20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (41 page)

Gemma gazed at the creature for a moment in a
mixture of amusement and befuddlement. The warmth of the last drops
of gin glowed within her as she drank them. Only the pressing pain
in her ribs kept her from guffawing at the thought of the tall,
lanky Christophe as an infant cradled in Maggie's tentacles. The
mental image was far too ridiculous to hold any terror or disgust
in it.

Gemma had nothing to fear here.

This is why she could not find Orion, no
matter how hard she had searched through Pugh's office. Orion was
not some formula, or a file, or anything so mundane. Orion was
flesh. Orion was alive. Orion was Christophe Moreau, the master and
commander of the
Thunder Child's Fury
. That infuriating man,
the one who had made her laugh, the one that earlier today she had
so wanted to kiss. They were one and the same. Orion had been in
front of her, all along.

And just when she didn't need to find it, it
had presented itself to her. But there was something more to it
than just churning out people like fabric from a jacquard loom. Why
would Brightman be interested in that? Had her former mistress even
understood enough about Orion to know what she really wanted? Had
she known that a Maggie was required to carry it out? Without a
Martian, this knowledge was useless.

A new thought left her cold. She knew what
happened to the older students, now. Was this how she planned to
continue her work when the first ones aged out? Create fresh ones
out of the old?

She could not let it go. Gemma set her
computer's mind to work on the problem. There was nothing else to
do but moan or watch Maggie stitch more rows on the scarf.

"Where else have I heard that name, Maggie?"
she mused aloud. "Orion. Orion. Oh, it's as bothersome as 'Moreau'!
Must have been back during that astronomy job last year at Oxford.
What did the professor say? The constellation of Orion was
associated with Osiris? That Egyptian fellow?"

"Yes," the voice replied. "Pugh told me the
story. His wife, Isis, brought Osiris back to life after his
brother killed him."

Gemma remained silent as she ran through the
possibilities. Rathbone, for all his insanity and anger, was right.
The greatest wonder out here was not the ship. The
Fury
was
just a vehicle. It was going to wondrous places, yes, and it was
terribly complicated; but it was still only a horseless carriage on
a different road. This was something altogether different,
something orders of magnitude greater.

One could do more with this than create new
people. One could copy a person.

One could bring the dead back to life.

One could be a god.

And that's when the lights went out.

~~~~

Christophe

"Damn that Wallace!" Christophe spat into the
yawning darkness of the Oberth deck. "Damn him, damn, damn, damn
him! Five more, five!"

Christophe seethed as he held the lifeless
body of Chief Nesbitt. The engineer's uniform was soaked in the
blood that poured from the gash in his throat. The poor fellow
hadn't even had time to cry out. Christophe screamed for him,
another crewmember lost to a useless and brutal death. And if the
power was not back online soon, he would lose the rest of them.

He had to find Wallace. He had to find
Wallace and end this madness.

Pugh called from one dark corner.
"Christophe! A live one! Over here! Call Hansard!"

Nearly blind with fury, Christophe made his
way to the pipephone and called sick bay.

As he hung up, Pugh said, "I think he got all
the on-duty engineers. Where is that bastard?"

"There's only one place he could be,"
Christophe replied as he jogged towards the corridor. "Elias, have
the master-at-arms and his men meet me at the
Iron Wind
.
They're already closer than we are."

"Can't Pritchard just stop him from the
bridge?"

"No! It's designed to launch independently!
Get Pritchard and the off-duty engineers down here to look at the
Oberths. I'm for Wallace."

"Are you armed?"

"Leyden pistol's been on me ever since before
the Rathbone incident," Christophe called behind him as he patted
the holster at his side.

He broke into a full run, his long legs like
pistons driving him towards whatever awaited him.

~~~~

Gemma

Maggie jolted when the lights flickered back
on at half-strength, as if she had been bitten by a snake. Her
knitting soared across the room and smashed into the wall.

"What is it?" Gemma asked aloud.

