Ray took off his mask and hat, and rubbed his eyes. Sounding thoughtful, he suggested, “Perhaps we can make this easier, if this spaceship is sufficiently intelligent. Add to the current request all asteroids at any distance that show linear melting patterns like those we just investigated.”
Hoo boy. It worked. A few dozen red circles joined the yellow circles. Most had huge distance numbers. Claire tried to zoom in, and got nothing. Too far away.
Undefeated, she asked, “How about constructs? Add circles, squares, rectangles, all objects with straight planes or geometrically regular curves.”
The red circles switched around. Quite a few looked local, for a completely arbitrary definition of local. Claire and Ray were able to zoom in on those while I guzzled cola and ate smoky flavored shrimp. They were a huge disappointment. Quite a few rocks, big and small, had domes or craters or broken off edges to qualify. We did find one with a flattened off section that looked suspiciously like it had been melted flat on purpose, but there were just too many false positives.
Then Ray came up with a doozy. “Show us any heat sources that don’t blend in with the rest of the asteroid belt.”
One single red circle lit up.
It was pretty far away. Claire zoomed and zoomed and zoomed, until we got a blurry image of the strangest thing. A little oblong asteroid a couple of city blocks long floated through space alone, and I could tell it was a couple of city blocks long because a building sat on the surface. It had windows, for Tesla’s sake. Aside from some red blotches, it could have belonged on any LA street corner.
A bell rang, loudly. Vera hovered past me, pressing her hand against the asteroid on the screen.
The Red Herring ignored her. I ordered it, “Take us there,” and as the Red Herring swung around, I looked up at Vera. “Is this important?”
Her pink crystal ball head turned its black pupil to face me. I could still see the hairline crack left in her globe from when Claudia had hit her really, really hard.
Vera made three loud, identical bell noises, and nodded.
“What do you know about it?”
Vera made those same three chimes. Yeah, I asked for that. Literally.
I stowed my empty bowl and bottle away before we reached the asteroid. As the Red Herring floated next to it, we hardly had to expand the view to take in the building. Aside from big stains resembling bright red bird poop, the building looked completely normal. Like, normal for Earth, not normal for sitting on a frozen rock in the vacuum of space. There were lights on in the windows, even! Lots of windows, in a two-story building too small for a mall, but too big for a single store or a house.
Vera pushed her tiny, ceramic chip hands against the screen, and then pushed again. She looked up at me. She might not have expressions, but she had body language. She was pleading.
“You want to go in there?”
She nodded, over and over.
I placed my hand against the warm, slightly squishy, but at least dry eyeball screen, twisting around and pressing down and hoping to guide us into a docking position with the building’s front door. It worked perfectly. Too perfectly. Maybe it read my thoughts? My interaction with Vera kicked a memory. Or body language? Animals could fake knowing what people said that way.
I gave in to the thought niggling at me. “We didn’t bring…” only to realize I was wrong. “We do have spacesuits!”
Leaving the Red Herring lying right alongside the building, I rushed back past the kitchenette, and threw open a hatch I hadn’t even been able to see before my superpower gave me a hint. Out of it, I pulled three… yuck.
“I’m not wearing that.” I couldn’t blame Claire. They looked like bright red bats, with gross membranous wings and no face of any kind. They weren’t that big. I knew they were spacesuits, but that was it.
Ray stepped up to the gill door of the Red Herring, with Vera already floating impatiently in front of him. He raised a hand. “I’ll try it.”
Claire shuddered, arms clasped across herself. “Ugh. Seriously?”
He nodded, grinning slightly more smugly than usual. “I have two reasons. First, I never waste a chance to flaunt my machismo.” Claire and I rolled our eyes and snickered simultaneously. “Second, if it fails to work, my power should protect me long enough to be pulled inside.”
Tucking the other two in a pouch, I threw one of the bats at him. He caught it in both hands, stretched out its wings, held it in front of his face, then around the back of his neck. Its wings slapped down, wrapping around his whole throat, and its stubby little tail planted against his spine—rather like how Archimedes held mine.
