Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (36 page)

Remmy’s matchstick shoulders slumped forward, and she let out a loud, growling sigh. A hand flapped at each of us in turn. “Zayde, this is Bad Penny, E-Claire, and Reviled. I don’t know their real names. I guess they’re not evil, but don’t trust them because―”

“They’re supervillains,” the old man finished for her. His voice had dropped to a whisper, and he lifted a shaking hand to cover his mouth, while the other reached out to point at me. Actually, to point over my shoulder. “Which means… you’re from Earth? And that’s a real cat, not a toy?”

“What?” I asked, caught off guard. Archimedes echoed my surprise with a meow, and the sound right next to my ear made me jump. I’d forgotten I was wearing him! How?! It wasn’t like he was that light. He just felt… like… part of my body.

Oh, right. I’d been wearing him too long. I reached around behind my neck and started prying at his tail, trying to get it off without horrible agony or major bruises. “Oh, yeah. Kinda. He’s been weaponized.”

“Is he safe to touch?”

Ow. Geez, it was getting harder to pry Archimedes loose every time. I didn’t like the sound of that.

I flashed suddenly back to Mourning Dove’s oh-so-creepy offer to kill my superpower. I shook it off. Things weren’t that bad, the fight with Remmy just had me unsettled. I sure was done messing with bioweapons, though. The next time my power suggested something like that, I’d spoil the inspiration by trying to figure it out. Nobody was getting hurt again by out of control Puppeteer tech if I could help it.

Finally unsticking the tip of Archimedes’ tail, I held him out in both hands for Remmy’s zayde. (It had to mean ‘uncle’ or ‘granddad’ or something.) Without a directing mind, Archimedes curled up into a fluffy black spiral of cat. Remmy shimmied out of the way as the prehistorically old man gathered Archimedes into his lap, petting it like the cat was as brittle as his bony fingers.

“My name is Shimon Litvin.” He pronounced it ‘shih-moan’. “You are from Earth? Did you come through the gate?”

I shook my head. “No. Nobody on Earth knows the gate exists, I don’t think. I built a spaceship. You know, mad science?”

That got a crooked grin. “I know mad science.” Hoo boy, so much weight in those words. I’d said something funny.

Well, I’d asked the guy living in a refinery on Io whose granddaughter stapled together flying saucers if he was familiar with mad science. I probably deserved a laugh.

Hoping my cheeks weren’t visibly burning, I pressed on. “Earth didn’t know you’re here until we got a radio message a few days ago.”

Remmy’s mouth suddenly dropped open, and she goggled at me. “It reached Earth? I sent that! I built the transmitter! Juno said her imaginary Jupiter friends told her we’d find aetheric fluid that way, and I convinced Calvin to at least try to send a message before flying off farther than anyone else has ever gone. I can’t believe it reached Earth. Do you know how hard it is to focus radio waves over interplanetary distances?” Her voice got whispery at the end. All anger was forgotten in the pride of creation.

I had to phrase this really carefully so as not to break that pride. “It reached Ceres. You focused the signal great, but you’d need a miracle to aim it. It just brushed over Ceres, but that was enough for us to come looking.”

Swiveling suddenly, Remmy grabbed Thompson’s sleeve and yanked on it. “Did you hear that? My transmitter sent a clear signal to the asteroid belt! If we can steal some automatons, maybe I can rig up an aiming and receiving system and we can talk to Earth!”

He gave her the older brother humoring while trying to get her mind on business act, complete with slow words and direct eye contact. “Maybe we will, but I have more important projects for you, first. By then you might get a brainwave and we can clear a way to the gate and the artifacts.”

Shimon lifted Archimedes back up in both hands, offering him to me. Those hands shook violently, but not as hard as his voice. “Listen, children… this may seem out of nowhere. It has to have been more than fifty years, but… who won the war?”

Ray got it before I did. “World War Two?”

Shimon nodded. “Yes. We got out―”

Claire interrupted him. “America and Britain won. Germany, Japan, and Italy lost.” The huge sigh of relief he let out made it clear she’d done the right thing. That answer had been important to him.

The terrible allure of history caught up with me. Without thinking, I found myself saying, “It wasn’t clean. Hitler committed genocide on millions of Jews―”

Now it was the old guy’s turn to interrupt me. He sank back into his chair, head bent and nodding. “Yes. He didn’t say why he was rounding us up, but we knew how it had to end.”

