“Let him go! Let him go now! Drop your powers and your defenses!” I shouted.
Archimedes screeched. Juno stiffened up in concentration. The light in Calvin’s eyes flickered.
The light in Claire’s eyes disappeared completely. She blinked, and her power turned off, letting me see the furious scowl she gave to the back of Juno’s head.
Ray crept up to the very edge of the corner. While I’d been busy, he’d gotten ahold of what looked incongruously like an animal skull. He had a small pile of them next to him.
Then the wall next to Juno turned grey, and everything exploded.
Dust and chunks of puppeteer shell flew everywhere. Into the hallway stepped a robotic battlesuit.
I gaped. Everyone gaped. Remmy stood in the cockpit, her legs strapped into place and her arms gripping levers on the upper arms of the suit. I recognized some of the parts. The windshield came off a flying saucer cockpit. The arms were the heavy, squared-off arms of the zero-g freight lifter from Io Alpha. The digitigrade legs had come off a Rotor defense walker. Lumps and tubes fastened to the forearms had to be different kinds of guns grafted into the machine. Small aetheric propellers lined the outer arms, and a big round tank on the back probably held one of her charged aetheric fluid tanks.
The weirdest cannon I’d ever seen sat on one shoulder, its short barrel extended by spinning cogwheels that seemed to float in place, held by nothing. Out of them poured flickering pink light, which played across the opposite wall. It shaved away Puppeteer flesh and shell like the proverbial hot knife melting butter.
Juno said, “Child―” and a giant steel fist backhanded her, lifting her off her feet. Juno hit Claire, saving herself a broken spine and merely sending the two of them tumbling unconscious across the wall and floor.
Was Claire okay? I couldn’t get to her! I wanted my teleport bracelets so bad right now. Penelope’s Log: do not supervillain if you’re not fully armed! Shouldn’t I have learned that already?
The glow disappeared from Calvin’s eyes. He looked up at his sister, puzzled and amused. “You get at least eight points out of ten for style, Remington, but unless you explain yourself right now, there will be trouble.”
“You’ve been mind controlled!” The cockpit must have been airtight, because Remmy’s voice hissed out of speakers. “By her!” and she pointed a metal finger at the unconscious Juno, “And them!” Swinging around, she pointed at me. Her eyes glared pure hate at me through her goggles, and her pigtails bounced when her head turned. They bounced because they didn’t weigh enough to hang down anymore. Where each long, beautiful blond tail had hung, a ragged puff stuck out maybe an inch past the ties.
Remmy had cut off her pigtails. That sent a chill through me worse than the hulking, twelve foot tall death robot she’d kludged together just to kill me.
“Hold your jets there, Remington.” Calvin argued. He laid one hand on the leg of her mecha, and rubbed his head with the other. “I admit I feel a little groggy, but Juno and the Inscrutable Machine have been helping me free everyone from the automatons.”
“No, they haven’t! They’ve been using you to unleash the Puppeteers all over again!” Every word came out in a shout, voice hoarse with fury and shaking like Remmy would break down crying any minute.
I didn’t feel even slightly guilty aiming Archimedes at her and ordering, “Relax, Remmy. Calm down. Take a nap.”
I’d caught her while she was distracted yelling at her brother. Her head sank, then bobbed. A hand let go of the arm control lever, and flopped around. Finally it reached up and grabbed an automaton’s facemask that hung from the robot’s ceiling next to her head like a particularly goth pair of fuzzy dice. Pushing her goggles aside, she shoved the mask over her face.
Straightening, she turned the battle suit fully to face me, its legs wheezing and clattering and its clawed feet crunching into the floor. “You see, Calvin?” she shouted, her voice a little more muffled. “Mind control! But they won’t be deceiving anyone ever again!”
I just stared. I think my mouth hung open. Around the edges of the automaton’s mask bulged a red lining, and a twisted yellow rope tied it in two places behind Remmy’s head. I had time to gape because it took her a few seconds to finish fastening it in place. That let the stunned thought finish processing.
Remmy had built a telepathic shield out of a robot’s metal face, some Puppeteer goo, and her own hair. Wow. That was Tier 3 if anything ever was.
