The ‘tapping on metal rails’ thing caught my attention. So that was how the automatons sent signals to each other? They drummed a kind of Morse code into the rails they rode? Trust Ray to spot that. Interesting method of getting around the lack of wire signals or radio. Plus, it was the kind of unmistakably clear digital signal AIs could interpret easily.
I waved my empty water bottle at the room. “Sure, but you can’t draw a general rule out of that. Look at the Conquerors. Portals, tiny generators that produce enormous power, exhaust-free ‘flying car’ style propulsion, and I couldn’t even begin to guess how Vera’s chemical degradation field works.”
Panic rose up in my chest. Where was Vera? I patted my belt pouch, and relaxed at the heavy bulge. Right. The strobe light pistol had shut her off.
Ray shook his head, the beaky nose of his mask waving around. “Not trying, Oh Queen of Scienceness. Just enjoying the coincidence that makes it seem like it works backwards out here. If you wanted to be technical, most of the really advanced abilities the Rotors have are based on access to a post-electrical power system.”
That got me thinking. I pursed my lips. Rounded walls. We were in another flying saucer. “The Jets have their own mad science getting them over the space flight hump. I don’t see any fuel tanks, or places for fuel tanks. I bet this ship uses the same type of engine Calvin does, but Remmy hasn’t tricked it out with Rotor tech to provide the power. Speaking of…” I started to push myself out of my seat, but it was sooooo comfortable. Ah, criminy. What was the point of being a supervillain if I did everything myself? “Minion, check if the aetheric fluid jars are still good. We went through a lot of effort for those.”
“Yes!” Remmy yelled from inside the cockpit. Ray beat her to the access hatch, because he just had to jump off the bed while she had to get the cockpit door open, first. He shimmied into the tube as she galloped up to it, and in a couple of seconds, his black-gloved hands slid out first one metal canister, then the other, into Remmy’s eager embrace. She unscrewed both lids, and we all peeked inside.
The glass tubes of dully glowing grey stuff looked perfectly intact.
Chortling in triumph, Remmy screwed the lids back on, and waddled with one canister over to the wall to strap it securely into place. It was nearly as big as she was, and probably weighed more. She had to carry it staggering in both arms. Ray followed with the other perched easily on his shoulder, and buckled it in the spot above hers.
Satisfied that her precious cargo was safe, Remmy leaned back and yelled, “Thompson! You have to see this! We did it, Thompson! We stole the aetheric fluid we need!”
Bootsteps clonked on metal, and Remmy’s older brother climbed down the ladder. Hanging from it with one hand, and as big as he was, he looked way too much like a gorilla. He also definitely did not share her excitement. “So?”
Arms wrapped lovingly around the lower canister, Remmy chattered over her shoulder, “So, didn’t Calvin tell you? Me and him and these three got Europa Station back online. We have light, atmosphere, and gravity already working. With these, we have a full power system for anything we want to hook up.”
“So?” he repeated.
Remmy’s mouth hung open in what I felt was an entirely justified expression of aggravated dismay. Her eager tone took on a bit of also well-earned exasperated screech. “So?! So, this is what we’ve been hoping for since the invasion! We have a place for the Jets to live, more room than we’ve ever had before. We need to tell everybody when we get home, so they can start moving in.”
He scowled, his eyebrows, mouth, and voice all going absolutely flat. “We’re not telling anybody.”
“Are you stupid?” Remmy yelled.
Thompson did not like that. His fist clenched, and he stepped off the ladder. Panic pricked at me again. We couldn’t let him hit her, could we?
It didn’t come to that. Remmy cringed back against the canister and raised her hand. “Okay, okay. But why not?”
Her brother’s fists clenched tighter, but stayed at his side. He was no longer scowling at her, but at something inside. “Because I’m not losing anyone else to the Rotors. When the automatons find out Europa is working, they’ll say it’s theirs and send an army out to take it. We can’t dogfight near the station, and they outnumber us twenty to one. Nobody’s moving onto Europa until we can defend it.”
