Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon

by Richard Roberts

  I nibbled on my lower lip for a moment, then asked quietly, “You know this is all gibberish, right? We don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  He turned his face to me, blue eyes gleaming mischievously and his grin as toothy as a wolf’s. “That’s what makes it so much fun.”

  I bumped my shoulder against his, leaning against him long enough to laugh, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

  We walked a few steps like that before a sudden urge made me peek back over my shoulder. Juliet padded behind us on silent, bare feet, with Vera by her shoulder, both watching me and Ray curiously. I swear Juliet was actually drawing our little moment.

  Ray saw it too, gave my elbow one more squeeze, and whispered, “In space, no one can give you privacy.”

  I snorted, and hurried to catch up with Remmy.

  We’d found something, but it was hard to tell what. The staircase had given way to a hallway, and the lights went out before it opened into a very large room.

  There’d been a lot less clutter on the stairs, but there were still a few bottles and shoes scattered around. I watched the shadows around my feet carefully as I stepped into the darkness.

  Then Vera floated past me and let out a pink flash. The lights all turned on at once―a bit muted, but on.

  What a mess.

  This chamber had been ground zero of a war. A giant machine of tubes and slots dominated the center, or at least what I could make of it. That nasty red Puppeteer goo had covered most of it in a web. There wasn’t much red left. Grey and black were the dominant themes of the burned out hulk. Something had run on rails in circles around the floor, but now there were only chunks of metal, a lot of them gears.

  Was that a…? No, it wasn’t a human body. A mannequin arm stuck out of a cyst of Puppeteer goo on the floor. A big, blackened hole cut right through the middle of that growth and into the room below.

  Even though they looked dead, Remmy walked well around the Puppeteer lumps. I copied her. Vera showed no such inhibitions, floating out ahead and silently studying the gooped up machine that dominated the room.

  Despite her caution, the pneumo machine attracted Remmy like a magnet. She stepped up into arm’s reach of a bare metal portion, studying the ceiling, and all the tubes. Her voice uncharacteristically soft, she said, “I heard this was how they got in. Some meat puppets pretended to be human long enough to reach the mailroom, and then the Puppeteers came out and got into the pneumatic tubes. They came out everywhere, infecting people. And then the Conquerors showed up.”

  The word made me look around. A chunk of cloudy glass I’d seen became more important. I circled back to a crystal ball split into three pieces. Crouching down, I scooped the parts together to make most of a sphere. I picked it up…

  …and immediately put it back down again. Too heavy! The orb was bigger than my head, but there was no question of its identity. This was a broken Conqueror orb. It even had a visible pupil, and some chunks of ceramic scattered around that had been part of its shell.

  The fight had not been one-sided.

  Remmy was thinking about the same thing in another direction. She pointed at Vera. “How did you control a Conqueror?”

  I stood back up, looking around for more dead orbs. With all this clutter, there might be more, but I couldn’t see them. Most likely they would be under the burnt out Puppeteers who killed them, right?

  With my mind half on that, I answered, “I don’t. Vera is under her own control. She just likes me. She’s not an actual Conqueror orb, anyway. She’s a fake I built.”

  “Oh.” Before I could parse the emotions in that one word, Remmy scrunched up her face and gave a grey shell a kick, crumbling it into dust. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Did you live here?” Ray asked. I looked back. He was in the middle of prying open the mannequin arm.

  Remmy scowled now. She stuck her hands in her pockets, which didn’t work very well with her oversized wrench still in one hand. “I lived everywhere. Calvin and Thompson couldn’t get along, and Dad was sick. Only the automatons could really take care of him, but they always faulted us on something. We were here when the Puppeteers came. They’d already tried a direct invasion, but with Dad’s guns, we fought them off. Once the meat puppets got in here, there was no hope. Calvin got me out right as the Conquerors arrived. I got to see the power cut out through the window.”

  Yikes. Not a happy childhood. I was going to let that drop, but Ray seemed interested, if very serious. “Where did they come from?”

