We all walked down the tunnel together, from the brightly lit control room to the flying saucer at the other end. One question loomed immediately, so I asked it. “Why is this ship lying on its side?”
Remmy answered with enthusiasm, so energetic that she skated ahead of her brother to twist the wheel holding the entrance hatch closed. “Atmospheric craft lie horizontal. Interplanetary craft travel vertically. We could take this one into space, but for stability, maneuverability, cargo space, that kind of thing―we orient them differently.”
We trooped in, and one other thing became clear. This ship was much smaller than the one we’d traveled in to Io. It had exactly one room, which certainly didn’t take up the full space of the disk. The pilot seat and its bank of controls and readouts dominated the center. Everyone not piloting would have to cluster around the edge. There wasn’t enough room to do anything else.
We would all get a great view through the glass dome, at least.
Remmy made straight for the pilot seat like that was her divinely bequeathed throne. She didn’t fit any better than she had in her brother’s spaceship’s chair, but she strapped herself in and reached out to press the microphone button. “Io Omega, this is the Fawkes Faux Fox. We’re leaving on a harvesting run. Not going far and won’t be but a few minutes. Open Tartarus Gate, would you?”
“Sure thing, Remmy. Is the Chief with you?” came the staticky answer.
“Yeah. I think he’s afraid I’ll run away if he takes his eyes off me.” Behind her, Remmy’s brother ignored her nonsense, sitting down and wedging himself between the back of her chair and the wall.
The voice on the other end dripped sarcasm. “No, you wouldn’t do that again. Opening the gate.”
When we’d entered, the vault above us had cracked open. Now a giant garage door slid upwards from bottom of the hangar. Remmy gave the four locked together levers right in front of us the most delicate nudge, and I upgraded from feather heavy to, oh, cottony pillow heavy. We had, just barely, left the ground.
Remmy gave smaller levers little pushes, and the ship drifted out through the open gate. Right as we passed through, the radio crackled again. “Raise us before you return, Fawkes Faux Fox. There’s an ice barge on its way.”
Remmy stabbed the radio button. “Got it.”
We drifted out into the pale twilight landscape of Io. The hatch didn’t give us a good look down, but I wouldn’t have been able to see the horizon anyway. ‘Mountains’ didn’t begin to describe the landscape. Io’s ground zigzagged like a heap of chopped vegetables, with great rock plates sticking straight up or leaning against each other everywhere.
“Is crashing into each other that likely?” Ray asked, his voice doubtful but his expression absorbed by peering around at the alien world in every direction.
“Crash…? Oh, yeah, right! No rotor tech on Earth, so no jet tech. No, it’s just safest to keep jets engines as far away from each other as possible. Any one ship is pushing what you can get away with. Get two or more too close, and the contrails can feed into each other.” Taking her hands off the controls, Remmy drew her finger across her throat and grimaced.
“Do you just get thrown apart? What happens?”
Remmy went back to her control bank, easing the flying saucer up farther into the sky. “Wormholes.”
One of us must have looked skeptical, because she repeated, “Honest truth. Wormholes. Not the fuzzy ‘Where does this go?’ kind in math books. Like, the room you’re in is suddenly ten feet shorter. The space and everything in it is gone forever. Even without feedback, these babies make a mess in an atmosphere.”
She paused, and then sank back into her seat, looking straight up in thought. “I guess that’s why you never developed rotor technology on Earth, huh? I hear the whole atmosphere is like a Rotor garden. You’d blow up your own sky.”
Aaaaaand that destroyed my vague aspirations of bringing some of these rotors home. Clean energy and fuelless travel was only an airless and barren planet away. Shucks, drat, and criminy buckets.
Claire pulled her way closer to me, clinging to the straps around the edge of the cockpit. I got a nudge in the ribs from her elbow. “You know what this reminds me of?”
I looked at her blankly. “What?” Like any uncorrupted mortal could fathom the workings of a Lutra mind!
“Planet Hoppers 3.”
I blinked, staring into that playful grin. My eyes tracked over to the control panel, and I squeaked, “Oh, yeah! Lift control, balanced against gravity. Maneuvering jets. That wonky overhead view. Even Planet Hoppers 4 couldn’t touch these graphics. Tesla’s Probable Contribution To Local Technology, I think I could fly this ship!”
