Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (40 page)

Claire floated up next to me, grabbing the railing next to a ‘Warning: Increasing Gravity’ with an arrow pointed up… down… ugh.

Unfazed, she chirped, “I like it. It’s like a post-apocalyptic fps,” and everything swam into focus.

Right. I’d seen dozens of scenes like this in computer games. It was just regular architecture tilted at a crazy angle. I turned myself so that following those stairs would be ‘down’, and followed the floating Chief Fawkes and Remmy. My boots hit the steps a couple of times, kicking up clouds of dust that seemed in no hurry to settle.

We only had to go a couple of turns around the stairwell until my shoes hit the floor and stayed there. Now I might feel floaty, but we really were climbing ‘down’ the stairs.

An ‘Entering Microgravity’ sign had an arrow pointing up. Ah, up. I loved you so much.

Remmy’s voice came hushed and anxious in my radio. “Should I feel more or less freaked out that all the bodies are gone?”

Her brother just grunted, and continued leading us downstairs.

He led us all the way to the bottom. We actually stopped one level up from the bottom, but I could see it beneath us. There had been doorways along the way, most of them open. Unlike the naval hatches used by the Rotors, these had shutters that went up and down. Big, solid, blast door type shutters.

One of those had been melted through. The other was stuck shut because of dents that I could imagine were fist-shaped.

We stepped through into a messy hallway, and I had to say this for Jet engineering―the rotating disk was big. Seriously big. I could see the curve in the hallway way up ahead, but it felt straight and gravity felt comfortably Earthlike.

Much like Europa station, this place was a mess. It might be a worse mess. True, nothing was floating, but the walls, floors, and ceilings had holes in them. Pictures had been thrown off the walls, and broken wood and fabric were scattered around, spilled out of what were obviously apartments on either side.

The second freakiest thing was that the fluorescent lights in the ceilings were on. This place still had electricity.

The freakiest thing was all the Puppeteer goo.

The hall and the apartments on either side were worse than anything I’d seen on Europa, except maybe in the sorting room. There were enough charred cysts to show the Conquerors had been there, but the vast majority of the hard-shelled, egg-shaped tumors looked intact, connected by long, thin roots of frost-covered red flesh. It wasn’t as bad as the Red Panacea Clinic. Whole walls and floors weren’t covered. No zombie mishmashes of human and goat parts.

I tried to say something. The words stuck in my throat.

Remmy managed to speak, but even the tinny radio tone couldn’t disguise the quaver in her voice. “Tommy, I can’t repair this place if I’m a meat puppet.”

He didn’t sound impressed. “This stuff is all dead, which is why the Conquerors left it. I’ll be guarding you. You’ll be fine.”

I drew a raspy breath, and reached up to stroke my hand back over Archimedes. Frost covered his fur, but he felt the vacuum as no more than a chill. Another unpleasant reminder that I’d meddled with Puppeteer tech, but that had a use.

I shut my eyes, and forced his to focus. Everything inanimate turned red. My friends and Chief Fawkes were green and yellow, with an awful lot of yellow. The Puppeteer flesh formed a network of blue that spread exactly like a root system through the lower levels of the station.

Blue, but not yellow. I looked closely at the nearest tumor. Blotches of the blue tended towards purple, but nothing moved.

Yellow moved unexpectedly. Archimedes’ head turned. A man-shaped yellow mass with rabbit ears leaned against a yellow wall, saying, “Crude and brutal. If I’d done my job―”

“Harvey?!” I shouted, opening my real eyes.

Of course, he wasn’t there. I closed my eyes again. Still gone. Penelope’s Log: you are an idiot.

He’d sounded so guilty and disgusted.

“Is Harvey here?” Claire asked. Everyone stood completely still.

I shook my head. “No. If he was, he’s gone now. Or maybe I’m just hallucinating.”

“Juliet’s sanity may be a little shaky, but I believe Harvey is real,” said Claire.

“And if he is, then he might be able to talk to other people. Or to Archimedes,” added Ray. He’d been paying attention.

Thompson turned around to look at us, with Remmy tucked under his arm like a bag of flour. “Is this supervillain talk?”

I swallowed, focusing on the task at hand. Harvey was gone, and there was work to be done. “I analyzed the goo. It’s not dead, but it’s in deep hibernation.”