  Remmy looked sour-faced, and I was a little surprised that she answered. “Kalyke. The founders came to Jupiter from Kalyke, and said no one was ever allowed to go back. Then one day when I was little, the moon turned red and Puppeteers came swarming out.”

  “There you are! Where have you been? I had a whole joke prepared about freezing things off, and it’s quite spoiled now.”

  My attention suddenly diverted, I looked back at Juliet. Even on her warped face, her anger did not look convincing. She stared intently at the gooed-up machine for a few seconds, then rolled all four of her eyes. “I shall not tell them that, Harvey. Why must you be so hard on yourself?”

  Remmy had started backing towards the far exit, but I lifted a hand to her and mouthed, “It’s okay.”

  She accepted that, barely. She stood there and joined me, Ray, and even Vera as we all watched Juliet. The four-eyed, goat-horned young woman stood listening to her phantom friend for awhile, and then turned to look at us. Primly, she explained, “The Puppeteers had already made contact with those dreadful doctors at the clinic, but Harvey prevented them from ever―yes you did, Harvey, that is exactly what you said―coming back. Unfortunately, the Puppeteers are quite interested in distance-independent gate travel, and caught humans activating a gate recently. Having learned the location of that gate, they came to our solar system and…” She paused for a second. Unable to hear Harvey’s side of the conversation, I couldn’t even guess why.

  She picked up again quickly. “In any case, you’ve seen what they do. It was beyond Harvey’s abilities to save us a second time.” She shot the empty spot where Harvey must have been sitting a stubborn look, and finished, “The Conquerors followed the Puppeteers, and arrived in time to stop the invasion at Jupiter.”

  Then with no Puppeteers to fight, the Conquerors attacked Earth anyway. I knew that. Only to have their own Orb of the Heavens stolen, or something. I had superhero parents who were there, and they kept the details secret from me!

  Here was a chance to dig up some of those secrets. Ray pounced like a tiger on that chance, asking, “Does Harvey know who the Conquerors are?” He sounded eager, hungry. This was a secret so big, I didn’t think any human knew the answer.

  We weren’t about to find out. I knew that when Juliet lectured Harvey, “Your guesses are superior to most scientific facts.” Looking back at us, she relayed, “There are no Conquerors. They’re long dead, murdered by their own machines, who now move in and destroy the ability of innocent worlds to resist, then wait for commands that never come. It’s still better than being turned into meat puppets.”

  Juliet’s eyes turned shiny, and she flashed a sudden smile at Harvey’s presumed location. “Thank you for saving me from that. I love you more than there are words to express.”

  A red eye turned to me, and suddenly Juliet straightened, clearing her throat and rearranging her papers. Remmy took that as a signal to turn and stomp towards the double doors across the mailroom, declaring loudly, “That was freaky, and we’re leaving now.”

  I fell in next to Ray, and gave him a little bitty smile. That had been kinda grim, but we’d learned things no other human knew. He gave me the exact same smile back.

  It had been really cool, and for once I was kinda glad Claire hadn’t been here.

  The lights were still out in most of the following hallway, but picked up normally a ways down. Remmy stood in the center, turning around in circles and pointing in various directions, muttering, �
�And that is…”

  Then she swept off again, faster now. I had to hurry just to keep up with her. If she was putting distance between us and the mailroom, I couldn’t blame her.

  She stopped at a sealed hatch, gave a tug at the wheel, but couldn’t open it. Knocking on the metal with her knuckles, she turned to Ray. “If you’re so strong…” Ray gave the wheel a twist. Metal groaned, and the door popped open. “…thanks.”

  The wood and carpeting stopped on the other side. A metal staircase like I’d expect in a naval vessel led us down. The fighting had been much worse here. Holes had been melted in some of the walls, and we had to skirt past damp, blackened lumps that must have been ex-Puppeteer monsters. I didn’t see any Conqueror orbs, but I saw sparkly dust and smashed sections of ceramic. There might be a pile of broken orbs at the bottom of this spiral staircase.

