20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (12 page)

He was certain that the women on Mars would
not wear crowns of exotic flowers nor smell of coconut milk. The
crew would be packed together in the
Fury
for quite some
time, though, so in a sense he would not be "moving on" anytime
soon. So perhaps he could talk to this Lady, hear her stories,
examine the minute details of her dresses and her manners, or take
a turn with her in the Garden. He could already picture her face
among the cherry blossoms there, with petals falling all around her
like pink snow.

He sighed the sigh of poets and rolled into
his hammock -- hanging where his bed should have been -- for a
brief rest before his next duty shift.

The wall above his desk was a veritable
scrapbook of his numerous adventures. Plastered with daguerrotypes,
tickets, and CDVs, it was a task to see the bulkhead beneath them.
Tiny magnets that he had smuggled out of Dr. Pugh's office held
them in place. He looked up at one picture of himself and the good
scientist on one of their voyages and mock-saluted it. They were
surrounded by portraits of Commander Maury, Lord Nelson, and Robert
FitzRoy on the deck of the
Beagle
with Darwin. Sophie the
Steamfitter peeked out at him from her hiding place between two
pages of Maury's
Sailing Directions
in the row of books just
below them.

An image of Tesla, another titan of his
childhood, marked the
Fury's
entry in the latest edition of
Jane's Fighting Ships
. According to Pugh, the inventor had
struggled before the Invasion and had just wanted a chance for his
devices to be used, a chance to be proven right. Somehow, the
tripods had not been able to get within several miles of Tesla's
Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island in America; the TIA had been
eager to find out how he had managed such a feat. They had set him
up with new facilities in New Zealand not long after that and given
him his chance at glory. His new Tower in the mountains had beamed
power all over the small island nation, including Dr. Pugh's
laboratory. On his wall, Christophe had a tintype of the exterior
of the Tower, a latter-day castle keep of scaffolding and wire.

Like Pugh, Tesla had been both fascinated and
repelled by the information that they had found in the alien
cylinders. Christophe had seen the inside of one of the vessels.
There were no banks of instruments or controls of any sort. It was
as if they had crammed themselves into tins and waited for their
ballistic missiles to smash into something. The plans they had
found inside the cylinders were much more complex.

Tesla, Pugh, and a host of other men had
convened at that Tower many times during Christophe's youth. Often
they were joined by another man, Hermann Oberth, who had assisted
Tesla in the final designs of the main engine and the maneuvering
thrusters for the Fury.

As Christophe had grown up, he was included
more and more in their conversations, though it had taken him ages
to comprehend even a handful of their words. From what he could
gather, Tesla had managed the design of the plasma radio antenna,
but Oberth had resigned his first love of chemical rocketry to help
them solve the problem of generating the needed power. Tesla had
been eager to work on that problem as well, but the TIA ministers
had grown anxious about their timeline. Just before the lunar
voyage, they'd drawn lots to determine the namesake of the engine
itself -- would it be the young upstart Oberth, or the elderly
wizard Tesla?

Tesla had not been very happy about the
outcome, but the TIA had just increased the funding on his death
ray experiments with Hui to soften the blow.

Using his foot, Christophe pushed away from
the wall, making the hammock sway a little, since there were no
ocean swells to do it for him. He was thankful and relieved that
the drill had gone well. Maggie's idea had worked, after all. She
would be pleased. Oberth had been a bit miffed about her
contributions at first, as he did not consider her a proper
scientist, but thankfully cooler heads had prevailed. The head
might not be the most dignified of places to shelter, but over the
years, he had found that dignity and good sense did not always mix
well. Besides, there was the possibility of needing to shelter from
a flare for hours at a time; one might need to take a wee during
that time, so they would have needed toilets in the shelters at any
rate. The combination of the two was a sheer stroke of genius on
Maggie's part, in his opinion.