Remmy’s head sunk down between her shoulders. “But it’s not their station. There aren’t any intact automatons. If they take it from us, they still can’t do anything with it.”
He met her whiny tone with a sneering question. “Since when did automatons listen to reason? Since when did they have a hint of mercy for anyone who doesn’t help enforce their rules?”
Unfortunately, he had a point. We’d seen that ourselves. Remmy slumped against her canister, but rallied for a final try. “So, let them send an army. They can’t bring automatons with them. When they land, we invite them all to live free with us. A lot of those folks will be Jets, and they’ll want to come back.”
“And then they all turn and shoot each other. I’m not letting that happen until we can defend ourselves so well they’ll give up without a fight. There are too few of us left already.” He rattled it all off matter-of-factly, and Remmy sank back down.
When she didn’t have another argument, he concluded, “Europa is Calvin’s thing. I want Io back. Io is our home. And we’re coming up on approach, so you’d better get yourself back into the pilot’s seat for a landing.”
Remmy stomped sullenly into the cockpit, and I wanted to feel badly for her. I did. I just had a distraction. Thompson wasn’t blocking me from the cockpit anymore.
I crowded in behind Remmy, and I was only the first one to spot the opportunity. I had barely tucked myself in beside the doorway when Ray slid in next to me. His arm looped around mine, and I was more than willing to forgive this tiny breach of my request not to flirt. Elbow locked into elbow, shoulder pressed to mine, I got to feel again what used to be obvious and now was kind of surprising. Those wiry muscles might be able to lift a car, but Ray was still as thin as I was. Out the corner of my eye, I noticed Claire hanging around outside the hatch, but there would have been room. Of me, Remmy, Ray, and Claire, she was the only one not put together out of pipe cleaners.
And then, I forgot all about them. Io loomed above us.
The flying saucer had a classic glass bubble in the middle of one side. Remmy sat in the center, on a chair laid on its back and facing up. Cold radiated off the windows, but heaters glowed behind her, cutting the chill. Under the dome, levers and dials and switches encircled her, a ridiculous number, too many to make sense or be useful.
They made sense to Remmy. She pulled a couple of levers, checked gauges, and watched the churning yellow mass of Io get closer.
The moon was yellow. It had some orange and white, but mostly yellow. The yellow seethed. It gleamed. Light sparkled through space around the moon, as if it had its own constellation. Blue and purple spread around the moon like a planetary ring, but thinner and spread out, like an aurora borealis in space.
WHANG.
Light flashed, blue and white, blinding me. The ship bonged as if hit by a giant hammer. As I blinked away the spots, Remmy leaned forward and thumped a gauge. As tiny as she was, she had to lean way over to touch anything. “What a pile of junk. This would be so much easier if Thompson would get off his high horse and let me upgrade his ship with Rotor parts. At least the charger works. We were running low.”
“What exactly just happened?” Claire asked, very quietly. On second thought, maybe she just seemed quiet after that explosive noise.
“Lightning. I thought they had lightning on Earth?”
“Not in space.”
Remmy gave a toothpick shrug. “Welcome to Io. Hold onto something.”
Fortunately, the cockpit had leather straps on every surface, so I grabbed a couple. Remmy pulled on the two biggest levers, and dizziness rose up as gravity disappeared.
&nb
sp; Dizziness could go kiss a Puppeteer. I watched goggle-eyed as a space station swung into view. In fact, goggles would be a good idea. Mine had ended up around my neck again, and I tucked them into place and grabbed the supports. Corrective lenses Good.
Io’s space station was very different from the Rotor colonies. I had no way to tell how big it was, but it kept up the flying saucer theme. Six rotating disks stuck out from a larger central disk. I couldn’t tell if the middle disk was meant to rotate or not, because debris coated its surface. The larger bits were clearly spacecraft, both the fat biplane-winged boats of the Rotors and the flying saucers of the Jets.
A giant arc of blue-white lightning flashed over the station. Then another. Remmy muttered, “Must be perihelion. Thanks, Tommy.” Digging around in the cushions of her cockpit seat, she pulled out a rainbow fish leather cap, and buckled it on. It wasn’t much of a cap. In fact, it was mainly plush pads over her ears.
