Juliet held out both hands. The wall spat a pencil into one, and a small, tied-up pack of papers into the other. “Perhaps the gates are here because the Earth and its solar system suited their needs?”
I grunted. “I wish we had time to discuss it.” Raising an arm, I pulled my goggles into place while Archimedes climbed my arm into firing position.
Ray stepped up next to me in front of the airlock. His hand caught mine, and gave it a squeeze. If only I had time to blush about that. He was also unusually all business, asking with an entirely sober frown, “Do we have a plan?” That arch in his voice suggested we needed one, badly.
Fortunately, I agreed. “We do. Archimedes and I can psychically fight her to a standstill, so we double-team her. Whoever knocks her down, we hit her with a cursed penny. That will destroy her defenses, and I’ll use Archimedes to knock her out. And then…” I took a deep breath. “Harvey uses his surgical skills to remove her psychic powers. Once she’s no longer a conduit for the Jovians, she’s not our problem anymore.”
The Red Herring’s monitor eye turned, showing me Calvin’s ship landed at the other end of the hangar. Harvey said, “Please hurry. She is already inside the tunnel system.”
Ray and I stepped out into the red-shelled crater, and I gave his hand one more squeeze. “We’re coming for you, Claire.” Then I let go and tried to think about business and not giggle.
A dash of guilt should do. I had something I didn’t want to say out loud. If we kept Juno so busy she lost her grip on Claire, we’d have the fight in the bag. Claire was the crown royal princess of sucker punches and surprise attacks.
A crack formed in the ground at our feet. It led off towards one wall. Being friends with the sentient moon Juno was invading would make this a whole lot simpler.
We followed, and I looked back to see the crack seal up behind us.
I had to fight the urge to run. When we caught up with Juno, I would need to be at full strength. We followed Harvey’s trail into a corridor, and the deeper we got, the more I looked around in surprise. It really was a corridor! I’d expected perfectly round tunnels, with all kinds of bulging cysts and dripping mucus and breathing vents and stuff like that. Nope. The walls might be made of red chitin and the corners rounded, but this man-sized, squared off hallway was downright boring.
“How big a lead does she have?” I asked the walls.
The shell split into a face, with bubble eyes and a jagged, beaked mouth. “Difficult to say. The perfect organism is too distracting. I get lost admiring how she freely touches and reacts to all life around her, how her body adapts to―”
“Focus, Harvey!” I barked. Criminy, Claire’s power really did a number on him.
A new face opened up ahead of us, replacing the one we’d left behind. “I can deny her nothing. If I segregate my senses from my abstract reason, I know that the Jovian relay must be physically close to her. I would not block the perfect organism from wherever she wants to go, but I am encouraging her to take longer, more interesting paths.”
“It’s not all blank, straight corridors, huh?” I grinned despite the gravity of the situation.
My grin disappeared as the hallway in front of me buckled, chitinous shards stabbing inward. I drew myself up short and squeaked, “Sorry! Sorry! You don’t have to take it personally!”
The ceiling, walls, and floor smoothed out, leaving only a network of cracks. Suddenly distant, Harvey said, “I apologize. A pain reaction. Human vehicles have arrived. They have fired incendiary projectiles at the surface. One vehicle is landing. Another is chasing Juliet and the Red Herring, but they have no realistic chance of catching her.”
I groaned. Tesla’s Nine Engineering Degrees!
Ray grimaced, too, tugging down the brim of his hat. “Collateral damage. Bystander casualties.”
I groaned louder, throwing in some exasperated ‘arrrg!’ “Do we have time to go back?”
Harvey’s voice echoed out of several different cracks in the damaged walls. None of them quite kept the same rhythm, making the words sound slurred. “I am indulging the guilty pleasure of luring the perfect specimen through the respiratory tunnels. The effect of the wind―”
I rolled my eyes. Even alien boys were all the same! “Right, right. Give in to temptation. Run with that as long as you can. We’ll… I don’t know. We’d better figure something out fast.”
