Claire pulled a grape out of a bowl of fruit and tossed it down the corridor, to be caught in Juliet’s cupped hands. She popped it in her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut, and started making, “Mmm. Mmmm!” sounds of pleasure as she chewed.
I went up and examined our progress towards Jupiter. We were down to six digits, so Ray must have been right. I hadn’t been sure. Symbols flipped over at the right times to be base ten, but there were way more than ten numerals being used.
Alien languages, am I right?
We were also down to only two objects in the top ten closest that were in front of us. The object farther away was much brighter than the closer asteroid.
“Quite an albedo on that bad boy,” I muttered to myself as I zoomed in. The closer asteroid looked interesting. Ray had left set up a funky mineral scanner filter, and I was pretty sure those purple highlights meant a whole lot of platinum in this asteroid.
Whatever the magnification limit was on Red Herring’s sensors, we hit it for that second asteroid. No matter how much I tried to expand, I got a little bright dot.
That dot looked odd. It enlarged just enough that I could see the whole thing shined. Had we found the legendary lost planet of mirrors?
It got bigger. The asteroid had a funny, squashed and elongated, shape. As I watched, bright lights flashed and flickered behind it for a few seconds, then stopped.
Asteroids did not do that.
The object got closer, growing on the screen to become a tiny but recognizable disk.
How long had I been standing here, trying not to admit the obvious?
Pointing at the screen, I gurgled, “Spaceship.”
“Spaceship?” Claire asked from behind me, suddenly perky and alert.
“Spaceshiiiiiip!” Ray yelled, his wingtip shoes thumping on the floor as he ran up to join me.
Crowded shoulder to shoulder, Ray and Claire and I peered mesmerized at the tiny, growing disk on the screen. It was weirdly colored, mostly red, but with-
“Mineral analyzer routine off,” Ray commanded, and the colors disappeared. Oops. My mistake.
Claire poked at the screen, trying to expand, but we were at maximum magnification already. That gave us a fuzzy picture, but even fuzzy there was no denying the obvious. A flying saucer was headed almost straight toward us. It had little barrel-shaped engines along the sides and back, and a couple of extra disks attached to the body, but the basic shape said ‘flying saucer.’ Two dishes pressed together. That shape.
Claire pressed her face right into the screen. “Can we contact them? Do we have communications equipment?”
Okay, superpower. What did you leave in my memory after that blackout? Not enough. “Yes, but I don’t know how to use it!”
Behind us, Juliet’s voice rose in surprise. “Oh, really? Not even once?” Harvey must be weighing in on our close encounter.
Ray took my hand, and gave it a squeeze, countering my panicky sharpness with a quiet, even tone. “However the Red Herring flies, it laughs at inertia. Worst comes to worst, we can close and match speeds with their ship, then figure out how to communicate.”
I squeezed his hand back, and didn’t let go. We stared. We stared so long that Juliet wandered up and stared with us. We had to shrink the magnification bit by bit, increasing the detail until we could clearly see glassy porthole bubbles. The ship didn’t shine; it glowed. Every surface released light. Not much, but in the blackness of space it stood out.
None of the porthole bubbles was positioned at an angle that we could get any kind of decent look inside.
Okay, we were getting close, and I had an idea. “If we pull alongside, I can signal with Archimedes.”
An extra little yellow circle appeared next to the spaceship. It was really motoring, distance numbers flashing down.
Ray and I figured it out at the same time. “They’re firing on us!” he yelled, and I grabbed the viewscreen and rolled us off to the side. Was the missile tracking? No, it kept flying on the same course. Well aimed, but we were too far away and too maneuverable.
A series of beeps echoed out of my belt pouch. They were matched by bell chimes in a staggered rhythm behind me. Vera was so quiet, with talkative Juliet to pay attention to, I’d forgotten Vera was even here. Now she rang the same series as my phone did.
I was getting a phone call in space while under attack by a spaceship?
No, idiot. That was Morse code! I flipped out my phone. Good grief, I had a ‘receive radio signals’ app. This was what I got from letting my superhero Dad custom build me a smartphone.
