Oh, and let’s not forget the little short-range radios Remmy had clipped on the inside of our helmets. That was clever.
I looked back over my shoulder at the pink floating crystal ball of my friendliest creation. “Vera, expect to be busy. We’re going into zero gravity, in a place gutted by Puppeteers, and your heat ray makes a good welding torch. Are you ready for all that?”
She nodded. If only I’d given her an expression.
Ray raised one gloved finger. “Assuming no one shuts her off again.”
I groaned! “Yeah, really. How many Conqueror deactivation pistols do you Jupiterians have, anyway? We’d have killed for those on Earth.”
Chief Fawkes answered, calling out from inside the cockpit, “My old man made four. We lost one when the Puppeteers attacked Europa. He was carrying it. Now there are two.”
“Yikes. Sorry,” I said, half for destroying one of their treasures and half for the losing Remmy and Thompson’s dad thing he’d skimmed over.
Remmy shook her head. “Don’t be. They only work if you’re attacked by one drone at a time. Any drone not put to sleep immediately wakes up the others.”
Her brother yelled out to us again. “The only thing we could have used them for now is to get past the Conquerors guarding the gate to Earth. We’d have needed all four.”
Basic math finished processing in my subconscious. I facepalmed. “So I bring the only friendly Conqueror Orb in the universe to Jupiter, and run into the only three weapons capable of shutting her off. Ah, the life of a supervillain. Yipe!”
That last came as gravity stopped, detaching my feet from the floor. Then it came back, but in the wrong direction, plunging me towards Remmy. Above me, Ray’s hands darted for his seatbelts. As fast as he was, he only had time to get one unfastened.
Instead, Claire extended her arm, grabbed her wrist, and fired off her grappling hook. The claws sank into my jumpsuit, jolting me to a halt before I crushed Remmy, and reeling me back up to Claire instead.
Gravity switched again just in time to dump me into Claire’s lap. She wrapped a protective arm around my waist. That kept me still as we lurched a few more times.
Vera drifted over to me. The sudden shifts of direction had not bothered her at all. She maintained a perfect relative position.
Not to self: explain to Vera that falling hurts, and she should stop people from falling if at all possible.
Weightlessness came back. After several seconds, it looked like we might stay weightless. Chief Fawkes confirmed that when he opened the cockpit door. “We’re docked, or as close as we’re going to get.”
Remmy rummaged in her many pockets, and pulled out three little pistols, or drills, or actually, they looked like miniature sanders with the flat disks on the end. She didn’t leave me wondering for long. “These will be useful on board the station. By now, every scrap of metal is magnetized. If you start to drift, fire this into any wall and pull yourself to safety.”
Ah, grappling hooks! Grappling hooks specific to our situation. Very handy. Remmy flicked them at us one at a time. I caught mine, tucked it in a pouch, and reached up to the straps spaced out on every surface to climb towards the exit.
“Two at a time,” Thompson instructed. I reached out a hand immediately to Ray, and he accepted, pulling me over to the hatch and into the little exit tunnel.
“Ahem?” Remmy raised her brows. Whoops! Right. We turned on our radios and fastened on our helmets.
The inside hatch closed over us. I was alone with Ray, and all I could think was that I’d actually yelled ‘yipe’ instead of squealing or screaming.
Come on, Penny. Supervillains don’t blush.
Ray kept his mind on business, letting me cling to the ladder rungs as he twisted open the outside hatch. A gust of air yanked at me. It dragged Ray right out of the ship; but with effortless grace, he floated through the short empty space between our spaceship and the station itself. Grabbing a railing inside, he held his arm out to me.
He’d have to wait a moment. I climbed awkwardly around the exit, and pulled the outer airlock hatch shut. The wheel turned itself.
Kicking off, I floated maybe ten feet, tops, to dock with Ray’s waiting arm. We were in.
And a funky interior it was. A round, white tunnel ran down the center of the disk from this end to the other, which was quite a ways. We were open to space on our side. Were the Jets really this casual about airlocks?