“Well, in the end America got involved, and they took back France, and Russia took back Eastern Europe, and they crushed Germany between them. Hitler committed suicide. Things were just as nasty on the Pacific front, but America won by coming up with a weapon through regular science that scared even superhumans. Stalin turned out to be almost as crazy as Hitler, and the world spent about forty years with Russia and America daring each other to start World War Three, but it didn’t happen.”

Shimon might not have heard me. He sat back in his chair, nodding his head. His voice sounded like rustling paper. “We knew. That was why when Milla offered to take me with her, I left. She cared more about me than her parents’ objections, and, well…” He reached up and laid his hand between Remmy’s pigtails. “She doesn’t know what the word ‘Jew’ means, but God blessed me by giving me a great-granddaughter anyway.”

Pulling Remmy closer, he kissed her on her forehead. “Thank you, my Remmy, for bringing these children to me so they could lay an old man’s ghosts to rest.”

Thompson’s hand laid on top of Shimon’s, only to brush the old man’s away and pull Remmy’s head upright. He couldn’t quite clear the reverence out of his voice as he said, “That’s not why she’s here. I need Remington to fix the black box machine. If we run out of robots, Io Omega is dead.”

Shimon reached over and tapped a gnarled finger on the console next to him, indicating a gauge that no doubt would have been very informative if I had any idea what I was looking at. “And again I tell you, the black box machine is fine. The bioresin caster has stopped supplying.”

Thompson shrugged. “It’s all the same to me.”

Remmy climbed up on the railing, clinging to a support pole and leaning way out towards the tower of pipes. “It makes a big difference to me. Nobody knows how the black boxes work. The resin caster? That’s a lot simpler. Where’s the jam, Zayde?”

Shimon leaned over the control panels, and pointed at a gauge. “The oil condensing tank will not heat. After that, the rest of the process finished, so to me, I’m thinking the rest of the machine works.”

Thompson reached down, grabbed Remmy by the elaborate frills covering the scruff of her neck, and hoisted her into the air. “Where is the condensing tank?”

Wheezing and pedaling her feet, Remmy pointed over the edge of the railing.

Thompson grabbed the bar, hunched to jump over, then stopped. His face turned to look down at me, and, I admit it, I took a step back in alarm.

Raising one eyebrow, he asked, “You’re a mechanic too, right, kid?”

I glanced down at the goggles that had settled around my neck. “Sure, but I only―” My voice cut off as he reached over and grabbed a handful of my jumpsuit behind my neck. I struggled for breath as he lifted me, but in the light gravity, the collar didn’t constrict my throat too badly. Just uncomfortably. Archimedes fell out of my hands into Shimon’s lap, and just in time.

“I don’t care who fixes the machine, as long as it’s fixed,” Thompson said, and stepped over and off the railing. We fell like feathers, too gently and precisely even for Io’s gravity. Yep, Chief Fawkes could fly, alright. He landed on a metal tank near the floor, next to a mass of pipes and valves that looked the same as all the rest of the machine to my eyes. Me and Remmy were deposited on two of the larger pipes.

This was way worse than the aetheric rotor engine. At least that had gears, which kinda make sense. This was all chemical tubing and electrical wires, about which I knew a resounding bupkis. Okay, actually I knew a teeny tiny bit of electronics, but in the face of real mechanical repair work―bupkis.

Remmy, on the other hand, knew exactly what she was doing. Before her pigtails settled, she had her goggles on, and a pair of skinny pliers and a voltmeter out. Leaning into the mess, she poked it with the voltmeter. The pliers pulled wires apart, only to be returned to a pocket and exchanged for her massive wrench. Unscrewing some nuts, she held them out to me. “Here.”

I caught them in both hands. At least I could do something! Penelope Akk, interplanetary holder of spare parts.

Remmy brushed back her pigtails with the wrench, getting a streak of oil on them, and pried a lid off a box I hadn’t even noticed wasn’t a pipe like everything else. An ominous puff of black dust drifted out. She sighed. “No mysteries here. The temperature control arm burned out. Do we have a replacement?”

Her older brother met her demanding stare with a shrug. “Get it through your head, Remington. You’re the only mechanic we’ve got left.”

Remmy slumped her shoulders, rolled her eyes, and rocked her head backwards. Oh, and she growled, you know, in case Thompson hadn’t gotten the point. “It’ll take hours to find one. Days. I’m not sure I’d know how to install it anyway. I mean, plugging something else in, that would be easy. I could kludge a robot arm― whoah, whoah, whoah!” Thompson was already turning to jump off the machine, but paused while Remmy pointed at the box and said, “Remove the old control arm first! Not yet; not yet!” The pliers came back out, and she yanked a few wires loose. “Now.”