Ray groaned, squeezing his eyes shut. “I am so rusty at Morse code. Play it again slowly, Vera.”
She did. Ray kept holding up his hand to stop her. “We. Will. Not. S. U. R. R.”
“They fired again,” Claire warned, pressing her hand to the monitor and swinging us off in a new direction.
“We will not surrender,” Ray repeated. “But there’s more. Keep going, Vera. We. Will not. Be. M E meat? P U P… we will not surrender, we will not be meat puppets?” He looked around, face twisted up in bafflement.
Claire looked and sounded calm, with only a thoughtful pout as she kept her eyes glued to the screen. “They can’t hit us from this distance, not if we’re alert, but we can’t close to make contact.”
I scowled. “And I can’t use Archimedes on them from this distance.”
“Yes you can,” Juliet corrected me. Lifting Archimedes off my shoulder, she walked him down my arm, then pulled my arm out to press Archimedes’ face to the monitor. It sank in.
I twisted until I was aimed at the flying saucer, and yelled, “We mean you no harm! Stop shooting at us! We really do come in peace!”
Did it work?
How would I know?
Okay, okay. Time to be team leader. Um. “Juliet, you can pilot the ship better than we ever could. That circle on the bottom looks like an entrance hatch. Fly us around and connect us to it, but keep an eye open in case they fire again.”
“I’ll keep all nine eyes open!” She leaned back against the wall, and closed her eyes. The eyes I knew about. A dozen twisty little tentacles fastened against the back of her neck, and six smaller dome monitors fluttered their lids farther down the ship. She already knew the Red Herring way better than I did.
Stars rolled as Juliet guided us in. Were we already that close? I fired off another message. “We are coming to dock with you. Do not attack! When you meet us, you will see that we are friendly.”
Frankly, I was counting on psychic command more than sweet reason. We pulled up so close to the flying saucer, we no longer needed magnification, and no more weapons fired. I sent out an up close, “Do not attack!” command just in case.
The saucer was longer than my space fish, but I didn’t think by much. Since the main screen showed us straight ahead, I didn’t get a very good view when we pulled in alongside. Metal lay right next to the screen, filling the left side of the view. That kept jerking around. The Red Herring’s front eye must be turning. Once again, an essential part of being a mad scientist was being the last person to understand how your inventions work.
Nervous moment time. Our airlock opened with a gross sucking sound, showing a round hatch with an old-fashioned turning wheel at the other end.
Claire stepped out in front of me, but I pushed her back, lifting my arm to brandish Archimedes. “I think we need something a little more compulsive.”
She nodded, squeezing behind Ray. I could hear him breathing hard, right behind me. He didn’t like this. Or maybe he liked this a whole lot.
Tesla knew my heart was whirring in my chest, and my blood felt like I was full of bubbles. Who were we about to make contact with? Was this suicidally reckless?
Well, we were trying to be friendly. I would start by knocking. Reaching out with my free hand, I pounded against the hatch three times. The bonging noise wasn’t loud, but they were no doubt as close as we were on the other side, and could hear it.
Oh, yeah
. They could. The wheel turned. The door pushed open towards us.
I leveled Archimedes and yelled, “Do not attack! We are friendly!” so emphatically that Archimedes yowled at the top of his kitty lungs.
The door finished opening, revealing a man in a fedora and suit holding a pair of crazy looking pistols, and with a confused look on his face. On the other side, a woman with brown hair looked equally confused, but with glowing white eyes to match.
We were not the only super-powered humans out here. Definitely time to play it cool.
They were also positioned around the entrance tunnel at weird angles. Then I saw the ladder on their side. Ah, right. Gravity was oriented in different directions in our ships.
Don’t leave them to freak out, Penny! Slowly and clearly, hoping they spoke English, I said, “I don’t know who you thought we are, but we are friendly humans on an exploration mission. If we weren’t so surprised to see you, we would have left you alone when you fired on us. I hope we can talk peacefully.”
