Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (53 page)

Plenty of time for Claire to climb to her feet in the one stable part of the room, launch her grappling hook to grab the back of Juno’s neck, and yank. With a whipping motion, Claire catapulted Juno through the gate, where the already battered body landed in the basement and didn’t move.

The gate shut. The room stopped convulsing. Ray balanced on a tooth as it slid down into the floor, and set me on my feet.

Claire staggered a couple of steps forward, and pointed an angry finger at me. “You are making me a real weapon as soon as we get home. I am never playing damsel in distress again!”

“I’d say you’ve got a real weapon,” commented Ray, suddenly completely at ease and a little bit sly.

Claire looked at the grapple’s claws, now withdrawn into her wrist brace. “Maybe. Don’t you think it’s girly? It looks too much like a gymnastics ribbon. “

Ray smirked. “I think you’re stuck with girly. Any weapon that isn’t adorable will interfere with your superpower.”

Claire pouted. “I wish I had my mom’s power.”

Ray’s smirk grew into a lurid grin. “Do you really want to know how the Puppeteers would have reacted to that?”

As they snickered, I leaned against Ray and left them to it. How they could have energy after all that, I did not know. Listening to it certainly soothed my nerves.

Unfortunately, a supervillain’s work is never done. I straightened up and looked over at Harvey. “How is the evacuation coming?”

“See for yourself.” A round dome bulged out of the ceiling, opening to reveal a featureless black eye that lit up with a view of the hangar.

It didn’t have sound, but we were just in time to see Remmy’s battle suit and Thompson face to face, with him pointing an accusing finger up at her. She pointed a finger back, and her mechanical arm fired a projectile point blank into his face. It looked like she’d fused dozens of those grappling disks into a reusable cannon. Picking up his now limp body, she carried it to the ramp of the Rotor ship and threw it inside.

Everyone gathered around took this as a signal to crowd in themselves.

Despite my exhaustion, my face lit up in a grin. Remmy was going to make a fantastic superhero.

Harvey warned us, “We are still not out of danger. The gate was being watched. It will be reopened soon, and I will not be able to stop that. I do not know if my people, the Conquerors, or a race I have never heard of will come through, but it is only a matter of time.”

I shook my head. “I was serious about blowing the gate and the whole moon anyway.”

“Then you should evacuate. The cannibalization process is well under way. When I die, all biotools in Jupiter space will begin to degrade and die as well. Your vehicle was made separately, and should survive and keep Juliet alive.”

I countered his matter of fact tone by reaching up and patting the hard-shelled mummy dangling from the ceiling. It was really just like touching a clay pot. “We’re all getting out of here alive. Can you open that gate to wherever you want? Like, the Red Herring?”

“Only briefly. There is no gate to anchor the other side. If I leave, the detonation will stop.” He sounded doubtful now, confused. I hoped Juliet knew what to do with her semi-suicidal boyfriend. If anybody could cheer him up, she could.

Perhaps an encouraging grin could start the process. I thumped his hard shell while his feelers waved erratically. “I guarantee I can rig this place to blow without you. I’ll do that, and we’ll all pile into the Red Herring and get away from here.” My other hand drifted, almost by itself, to the hard, round shape in my pouch. “If we could wake Vera, this would be perfect.”

“Certainly. She will kill me as soon as she wakes up, however.”

My thoughts stopped. I hadn’t actually been asking Harvey to wake her up. It hadn’t occurred to me he might be able to.

A lot of things hadn’t occurred to me. Hadn’t I given Remmy some advice about that?

“You can really wake her up?” I asked, because I couldn’t be this lucky, could I?

“The reactivation signal is not difficult to mimic. Place her on the floor, or against any wall.”

I pulled Vera out of my pouch, and… paused. Okay, this would need careful timing.

Slipping off the Machine, I tossed it to Ray. He hopped up on Harvey like a monkey, the Machine’s jaws poised against the thick fleshy cord that held Harvey off the floor.

Penelope’s Log: taking just a brief moment to reiterate: Harvey is so, so, so gross, even if he’s kinda nice. Returning to business now.

“Open the gate to the Red Herring.”

The archway under the grey stone gate lit up, showing the ship’s interior. Juliet lay half-buried in the wall. She looked asleep with her human eyes closed, but the red goat eyes on the sides of her head swiveled towards us. Blinking, she began wriggling free of the clinging flesh attached to her body. Criminy, did she and Harvey deserve each other. Yuck.

“I don’t want her to see me how I really am.” Harvey’s whisper didn’t come from any direction. Probably only I could hear it.

He needed to hear something thoughtful and wise. I couldn’t think of anything like that, so I muttered, “Suck it up. Now, wake up Vera.”

I placed Vera on the floor, and knelt above her, hands atop her shell.

Nothing happened for a second, until I heard Harvey’s voice ask from inside the Red Herring, “Juliet, a very unusual race lives on the first dwarf planet past the gas giants. Would you like to meet them?”

Shaking away the last of the snakelike tubes holding her to the wall, Juliet jumped up and down gleefully. “Yes! Get in here!”

