20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (15 page)

He wandered off, leaving Gemma wondering what
motivation he would have to help her. It would be a new thing for
her, having a priest as an asset. It was Mrs. Brightman's opinion
that it would not be that difficult to get a priest to spill
secrets; they simply did not have any of scientific benefit. Gemma
had never stepped foot inside a confessional, but she was sure that
tralphium was a rare topic of discussion there.

Caroline tugged at her elbow and suggested
that they circulate around the room. Mr. Wallace was getting a bit
near their side of the parlour, so Gemma did not object. On the
way, Caroline pointed out other officers that Gemma had not yet
met, including the ship's surgeon, Dr. Hansard, who was worrying
the mouthpiece of his unlit pipe between his teeth beneath a "No
Smoking" plaque.

She allowed Caroline to prattle on as they
made their way across the floor. The Boolean linked arms with her
and chattered away about everything from Mr. Davies' impending
child to the ship's archery league. Gemma only half-listened to her
new ally; she nodded and uttered an "oh, my" or "how delightful"
here and there with impeccable timing. The other half of her brain
observed the movements of the captain as he left his perch at the
mantel and meandered his way through the cluster of officers and
midshipmen that had just approached him.

"Oh, you like the fireplace, then?" Caroline
asked. "It's just for show, really. Open flames aren't allowed on
the ship. Even Frau Knopf has to cook with electric power. It's too
bad, though. I think fireplaces are so romantic, don't you?"

They encountered Mr. Davies in the far
corner, still at the whist table. He stared into his pocket-watch
with a furrowed brow. He closed it as they approached and got to
his feet.

"Ladies," he greeted them. "We've put in our
required appearance here. I have some business in the orrery to
complete today. Would you care to have a peek at it, Miss
Llewellyn? Caroline can chaperone us, if you wish."

Curiosity about the much-discussed orrery
mixed with her interest over the message she had just received from
Rathbone. The Boolean was correct, though. They had all three been
seen by Frau Knopf and had managed to avoid Mr. Wallace so far. She
took a final sip of tea and pondered his offer.

"Of course, Mr. Davies," she replied at last.
"If you'll allow me a few moments in my quarters--"

"To change back into your uniform," Caroline
said, completing her thought. "I know you must be miserable, back
in your corset! I can give her half an hour, then go fetch her,
Nigel. I'm off duty for the day, anyways, and I could use a
sit-down, meself, for a few minutes. Oh, and one last jumble!"

~~~~

Christophe

Christophe could feel Cervantes' gaze boring
into him as Miss Llewellyn slipped out of the parlour with the two
Booleans.

"I would be careful of that one,
amigo
," said the first mate in a low whisper.

"McLure?" Christophe replied in the same
quiet tone. "I'm aware of her interest, old sport, but don't worry
yourself on that account. I can quote you a mile of protocols
between us."

"Not her. The geologist."

"Miss Llewellyn?"

"There's more to that one than meets the eye.
Nothing escapes her notice. She studies everything and everybody.
Even through the mirror, if necessary."

"What, what?
You
were actually
watching a girl?" He leaned in closer, smirking at his friend. "I
didn't think she was your type. Not enough engines."

Miguel looked about them as he tugged
Christophe over to the whist table that Chief Davies had vacated
moments before.

"I am serious. I survived as long as I did in
Madrid before Pugh found me because I learned how to read people.
She watched you on the bridge during the launch, too, but not with
the same eyes as our young Boolean. She is looking for
something."

Christophe cast him a sideways glance. "You
said the same thing about the girl at Admiralty Computing.
Remember, the pretty dark-haired one with the dimples? But she only
had eyes for Booleans."

"
Si
, I remember. But it wasn't just
me. Even Maggie agreed that girl was trouble. And Pugh had warned
you to stay away from the computers! But just because we were wrong
then doesn't mean you shouldn't be wary now," Miguel said, concern
etched on his face. As Mr. Holomek, one of the midshipmen,
approached them with a question dancing around his face, he added,
"It could be nothing. But until we know more about her, it would
not hurt to keep your distance."

