Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (16 page)

We found no sign of the parents until we reached the kitchen, which is where we should have looked first. Papa doesn’t own or operate a personal phone. Our low-tech solution was a blackboard in the kitchen. It saves paper, and it’s fun, and Papa hardly ever leaves the property when he’s out of the bubble anyway, so it’s not like he’s hard to find. Chalked there in Papa’s childish block letters was the message:

I AM IN THE LABERTERRY

We ambled out to the backyard and down a short path that followed the lake to the other structure that made up the Broussard Estate. Like the rest of the place, it was not what it appeared to be.

There was a rusty tin roof, weathered siding, and a wide screened-in porch. The porch opened onto a landing and a short dock, where a wooden pirogue was tied up. The place does look like pictures I’ve seen of bait shops on a bayou. But it’s just a façade, one that appeals to Papa. Inside is Papa’s laberterry.

There’s a screen door, but once you’ve opened it, you can’t just walk in. The security there is just as strict as at our house, probably more so. I pressed my palm to the plate and leaned forward to look into the twin lenses. A dim red light flashed, and Papa’s recorded voice called out.

“Come on in, Cassandra Ann!”

“What the . . .” Cassie looked shocked, too. We had never been misidentified by a machine before. People, sure, but this shouldn’t have happened. I looked at Cassie, and she shrugged, so I did, too, and opened the door.

A grizzly bear, ten feet tall standing on his hind legs, raised his front paws and gave out with a heart-stopping roar. Well, it would have been heart-stopping to anyone who wasn’t expecting it. But not for long.

“Hello, Winnie,” Cassie said, and patted him on the side. A little dust and some hair puffed out from his pelt, which had seen better days. Some of the seams were coming apart where he had been sewn together, and one of his hind legs was split open so you could see the metal strut inside. He also clicked when he moved.

“You need an oil can, silly old bear,” I told him.

We had named him Winnie a long time ago. He was part of Papa’s oddball collection of stuff that he had brought with him from Earth, then from Mars. He had been part of an amusement park that Papa had built animated figures for, many years ago.

You had to go around Winnie to get to the stairs, which went down for three flights to end in another door with another palm plate and another set of lenses. I let Cassie operate that one, and sure enough, it greeted her as Pollyanna Sue. Then it opened and admitted us to the inner sanctum.

Don’t call my papa a mad scientist, at least not in my presence. I’ll rearrange your face . . . or at least hurt your feelings real bad. But “eccentric scientist”? I’d have to let you get away with that.

What we entered was not the lab of a mad scientist from old movies, with dry ice bubbling in beakers full of colored water, and electrical arcs from Jacob’s ladders humming and sizzling up toward the ceiling. It was part machine shop and part museum. It was quite a large room, much bigger than the bait shop above it.

Haphazardly spotted around the room were some of Papa’s toys, like an X-ray machine, an MRI, an electron microscope, a huge hydraulic press, several drill presses, and racks and racks and racks of hand tools and power tools. If someone somewhere ever invented a tool that Papa doesn’t have, it probably wasn’t good for anything. He has stamping machines and furnaces, and analytical machines from chemical labs and hospitals. There are bins and bins of hardware.

No one gets in the lab but Travis, Papa, and Mama, and their two little puppies.
No one.
That means no maid service except for guess who. We had been down there two weeks ago, in anticipation of Papa’s arrival, and cleaned it from top to bottom. That is no small job, believe me. Mama does a white-glove inspection, and it all has to shine.

We are saved a little effort because of one cardinal rule: Don’t move anything! The one thing Papa can be strict with us about is his lab. We clean only surfaces, leaving everything just where we found it. He wants all his projects to be exactly as he left them when he gets out.

—

We found him after a short search among things best left undescribed. Or maybe I should say things I’d be hard put to describe if someone asked me to, so don’t ask, okay? The things Papa builds seem to defy logic, and often look like nothing more than a random selection of junk tossed into a garbage can with some epoxy glue squirted in, shaken up for a few minutes, then dumped out on the floor. Sometimes they emit sounds or lights or even steam, and I steer clear of them. They look like they might bite.

He was sitting at a workbench wearing some sort of magnifying glasses, peering into a box about a foot on each side.

“Stay back a minute, my girls,” he said. “I’ll fix this up in no time.”

He went back to his work, and it really didn’t take him long. He finished up and sat back with a satisfied sigh.

“That’s done,” he said, and turned to us grinning. “Come give your papa a hug, my darlings!”

We did that, and when we moved away he looked at us with an odd expression.

