20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (20 page)

"Scuttlebutt has it that Pugh raised him," he
said in an exaggerated whisper. "Adopted him, you might say. Found
him, see, in what was left of Luxembourg City after the Invasion.
They got hit hard by the Black Smoke. Almost nobody left. Dr. Pugh
was in the first group they allowed in after the tentacle-heads
died. He either found him, or found his mother about to give birth
to him. Not sure which."

"So Cap'n's an Orphan?" Caroline asked, with
a bit of water gathering in one eye. There was a quiver in her
voice, and she rested her fingers on her chest. "Like us?"

He hesitated before answering. His eyes
darted right and left, as if looking for the subject of his
conversation, who was not yet in the room.

Gemma desperately wished that Caroline had
not asked Humboldt about what was obviously her favourite topic.
She squinted at him in warning, but he ignored the look and kept
talking, enjoying his enraptured audience.

"Well, like you and Nigel, yes. Sort of. But
bloody rich, though. There was a lot of bees and honey in that city
before the Invasion, if you take m'meanin', and most of the
buildings was still standing when it was all over. Just the folks
was dead. The gold was still there, see, and they took it all."

More crewmembers filtered into the orrery,
bringing a murmur of treasure and adventure with them, as well as
the low-grade anxiety about the lack of any incident so far. Their
mutterings echoed among the planetary flowers in Nigel's little
garden. Some of them cast ogling looks in Gemma's direction.

Mr. Rathbone played the opening bars of a
tune, "Jack Star's Shanty", which had been a popular number at the
Cirque du Lune. Nigel sang the shantyman's portion in a
surprisingly agreeable voice while others called back the
chorus.

Humboldt's gaze flickered over to his
crewmates before he waddled over to the turning orb of the Earth
and stabbed his finger in the general direction of Western
Europe.

"Why d'you think the TIA picked it as their
headquarters? Didn't have a lot of building to do, just clean up
and move in. Turned from a ghost town into a bloody world capital.
Where do you think the money to fund this mission comes from? The
Crown contributed some, so did the Vatican Bank, sure, but most of
it came from the TIA proper. It ain't got no taxin' power, and
there's no tributes nor aid from the rebuildin' countries. It's all
found gold and profits, see? In fact, I hear that the TIA is
sending aid to
them
."

He leaned in closer and nudged Gemma's upper
arm with his elbow. Ignoring her smouldering don't-touch-me stare,
he blathered on. "I think they gave him a big allowance out of it.
He's got his own little boat, y'see, what they call the
Kiwi
Clipper
."

He leaned still closer to Gemma. She wrinkled
her nose at the close proximity of his liquour-laden breath and his
hair pomade. Faint flashes of the face of the Man from Shanghai
flickered in the back of her mind. That man had smelled of the same
pomade. She stiffened out of pure instinct.

"Must've been the same time you was learnin'
how to dance, love." He grasped Gemma's wrist. She could feel white
heat pricking the back her eyeballs. She couldn't stand for him to
bring that up, not again, especially in front of Caroline.

"Don't touch me," Gemma growled in tones low
and dangerous.

Caroline started at the sound of it, but
Humboldt just chuckled and held on. He waggled his shaggy eyebrows
at the young Boolean. Every word he spoke brought the ghost of
Shangai closer.

"Pretty sure I saw this little lovely down at
the Cirque du Lune, or one that was her very image. I hear tell
she's supposed to teach you how to be a lady."

His hand crawled up Gemma's arm, a
five-limbed spider making its way toward her shoulder. The heat
from his hand was burning her… the Man from Shanghai was reaching
for her again…

"Maybe she can teach you to--"

Quick as a thunderbolt, Humboldt was on his
back, and Gemma's heel was at his throat. The instinctive reaction
pulsed through her before she was aware of it. The move was swift,
as Madame Liu had taught them, one fluid motion that any witness
would be hard-pressed to describe, except for the finish. One arm
was trapped beneath the man, and the other was twisted and ensnared
in her much smaller hand. He didn't breathe. He didn't even twitch
beneath her patent-leather-shod foot. He just stared at her, with
the same look of terror in his eyes as the Man from Shanghai. That
was who she saw, not the quivering Humboldt, in a haze of red.

It was only the lack of brass on her heel --
this time -- that had prevented a replay of that bloody coup de
grace. As it was, all she had to do was apply a little pressure
with her foot--

And then she heard the silence. Suddenly she
was no longer in some grimy back alley in China. Mr. Rathbone's
fiddle screeched to a halt. The endless speculation about
ruby-encrusted El Dorados and Cibolas died instantly. CDVs froze in
the air, mid-trade. Teacups paused between saucer and lips. The
only sound besides Humboldt's eventual squeal for mercy was the
eternal turning of the gears below their feet and the revolving of
the model planets, which ignored everything. As shocked as they all
were, the globes kept on turning.

Gemma quaked with a rage that she had not
felt in years. Caroline pulled at her gently and urged her to
release the man. That gave Gemma the bolster that she needed in the
face of Discovery. Ladies didn't ram their offenders into the
floor; at worst they gave them a good sharp slap with a dose of
righteous indignation, Sophie the Steamfitter notwithstanding.
Certainly geologists were not known to be a violent lot. Convinced
her mask had been ripped away, she slowly removed her foot from his
throat.

She had just done more damage to herself than
Humboldt ever could, with all his drunken rambling. Her face went
numb, and she released the breath that she hadn't known that she
was holding. It was entirely possible that she would be popping out
of an airlock any moment now. Pugh wouldn't have to report her
Peculiar Occupation to the captain now, not when half the crew had
witnessed her act of savagery.