Well, that was the dorkiest speech I’d ever given. I sounded more lame and stilted than a black and white B movie.
“They are children,” the woman said to the man. With those glowing white eyes, I couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or us.
“Puppeteers don’t care how old their victims are,” he answered. Suspicion, disgust, anger, guilt, no shortage of overtones in that voice. Whew.
I tried to stay part of this conversation. “I don’t know who these Puppeteers are, but if they’re that hostile, they’re not us. We’re troublemakers at worst.”
The man shifted his weight, frowning in thought. “She doesn’t talk like a meat puppet, but CONQUERORS! WATCH OUT!” The change of position had momentarily hidden one of his arms, which came back into view holding a wide-barreled pistol. All it did when he pulled the trigger was flash a bunch of lights. They left my retina spotty, but didn’t hurt me.
Behind me, something thumped, and Claire squeaked, “Vera!”
“Stop shooting!” I yelled through Archimedes. I couldn’t tell if it affected the woman, but the man winced. Trembling, he lifted the other pistol, hand shaking more and more as he tried to point it at us.
His words came slowly as he fought against the compulsion. “That’s a meat puppet behind them.”
On cue, Juliet squealed from inside our ship, “That’s not a very nice thing to call someone!”
“Calvin.” The woman spoke the word sharply, but also completely calm. She put a hand on the man’s shoulder. He stopped shaking as he quit trying to fight the order not to attack us. “You are too eager to protect us. You miss the obvious connection. A Conqueror drone and a meat puppet would be trying to kill each other.”
He let out a sigh, and leaned back. She stepped up to the edge of the hatch, which really made the weird gravity difference obvious. We were left partly looking up her multiple layers of skirts, and she had to bend forward to talk to us. “What are you that you command the powers of the Puppeteers, the Conquerors, and the Jovians all at once?”
“We’re supervillains from Earth.” The word ‘villains’ had no effect, but they both jumped visibly at the word ‘Earth.’ Suspicions confirmed. There were humans out here that Earth’s population knew nothing about.
Still, uh… ‘supervillains’ is an awfully negative word. I added hastily, “That is like… thieves who steal from other thieves.”
The man grinned suddenly. “Outlaws.”
And now I was grinning, and nodding my head. “You got it.”
He loved it. I could see it on his face. The woman started smiling, too.
“So, can we call a truce long enough to make friends?”
“Child, I believe you are the answer to our prayers,” the woman answered gaily.
I nodded. “Good. Claire, diplomat it up.” Then I turned and pushed past Claire and Ray, scooping my poor Vera up off the floor.
She had folded up completely, covering her crystal head in the ceramic shell that made up her body. Criminy, these people had a gun that could turn off Conqueror orbs. They’d clearly had to use it.
I tapped the ceramic with a finger, which usually activated her. “Are you okay, Vera?”
Nothing happened. With increasing anxiety, I tapped again, and again. Ceramic cracked, unfolding, and Vera’s pink orb of a head floated up to stare at me as her body reformed. The anxiety flooded off me, and I let out my breath in a long sigh.
Metal clanked, the sound of ladder rungs being climbed. The woman asked, “First, I must know. You came from the direction we were going. We followed a signal from the Jovians, telling me that a source of charged aetheric fluid could be found there. Then we saw a flash of light, and the Jovians said the source was gone. Do you know anything about that?”
Claire answered. “We sure do, but you didn’t want to go there. Are Puppeteers bright red buglike things that spread red cancerous stuff all over a building and mutate people into goat zombies?”
“Yes.” The man did not sound happy.
“That asteroid was infested, and we blew it up. I’m sorry. We’ll do what we can to help you, but you might as well turn around.”
A brand new voice echoed out of the hatch. It sounded distant, young, female, and impatient. “We haven’t turned around because our engine is busted, and someone won’t give up his precious bug burning pistol so I can build a new ignition system!”
