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

by Richard Roberts

  Ray pointed out the window. “Human voice transmission in English from Jupiter?” He blurted it out, too eager to get an answer to even construct a full sentence.

  “Correct, and on an impractically high frequency. It could not possibly be heard on Earth. We picked up the transmission only because it swept momentarily past Ceres. The Orb of the Heavens is always listening.” Mentally, I applauded. Spider had phrased that in the absolute creepiest way possible.

  Glancing back at the window and the luminous blob of Jupiter, I filled in, “And suddenly exploring Jupiter’s moons is top priority.”

  An emphatic note of approval colored Spider’s normally dry tone. “Correct. I believed we would be alone out here. Now I am not even certain we are alone in this asteroid belt. I need you to build a spaceship, explore the belt near Ceres to be sure my facility is safe, then travel to Jupiter and investigate it and its moons for life. I have come to trust the Inscrutable Machine as being at least as competent as adult supervillains, but this is still too dangerous to send you out without backup. Orb of the Heavens, if you will send the activation signal, please.”

  The Orb didn’t do anything visible, but a pale grey ball the size of a baseball fell out of the ceiling. It shattered as it fell, revealing a pink crystal sphere. The flakes hovering underneath whirled around, forming an abstract fairy-like body.

  It had taken me half a second to recognize her. I felt guilty it even took that long. “VERA!” I ran forward, arms spread. It was a reflex, and as soon as I began I realized it was a stupid reflex… but then it turned out it wasn’t. Vera zipped across the intervening space and pressed her hard face and detached arms against my chest. I hugged her gently, although I didn’t need to be gentle. Her wings and body might float in midair, but they didn’t move when I pressed against them. They just got lost in Archimedes’ black fluff.

  If Vera was here―“Is The Apparition coming with us?” I hadn’t been sure I’d ever see either of them again.

  Spider’s voice answered, “She volunteered, but we discovered she cannot leave Earth. ‘Why’ is a question I leave to experts. She agreed to send Vera with you. In addition to her other more obvious uses, Vera is capable of communicating with the Orb of the Heavens as if she were an actual Conqueror Orb. She can act as a portal beacon, and if things get desperate enough, will send an emergency signal to the Orb of the Heavens to teleport you back here. I have great faith in Bad Penny’s technical skills, but space travel is hazardous in the extreme.”

  She had a point. I couldn’t be sure how my spaceship would―

  OW.

  I gripped the back of my skull, and forced myself to stand up straight.

  The pain was a message from my superpower. “I’m going to get building. I need to get this out of my head.”

  Ray’s hand caught my wrist as I stepped forward. I looked back in surprise, and met an uncharacteristically haunted stare. “Are you sure this is safe? I mean your head. Your power is acting strange.”

  A faint, cold shiver crept up my spine, and Archimedes mewed, so quiet I wasn’t sure anyone but me heard him. Not the kind of sentiment I wanted to hear two days after Mourning Dove pulled her creepy prediction of doom routine. I started to say something completely snarky, and bit it back. Poor Ray really looked worried for me.

  I split it down the middle, and asked, as neutrally as I could, “Do you want to go to space?”

  His fingers loosened, but didn’t let go. I stepped the emphasis up just one notch. “Because I do.”

  He let go to wave his hand at a big sliding metal door. “The equipment’s in the hangar over there.”

  Personally, I was less worried about my power than about denying it. That was where the headaches could get nasty. I picked up my pace and hurried through that door, leaving Ray, Vera, and Claire all behind. I passed through a hallway with a lot of empty lockers that should have contained space suits but didn’t, and an airlock after that.

  The air pressure didn’t need cycling, so the opposite door opened immediately. I got a vague impression of another really big room, but all that mattered was the same set of bioengineering tools I’d used two days ago, plugged into sockets in the middle of the floor.

  I remembered pricking my finger on a sterile needle, adding a drop of blood to a tank of water, and then dropping in one of my cursed pennies. Even those were vague impressions of physical actions. After that, it was like I fell asleep.