Hands grabbed me around the waist. Ray lifted me off my own feet, and bolted back up the corridor we’d taken to get here. Behind me, I heard Calvin’s indistinct voice and the scraping and crunching of heavy robotic footsteps. Rapid scraping and crunching.
“I could use a less straight path, Harvey!” Ray called out as he ran. Looking back over his shoulder, I saw Remmy turn the corner. Ray ducked into a side corridor that hadn’t been there a minute ago just as a hailstorm of white fire roared across the walls and floor.
“We’re faster than her,” Ray said. “We’ll circle around and come up the way Juno did to pick up Claire. Then we deliver Juno to Harvey, and by then, we’ll have lost your psychotic fangirl!”
Even Ray couldn’t carry me forever, and circumstances were too tense to enjoy it. I wriggled until he let me go, and ran alongside him, holding Archimedes to my chest so he wouldn’t weigh me down.
Up ahead something thumped, a booming noise that vibrated the floor. Oh, criminy. What else could go wrong?
We ran right out into the landing crater again.
Things had changed a bit. No fake Puppeteer zombies moved. There was a lot of black char around, yes, but also sweeping lines and patches of grey, dead shell. Before coming after us, Remmy had annihilated our little survival horror game.
Which meant the Rotor army was back to planting incendiary bombs, or had been until a Jet flying saucer landed. Out of it dropped Thompson, holding the stone spear, and behind him, a dozen Jets armed with submachine guns, the kind that wouldn’t do much good against Puppeteers but were super effective at poking holes in humans.
“What are you doing here?” he yelled at the Rotors.
“Cleaning out this nest once and for all!” Sabrina shouted back.
Ray tugged at my hand. He was right. We didn’t have time for this. We beat feet along the hangar wall, jumping over the trenches Remmy had left, and headed for the next open passage.
Behind us, Thompson roared, “I knew it! You’re helping Calvin steal the artifacts!” Another boom, and the fleshy floor underneath me shook. Little bits of shell pelted the back of my head as the wall behind me exploded from the power of the stone spear.
The next shot splattered the ground in front of us, and Ray grabbed me by my arm, pulling me into a ditch.
Someone decided to be the voice of reason. “Stop shooting! You can have the artifacts, and then we’ll burn down this asteroid and every last Puppeteer on it!”
“And once we’ve taken out Io Alpha, we’ll be safe!” added someone else. I winced. Was there a law that the person with the stupidest thing to say will always yell it the loudest?
Thompson’s voice rang out, loud but steely hard. “Over my. Dead. Body.”
The spear boomed, and then boomed again. People screamed, and metal clattered. The hiss of flame guns added to the chaos.
My own voice sounded a lot more squeaky and desperate. “Harvey!”
“The pain is becoming hard to block out,” he answered. I couldn’t tell from where. Did it matter, Penny?
“Then act like you have a stomachache!”
A moment of silence. Well, silence from him. There were way too many sounds of violence and people in pain for my liking.
“Understood.”
The chaos multiplied. The floor of the ditch Ray and I crouched in split all the way down to the rock. We scrambled up the sides in time to see ridges of flesh and shell burst up out of the floor. The nice, flat runway became a ragged badland of pillars and crests. Pink bile fountained out of g
eysers, hissing and adding an acidic tang to the air.
To my dumbfounded shock, people on both sides climbed up the new ridges and used them as cover to keep shooting at each other.
At least they weren’t out in the open anymore, and the floorquakes ruined their aim. Their aim had been pretty bad to begin with.
I caught a different and even less welcome thud. Ray and I dropped down low in the trench as Remmy stepped out into the hangar. As surprisingly spacious as the corridors had been, they’d been too small for her battle suit, and now it straightened up to its full height.
“We have to get moving,” Ray whispered to me.
“We have to stop this!” I whispered back.
“How?”
I had no ideas. I crouched down, watching Remmy, and let my mind whirr. It was hard to get past the top thoughts, of how much it hurt that she hated me this way, and how awe-inspiring her power was fully unleashed.
She poked her finger at something in the power armor’s cockpit, making squiggly motions. My brow furrowed at the bizarre, out of place emotion. It was like…
…oh, Tesla. She’d built my smart phone into her suit. I couldn’t think of an app that should have let her track us, but she turned and started walking in me and Ray’s direction, each step slow and with a lot of twisting the upper torso around to look for us.