~~~~

Gemma

Alone at last, Gemma pulled the paper out of
her reticule and smoothed it out on the desk. The stack of notes
and maps that Dr. Pugh had given her were on the corner, crying out
for attention. She reached for her copy of Lyell and found that it
was on the opposite side of the desk from where she had left it.
She narrowed her eyes as she retrieved it. She calmed herself with
the thought that Frau Knopf must have inspected her room
already.

She rested the book next to the message. She
didn't open the volume yet, as she did not yet know what page she
would need. Taking up her pencil, she set about calculating just
that.

The message itself was fairly short and
simple: "DATA FROM 1924-23-08 2ND SMPL". After that was a series of
numbers divided into triplets.

The first step was to look at the date
provided and the number that followed. The fact that it was a "data
sample" label was just to veil -- however thinly -- the meaning of
the numbers. Normal procedure was to sum up the digits in the date,
take the result, sum that up, and repeat the procedure until the
number was the number of digits dictated by the number following
the date. In this case, she reduced the date to two digits.

One plus nine plus two plus four plus... she
worked the sum in her head, reducing it until she came up with
eleven. She then opened her copy of Lyell to that page, which in
itself was just a page of geology text. No one who picked up the
book would notice anything unusual about it, as there
was
nothing unusual about it. Alone, it was just a book; there was no
reason to hide it, so there was no reason to fear a sudden
inspection of the room.

She examined the first triplet: 18 1 1. She
located the 18th line on the page and then found the first word and
the first letter of that particular word: "A". She wrote that
letter above the first triplet in a light hand. The next triplet, 1
4 2, led her to an "R". She continued until she completed the first
word: "ARTEMIS".

Artemis. Greek goddess of the hunt, twin
sister of Apollo. The first word of her first received message on a
job designated her code name for that mission, if she had not
received one already. She had used every name from "Rose" in
Shanghai to "Eve" in Prague in the past; why not add the name of a
goddess to the list?

The next sets of triplets revealed the entire
message: "ARTEMIS JESTER CHURCH SEAT TEST ORION OUI FRENCH
CRYSTAL".

She smiled; the double encryption that Mrs.
Brightman favoured was a bit of insurance. If anyone recognized the
book cipher in the message and broke it, they would not understand
the plaintext. It was usually gibberish, and it had the added
effect of making some people believe that they had made a
mistake.

All Brightman Girls memorized the Messaging
Protocol at a young age. None of it was ever committed to writing.
Much of her earlier training had involved prodigious rote
memorization to prepare her mind for this type of exercise. To
Gemma, it was just another facet of her mistress's brilliance, and
yet again she was grateful that such a genius had seen fit to take
her in. In the Brightman Protocol, in the first message received on
a mission, the second word indicated the code name of her target:
"JESTER".

Third word or even a phrase ... some clue as
to who the target was, in the event that the target had not been
pre-determined or if the target had changed. "CHURCH" by itself
might have led her to Alfieri, but "CHURCH SEAT" made her think
differently. Mrs. Brightman loved to play with words and sounds in
her messages. A "church seat" was a "pew". She didn't even have to
say that one aloud to realize that "JESTER" was the head of the
Cohort. Gemma had noticed over the years that Mrs. Brightman
reserved that particular code name for the more troublesome
targets. The use of it here on top of what she had gleaned from
Pugh earlier told her much about their mutuality of feeling.

So, Gemma was Artemis. Pugh was Jester, which
was surprising, given her previous admonition to watch the captain.
She continued through the message, looking for an explanation for
the change. The verb, "TEST", was a standard action word in the
Brightman vocabulary; it really meant "EXAMINE" or "INVESTIGATE"
the item that followed next, which was usually more direct:
"ORION".

That stopped her short. "Orion" was a
constellation, representing the Hunter. He was also the companion
of the namesake of her code designation. If she recalled correctly,
Artemis actually killed Orion -- in some stories, by accident, in
others...not so much.