  I didn’t get to find out. We reached one level, and Remmy yelled, “Ah-ha!” again. The door she pointed through had been melted off its hinges. So was the one down the hall.

  There was nowhere to step that didn’t have us touching burned-out Puppeteer goo, but Vera floated ahead of us, studying everything. She didn’t react to anything as a threat, so I had to assume it was all dead.

  The room on the other side wasn’t as big as the mailroom, but it had a similar design. Rails on the floor ran between five machines, and the central machine hooked up to a big copper pipe coming out of the ceiling. Well, not a pipe exactly, but a long row of gears pressed so close to each other, they looked like a pipe. Oh, criminy. This whole setup was unshielded. Whatever aetheric charge was, if you worked in this room, you were exposed to it directly.

  Not that anybody worked in this room. The rails, it turned out, were for a bunch of department store mannequins. They’d all been broken, melted, ripped apart, or covered in Puppeteer goo, with cogs spilling out of them everywhere. More cogs than I’d ever imagined. This room was where bad watchmakers went when they died.

  Watchmaker heaven would not have big hard-shelled Puppeteer tumors everywhere, damp walls, a terrible chill, or heat ray blasts carving and blackening everything. I couldn’t even tell if any of this equipment was intact.

  Remmy didn’t look as lost as me, but that was a low bar to clear. She poked at one of the machines with her wrench. “Well?”

  I shook my head and shrugged, my face feeling tight with awkward helplessness. “The engine upstairs made sense. This one doesn’t.”

  Remmy’s frown didn’t look optimistic either. “I think it’s too broken, but I don’t know. I’ve never seen one of these before. If I can get this automaton working, we can find out. All the motor units are smashed, but maybe I can kludge something together.” Stepping behind the nearest mannequin, she squatted down and peered into its ripped open back. Most of the parts inside did look like they still fit together, and it connected by a pole to wheels locked into the track.

  I crawled around to join her, wondering if there was anything I could do at all, and blacked out.

  w. I woke up to a dull ache in the back of my head. Ray’s arms were around me.

  Planted against the wall on the far side of the chamber, Remmy pointed a shaking wrench at us. “Don’t come near me! What in Michelson’s Mistake is wrong with you?!”

  What was wrong was that I’d been pushing my power too much. Ow. That really did ache. I couldn’t remember what I’d made, but I obviously had gone into a mad science fit.

  Ray did the talking while I checked if my arms and legs worked. “You’ve never seen a mad scientist at work before?” He didn’t sound contemptuous, just puzzled.

  Remmy still sounded hysterical. “Not like that! Not with the laughing and the carrying on! I’ve never… I…” She slowed down, relaxing a little, face scrunched up on one side in thought. “I remember Dad could get creepy when he was working.”

  Juliet raised her pencil hand to get my attention. She was standing a lot closer than Remmy, but still stared goggle-eyed. Although she kind of did that anyway. “Harvey and I have considerable experience with biomedical genius, and even a trained human should not be able to revive an aestivating spore, imprint an animal magnetic template, or trigger an organ repurposing sequence.”

  Okay, so I’d done something with Puppeteer goo. Presumably the pod next to me that had now been burned down to still-glowing ash, with Vera floating above it. I looked down at the three red, fidgeting balls in my lap. My spacesuit bats had been turned into something more… tentacley. Yuck.

  Ray’s arms tightened just a smidge. “You dropped a penny into a gap in that thing’s shell, and when it opened up, you stuck your hand into the goop and felt around. It―”

  I held up a hand. “Yeah, I don’t really want to hear more.”

  He snickered, and his voice lowered. There was no privacy with an alien robot, a mutant goat girl, an invisible doctor, and a scared eleven-year-old mad scientist in the room, but he pretended we could talk confidentially. “You remember that cloning equipment we got from Happy Days?”

  “Yeah?” That was about as witty as I was going to get with this headache.

  “It had a lot of new machines built on top of old ones, and it came with a jar of red stuff.”

  I groaned, putting the pieces together. “Hundred-year-old Puppeteer goo, passed down nutcase to nutcase from the Red Panacea Clinic.”

