20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (54 page)

When he was satisfied that she would not
crash them into the canyon walls, Christophe leaned back in his
chair and dozed. They had not taken his lanky form into account
when they had designed the cramped bunks just aft of the tiny
bridge. His heavy breathing -- just short of a snore -- accompanied
the clicking of Maggie's ever-present needles. She worked row after
row as Gemma piloted the craft and scanned the passing cliff wall.
Gemma found the signs of life welcome in a ghost town that had
neither ghosts nor town, and Maggie's knitting was less worrisome
than her tendency to nibble on the edge of her tentacles in her
more anxious moments.

Sleeping whilst a woman was at the tiller?
Gemma was certain Christophe had never done that before, either.
She blinked into the stillness, which was broken only by his
breathing and the rumbling of the small craft's engines. She
spotted something odd in the distance, something that did not
belong in the empty countryside.

"Maggie, do you see what I see? I am not
asleep, am I?"

The clicking stopped. Maggie scooted forward
to the space between and just behind the seats.

"I see it, too," she said. "That does not
look natural."

Rooted in the north rim was the end of an
arch. About a mile to the south it turned towards the ground and
pushed into the crimson floor of the canyon. From a distance, it
had blended into the background, but as they pulled ever closer to
it, it looked less natural and more artificial. Gemma had to bite
back the phrase "man-made".

Maggie tapped Christophe's shoulder. He
started awake, and only his harness kept him from jumping up. He
shook off the sleep quickly, as any seasoned sea captain would.

"Martians?" he asked.

"Not quite. That thing." Gemma pointed ahead.
"What do you make of it?"

They were much closer now. Dust and corrosion
had robbed it of its gleam, but it was definitely made of metal and
not rock.

"Christophe, will you take the controls? I'd
like to focus on the structure."

With a nod, he kept them on course with the
arch dead ahead. Gemma tensed with anticipation as it loomed higher
and higher above them.

"Shall I pass through it, o geologist?" he
asked with a wink.

Gemma chewed her lip. This wasn't quite the
same as deliberately mucking up a calculation or sabotaging an
experiment by swapping distilled water with acid. This was an
entirely different world. Caution -- despite her earlier speech on
the ship -- was called for.

"Can we turn? Parallel it on this side and
get a closer look at the top of the arch?"

"I get a nasty feeling just looking at it,"
Maggie broke in. "The thought of flying through that opening? Ugh."
With a shudder, she dug into her knitting bag and retrieved a
second set of needles.

"Very well," Christophe said.

He eased the nose of the craft up and angled
them towards the top of the structure. He banked gently at its
anchor point to the wall and ran parallel with it. Neither door nor
hatch presented itself.

"What an odd structure!" Christophe said.
"Even Martians need maintenance hatches, surely."

They reached the outer edge. He executed a
slow turn to wrap them around to the far side.

"Perhaps it is not a building?" asked Gemma.
"Perhaps it is a device or a machine?"

"Possibly. At any rate, it's the only sign of
habitation that we've found. There are no signs of windows set into
the rock adjoining it. If it were a machine, wouldn't there be,
say, a control area close by? Even if they don't need tea breaks,
they do need somewhere to do their work."

Gemma squinted as she studied the structure
from this side. "Nothing here, either. Perhaps we should examine it
underneath the main arm?"

"That would be an odd place for a hatch."

"Not if they can climb like me," said Maggie.
"Or if they could fly up to it and dock there."

Christophe scratched at the scruffy spots on
his chin. "Let us report in, then give it a shot."

Gemma continued to squint out the viewport at
their jagged course as she listened to the grumpily affectionate
banter between the captain and the man she now knew as his father.
But now it was a comfort instead of an annoyance.

"Be careful, lad."

"Will do. We are heading in now. Everyone
buckled in?"

