Rumour has it, the Hub went underground at that point, either using private funding or squirrelling away millions of boffin dollars from the government via back channels and secret handshake deals.
So yes, the lab itself was not a surprise.
What I wasn’t expecting was that most of the boffins were younger than me.
“Isn’t this illegal?” I speculated as I saw my third lab-coated twelve-year-old in as many minutes.
“They get to count it as credit towards the science degrees they are all mysteriously acquiring before they’ve even left high school,” said Joey, who had slipped out of her Official Solar Costume to wear jeans and an old Buckshot Loves Catsuit t-shirt that made Griff roll his eyes at her. “When it comes to super science? Teenagers have the right kind of brains.”
“You mean, not fully developed?”
“Open to all possibilities,” she grinned back.
“She’s kidding,” Griff grumbled. “There are grownups working here too. They just found it was more productive to contain the teen scientists to a single floor.”
I spotted several of Griff’s orphan boys working on various projects along the way. Other people might put computer games in the hands of underprivileged kids, encourage them to start a rock band or turn their graffiti into art. Griff had gone with “superhero science.”
“They’re bright lads,” he assured me. “It’s not that I’m worried they’re going to end up shoplifting or selling drugs if we don’t keep them busy. I’m literally afraid some of them will end up as supervillains. It’s not unprecedented.”
“So you thought you would cut through all the red tape and give them unfettered access to a private science laboratory?”
“Supervised access,” he protested. “And really I just signed off on the work experience forms.”
For all my sarcasm, I was excited. I had wanted to see inside the Innovation Hub for years. This was the team that provided equipment, weapons and support gear for Australia’s Mightiest Superheroes—actually, the World’s Mightiest Superheroes.
Supposedly every country’s Innovation Hub performed regular maintenance on their local Machine, though I was skeptical about that, like almost every journalist I knew. I mean, the Machines came to us from who-knows-where. Were we supposed to believe that humans had worked out how to upgrade the software?
“We really shouldn’t bring you in here,” said serious-faced Liam, wearing a lab coat designed for a much larger scientist. “It’s a strict No Press zone.”
“Off the record,” I said absently, admiring an impressive display of freeze ray guns.
“It’s fine, Liam,” said Griff. “Fry agreed to have her mind wiped afterwards, Men in Black style.”
I stared at him in alarm. “I did not—oh, very funny.”
“Along here,” said Joey, giving Liam a stern look so he didn’t imagine for a second that he was in charge. “Turns out we have a couple of students investigating extra-dimensional travel for a negotiated study. They’re the ones who will be examining the Cosmic Eggs we just took into custody.”
Liam’s eyes lit up. “Cosmic Eggs? Plural? Do you have to give them all to Hayley? I can think of uses for those artefacts without even trying…”
“And that’s why you don’t get to play with them,” Griff said swiftly.
“Turns out Tina Valentina paid a visit to these premises twelve months ago,” said Solar.
“So much for the No Press zone,” I observed. The rules had never quite applied to Mum. I got that from her.
“She spent a lot of her time sifting through Storage Unit 8, which contains artefacts recovered from Megadethra’s Millennium Bug Invasion. Remember when she opened up all those wormholes over Sydney and sent literal alien bugs through, on New Year’s Eve 1999?”
“Yeah that one’s hard to forget.” It’s my earliest memory. I think I was allowed to stay up late to watch the fireworks, and ended up staring at the TV screen as a bunch of minor celebrities were swarmed by scary giant alien bugs. Good times.
“Turns out your mother slipped some unofficial funding to one of our student teams, to knock one of the artefacts into working order.” Yes, that sounded like Mum.
“It wasn’t unofficial!” protested an offended voice. “She used PayPal. We declared it in our budget and everything!”
Two teenage girls in coveralls—one tall and curvy with pigtails, one exceptionally short with a shaved head—stepped out from behind a teetering wall of crates. Neither of them looked older than fourteen.
“How much money?” I asked.
The girls both practiced innocent expressions in our general direction.
“This is Hayley, and that’s Buzz,” said Joey. “The amount was, uh, 2 million dollars.”
Griff swore.
“Okay then.” My mother wasn’t short of cash, but goddamn. “What did she get for that generous donation?”
“Well,” said Hayley, looking sheepish and proud. “It’s not like she ever collected the goods…”
“Not that she could have,” Joey interrupted. “Funding or no funding, the item in question is government property.”
“She didn’t even take our baby for a test drive!” piped up Buzz. “We would have totally let her do that.”
Joey made a gesture that was half facepalm, half encouraging them to get on with it.
“We almost never get to show her off,” said Buzz, a socket wrench dangling from her fingers as she led the way around more crates and sealed plastic canisters, to a wide open workspace containing…
Okay, it was a spaceship. Maybe half the size of my mother’s living room, so not a huge spaceship, but still.
It looked like a spaceship that had had been transplanted directly from a 1960’s space cartoon by way of a Katy Perry music video. It had port-holes with curtains. There was a smiley Martian painted on the side. I’m pretty sure there was glitter mixed into the silver paintwork.
“That’s, uh…” I said, but as it turned out, there was no way to finish the sentence.
