20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (40 page)

Pugh's hand rested on Christophe's shoulder,
which was shaking from the aftermath of his attack. "Perhaps we
should contact the--"

"Contact whom, exactly?" Rathbone asked.
"Headquarters? Why would they give you permission to discover one
of their own? Admiral Thorvaldson? Old Artur hasn't got the
foggiest idea what's happening under his nose." A bit of blood
dribbled off his lips.

"Their own?" Christophe shook Pugh's hand off
his shoulder. His carefully ordered world crumbled with every word
that Rathbone fired at him.

The prisoner gurgled for a second, speaking
through bleeding gums. "The TIA has Watchers of their own. A
Watcher that could be anyone, from the lowliest swabbie on up the
chain."

"Who, then?"

"Promises, Captain. Promises."

Pugh said, "Christophe, the regulations! On
your own you can't--"

"I can do what I need to do to protect my
ship," Christophe snarled without looking at him. "This is my
decision, Elias. On my own head be it. If our own people are trying
to kill us, I'm not concerned about disobeying orders! Very well,
Rathbone. You are granted immunity. From execution. But not from
confinement. You'll stay in the brig for the duration. I can't let
you talk to anyone else. Not after what you've seen. We'll give it
out that you had a nervous breakdown, just in case you do start
talking to someone. When we get back to Shackleton Station… well,
we'll see."

"And your pet?"

"I can't guarantee Maggie's behaviour. But
I'll order her to stay out of the brig," he said. He straightened
his spine and his jacket. He had to keep this from being a doomed
ship. "This is all contingent, of course, upon verification. You're
leveling a very serious charge at a member of my crew."

"Well, he's not as much a member of your crew
as you think. D'you really need a Cultural Officer, anyway?"

"Wallace?" Christophe asked, incredulous.

"You're certain of this?" Pugh demanded.

"Positive. You can verify it with the message
archives. Been readin' his messages since I cracked his code. Long
ones. Detailed ones. He's none too fond of you, Dr. Pugh, I can
tell you that. I found most of Orion in his messages, what it was,
at least. About the captain being, shall we say, custom ordered.
Not the how. That's what I was needin'. How Frankenstein put
together this particular creature."

"What's Wallace going to do? I hardly believe
he would want to martyr himself as well."

"Don't reckon that was in his plans. Go have
a look at the
Iron Wind
, Captain. Do an inventory of the
ship's stores. You might find some missing items in its hold. Don't
know exactly what he meant to do to the ship. He was smart enough
to leave that out of his messages. But one thing is for sure. He's
going to do something. He's going to do it soon. And he doesn't
expect to hang around to admire his handiwork."

"How do you--"

"It's what I would do."

"Sinister minds think alike, I suppose," said
Dr. Pugh. "I'll work with the Booleans to verify his claim. We need
to know before we act. Can we distract him until then?"

"Oh, you'll need more than the messages,
Captain. You'll need his code to read them. It's a doozy, that one.
Took me forever to crack. Been workin' on it ever since we
launched."

"Wallace!" Christophe punched the wall of the
chamber and let loose a string of curses. "Our own people! We'll
never make it to Mars if we keep fighting each other! We'll never
make it anywhere!"

"That's what you don't understand," Rathbone
answered with a frozen laugh, one devoid of mirth. "That's what his
messages were about. You weren't meant to make it to Mars. Fighting
the Martians is not the point. Not the point at all."

"Then what is the point of all this? Why go
to all this trouble, all this expense--"

"Most of the people what funded it aren't in
on it. Wallace is using what others have built for his own ends. He
isn't trying to continue a war, you fool. He's trying to prevent
one. On Earth."

"Prevent one?"