Criminy. I hoped I was going to enjoy tinnitus.
Remmy messed with levers, and the view spun. Gravity came back, but it wasn’t down. It was off to the side. I clung to my strap desperately, but the real reason I didn’t hit a rack of dials was that Ray had my arm. I glanced down. My smart boy had wedged his feet into straps.
Gravity went through a few more quick shifts, and I couldn’t keep track of the planetscape swooping past the window. When ‘down’ steadied again, it was the down I was used to, towards the supposed floor.
I couldn’t see Io outside, anymore. I could see Jupiter. It was big. Boy, was it big. Yipes. I would swear the sparkling blue smudge reached out from Jupiter to us, but with no shortage of distant lightning flashes, that might be wishful thinking.
The ship was getting close to the space station now, passing it. The outer disks did spin, with faint white flare engines pushing them around. The nearest disk looked pockmarked. It had holes punched in it.
“Is that an orbital elevator?” Ray asked, his voice hushed in awe. I looked past the station. Tesla’s Ringing Bells, Ray wasn’t kidding. A line ran down from the station out of our view, towards Io.
Remmy grunted, messing with switches and levers regularly, now. “Kinda. More of a tether, but we ran elevators up and down it until the Puppeteers came. Now nobody wants to go to Io Alpha.”
Behind us, Thompson snarled, “And you know who didn’t show up until it was time to gut the station to stop the infection from spreading? The Rot―”
That was as far as he got. Lightning hit us again, and the thunder that came with it left me unable to hear anything for several seconds.
Remmy didn’t flinch. She kept one hand on both of those two central levers, while the other tweaked the smaller ones. The space station went past above us. Gravity got lighter and lighter, but never stopped.
Lightning hit us three more times, but when there weren’t spots in front of my eyes, the tether always remained in view. Everything else disappeared in swirling yellow.
Eventually, in response to nothing I could see, Remmy lifted a microphone off the dashboard. “Io Omega, this is Remington Fawkes piloting the Pile of Junk Your Chief Calls a Spaceship. We’re coming in a little faster than I thought. Open the doors right now.”
Weight settled onto me, but still not much. The black of walls crept over the view provided by the cockpit bubble.
That blackness closed. The whole spaceship shook with a mighty thump.
We’d landed on the moon of Io. That thought almost made up for the disaster we’d left behind at Callisto.
e clustered around the entrance tunnel, with a muted clonk announcing it was time to depart. Remmy climbed in, twisting at the wheel sealing the exit hatch. It didn’t budge.
Looking back past us at her looming older brother, she complained, “You broke it. Is punching it your answer to everything?”
Thompson leaned past us, pushing me aside like a gnat. His arm cocked, and he hit the hatch right next to the dents his knuckles had left last time. I had time to cover my ears, so that clang was merely unpleasantly loud.
Grabbing the wheel in one hand, he gave it a twist. It turned, and the door opened. “Yes.”
Remmy jumped out of the hatch into the tunnel beyond. I followed, and had just enough time to register a long hallway lined with dark windows when I picked up the smell. My nose wrinkled in disgust. ‘Rotten eggs’ would be the polite way to describe it.
Ray, of course, was a bit more direct. “Taco night?”
“Smells like it,” answered Claire in the same blandly amused tone.
Remmy jerked a thumb at the darkness outside. “Yeah, Io’s atmosphere is mostly sulfur. Super poisonous.” She sounded like she resented every word, and her glower was actually a reduction in anger as she spun around and pointed at Thompson. “You need a new hatch. I don’t want yellow lung.”
He reached past me and gave her shoulder a push. “Keep moving.”
The tunnel lurched under us. I managed to keep myself upright until the shaking began, vibrating and wobbling the floor under my feet. I had to lean against a window for that.
“Was that an earthquake?” Ray asked. I couldn’t, because his hands had just taken hold of my shoulders, keeping me upright. They were strong, and way more stable and confident than mine would have been touching him.
