20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (38 page)

"Upset
her
?" Gemma asked, fighting the
panic rising in her aching chest.

The beak clicked twice in response, and the
round blue eyes above it blinked. In Gemma's mind, she thought she
heard the Man from Shanghai whisper, "Yes."

Pugh walked between her and the creature he
called "Maggie" and continued in a gentle voice. "Don't worry about
your change of togs. We did not watch! Maggie handled that for us.
She thought that one of Christophe's old sailing shirts might be
more comfortable than that scratchy old jacket. Especially with
those bandages." Embarrassment coloured his laugh as he witnessed
disgust and horror spread across her face. "Not to worry,
Llewellyn. She was very careful to avoid injuring you further.
Trust me, if she can dress a squirming two-year-old," he said as he
cast a meaningful nod at Christophe, "she can handle an unconscious
patient. She's quite good at it, actually."

"Maggie," Gemma managed to stammer. She
swallowed twice before she could speak again. "This
thing
,
this Martian, is Maggie? This is your other assistant?"

Maggie squealed and rolled away to the far
side of the room and sagged into the floor, like a lump of sad
pudding. Gemma blinked again, but the alien was still there.

"Please don't call her a thing," Christophe
said softly. He leaned closer and whispered, "She's very
sensitive."

"Impossible," Gemma whispered.

The Invaders were all dead. They could not
survive contact with humans for long; that was the gospel of the
Invasion Chronicle
. What, then, was this creature that
sulked in the corner?

She stumbled over her words. "Th-that
Martian…"

The monster gurgled as Gemma spoke and
huddled even more into the corner, if that were possible for such a
brute.

"She saved you," Christophe said with more
than a twinge of indignation in his voice, as if she had called his
mother a warthog. He leaned back into the chair beside her low bed.
"She pulled Rathbone off you before-- well, before. You should be
grateful to her."

"
Saved
me?
Grateful
?" she
cried. "To an enemy? Christophe, these -- these demons -- they
killed my parents! Cervantes' parents! Brightman did this--"

"No, no, no, love," Christophe cooed as he
took her waving hands into his own, "the
Martians
did that.
This is
Maggie
. She's one of us. She's Terran."

She could not bear the hope shining in his
eyes. Her gaze trailed down to his hands, which seemed to swallow
up her own smaller ones between them. If he had stated that dragons
had taken up gardening at Windsor castle, she would not have been
more stunned. Despite the throbbing behind her own eyes, she sat
up, hands still caged within the captain's, and turned her
attention back to Pugh.

"Where is Rathbone?" Gemma demanded.

Pugh shook his head as he replied, "The brig.
He needed some rest. The poor fellow kept blathering on about
Martians on the ship."

"Well, aren't there?" She yanked her hands
away from the captain and pointed a quivering finger at the alien
in the corner.

The elderly scientist folded his arms over
his chest and leaned back against the wall near the moping Maggie.
Pugh sighed, as if he were repeating a formula to a lazy student
for the forty-fifth time. "Maggie is just as Terran as you or I,
Gemma. She's simply not human."

"Terran? Human? What's the difference?" she
sputtered.

"A great deal, I'm afraid," Pugh
answered.

Gemma pursed her lips as she realized that
something did not add up. "You and I are human, you said. What
about Christophe?"

Pugh spread his hands in a helpless gesture.
Christophe just beamed at her with that ridiculous, toothy,
full-faced, open-mouthed raised-eyebrow grin of his.

"Well?"

"Well, I am Terran," Christophe admitted.
"Close enough."

Gemma sank back into the pillows. His face
crumpled as she recoiled from him, but she could not help it. All
the wind had blown out of her sails at last. She focused her
attention on Pugh, instead, so that she could not see the agony
bubbling up on the captain's face. Hysteria jousted with Curiosity
deep in her mind.

This cannot be
, she thought.

She had often mocked this young man in her
thoughts for being not quite real. She had had no clue that she was
right.

Curiosity won.

"You're going to have to explain that," she
said at last, unable to disguise the weariness in her voice.