Thompson nodded. “Good enough. If it moves, we’ll kill it.” He started walking again, skirting around a particularly large hole in the floor. And the wall. And the ceiling behind the wall. And so on, right out into space.

I peered at the hole. The ‘floor’ below seemed mostly filled with machinery and a tiny service corridor. The edges of the wreckage were ripped, not melted. “This doesn’t look like Conqueror damage.”

Remmy explained in a carefully blank voice, “The Rotors fired on the station to try and destroy the Puppeteers. They had just enough time to poke the place full of holes before the Conquerors turned on them.”

Chief Fawkes ignored the topic, but apparently, we’d gone far enough because he finally put Remmy down on her feet. “We start here.”

Remmy craned her head this way and that, looking at the devastation, at the holes big and small leading out into space along the side apartments. “There’s just no way. This place is worse than I thought. It’ll take years.”

Okay. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Harvey’s appearance had knocked me off balance, but it was time for Bad Penny to do her thing.

“For the whole station, maybe, but we don’t have to repair the whole station. Not yet. This place still has power. There’s a whole graveyard of wrecked spaceships stuck to the hull. Our expert in fitting things together picks the best parts, and we weld them over the holes. All we have to do is seal a section, pressurize it, and move on to the next one. Every time you do, you have a bigger base of operations and can bring in more people.”

Remmy gawked at me. My bubble helmet spacesuits were pretty good. I could see her open mouth clearly, and the way her head twitched from side to side as she wrestled with my plan. Finally, she looked up the corridor and then down, and really shook her head. “That won’t work. We can’t seal off the hallways, and if we did, we couldn’t get in and out. And what would we do about the stairs?”

I opened my mouth to reply, only to realize she had a good point. We could get big enough chunks of metal to close the hallways, although the edges would be a mess, but we’d be locking ourselves in.

Ray came to my rescue. He stepped up next to me, peeking through the hole at the not-that-slowly turning stars outside. “There are a number of broken Rotor ships out there, correct? Do those smaller aetheric rotors make air-retaining bubbles like the big ones on the space stations?”

Ooh. The possibilities of that tickled my brain, and not my super brain, either. Remmy felt the same way, because hope rose in her voice. “Yyyyeah. Only a couple of rooms worth, but they do.”

Time for me to take over! “We put one on the stairway, and one down the hall. They’ll spill air whenever we go in and out, but I bet our technology kludge can scavenge an atmosphere generator or two.”

Remmy nodded slowly, losing her war with pessimism. “I’ll need a lot of parts, and I mean a
lot
of parts. Batteries, engines, bits of bulkhead, the biggest rotors I can pry off. Some of this stuff weighs tons.”

Her older brother cracked his giant knuckles―not that we could hear them. “Sounds like my job. If I can’t fit them through a hole, I’ll take them down the stairs.” He wasn’t shy about action, either. As soon as he said that, he stepped into a nearby apartment, and jumped up through another hole in the outer shell.

Flourishing his hand twice, Ray bowed to me. “And I shall be your muscle inside, my lady.”

“And I’ll scout out parts and map out all the holes we have to fix,” said Claire from… actually, I didn’t know where she had gone. Talking through radio had that effect.

It was time to apply the elbow grease. I’d start by the staircase, since that would be one end of our little base. I had to head into the side apartments to start working, and to do that, I had to try really hard not to think about who had lived here, guess what they were like from the curtains and discarded clothes, and ignore the Puppeteer cysts.

Claire helped by climbing down a small flight of stairs, and pointing first at side rooms, then back up the way she came. “Two little holes that way. Look like bullet holes. A fist sized melted hole over there, and a big one upstairs.”

I followed her directions, and in a frozen bathroom found two of what did, indeed, look like bullet holes in the curving outer hull. I unleashed my secret weapon, pulling the Machine off my wrist and flailing it around until it started. The cold clearly made my poor baby sluggish.

Grabbing a discarded coffee pot, I stuck the Machine to it. “Eat.”

Wait. Would he hear my instructions in space? Apparently so, because he crunched up the pot, growing layers of metal plates on his centipede back. The Machine absorbed radio waves. Maybe it could translate them into voice commands.

“Metal rod, as long as that hole and as wide. Wrapped in rubber.”

The Machine regurgitated the coffee pot in the requested shape. I inserted it into the first bullet hole, and ordered Vera, “Weld.”