Joey looked embarrassed.
“Groovy,” said Griff, with all the sarcasm he could muster.
“It’s fabulous,” I admitted. “But what is it?”
“An extra-dimensional substellarmobile,” said Hayley brightly, wiping a touch of grease from her freckled cheek. “We were going to call her the Silver Submarine, but we didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about her function.”
“So we call her Audrey,” said Buzz.
Joey peered into one of the port-holes. “Is that a flowering fern in there?”
“Audrey gets lonely,” said Hayley.
“Does she work?” I said impatiently. “Is she spaceworthy?” Dimensionworthy. Whatever.
“Sure,” said Buzz. “Ms. Valentina was due to visit her a month ago. Our only holdup was the lack of appropriate fuel cells, but the government just got their hands on an illicit shipment of Cosmic Eggs, and we got first dibs because…”
Somewhere, there was a raspy, throat-clearing cough. Everyone around Audrey went still and tense, as if the school principal had suddenly appeared in the middle of a conversation about an impending feminist protest rally. Joey looked guilty. Griff looked like he had a headache coming on.
Surely there was only one person who could have quite that impact on a group of generally shameless people. I swivelled slowly on one heel, and found myself face to face with The Dark.
The Dark is the scariest superhero. Not even the U.S.A. has ever had one that could beat him in terms of pure presence.
He’s all black cloak and shadow.
He has a voice so deep and resounding, it’s like Tom Jones ate a tobacco factory and didn’t bother to chew before he swallowed.
His shoulders and his jawline are so sharp, they use dimensions not usually seen in our reality.
/> You can never see his face, or the pupils of his eyes; his visor is a streak of brightness against the black, but he manages to look like he’s judging you, 100% of the time.
I had never been this close to him before.
Once, when I was tiny, I sneaked out of bed in the hope of catching Santa distributing my presents around our designer tree. Instead I found my mother at the foot of our foyer staircase, engaged in an angry whispered conversation with two costumed men, broad-shouldered and epic.
Original Solar loomed over my mother with his muscles and his chin dimple. The Dark was engrossed in their conversation. For one brief moment, he turned and looked directly at me, where I was hiding in the shadow of the banisters.
He didn’t say a word, but I scampered back to bed, shivering.
I’ve seen him since then—press conferences, live battles, and so on. But not this close. Not three feet away from me, staring directly into my eyes with his white swoosh of a visor.
“Friday Valentina,” he said now in that gravelly, end-of-the-world voice of his. “I need a word.”
“I’m allowed to be here,” I protested, feeling like a toddler all over again.
His cowl shifted slightly, and what little I could see of his face looked pained. “I know. I cleared you for access.”
“I don’t think we’ve done anything wrong,” said Joey defensively, stepping up beside me.
The Dark judged us all with his scowl. “Did I say otherwise?”
Griff snorted. “You can’t help it, mate. You give off an air of angry authoritarian supercop.”
“It doesn’t seem to affect you,” The Dark said to him.
“I’ve built up my immunity.”
“Um,” I said, feeling stupidly brave. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
The Dark turned his attention back on me, and it was like all the air was sucked out of the room. “Your mother. We know now what happened to Tina—why she never made it to the test launch of the Silver Submarine.”
“The Audrey,” corrected Buzz, and then zipped her lips shut when The Dark’s gaze fell on her.
My stomach felt tight. “You know where Mum is?”
The Dark was silent for a moment. “You’d better come and see,” he said finally.
Oh that didn’t sound good.
The footage was grainy and lacking in detail, but it was real. It had been verified by The Dark’s own contacts, and he might be a terrifying mofo but I couldn’t imagine he trusted “contacts” lightly, or that anyone would dare screw him over with false intel.
Six weeks, three days and fourteen hours ago, Tina Valentina was snatched off the street, right here in Sydney. A swirling wormhole opened up for 47 seconds, long enough for several soldiers dressed like something out of a punk rock Nutcracker Suite to grab her, and yank her through to a different dimension.
Silver and green space armour, with embroidered coats and high furry hats. Megadethra’s aesthetic all the way. She’d always used the same colour palette, even in the mid-90’s when all the superheroes were changing up their iconic looks. As intergalactic space tyrants go, Megadethra likes to stick to the classics.
When the wormhole closed, it made a popping sound.
The ladies’ loos at the Innovation Hub were seriously nice. Fancy hotel that serves high tea kind of nice. Everything was retro and gilded. There was a seven foot oil portrait of Princess Leia as Rosie the Riveter hanging above the baby change counter.
Griff found me there, sometime later, leaning over the sinks. “Did you hurl?”
“A little privacy?” I grumbled.
“Just checking you haven’t drowned yourself.” He looked around the bathroom with appreciation. “The Gents’ features a very different portrait of Princess Leia.”
“Men are scum,” I said automatically.
“Are you OK, Fry?”
An awful feeling choked up my throat like the panic attacks I used to have when I was a kid, and I knew my mother was about to get on a plane to go to some country that wasn’t here.
Travelling wasn’t scary. But my mother leaving the country without me? Sucker punched me in the feels every time.
