Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (46 page)

She tucked my modified Conqueror orb under one arm and pulled out a screwdriver. “Maybe.”

“I’ll hold the parts,” Ray offered, taking the orb and holding it in front of her.

The same squid-infested woman was in the same place on the way back. Sabrina flipped her the bird as we passed.

On the steps down to the dorms, Remmy twisted a wire into place, and announced, “Got it.” She held up the newly combined strobe pistol and Conqueror orb, and they could not have been more obviously kludged together. Stiff wires fastened the orb onto the end of the gun by connecting to the golden band, and that was the only visible modification.

Things had gone quiet. At the foot of the stairs, I heard exactly one voice, a boy saying, “I know something’s up. Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on? Do you not like freedom?”

Oh, criminy. I snatched the jury-rigged pistol out of Remmy’s hands, and raced for the school wing. Skidding around the doorway, I saw Donovan with his back to us, one fist on his hip, the other hand holding out a control squid towards a bunch of cowering teenagers.

“This is just the beginning. True freedom is coming soon,” he said, and I shot him in the back.

Pink light pulsed, firing like a machine gun. Something under his jacket writhed, and grey dust poured out. The red tendrils running up into his hair peeled and crumbled. Even the control squid he’d been holding turned into charcoal and disintegrated.

He screamed, but not very loudly at all, and fell over.

Sabrina sprinted past me, and caught him in her arms before he hit the floor. Sobbing, she curled up on the ash-covered carpet, cradling him against her chest.

I dropped down next to her. “Criminy. He’s bleeding.” I grabbed the first cloth that came to hand―Donovan’s lapels―and dabbed at the back of his neck. Sighing in relief, I called out, “It’s not bad. Just a scrape.” The control squid parasitizing him had left raw patches down his back, but nothing looked dangerous.

Donovan screwed up his face in discomfort, and peered woozily up at Sabrina. “I didn’t infect anyone else, did I?” She sobbed more loudly, and hugged him tighter.

I pushed myself back to my feet, hefting the Puppeteer killing pistol. Hardly a pistol anymore. With the heavy Conqueror orb attached, I had to hold it in both hands.

All of a sudden, I was the center of a mob. Kids crowded around me, all of them shouting.

“You did it!”

“You saved him!”

About three people hugged me at once, and one of them squealed, “Thank the stars you came back to save us.”

Gertrude lifted the makeshift gun out of my hands, staring at it. “I’ve never seen a mechanic’s work like this. How could anyone repurpose a Conqueror drone?”

Aggie stood on the other side of Sabrina from me, shaking her head. “Your power is incredible. Just incredible.”

Behind me, Remmy screamed, “ARE YOU ALL STUPID?!”

I whirled around to see Remmy march up shaking her wrench, first at Gertrude, then around at all the other kids. Her voice was raised to a high-pitched squeak. “Why are you praising her for fixing the mess she caused? She brought the Puppeteers here! She did this to Donovan! This is all her fault, and now you’re kissing her feet because she made half of one invention that isn’t evil for once?”

My stomach knotted. “Remmy―”

“SHUT UP!” she screeched, right in my face. I winced at the raw fury in her voice. “How do you do it?! Is this mind control? You destroy everything you touch, and people fight for the right to tell you how great you are!”

Claire stepped up next to us, giving Remmy a warm, sympathetic smile, face tucked down and eyes lifted. “Remmy―”

Whack
. Remmy hit her in the face with her wrench, and Claire flew backward, rolling on the carpet.

I blinked. I hadn’t had time to react. I could see Ray out of the corner of my eye, and neither had he. We’d been slowed down by Claire’s power.

The wrench jabbed me in the chest, not as violently as she had hit Claire, but it still hurt. Remmy’s face had turned red, shading to purple as she yelled, “I’m not stupid! I heard her talking about clouding people’s minds! You drove Thompson crazy for that spear. Every time you walk into a room, Calvin stops being himself!”

She drew back the wrench, but she didn’t have Claire’s power to distract us now. Ray caught her arms, and as she kicked and screamed incoherently dragged her over to a small door, out of place among the schoolroom doorways. It turned out to be a bathroom, and he threw her inside and held it shut.

Rubbing her cheek, Claire arrived with little metal sticks that must be lock picks. She fiddled them inside the lock, and when it clicked, jammed them into the hole and left them.