She did. The pink Conqueror heat beam turned the blobby edges of the hole and the end of the plug molten in seconds, and in the vacuum, they chilled almost as quickly.

I’d just finished patching the other downstairs hole with part of a nearby wall when Remmy screamed, “
Aaaaaah
!”

I jumped, but she sounded excited rather than afraid, especially when she babbled, “Guys! Guys! You have to see this!”

Ray, Claire, and I gathered around the big hole in the hull just in time to see a metal fist grab the edge. Remmy pulled herself into view like a monkey, wearing, uh…

“They’re cargo lifters for space!” Remmy squeaked gleefully. “Check this out. They have maneuvering jets and everything!”

She let go of the gap, and immediately drifted away. Well, technically we turned while she went in a straight line, but it looked like she’d started sailing off into space, right until white smoke puffed behind her, and she zoomed up to grab the edge again.

“I forgot we even had these!” she shouted. “We might be able to do this!”

We collectively winced. Thanks to the radios, she was right in our ears. It was great to see her excited, at least.

Who was I kidding? I wanted a pair of giant mechanical arms! Why did I not have a pair of giant mechanical arms? Who was the senior mad scientist here, anyway?

To add insult to injury, my plugs soon proved to be pathetic compared to what Remmy’s superpower could come up with. She dragged over sections of ship’s hull, and the things inside I thought were heating elements matched up with the ones inside the station’s outer walls. Vera cut away any parts that didn’t fit, and then welded them into place.

Ray stayed by my side most of the time, usually bracing his booted foot against one wall while he kept centripetal force from flinging a slab of metal away. He lifted beds and dressers out of my way, while breaking the monotony with a string of surreal witticisms.

“Burn! Burn from the unbearable gaze of the Clockwork Queen’s glass eye!”

“When you stare into the abyss, a girl in a mechanical suit stares back.”

“Hey there, good looking. Does your mother know―oops, wait, that’s a hat rack.”

“How many hats did the Jets own?! Is there a hat farm on one of Jupiter’s moons somewhere?”

“Not to muscle in on the mad scientist schtick, Remmy, but have you considered a shoulder mounted rocket launcher for that power armor you’re wearing?”

I let out another snort. Was it too late to change my secret identity to ‘Clockwork Queen’?

When he asked, “May I borrow the Machine?” it took me a second to realize he wasn’t joking.

“I can ask the Mini-Machine to grow legs.” We’d fed the Machine so much metal, I’d had to make it spit up a clone, which now sat like a barnacle next to the giant hole which we’d saved to patch last. Of course, then Claire had pointed us at a room where the wall hadn’t broken, just cracked and buckled and had to be replaced. That had taken a lot of time.

Ray shook his head, smiling mysteriously, or at least smugly. “Too large. I require the original’s portability and its unique ability to absorb excess kinetic energy.”

Eying him suspiciously, I dropped my precious Machine into his open hands, and followed him out into the hallway. He’d cannibalized someone’s bookshelves to lay wooden boards over the pit in the middle of the floor, and as I watched he knelt down and whacked a railroad spike sized nail with the Machine. I winced, forcing myself to hold still as he pummeled the nail through the metal flooring, and drove in a few more. I knew he was right about the Machine’s energy absorption. He hit the nails hard enough to send himself flying into the air, but thanks to my baby, all that energy went one way.

I wasn’t sure what it would take to destroy the Machine, and had no intention of finding out. As undignified as this was, my greatest invention was in no danger.

Claire immediately trotted over the boards holding a red rubber ball.

My brain rearranged what I’d just seen. Not a red rubber ball. She had a handful of Puppeteer goo! Too shocked to say anything, I rushed after her, and watched her jam the goo into a hole in the wall, pounding it with her fist until it lay flat.

Claire saw me staring and gave me the Lutra grin―utterly unabashed, head lifted like a cat’s in pride at getting a reaction. “Two layers of gloves, one rubber, both filled with circuitry. You said this stuff is inert. There are electrical hazards all over the place. Either this stuff is a good insulator, or the smoke will tell us where we have a problem.”

She waltzed past me, the picture of graceful serenity, and into the apartment across the way. My guess was to get more Puppeteer flesh, because the living room had three cysts and a thicker root network than anything I’d seen so far. This apartment was as overgrown as the Red Panacea Clinic. Yeesh. Whoever had lived here, they’d sure gotten alien attention.