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 mo
ved slowly through a sea of green, two shades of green swirling around each other. Did that mean she was asleep? It would do.
First I pulled her space-destroying shield off her arm and flung it as far as I could down the hallway. Then I tried to drag her flame gun away, gave up, and kicked it so it rolled a few feet.
I lifted my goggles and rubbed my eyes. Weak and hoarse, I said, “We have to go tell Calvin. He’ll need to know.”
Claire sat down on the main steps, arms crossed over her knees. “Penny, the first chance we get, we go home. I haven’t updated my Twitter accounts in days.”
Bwa?
With great effort, I kept that from being what came out of my mouth, but couldn’t stop the next thought from escaping. “Accounts plural?”
Ray started smirking. “E-Claire has six Twitter accounts, all claiming the others are fakes.”
Claire puffed out her chest proudly, face held as regally high as a lioness’. “And I only run two of them.”
I filled in sarcastically, “…but if they both stop posting at the same time, the game falls apart. Yeah, yeah. I’ll add that to the million of reasons we need to tell Calvin where his sister is, pat him on the back, and blow this popsicle stand.”
Claire grinned at me, and I yanked her up off the steps and gave her a hug. Yes, well done, tension defused. It could be surprisingly great having friends who knew how to push my buttons.
“Would you guard Remmy with this until she wakes up? She’ll finish cleaning out Callisto.”
I turned my head around to see Ray handing the Death-To-Puppeteers Beam to Sabrina. She crouched next to Remmy’s unconscious body, teeth clenched. If only we could do for her what Claire had just done for me.
She growled, “We’ll clean out Callisto, alright. I’ve had enough of living in terror of Puppeteers. We all have.”
Maybe we had given her what she needed―a weapon for revenge. Closure.
A momentary image of Claire tweeting affronted, contradictory messages at herself for a public audience brought my smile back, and let me focus on business.
“I’d rather tell Calvin I knocked his sister cold than risk her outsmarting us on the way to Europa. Let’s get moving.”
hat left a problem, of course.
“How are we going to get home?” I looked up at the glowing ceiling of Calvin’s spaceship. Neither the ceiling, the glow, nor even the ineffable forces of the cosmos answered me.
Claire breezed past me towards the cockpit. “I’ll drive.”
“Why you?” Wait, shut up, Penny. You’ve got a goose-egg on your forehead and your heart aches. You don’t want to drive!
Fortunately, Claire had her answer ready. “Artificially enhanced super reflexes, I’ve been watching Remmy, and I play more flight simulators than you do.”
Relieved to be relieved of duty, I sank down in a chair and closed my eyes. The ship lurched, pulling me down for a second, but that meant we were airborne. Or spaceborne.
I only felt a gentle tug to one side as we accelerated. Claire was getting the hang of the system. I peeked enough to see the wall towards the back of the ship brighten. Evidence for my theory that Remmy used the push of aetheric rotors to disguise the pull of engine thrust.
“Any guesses how I find Europa station?” Claire called out.
Ray’s voice headed in her direction. “That trackball device measures distances to target. We’ll have to be close to aim it, but that won’t be hard. Europa is the white spot over there.”
“The moons must be close together right now. Handy.”
Awhile later, “We’re about halfway there. Reverse thrust.”
“Oh, right.”
I lurched from side to side, and forward and back, like I was riding in a car dealing with particularly difficult traffic. That smoothed out again after a minute.
A loud clang woke me up, bouncing me up in my seat. Had I put the seatbelts on myself? I was wearing them now. The whole ship vibrated for a few seconds.
Her voice shakier than the ship, Claire announced, “We’re docked.”
I opened my eyes as Ray entered the room, worked the lever and wheel to unlock and descend the ramp. Claire arrived several seconds later, leaning against the doorframe.
She took a couple of deep breaths, giving me a muzzy grimace. “Flying one of these is easy. Landing is not. I’ll spare you how many times I thought we were going to crash.”
Unfastening my seatbelt, I stood up, stretched, and petted Archimedes. “Take a break. We’ll be back here as soon as we find Calvin and Juno. We haven’t been gone that long. Ray, you wake him up, and I’ll wake her.”
Even coming down from a case of nerves, that made Claire grin wickedly. “I’m pretty sure they’ll be together, and you’ll be more than a little embarrassed when you find out why.”
I ignored the Jaded Lutra act. Ray agreeing to behave had just opened the door for Claire to take over supplying innuendo. Instead of blushing or delivering a devastating riposte, I squeezed my eyes shut and took advantage of Archimedes’ ability to see through walls.