“Didn’t have no trouble gettin’ in, did you?”

“Papa,” Cassie said, “for some reason the door . . . Did you do that?”

He laughed. “Pretty funny, huh? Even the door cain’t tell y’all apart.”

“Pretty funny,” I agreed. Behind his back, Cassie rolled her eyes, but she assured him she thought it was pretty funny, too. It could be worse, I always figured. He might like itch powder and exploding cigars.

“What’s in the box, Papa?” Cassie asked.

He got serious real quick.

“It’s for something I gotta find out, me.”

Cassie was looking into it, frowning. I did, too.

It was like all the things I’d ever seen Papa build. No, actually, I mean invent. He was quite skilled as a carpenter, a machinist, any manual skills at all, really. If you wanted him to build a house, he’d make a great one, and it would be just according to a normal house plan. Building our tree house, he had let his imagination loose a little, and the result was a lovely fantasy, a toy. Ask him to build a mechanical device from plans, something that already existed, he would faithfully copy it.

But when he was inventing, he went into some sort of creative trance and grabbed the first object that came to hand that would serve his purpose. That’s one reason he has so much unsorted junk scattered around the lab. He always knew where each item was, could go directly to it. And then he would build something weird. And always it looked like a mess, but it always did its job.

This box was no different. There was some greenish light down near the bottom, and a couple of reddish lights elsewhere, but I couldn’t see the source of either light. It was making a very faint hum, so quiet I didn’t notice it at first. There was a faint smell I couldn’t identify, but suspected was some sort of lubricating oil. Maybe the slightest whiff of ozone.

No telling what it was for. I just had to hope Papa could do a better job of explaining it.

“Does it have to do with the problem with the ship?” I asked.

“It do,
cher
,” he said, with a frown. “This thing ought to tell me something ’bout that, if I done her right.”

“So . . . when are you going to do your experiment?”

“That gonna be a little hard to do,” he admitted. “I was hoping you girls might be able to he’p me with that.”

“Anything you say, Papa,” Cassie told him.

“You got it,” I agreed.

Well, I’ll abbreviate a little here, because I’m still a little pissed off.

Mama arrived while Papa was struggling to explain what he needed. Essentially, he needed someone to take the box somewhere and do something with it. The box was some sort of detector for dark lightning, or something like that. I didn’t understand it completely. What Papa wanted to do was train someone to go to this place and take readings.

Sounded simple enough. Wasn’t simple at all.

The procedure wasn’t all that complicated. A reasonably smart chimpanzee should have been able to handle it, and Cassie and I understood it after a few run-throughs. A few lights, a few buttons, a few notes to take, since Papa hadn’t had time to invent and program an automatic register for the thing.

In fact, he’d been in such a hurry, it was a wonder the thing worked at all. Several times while he was demonstrating how it worked, it just stopped. He had to open the top and fool around in there with a screwdriver. Once it gave off a shower of sparks, making me jump and causing Papa to suck on a singed finger.

It soon became clear that whoever operated the box was going to have to know how to keep it running right, and how to fix it when it didn’t work. And no one needed to point out that there was only one person in the room who could do that.

Papa was really upset.

“I’m going to have to go with whoever takes this thing where it need to go,” he said, in some agitation.

“Why can’t you . . .” Cassie said, and stopped. I knew she had been going to ask why he couldn’t go there and do it himself, and didn’t bite her tongue in time. I glared at her, and she gave me an apologetic shrug.

“Because I get flusterpated, my darling,” Papa said, sadly. He knew his limitations, and though he had long ago come to terms with them, it wasn’t a source of pleasure to have to acknowledge them, even to himself.

Papa needed someone from his family, preferably me or Cassie or Mama or Travis, to keep his anxieties in check. He was going to have to take the device himself to do whatever it was he intended to do with it, but he was going to need a minder, a human security blanket, to keep calm enough to do what had to be done.

Mama and Papa discussed it, with helpful asides from Cassie and me that never seemed to be appreciated, at least not by Mama. Well, Mama never seems to appreciate us. (Insert put-upon sigh here.)

There were really only four possible minders, and Mama said she and Travis were not on the list because the family meeting they were holding was too important for either of them to miss.

“Well, Papa,” Cassie said, “how long do you think it would take you to . . . well, to beef up that box so it isn’t breaking down all the time?”

“Too long, probly. A couple a days, at least.”

“That’s too long?”

“I’m really worried,
cher
.”

So was I, and even more when I heard that Papa seemed to think it was really an emergency that required action that fast.