"Maggie is not the only one of her kind,"
Pugh said. "There are several second-generations. Remember that
crash on Mount Cook I mentioned on your first day? The victims
weren't human. That's why it wasn't in the papers."

"There are others?"

"Most of them are in the custody of other
departments. Who do you think did most of the construction work in
orbit before Shackleton Station was finished? The poor brutes." Dr.
Pugh sniffed. "Well, our Martians are better than their Martians,
of course."

Maggie gurgled. Pugh turned to her and said,
"Yes, yes, I am sorry, Maggie, you are still Terran. I was simply
making a point. Give the girl time."

"I don't understand. Where did she come from?
The
Chronicle
said--"

"The
Invasion Chronicle
only told part
of the story. Not all of the Invasion Orphans were human, Gemma,"
Pugh explained. "The Martians 'bud off' without sexual
recombination, thereby creating a perfect copy of themselves. They
are especially prone to do this if they sense death is near. We
know this because we have witnessed it. Several of the Invaders
managed to bud off after they had fed and before they had perished
of disease.

"They left their children behind. Living
children. Children nearly identical to the parent, with one major
exception. Apparently, they have the ability to control what Code
the copy receives, as long as they have that Code in them. Do you
remember their means of nourishment?"

"They drink blood! How could I forget?"

"Yes. To them, though, the consumption of
blood is far more than sustenance. It is the collection of data, of
Code. Once a Martian consumes blood, it seems, the Code within is
available for use. These particular Martians managed to mix enough
human Code with their own, and enough of their victims' antibodies,
to give their progeny human immunities. Therefore, their children
did not die from our diseases. Maggie is one of those children. But
something went horribly wrong with her, at least from a Martian
point of view. She has far more of the human touch than they
expected. She is hardly, as the
Chronicle
would say, 'cool
and unsympathetic'. She has the heart of a lioness, and she
protects her cubs. She loves. She understands."

Maggie purred her way through the end of
Pugh's speech. Gemma felt as if she would vomit, and she had to
work hard to ignore Christophe as he fidgeted next to her.

"So, she is partly human? And her children
will have her immunity? Can she--"

"Species is no object," Pugh said.
"Naturally, we feed her from livestock and not from people. She has
budded off several times and produced a variety of other
creatures." Gemma could not help but notice his slight glance in
Christophe's direction.

"I think we should tell her all of it,"
Christophe said. "We've gone this far."

"What else is there?" Gemma asked. "What
makes you
just
Terran?"

Dr. Pugh rested his hand on Christophe's
shoulder. "As I said, species is no object. And it doesn't take
much of a sample to capture a Code, if that is all one wants. A
crumb is sufficient, instead of the cake entire, if one is not
hungry, to get the job done. We don't have to kill to copy."

Gemma's thoughts froze. Comprehension escaped
her, or at least, she wished that it had. She looked from
Christophe to Pugh, then to Maggie, then to Pugh and back again to
the young man in front of her.

"Dr. Pugh," she asked, unsure of how much
longer she could remain so calm in this tiny spot of insanity,
"h-how much blood did you have to give to Maggie? I know there is
some of you in there somewhere." Christophe looked shocked at her
conclusion, but Pugh simply smiled at her as she stammered on.
"I've heard you call him 'son'. Don't deny it. I am a trained
observer, Dr. Pugh. You have only sharpened that knife in my time
with you. You are his father!"

Pugh laughed. "That's my Llewellyn. I knew
you would figure it out eventually. Yes, yes, I am his father.
Well, after a fashion. But I'm not the only one." At Gemma's
puzzled look, he added, "Later. You are a tad weak for the whole
story just yet, child. Suffice it to say, long ago, we gave Maggie
some Code samples. We asked her to use them to create a commander
for us. We needed a leader for this mission. She budded off. That
bud now sits before you."

Gemma stared at Christophe in a state of
utter shock. She had seen no sign, no evidence, that he was
anything other than a randy, red-blooded human male. He offered her
only another of his nervous chuckles in response. Rathbone's remark
about "that failed experiment they call captain" crept out of her
memory and leered at her. She had been about to die at Rathbone's
hands; his intimation was likely true. Why would he lie at a time
like that? No, no, they had not told her everything. Not yet.