“Let her try, Remington,” Chief Fawkes suddenly rumbled. He’d gone so still, I’d forgotten him.
“You can’t be serious!” Remmy protested.
Her brother started to lurch upright, but folded back when Remmy noisily undid the buckles holding her into the pilot chair. She gave me a glare that said the tentative friendship we’d regained was creaking badly here, but what could I do?
One thing I could do popped into my head. It had nothing to do with whether Remmy hated me, but might have a whole bunch to do with living to see another Jupiter rise, or however it worked here.
Saying, “I don’t see a recharging shield or a health bar, so before I risk crashing us into the rocks on a poisonous, frigid moon, let me make sure we have an emergency exit.” Fishing in a pouch, I pulled out Vera. I’d left her asleep too long anyway, poor thing. It was so easy to treat her like a tool.
I tapped her with my thumb, her ceramic shell came apart, and the cockpit went crazy. Chief Fawkes saw her unfolding out of the corner of his eye and roared, “Conqueror!” His hand darted into his own pocket to pull out a familiar kind of pistol with a light bulb at the end.
Before he got it pointed at us, Vera’s hands came together, and a flash of pink turned the business end of the pistol into slag. Remmy leaped onto her brother’s back, arms around his shoulders. “Wait, wait!” Recklessly, I threw my own arms in front of Vera.
The frantic moment stopped. The saucer went quiet except for everyone’s heavy breathing. At the edge of vision, I saw Ray sliding into the pilot seat, hands hovering protectively over the controls. Thank goodness someone thought to make sure we didn’t crash.
Oh, criminy. This was all my fault, wasn’t it?
“I’m―I’m sorry. I should have warned you. Vera isn’t a Conqueror orb. She’s a fake I made.”
“A fake… you made,” Chief Fawkes repeated slowly, watching at me with a hard look I didn’t understand. It wasn’t unfriendly, but I didn’t like it.
Remmy gave his shoulders a shake, with the same success I’d have had trying that on a bull. “I’ve been trying to get it through to you how dangerous her power is, Thompson.”
He climbed very slowly onto his knees, which gave him plenty of time to answer her. “Dangerous is good, when it’s on our side. Let her pilot.”
“Uh…” He looked at me, and again, it wasn’t quite threatening, but I didn’t like it. I scuttled into the chair, which Ray vacated for me.
I was starting to seriously not like Remmy’s oldest brother, but I meant to help these people, and him being a bully and a jerk shouldn’t change that.
Also, I kinda wanted to fly a spaceship.
Buckling myself in, I scanned the control bank. The saucer had four main jets pointed straight down, so that was the four sticks locked together. I gave them the most gentle of pushes, and watched which gauges moved. ‘Thrust Pressure’ had a helpful line marked for Io’s gravity, and I eased down until the needle hit that line. The altimeter stopped moving.
HA! Guess who could fly a spaceship? If only I could tell my parents about this!
The other two thrust levers had smaller, secondary levers next to them. I watched the gauges as I tweaked those. Right, rotating the jets that turned us and kept us moving.
A few more nudges, and the flying sauc
er sailed along towards a distant ridgeline.
If I left everything alone, we should be stable for awhile. I sat back in my seat, and beamed.
Ray gave me a short bow. “All technology is but a slave to your will, Dark One.”
Claire tried to keep a straight face, which devolved into a pffft and then a snort of laughter. Someday I would have to break it to her that her power matched her personality. She was naturally adorable like her mother was naturally sexy.
Remmy said, “Huh.” Her face, as she flopped over the back of the pilot seat, was equally uninformative.
I leaned my head back to address her. “Going up is easy. How do I go down without hitting the ground, when I can’t see it?”
She came alive, jerking upright and pointing a finger at the dashboard. Like she’d been made to repeat it a million times, she recited, “Flying by sight is the fastest way to get killed on Io. Chemical plumes and lightning can blind you at any moment. Your altimeter tells you how far you are from the ground. If it breaks, you go by your backup altimeter. If that breaks, you go up until you can see clearly, head towards the tether, and start radioing for help.”