  I didn’t actually fall asleep. I just couldn’t remember what it was like to be so deep in my power. I only understood what I was doing when I sagged back tiredly into Ray’s arms. A gooey tadpole, crimson and veiny, flopped around on the hangar floor in front of us. It was disgustingly ugly and yet a perfect thing at the same time.

  I looked up at Ray, and croaked, “It needs food. Tons of it. Fresh meat or plant matter. Intact cells.” My throat hurt. I’d been laughing too much.

  “We’ll take care of it,” Ray promised.

  Now, I fell asleep.

  I woke up in Ray’s lap, with his arms around me. It was sweet, and warm, and a little exciting, and then the embarrassment hit me like a red-hot hammer.

  I leaped to my feet, tried to say something that came out as, “Og!” My hands groped until I found Archimedes. I’d moved him to my shoulder, apparently. And where was my helmet? My uncovered face had been way too close to Ray’s!

  Fortunately, Ray had also been asleep, propped against the wall of the hangar bay. He woke with a start, but after I stood up, and he missed my antics because he was staring past me.

  I looked, too.

  My tadpole had grown up. A catfish the size of a building filled the hangar. Well, it was catfishy. It also looked a lot like one of those prehistoric fish, all bony plates and segments. One big red-and-black eye sat in the middle of its face, and whiskers thicker than my arm twitched lazily around its mouth, proving it was alive. Oh, and the whole thing was red. A nasty, bloody red.

  I turned my head at movement, which proved to be Claire skating up. Vera floated behind her, carrying my helmet, the little sweetheart.

  Claire went into gushing fangirl mode, her hands waving all over the place. “You should have seen it, Penny! You asked for plant matter, and the Orb of the Heavens dropped a tree on your little space fish, and the space fish ate it. The cow was kind of gross, so I asked for no more live animals, but it ate everything. Blood, bones, bark, leaves, compost, and the first bag of hamburgers before I explained to the Orb that those were for us. Paper and all. It was the size of a bus when I fell asleep. Do you think it’s done?”

  Blacking out while I worked meant I couldn’t remember much about what I’d made, but I knew this answer. “Yes. It’s ready to fly.”

  Claire let out a squeal, and the knowledge crept up from my toes in a wave of glee. I was minutes from flying a spaceship.

  I knocked on the side of the space fish. “Open up!” On my shoulder, Archimedes meowed. Oh, okay. Bioship. Telepathic commands were the easiest way to operate it.

  That telepathic command did the trick. A gill flap opened up into a doorway.

  Cheeks burning, I swiveled around. This had to be done. I poked a fingertip into Ray’s chest, making myself look him in those blue, blue eyes. “The three of us could be alone in that spaceship for days. This is a time-out from flirting, okay? Promise.”

  He hung his head with a heavy, theatrical sigh. “If that’s what you need.”

  I gave him a big, tight hug, and a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks.” My lips burned. That was kind of the problem. Days and nights all alone except for Claire the anti-chaperone was more than I was ready for.

  The anti-chaperone cleared her throat. “Space.”

  Ray asked, “Space?”

  I confirmed, “Space.”

  We all piled into the spaceship. It kinda looked like the inside of an overgrown RV, if everything were made of red plastic. There were no obvious controls.

  Acting on memories I hadn’t known I had, I stepped up
into the space fish’s skull. My fingers plucked one of my five remaining cursed pennies out of my pouch, and pressed it into a spot next to the big bulge in front. The penny stuck, and the bulge opened, an eyelid for the inside of that giant eye. The shape might be a little gross, but it showed the inner wall of the hangar, not nasty retinal tissue.

  I touched a fingertip to the middle of the screen, and slid up. The head of the space fish shifted subtly under my feet, and the view rose. “Seal all airlocks. Prepare for flight. Vera, tell the Orb to open the hangar doors. The Red Herring is taking off.”

  Red Herring was way better than ‘Space Fish.’ Well, a little better.

  The hangar roof popped open. I probably should have included a few more stages in those takeoff instructions, because the Red Herring got sucked right up and out in a gusher of mist. That sudden a movement should have flattened me, but I only felt a brief pull. I also felt light, but we clearly had gravity, or… something pretending to be gravity? I was having to find out how super advanced Red Herring was the hard way.

