Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (43 page)

As softly as I could, I said, “Listen. Your brothers are idiots, so forget them. Do what’s important to you. You took the first step to bringing Io Alpha back online today. Now we’ll head to Europa and make it livable. Let them fight over who’s the hero. You act like one.”

The hints of sniffling stopped. Remmy looked up, eyes red, mouth turned in a scowl. She twisted off her helmet, and as mad as she looked, her scratchy voice didn’t hold any anger. “Yeah, well. Thompson still has my aetheric fluid, so that’s easier said than done.”

“You left something on Callisto. Look in the engine room,” announced Calvin’s voice from the radios on our collars.

We didn’t have to move, because Ray darted back into the engine room for us, and a few seconds later emerged with a heavy metal canister. Opening the lid, he showed off a familiar glass tube of softly glowing grey something.

Remmy perked up considerably. As she sat upright, I put a hand on her shoulder, and this time she let me. “One thing I’ve had to learn as a supervillain is that you never have the tools you wish you had. Treat life like your superpower. When you don’t have the parts you have, figure out what you do have that will make things work.”

“You could learn a lot from this girl, Remington,” Calvin said over the radio.

“These children are blessed by the Jovians. Follow their example,” Juno added the same way.

Remmy growled, rolling her bloodshot eyes. She leaned over and grabbed the metal canister from Ray, hugging it and her hard-won aetheric fluid to her chest, even though her arms barely reached all the way around.

t least Calvin’s heavily customized flying saucer had portholes. I knew when we went into orbit around the scratchy brown and white ball of Europa, and got peeks of the space station as we closed for a landing.

Claire responded to the view with, “I thought for sure Thompson would chase us.”

Remmy, arms and legs still wrapped around her fluid tank but noticeably calmer, said, “By the time he got his ship going, we were a speck. If he did follow us, what would he do? Shoot us down? I…”

She trailed off for a moment, and the sullen scowl crept up into a faint but proud grin. “I overdid it on the rotors so this ship could go fast without you feeling it. When Calvin cranks up the speed, we fly in a whole cloud of feedback. If somebody survived getting close enough to shoot at us… shoop. Cannonball gone.”

Claire and Ray grinned, but I snickered. The joy of mad science was when unintended consequences played out in your favor.

A couple of minutes later, we landed. I helped Remmy carry her fluid tank down the ramp and across the deck to the main rotor. By the end of that, my arms ached and I was sure I put the canister down seconds before my fingers slipped. Remmy had merely grunted and shuffled. Ray, of course, strolled up behind carrying the other canister over his shoulder as lightly as a basketball. My jealousy was entirely defused by my delight that Calvin had recovered both lost tubes of aetheric fluid.

I stretched, and I wasn’t the only one feeling the drag. Claire yawned, and asked, “I wonder what time it is?”

Ray looked up into the star-studded sky, first at Europa, then at Jupiter, then at the bright little dot of the sun. “My sense of time is distorted by hours of space station jacking. It might be two pm, or midnight.”

“Let me check,” I offered. Let’s see. I had my phone in my back pocket. I flipped it open, and…

Awww, criminy. “Out of power.”

“Well, you haven’t recharged it in days,” Claire pointed out.

I pressed the buttons. Not even a ‘battery needs charging’ image. Criminy twice.

Realization made me wince. “Criminy
buckets!
I took it out into space! For hours!”

Ray winced in sympathy. “That will do it. Frozen to death. At least your dad can fix it.”

I gave him my best skeptically raised eyebrow. “The second mysterious phone death in a month? Handing the parts over to the one man who can recognize flash-freezing damage on sight? I’ll say I fed it to the Machine because I’m making myself a new one.” I tossed the busted smartphone on the ground.

Ray let out a single, barking laugh. “As if your power will let you make something so straightforward and prosaic.”

With a shove of her foot, Remmy finished wedging an aetheric fluid jar into its socket. Stepping over to me, she picked the phone up off the floor and peered at it through her goggles. “So, you didn’t make this?”

I shook my head. “Nope. This is regular Earth science.”

Remmy flicked a screwdriver from her pocket like she was drawing a switchblade. She poked the end into cracks until she found a good one, and levered the cover off. “Looks like the inside of a robot black box, but it’s tiny!”

All bland and casual and carefully not sounding superior, Ray shrugged. “Sixty years of improvements in microcircuitry since your ancestors left Earth.”

“Huh. I bet I can kludge this into something.” Dropping the broken calculator into one of her pants pockets, she went back to hooking up the fluid tanks.

I really should help with that. Standing behind her, I looked over her shoulder at the massive assemblage of cogs and levers and pipes that I knew contained more cogs, and absolutely none of it made sense. At all. It had all seemed reasonable enough the first time, but now the whole machine could have been written in Greek. Or German, which I was still no good at.

Remmy twisted a pronged plug into place on the bottom of a tank, and tapped her chin with her oversized wrench. She looked down at her feet, or rather at all the different pipes spreading out under her feet and disappearing into the floor. “I bet the plumbing is mostly intact. If I give that power first, we have plumbing, heat, air, and lights. The automatons are dead, but the key winding grid could still be useful. Hmmm.”