The radio crackled for a moment, and then
Christophe said, "Elias, it looks as if--"

~~~~

Elias

The transmission dissolved into a sudden
silence. Dr. Pugh strained his ears, fiddled with the knobs, and
bulged his tired eyes as he fought to hear another syllable.

"Christophe?" he shouted into the microphone.
"Christophe! What happened?"

Gasps erupted behind him. Pritchard's hand
shook his shoulder with an unexpected gentleness.

"Dr. Pugh," he said in a hoarse whisper,
"look up."

The scientist turned to look at the viewport,
where a bright light, centred on the North rim of the canyon,
flared out at him, bright as the sun.

"No, no!" he screamed as the light began to
fade, as if it were dragging his family away with it.

His knees buckled beneath him. If the new
captain's strong arms had not caught him, he would have collapsed
onto the deck. Pritchard eased him into a chair before taking up
the microphone. He called for the captain, again and again, until
the
Fury
crossed the terminator into the dark night of
Mars.

Silence.

The bridge crew held a collective breath and
gazed down into the blackness.

Dr. Pugh moaned, and his gnarled hands
cradled his ancient face. "Oh, Christophe! Maggie! Gemma! My son!
Oh, no, my son!"

~~~~

Christophe

"Elias, it looks as if--"

Christophe dropped the handset as the thin
Martian air in front of them shimmered. A curtain of light unfurled
from the top arm of the structure, but they were so close that he
could not turn in time to avoid it. He started to bank, but instead
he collided with the brilliant net at an awkward angle. The light
flared, bright as the sun, penetrating the small craft with all its
strength. The pain of it forced him to call out. He could hear
Maggie shrieking and even stoic Gemma crying out his name next to
him. The light burnt its way past his eyelids.

