Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (39 page)

He kept giving me that impenetrable look. I rolled out of the chair and collapsed on the floor, point over the seat at Remmy. “You drive us home. I don’t want to think about trying to land this thing.”

She slid into place, focusing on the instruments and not me. I turned my tired gaze up to Chief Fawkes. “If you want metals, there’s a much easier, safer way. Let your sister combine a Rotor and Jet engine so you won’t run out of power, and hit the asteroid belt. You don’t even have to go all the way there. There’s rocks filled with metal all over the place. Let her do her thing, and Remmy can get you more iron than you’ll ever know what to do with.”

Remmy sat up straighter in the pilot seat, and gave her brother a defiant look. “Yeah. Yeah! I can do it. Forget it’s Rotor tech, okay? It’s Remmy tech. No more wondering if it’s another month or a year before we luck into an iron eruption.”

He gave a grunt. For him, that was practically an apology. “I guess I should listen to the geniuses.”

Remmy nodded hard, jutting out what chin she had. “You should. We’re the smart ones.” She turned a sheepish smile to me. “That was fantastic for your first time piloting. I want to play computer games.”

Heh. “I want to take you to Earth and play computer games with you, but we have to do something about your broken space station first.”

Much later, I fell asleep in a hammock in Remmy’s bedroom. Archimedes lay curled up on my chest, and I dreamed about him arguing with a man-sized shadow that had twitchy bunny ears. I couldn’t remember what they were saying, but after a meal of baked fish on a bed of fried Europa ocean taters and melted goat cheese, I was grateful I didn’t dream anything weirder.

nscrutable Machine! Prepare for action!

My next weapon had to have some pump action like a shotgun. I couldn’t do that to Archimedes, and I wore him on my shoulder these days anyway. The pump action gesture was really important to looking dramatic.

I did not look dramatic. Ray and Claire reclined even further in their padded leather chairs and gave me amused expressions.

“Normally your very word is my gospel, Dark Mistress, but a prolonged repair job is not a battlefield of glory,” said Ray.

Claire smirked at me, then at Remmy. “Maybe it’s a mad scientist thing.”

I smirked back. “You fools shall regret your blindness when I go home and brag to Lucyfar about how I hotwired a space station.”

Ha! That got their attention. Claire and Ray sat up, with identical sly smiles and eyes twinkling with mischief. It was Claire who answered. “Okay, but it’s going to be hard to drive back to our lair.”

Undefeated, I raised a finger. “We’re Robin Hooding it. First we steal the station, then we give it away to the poor people of Io.”

Ray not only straightened up, but leaned a little forward, stretching out his arms with his fingers laced to pop his knuckles. “I guess it’s time to take this job seriously.”

“Then check your weapons,” I instructed. Hee hee! I felt so goofy, but it was great to have purpose again.

Let’s see. I had Archimedes perched on the shoulder of my jumpsuit. I’d figured out that while I’d look even dumber wearing anything under this uncomfortably tight rubbery suit, nothing was stopping me from wearing my clothes over it. We had all taken that route, and gratefully. Each of us held our own helmet, which we’d put on in a minute when Thompson landed the ship. Vera floated behind me, batting a hand lazily at Archimedes’ tail every time it twitched. I had two pennies left in my belt pouches, as well as Ray and Claire’s shoes, and Ray’s hat and mask. None of those would fit over their spacesuits. I’d wriggled my jumpsuit boots on, and kinda regretted it. The sticky soles would have been useful in zero gravity.

Above all, I had my secret weapon in all situations mechanical. I ran my hand over the Machine clamped to my wrist. Every time I used it, I appreciated more how my power had given me the ultimate mechanical tool. It could act as a screwdriver, extrude wire, purify corroded metals, harmlessly ground electrical shorts, emit light, and absolutely no bolt was too tight when I could ask the Machine to eat it.

Oh, and let’s not forget the little short-range radios Remmy had clipped on the inside of our helmets. That was clever.

I looked back over my shoulder at the pink floating crystal ball of my friendliest creation. “Vera, expect to be busy. We’re going into zero gravity, in a place gutted by Puppeteers, and your heat ray makes a good welding torch. Are you ready for all that?”

She nodded. If only I’d given her an expression.

Ray raised one gloved finger. “Assuming no one shuts her off again.”

I groaned! “Yeah, really. How many Conqueror deactivation pistols do you Jupiterians have, anyway? We’d have killed for those on Earth.”

Chief Fawkes answered, calling out from inside the cockpit, “My old man made four. We lost one when the Puppeteers attacked Europa. He was carrying it. Now there are two.”

“Yikes. Sorry,” I said, half for destroying one of their treasures and half for the losing Remmy and Thompson’s dad thing he’d skimmed over.