  Ray nodded. “The Red Herring is too advanced even for your power, love. I do not believe you invented it. Your power told you how to push button one for ‘spaceship.’“

  ‘Love.’ That word sent chills up and down me that pushed even the headache aside. I forced myself back up to my feet, and looked at the gruesome little balls in my arms. “So what did I tell the goo to make this time? We wanted to fix this automaton, right?” Hesitantly, I picked up one of the twitching balls, and held it out towards the ripped open back of the mannequin.

  The results were as effective and as gross as I could have dreamed. The ball uncurled, shooting tentacles into the mass of gears. Pulling itself into the gap, it spread tendrils like a web all through the machinery, until a sheet of Puppeteer goo filled the gap. A lump under the sheet pulsed, and again, and again, in an even rhythm like a heart. The automaton’s arms twitched and… it stood up.

  “Is there anything I can do for you children?”

  It had a remarkably good voice synthesizer, sounding like a bright, friendly young woman. Unfortunately, all the emphases were wrong, as if each word came from a different sentence. I didn’t know if that was built in, or a side effect of my Puppeteer implant.

  Remmy stumbled forward. Scared or not, this was what we came here for. Her wrench flicked, pointing between the automaton and the machine in front of it. “We need a new batch of aetheric fluid.”

  “Well-bred children say ‘please.’“ Despite its prim lecture, the automaton swung around on its rattling rails, and opened a hatch in the side of her machine. Pulling out a broken glass tube, she slid around the rails to the wall, and took an empty replacement tube out of one of the only cabinets not welded shut or covered in goo. Returning to her post, she slid it into place, and reached into the guts of the machine to begin moving parts around.

  After a few seconds of that, she straightened up. “I’m sorry, children. I would like to help, but the condenser seems to be broken. I’m trying to send a message to the maintenance automaton, but he isn’t answering.”

  Remmy scowled. Stomping around to the other side of the machine, she gave the automaton melted halfway into the floor a kick. “Is this him?”

  The working automaton asked brightly, “Perhaps Mister Morley can help repair him?”

  “He’s been dead for three generations,” Remmy snapped back. Glaring furiously, she hit the casing of the condenser with her wrench. The loud bong must have been satisfying, because she hit it three more times.

  The automaton wagged a finger at her. “Children who commit vandalism go to bed without supper. I’ve sent a message to your dorm mother, but she does not seem
to be answering.”

  At which point Claire slid into the room. Her frictionless soles even worked on this lumpy terrain, and she skidded to a halt as smoothly as any professional skier.

  Giving me a salute, Claire barked, “Intelligence report, team leader.”

  Was now the time to be supervillains?

  Now was the best time to be supervillains.

  “Report,” I ordered, with my best ‘cold and brusque’ tone. I also tried to look totally detached and businesslike and not in any way grossed out as I tucked the other two control squid into my belt pouches.

  “We’ve fallen in with a couple of kooks, Bad Penny.”

  “Hey!” Remmy shouted.

  Claire ignored her. “I gave them both a dose of ‘I’m harmless, go ahead and talk freely.’ Fawkes is a rebel, or maybe a revolutionary. Every other sentence is about how humanity needs to be set free from the automatons. It’s like he’s not a person, just an obsession.”

  I glanced at Remmy. She stood there fuming, gripping her wrench in both hands, but it was the kind of glare you get from someone who’d been caught dead to rights. I asked Claire, “And Juno?”

  “She’s serious about the Jovians thing. Acts like they’re space gods, and she’s their chosen instrument. She does have powers, clairvoyance at the least. Whatever you just did, she knows, and she told Fawkes you’re the key to their revolution. They’re right behind me.”

  The back of my head ached, but I had supervillain responsibilities. I waved back over my shoulder. “Stand behind me and look harmless.”

  Claire slid around between me and the automaton. “I can see your calves, young―” it started to lecture, but I shot it an angry glance and it slumped forward and went quiet. The squid really had put it under my complete control.