"But you're not… y-you don't have any--"

Dr. Pugh. "I assure you, child, that many
members of the fairer sex have examined him thoroughly and
confirmed that he is completely normal. The tests were repeated and
redundant, and the results were always consistent."

Christophe did not even have the decency to
blush at that, although he did chuckle. He merely said, "Elias, I
think we should tell her everything. There is yet another thing,
Gemma. Dear, dear Gemma. There is a chance you could be--"

"Let's stick with what we know, Christophe.
For now, the facts only. There are other things we need to ask her
first."

"I think I've heard enough for the moment,"
she said. Curiosity screamed in the back of her head, hungry for
more, but her Hysteria informed her that it was quite full, for
now.

"You do need to rest," Pugh said. "Dr.
Hansard was quite put out that we removed you from sick bay.
However, we could not speak openly to you there, once you were out
of the worst danger. As for your ribs, you are deeply bruised but
unbroken. You are now part of a very small circle that knows of
Maggie's existence, Gemma. It is your turn to speak frankly to us,
and then we'll let you rest a bit. I have a notion about why
Rathbone attacked you, but I need to hear it from you. And so, I
think, does your captain."

Gemma did not answer.

"He was your Watcher, was he not?" Pugh
demanded. "I know Brightman's methods. And you know I know."

"Watcher?" asked Christophe. He did not seem
as surprised as he should be. "Brightman smuggled one of her Boys
on board after all?"

Gemma stared daggers at Pugh. "How much have
you told him?"

"You are here and not in the brig, child. I
told him enough. That man tried to kill you. He very nearly
succeeded. Out with it."

"Yes," she admitted. "At least, he said he
was my Watcher. I did not know she'd managed to get one on the
ship, not until he--"

She hesitated. Memories of Rathbone gave way
to images of Humboldt's face just before he had crumpled to the
floor. "What is Mr. Humboldt's condition?"

"Alive," said Pugh. "Unconscious, last we saw
him, but alive. Still in sick bay, since he didn't see Maggie.
Don't change the subject."

"Gemma," Christophe interrupted. "We need to
know why he revealed himself. There had to be a reason. Why did
Brightman send the pair of you here?"

He reached for her hands again; when she
flinched, he held his hands up in a gesture of resignation and then
let them hang limp at his sides.

"Please," he said. "Please, tell me. As the
captain of this ship, I can protect you, but I need to know what
the danger is. What were you looking for? Did Brightman send anyone
else?"

She clenched her eyes shut. At this point,
there was no reason not to fill in the gaps. She had been
Discovered. This man -- if she could call him that -- knew the
worst parts of it already. The Man from Shanghai stirred in the
back of her mind, and she corrected herself. He knew the
second-worst parts.

"I was not even sure there was a Watcher
aboard, until he attacked," she recalled, eyes still fast shut,
leaving the memory of Humboldt's research in the vault of her
heart. "My task was to search for something called 'Orion'." She
opened her eyes to see their reaction, and the look that passed
between Pugh and the captain did not escape her notice. "But I have
no inkling of what that is. She gave me no details. Just the orders
to search for it. He was here, I think, to make sure I found it. He
was angry over what happened with Nigel's child. We stole her from
Brightman. I honestly have no knowledge of anyone else. But--"

"Yes?" the two men asked at once.

"Rathbone said something else." The throbbing
in her head raged now, and the noise of it made it difficult to
think. She pushed past the agony of it and pulled Rathbone's words
out of the haze. "Something I just now recall. 'Time's out. Time's
out for everybody. I've got to find it and get out
before
.'"

"Before what?" asked Pugh.

"That is when Maggie struck," she replied.
"She cut him off. He seemed most urgent about it, though, as if
some disaster were imminent. I got the impression that he might not
have revealed himself otherwise. He had decided to take over my
task because time was running out. But what the danger was, he did
not say."