Ray didn’t seem horrified or panicked. He put his mask and hat on, took a breath, and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Just push against the wall.” I instructed, guessing on what I knew of how to control my invention.
He did. A flap slid aside, opening a room just big enough to be an airlock. It closed behind him.
Come to think of it, if we were about to do something villainous, where was my helmet? On the floor, over beside the beds. But if Ray could talk, I could get by with a little less of a disguise myself. Eagerly, I pulled my leather and brass goggles out of a pouch, and buckled them on. I loved this look, and got to use it too rarely!
Uh, if Ray was asphyxiating out there, how would we know?
He wasn’t. The flap yawned open again. Ray stood in a human-sized tube now, connected to the front door of the out of place asteroid building. Prying the bat gently off his neck, Ray rolled it up and tossed it underhand back to me. I caught it— barely.
He looked and sounded pleased. “It works, but we don’t need it. There’s heat and atmosphere inside.”
Claire and I stared at him with the exact same blank expression. I finally shrugged. “No weirder than the building being here at all, I guess.”
Stars sparkled with sudden greed in Claire’s eyes. “This is mad science. There’s a mad scientist no one’s ever heard of who made it all the way out to the asteroid belt―and maybe farther!”
A look of downright deranged joy lit up Ray’s face. He’d clearly been holding it back. “Oh, it’s better than that. Come see.”
So, we did―Ray first, holding the door for us, Claire hopping eagerly with each step, and myself easing Archimedes down from my shoulder to my forearm, into firing position.
“No way,” Claire whispered in front of me. I followed her into a…
…doctor’s office reception room. A really old doctor’s office reception room. It held no actual receptionists, but a heavy wooden table sported a ledger, a pneumatic tube, and a bunch of cards marked for punching. On the wall above and behind the desk was painted ‘Red Panacea Clinic.’ On the front of the desk, a shiny brass plaque declared ‘We are in the middle of an enlightened summoning of health that will remove the barriers to the universe itself.’
That tickled a memory. “Weren’t the Red Panacea Clinic…?”
Claire finished for me, “A mad science medical team who vanished a hundred years ago. Some of their creations were used for evil, but the clinic itself disappeared without a trace.”
Ray asked slyly, “How does someone make that decision? ‘We’d better hide, and no one will look for us in the asteroid belt?’“
I looked around. This place really was a hundred years old. The posters on the wall had engraved looking pictures of men and women, usually in a lot of clothes, and splotchy typed headlines like ‘ENJOY A TRULY WOMANLY FIGURE WITH THE COLOR RED’ and ‘TRY OUR PATENTED RADIUM TONIC’ A display case had little jars overflowing with pills, all of them bright red, with labels like ‘Our Red Formula restores vim and removes all internal tumors in seven days!’
Jingling and banging derailed my train of thought. Vera gave the frosted glass door leading further in two more quick, loud shoves to get our attention.
“I guess we can sightsee later.” Reaching past Vera, I pushed on the door until its vacuum seal let go, and we stepped into madness.
&n
bsp; This had to be the main waiting room, or at least had started out as one. Rows of chairs lined the walls, many of them with lit red lamps hung overhead. A few more posters adorned the walls. It was hard to tell, because of the red gunk growing over them.
So much red. The wallpaper had been red-striped to begin with, but chitinous red masses grew in ropes and columns up the walls, and engulfed many of the seats. Red red red red red. Where there weren’t hard shells, the red mass had a meaty, blue-veined look.
A mass of fleshy webbing over the ceiling pulsed three times, then stopped. This was all alive?
“I’ve read stories about mutant monsters, but this is way beyond that,” Ray whispered in awe.
Claire squeezed my arm, hard, and pointed. I followed her finger.
Criminy. There were still people in some of these chairs. They had been overgrown by the red stuff, maybe merged with it.
Claire broke away, heading for the man she’d pointed out. She walked carefully, feet lifted high with each step, skirting around the lumps in the red carpet that suggested growths underneath. Ray and I followed. We were not going to let Claire try to make friends with a possible mutant monster without backup.