  Spreading my fingers, I was about to press them against the eyeball monitor, when my normal caution finally caught up with me. “Do you think we should have prepared more before launching?”

  “Too late now,” Claire answered immediately.

  “Space,” Ray added.

  “Space,” Claire agreed.

  I laid my palm against the monitor, and pressed. I did faintly feel some acceleration, but the surface of Ceres zipped past beneath us in a blur. My hand slid up, and the eyeball rolled to bring my hand back to center. With a casual twist of my wrist, we dodged a house-sized asteroid, and the long stretch of the Red Herring’s interior bent, then straightened as sleekly as a real fish.

  I was piloting my own spaceship.

  HA HA HA HA HA!

  he Red Herring sped away from Ceres through the asteroid belt.

  Right?

  I didn’t actually see any asteroids. I saw a whole lot of stars. We’d left a few orbiting Ceres, but if there were any more asteroids out here, they blended into the starscape. Nothing moved that I could see.

  “I was expecting something a little more dense,” Claire said beside me.

  On my other side, Ray clenched his fists, then threw a forearm over his eyes. “Movies lied to me! I don’t know what to believe in anymore!”

  Ha! Ray, you goofball! Okay, yes, I’d missed this side of you.

  That left me to ask the obvious question. “So, where are the asteroids?”

  A little yellow circle marked one of the stars on the screen, then another, and another, and another. As the circles started to multiply, I hastily corrected, “The nearest ten.”

  Circles winked out, leaving four. I’d asked for―oh, right. Twisting my hand, I sent the Red Herring into a slow roll. Other yellow circles showed up. Four clustered around Ceres, which apparently didn’t count.

  Ceres was hardly bigger than a star now. We must have been really moving. I turned us around to the largest cluster of circles, and tried to pick the closest. The Red Herring had helpfully labeled each one with its distance, and I knew for sure it was distance because it kept scrolling. That was all I knew, because the numbers were in another language, one I didn’t even recognize.

  Ah, the joy of having an omniscient superpower. It had no sympathy for anyone who didn’t speak Ancient Egyptian, whale, or Alpha Centaurian. Mom might be able to figure these out. Her Audit skills were all numbers-based, and that included decryption. I could ask her about these when I got home, assuming I was monumentally stupid and had a getting-caught wish.

  “Do you think we can zoom?” Claire touched her fingers to the monitor over one of the labeled stars, and spread them―and by Tesla’s Apocryphal Alternating Current Underwear, it worked! Just like a touchscreen phone, a little square separated from the rest and expanded. A couple more zooms, and she had a boxy rock to look at.

  What else would work? I tapped the asteroid with the least number of digits in its distance meter. “Take us there.”

  I puffed my chest out in smug glee as the view turned, and the long tunnel of the space fish behind us rippled. My baby had autopilot.

  Autopilot would be useful, since I was starving. I hadn’t eaten in… I pulled my phone out of my pouch. No bars in the asteroid belt, but the clock function worked. It was past 10am. I’d either worked all night, overslept badly, or both.

  A worry hit me. “Did we stock any food?” Wait. My few vague impressions included… “I know we have a refrigerator.”

  I walked down the corridor until a pair of egg shaped plates looked familiar. Opening one released cold air. Opening the other radiated heat. Both had shelves, and both had boxes and bowls of food.

  I picked out a warm bowl of Chinese noodles, vegetables, and shrimp. Even at a glance, the water chestnuts and baby corn had just the right amount of bend. Someone had included chopsticks under the cover, too.

  The selection wasn’t even close to limited to Chinese. Impressed, I called over to Claire, “Did your mom cook all this?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me!”

  I was about to dig in, but another need hit me. Okay, I also knew we had a bathroom.

  Getting there required passing creepy coffin-shaped beds, tables and chairs grown out of the walls, and round bulges that might be more eyeball monitors. A touch of my hand to the back wall opened up a seam. It looked like a closet, not a bathroom. How did this work?