Remmy shook her head. “Don’t be. They only work if you’re attacked by one drone at a time. Any drone not put to sleep immediately wakes up the others.”

Her brother yelled out to us again. “The only thing we could have used them for now is to get past the Conquerors guarding the gate to Earth. We’d have needed all four.”

Basic math finished processing in my subconscious. I facepalmed. “So I bring the only friendly Conqueror Orb in the universe to Jupiter, and run into the only three weapons capable of shutting her off. Ah, the life of a supervillain.
Yipe
!”

That last came as gravity stopped, detaching my feet from the floor. Then it came back, but in the wrong direction, plunging me towards Remmy. Above me, Ray’s hands darted for his seatbelts. As fast as he was, he only had time to get one unfastened.

Instead, Claire extended her arm, grabbed her wrist, and fired off her grappling hook. The claws sank into my jumpsuit, jolting me to a halt before I crushed Remmy, and reeling me back up to Claire instead.

Gravity switched again just in time to dump me into Claire’s lap. She wrapped a protective arm around my waist. That kept me still as we lurched a few more times.

Vera drifted over to me. The sudden shifts of direction had not bothered her at all. She maintained a perfect relative position.

Not to self: explain to Vera that falling hurts, and she should stop people from falling if at all possible.

Weightlessness came back. After several seconds, it looked like we might stay weightless. Chief Fawkes confirmed that when he opened the cockpit door. “We’re docked, or as close as we’re going to get.”

Remmy rummaged in her many pockets, and pulled out three little pistols, or drills, or actually, they looked like miniature sanders with the flat disks on the end. She didn’t leave me wondering for long. “These will be useful on board the station. By now, every scrap of metal is magnetized. If you start to drift, fire this into any wall and pull yourself to safety.”

Ah, grappling hooks! Grappling hooks specific to our situation. Very handy. Remmy flicked them at us one at a time. I caught mine, tucked it in a pouch, and reached up to the straps spaced out on every surface to climb towards the exit.

“Two at a time,” Thompson instructed. I reached out a hand immediately to Ray, and he accepted, pulling me over to the hatch and into the little exit tunnel.

“Ahem?” Remmy raised her brows. Whoops! Right. We turned on our radios and fastened on our helmets.

The inside hatch closed over us. I was alone with Ray, and all I could think was that I’d actually yelled ‘yipe’ instead of squealing or screaming.

Come on, Penny. Supervillains don’t blush.

Ray kept his mind on business, letting me cling to the ladder rungs as he twisted open the outside hatch. A gust of air yanked at me. It dragged Ray right out of the ship; but with effortless grace, he floated through the short empty space between our spaceship and the station itself. Grabbing a railing inside, he held his arm out to me.

He’d have to wait a moment. I climbed awkwardly around the exit, and pulled the outer airlock hatch shut. The wheel turned itself.

Kicking off, I floated maybe ten feet, tops, to dock with Ray’s waiting arm. We were in.

And a funky interior it was. A round, white tunnel ran down the center of the disk from this end to the other, which was quite a ways. We were open to space on our side. Were the Jets really this casual about airlocks?

To accompany my sarcasm, I ran a jaundiced eye over the opening, and saw the irregular, blobby edges. Oh. No, the Jets had an airlock. The Conquerors had melted it off.

Inside, chains marked what looked like a freight elevator running up most of the center, but the platform was waaaaaaaaay down on the other end. Here we had rails scrolling down the tube, spiral staircases without stairs.

Ray pulled us along the railing, one arm loosely hooked around my waist.

Nope, sorry, Ray. Supervillain team leaders don’t need chivalry! I pulled out Remmy’s funky grappling hook, aimed it at one of the two big doorways right in the center of the shaft, and fired.

I sank back immediately into Ray’s grip from the recoil, but he would get no pleasure rescuing this damsel in distress. The metal cap hit something inside the doorway, and stuck. I pushed the retrieve button, and the grapple sucked me right out of my black knight’s grip. I had to let up the retrieve button almost immediately. It didn’t pull hard, but I just kept flying faster and faster. The trick was to get a good speed, let the wire go loose, then suck up a length to pull it tight again.

My radio put a tinny edge on Remmy’s voice. “Be careful the first time you―oh, you’ve got it.”

Ha! That’s right. I did.

Just in case any of us forgot he had superpowers, Chief Fawkes swooped past me, arcing through the doorway. His sole concession to space travel was a diving helmet, and he dragged Remmy behind him with a fistful of her corset laces.

Vertigo hit me, just when I thought I’d kinda sorta gotten used to the dizziness of zero-g. Up above my head, a regular squared off spiral staircase descended upwards… yeesh.