"Christophe!" Maggie's manly voice said in
her mind. "There is danger. Someone has harmed the ship." She
rolled towards the door into the mysterious corridor. "I have to go
help him. Stay here, where you are safe."

Gemma stirred in the bedclothes and attempted
to stand. "Is it Rathbone? I should go with you."

"No, no, it isn't," Maggie protested with
raised tentacles as she opened the door. "It's someone I didn't
expect. Please stay, child. Rest. I do not fear him."

Maggie latched the door behind her, leaving
Gemma alone in the dimly lit chamber. The room felt all the emptier
for the alien's absence, much to Gemma's surprise. She could hear
the creature rolling herself down the hall. The skittering sound of
her movement through the corridor was unmistakable.

Here, here was Caroline's ghost! Here were
the eyes that had watched her in the hallway and followed her
through the ship! And thankfully so, Gemma thought, for that had
enabled the creature to save her from Rathbone.

She had to find out. She had to find out why
Maggie would save her, a stranger, one who reviled her kind more
than any other thing in the universe. Why would Maggie protect her
more than any Watcher ever had and risk exposing herself to the
crew of the
Fury
in the process? Gemma had to know. Her
instincts told her that if she did not help Maggie now, she would
never have the chance to find out.

The insect sound of Maggie's movement was
louder than ever; the background hum of the engines had faded into
an eerie silence. She had grown so used to the ever-present drone
that she had learned to tune it out. Now the lack of it was louder
than thunder.

She struggled to stand and yelped at the
coldness of the floor when her bare feet landed on it. Every muscle
protested as loudly as Maggie had as she reached for the clothing
that Frau Knopf had left. Grimacing all the while, she discovered
that it was a pair of trousers instead of her usual skirt. It took
her a few minutes to wrestle herself into them, but she managed
it.

She rummaged about for her shoes and
stockings and fumbled her frozen feet into them. There was a cool
edge to the air. Gemma snatched up one of the smaller blankets and
draped it over the loose shirt as she shuffled out the door and
into the unknown country of the corridor.

It was smaller and darker than any other
passageway she had seen so far. It was wide enough to allow
something of Maggie's size to move about, but no more than that.
The door to Maggie's nest was in the lower portion of a gentle
slope that crossed the decks above and below it. Gemma could not
recall seeing anything like it on the schematics and was unsure of
which direction to take. She cocked her head from side to side
until she heard the familiar skittering and scratching. Otherwise,
the narrow tunnel was empty, with neither sailor nor map to point
the way. Not even a spider troubled the cold shadows that draped
across the space at odd angles.

Gemma, slipping between pools of faint light,
padded towards the sound of Maggie's path. Breathing was a chore
through her tender ribs, and she limped up the course with
cantankerous knees that were keen on getting back to bed. She
passed door after unmarked door underneath the snaking tracks of
what appeared to be the hidden network of pneumatic tubes. She
could still hear Maggie in the distance, but she could not see her.
The occasional cross-corridor -- possibly in the area between decks
-- interrupted her path. Gemma felt that Maggie may have turned
down one of those, but she still heard the sound down the long
hall, though it grew ever fainter. Maggie did not dawdle.

Racks of tools and weapons decked the walls.
One happened to be in the light as she loped by it, and she could
see firearms hanging from it. Their odd appearance stopped her in
her tracks. Dull matte black rectangles hung in the place of
conventional revolvers. Except for their triggers, they did not
resemble anything that Gemma had ever seen before, not even when
she had assisted a weapons development specialist three years
before.

One of the slots was empty.

As she gazed at the spot where it should have
been, her foot slipped on something in the floor. She held her
breath as she stooped to pick up the scrap of paper that was so out
of place in this otherwise scrupulously clean back alley of the
ship.

Jagged and creased as it was, she could make
out the undeniable lower half of Sophie the Steamfitter, the mate
to the scrap she had found in the wreckage of the heat ray. Goose
pimples raced across her scalp as fury rose in her throat. She
could almost taste her anger.

"Accident, my arse," she swore. "Is anyone on
this bloody ship an actual
sailor
?"