  I stepped inside, the door shut behind me, and the walls clamped down like a vice.

  Seconds later, I staggered out. I felt so… clean. Even my jumpsuit and the ribbons on my hair were shiny and spotless.

  I so didn’t want to know how that worked.

  From way up front, Claire shouted, “I think you’re going to want to see this!”

  Yes, ma’am! On the way, of course, I grabbed a bowl of noodles and a bottle of root beer to gobble down as I watched the monitor. We were parked next to a huge asteroid. The floating in space thing crippled my sense of perspective, but it had to be at least a mile long.

  And someone had been drawing on it.

  Glassy dents traced zigzags, circles, straight and wobbly lines over the reddish-brown rock. The shiny black lines looked a little like crop circles, with all the interconnected circles and all, but only if drawn by an angry toddler. They were a mess. Some of the circles had been scribbled over and over, leaving deep and jagged craters.

  I swallowed my shrimp. “Okay, I give. What could have done that?”

  Ray’s eyes never left the screen. “Someone with a laser, an endless supply of electricity, and a serious grudge against the former occupant of that asteroid.”

  Definitely sobering. I suggested, “Maybe we should exercise caution. Shields up?”

  Nothing happened. Ray snickered, and stole a baby corn out of my bowl faster than a mongoose. “Worth a try.” The fiend popped the corn into his mouth and chewed insolently at me.

  Claire poked the circled asteroids, bringing back up the rectangular one she’d looked at before. “Can we go here next?” The Red Herring swung around, and Claire added, “Oh. I guess it doesn’t just obey you.”

  Tesla’s Lightning Party Suit, my space fish was fast. The distance numbers spun down, and it couldn’t have taken us more than a couple of minutes, tops, to get close enough to not need a zoom view. Claire zoomed in anyway, having to use both hands until the cubical rock filled the viewscreen.

  It became clear real fast that the asteroid wasn’t a natural cube. It had sharp edges, made of glassy, fused rock like the laser scars on the last asteroid. Large stretches were completely flat. Others had been gouged out by more melting. Here and there, discolored blobs clung to the surface. What were they?

  Odds were good they were more badly melted versions of the columns that swung into view as the next face of the asteroid turned towards us. Three chunks of shiny, pale grey material curved up like ribs out of the rock. Four more lumps might have been ribs melted or broken do
wn, with holes forming a circle where still more had been torn out.

  I turned my head. Behind me, Vera watched the screen with her usual silent curiosity. Her ceramic wings looked an awful lot like the grey stuff imbedded in that asteroid. “Are there any crystal rocks nearby that together would form a really big broken sphere?”

  Yellow circles marked a bunch of nearby specks. Claire zoomed in on one. Roughly a third of a crystal ball, with a clear outer layer, but the inner surfaces dark and cloudy.

  “Conqueror technology. This was a Conqueror base.” My whisper came out a little hoarse. It was a terrifying thought.

  Claire’s voice vibrated with the same anxiety. “That can’t be a Conqueror orb. It’s bigger than a house. Besides, we fought them on the Moon. The fight never got out this far.”

  “It might be older Conqueror tech,” Ray suggested. “Bigger. Clumsier. This base may have been destroyed a thousand years ago. Ten thousand. A million. It is all the same in a vacuum. All we know for certain is that the Conquerors fought someone here, and that someone fought back.”

  I held up my chopsticks. “We know one other thing. We know we’re not telling Spider about this base.”

  “Yep,” echoed Ray.

  “Hear hear,” agreed Claire.

  “Are there more asteroids with ruins like this?”

  If the Red Herring understood my question, it gave no answers. I switched to, “Show us the next twenty closest asteroids that we haven’t visited, and keep updating.” When the circles lit up, I pressed my finger against the eyeball screen in the middle of the thickest clump. We started moving.

  I ate my Chinese food, watching Ray and Claire zoom in and examine asteroid after asteroid. Nothing. Still nothing. Ray found one with a few scars, but then more nothing. It looked like I didn’t have to fear an entire Conqueror owned asteroid belt. We’d just gotten lucky that the base had been near Ceres.