Vera floated in the exact center of the big room, looking around, at the stairs, at the doors, at everything.
Claire crept up on her target. “Are you alive, Sir?” This guy’s head and shoulders stuck out of the red shelled gunk that had grown over him. He did look alive. He had light brown hair and a normally pink complexion. I couldn’t see enough of his chest to tell if he was breathing, but he didn’t look like a hundred-year-old corpse. He looked like a twenty-year-old sleeper.
His eyelids fluttered. “Help me,” he whispered. Then his head sank back against the ‘Feel As Fit As A Goat!’ poster on the wall behind him.
“We will. We absolutely will,” Claire promised, her golden ponytail bouncing with the determination of her nods. Hopefully, we could live up to that promise.
“Help me.” He sounded pained, repeating the same words. His eyes wouldn’t quite open. Stuck in a bad dream?
Claire inched closer, and reached out cautious―and thankfully gloved―hands. She took hold of the shell around the man’s chest, and tugged. Nothing happened. No surprise. It looked hard.
Ray cracked his knuckles. This time, he was all serious. “I’ll give it a try.”
I stepped past him, peering at the unconscious captive. “We have to get him out alive. There’s a seam―”
The shell split open in the middle of the man’s chest. Ribs gaped like fangs reaching for my extended hand. A hairy goat head shot out on a meaty tentacle, the fangs in its jaws nothing compared to the ones lining its barbed, harpoon tongue.
I screamed. Ray yanked me out of the way. I hit the floor, belatedly noticing we still had gravity.
Claire was still standing next to the thing! She squeaked in fear, her knees and lower lip trembling, but the goat head snapped back inside and the shell closed. The brown haired man whispered, “Help me,” again. Exactly the same. Same eye flutter. Same tone. Same head falling back against the wall.
This guy wasn’t alive. He was a recording, bait in a trap.
Claire inched around towards us, watching the thing’s midsection. Ray sprang back to his feet and crept up to meet her. When he got too close, the shell cracked open again, but by then he had Claire’s wrists, and they shot past me out of the way.
Instead, as the grisly rib cage mouth yawned, Vera floated out in front of it. She pointed both of her little arms, and a bright pink beam hit the goat head inside.
I could feel the heat from here. The head burst into flame, gurgling and honking. Sweet-smelling smoke billowed out of the monster. Vera’s heat beam wandered patiently up and down the mass, destroying the fake human face, the monster inside, the chair, and the whole cancerous blob that I’d thought had contained a man.
A fire alarm rang, an old-fashioned bell alarm down on the opposite end of the waiting room. A woman’s voice called out of an invisible speaker system, “Security to the lobby. Doctors and patients, take cover and stay calm.”
“Battle stations, Inscrutable Machine!” I yelled, lifting Archimedes, searching for any sign of movement.
I forgot to look up, but Vera didn’t. Whatever was up there, I found out about it when she fired another pink beam above my head. By the time I did look, all there was to see was a mass of smoke.
A badly charred goat skull fell out of the smoke onto the floor. My stomach knotted. Keep it down, Penny. You just ate, and you need that nutrition!
Another round shell over a waiting room chair split. A hand reached out, but the arm flopped and swayed wrong. Vera saved me from seeing whatever disgusting nightmare lurked inside by turning her heat ray on it. The sweet smell might be gross, the black charring mass might be disturbing to look at, but it beat whatever zombie mishmash of human and goat parts had been inside.
Ray and Claire had set their backs against mine, watching the room until we knew how we had to act. Claire leaned her head back to snort, “I think Vera’s handling this fight for us.”
Vera blasted a head-sized blob, then paused, floating in the middle of the room and looking around. A wave of pink light flashed out of her, sweeping the walls. Patches of the red meaty stuff turned grey. Another flash, and a couple of grey segments of chitin fell to the floor.
I shook my head. Stunned surprise was wearing away the nausea. “I’ve never seen her do this. She’s never attacked anything living, even when I was in danger. I was half convinced she was a pacifist.”
