20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (3 page)

"We made use of the spoils of war!" Captain
Moreau replied. "They invaded us. It was ours by rights."

"Bah. Theft!"

"Reverse Engineering!"

"How is it that we are not falling back to
Earth?" Gemma interrupted.

Dr. Pugh snorted at the question and mumbled
something about the current state of women in the natural
philosophies.

The captain's voice swelled with pride as he
answered. "Believe it or not, Miss Llewellyn, we are falling! We
are moving fast enough sideways at the same time that we end up
staying in place. It feels like we are standing still, but we are
moving at an incredible rate of speed. We feel the pull of Earth
beneath us as she seeks to pull us back into her embrace. That
keeps the station from drifting away. The movement keeps us in
place and prevents our falling. It is a perfect balance." He gave
her a long searching look, and then he turned his gaze to the ship
below them. "We are in orbit, my lady. Even when we are standing
completely still, we are moving faster than humans have ever moved
before. We are so high in the sky that we should be floating inside
the station. Do you know how it is that you can stand on the
floor?"

"More purloined technology," Dr. Pugh
growled. "We know how to build it, but we don't understand the
physics that makes it work."

The captain waved him off. "Gravity plates.
They are on the ship, too."

"Thank the good Lord for that," Dr. Pugh
replied. "If the ladies' skirts went flying up during tea, the
Cultural Officer would be quite put out."

"The wireless transistors in our suit helmets
were all ours," the captain countered. "We managed to shrink those
down all on our own." He smiled down at Gemma. "So, what do you
think?"

"She is ... unbelievable," Gemma stammered.
Her voice was a hair above a whisper as she watched the glow of the
test fade away. "Astounding. I believe she's larger than the
Titanic
!"

"Ah, that lady's been plying the seas for
twelve years, now," Dr. Pugh said. "This one could hold several of
those old girls. She's over five hundred meters long, but most of
that is for the Oberths. Do you know how she got her name, young
lady?"

Everyone knew the ship's history by now,
especially those orphaned by the Great Invasion. It had changed the
lives of everyone on Earth. Some things are so horrible that, once
glimpsed, they cannot be unseen. The Invasion had been that
horrible.

It had changed
everything
.

The Launch Coil, Shackleton Station, and the
ship had all been born out of one horrible, all-consuming need:
vengeance.

In 1901, the last year of the long reign of
Queen Victoria, they fell from the sky. The astronomers observing
the flashes of gas on their nearest planetary neighbor had no idea
what fire was about to rain down upon the Earth. Tentacled monsters
in hollow cylinders had plummeted down onto all the continents. The
creatures, all brain and no heart, had wrecked the countryside
around London, destroying Woking, Leatherhead, and a hundred other
villages. Other nations, from the European Continent to Africa to
the Americas, had reported similar devastation across their
territories.

The Invaders had left widows, orphans, and
suddenly childless parents in their wake. They had smashed homes
with their tripods and burnt entire forests with their heat rays.
They had captured mothers, grandfathers, and little babies and
drained them to the last drop of their blood.

The steamship
Thunder Child
had been
one of the first vessels to fight back against the aliens. Her crew
had sacrificed themselves as they destroyed one of the Martian
machines that threatened a nearby vessel.

After a month of wanton destruction across
the globe, the aliens perished where they stood, struck down by
common pestilence. Many had called their deliverance the Wrath of
God.

Gemma wasn't sure what to call it.

The Invasion had put a cork in a powder keg
of Earth's own making. Tempers had flared across Europe for years
before the aliens had landed. The Hague Convention of 1899 had
attempted to restrain the storm many had sensed was approaching.
The appearance of the Martians not long afterwards had calmed the
winds, but only for a little while as the nations recovered and
rebuilt. Crowned heads realized that new technologies not bound by
the Convention had fallen into their laps. A hastily convened
Second Hague Convention, the Invasion Conference, was called in
1902 by peace proponents around the world, including prominent
industrialists and philanthropists that had managed to weather the
Invasion. Scientists and "peaceniks" had called for research into
the alien technology for the benefit of all; war hawks had demanded
the ability to defend their people against future Invasions, from
within or without. The new Treaty had forged a compromise when it
founded the Terran Industrial Alliance.