“She’s just so far away,” I gasped. “I mean, another dimension? What does that even mean?”
“No one knows the location of Megadethra’s Palace Zone,” Griff said gently. “The only ones we know who’ve ever been there and survived were Original Solar, Molly Mathers and that TV crew, back in the 90’s—and they were never able to help the authorities figure out which dimensional layer it belonged to.”
I splashed water on my face, inhaling the refreshing coldness. “I know that. I know we can’t just drive over there and pick her up.”
“Friday. What if we could?”
Slowly, I pushed away from the beautiful sink and stared at him. “Say what now?”
And Our Friends Are All Aboard
“HEY FRIENDS, FRIDAY VALENTINA HERE, and you are not going to believe where I am filming this week’s Friday Report.”
I’m an expert at holding my phone at the perfect flattering angle for filming on the run. Which usually means me, hovering at a street corner while some real heroes smack around monsters or villains or killer robots, far above me. I’ve got some of my best footage that way.
Today I was wearing an oversized vintage Kid Dark hoodie which Griff bought me as a joke last Christmas—a gift he regrets, because I love this thing and wear it everywhere. An Astra beanie pulled down over my purple hair and my favourite thick-rimmed hipster glasses rounded out today’s look.
The backdrop of my vid was a silver-rimmed port-hole looking out at the swirling vortex of extra-dimensional space, so it’s likely not too many people would give a flying alien starfish about my wardrobe choices.
“This beautiful lady is a substellarmobile, otherwise known as Audrey. Yours truly is part of a covert rescue mission to the Palace Zone space dimension ruled by Australia’s longtime favourite Supervillain of the Century, Queen Megadethra herself.” I smirk at the camera. “When I say Supervillain of the Century, I mean the 20th century, of course. Megadethra is getting a bit long in the tooth these days. She hasn’t invaded Australia since Original Solar left the building… Or so we thought.”
The Dark turned his cowl in my general direction. “Covert rescue mission,” he reminded me in his heavy voice of doom.
“It’s not like I’m livestreaming this,” I protested. “There’s no wi-fi on this boat.”
“Probably for the best,” called out Griff. “We wouldn’t want to tip the enemy off. Megadethra learned everything about our dimension by watching our entertainment channels.”
“That does explain her Dynasty hair and Barbarella outfits,” I conceded, then turned my attention back to my phone. “Who is taking part in this exciting team outing, you ask? Let’s introduce the gang!”
Astra smiled and sparkled as I swung the phone in her direction. “The gorgeous and talented Astra has the dimensional sympathy necessary to pilot a ship of this nature. How are you finding it, Astra?”
“A smooth ride, but I don’t have much to do,” Astra said cheerily. “All I have to do is point and click—the navigation happens on a microcellular level, adjusting with every dimensional shift to make sure we end up in the right place, and of course that we get home to exactly the version of Earth that we left.”
“And sitting in the completely unnecessary co-pilot’s seat because he has control issues, we have the longest-serving Aussie superhero in our current team line up—The Dark!”
The Dark stared stoically ahead, ignoring my existence.
I was already moving on. “He’s much more cheerful once he’s had his morning protein shake. And here we have a completely anonymous civilian.”
“Cheers,” said Griff, keeping his face turned away from the camera.
“Kid Dark,” I coughed into my hand and thereby, my phone.
“Friday!” he protested.
“It doesn’t count as outing you once you’ve sold your story to Pan Macmillan, bro. Everyone knows who you are. Ooh speaking of which, the final member of our team requires no introduction.” I zoomed in on Joey, who was reclining on a yellow beanbag at the back of the cabin with an Amie Kaufman novel. She wore her full Solar costume, with an over-sized floppy sun hat, because apparently this mission was so unofficial, it technically counted as holiday time.
I hummed a few bars of “Walking on Sunshine,” just stopping short enough of having to pay song royalties.
Joey tipped up her hat, and gave me that stunner smile of hers. The cabin around us brightened, as if her hat had been protecting us from her sunshine.
“So, Solar,” I said, after swallowing once because my mouth was suddenly sort of dry. “How would you rate extra-dimensional travel?”
“I thought it would be faster.”
“I know, right?”
When alien hordes use dimensional travel to move between realities, they appear to zap instantaneously out of nowhere. Wormholes, portals, that sort of thing. I would have thought, since we were using a ship based on their technology, that it would be much the same. We should have appeared at my mother’s side in the blink of an eye. Right?
Apparently the preteen boffins who got this crate shipshape were concerned that Earth’s computers didn’t have the precision for those instant calculations. So we had a slower, staider form of extra-dimensional travel, in which multiple potential realities were catalogued and filed during transit.
It is entirely possible that they were so keen on the data we could provide with this trip, they deliberately put us on the slow route, but no one had asked me to pay for petrol and snacks, so I wasn’t going to complain too loudly.
It had been hours, and there was no sign that our destination was in sight. Astra was lost in the art of piloting, fascinated by her controls. The Dark watched her like a hawk as if he had any idea how this technology worked. He had secured a copy of the manual, which he read pointedly every time he could bear to tear his visor away from Astra.
Girl Reporter Page 5