Vera was safe. I looked back up the joined airlocks to see Claire sitting on the edge of the tunnel on their side, kicking her feet. The woman chuckled once, and the man stood up slowly, looking theatrically sour. I knew that expression. I saw a whole lot of it in the supervillain world.
Claire, of course, had on her best sunny smile. “I go by the name E-Claire. That’s Reviled, and our leader with the goggles is Bad Penny. The Conqueror orb is Vera, and the meat puppet is Juliet, but we freed them both. Vera is loyal to Penny, and Juliet is more interested in astronomy than eating people.”
“I am Juno,” the woman introduced.
“The Space Witch!” the little girl’s voice yelled.
“The Herald of the Jovians,” the woman corrected serenely.
The man gave a tug on his fedora, and held his hand out to Claire. “And I’m Calvin Fawkes, Miss E-Claire. They call me the Fabulous Mr. Fawkes.”
“No they don’t!” yelled the little girl again. Claire took his hand anyway, and he leaned down to kiss it.
Her voice bubbly with amusement, Juno said, “And that is Remmy Fawkes, Calvin’s little sister, who is in a terrible temper and could use nothing more than to meet another mechanic right now.”
“I could use―wait, another mechanic? Really? I thought you said they were kids!” Remmy shouted.
I shook my head. What could I say? “Permission to come aboard?”
“You are more than welcome,” Juno said.
Calvin frowned, adding sharply, “The Conqueror drone and the meat puppet stay on your ship. Sorry, little miss, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Hmmm. Was that fair? Apparently it was, because Juliet chattered happily, “You go on ahead! I need to watch the ship, and Harvey thinks I can teach it to take notes until we can find real pencil and paper.”
Juliet’s cheerful demeanor could give Claire’s superpower a run for its friend-making money. Calvin almost smiled, and clearly had to work not to. “I can trade a notebook and a couple of pencils for your mechanic helping my little sister fix our ship.”
“Sold.” Yeah, like I was going to give up a chance to poke around a flying saucer’s engine anyway!
I shifted Archimedes to my shoulder, and stepped into the airlock. Ray took my waist to hold me steady through the gravity shift, and I let him. He was completely gentlemanly about it, and I did have serious vertigo as my head passed through the barrier and I groped for the ladder rungs.
After that, it was easy. I climbed into a metal room that looked like the inside of an aircraft carrier, and got my first good look at our hos
ts. Calvin had short light hair under that blue hat, and loose blue pants, button-up shirt, suspenders, and jacket. He looked sleek, even with four leather pistol holsters at his armpits and hips. Juno wore a cream-colored dress that went all the way to the floor but didn’t puff out very far, with a high collar and a tight bodice.
Otherwise, she looked a lot like a slightly older She Who Wots, which is to say she looked like me, ten years from now. Well, I hoped I’d be half that pretty, have half that generous a figure, or move, even stand with that kind of grace. But her face looked like mine, down to a faint scattering of freckles, and her braided pigtails were the exact same shade of brown. Hers reached the middle of her back, and I barely kept mine longer than my shoulders. It still made me feel like I was part of a secret line of super-powered clones.
Calvin held out his hand, which I shook before he could kiss my knuckles. That would have been just too creepy. It didn’t bother him at all, and with a little tug, he walked me back to a set of metal strut staircases. I walked up ahead of him into a much larger room, lit with many unevenly flickering lights.
This was an engine room, alright. Lightning arced inside big glass tubes. Pipes came out of the ceiling and the walls, and a metal drum the size of a compact car had been broken open in the middle of the room, exposing its parts. Next to what had to be the engine stood a girl even younger than me. I had to guess eleven. She had pigtails too, but not braided. They came off the top of her head, and were even longer than Juno’s, all the way down to her hips. Like her brother’s, her hair was blond, although it had plenty of grease stains. She had no shortage of grease stains anywhere, and all the skin I could see shone with sweat. This looked like hard work for a little kid.
Calvin laid his hand on her head between her pigtails, and gave them an affectionate ruffle. “My baby sister Remington. Don’t be fooled, she’s a girl. I make her keep her hair long so you can tell.”
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