“Anyways, my darlings, I’m afraid your old papa would need somebody to babysit hisself even if I do clean the box up some.” He didn’t look at us as he said this. I reached over and squeezed his shoulder. Cassie put her arm around his waist.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be happy to go with you.”

“Me, too,” the twin piped up.

“We’ll both go,” I said.

“No, you won’t,” said the Mama unit. “I’m going to need one of you. There’s a lot of things we have to cover in this family meeting. A lot of things to be decided, and if they go one way, I will need someone to run some errands.”

“Then I’ll stick with Papa,” Cassie said quickly.

I glared at her. “I offered first.” I was determined to be the one to stick with Papa because we would be going someplace I’d never been before, and in the finite—although quite large—universe of
Rolling Thunder
, you didn’t get to do that every day.

Mama interrupted, a deep frown on her face. I thought she was going to read us the riot act and render a decision that had a 50 percent chance of being unfair, but that wasn’t it.

“Jubal, honey, are you sure this is safe?”

Papa’s frown was even deeper.

“That’s a hard one to answer,
cher
. I run some numbers, me, and I figger it ain’t no more dangerous than staying right where we are now.” He pointed to the floor. “Course, ain’t no place real safe right now, I figger.”

When our destination had been announced, I had done my own estimate, and couldn’t see how it was much more dangerous than standing right where I was, as Papa had said.

Anyway, safe or not, I intended to go.

“Let’s arm-wrestle for it,” I suggested. Believe it or not, we are not totally evenly matched. In upper-body strength, I had a slight edge.

“Flip a coin,” she countered. Too random for me. So I made another suggestion, and after a moment, Cassie agreed.

“Two out of three?” she said.

“Let’s do it.

So . . . one, two,
paper
! She had rock, and paper covers rock. I only needed one more to win.

One, two,
scissors
! She had rock again, and rock smashes scissors.
Damn!

I took a deep breath. One, two,
paper
!

Cassie:

. . . scissors!

Scissors cut paper. Two out of three. Hurray for me!

Someday, when we’re old and gray, I’m going to give you a gift, twin. You have a tell. You know what a tell is? It’s some sort of tic that lets your opponent know what’s in your poker hand, or what your hand is going to do in our little game. In poker, maybe you sniff loudly when you’ve got something good. Maybe your eyelid twitches.

On
two
, your other hand telegraphs what you’re going to choose. That’s your right hand as, being left-handed, you play with your left. Two fingers will twitch when you’re about to show scissors, four will twitch when it’s paper, and your hand doesn’t move when it’s rock. I let you win the first one, but I knew what it was going to be.

I’ve known this about you for years. I seldom use it. You’re not stupid, you would catch on soon if I won all the time. So I don’t bother looking when it’s small stuff, like who has to do a chore, or who gets first pick out of a box of donuts. But for the important stuff, I win.

I really do love you, spacegirl, and it sometimes hurts me to see how bad you take it when I win something that matters to you. Not enough to
lose
to you, of course; we all need an edge now and then.

—

You might get the impression that Polly and I are inseparable from what’s gone down so far. Since that bad skypool game, we had seldom been out of each other’s sight. It’s not normally like that. We each have our own life.

When we
are
together, we often act as a team. We know there are circumstances where we can count on unquestioning loyalty from the other one. But we are not dependent on each other, though I believe Polly is a little more dependent than I am. It may look the opposite from her perspective.

But there was no teary good-bye that day when we split up. She just sighed and took her medicine, leaving with Mama while I got Papa together for his ordeal.

We found something to carry his gadget in. I went back to the house and packed a purse that was almost as big as a carpetbag with the things I thought we might need. One of those things was a bottle of Papa’s tranquilizers. I made him take one before we set out, and by the time we got out the door, he had a slightly glassy-eyed look.

We were halfway down the driveway before I remembered the crowd of pimps lying in wait on the road. As we came into view, they all jumped like someone had stuck an electric prod up their asses. They started their patented chattering of stupid questions, holding their cameras toward us.

“Mr. Broussard, can you confirm or deny . . .”

“Sir, there’s a rumor going around that . . .”

“Hey, Jubal, just a minute of your time . . .”

“What gives you the right to start a panic . . .”

Several of them were actually coming up the drive, right past the
NO TRESPASSING
signs. I turned Papa around and told him to go back to the house. He did, amiably enough, not even looking back over his shoulder.