“Are you alright?” I asked over Remmy’s muffled yelling and the banging on the door.

She rubbed some more at the bruise forming on her cheek, albeit gingerly. “I’m fine. Lesson one I got from Mom was how to roll with a punch. You can’t cloud all of the people all of the time.”

She actually chuckled. “Five will get you ten I heal in less than an hour. My power won’t let anything happen to this pretty face.”

I took a deep breath. As disturbing as that had been, a lot of people were depending on us right now. Turning to the kids, I commanded, “Barricade yourselves in! We’ll try to clear out anything that tries to get to you, but there’s no telling how many Puppeteers there are, or how long it will take to kill them all. But I promise you this.” I lifted up the gun in both hands. “We will kill them all.”

I resisted the urge to laugh maniacally. I was trying to sound like a hero, not a villain, and frankly I didn’t feel it, not with Remmy locked up and raging against me. A laugh would just have been habit.

Posturing wasn’t any fun, either. I turned around without another word, and headed back through the atrium. Poking my head into the dorm hallways, I shot the housemothers first. Only two of them turned out to have parasites. The others just stammered, “Oh―I―Uh―You children―I’m being informed―” and so on. They were still getting messages to forgive everyone for everything.

I stomped up the stairs, making for the last Puppeteer I’d seen, the woman at the intersection. With Claire’s power turned off, as soon as she saw me, she pointed and asked, “Did you do this?”

I held down the trigger and rolled the pink, pulsing beam up and down her. I needn’t have bothered. The first few flashes killed the control squid crawling over her arms, and she fell down in a faint.

The victory felt hollow. Looking back at Claire, I asked her, “What just happened?” My voice sounded just a teensy bit raw.

Claire gave me a sad half-smile, and leaned forward to touch her forehead to mine. “She’s jealous of you. Didn’t you know?”

“Why would she be jealous of me?”

Claire stepped back, but she still kept her face tilted down, a hint of tease warming her smile. “Bad Penny is impressive. You build Tier 3 inventions like they’re baubles, and they look cool. All you have to do is use your power, and you’re the center of attention.”

This made so little sense I gave Ray a pleading look. He nodded emphatically, up and down.

Okay, fine, then. My heart ached at losing a friend I liked as much as Remmy to something I couldn’t control, but the pain would have to wait.

We found the militia captain in front of his quarters, with four other soldiers. They didn’t carry any normal weapons. Instead, they stood in the center of a swarm of control squid, dozens of them. How fast did these things breed?

I couldn’t answer that, but I found out how fast they died. I had to wave the beam around, but after a few seconds, the floor was covered in black powder and all five men lay groaning on the floor. Red stripes stained their clothes. They would have serious scabs tomorrow, especially the captain.

“That had to be most of them,” said Ray.

I shook my head. “We can’t take that chance. We need to gather them into one place. Come on.”

We tromped through mostly deserted hallways, and when I saw some people peeking out of doors, I called out, “Hide in your rooms! The Inscrutable Machine has come to deal with your Puppeteer problem. Someone will sound an all clear when they’re dead.”

That did the trick. Doors closed wherever we passed.

Another infested man, whose jacketless undershirt showed off the bulging tentacles on top of his already bulging muscles, had time to say “What are―” before I burned his parasites away. We left him at the bottom of the stairs as we headed down the metal service hallway to the pneumatic room.

It wasn’t as bad as the one on Europa, but all the automatons pulsed with red flesh, which led in tendrils to a cyst growing in the corner. The sheer mass of red goo took a few seconds for the pistol to degrade, and then I swept the pink beam over the automatons. They froze up, choked with crumbs and dust, but I didn’t need them.

I did need the one I’d left intact and infested up against one wall. I pointed Archimedes at her instead. “Announce this. ‘Slavery to aliens is not freedom. I defy you all, and if you want to do anything about it, you’ll find me on the top deck at the main staircase.”

I jerked my head at my teammates. “Let’s hurry. I’d like to get there before they do.”

We didn’t succeed. We jogged up the market passage only to see about a dozen men and women with a couple dozen more control squid clinging to them standing in a group at the foot of the stairs.

Suckers. They didn’t know what hit them. I made extra sure to play the pink decontamination beam around the floor first, so none of the squid could escape.

Things got quiet. Very, very quiet.