Greater than a conglomerate, but not quite a
superstate, the TIA had won from the Convention unprecedented
rights and powers to act on a global scale. This included
everything up to and including the right to declare war upon the
Martians on behalf of the Treaty signatories.

The new organization had confiscated all the
Martian technology it could salvage in order to research it and
re-engineer it for human use. They allowed bits of it to trickle
out at a time, ostensibly preserving the bulk of it for when the
world could use such treasures amongst themselves in a peaceful
fashion, like good little children.

Even as the TIA pushed the state of industry
ahead with the Martian treasures, they fought to keep people's
minds on the world that they had lost. The Ministry of Culture, a
branch of the TIA that had a consulate in every capital, had frozen
certain customs and sensibilities in place and time, but with the
force of commerce (and the Convention's blessing) rather than that
of law.

Fashion, which would normally ebb and flow
with the times, was at a standstill. Hats, parasols and other
accoutrements that might have died out over the years on their own
became
costume de rigeur
. TIA member corporations owned
every facet of public life, from the House of Worth down to the
last Jacquard loom, every publishing house and newspaper, and most
laboratories that studied everything from biology to astronomy.
They decided what was worn and what was seen. Newer fashions (lower
waistlines, higher hemlines) attempted to surface from time to
time, but most of those efforts were either home-brewed or
disappeared from the market quickly as their designers were quietly
bought out.

In the meantime, the machines had been torn
apart, examined to the last millimeter, and rebuilt to carry humans
to the Red Planet. The resulting ship had been named the
Thunder
Child's Fury
in memory of those who had first fought the
Invaders. The official war cry of
Terra Vigila!
-- Earth,
Awaken! -- marched across her hull.

A passenger on the ship rescued by the
Thunder Child
had survived to record all that he had
witnessed in a journal known simply as the
Invasion
Chronicle
. It had, as the Invasion Conference had decreed,
become part of every schoolchild's education in every nation and
every language.

That included the very private education of
Gemma Llewellyn. Petunia Brightman had found her in the ashes of
the Woking massacre, next to her parents' bodies. Gemma, just an
infant at the time, had no memory of them. No other family members
had appeared to claim her. The schoolmistress, in her kindness, had
taken her in along with many other Invasion Orphans. She had given
them a home, an education, and a purpose. Brightman's institution
was more than just a school or an orphanage; it was home.

Gemma trembled as she turned the story over
and over inside her mind. History stretched out before her in this
metal monster; here was her chance to avenge her world, her unknown
parents, and the loss of so many lives. She was aware that the two
men were staring at her, awaiting an answer, but she kept her
thoughts locked in her heart. She simply stared at the ship, trying
to drink it all in.

Captain Moreau broke the long silence. "We
carry part of the original
Thunder Child
with us, you know.
They recovered some of the wreckage from the bottom of the Thames
some time ago. They melted down the hull and used that in
constructing the bits that were not part of the original Martian
cylinders. Her bell is our ship's bell, cleaned, gleamed, and ready
for war. We carry the heart of our predecessor with us."

They turned at the sound of footsteps behind
them. A crewman appeared in the entryway to the observation
deck.

"Pardon the interruption, Captain," he said
with a salute. "The Oberth tests are complete, and it is safe to
use the gangway now. You may board at your leisure."

The captain saluted back. "Thank you, Ensign.
Dr. Pugh, Miss Llewellyn, would you please follow me?"

He led them down the corridor and took the
lift to a lower deck. The upper deck had been nearly empty, but
this one was aflutter with activity. Crewmen had lined up on the
station side of the door during the tests; now they pushed wagons
filled with provisions through the cavernous boarding area, which
bristled with the blue uniforms of the crew.

The crewman that had come to fetch the
captain preceded them through the door.

"Captain on deck!" he called out.