To accompany my sarcasm, I ran a jaundiced eye over the opening, and saw the irregular, blobby edges. Oh. No, the Jets had an airlock. The Conquerors had melted it off.
Inside, chains marked what looked like a freight elevator running up most of the center, but the platform was waaaaaaaaay down on the other end. Here we had rails scrolling down the tube, spiral staircases without stairs.
Ray pulled us along the railing, one arm loosely hooked around my waist.
Nope, sorry, Ray. Supervillain team leaders don’t need chivalry! I pulled out Remmy’s funky grappling hook, aimed it at one of the two big doorways right in the center of the shaft, and fired.
I sank back immediately into Ray’s grip from the recoil, but he would get no pleasure rescuing this damsel in distress. The metal cap hit something inside the doorway, and stuck. I pushed the retrieve button, and the grapple sucked me right out of my black knight’s grip. I had to let up the retrieve button almost immediately. It didn’t pull hard, but I just kept flying faster and faster. The trick was to get a good speed, let the wire go loose, then suck up a length to pull it tight again.
My radio put a tinny edge on Remmy’s voice. “Be careful the first time you―oh, you’ve got it.”
Ha! That’s right. I did.
Just in case any of us forgot he had superpowers, Chief Fawkes swooped past me, arcing through the doorway. His sole concession to space travel was a diving helmet, and he dragged Remmy behind him with a fistful of her corset laces.
Vertigo hit me, just when I thought I’d kinda sorta gotten used to the dizziness of zero-g. Up above my head, a regular squared off spiral staircase descended upwards… yeesh.
Claire floated up next to me, grabbing the railing next to a ‘Warning: Increasing Gravity’ with an arrow pointed up… down… ugh.
Unfazed, she chirped, “I like it. It’s like a post-apocalyptic fps,” and everything swam into focus.
Right. I’d seen dozens of scenes like this in computer games. It was just regular architecture tilted at a crazy angle. I turned myself so that following those stairs would be ‘down’, and followed the floating Chief Fawkes and Remmy. My boots hit the steps a couple of times, kicking up clouds of dust that seemed in no hurry to settle.
We only had to go a couple of turns around the stairwell until my shoes hit the floor and stayed there. Now I might feel floaty, but we really were climbing ‘down’ the stairs.
An ‘Entering Microgravity’ sign had an arrow pointing up. Ah, up. I loved you so much.
Remmy’s voice came hushed and anxious in my radio. “Should I feel more or less freaked out that all the bodies are gone?”
Her brother just grunted, and continued leading us downstairs.
He led us all the way to the bottom. We actually stopped one level up from the bottom, but I could see it beneath us. There had been doorways along the way, most of them open. Unlike the naval hatches used by the Rotors, these had shutters that went up and down. Big, solid, blast door type shutters.
One of those had been melted through. The other was stuck shut because of dents that I could imagine were fist-shaped.
We stepped through into a messy hallway, and I had to say this for Jet engineering―the rotating disk was big. Seriously big. I could see the curve in the hallway way up ahead, but it felt straight and gravity felt comfortably Earthlike.
Much like Europa station, this place was a mess. It might be a worse mess. True, nothing was floating, but the walls, floors, and ceilings had holes in them. Pictures had been thrown off the walls, and broken wood and fab
ric were scattered around, spilled out of what were obviously apartments on either side.
The second freakiest thing was that the fluorescent lights in the ceilings were on. This place still had electricity.
The freakiest thing was all the Puppeteer goo.
The hall and the apartments on either side were worse than anything I’d seen on Europa, except maybe in the sorting room. There were enough charred cysts to show the Conquerors had been there, but the vast majority of the hard-shelled, egg-shaped tumors looked intact, connected by long, thin roots of frost-covered red flesh. It wasn’t as bad as the Red Panacea Clinic. Whole walls and floors weren’t covered. No zombie mishmashes of human and goat parts.
I tried to say something. The words stuck in my throat.
Remmy managed to speak, but even the tinny radio tone couldn’t disguise the quaver in her voice. “Tommy, I can’t repair this place if I’m a meat puppet.”