Claire stretched, arms above her head, one hand grasping her elbow. “Personally, I think it can wait. I’m exhausted. Why don’t we all get some sleep first?”

Ray almost didn’t stare at her at all, and sounded serious and tired instead of lecherously evil. “Seconded. I don’t know if I require a nap or eight hours, but confronting Puppeteer zombies earned us all a rest.”

I ground my teeth a little, looking back at the inexplicable maze of parts that used to make sense. “Not me. I said I would use my power to help these people. I just need to figure out how.”

Claire looped an arm around my shoulder and gave me a brief, small hug. “I’m afraid I’m going to bow out. I’ve had all the mechanical work I can bear for awhile.” Looking up at the sky, she let out a huge, wistful sigh. “What I really want is to be home playing Teddy Bears and Machine Guns.”

“I actually miss school,” said Ray.

So did I, as crazy as that would have sounded a couple of days ago. I gave them both a wan smile. “My plan is to make something big and helpful, then quit while I’m ahead and go home. If we can’t contact Juliet, we’ll wake up Vera and gate back.”

Ray inclined his head first towards Claire, and then the deck’s central staircase. “Go rest. I shall play Igor and attend upon The Master’s need for tools and parts.”

It was my turn to wave Ray towards that staircase. “That’s sweet, but you don’t have to be my slave. I’ll manage. This is my thing, and you two can take a break.”

Ray gave me a long look, and apparently decided I was serious. He shrugged, put his hands in his pockets, and walked off. As Claire fell in next to him, he speculated, “Maybe we can find a board game. Those were popular at the turn of the twentieth century, weren’t they?”

That left me and Remmy, and Remmy had things well in hand. She knew what she had to do, and had already gotten back to work wedging pipes back into place to connect lines of whatever aetheric power actually was. I walked away from her, scowling up at the sky.

What
could
I do? I didn’t want to turn my superpower loose. It was much too fond of biotech lately. A shudder ran along my shoulders. No more of that. I would wipe out all Puppeteer everything if I got the chance.

That would be great. Superpower, do that!

My head ached a little. I’d been pushing my power like crazy lately. Still, if it wasn’t for this, what was it for?

Come on, power. Puppeteerocide! Gooocide! Rougocide! Whatever, just give me a device.

This one didn’t overwhelm me and knock me out. It crept up. Vera’s most useful power for supervillainy had been a field that broke down and degraded gunpowder anywhere near her. In the Red Panacea Clinic, that same power ate the life out of Puppeteer goo, turning it grey and crumbly. Maybe that had been its original purpose.

Not every Conqueror orb could do that, but I’d seen a few broken orbs the last time we explored this place. Were any of them support grade?

A memory flashed up. Shards under a stair. Big shards, which must have broken off a head-sized orb.

What else would I need? Hmmm. I let my feet carry me along, swimming in the daze of my power. A jewelry display caught my eye in the wrecked market. I took the largest gold ring from the box, and kept walking. A bunch of wax cylinder phonographs had shattered, but a tuning fork lay in the debris. I scooped that up and gave it a ring. The cold had warped it off note, but that was fine. I could work with it.

Maybe I picked up some other things. I couldn’t really recall. I certainly remembered reaching through the gaps in a metal staircase, straining until my fingertips managed to scoop three quarters of a crystal orb into my grip.

When I worked my way back up to the deck, I decided I had enough. I didn’t really need to borrow Remmy’s tools. The Machine sprang off my wrist, still carrying lots of power from eating that Puppeteer cyst. I squeezed until it spat heat out, melting a circle into the broken side of the Conqueror orb.

Eventually, I was left turning the finished device over and over in my hands. I hadn’t done much visibly. The orb remained a dulled, greyed-out pink without a pupil or ceramic body. The broken-off end had been glued back on, with a thick, visible layer of gold around the seal.

It worked. I knew it worked.

I knew it in the back part of my head that throbbed painfully. Penelope’s Log: do not make your head explode by overusing your power, okay? That was not enjoyable.

Ah, who was I kidding. I totally felt smug.

Standing up, I worked the kinks out of my arms and spine, and then yelled down the stairs as loud as I could, “IT’S FINISHED! COME CHECK IT OUT!”

Less than thirty seconds later, Claire came sliding up the hall on her frictionless shoes. She looked fresh again, back in her supervillain costume without the uncomfortable spacesuit underneath.

Aw, man. I wanted to take mine off.

Claire even smelled fresh and soapy. “What happened to you?”

“I took a shower.” Ooh, her dreamy smile made me even more jealous. It didn’t entirely fade as she looked around and added, “I think Ray is taking one himself. This place echoes, so I know he heard you.”

I lifted my new toy in one hand. “Well, we’re going testing out my answer to all of Jupiter’s problems. Come on.”

Calvin and Juno, arms around each other’s waists and also suspiciously clean, showed up by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs. Juno’s glowing eyes and mysterious fortuneteller smile studied me. “What have you wrought, child? Are we another step closer to freedom?”