I grimaced as an idea came to me. It seemed slightly less risky than making open targets of ourselves for Remmy’s flame guns. Nodding towards the firefight, I hissed to Ray, “We need to lure her into that. If it doesn’t disable her suit, it will distract her.”
He groaned, and gave the meaty ground underneath us a punch. “Protect her, no matter what.” With that, he picked up a broken piece of shell, stood up, and threw it at Remmy.
Her arm swung around, a propeller buzzed, and like with the typewriter, the shell disappeared. The only difference was that this time, the mass of arcing white and blue lightning was huge, as tall as Remmy’s mecha. Charcoal dust and bits of shell were sucked into the air by the wind, disappearing into the shield along with Ray’s projectile. The time it took Remmy to lower her shield and point her gun hand at Ray let him take off, running from obstacle to obstacle, right into the broken no-man’s land between the battling forces.
Remmy took a few steps, but didn’t chase. She just fired volley after volley of fire.
My stomach knotted. Ray wasn’t her real target. I knew what I had to do.
I wanted my teleport bands back so bad!
Scrambling up over the lip of the gully, I headed for a boulder-shaped nearby chunk of shell. Then I ran, crouched low and arms over my head, to a small ridge. Remmy didn’t see me. I didn’t want her to see me until there was a lot more room between us.
So, instead of being an idiot and crisscrossing through the open, I kept low and ran around the barrier the Rotors were using as their shield. I got a few nods as I passed. Sabrina called out, “Bad Penny!” but I didn’t answer. I ran past a small group of men huddled and talking, and caught the words, “There are more of us. If we burn out―” but I left them behind as well.
Circling around the other end of the Rotor’s barrier, I bolted for the nearest pillar of flesh.
Remmy saw me. On the other side of the hangar she whirled, no longer shooting at Ray.
The hill of Puppeteer goo between me and her turned from red to grey. Oh, criminy. I’d forgotten she could do that.
I was near an obstacle she couldn’t easily destroy. I ran, whining in the back of my throat at the thought of being hit by a giant blob of burning sulfur, and skidded behind a landing strut of the Rotor spacecraft.
Remmy took the bait. She charged, right through the no-man’s land, until white fire peppered her suit from both sides.
Her shields spun to life. The top half of the mecha twisted as she noticed the firefight for the first time.
The speakers on Remmy’s armor crackled, pitched up to a volume that rang through the hangar, overwhelming the sound of fighting. “IS EVERYONE BUT ME STUPID?”
Sabrina’s voice sounded tiny and distant compared to that. “Thompson attacked us!”
“Io Alpha is ours! I won’t let you destroy it!”
“I was born on Io Alpha!”
“Then you’re fighting on the wrong side!”
“I don’t listen to you! The only reason anyone listens to you is because they’re afraid!”
Other people started to pitch in, but once again, Remmy’s speakers drowned them out. “SHUT UP! YOU’RE ALL DOING EXACTLY WHAT SHE WANTS!”
Well, I had Remmy distracted, and the fighting had even stopped. It had been replaced by a screaming argument between two crowds and a little girl with a megaphone, but no one was dying.
“I don’t suppose you can get me across unseen?” I asked the floor.
It opened up underneath me, dropping me into a shallow pit. One side of the pit bulged, leading into a tunnel. I’d have to crawl, but I could fit.
“Why― because I didn’t ask,” I asked and answered myself.
Remmy’s amplified voice came through perfectly clear as I crawled right underneath the battleground. “DO NONE OF YOU SEE IT? THIS IS BAD PENNY’S FAULT! SHE TOLD YOU SHE’S A SUPERVILLAIN. DID NOT ONE OF YOU THINK THAT JUST MAYBE THAT MEANT SHE REALLY IS EVIL?”
More angry voices. More me crawling. The spear boomed, and flame guns hissed and regular guns popped, but it all disappeared into the snapping and crackling of Remmy’s shields, and the roar of the wind they created.
“THIS BATTLE IS OVER. GET BACK IN YOUR SHIPS AND LEAVE. I’LL DEAL WITH BAD PENNY.”
She was right above me now. I crawled past her, looking down at my hands.