"Don't be such a prat. Anyone that can read a
newspaper should guess that half of Europe is chomping at the bit
to get back to business as usual now that the post-Invasion
love-festival is fading out. And what else is our business, but to
fight each other? I'm sure Pugh here taught you some history.
Humans have never been nice to each other without some profit in
it. We'd rather fight it out any old day, no matter what we signed
at the Invasion Conference. It would've been messy enough with what
we can cook up on our own. Then the Martians dropped by for a visit
and left their toys behind: Black Smoke, walking machines, heat
rays, Red Weed. Imagine what we can do to each other now! We can
finish what the tentacle-heads started! Wallace and his fellows
want to hold that off as long as they can. At least, until they can
get the worst of the leftovers under their own control and they can
wring some profit from it. Then they can dictate who is in charge
of it all."

"But what does that have to do with us?" Pugh
asked.

"Martyrs. Wallace needs martyrs, not victors.
If we lose a crew to the Martians, it buys them some time." He
rubbed his hands together, almost enjoying his revelations. "Oh,
once I broke his codes -- and there ain't a code I can't break -- I
read more than I cared to, more than even Brightman had told me.
Bit of a nasty shock to find out who they were trying to bring back
to life. Ha! A daft idea, maybe even more daft than going to Mars
in the first place. And instead of the grand hero, they got you.
They found the best possible use for their failure. A kind of
success, I reckon." He spat on the floor again. "Your mission is to
die, you freak. All of you. Die here in space. A little disaster
for the folks back home, so they'll hold off killing each other for
just a little bit longer. Maybe they'll say, oh, the engines went
bad. Maybe they'll say, oh, the Martians outgunned 'em. The story
doesn't really matter, does it? As long as they have martyrs.
You're fodder. Your face on all those little cards. That's what
they want. Like all the Sophie the Steamfitter smut. It's to stir
people up, get them all on one side. The TIA's side. For just a
little while longer."

Christophe ground his teeth. He had never
trusted Wallace, true, but he had never fathomed anything like
this. He had to find the man, he had to find the truth, find--

The harsh lights of the cell sputtered and
died, leaving them in darkness for a heartbeat until the dimmer
emergency illumination flickered on. Christophe glanced at the
brig's monitor, and it glared back at him with one baleful red eye.
Christophe had not seen the red one lit since the lunar voyage.

"We're on batteries only," Christophe said as
he held his hand out to steady Pugh, who had stumbled in the
darkness. "Power's out."