He didn’t sound impressed. “This stuff is all dead, which is why the Conquerors left it. I’ll be guarding you. You’ll be fine.”
I drew a raspy breath, and reached up to stroke my hand back over Archimedes. Frost covered his fur, but he felt the vacuum as no more than a chill. Another unpleasant reminder that I’d meddled with Puppeteer tech, but that had a use.
I shut my eyes, and forced his to focus. Everything inanimate turned red. My friends and Chief Fawkes were green and yellow, with an awful lot of yellow. The Puppeteer flesh formed a network of blue that spread exactly like a root system through the lower levels of the station.
Blue, but not yellow. I looked closely at the nearest tumor. Blotches of the blue tended towards purple, but nothing moved.
Yellow moved unexpectedly. Archimedes’ head turned. A man-shaped yellow mass with rabbit ears leaned against a yellow wall, saying, “Crude and brutal. If I’d done my job―”
“Harvey?!” I shouted, opening my real eyes.
Of course, he wasn’t there. I closed my eyes again. Still gone. Penelope’s Log: you are an idiot.
He’d sounded so guilty and disgusted.
“Is Harvey here?” Claire asked. Everyone stood completely still.
I shook my head. “No. If he was, he’s gone now. Or maybe I’m just hallucinating.”
“Juliet’s sanity may be a little shaky, but I believe Harvey is real,” said Claire.
“And if he is, then he might be able to talk to other people. Or to Archimedes,” added Ray. He’d been paying attention.
Thompson turned around to look at us, with Remmy tucked under his arm like a bag of flour. “Is this supervillain talk?”
I swallowed, focusing on the task at hand. Harvey was gone, and there was work to be done. “I analyzed the goo. It’s not dead, but it’s in deep hibernation.”
Thompson nodded. “Good enough. If it moves, we’ll kill it.” He started walking again, skirting around a particularly large hole in the floor. And the wall. And the ceiling behind the wall. And so on, right out into space.
I peered at the hole. The ‘floor’ below seemed mostly filled with machinery and a tiny service corridor. The edges of the wreckage were ripped, not melted. “This doesn’t look like Conqueror damage.”
Remmy explained in a carefully blank voice, “The Rotors fired on the station to try and destroy the Puppeteers. They had just enough time to poke the place full of holes before the Conquerors turned on them.”
Chief Fawkes ignored the topic, but apparently, we’d gone far enough because he finally put Remmy down on her feet. “We start here.”
Remmy craned her head this way and that, looking at the devastation, at the holes big and small leading out into space along the side apartments. “There’s just no way. This place is worse than I thought. It’ll take years.”
Okay. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Harvey’s appearance had knocked me off balance, but it was time for Bad Penny to do her thing.
“For the whole station, maybe, but we don’t have to repair the whole station. Not yet. This place still has power. There’s a whole graveyard of wrecked spaceships stuck to the hull. Our expert in fitting things together picks the best parts, and we weld them over the holes. All we have to do is seal a section, pressurize it, and move on to the next one. Every time you do, you have a bigger base of operations and can bring in more people.”
Remmy gawked at me. My bubble helmet spacesuits were pretty good. I could see her open mouth clearly, and the way her head twitched from side to side as she wrestled with my plan. Finally, she looked up the corridor and then down, and really shook her head. “That won’t work. We can’t seal off the hallways, and if we did, we couldn’t get in and out. And what would we do about the stairs?”
I opened my mouth to reply, only to realize she had a good point. We could get big enough chunks of metal to close the hallways, although the edges would be a mess, but we’d be locking ourselves in.
Ray came to my rescue. He stepped up next to me, peeking through the hole at the not-that-slowly turning stars outside. “There are a number of broken Rotor ships out there, correct? Do those smaller aetheric rotors make air-retaining bubbles like the big ones on the space stations?”
Ooh. The possibilities of that tickled my brain, and not my super brain, either. Remmy felt the same way, because hope rose in her voice. “Yyyyeah. Only a couple of rooms worth, but they do.”