I looked around. I looked at Ray and Claire. Every uninfected citizen was hiding, and the formerly parasitized lay in an unconscious heap by the stairs.

A scream rang down the hallway, not of pain or fear, but anger. White light flashed, hurting my eyes, and I squinted to see flames roaring up a hall and across a ceiling. In their glare, a small, dark figure stepped out of a side hallway. It carried something heavy under one arm, and had pigtails down to its waist that swayed as it walked.

Ray grabbed me by the arm and yanked me into a shop as Remmy fired another blaze of white fire down the hallway. Claire had been smart enough to dodge by herself.

That would have killed us. Dead. No question.

Above the distant crackle of flames, Remmy yelled, “Keep the gun! I don’t want anything you’ve made! I’ll save this station by myself, and the first thing I’ll save it from is you!”

Tesla’s Tingly Dishwashing Detergent. Remmy had lost it.

I risked a peek. She walked up the corridor towards us, pigtails dancing in the hot breeze and face covered in tears. Under one arm she held a trashcan sized gatling of fastened-together flame guns. It looked like she’d taken it off one of those security walkers we’d faced before, and rigged it for manual fire. On her other arm she’d tied an aetheric rotor like a shield.

Ray leaned around me, and heaved a typewriter at her. With his strength, it flew as fast as a baseball. I only had time to squeak, “What do―” before it hit.

Remmy didn’t try to dodge. She raised the rotor arm, and the propeller span in a blur, kicking off lightning. The typewriter hit that and just… disappeared.

I had a less physical weapon. I closed my eyes so that Archimedes could aim through his own from my shoulder. In all the red and green and yellow, Remmy’s shield was an oval of pure black. Criminy.

It wouldn’t help her. I shouted, “Sleep!” and Archimedes meowed, and Remmy fell over on her face. The propeller, thankfully, stopped spinning.

First, we had to disarm her before she woke up. Then what would we do? I didn’t know. I scrambled down a hallway that smelled like smoke to Remmy’s unconscious body. The fires her gun lit had already gone out. There wasn’t enough wood in the paneling, and it burned too fast. A few spots of carpet glowed orange, but that was it.

She looked so small and harmless, lying on her stomach on the floor. How had I alienated her so much?

I had to be practical first. I had to get those weapons off her and stop her killing me before we could make up. Especially the shield.

I gave it a tug, and Remmy rolled, yanking me down. My vision juggled as I hit the floor, and I felt the barrels of Remmy’s flame gun press into my stomach before I clearly saw her face above mine, teeth clenched and dripping tears.

She’d suckered me. I’d been so torn up I fell for it. I didn’t even feel stupid. I just felt bad for her.

“Tell me what you’ve done to my brother and how to fix it, or I’ll give you a stomach full of molten sulfur,” she hissed.

Ray and Claire stood a dozen feet away. Even with Ray’s speed, they didn’t dare do anything. Firing Archimedes would take too long.

I had one weapon left, one Remmy wouldn’t notice. One of my arms lay by my side. I slipped one of my two remaining cursed pennies out of my pocket, and flicked it upwards. It stuck to her shirt below the corset.

Remmy grabbed the front of my jumpsuit with her shield hand, and started shaking me. “What did you do? You’re in this with the witch, aren’t you? She gets a vision that we should go to the asteroid belt, you show up, and he won’t talk to me anymore! All he cares about is how you’re supposedly going to free everyone!
Does this place look free?
”

Her voice rose, getting more and more hysterical. The arm holding the flame gun slumped as she paid attention to shaking me around. Criminy, she was strong.

Not strong enough to stop me from jabbing my head forward, smacking her in the face with my forehead.

OW! Ouch ouch ouch! How did anybody do that? My head felt like it would split, but my belly didn’t catch fire. I’d caught her completely off guard.

I managed to open my eyes from the agonized wince to see Ray holding Remmy’s hands behind her back. I focused Archimedes, and commanded, “Sleep. Sleep, Remington Fawkes. Sleep deeply and quietly. Sleep. Sleep for hours. And please, feel better.”

She’d resisted one command long enough to play dead. Despite her fury, and under the influence of my penny, she couldn’t stand up to being hit by Archimedes so many times. She slumped in Ray’s arms. I looked at her through Archimedes just to be sure. The yellow of her superpower looked subdued, and blue moved slowly through a sea of green, two shades of green swirling around each other. Did that mean she was asleep? It would do.