Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (35 page)

Jackets were common on men and women, usually buttoned. A couple of women wore corsets, but only a couple. Lots and lots of folks wore shiny fish leather jackets and/or pants, even the women. So, things were a bit more egalitarian in the Jets. Everybody was equal except Chief Fawkes.

The rattle of a faint earthquake broke the silence of sibling affection. It jarred a thought into my head. I stepped back next to Ray and Claire, and whispered, “Hey, did I ever tell you my mom’s second favorite statistic?”

“Your mother has favorite statistics?” Claire let out a giggle.

“The Audit has a list of her favorite statistics, measured and updated daily on a numerical system,” Ray predicted confidently.

“Ha ha,” I said, but without rancor. He’d pegged my mother perfectly. “Have you ever noticed how many heroines are natural blondes? People with superpowers have the same natural hair color demographics as the regular population dyes their hair. Like, thirty percent of Caucasian girls bleach their hair blond, and thirty percent of Caucasian superheroines are natural blondes. That includes stuff like pink and blue. Doesn’t matter what your parents’ hair color is, either. The difference is so huge, it’s like half and half any natural blondes you meet have powers.”

Claire gave her platinum ponytail a proud flip. Ray leaned closer to me in eager curiosity. “Some kind of wish fulfillment?”

I shrugged. “Nobody knows, but my mom says never to trust the obvious explanation for a statistic. Correlation is not causation. Numbers don’t lie, but the way you interpret them sure does.”

Thompson announced over us, “Alright, party later. Work now. Move it, Remington. The black box machine is busted.” He put Remmy down and gave her a little push towards the door. Well, a door.

She widened her eyes, and said in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “Oh, I get it. Yeah, you waited to come get me until it was disaster time. Although what you expect me to do, I have no idea. You know I don’t fix things. I just kludge them together.”

“You’ll figure something out. And bring your friends. I don’t want them getting lost.”

liked Io. Sure, the floor shook every few minutes, but that wasn’t all earthquakes. Sometimes we walked past a door, and through the window, I saw masses of machinery whose pumping made the nearby corridors vibrate. Everything was weirdly clean, almost sterile, with wide hallways made of steel, concrete, or both, all painted white. Primal ur-computers sat in the middle of corridors for no obvious reason. They didn’t have keyboards, but they had plenty of buttons, flashing LED lights in rows, and dials and switches enough for any mad scientist’s dream. When we weren’t passing doors with intriguing signs like ‘Benign Irradiant Purification’ or old-fashioned computers, one wall would give way to a flimsy railing and a huge pit full of pipes and metal vats, some of them puffing steam.

We reached our elevator. It had a folding metal gate in place of a door, and big glowing green and red buttons. When it arrived, the elevator platform itself had incomplete sides. We would get to watch the walls go past on our way down.

It also had a robot standing in it, holding a crate.

The Rotor automatons could have passed for mannequins if they held still. This had to be a robot. It was so robotic, Ray, Claire, and I snickered. It had a boxy oblong head with a slowly rotating circular antenna sticking out of the top. It had big red plastic eyes. Arms shaped like wrenches with blunt pincers at the end stuck off a cubicle body. Its stumpy legs looked capable of waddling, and that was about it.

As we stepped into the elevator, Thompson asked it, “Destination?”

The answer came in a barely intelligible electronic rasp. “Monitor tower.”

Chief Fawkes grunted. “Tough. We’re heading down to manufacturing.” The inside panel of the elevator had a whole lot of buttons. He hit a couple. We started moving, down alright, but in no particular hurry.

From all those buttons and the distance between even individual floors, I fast got the impression we’d be in the elevator awhile. Of course, we might be going so slowly because if we went any faster, the elevator would leave us behind. Claire and Remmy’s hair floated all around them, and Ray had to hold onto his hat.

I edged very carefully over to Remmy, gripping the fencing along the sides to make sure I didn’t accidentally leap into the air. When I was close enough to, at least, pretend we were having a private conversation, I said, “Fixing things isn’t my specialty either, but if there’s anything I can do to help, I will.”

Remmy’s moody expression darkened into eye-squinted, lip-pursed fury. “Why would I want help from a meat puppet?!”

I just… I stared at her, trying to form words. Eventually, they came, but my voice sounded weak even to me. “I only wanted to help.”

Her voice, high-pitched to begin with, went screechy with rage. “Like you helped everyone on Callisto? By infesting the system with the monsters YOU made, so the Puppeteers could use our weapons against us?”

My own anger suddenly ignited inside me. Didn’t I get enough of this on Earth? It was bad enough being labeled a criminal. Now I was being accused of flat-out evil!

I tried and failed to keep the edge of that anger out of my voice. “I didn’t want that to happen any more than you did.”

“Oh, yeah?” Remmy yelled back. “I knew those people, Bad Penny! I lived with them after your Puppeteer masters took over Io, until Calvin and I couldn’t live with the automatons’ stupid, inflexible rules anymore. Do you want the names of the people I saw set on fire and blasted because of you?”