He couldn't tell if the close quarters had
embarrassed the young lady or not. As beautiful as she was, Miss
Llewellyn's face was an inscrutable mask. Other girls he had known
would have been giggly and wriggly and talked too loud and far too
much, but she had remained steady. He was eager to tell Maggie
about her. But Maggie was busy now; it would have to wait.

He wiggled his toes inside his shoes and
sighed. He missed strolling barefoot across the teak deck of the
Kiwi
, along with the endless wind and the smell of salt on
the air. He longed for the hot sun on his face and could feel
himself growing paler already as his tan faded beneath the
artificial lights. He had resigned himself to the irony that he
might be leaving those wonders behind forever in his voyage to
ensure that they would endure. But he also knew that good company
could outweigh many miseries.

Yes, Gemma Llewellyn is a damned fine
lady
, he thought to himself as he rocked his hammock again. He
wondered what she thought of him.

~~~~

Gemma

What a wanker!
Gemma thought.

The more she thought about the captain's
tentacles wound around her in the water closet, the angrier she
became. It wasn't the most ladylike of thoughts, but she was alone
in the corridor after blowing her way past the rest of the Cohort
and taking the lift back to the laboratory alone. There was no one
to see or care. Mrs. Brightman was many miles away, out of the
grabby grasp of that man, so her opinion really did not count. She
marched down the corridor in a haze of fury. Only long years of
training kept her from muttering her thoughts aloud.

Certainly, he was handsome; there was no
doubt about that. She had met handsome men aplenty. Not all natural
philosophers resembled Methuselah's elder brother. Mrs. Brightman
had carefully, carefully taught her over the years to resist the
charms of her targets, to the point where most of them repelled
her, no matter their looks.

All men are tools to achieve an end
,
her headmistress had said.
Their affections are beneath you.
They are not worthy of your true feelings.

To her, Moreau was too beautiful and too warm
to be real, especially now that she had seen him (and felt him and
smelt him) up close. It was as if someone had drawn Sir Lancelot
onto one of Mr. Humboldt's punch cards and shoved it into the
Analytical Engine, only to have a randy captain pop out on the
other side. The farcical image made her feel a trifle better, and
her anger simmered down to a mere boil. She squared her shoulders
and marched on towards Dr. Pugh's study, suddenly feeling a little
less like she was answering a summons to the headmaster's
office.

Pugh had sent her ahead of him, as he needed
to chat with Hui and Father Alfieri. She puzzled over his line of
thinking; with his reaction to her yesterday, why would he send her
to his office unescorted? She could only conclude that he didn't
use it as his real office any more than Mrs. Brightman used the
College's second-best parlour as hers. She wondered where his true
office was.

Dr. Pugh's chamber was quite small. The
clutter within made it feel even smaller. This wasn't just the
garden-variety sort of untidiness; she suspected some of the piles
of paper pre-dated the lunar voyage. She scanned the room without
touching anything, as was her habit when she had no particular
objective in mind. Stacks of notebooks and journals were scattered
all over the chamber, along with several editions of the
Invasion Chronicle
. A salad of languages and scripts, from
Chinese to Arabic, marched across the loose pages that concealed
what must have been his desk. She could make out the name "Moreau"
at the bottom of one sheet that peeked out from underneath a book,
but she dared not touch it no matter how much her fingers itched.
He was The Captain; his name was liable to appear all over the
ship. Her mission was yet too undefined to be caught sneaking about
now, but oh! How she fought it! It would simply have to wait.

Many other scientists back on Earth would
have given their left arm to be where Gemma was standing now. It
once again amazed her how Mrs. Brightman had managed to arrange her
appointment. Out of habit, she felt a burning urge to uncover the
secrets buried in these notes; again, she had to restrain her
curiosity. Discovery would not do so early in her journey, when
Pugh could lurch through the door at any moment. It would not do to
confirm his suspicions.

Daguerreotypes and CDVs covered the wall. A
young Pugh stood next to the famous Professor Aronnax of
Nautilus
fame in one. Another image showed a slightly older