Flying by instruments as a rule? Yikes. Gritting my teeth, I turned off the forward thrust and decreased our upward thrust until we weren’t keeping up with gravity. My pigtails drifted up off my neck. Remmy’s had been tied in loops, but they rose like dog ears and the ends splayed out. I watched the altimeter drop, and eased thrust back up until we stabilized at just above 500m. Half a kilometer off the ground. That ought to be plenty safe.
I looked up at Remmy again. “Next lesson?”
She reached out to touch my hands on the vertical thrust controls. “It takes a lot to roll an atmospheric craft, so when in doubt, go up. The first few times you get hit by lightning or caught in a gas plume, you’ll panic and just about launch yourself into orbit, but it’s better than hitting the ground.”
I nodded slowly. “Safety first. It’s easy to get down. If I hit the ground, there’s no getting back up.”
She nodded in grudging approval. “Right.”
“So, what do we do out here?”
Giving me lessons was loosening her up again. She gave her head a sarcastic circular roll. “Well, normally we go looking for gas plumes, and gather anything that isn’t pure sulfur. We’ve got plenty of sulfur. You never run out of sulfur on Io.”
Behind me, her brother let out a gruff chuckle.
I looked out through the cockpit dome. If there were any gas plumes, I didn’t see them. I did see rocks buckle in the distance, crumbling an entire hillside.
My grimace must have been something special, because Remmy followed my gaze, first with worry and then with a more bland curiosity. “You’ll see a lot of that if you stay on Io. That’s a pretty big quake for this near Io Omega. I see volcanism.” Crouching down, she fiddled with some knobs that were not part of the thrust system, so I had no idea what they did.
Her head shot up. “Tommy! Liquid iron!”
Metal and leather clanked as he scrambled to his feet. “You heard her, girl. Go!”
If there was one thing I’d learned, it was that Chief Fawkes did not take well to arguments. My gut tightening, I spun us around and got us heading towards the brand new volcano. Almost immediately, it disappeared underneath my view. We were going way too fast. Spinning the thrust jets around, I lurched us as sharply as I dared to a stop.
Remmy stayed crouched next to my feet, messing with dials, switches, and gauges I didn’t understand. There were a lot of those. My pride at having figured out the navigation controls dwindled, because that meant I understood one tenth of the control panel, tops.
A tiny hand covered in blue rubber pointed over and past my lap. “That way, slowly… almost… stop! Okay, down to fifty meters.”
Fifty meters above lava. I shot Vera an anxious glance, and whispered, “If this goes wrong, gate us all back to the Orb of the Heavens and don’t wait for me to give the order. You can do that, right?”
She nodded. She had no face to have an expression for me to read.
I lowered our main thrust until the altimeter started dropping. Remmy scowled impatiently, but the needle was dropping way too fast for my comfort already. We passed a hundred meters, and I nudged the thrust up, until we coasted to a halt a hair’s breadth under fifty.
Slow, deep breaths, Penny. I waited for instructions, hand on the levers ready to catapult us up into the air if anyone yelled or the altimeter moved. Fifty meters was not much when the ground liked to jump up and down as much as it did on Io. Fifty meters above an actively erupting volcano.
Chief Fawkes scrambled around me, and worked a crank, then a heavy switch. Something in the flying saucer hummed.
“Down to twenty-five. Fifteen would be better,” Remmy whispered.
“You’re kidding me.” At least her anger with me had disappeared. Grateful that the heavy levers only moved slowly, I lowered our thrust by a hair. The altimeter creeped down. Fifteen meters would have the needle so close to zero I could hardly tell the difference!
That was it. We were as close as I dared. I set the thrust back to Io gravity.
The saucer shook, and I locked my arm to stop myself from shoving the controls and launching us into the air. This was the feel of lava pumping into the ship as Thompson worked his own controls.
The thrust gauge sagged. The ship was getting heavier, a lot heavier. I pushed the four main joysticks up to keep pace.
Remmy whispered, “That’ll do.” She was talking to herself, not me, but I didn’t care. Everyone yelped as I pushed up the thrust, treating us to several seconds of greater-than-Earth G-force until I could level off without fear of dropping into an open volcano.