She stuffed the card into the pocket of her
trousers and hobbled on, as Maggie's version of footsteps had
almost faded entirely.

"Crickets!" she muttered. "I'm rescuing a
Martian. Will wonders never cease?"

Muffled voices in the space ahead spurred her
on, but she saw no one. She only found the odd vent here and there
in the wall that showed glimpses of the main corridors through tiny
slits. She heard sailors' voices filtering through the registers,
and apprehension skulked behind their words. They talked of
sheltering in the head.

Has there been a solar flare?
Gemma
asked herself.
Am I safe here?

The corridor stretched on forever, but a
commotion around the corner ahead drove her forward. She could hear
an unearthly screech echoing down the cold and empty metal tunnel,
reaching for her like the Man from Shanghai had, and then she felt
it searing her thoughts.

Maggie was screaming.

The force of her suffering nearly knocked
Gemma down to the floor. Maggie wasn't just screaming. She was in
agony.

Gemma willed herself into a lurching,
running, hurtling pell-mell around the corner and into the
cross-corridor. At the end of it was an open door, and beyond it
the cavern of the cargo bay. Silhouetted in the opening was a man
bent over a boneless grey mass. He placed one of the strange
weapons she had seen a moment before on a rack just inside the
door.

Maggie's tentacles convulsed and seized, and
her beak clacked loudly with her twitches. Icy claws tore at
Gemma's pounding heart; she was too late, too late to help Maggie.
With a howl of fury, Gemma seized the first tool she could reach
from the rack and launched herself at the man.

The next few moments blurred into a haze of
pain. The promise that the stars had made to her seemed so far
away. She would have to kill again, after all.

~~~~

Christophe

The trek across the ship took ages, but
Christophe finally arrived at the cavernous cargo bay that housed
the
Iron Wind
. He slipped into the chamber and stole over to
where the vessel hung suspended over its own airlock. The black
Leyden pistol felt heavy in his hand as he crept through the
shadows of the towering crates. The sudden eruption of the slaps
and thuds of harsh blows urged him forward.

A shocking sight met him as he rounded the
last stack of containers. Wallace was there, pinned beneath the
last person he expected to see. Despite her injuries, Gemma
clutched a hammer in her hands, held high above them both. She was
an angry succubus, ready to bash in the head of her unconscious
victim. Her face was a harpy's mask of twisted fury, and her loose
hair was a mass of pure bedlam about her head. Her forehead shone
with a mixture of sweat and blood trickling down from her
scalp.

"Gemma!" Christophe roared as he ran closer
to them. Her rising arms froze at his call. "No! We need him
alive!"

"No, we don't!" she snarled back. Wallace was
limp and still beneath her. Christophe could not tell if the man
was still breathing. "Do you know what he's done? This bastard
killed Cervantes! And Maggie!"

"Llewellyn! No!" He bellowed at her as he
continued to close the distance between them. He could still feel
the pressure of Maggie in his head, even though it was silent.
"Maggie's alive! Just hurt!"

She froze, but she did not look up.

"I know what he's done," Christophe said. "If
he dies, we all die! Let him go! That's an order!"

"Shove your orders! Shove me out the airlock!
It would be a mercy! I've had enough!"

The hammer rose even higher.

Christophe squeezed the trigger of the Leyden
pistol without further hesitation. Tiny balls of light shot across
the remaining distance and struck Gemma in her already battered
ribs. With a sharp shuddering twitch, she collapsed, the wooden
shaft of the hammer still grasped in her right hand. Her fists
clenched; waves of spasms washed over her muscles as the
electricity carried by the steel-encased glass arced through her
body and down into the man beneath her. Wallace, unconscious and
unfeeling, twitched just as madly.

Christophe crossed the floor and loomed over
her. He watched the seizure ripple through the fallen woman without
touching her. His mouth was a hard, grim line as he watched the
familiar stages of the Leyden Effect play out. Gemma's eyes rolled
back in her head. He watched the agonized contractions on her face
and her rapid intakes of breath until both she and Wallace were
still.