“This is private property,” I shouted. “Access is denied to all of y’all. I’m recording this. I will count to three, and if your asses aren’t on the other side of our property line at three, you’re going to be very sorry.
One!
”

I didn’t have to get to three. Grumbling, they all moved back over the line. Property rights are taken very seriously in the ship’s regulations. A citizen’s home is his or her castle. Penalties for uninvited invasions are stiff, even if you are a “reporter.”

I caught up with Papa and hurried him along.

“We’re going out the back door, Papa,” I said. Actually, we went around the house to the boathouse in back. I loaded our stuff into the motorboat. I sat in the back and turned it on, and powered out of our little bay and into the pond.

I know it was silly, but I kept looking up and around the curved landscape of the ship. There was no way I’d be able to spot what I was looking for, but I was pretty sure they were out there, up the curve in one direction or another.

We don’t have helicopters or airplanes for the press to harass you with, but that doesn’t mean we have privacy. When your world curves like a rolled-up paper tube, it means that anyone up the curve of the tube can look down on you. It’s easy to set up a telescope and see right into someone’s backyard.

They could see us, and could be coming after us now, from any direction. If they encountered us on the public streets, all bets were off. They could shove their cameras in our faces with impunity.

That was our disadvantage. On the plus side, it wasn’t going to be easy to catch up with us. There weren’t any fast cars for them to jump into. They could keep an eye on us and guide the pack of press at our driveway in the right direction, but they would be limited to bicycles or the same transportation I was planning on using, the streetcar network.

I was betting we could outrun them.

—

We beached the boat on the far side of the pond, not far from a road. I hurried Papa to the nearest station, and we got there just before a car arrived.

It wasn’t crowded, so we got seats. Maybe a dozen people aboard. And inevitably, they recognized Papa.

No one moved, no one said anything. A couple of people even looked angry. It was a nervous fifteen minutes. People got off, people boarded, and I kept looking for the press posse.

Finally, someone spoke. It was a woman about Mama’s age, and there was no hostility in her voice, just concern.

“Mr. Broussard, what’s going on?”

Papa smiled at her.

“You can call me Jubal, ma’am. And I’m fixin’ to find out what’s goin’ on, me.”

There was conversational buzz then, and I could see them gearing up for a real question-and-answer session, but we were saved by the trolley.

“This is our stop, Papa,” I said, getting out of my seat.

He looked around the car as he rose. “Nice travelin’ with y’all. Everybody have a safe trip.” I don’t think he got the irony of that. All those people were very worried, not about the trolley, but about our little trip to the stars. Which, to a lot of people’s way of thinking, he had just put in jeopardy.

—

Our destination was the town of Wayback, the capitol of Frostbite Falls province. The trolley left us in the center of town, at the intersection of June Foray Avenue and Paul Frees Street. The streets here were cobblestoned, and the buildings mostly made of red brick. In the middle of the park in the town square was a slowly rotating statue of a cartoon moose holding up a flying squirrel wearing a crash helmet. Some old television show Travis liked, which I haven’t seen.

I led Papa a block south to Daws Butler Avenue, where there was a doorway with a sign over it reading
IRON MAN GYM
in raised gold letters. Little LED figures of a man and a woman in skimpy clothes endlessly lifted and put down barbells with huge round weights on the ends.

Inside, there was a small, unattended lobby with a few chairs and potted plants. A screen on one wall showed a montage of the facilities available at the gym, which were all no-nonsense weight machines and treadmills and stair climbers. No spa at the Iron Man, no massages, no saunas. All those things and more were available next door. Apart from that, the only thing to see was a gleaming elevator door, right in front of us.

This elevator had only top and bottom floors. It started down slowly, then accelerated smoothly.

The distance we were going?

Half a mile. Straight down.

—

That is, of course, actually straight
out
, away from the center. But it felt like down. And every second I was getting heavier. At the bottom I would be carrying an extra third of my body weight because at that point, the spinning of the ship would work on me at the rate of exactly one gee.

That half mile also happens to be the average thickness of the rocky shell that was left over after the asteroid was hollowed out. At a depth of a mile and a half, we would be on the outside surface of the ship.

Which would be over our heads.

Under our feet would be a floor, and beyond that nothing but interstellar space for many, many light-years. Papa was perfectly happy to feel the weight settle on him gradually, then peak as we slowed down and stopped. Myself, I was wishing for arch supports. And other supports, for that matter. The one time I worked out down at the Iron Man, I didn’t like the way I looked in the mirror. Everything sagged. Face, boobs, and butt. I never went back, and neither did most of the girls I know. I find it hard to believe that human beings evolved in a one-gee gravity field; we’re just not sturdy enough. I’d be a total wreck in a week.