The whole idea made my stomach turn cold, fighting with the hot anger. I gripped the fence behind me, because I couldn’t shrink back against the wall safely. Those battling feelings let me remember something important. I liked Remmy. I wanted Remmy to like me. The least I could do was apologize.

Closing my eyes, because I didn’t want to see anyone else’s expression, I said, “I’m sorry. If I’d known that my inventions would turn on people, I’d have destroyed them myself.”

Remmy’s screech of anger dropped to a wounded hoarseness. “After they fawned all over you as the greatest mechanic ever, how could you not know that messing with Puppeteers would get people killed?”

A soft hand slipped into mine and squeezed it. Claire’s. Ray’s hand settled on my shoulder. Real help came from the least expected quarter. As I stared at my closed eyelids I heard Thompson growl, “Knock it off, Remington. Like your inventions never went wrong and hurt people. Besides, I told you
―
they’ll be fine.”

That made for an awkward elevator ride, and when I finally opened my eyes, Remmy had her arms folded and was pointedly not looking at me. Despite the dragging silence, eventually we did reach the bottom, or at least our destination. The gate clattered back, and we emerged onto a catwalk in a dimly lit factory.

Technically, the individual factory spaces were well lit, and I could look over the railing and see rows of workstations, like a metal cubicle farm in a robotic office building. Clunky rectangular robots carried around boxes and silvery domes and less identifiable items between tables. The loads usually dwarfed the robot, although light gravity had to help.

Only half a dozen tables were in use, with sparks suggesting welding at two. There was room for an army to work in this vast warehouse of a room. Despite all the lights down at ground level, the vast walls and ceiling were shrouded in shadow. Whoever built Io Omega liked to build big.

Towers of pipes and vats and coils broke up the monotony, maybe the same ones I saw on the upper floors. The catwalk’s job seemed to be connecting these, and we traveled a maze of intersections and short staircases, with me holding onto the railing because it would be way too easy to jump right off the platform in this light gravity.

Was Remmy right about me?

We circled a machine that looked more modern than the others, with fewer tubes and more glass panes. It jutted off the side of one of the biggest masses of pipework, with a set of control panels on the catwalk and a little old man asleep in a chair next to them.

“
Zayde
!” Remmy leaped towards him. Her flailing limbs made me think she’d meant to run, and wasn’t used to the low gravity yet. She soared through the air, and Ray lurched forward to chase her down. Fortunately, the catwalk had no shortage of struts connecting it to the ceiling far above. Remmy grabbed one, and much more expertly swung herself around to tackle the old man.

I thought he’d break. This guy was
old
. Weathered. Pruney. His white hair and beard held sprinkles of black nothing like Remmy’s, but he was the only person on Io Omega who truly resembled her: short and skinny.

“Einnikel!” He croaked back, standing up to meet her. She bowled him over, but twisted around to take the blow when they hit the railing. That was more like it. She might have been out of practice, but Remmy knew low gravity well, and the old man was… well, not as fragile as he looked, but too old to treat roughly.

He climbed stiffly back to his feet, holding her up and hugging her tightly. Kissing her between her pigtails over and over, he asked in a hoarse and slightly muffled voice, “Where have you been, Remmy? How has Calvin been taking care of you? If Thompson is here, Calvin is not here, so tell me how he is doing?”

Wow. That accent. Nobody else I’d met in space had a recognizable accent, but this guy sounded so stereotypically Jewish that he could do commercials for Cantor’s―except they would be too embarrassed. For that matter, nobody else I’d met had been nearly this old.

Remmy’s gleeful smile faltered. “He hasn’t been himself lately.” Her joy returned just as fast, and she wriggled back in his arms to look the old man in the face. “But we got Europa back online!”

Thompson interrupted with a sharp, “Remington.” She bit her lip, holding back anything else she would have said.

That left the topic hanging. The old man―I was pretty sure ‘zayde’ was Yiddish, not his name―looked past Remmy and Thompson at us. “Remmy, who are your friends?”

“They’re not my friends.” Her harsh tone hit me like a fist. I flinched, visibly.

Claire stepped out ahead of me. The uneven light of the factory suited her, and every step turned her hair a different color, highlighted her glasses or the blue eyes behind them or her warm, friendly smile. Thompson and the old man stared blankly as she walked up and put her hand on Remmy’s wrist. “Do you really believe Penny meant for any of that to happen?”

Remmy glanced at Claire, then looked back down at her feet. Claire was cheating for me with her power. I couldn’t resent that. I’d have to find some way to deserve it.

“…no,” Remmy finally muttered.

I had to say something. “Thank you, Remmy.”

Claire stepped back. Thompson blinked. The old man shook his head, like he was removing cobwebs. Even with my heart twisted up by this fight, I had to admire that. He might even have recognized that his mind had been clouded.

He kept glancing at Claire, but slipped an arm around Remmy’s waist, pulling her into his lap as he sat back down in his chair. It was ridiculous. He was hardly taller than her, and looked like he weighed less. If it weren’t for the low gravity, she’d have crushed him. He stroked a few hairs that had escaped Remmy’s pigtails back over her head, and asked quietly, “What are their names, Einnikel, and should I be mad at them or not?”