Remmy’s irritability was dropping by the second. “Don’t worry about it. This is the most tectonically stable spot on Io.”
My eyes started adapting to the tunnel’s widely spaced light bulbs. The darkness on the other side of the windows resolved into a giant, shadowy hangar, with other ships visible around the walls. The end of the tunnel had retracted into the hangar wall, and Remmy was reaching for that hatch when it opened for her.
Surprised and cautious, she stepped into the room beyond. We all did. It looked like a hangar observation room. I saw control panels, thick windows, and more of those clunky Jet spacesuits along the walls. I was lucky to make out even that much, because a whole lot of people were waiting for us.
“Remmy!” Several of them shouted at once. A blonde who looked vaguely like Remmy picked her up, then passed her to a man. They kept passing Remmy around like a game of hot potato, and threw her in the air twice.
Declarations of how happy people were to see her blended together, but Remmy managed to squeak over them, “I don’t recall being this popular!”
Jets got out of Thompson’s way as he walked through them, grabbing his little sister by the back of her corset and setting her on the floor, where he pointedly failed to let go. “Yeah, well, it’s not for your personality. We need you.”
“Whyyyyyy?” Remmy peered up at him suspiciously. One pale eyebrow went up so far, it threatened to disappear under the goggles on her forehead.
That got a scowl from Thompson. A hard scowl, the kind that threatened violence. The nearby Jets all took a step back, and they knew him. Still, all he did was say, “Because you’re the last mechanic we’ve got, and I can’t let you go to waste humoring my little brother’s private crusade, anymore. All the rest ran to the Rotors after we lost Io Alpha. All of them. I indulged you two, but things are starting to break down here.” He sneered. “You think I flew to Callisto to help Calvin with his cockamamie plans? I was there to kidnap you.”
Everyone stopped for a moment. Then, to my considerable surprise, Remmy hugged Thompson. He lifted her up and hugged her back. The only sound for several seconds was Remmy’s wheezing and the popping of her back in her brother’s super-strong grip.
I used the moment of peace to look around. The limited gene pool of Callisto had nothing on Io. I spotted two sets of drab brown hair, and one woman with black hair. Everyone else had shades of dirty blond like the Fawkes, and the same pale skin. They certainly didn’t all have identical faces or figures, so maybe I was imagining a family resemblance.
Their figures were actually less uniform than on Callisto. I hadn’t realized just how thin everyone on Callisto had been until I saw normal people again. Not that the Jets were fat
, but they all had meat on their bones, and some were even a little overweight.
Io fashion varied a lot more than Callisto’s. While their clothes might look suspiciously adjusted from Rotor dresses and suits, knee-length skirts were common. Claire was not getting the same kind of stares here, although stockings or pants underneath were the general rule. It was better than zero G, but I felt feather-light, as if I were back on the moon. Skirts and hair that bounced up did not settle quickly. Remmy’s super-long pigtails flowed behind her like a cape.
Jackets were common on men and women, usually buttoned. A couple of women wore corsets, but only a couple. Lots and lots of folks wore shiny fish leather jackets and/or pants, even the women. So, things were a bit more egalitarian in the Jets. Everybody was equal except Chief Fawkes.
The rattle of a faint earthquake broke the silence of sibling affection. It jarred a thought into my head. I stepped back next to Ray and Claire, and whispered, “Hey, did I ever tell you my mom’s second favorite statistic?”
“Your mother has favorite statistics?” Claire let out a giggle.
“The Audit has a list of her favorite statistics, measured and updated daily on a numerical system,” Ray predicted confidently.
“Ha ha,” I said, but without rancor. He’d pegged my mother perfectly. “Have you ever noticed how many heroines are natural blondes? People with superpowers have the same natural hair color demographics as the regular population dyes their hair. Like, thirty percent of Caucasian girls bleach their hair blond, and thirty percent of Caucasian superheroines are natural blondes. That includes stuff like pink and blue. Doesn’t matter what your parents’ hair color is, either. The difference is so huge, it’s like half and half any natural blondes you meet have powers.”
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