“They’re nowhere near each other,” I reported smugly. “Calvin is… I think he’s on the top level market, down by the bulkhead seals. Juno is in the dormitories, and she is way more powerful than I thought.” Calvin was a distant green man shape. I couldn’t see Juno specifically, just a misty white blob that filled the area she was in. I had to assume she’d be smack dab in the middle of that cloud.
The real reason I was so happy Calvin and Juno weren’t together was cowardice. Let Ray be the one to tell Calvin what happened to his sister!
Ray gave me an encouraging fist bump to the shoulder when we reached the bottom of the ramp. “You’ve done everything you set out to do. Even if Remmy never forgives you, she’ll have a happier life because you met. All you have to think of now is the best way to get us home, and if Harvey can talk to you through Archimedes, that won’t take long.”
I flashed him a weak grin. He reached out and flicked his thumb down the bridge of my nose. “So remember, young miss, when going into space, always bring along your psychic cat.”
I went “Pffft,” at him.
We parted ways in the wrecked marketplace. After just having visited Callisto, the identical layouts felt creepy. I found my way down to the dormitories with ease, but where in these hundreds of rooms was Juno?
Archimedes Vision didn’t help much. I was walking through fog. Okay, that splotch of green and yellow and blue and purple had to be her.
This was the far dormitory from the one we’d slept in, but still much closer than I’d expected to see Juno. Of course, if her power was this spread out, she must not be asleep. These little rooms and deserted hallways provided a lot of peace and quiet to… do… space witch stuff. Worship Jovians?
A quick blink confirmed my direction. I stopped in front of door 43 in Dorm A, and knocked on the door. “Juno?”
No answer. Archimedes wriggled and mewed, agitated. I hadn’t made him do that.
I knocked louder. Still nothing.
Well, time to be rude. I pressed the latch and opened the door enough to peek in.
My throat tightened, strangling a scream. A teenage boy lay on the floor, not even on the bed. He was emaciated, stripped down to his boxers and covered in tendrils of red flesh. Control squid crawled languidly over his skin, and as I watched, a fleshy red bulge on his shoulder shook, split, and a damp, freshly hatched squid climbed out.
My heart raced. Grabbing Archimedes in both hands, I yelled down at the monsters, “Sleep! No, die! Die, all of you! Curl up and die! And let him go!”
They did curl up, and the white lights in their eyes went out, but they didn’t turn grey. The one that had taken over the boy didn’t move.
He looked familiar. Wasn’t this the kid who gave Remmy a hard time back on Callisto?
Criminy, this was a little too much even for revenge. No, no way Remmy knew about this.
But Juno was nearby, probably right across the hall, a
nd the eyes of the squid glowed white. Like they’d glowed white on Callisto.
No way.
I walked Archimedes down to my arm, and checked my pocket for my last remaining cursed coin. Only one door on the opposite wall was closed, and that was where the white glowed brightest.
I shut the breeding room behind me. The last thing I wanted was those monsters sneaking up from behind.
My head felt light from shock. I tried to focus. This would require all the strength I could muster.
I crossed the hall, pressed the latch, and opened the door to Juno’s room.
Not that she was sleeping in it. She floated in the center, legs crossed, hands in her lap. Even with her eyes closed, a white jellyfish shape with bloated tentacles floated around her. It wasn’t entirely visible, but the white light it shone on every surface gave off flashing hints of its outline.
“What are you doing?” I managed not to scream it at her, but only just.
Quiet and tranquil, her voice merely hinted apology. “Regrettably, you already know.”
So, it was true. My grip on my anger failed, and it boiled up inside me. “So this is your idea of freeing the rotors from the automatons? By mind controlling anyone who disagrees with you?!” Criminy, did I sound screechy.
She smiled. I’d met a lot of villains. Several were my friends. I couldn’t recall ever seeing such a peaceful, smug, evil expression. “No, child. This was the first step of freeing the Jovians from our prison. Through me, we would have had a thousand flesh and blood hands that could wield tools and weapons. I had hoped to keep you usefully ignorant, but the truth is, you are obsolete. You have brought us the key to the Puppeteers’ gate, and we need nothing else.”
Pointing Archimedes right at her face, I snarled, “Shut up and die.” I didn’t yell, but Archimedes did, his howl venting my anger and disgust.
Juno flinched, and stumbled. It wasn’t enough to knock her out, but she had to stand on her own feet, and her hiss no longer sounded tranquil at all. “You dare to fight us with our own power?”
And here I thought I was a melodramatic villain.
She didn’t have to issue commands. The light in the room flashed, and I got the impression of tentacles stabbing at me. My head hurt. My back went stiff.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon Page 32
