high opinion of Jupiterian cooking. My skepticism was not immediately dispelled by the block of barely flexible, rainbow-tinted, mostly white stuff. “What is this? Hardened blubber? Edible plastic?”

Ray stuck the ragged block in his mouth, ripped off a chunk, gave it a few chews, and swallowed. “Fish jerky.”

I lifted the block and sniffed. It did smell fishy, with a hint of petroleum, like the blobs of fish they served in the Rotor dorms. It was also so salty, my nose stung just smelling it.

Eh. I was hungry. I took a bite, although that involved a certain amount of yanking and struggling to rip off a piece that Ray had not had to deal with.

Actually, it mostly tasted like salt. However they dried this stuff for storage, it greatly reduced the chemical flavor. Jovian Fish Jerky might not be a taste sensation, but it was edible.

The bottle contained water with a citrus tang. Ah, scurvy prevention.

About the time I’d succeeded in chewing my second bite into submission, I noticed that my chair felt awfully warm, much warmer than my skinny butt could possibly have explained. For that matter, so did the top of my head. I looked up to see coils built into the underside of Ray’s bed show just the faintest hints of red. Built in heaters were a nice touch, which I appreciated after being dragged through the icy void of space.

I sank into the chair, gnawing my meal and wondering if I could invent super jaws. The block of meat was way too big for me, even as hungry as I was, so eventually I used the Machine’s jaws to cut it in half, and passed the rest up to Ray. He ate the stuff like it was soufflé.

We all lingered over the meal, relaxing in our thickly cushioned seats and bed. Remington and Chief Fawkes said things I couldn’t make out through the closed cockpit door, then Remmy’s Extra Big Brother came out, and climbed up towards the top of the ship. Faint whistles and squeaks that echoed down sounded like radio noise.

I was considering my last couple of bites of alien fish jerky when gravity shut off. I clutched at the straps of the seat. My water bottle drifted off to the side, then fell out of the air as gravity turned right back on. Lunging forward, I actually managed to grab it in both hands before it hit the floor. Go, Penny! +1 coordination!

A soft noise made me look up. Ray was leaning over the edge of the bed again, chuckling.

“What?” I asked him accusingly.

Ray required no explanation to know how upset I was―i.e. not at all. He curled his head down farther, caught his hat when it tried to fall off, and explained, “Merely enjoying the contradiction in tech levels. The alien race with no technology at all has living fish that ignore inertia and fly without propulsion. The pre-electrical culture relies on pneumatic tubes and tapping on metal rails for communication, but they have atmosphere bubbles and artificial gravity. The only folks with motors and radios have to rely on acceleration to mimic gravity. While technically a higher level of technology, this ship looks crude in comparison with Calvin’s, and barbaric compared to the Rotor stations.”

The ‘tapping on metal rails’ thing caught my attention. So that was how the automatons sent signals to each other? They drummed a kind of Morse code into the rails they rode? Trust Ray to spot that. Interesting method of getting around the lack of wire signals or radio. Plus, it was the kind of unmistakably clear digital signal AIs could interpret easily.

I waved my empty water bottle at the room. “Sure, but you can’t draw a general rule out of that. Look at the Conquerors. Portals, tiny generators that produce enormous power, exhaust-free ‘flying car’ style propulsion, and I couldn’t even begin to guess how Vera’s chemical degradation field works.”

Panic rose up in my chest. Where was Vera? I patted my belt pouch, and relaxed at the heavy bulge. Right. The strobe light pistol had shut her off.

Ray shook his head, the beaky nose of his mask waving around. “Not trying, Oh Queen of Scienceness. Just enjoying the coincidence that makes it seem like it works backwards out here. If you wanted to be technical, most of the really advanced abilities the Rotors have are based on access to a post-electrical power system.”

That got me thinking. I pursed my lips. Rounded walls. We were in another flying saucer. “The Jets have their own mad science getting them over the space flight hump. I don’t see any fuel tanks, or places for fuel tanks. I bet this ship uses the same type of engine Calvin does, but Remmy hasn’t tricked it out with Rotor tech to provide the power. Speaking of…” I started to push myself out of my seat, but it was sooooo comfortable. Ah, criminy. What was the point of being a supervillain if I did everything myself? “Minion, check if the aetheric fluid jars are still good. We went through a lot of effort for those.”

“Yes!” Remmy yelled from inside the cockpit. Ray beat her to the access hatch, because he just had to jump off the bed while she had to get the cockpit door open, first. He shimmied into the tube as she galloped up to it, and in a couple of seconds, his black-gloved hands slid out first one metal canister, then the other, into Remmy’s eager embrace. She unscrewed both lids, and we all peeked inside.

The glass tubes of dully glowing grey stuff looked perfectly intact.

Chortling in triumph, Remmy screwed the lids back on, and waddled with one canister over to the wall to strap it securely into place. It was nearly as big as she was, and probably weighed more. She had to carry it staggering in both arms. Ray followed with the other perched easily on his shoulder, and buckled it in the spot above hers.

Satisfied that her precious cargo was safe, Remmy leaned back and yelled, “Thompson! You have to see this! We did it, Thompson! We stole the aetheric fluid we need!”

Bootsteps clonked on metal, and Remmy’s older brother climbed down the ladder. Hanging from it with one hand, and as big as he was, he looked way too much like a gorilla. He also definitely did not share her excitement. “So?”

Arms wrapped lovingly around the lower canister, Remmy chattered over her shoulder, “So, didn’t Calvin tell you? Me and him and these three got Europa Station back online. We have light, atmosphere, and gravity already working. With these, we have a full power system for anything we want to hook up.”

“So?” he repeated.

Remmy’s mouth hung open in what I felt was an entirely justified expression of aggravated dismay. Her eager tone took on a bit of also well-earned exasperated screech. “So?! So, this is what we’ve been hoping for since the invasion! We have a place for the Jets to live, more room than we’ve ever had before. We need to tell everybody when we get home, so they can start moving in.”

He scowled, his eyebrows, mouth, and voice all going absolutely flat. “We’re not telling anybody.”

“Are you stupid?” Remmy yelled.

Thompson did not like that. His fist clenched, and he stepped off the ladder. Panic pricked at me again. We couldn’t let him hit her, could we?

It didn’t come to that. Remmy cringed back against the canister and raised her hand. “Okay, okay. But why not?”

Her brother’s fists clenched tighter, but stayed at his side. He was no longer scowling at her, but at something inside. “Because I’m not losing anyone else to the Rotors. When the automatons find out Europa is working, they’ll say it’s theirs and send an army out to take it. We can’t dogfight near the station, and they outnumber us twenty to one. Nobody’s moving onto Europa until we can defend it.”

Remmy’s head sunk down between her shoulders. “But it’s not their station. There aren’t any intact automatons. If they take it from us, they still can’t do anything with it.”

He met her whiny tone with a sneering question. “Since when did automatons listen to reason? Since when did they have a hint of mercy for anyone who doesn’t help enforce their rules?”

Unfortunately, he had a point. We’d seen that ourselves. Remmy slumped against her canister, but rallied for a final try. “So, let them send an army. They can’t bring automatons with them. When they land, we invite them all to live free with us. A lot of those folks will be Jets, and they’ll want to come back.”