Pugh and a boy that resembled a younger version of the captain.

Others were not so pleasant. Photographs
recorded the systematic dissection of viscera emerging from a mass
of desiccated tentacles. Artificial tints highlighted the sparse
internal organs. Zoological drawings reduced the world's nightmares
to simple blotches of ink and watercolour.

Every other picture she had seen -- from the
Invasion Chronicle
to the annual memorial issue of
The
Daily Telegraph
-- had been mocked-up horrors of enormous beaks
dripping with imitation saliva and sprouting rubbery limbs. Some
enterprising soul had even turned a tidy profit off CDVs of the
Martians, sold in tobacco shops alongside penny dreadfuls and the
TIA-published
Adventures of Tommy the Terran & Sophie the
Steamfitter
. Here, the monsters appeared labeled and diagrammed
as if they were merely worms; they made the previous illustrations
seem ridiculous and exaggerated.

Gemma wrinkled her nose slightly at the faint
stink of formaldehyde that permeated the room. Another underlying
odour intertwined with it, one that she could not identify. Her
time in laboratories had exposed her to many such unknowns. She had
seen -- and smelt -- far worse in person when she had worked for
the Roman vivisectionist in the year prior. She tried to imagine
these particular images on the wall of Mrs. Brightman's second-best
parlour alongside the ever-present vases of lilacs. A girlish
giggle escaped her mouth.

"What do you find so amusing, Miss
Llewellyn?"

She turned to see Pugh lurking in the
doorway. He had a terrible habit of sneaking up on her. Very few
men had been able to creep up behind her so easily in the past,
except for perhaps that one fellow in Shanghai. Gemma had made
certain that he was no longer a concern.

"You arrived here rather quickly for someone
so unfamiliar with the ship," he growled.

He picked up a small metal charm from the
desk, from somewhere beneath a piece of paper, and shoved it into
his watch pocket. He wasn't fast enough to conceal it from Gemma.
She knew a mourning locket when she saw one. Even this many years
after the Invasion, they were as common as watches.

"Drat that Alfieri, anyway," he muttered. "He
held me up longer than I thought. I certainly don't want you in my
office alone again. Ever. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Dr. Pugh."

"So, let us be direct. I am very familiar
with the business of your so-called College. Did Petunia send you
here for me?"

"Mrs. Brightman made no mention of you, sir."
That much was true, though she swallowed hard at the mention of her
mistress' given name.

He cleared his throat before continuing. "You
are here for
something
, though. However, since your being
here is probably not your choice, I won't have you put out the
nearest airlock. At least, not unless you give me a specific reason
to."

Gemma had never been this close to someone
naming her true role. Her heart pounded hard in her chest, and it
felt like the blows of a blacksmith's hammer on hot steel. Her
worst nightmare -- besides that of the Martians returning -- had
always been
Discovery
. That business with the gentleman in
Shanghai had been a horrible mess. Despite her skills, she had
barely escaped with her life. And now she could not elude the
consequences of using those skills. She needed other means of
protection besides escape.

Pugh slumped into his chair and regarded her
with weary eyes. "I'm sure that if you were here for me, you
wouldn't tell me. In any case, I wouldn't still be here to ask the
question. But perhaps you can tell me a few other things about
yourself. How much notice were you given of this particular
voyage?"

"Two days. Someone else was set to go, but
they were removed at the last moment."

It then struck her how odd that was. She was
accustomed to doing exactly as ordered, with little notice, and
without question, and with her real name. It was indeed strange
that one would undertake the most perilous journey known to
humankind without at least a fortnight's preparation. She frowned.
She had never had the leisure to consider the strangeness of it
all.

"Two days," Dr. Pugh muttered. "Hrmph. Even
in our rapidly moving modern age, even with all the means at your
teacher's disposal, that is not much time at all to prepare for
this sort of adventure. I will assume she pressed you into service,
for whatever reason. Probably to watch me, as that is what Petunia
does. Watch people. And steal science. Though this is a pretty long
reach, even for the Belladonna of Guildford. Do you have any idea
whom you replaced?"