Turning around confronted me with more cracked walls and floors. The only part of the corridor that hadn’t convulsed and turned into a sharp-edged death trap was the bit Ray and I had stood in. Not only was it nice not to be punctured, it was sweet of Harvey to protect us even while being shot.
At least, we weren’t that far. It took, what, a couple of minutes to get back to the landing crater? We ended up back in the same in the doorway, looking out and up on a huge, fat Rotor spaceship. Their ships looked a lot like their space stations, bloated boats with biplane wings and propellers. People crowded around a huge exit ramp.
Someone saw us. I knew this, because the white spots of flame guns shot out at us.
“Have you lost your minds? We’re human! Stop shooting!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
“Bad Penny?” The shooting stopped.
Ray and I ran closer. A bunch of Rotors, men and women, were setting up barricades, sitting atop security platforms that had been jury-rigged to copy Remmy’s, watching the walls and floor with guns pointed everywhere, and unloading barrels with big flame stamps and ‘DANGER’ painted on them.
The presence of those last did not make me happy.
I slowed down when we were close enough to have at least a shouted conversation. “What are you doing here? This place is dangerous! Go home!”
One of the walkers stomped up to the metal sawhorses marking the barricade. It crouched down, and on its back, Sabrina lifted her goggles to shout back, “No! Not again! We’re not going to cower in our homes anymore hoping the Puppeteers have forgotten us. We represent all the remaining human colonies, and we’re going to burn out the entire infestation. We’ll burn this place down to the rock, and take back the gate to Earth so no monsters can ever come through again!”
This got a scream of approval from all the adults. In the back, a couple of dozen guards protected a walker loaded with bombs, which headed for the far side of the hangar.
“Let us deal with it! This is what we do! You don’t have psychic shields, or super speed, or a way to override Puppeteer defenses!” I didn’t want to describe to them my nightmare scenario. If things got bad and Juno outmaneuvered us and opened the gate, even for a minute, all these people would become slaves she would force us to fight. If the Puppeteers came through, they’d merely be forcibly civilized.
“Then we’ll guard your back,” some guy yelled.
“We can do this, Bad Penny! Finish your mission, and there will be a safe out of this nightmare waiting for you, and a lot less Puppeteers to fight!” Shouted someone else.
Straightening her walker, Sabrina opened fire with its gatling flame gun, sweeping white fire over a stretch of the floor near the walls. The fleshy floor underneath me rocked as the nearby sections of Kalyke spasmed in pain.
“I’ll burn the Puppeteers down myself if I have to!” Sabrina screamed, her voice peaking in fury. Around her, men and woman applauded or added their own angry shouts.
I lifted my goggles long enough to rub my eyes. “We don’t have time to talk them out of this.”
“Then we intimidate them into staying near the ship and keep them too busy to set off bombs,” said Ray.
I raised an eyebrow at him, feeling sudden relief. “You have an idea?”
He gave me an affectedly lazy shrug and a grin. “With Claire gone, someone had to think about the geeky solutions.”
I just looked at him until he explained, “We’ll sic Harvey on them. Give them the zombie apocalypse they imagine.”
I grabbed his elbow, and we fled back to the tunnel entrance. Grabbing the edge of the doorway,
I asked, “Harvey, do you have more of those brooms? A lot more?”
“The scavengers? To make more than a few hundred would take two or three times the length a human can hold their breath. Behavioral override ganglia would be more effective.” The voice from the wall sounded strained and irritable.
“Juno would take them over instantly. The last thing we want is to give her a bunch of armed pawns.” Actually, the last thing I wanted was to see those brave, innocent people ‘civilized’ against their will.
“I am awakening my cleaning systems and sending them to the landing stoma.”
Sure enough, a vaguely Claire-like blob of red goo pulled itself out of the floor between us and the Rotors, and started shambling towards the barricades. Others staggered into view, and on the far side I heard the hisses and crackles of the bomb convoy firing.
We had been afraid of these things? In an open area, they just staggered, and the cleaners nearby were riddled with white fire and burned down as I watched. More emerged, but they were shot down as soon as they stood up.