Time for me to take over! “We put one on the stairway, and one down the hall. They’ll spill air whenever we go in and out, but I bet our technology kludge can scavenge an atmosphere generator or two.”
Remmy nodded slowly, losing her war with pessimism. “I’ll need a lot of parts, and I mean a lot of parts. Batteries, engines, bits of bulkhead, the biggest rotors I can pry off. Some of this stuff weighs tons.”
Her older brother cracked his giant knuckles―not that we could hear them. “Sounds like my job. If I can’t fit them through a hole, I’ll take them down the stairs.” He wasn’t shy about action, either. As soon as he said that, he stepped into a nearby apartment, and jumped up through another hole in the outer shell.
Flourishing his hand twice, Ray bowed to me. “And I shall be your muscle inside, my lady.”
“And I’ll scout out parts and map out all the holes we have to fix,” said Claire from… actually, I didn’t know where she had gone. Talking through radio had that effect.
It was time to apply the elbow grease. I’d start by the staircase, since that would be one end of our little base. I had to head into the side apartments to start working, and to do that, I had to try really hard not to think about who had lived here, guess what they were like from the curtains and discarded clothes, and ignore the Puppeteer cysts.
Claire helped by climbing down a small flight of stairs, and pointing first at side rooms, then back up the way she came. “Two little holes that way. Look like bullet holes. A fist sized melted hole over there, and a big one upstairs.”
I followed her directions, and in a frozen bathroom found two of what did, indeed, look like bullet holes in the curving outer hull. I unleashed my secret weapon, pulling the Machine off my wrist and flailing it around until it started. The cold clearly made my poor baby sluggish.
Grabbing a discarded coffee pot, I stuck the Machine to it. “Eat.”
Wait. Would he hear my instructions in space? Apparently so, because he crunched up the pot, growing layers of metal plates on his centipede back. The Machine absorbed radio waves. Maybe it could translate them into voice commands.
“Metal rod, as long as that hole and as wide. Wrapped in rubber.”
The Machine regurgitated the coffee pot in the requested shape. I inserted it into the first bullet hole, and ordered Vera, “Weld.”
She did. The pink Conqueror heat beam turned the blobby edges of the hole and the end of the plug molten in seconds, and in the vacuum, they chilled almost as quickly.
I’d just finished patching the other downstairs hole with part of a nearby wall when Remmy screamed, “Aaaaaah!”
I j
umped, but she sounded excited rather than afraid, especially when she babbled, “Guys! Guys! You have to see this!”
Ray, Claire, and I gathered around the big hole in the hull just in time to see a metal fist grab the edge. Remmy pulled herself into view like a monkey, wearing, uh…
“They’re cargo lifters for space!” Remmy squeaked gleefully. “Check this out. They have maneuvering jets and everything!”
She let go of the gap, and immediately drifted away. Well, technically we turned while she went in a straight line, but it looked like she’d started sailing off into space, right until white smoke puffed behind her, and she zoomed up to grab the edge again.
“I forgot we even had these!” she shouted. “We might be able to do this!”
We collectively winced. Thanks to the radios, she was right in our ears. It was great to see her excited, at least.
Who was I kidding? I wanted a pair of giant mechanical arms! Why did I not have a pair of giant mechanical arms? Who was the senior mad scientist here, anyway?
To add insult to injury, my plugs soon proved to be pathetic compared to what Remmy’s superpower could come up with. She dragged over sections of ship’s hull, and the things inside I thought were heating elements matched up with the ones inside the station’s outer walls. Vera cut away any parts that didn’t fit, and then welded them into place.
Ray stayed by my side most of the time, usually bracing his booted foot against one wall while he kept centripetal force from flinging a slab of metal away. He lifted beds and dressers out of my way, while breaking the monotony with a string of surreal witticisms.
“Burn! Burn from the unbearable gaze of the Clockwork Queen’s glass eye!”
“When you stare into the abyss, a girl in a mechanical suit stares back.”
“Hey there, good looking. Does your mother know―oops, wait, that’s a hat rack.”
“How many hats did the Jets own?! Is there a hat farm on one of Jupiter’s moons somewhere?”
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