Another chunk of greyed out shell spilled off a wall. The poster it had been covering fluttered down. It had a sepia tone photo of a man with a flat top hat and ridiculously spiky waxed moustaches, surrounded by goats as tall as he was. Huge, carnival advertisement size letters raved ‘Red Panacea Clinic Is Proud To Welcome Dr. Hedley Butts To Our Practice. His Work With Goats Proves The Miracle Benefits Of The Color Red!’
Her voice slightly raspy, Claire said, “That explains a lot. Two of the sickest medical minds of the nineteenth century Mad-Science-Boom joined forces to make this horror house.”
I had to ask, even with the alarm ringing and the smell of burnt flesh everywhere. “Did they call him Dr. Butt Head?”
“No. His goats ate people. They took him seriously.”
Eesh. Ray filled in the other half of that for me. “These days, a villain as murderous as he was wouldn’t live long enough for Mourning Dove to find him, but back then…”
I nodded. I knew, but it was creepy to see the results. “No rules.”
Vera had run out of immediate targets. She floated back up to me, and with her little bitty hands pushed my wrist from side to side.
“What is it? What do you want?” Was she trying to aim Archimedes at something? She abandoned my wrist, and turned Archimedes’ head instead.
Maybe…? I closed my eyes, and tried to focus on what I saw through his.
“Criminy!” I squeaked, jumping back against Ray and Claire.
“Are you alright?” Ray asked immediately.
I nodded, waving him off with my free hand, then turned Archimedes’ head to look at him. “I’m fine. This place looks different through psychic cat symbiote eyes.”
Walls, rugs, posters, regular inanimate objects looked blankly red in Archimedes’ vision. I’d blown them off for that reason. Living things were a mass of color. Vera shone white like a star. The pervasive red goop was all kinds of blues and pinks and purples, with the colors flowing sluggishly along the vines. Ray and Claire were mostly green, with blue blobs inside that were probably important organs. A web of yellow lights filled both of them. In Claire, it seemed like her nervous system, because it really lit up her brain, and traveled through the rest of her in thinner lines. In Ray, it looked more like his blood stream, pulsing through his arms and legs, thickly webbed in his torso, and barely visible in his head.
Vera wanted me to see something, and it probably wasn’t
Ray and Claire. I waved my arm slowly. I had to strain to focus, like making out details in my peripheral vision.
When I faced the far end of the lobby, what Vera wanted me to see took no strain at all. A glowing white hexagon, bigger than an adult, and a mass of yellow next to it. They showed up through the floor. Inanimate objects were so blankly red, I could see through them to the masses of infesting goo on the upper floor and down in the basement. A green spot above us just might have stood out as what Vera wanted, if the thing in the basement hadn’t been so brilliantly obvious.
I pointed across the room. The basement seemed to be only on that side of the building. “Down there. What is it?”
Vera didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. She floated down to that side of the waiting room, emitting more pink pulses. Through Archimedes’ eyes, those looked like white flashes, but in reverse, sucking into her. They visibly reduced the amount of blue in nearby goo masses.
Taking each step carefully, still not sure I could see clearly through Archimedes’ eyes, I followed. The white hexagon might be static, but that yellow thing in the basement writhed, and it had plenty of blue and pink and purple around it. Vera would need backup, and we had to be there with her.
One of the bulges we were about to pass had a webbing of yellow inside. “I think that―”
Vera spun around and heat rayed it. I jumped in surprise, my human eyes opening. The black charred thing that crawled out of the mass looked disgustingly like a human torso with goat heads on the ends of its arms. So, so gross. Vera kept broiling it until it collapsed into charcoal.
Then she swung around and began burning into the floor. The rug burst into flames, then went out as she cooked it down to dust. Her beam played around, tracing a wide square and melting slowly through the floor. It would take a few minutes, but she was determined. I had never seen her so determined.
“I’m sure a staircase would be easy to find,” I pointed out.
At the edge of my vision, Ray shook his head. “No way. We do not charge into the pre-prepared gauntlet of traps.”
“Just being in here gives the monsters an advantage.” Claire sounded ragged and anxious, and criminy, I could not blame her.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon Page 10