This wasn’t going to hold anyone back, just encourage them that they were doing the right thing.
“No!” I complained. “Don’t you know how… I wish I could show you. Ergh!”
“Place your hand on the wall,” Harvey instructed.
That caught me off guard. What? What did he mean? I did, laying my palm against the smooth, warm, rough shell.
About a dozen tentacles broke through, burying themselves in Archimedes’ eyes, mouth, and ears.
My vision spun. Everything turned blue, a blue I recognized. I was looking at the hangar through Puppeteer eyes, and those yellow spots were the Rotors at their barricades, and the white were their weapons.
A few white spots hit the floor near me. Excellent. They were watching.
Shrieking as loud as I could, I yanked myself out of the floor and ran on all fours in an arc that spiraled closer to the barricades. More and more white spots shot out at me. People shouted.
A mass of white hit me in the face.
My vision flickered, and I leaped out of the wall to the floor of the hangar. Hey, I could jump pretty well. I bunched up my legs, and they got heavier as my mass flowed down into them. I leaped, and leaped again, and Rotor fire tracked towards me. A couple of purple and yellow scavengers imitated my earlier outbreak, running around with their arms outstretched.
It only took a few seconds for the guards to hit me, now. My legs sizzled away, thankfully without pain, so I ran forward on my hands, gargling furiously.
They loved that. Everything disappeared in a hail of flame gunfire.
I respawned near the bomb-carrying caravan. No subtleties this time. I charged them as fast as I could, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on all four. I lasted all of two seconds before the white hit, but I saw the walker stop in its track and heard a lot of frightened yelling.
I also heard Juliet’s voice in my ear. “This looks like such fun! May I join you?”
Uh… “…sure?”
I wriggled out of the floor in another zombie body. They hadn’t noticed me yet. I’d been able to adjust my shape before. Could I grow claws?
Oh, yeah. I pushed big, hooked, knifelike claws out of my stubby hands.
Penny like. Plus, if the rest of me looked like Claire, this must be a nightmare.
I was immediately forced to eat crow. A nightmare would be the thing that shambled out of the wall. It must have been twenty feet tall, with more and more cleaners jumping into it to create a bulky, muscular, but still feminine body. It lit up on fire, but had so much mass, that it staggered forward anyway. The ponytail curled up and around into a scorpion stinger, and shot out, telescoping to stab the ground inside the Rotor camp before Sabrina’s walker burned the whole tail away.
They seemed busy. I ran low along the ground towards all of these guards so focused on Juliet’s giant. I was just another moving red thing in a hangar carpeted with scurrying red bodies, right?
My new avatar actually managed to jump up onto a barricade, spread its claws, and screech at a guard before he blew it away.
When my vision flickered to the next emerging zombie, I stopped. “Can I leave this to you, Juliet? You’re better at it than I am.”
“I should love to. It’s an absolute pip!”
My normal vision returned as tentacles withdraw from Archimedes’ head. Ray stood next to me, staring out into the chaos of the hangar. He shook his head, and snorted, “I wish I had popcorn right now.”
The giant had been burned down to a weakly crawling mass of flesh, but clawed arms whipped out from three different places, slashing at the barricades. In the distance, someone yelled, “Pull back! Pull back!” Nobody seemed to have noticed that not a single person had even been scratched.
“Okay, saving Claire time,” I announced.
Ray gave the brim of his hat a tug. “Yes, Mistress.”
We followed Harvey’s trace with a little more haste and a little less marshalling our strength this time, especially when the faces in the walls said, “The perfect organism… Claire. Her name is Claire? Even her name is perfect. She seems to know the right direction. She has left the wind tunnels and is getting close.”
I struggled with my desire to run flat out, and kept to a light jog instead. I was about to ask Harvey if we were going to make it when he started rambling. “I must be broken. As perfect as Claire is, I would not trade Juliet for her. I value Juliet’s flaws more dearly than everything I was designed to believe in.”
We must be close. That was the sound of a clouded mind. Around the next corner, someone said, “Shhh. I hear something.”
Calvin.