Vera stirred under my hands. “Machine, eat! Cut him down!” I shouted, leaning forward and wrapping my arms around the unfolding Vera.

A clunk sounded behind me. I had to look over my shoulder, even if it was risky. I got to see Ray pick Harvey up and fling him through the gate. When the hard mummy shape landed on the floor of the Red Herring, Juliet wrapped her arms around it, pulling it into her lap and covering the featureless face with kisses.

For one final measure, I pried Archimedes loose and tossed him into the interior of the Red Herring. Juliet could use him better than I ever could, and…

No more biotech. No more Puppeteer anything. Humanity was not ‘civilized’ because of me.

Juliet was too busy embracing Harvey to notice my gift. Harvey’s ears were vibrating wildly when the gate cut off.

“I’d call that a happy ending,” chirped Claire. I let Vera float up into the air next to me. She looked around the room curiously, but didn’t start blasting anything.

Ray lifted his hat, pulled off his mask, and gave me a curious, eyebrow-lifted stare. “Can my evil mistress truly unleash her terrible power and burn this unwelcome rock from space?”

I winced. “Yes.” I was not comfortable with this, but my superpower loved Puppeteer biotech, loved weapons, and most of all, loved bombs.

Okay, power. How could I use whatever I had in this room to blow Kalyke to kingdom come?

I was not even slightly surprised when my hand slid into my pouch and pulled out my last cursed penny. I reached up and stuck it into the dangling tentacle that used to hold up Harvey. Walking over to the wall, I levered off a chitin plate that looked the same as all the others to regular me. Super me knew what to expect, and caught the stone disk that fell out. The disk had the same primitive appearance as Thompson’s stone spear, and looked like a blocky, stylized sun.

Or like a gear, with the teeth sticking around the thickened edge. Yeah. A lot like a gear. I dragged the heavy thing back to the middle of the room, and lifted it to touch it to the dangling alien uvula.

I did not know what I did next. I felt a little funny, and then it passed, and the only clear memory I had was of a picture of Kalyke blowing apart in a ball of fire and pieces smaller than dust.

Ray and Claire both stepped up in front of me. “Time to go, then,” said Claire. She and Ray were both smiling.

Okay, that was it. No more sulking. I was in space. I was on one of the moons of Jupiter, for Tesla’s sake, and I had something even cooler than that right in front of me.

I walked past both my friends and up to the gate. Pulling off my gloves, I ran my bare fingers over the rock. That was all it felt like, rock. That was all it looked like, a bunch of crudely squared off rocks balanced in an arch. It didn’t just look old. It looked primitive. The effect was only enhanced by the engravings covering every surface. They weren’t symbols, or glyphs, or writing, or anything like that. They were pictures, little stick figure men and women with spears hunting bison, or gathered around a pillar with the sun shining overhead, or standing next to curvy water lines doing nothing I could figure out. They looked like cave paintings, on the highest tech piece of machinery in the solar system.

A truly messed up idea snuck into my head. Sure, I was good, but what if there was a much better mad scientist way back in the time of the cavemen? A mutated brain with such an absolute understanding of science that it could make a space warping gate by piling rocks up just right?

Some of the bison looked like they had six legs. So, you know, an alternate explanation would be that it had been built by advanced aliens with highly retro artistic sensibilities.

It would be a shame to leave it, but this gate was too dangerous. Also, a ticking in the back of my brain suggested that we were running out of time.

With enormous relief, I turned to look at my friends and said, “Vera, take us home.”

dramatic flash left us standing on the metal floor of Ceres, looking out its windows over the frozen landscape.

I looked at Ray, and at Claire, and they looked at me, and we all threw our arms around each other and squeezed! Of course, only my ribs would end up bruised, but such was the burden of leadership.

“I want to go home,” Claire groaned.

“I want to go back to school,” said… oh, wait. That was me.

Ray hmmmed. “I could use something to eat,” said superpowered metabolism boy.

I held up a single finger. “We’re sticking around long enough for just one more thing.”

Over in the corner lay the haphazard bioengineering set we’d taken from Happy Days Durable Medical Supplies. I pointed at it and announced, “Vera, that contains Puppeteer biotools. Destroy it.”

The words ‘destroy it’ were entirely unnecessary. No sooner was ‘Puppeteer’ out of my mouth than Vera spun around to look at the set, and to my mild horror so did the Orb of the Heavens. Vera extended her tiny arms, orange flickered around the Orb of the Heavens, and a pink flash not only annihilated the bioengineering machines, but melted a large hole in the floor and wall.

Spider didn’t need to know they could do that.

Out the window, I saw a little spark go off next to Jupiter. Wow. That must have been a serious explosion. Good job, superpower. You do love your bombs. Hopefully, nobody got radiation damage.

My work on this asteroid was complete. I lowered my goggles around my neck, flipping my braids over them and for a moment regretting that Remmy had cut hers off. They had been one of the many things about her I’d envied.

Spider’s smooth, confident woman’s voice projected from the Orb of the Heavens. “Bad Penny, Reviled, E-Claire, please return to my office immediately. Time is critical.”