Archimedes weighed down one arm. The other wrist just held the Machine.
Even mid-rant, Remmy might hear me speak. Instead, I knocked my head against the roof of the tunnel. On the third bump, Harvey got the message, and it opened.
I poked my head out in time to hear Thompson snarl, “You’ll be in trouble for this later, Remington!”
“BUT DO YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE ME RIGHT NOW?” Remmy boomed back.
I pulled myself out of the ground, and reached up to grab the mechanical struts of one of the mecha’s legs. I might not be in superhuman shape, but I was fit enough to climb up the jungle gym of Remmy’s patchwork power suit. Holding on with one hand, I unfastened the Machine and wedged it into a gap between the body armor and the armor of the fluid tank.
I didn’t care what Remmy made her suit out of or how deranged and brilliant the craftsmanship was. The Machine would eat it.
My hands clung tighter and I let out a squeak as the torso swung from side to side so that Remmy could give all the combatants a challenging look. At least my squeak had been quiet. Instead of noticing me, she announced, “IF IT TAKES A HERO TO STOP A VILLAIN, FINE. I WILL BE THAT HERO! I DON’T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TOMORROW, BUT TODAY NO ONE DIES. NO ONE!”
Letting go of the suit, I dropped to the ground, and slid into the tunnel. As I snapped the Machine back onto my wrist, Puppeteer flesh closed above me.
I couldn’t take Remmy’s greatest creation away from her now. I just couldn’t.
Mind you, I could get out of here while she had her mind on saving people. I started crawling, fast.
The roof above me muffled everyone’s voice but Remmy’s again. “I’M NOT REMINGTON TO YOU ANYMORE. HEROES HAVE TITLES. THE KLUDGE WILL STOP BAD PENNY’S PLANS, AND THE FIRST STEP IS NOT LETTING YOU KILL EACH OTHER.”
Thompson said something very brief.
“BECAUSE I’LL HIT YOU.”
My escape tunnel ended in a shallow pit. Another tunnel opened up next to me, and Ray crawled out.
The hallway back into Harvey’s base stood right in front of us, the floor decorated with the distinctive giant-taloned footprints of a suit of kludged-together power armor.
I took a deep breath, and felt a sudden twinge of guilty relief as Ray grabbed me, hoisted me in his arms, and took off running.
&n
bsp; My wind was starting to return when we rounded the badly abused corner to where we’d left Juno.
She wasn’t there. Neither were Claire or Calvin.
I growled wordlessly between my teeth to keep from swearing.
“Not a surprise,” grunted Ray, still running.
“No.”
It also wasn’t a surprise that the debris blocking the passage to Harvey had been cleared away. Harvey had been progressively more quiet. I could easily picture dozens of scavengers carrying away bits of rubble just because Claire asked nicely.
This tunnel wasn’t straight, but it was close. Every time we reached a turn, a squishier, less tidy gap led to a new path that continued in Harvey’s direction. Claire had done a lot of asking, and Harvey a lot of reorganizing.
“Harvey, are you there?” I called out.
“Yes. Mostly. She’s so close, and so beautiful.” The words came from half a dozen places, Ray left them behind so fast.
He dodged around the last kink in the corridor, and skidded to a halt.
The chamber wasn’t huge. It was merely the size, say, of a large church. It had a peculiar ovoid shape, like an old-fashioned auditorium, sloping down to the far end. A couple of other doorways decorated the top level.
Down on the bottom, on the farthest side, was a circular, fanged mouth bigger than a man, and for the moment, closed. An A-shaped framework of red shell loomed over and around it, and around that opening lay four deactivated Conqueror orbs.
I hopped out of Ray’s arms, and we picked our way down. Surprise gave way rapidly to hurry, but I had to stop at the first orb and roll it over.
The orb seemed perfectly intact, just deactivated. It even had its ceramic shell.
“Now we know what the four deactivation pistols were for.” Ray spoke in a hush, and yet it sounded weirdly loud in this big, quiet room.
I palmed the unconscious shape of Vera in my pouch. Claire got Juno past the Puppeteer defenses, and Juno deactivated these guards using a trick she’d practiced on Vera. She hadn’t been kidding. I’d been a literal godsend, handing her everything she needed to free her alien masters.
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