Everyone froze in a tableau of salutes.

"As you were," the captain said with a return
salute. Even as the mass of people began moving again, the small
party was able to navigate freely as the crew made way. Moreau was
a good head taller than most of the men around him, so it was easy
to follow him in the crowd, which funneled down to a single line of
people and carts on the gangway.

The caravan passed through a pair of thick
doors and entered a small windowless tunnel. Its floor did not feel
entirely stable, and the walls looked as if they could collapse
like an accordion at any moment. In an odd way, Gemma felt slightly
lighter as she walked through it, almost as if she were wading
through water. She felt heavier as they reached the other side.

"Ah, they still haven't fixed the
manufactured gravity here," Dr. Pugh grumbled. "And we're still
entering through the cargo bay. They really were in a hurry to make
the launch window, weren't they?"

The other side was even busier than the
station. Rows of crates and boxes marched on either side of her
down the long sides of the cargo bay.

"I am sorry, Miss Llewellyn," the captain
said. Some of the shine left his eyes as they looked around. "They
didn't have time to complete the formal entryways. We had a
substantial refit after the shakedown cruise, and some things had
to wait in order for us to make the launch window, as the good Dr.
Pugh stated. However, later versions of the Victory Class should
have a formal reception area."

She nodded. Secretly, she was grateful for
this peek behind the scenes, for this chance to see the inner
workings of the
Fury
. Absent were the overwhelming aromas of
tar, sea salt, and mildew that had been her constant companions
since London, though the tang of hot, sweaty men was universal. A
pungent undertone of barnyard crept beneath the scents of oil,
rubber, and that strange fragrance that had followed her across the
tunnel, lost somewhere between a seared chunk of beef and hot
metal. Crates of every conceivable size lined the walls as far as
she could see, and the buzz of barked orders to move this or shove
that out of the way was a welcome cacophony after the stale quiet
of the station.

I must be tired
, she thought.
I
hear hens clucking in the distance
.

"Ah, Captain!" a man's voice. "Jolly good to
see you again."

They turned to see a man that might have
stepped off the painted cover of
Vanity Fair
. His uniform
insignia was so shiny that he practically blinded Gemma. She could
smell the pomade in his hair -- Murray's Superior -- from five feet
away. A pince-nez perched on his nose, and a thick handlebar
moustache with the sharpest curls she had ever seen on a man
concealed his thin lips.

He bowed to them. "Arthur Gordon Wallace, at
your service. I am the official representative of the Terran
Industrial Alliance's Ministry of Culture for this voyage. So
pleased to see you again, Captain, Dr. Pugh. And who is this lovely
young lady?"

As the captain introduced her, Dr. Pugh
wandered away to talk to another man in laboratory brown.

"You had a pleasant trip, I trust?" asked Mr.
Wallace. "We take great steps to ensure the civility of the ground
and station crews."

Gemma sighed internally. As if politeness
were the most vital aspect of hurtling through the sky at greater
than the speed of sound. "Yes, quite. Thank you, Mr. Wallace."

"Excellent, Miss. I hope to see you again at
tea tomorrow. We must remain civil, even when we are twenty million
leagues from home. If you will excuse me, I must have a word in
private with Captain Moreau."

She nodded and stepped away from them. Unsure
of where she should go next, Gemma examined the crew bustling about
her.

"Oi!" Yet another voice came at her out of
the fog of noise. "Didn't I see you dancing in Luxembourg City a
while ago?"

Gemma turned to see a wild-eyed crewman
gawking at her. The leer on his face took her aback. She managed to
squeak, "I beg your pardon?"

"I did! I did see you!" He clapped and
shuffled about on the deck. His hunter green uniform -- which made
him stand out from the other crewmen -- fluttered as he danced
about. He shook his head in disbelief. "I swear there was a girl on
stage at the Cirque du Lune not long ago ... she did that Oriental
dancing with lots of feathers and little else. Lovely gams, she
had! You're wearing a lot more now, to be sure, but come on now, be
a lamb and do a shimmy for us."