"Looks like he's already set to go," said
Rathbone.

~~~~

Gemma

The glass walls shimmered in the light of
Maggie's "nest". Gemma examined her new cell as she nibbled bacon
and tried to ignore the purring Martian in the corner. It was far
easier to focus on the walls and the strange symbols that marched
across them.

"You've been a busy little squid, haven't
you?" she asked in a dry voice. She felt that if this creature were
going to harm her, it would have already. An annoyance at her own
fear crept over her.

"Please don't call me that," she heard the
Man from Shanghai say in her head. "My name is Maggie."

Rather than answer, Gemma kept one wary eye
on the beast as she tore into some of the other items from the tray
and felt her strength return. There was very little, it seemed,
that bacon could not cure. She washed the salty taste down with the
gin.

Gemma recognized Dr. Pugh's scrawl peeking
out here and there from the forest of letters. After her tenure as
his pupil, she could decipher most of it. Notes on the Code of Life
coated the room like blood cells on a microscope slide. His notes
could act as a Rosetta stone for this new jungle of
information.

Her mission was dead, but her curiosity was
not. Gemma had enjoyed the learning, albeit after the fact. She
hungered for more, despite her current discomfort.

Not to mention, the notes also distracted her
from thinking about Christophe.

Had she felt something for the captain? She
had felt something, to be sure, but she was at a loss to name it.
She could not call it love, as it was as unfamiliar to her as the
landscape of Mars. Despite Father Alfieri's sermon, she could not
compare that celebrated sentiment with the tangled feelings
bouncing around in her head.

For most of the trip, she had felt annoyance
where he was concerned. But there in the Gardens, when they had
both let their guard down, she had felt something else. The feeling
had been close cousin to what she had felt for her Philippa, her
Jennie, and it had warmed her. During that time, she had enjoyed
his company, and he had treated her as an equal.

Her computer's mind shifted gears. Could she
use what she had felt for Jennie as a Rosetta stone, as well? Could
one form of love help her understand the others that Alfieri had
mentioned? Could it be that her love for Jennie was what she felt
for Christophe?

She had wanted the man to kiss her. She had
wanted that kiss, in that moment. But a desire for a kiss did not
encompass what Alfieri had said about love. Did she even want that
kiss now?

She had recoiled from Christophe -- as she
had on the inside from every other man -- when she had discovered
what he was. But now? Having been fed bacon by a purring creature
that was basically his mother, having rested a little and imbibed a
little liquid courage, she wasn't so repelled. She wasn't even sure
how to name what he was. But there was one thing she was sure of:
something still stirred deep inside her when she remembered that
almost-kiss.

That very moment, which had been so fuzzy for
the past hour, was coming back to her now as her headache receded.
He had been about to ask her something. He needed to know
something. "Do you trust me?" he had asked. What did he need to
know? What had he been about to ask, if not the old standard "do
you love me" tripe found in the penny dreadfuls? What else could it
have been? She scowled at the walls again, wishing she could find
the answer written there.

"Maggie," she mused aloud, "I think the Code
of Life will be easier to decode than men ever will be."

Maggie squealed in what might have been
agreement. She tapped a section of the wall with a tentacle so
urgently that Gemma turned her attention to the diagrams there.

Pugh had described Maggie as a researcher.
Gemma no longer needed to question how Pugh had analyzed the Code
of Life. He needed neither machine, nor microscope, nor analytical
engine to analyze Codes; there was no algorithm to steal. There was
no secret formula to encode in a furtive frenzy and hurl through
space over the wireless to a waiting Mrs. Brightman, even if Gemma
had still been so inclined.

There was just Maggie.

Maggie was the true author of this research.
Pugh and his team had taken all the credit and left the real
creator none.

"Typical," Gemma said with a snort. "And Pugh
said he didn't use computers."

"He has his reasons," came the reply. The
words slipped into Gemma's brain so easily, so painlessly, like a
voice buried deep in her memory, though she had never heard it out
loud before. "I doubt the Royal Society dinners could accommodate
my dietary requirements, anyway."

As Maggie "spoke", Curiosity and Hysteria
were at it again. Curiosity won this round and stuffed Hysteria
into a mental corner in the back of her head. Gemma could sense no
malice in Maggie's movements or unique method of speech, and she
began to relax a little more (perhaps it was the gin talking) and
watched the researcher continue her work. Two chains of Code
appeared in impossibly tiny hand -- or tentacle, as the case might
be. Each was labeled, but she could not discern the letters printed
there. Arrows pointed from the set to a third chain. As she looked
more closely, she saw that the last chain seemed to contain a very
specific blend of the codes above. It was labeled clearly as "C.
Moreau".

He was a bespoke hero, after all.

She gritted her teeth as she sat up to read
the labels on the other chains. The leftmost of the top two bore
the label "E. Pugh". That confirmed it; Pugh was his father, after
a fashion. That was no surprise.

The second was labeled "Nobody". That wasn't
a proper name in any language that she knew. Was it a label for an
unknown person? But why would they use Code from someone they
didn't know? No, knowing Dr. Pugh, that was not the case. Perhaps
Maggie was not given the person's name. Or it was an alias, then,
for a secret within a secret, Christophe's mysterious "other
father". Or, perhaps, another mother? Or to partially "blind" the
process?

She looked at Maggie, as if to ask her a
question, when she noticed that the creature had put down the
grease pencils and had picked up, of all things, a pair of knitting
needles. They were longer than normal, probably to accommodate her
longer limbs, but they were, for all intents and purposes, knitting
needles. The makings of a woolen scarf tumbled from them, and the
letter "M" scrolled out from the end. Was the Martian knitting a
scarf for her "son"? The sight of it was so absurd that Gemma could
not help but laugh, even though her ribs screamed as she did
so.

"So, even you could not escape the Knitting
Circle of Doom, eh?" Gemma remarked with a chuckle.

Maggie gurgled at her in what Gemma assumed
must be her version of a laugh.

"Space is cold," the voice in her head said
again. "I must keep my little bud warm."