. . .
Jane’s already in motion. She’s ducking past the security guard. She’s in the bank vault. She’s rifling among the deposit boxes for the grenades the Doom Team always keeps there just in case of trouble at the bank.
“Oi!” says the security guard. He starts to chase Jane. Tom knocks him down, shoves a sedative-laced dog biscuit in his mouth, pivots, and runs outside. He’s just in time to see Bertram’s limousine squeal off down the street.
“Damnation,” says Tom. “Rocket ship. Rocket ship. Where do I have a rocket ship?”
His eye settles on the statue of a mounted Wellington on a pedestal in front of the bank.
“Aces,” says science adventurer, Tom.
. . .
Tom begins to scramble up the bronze and granite. He pushes a button on his watch. The Duke of Wellington leans forward, merges into the horse, and spreads his cape to form wings and a cockpit. The horse’s legs sink down into the pedestal and the word “WELLINGTON” begins to glow with an orange-ish light.
You can arrange this sort of thing when you’re a time-traveling science adventurer.
The metal statue arches forwards. The whole pedestal is becoming a ship. Tom flips up Wellington’s cape and climbs inside it. He revs the engine loud.
. . .
“Grenade,” says Jane, scattering diamonds, Weimar currency, dinosaur teeth, and highly dangerous nanotechnology all over the floor of the bank deposit vault. “Grenade. Grenades!”
The bank receptionist, who has just worked herself up to the notion that she can probably take on a single under-aged girl-shaped entity even without a security guard’s help and burst into the deposit room hears that, shrieks, and resolves on the instant to give her two weeks’ notice.
. . .
Jane pulls out a deposit box full of grenades and they scatter across the floor. She takes one.
“Don’t shoot Linus yet,” she whispers. “Don’t shoot Linus yet. Don’t shoot Linus yet. Don’t shoot Linus yet —”
The black dog is standing there. It pants.
She puts the grenade in its mouth. Wincingly, she pulls the pin.
She closes her eyes.
The dog is gone.
. . .
She looks around. She stares at the receptionist, who is cowering. She says, “Clean this up, would you?”
Then she scoops up a diamond or two, because you never know, and she dashes out.
Bertram places a call. One of his soldiers answers it. He nods. He hangs up. He unlimbers his holy water squirt-gun.
“Sorry, kid,” he says, to Linus.
“It’s just,” Linus says, because this kind of thing actually happen to him quite a lot, “that I’m the antichrist. Right?”
. . .
“It’s not —”
The guy sags a little.
“Yeah, fine,” he admits. “We’re killing you because you’re the antichrist. But we’re getting paid, too!”
The black dog appears. The black dog pants. A grenade rolls across the floor to clink against the soldier’s boot.
Linus ducks away.
. . .
“Jane!” yells Tom. “Come on! I can’t chase down Bertram’s jet without a trusty Doom Team Auxiliary as my copilot!”
“I am not an auxiliary!” Jane shrieks as she scrambles into the amazing Wellington rocket face first and the statue launches.
Tom tries to pacify her. “It’s because you don’t actually have a destiny to destroy the world,” he says.
“I’ll pancake you,” she mutters. She tries to wiggle herself around to get to the auxiliary controls while the plane’s in flight. Tom, in a spirit of high-spirited hijinx, takes a moment to juke and roll Jane this way and that in the rocket ship.
“I. Don’t. Have. My. Seatbelt. On,” Jane grates out.
“Fine,” Tom says. “Oh, hey, there’s his car. Maybe we won’t have to chase his jet after all —”
Bertram has a rocket launcher.
Tom stares down.
“That’s just not cricket,” he says.
Bertram fires.
“Jane!” Tom shouts. “Pump the position indeterminator!”
“Glargh!” yells Jane, in utter frustration, because she’s barely even got her elbow into usable position, much less a finger or a foot, and rams her nose into the position indeterminator button.
. . .
“Great,” sighs Tom, as the forests of Venus spin by underneath them. Jane floats gently up to where she can position herself in her seat. “Just great.”
“Can you sight him from here?” Jane asks, but Tom just pounds his head into the dashboard and then rests it there.
“Stupid,” he says. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Worthless snake-DNA human-killing boy goddamn.”
“Tom,” she says.
“Why couldn’t it have been someone else, Jane?” he asks, and then, in almost complete contradiction to that: “I think I must deserve it. I must deserve to be alone.”
. . .
Jane sighs.
“We’re probably going to get captured by Venusians,” she says.
“Fine,” he says.
“Remember the Doom Team motto,” she says.
“Fine!” Tom says.
And after a while, he turns the astounding Duke of Wellington back for home.
– 10 –
Time passes.
The space princess assassin Maria Souvante moves in to take care of Amelia’s abandoned children.
“It’s not that I need the money,” she informs them. “I’ve just always thought I’d be a dab hand as a nanny.”
“Who even hired you?” Jane asks.
Maria waves a hand airily.
. . .
“You do understand that uncle Bertram took all our money and ran away to an uncharted island, right?” says Tom.
Maria nods. “It’s why I’m here,” she says.
“Pardon?”
“We’re playing a deadly game of cat and mouse,” Maria says. “But right now, he’s it. So where better to stay than the last place he’d ever visit?”
“Whatever,” says Tom. “Just, you’d better not be joking about that dab hand thing!”
“She’s not that bad,” says Jane, sizing her up.
. . .
Maria wanders the house.
She pores over Amelia’s notes. She teaches the children glad songs of space. Once, when a lizard-alligator bursts in from the sewers, she subdues it and makes the children boots.
“I can’t help feeling like I’m betraying my cold-blooded kindred somehow,” says Tom, wiggling his toes and experimentally stomping around the house in his new boots. He isn’t saying it, but they’re extremely comfortable.
“Children, children,” says Maria. “You’re all animalistic Earth-beasts when seen from space.”
Tom grins at her. The sentiment appeals to him.
“Mine are shinier,” he teases Jane and Linus.
Linus sticks his tongue out at Tom. Jane can’t seem to get her feet in. Edmund shrugs and the black dog pants.
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