I guess if you grew up on Earth, you just didn’t know any better.

—

We got out of the elevator to the usual smell of sweat and testosterone, the clank of barbells, the pounding of feet on the treadmills and the running track.

The only other attraction of the gym was that it was one of the few places where people could come and see outside. There was the North Pole, of course, but that was weightless, and a lot of people didn’t care for that. Some didn’t much like one gee, either, but found it tolerable for a couple of hours. So there were several places to look out at the stars.

We turn every 98.5 seconds. That means the stars outside don’t exactly
fly
by, but they move pretty fast. In a minute and a half, the same ones will reappear. Papa doesn’t like any kind of motion like that, so we hurried out of the gym and into a safer, windowless corridor.

You could have been coming to the gym for twenty years and never have entered this corridor. It wasn’t long, and at the end there was nothing but a strong door that said
NO ADMITTANCE—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
ONLY
. It opened to my thumbprint.

We entered a spaceship hangar.

This was one of five hangars in the ship. The first three were up at the pole, and they were enormous. Each one held around fifty very large ships, cargo ships in near weightlessness to facilitate loading.

Then there were the two on the outside, this one and another 180 degrees around the circumference. These housed smaller craft, both manned and drones, that were used for inspections of the outer surface and the drive structures at the aft end. They were much smaller, “about the size of two city buses,” according to Papa. Well, they’re a lot bigger than the streetcars we use. They’re roughly cylindrical, with bulges in the front and rear where the bubble engines are, and they have wheels on struts that they sit on when in the hangar. At the front end there is a wide window, and toward the rear there are stubby wings. If needed, they could enter an atmosphere, fly a bit, and land. When I asked Travis why he decided they should be able to fly, he said “Why not?” Good question. I couldn’t think of a reason why not.

There are a few dozen of them, and they are painted a variety of bright, bold, shiny colors. Lined up in a row, they looked like giant Easter eggs. Well, sort of elongated Easter eggs, but still. The ships were launched by simply dropping them through a lock to the outside. That way, they already had a good velocity when they entered space.

But this wasn’t our final destination.

We walked past several groups of people either doing routine maintenance of the ships or standing around not even trying to look busy. We didn’t talk to anyone at all. Papa was preoccupied, turning over some arcane quantum theory in his head, maybe, and I . . . well, I wasn’t sure I liked the way they were looking at us. Maybe I was paranoid. Seeing Papa out in public is unusual. Maybe they were just surprised to see him.

We walked the length of the hangar. When we reached the end, there was another door. This one was unmarked but had extra security. I felt eyes all over my back and I pressed my thumb to the plate and put my eye to the lens. There was a click, and we hurried through.

We entered Travis’s private hangar.

—

The ship inside was a slightly larger, much plusher version of those ships we had passed on our way here. It was painted a metallic gold with black highlights—black and gold being our school colors, so I was down with that—and reminded me of nothing so much as a fat bumblebee. Bees being one of the bugs we
do
have in the ship because we need them to pollinate, and, of course, for the honey.

I got Papa up the ramp and into a seat near the middle of the gig. The interior was comfortable. There were six seats in this lounge area. Back of that was the head and two staterooms. The ship would be flying itself. A good thing, too, because I had no idea how to fly a spaceship.

I got Papa settled down and brought him a glass of iced Dr Pepper. He was busy setting his gadget up on a small table, running tests on it. At one point, a little wisp of smoke curled out of the box, and I looked a question at Papa.

“Not to worry,
cher
. It’s okay. Not gonna blow up or nothing.” He went back to his adjustments.

So I went forward and through a curtain in a permanent bulkhead. Beyond it was the control room.

The top half of the front end of the ship was perfectly clear. Below that was a dashboard with a few pressure points glowing, and several touch screens. Not real complicated controls. There were three comfortable, leather-covered chairs facing forward, the one in the center being slightly more substantial and obviously reserved for the captain.

“Welcome, Cassandra,” said the autopilot, a feminine voice. “Podkayne alerted me that you and Jubal Broussard would be boarding. I see you have already provided a cold beverage for Jubal Broussard. Is there anything I can prepare for you? Snacks? A drink?”

“Not just now. Can you just call me Cassie?”

“As you wish, Captain Cassie.”

“Captain? When did this happen?”

“When I questioned your mother as to command, which would normally devolve upon the eldest passenger if I lacked other instructions, I was informed that Jubal Broussard was in a state of emotional fragility such that taking command was precluded. Thus, you are the captain, by default.”

“Okay. What do I call you? Autopilot?”