Her brother reached his gorilla arms into the maze of metal tubing, grabbed the thick pipe she’d indicated, and pulled. Metal shrieked and cracked, and the pipe broke free, proving that it was actually a solid bar. He tossed it over his shoulder into the factory shadows.

“Okay, bring me a spare robot. A broken one would be fine. I’m only using the top half,” Remmy instructed.

Her brother jumped down, and I made a note of another use of being able to fly―unlike us, he could fall at a decent speed in low gravity, and run as well. Despite Remmy’s fastidious and efficient instructions, he grabbed the first robot passing by, lifted it up over his head in both hands, and seconds later jumped up to slam it onto the top of the tank next to his little sister.

“Hold still. Your previous orders are canceled,” she told it. Out came the wrench, and she pried open the back of the robot’s boxy body. I was treated to a mass of cogs, wiring, pistons, axles, and motors such as would grace the engine of the finest modern sports car. While I’d watched her brother, Remmy had wrapped her hands up in bandages again. She poked and prodded with her voltmeter, unfastening wires and tying new ones together. When that had been accomplished to her satisfaction, she leaned into the guts of the bioresin distiller, guiding the robot’s arm.

Her voice rang out from inside. “I can’t connect this. Give it a push.” Chief Fawkes grabbed the robot’s arm in both hands, and shoved. A loud, metallic clonk exited the machine, followed closely by Remmy. “Okay,” she said to the robot, “Your job from now on is to stand here and not fall off.”

“I’ll make that easy.” Thompson took the robot’s other arm, and grunting with effort, bent it into a spiral, wrapping it around another pipe.

Remmy pulled her pigtails out of the guts of the distiller, leaned her head back, and yelled, “Okay, Zayde! Reactivate the boiler!”

The distiller rattled. The robot’s bent elbow straightened abruptly, pushing farther into the hole brother and sister Fawkes had created for it. A few seconds later came the knock, knock, knock of heating metal.

Remmy pumped her fist. “Yes!” Letting out a sigh, she waved her wrench up at Thompson. “It’s ugly, but performance should be the same as the original control arm. You need a mechanic, big brother. A real one.”

That was my cue. “I’d say he’s got a real mechanic.”

That stopped Remmy cold. Her mouth hung open as she stared at me, although her goggles hid the rest of her expression. Suddenly she gave me a small, awkward grin, and whacked the robot’s shoulder with her wrench. “Yeah, well, Io Omega’s going to look mighty weird if all the regular parts get replaced with kludges like this.”

Motion caught my eye. My friends of course were interested. Above me, Claire leaned over the railing, and Ray went one further by clinging like a spider upside down to the column of pipes. It was his creeping up towards us that I’d noticed. Somehow, his hat stayed on.

Suppressing a smirk, I returned my attention to Remmy. “It’s a lot of fun getting to watch another mad scientist at work. When I use my power, I never know what I’m doing. Half the time I don’t remember anything. I wish it was as relaxed and controlled as yours.”

She stood up a little straighter, a bit of pride tugging at the edges of her halfhearted smile. “I dunno. All the other mechanics get a feel for the inventions our great-great-whatever grandparents used to found the colonies. It’s like they’re that smart. Dad’s power went even further. He built all kinds of new stuff. I just see how different machines could fit together. I’ve tried to study how things work the hard way, but mostly I have to fake repairs with a jury-rig. Like this one.”

She gave the robot another whack.

Dutifully, its metallic monotone said, “Ow.”

I giggled.

“If you’re going to yakk, do it where people can stand upright,” Thompson scolded his sister. He wrapped the base of her pigtails around his fist. I winced at the very thought of being carried around like that, and shrank back in case he reached for me.

My knight in jet black wool rescued me. Ray swung down off the pipes above, and scooped his arm underneath me so I could sit on it. “Transporting this one is my responsibility,” he told Chief Fawkes with an absolutely straight face. He jumped, and as we rose past the catwalk, grabbed the rail, spun around, and deposited me lightly onto my feet.

Seconds later, Remmy’s brother dropped her next to me the same way, only he really had dragged her up by the pigtails. She didn’t
look
pained. Maybe with the reduced gravity it hadn’t been that bad. I had no intention of finding out first hand.