Was Orion a person? An experiment? That was
the flaw with the double-cipher system. Not every situation was
covered by pre-arranged code words, and sometimes one was left to
decipher a third layer on one's own. Sometimes there were clues,
though, in the rest of the message: "FRENCH CRYSTAL". "Crystal"
always meant "watch", as in "look into a crystal ball and see". As
for "French", she suspected that Brightman had meant "Moreau". So
"Orion" had something to do with the captain. She supposed that
that was her assignment. At the very least, this was consistent
with Brightman's last words to her. But her specific mission was no
clearer.

She committed the plaintext to memory. Now
she did have something that would not bear Discovery; she had to
dispose of the decrypted message somehow. It certainly could not
stay in her room; it had to remain free of any tools of her craft.
She did not feel comfortable burying it in the sand of the fire
bucket by her door. There was no telling what Frau Knopf would
include in her threatened "inspections". Normally Gemma would burn
it. On Earth, fireplaces were always within easy reach, but not
here. Some of the Brightman Girls simply ate their messages. She
had discovered the hard way that ink simply did not agree with her
system, and she did not want to have to explain the mess in her
stateroom to Frau Knopf in case it decided to come back up.

This job was going to wring every bit of
innovation out of her. There might be an incinerator for refuse
somewhere on the ship, but she did not know where it was and likely
could not explain her presence there if she were seen. There was a
possibility of ejecting it from the ship, but she did not want to
deal with questions in case someone monitored the airlocks. She
wanted to give them a wide berth, anyway. If she were on a steam
ship, she could toss the paper off the back of the boat (downwind,
of course).

Nothing out here in the wild dark sky was the
same. She wondered if the unknown sender of the mysterious message
in the wireless window faced the same dilemma. Gemma still felt a
need to work out the text of that message as well, if she could
determine the cipher used. But that particular mystery could
wait.

She could still taste the goat's-milk cream
from the tea. She wished she had a mint -- and then she had an even
better idea. If she could get her new bosom friend Caroline to take
her to visit the goats, one of the cud-chewing beasts might just
have an extra snack that evening. She folded the paper and tucked
it into her reticule.

She would need to send a response in the
morning. At the moment, though, she did not have any news for them.
She did have a question, and it was one deeper than "where is my
bloody gear?" She still did not remember how Moreau's name seemed
so familiar to her. She would ask about his pedigree. That might
also give her a clue about Orion, in case the two were related
somehow.

She released a long sigh of relief. The
orrery would be as good a place as any to begin her search for
"Orion". After she changed back into her browns, she picked up Dr.
Pugh's notes and skimmed the first page. Perhaps she could glean
from them why the Red Planet was red, to have some tidbit of news
for her new allies. A few minutes later, as she heard Caroline's
knock on her door, she realized it was time to get to work.

"It's not to scale, of course," Mr. Davies
said, "but it works for our purposes."

He stood at the side of the chamber with his
hands clasped behind his back. He had discarded his hunter green
for a set of oil-stained dungarees. There was a hint of pride in
his stance as he stared across the waist-high rail that separated
them from the behemoth mechanism beyond.

The orrery was more like a garden, except
that planets grew in the place of roses; instead of blooming
amongst the music of birdsong and crickets, they thrived within the
beetle-like tick-tick-ticking of clockwork gears. The high domed
ceiling gave the chamber the air of a small cathedral. Smaller
niches bubbled off the sides of the room, like chapels around an
ambulatory. In place of an altar, there was a great gleaming orb
that represented the Sun. Circling about this metal giant was a
series of pole-mounted globes that glided along shiny brass
tracks.

"I count only four worlds here, Mr. Davies,"
Gemma observed. She may not be a true scientist, but she did know a
few things about natural philosophy. "I believe there are more in
the solar system, are there not?"

"Indeed, Miss Llewellyn. Point of order,
though. When we are all off duty and just us chickens," he said,
pointing to himself and to Caroline, "please feel free to call me
Nigel."