I skidded around the corner and felt like a complete idiot when I saw Juno, Calvin, and Claire standing in a tight group. Of course Calvin was here. Harvey just couldn’t see him with Claire in the way.
Criminy, Calvin’s reflexes were fast. I only saw a brief flash of his guns out and training on me. Then the world spun as Ray grabbed me around the middle and yanked me back behind the corner.
I lay against the wall panting. From around the bend, I heard Calvin raise his voice. “I knew you’d escape, but I can’t let you stop us, Bad Penny. This is too important!”
Ray crouched next to me, hands together, and pulled them apart. Pink and purple light flowed out into an energy ball between his spreading hands, getting bigger and bigger.
“Ray―”
“If Claire gets a bone fracture or two, I’ll take the blame. As long as we save her.”
The strangest things hit you sometimes. He sounded so serious, but still not as passionate as when he’d saved me.
Ray’s energy ball got larger than a basketball. Was he putting all the force he had into it? Without warning, he ducked around the corner and threw it. He moved faster than I could easily track, which was a relief. Pops echoed loudly, and three actual bullet holes splintered the chitinous floor.
Juno and Calvin yelped. A second later, wind rushed around us and a deafening crack left me wincing. A thunder of booms followed.
“Penelope, a new external threat has arrived,” said Harvey from the wall behind my back. After all that noise, he sounded distant and tinny.
I heard Calvin’s voice next. “The blast blocked the way forward. We’ll have to stand and fight.”
“We could not leave them behind us anyway. This is why we should have dealt with the children more permanently!” snapped Juno.
Cruel glee sprang up inside me, and a nasty, nasty grin pulled my face tight.
“We’ve got her,” I whispered to Ray. “Calvin doesn’t even the odds. He’s another distraction she can’t afford.”
As he gaped at me, I stepped calmly and slowly out into the other hallway. I didn’t want to move fast. Calvin needed a good look at who it was.
He scowled at me, wary, his pistols not quite raised. “Walk away, Bad Penny. You’re not all the villain you say you are. Let us save the day.”
I ignored him. “
Let them go,” I said to Juno, cold and hard, lifting my arm and pointing Archimedes at her with the same slow deliberation.
It gave me time to look around. Ray had missed Calvin and Juno, alright. Right between them and us was a doorway, a side corridor that must be the direct route to Harvey. At the moment, it was a cave-in of gooey red flesh leaking disgusting pink fluid and broken slabs of Puppeteer shell. Claire stood right next to Juno, eyes vacant, a serene and beautiful―
I dragged my eyes up to Juno. She had her hand on Claire’s shoulder, and that cold, regal stare pulled tight with anger around the lips. The eyes of all three glowed white. Excellent. Juno was having to keep Claire and Calvin under tight control.
Calvin stepped in front of Juno. He might not be as big as his brother, but he could square his shoulders impressively, especially holding a pair of pistols. “I don’t want to hurt you, Little Miss, but I can’t let you hurt this lady either.”
“It’s time to wake up, Calvin,” I told him. Archimedes meowed along, almost making understandable words.
He blinked, and stared at me. The barrels of his guns drooped an inch.
Grinning in triumph, I kept it up. “Wake up. Don’t let her control you anymore. You don’t want to shoot me. You don’t even know what you’re doing here.”
“We’re saving my people. We’re saving all of Jupiter. When the gate opens, no one will be a slave anymore.” His distant, troubled expression and increasingly vague voice sounded like a man arguing with himself, not me.
“Shoot her, Calvin!” Juno ordered.
The pistol in his right hand twitched, but he sputtered, “No, Ma’am. What kind of man shoots a little girl?”
“She’s pointing a weapon at you.” Juno’s voice resonated, like multiple people talking at once. I was pretty sure some of those voices could only be heard in my head, and others in Archimedes’ head. She was really pouring the power into Calvin.
“If I can’t defeat a little girl without hurting her, maybe… maybe I… deserve to lose.” Calvin sounded completely lost now.
Impatient and angry, she pulled on his shoulder, twisting him around to look at her―and exposing herself.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon Page 34