Chief Fawkes climbed to his feet, leaning over the controls to give me another hard, mysterious stare. “You’re either a flying genius, or you’ve piloted before.”
Remmy groaned. I unbuckled my seatbelts with shaking hands. My voice rasped, too. “I play a lot of computer games.”
He kept giving me that impenetrable look. I rolled out of the chair and collapsed on the floor, point over the seat at Remmy. “You drive us home. I don’t want to think about trying to land this thing.”
She slid into place, focusing on the instruments and not me. I turned my tired gaze up to Chief Fawkes. “If you want metals, there’s a much easier, safer way. Let your sister combine a Rotor and Jet engine so you won’t run out of power, and hit the asteroid belt. You don’t even have to go all the way there. There’s rocks filled with metal all over the place. Let her do her thing, and Remmy can get you more iron than you’ll ever know what to do with.”
Remmy sat up straighter in the pilot seat, and gave her brother a defiant look. “Yeah. Yeah! I can do it. Forget it’s Rotor tech, okay? It’s Remmy tech. No more wondering if it’s another month or a year before we luck into an iron eruption.”
He gave a grunt. For him, that was practically an apology. “I guess I should listen to the geniuses.”
Remmy nodded hard, jutting out what chin she had. “You should. We’re the smart ones.” She turned a sheepish smile to me. “That was fantastic for your first time piloting. I want to play computer games.”
Heh. “I want to take you to Earth and play computer games with you, but we have to do something about your broken space station first.”
Much later, I fell asleep in a hammock in Remmy’s bedroom. Archimedes lay curled up on my chest, and I dreamed about him arguing with a man-sized shadow that had twitchy bunny ears. I couldn’t remember what they were saying, but after a meal of baked fish on a bed of fried Europa ocean taters and melted goat cheese, I was grateful I didn’t dream anything weirder.
nscrutable Machine! Prepare for action!
My next weapon had to have some pump action like a shotgun. I couldn’t do that to Archimedes, and I wore him on my shoulder these days anyway. The pump action gesture was really important to looking dramatic.
I did not look dramatic. Ray
and Claire reclined even further in their padded leather chairs and gave me amused expressions.
“Normally your very word is my gospel, Dark Mistress, but a prolonged repair job is not a battlefield of glory,” said Ray.
Claire smirked at me, then at Remmy. “Maybe it’s a mad scientist thing.”
I smirked back. “You fools shall regret your blindness when I go home and brag to Lucyfar about how I hotwired a space station.”
Ha! That got their attention. Claire and Ray sat up, with identical sly smiles and eyes twinkling with mischief. It was Claire who answered. “Okay, but it’s going to be hard to drive back to our lair.”
Undefeated, I raised a finger. “We’re Robin Hooding it. First we steal the station, then we give it away to the poor people of Io.”
Ray not only straightened up, but leaned a little forward, stretching out his arms with his fingers laced to pop his knuckles. “I guess it’s time to take this job seriously.”
“Then check your weapons,” I instructed. Hee hee! I felt so goofy, but it was great to have purpose again.
Let’s see. I had Archimedes perched on the shoulder of my jumpsuit. I’d figured out that while I’d look even dumber wearing anything under this uncomfortably tight rubbery suit, nothing was stopping me from wearing my clothes over it. We had all taken that route, and gratefully. Each of us held our own helmet, which we’d put on in a minute when Thompson landed the ship. Vera floated behind me, batting a hand lazily at Archimedes’ tail every time it twitched. I had two pennies left in my belt pouches, as well as Ray and Claire’s shoes, and Ray’s hat and mask. None of those would fit over their spacesuits. I’d wriggled my jumpsuit boots on, and kinda regretted it. The sticky soles would have been useful in zero gravity.
Above all, I had my secret weapon in all situations mechanical. I ran my hand over the Machine clamped to my wrist. Every time I used it, I appreciated more how my power had given me the ultimate mechanical tool. It could act as a screwdriver, extrude wire, purify corroded metals, harmlessly ground electrical shorts, emit light, and absolutely no bolt was too tight when I could ask the Machine to eat it.
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