He was blind. They were flying blind. They
were still in the air, but for how long?

~~~~

Gemma

Tentacles that Gemma could not see supported
her shoulders and legs as her harness fell away from her.

"I have you, love," came Maggie's voice.

Gemma blinked, awake at last, and tried to
clear her vision of the lingering outlines of light -- outlines of
images that could not truly exist. Her eyes still burned from the
light, so she had not been unconscious for long.

"Be still," Maggie continued. "You just had
the wind knocked out of you, is all."

Gemma could hear Christophe's muffled voice
in the background.

"Yes," Maggie responded to him, "she is
uninjured. She is awake, but groggy."

The images on her singed retina lingered. A
rainbow of phantoms crawled over the cabin in front of her, but
even they were starting to fade. Maggie cradled her like an infant
above the floor.

"I believe I can stand now, Maggie," Gemma
said with a shaky voice.

"Careful," Maggie warned as she lowered her
to the deck. "We are not level. Christophe and I are fine, though.
I believe the
Iron Wind
was our only true casualty." She
retrieved one set of knitting needles from behind a broken control
panel and worked them for a moment before realizing that they were
empty. The yarn had slipped off them and rolled out of sight. She
gnawed on the tip of one of them as she said, "Christophe is aft,
checking on our supplies."

Gemma balanced as she stood on her own. There
was enough of a tilt that she had to pay attention to her stance,
but that was all. She turned to the viewport and saw only the wall
of rock that had ended their journey so suddenly.

Gemma rubbed her collarbone, which she knew
bore marks from the force of the harness keeping her from flying
out of her seat.

"What
is
working?" she asked. "Can we
still contact the
Fury
? Perhaps we can think of something.
If we still have the extra supplies that Wallace--"

"Mark down the radio as the second casualty,"
Christophe said as he made his way down into the main cabin. He
fidgeted with a large-barreled pistol in his hands. "Even the
redundant unit is shot." He looked down at her with world-weary
eyes. "I am happy to see you are uninjured. I wish I could say the
same for our long-term prospects. Even if we could signal the ship,
there is no way they could fetch us from the surface."

"Maggie," Gemma asked, "can you contact
Pugh?"

"I have been trying, but I can get no answer.
Same with Elsa and Caroline. It is as if they aren't there. I have
never done it from this far away before, though, so I am not sure
what that means."

"Keep trying," Gemma said. "If you can
contact them, perhaps the
Fury
can convince the
Orestes
to get here and use their dropship."

Christophe flashed her a weary smile, and for
a moment, he was the lad in the Gardens again. "You never give up,
do you?"

"It's not over 'til it's over, Captain." She
nodded at the pistol, visions of Cervantes joining the fading
lights dancing on her retina. "I don't think it's yet time for
that
."

He gazed down at the weapon. "Oh! Flare gun.
I thought I might use one of the pressure suits and have a run out.
We need to see if we can at least let the ship know we're alive.
It's not very powerful, and they may not see it, but so far it is
all we have. Not exactly a lot of wood about for a large bonfire or
any of the usual Robinson Crusoe solutions."

"We should wait for nightfall," Gemma said,
trying to still the shakiness in her voice. "And for when they pass
over us, to give us the best chance... perhaps we'll see their
running lights overhead."

He set the flare gun aside and peered at his
watch. "I'm not sure if we will see them, but we can look. I
believe it will be sunset before too long, and they should be
passing over this area not long after that." He took her hand and
then took one of Maggie's tentacles. "I'm sorry, ladies. I should
not have led us down here without a backup plan."

"It was my idea."

"And it was my call. I'm the captain." He
slumped. "Was the captain. Pritchard is in charge now, and his duty
is to do what's best for the
Fury
."

Gemma swallowed the sudden panic that
threatened to shake her to pieces. Terror would serve no purpose
now. Brightman had ground that into her over a lifetime.

One bright thought outshone the dread that
hung over her like a thundercloud: she was as far away from
Brightman as she could possibly get. At least she did not have to
deal with that particular horror. Gemma would rather face an entire
horde of Martian machines than take on one more mission for that
monster.

The thought buoyed her. There were still
Girls under the woman's control. Gemma had to get back. She would
not die in a boat, like the Lady of Shalott. She would live, and
she would break Brightman's curse. She had to free them, the way
she had been freed, free them to see a larger world. Free them to
seek their own destinies rather than continually nick secrets in
the service of another. Free to seek the stars themselves, if they
so desired.

"Let us suit up, then," Gemma said. "I will
go with you. As ship's geologist, I have a duty to collect some
samples. Surely we have time for that, Captain."

He gave her hand a squeeze and then led them
all aft to the small airlock. He opened a storage locker that
contained two heavy suits. Gemma's eyes widened as she examined
each piece, from the massive gloves to the copper clad helmets to
the strange backpacks that were to supply them with air in the thin
Martian atmosphere. They were far more complex than the ones they
had worn on Launch Day.

"They are based on designs we found on the
Nautilus
," Christophe said. "Slightly upgraded, of course.
The original ones were for underwater use, for great external
pressures. We have the opposite problem here. But we should be able
to make short jaunts out of the ship before--"

Maggie waved his words away with one tentacle
as she helped Gemma shoulder her way into the smallest of the
suits.

"There isn't one for me, of course," Maggie
interrupted. She pointed at her own bulk. "I don't believe I will
need one. I believe whoever designed this body in the first place
did so with multiple environments in mind."

"I agree," Gemma said. "Still, you do have
some active Human Code in there. Your eyes, for example, are not
like theirs. Not sure how they'll respond to the lower
pressure."

"Yes," Christophe said as he holstered the
flare gun into the suit's belt. He picked up the helmet and aimed
it for his head. "Let us check things out first, and we will see if
it is safe for you, mum."

He retrieved a brass-encased block of
instruments from the closet. A barometer and a thermometer gleamed
alongside several other sensors on its front panel. "Are you going
to be all right alone?"

"Of course. I am never truly alone. And, as
Emily Dickinson would say, 'I dwell in Possibility.'"

Maggie helped him settle the helmet into
place and activated the magnetic locks that would hold it on
through the wildest of dust storms. She did the same for Gemma.

"Be careful, you two. I love you both."

Clutching a storage bag as a makeshift sample
collector, Gemma followed Christophe into the small airlock and
readied herself for more of the rumpled and jagged landscape. He
reached for the control panel to open the door and paused. He
turned as much as the small chamber would allow the bulky suit to
move. All she could see were his eyes, where a boyish mixture of
pride and curiosity danced. He touched her hand, though she could
not feel it through the glove.