She dusted her hands and straightened her
drab laboratory blouse as if it were a royal robe in her most
severe we-are-not-amused posture.

"And that, my dear Caroline," she said with
the same coolness one would use to explain the number of pence to a
shilling, "is how one deals with obnoxious party guests, according
to
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management
. Tomorrow's
lesson will be in self-defence with hatpins. Tea?"

Gemma marched over to the food-laden table by
the door. Her posture dared the rest of them to utter a word. She
could feel the faces of everyone -- including Mr. Humboldt --
gaping at her back in stunned disbelief.

"I didn't mean no harm, love," Humboldt
managed to squeak in a hoarse voice.

He sounded surprised that he could speak at
all. She studiously kept her back to him as she picked up a
gold-trimmed plate and plunked petit fours onto it with enough
force to shatter their icing. She held out another plate from the
stack to Caroline, who had not left her side, with a shaking
hand.

Everyone stared at her.

Everyone, that is, except Dr. Pugh, who had
stationed himself beside a mound of scones at the end of the table.
He merely muttered into his tea something about the lad deserving a
horse-whipping.

There was a sudden cry of "Huzzah!" from the
men in the room, and the sailors clapped each other on the
shoulder. The tense cord of anxiety had been cut, somehow. As their
cheers of joy faded once more into background murmurs, Captain
Moreau burst through the door, slightly short of breath, as if he
had been running all the way from the bridge.

There was a quick cry of "Captain on deck!",
and all the crewmembers snapped to attention.

"As you were," the captain managed to huff
out. He joined Pugh by the table and said quietly, "Awfully sorry
to be late. What did I miss?"

Gemma froze as the rest of the crew relaxed.
She braced herself for the report, the deep-etched frown on the
fresh face of the captain, the wailing of the tender-hearted
Caroline, the sudden grasping of her arms, the quick-step march
down the corridor to the nearest airlock. They would completely
skip clapping her in irons to await her fate. Resistance would be
undignified and worse than useless. And worse, she had failed her
mistress, absolutely failed, due to her own lack of control. She
hadn't even made it past the moon. There was nowhere to go. She
wondered if landing in vacuum would hurt.

All the crewmembers turned their heads in
different directions, looking anywhere except at the captain. Some
of them whistled. Others studied their CDVs as if they contained
the secrets of the universe, and still others examined the
constellations on the ceiling. Pugh stuffed an entire Bosworth
jumble into his mouth. Caroline stirred a fifth sugar cube into her
tea and swore to Gemma that she never knew that being a lady could
be so exciting. Mr. Humboldt, with his ascot tied to hide the
darkening bruise on his neck, was utterly silent.

"Oh, nothing really, Captain," Pugh replied
around a mouthful of pastry. He pointed to the tiny model of the
Fury
. It had just crossed the invisible border that they had
all been anticipating for days. "Just a minor glitch, is all."

~~~~

Christophe

"Ah, I thought I would find you here,"
Christophe said, "especially since your usual thoughtful spot had
been invaded."

Miguel looked up from the table with a smile.
"I had all the party I could stand on launch day." He gestured at
the coils and glass balls lined up before him in smart rows.
"Thought the Leyden pistols could use some attention. And the
armoury was quiet, for once."

"And I had all I could stand on the lunar
voyage. But overall, it was a quieter affair then I'd expected.
Like some company?" Christophe pulled up a stool opposite Cervantes
and snatched a coil and an empty frame. "I am glad they found a way
to reduce the voltage on these. But I wonder what old Nemo would
say if he knew we had turned the power down on his design?"

Cervantes chuckled. "Who knows what he would
have to say about anything? He used his electric rifles to hunt
food, not Martians. His men were so loyal, he'd never dream of
having to use it against one of them."

"I wouldn't dream of using it against our
own, either. One of the benefits of an all-volunteer force." He
picked some marble-sized balls out of a container on the side of
the table and rolled them around in his hand. "Still, I wouldn't
want to be on the business end of one of these again, even on the
non-lethal setting. Once in training was more than enough. Quite
the nasty shock."

"I have a distinct appreciation for the
Leyden Effect, as well," Cervantes replied with a shiver, "but who
knows what will happen out here, Christophe? We have to be ready
for anything. At least it is our technology, even if Nemo didn't
mean it to be used this way. That ought to make Elias happy, along
with what the bombs are carrying. The payload is definitely of
human manufacture."

Christophe did not reply. He simply picked up
the next piece and snapped it into place. Cervantes loaded three of
the steel balls into his pistol, set the safety, and slid it into
its charging canister.

As he returned it to the nest of other
pistols on the rack, Cervantes said, "The orders still trouble you,
yes?"

"There were more protestors in Wellington
before we left. They weren't striking for workers' rights or
suffrage this time. They rejected the notion of … what was it that
one sign said? 'Unlimited warfare'? Miguel, what if Alfieri is
right? What if the Martians sue for peace? What do we do?"

"The middies got you thinking, didn't they?
Christophe, we have never spoken with them. How would we even know
if they asked for parley?"

"Exactly, old sport. Well, Maggie might."

"We're not sure if even Maggie can understand
them. Or our linguist in the Cohort. Our orders are fairly simple:
eliminate the Martian threat by any means necessary and return with
any war prizes. 'Any means necessary' could mean anything from the
G-bombs to a strongly worded letter to their mothers, if we knew
where to send it. There may be a loophole, though." He cleared his
throat. "If they do manage to communicate with us clearly enough
before we make orbit, and they have something to offer, I'm sure
the TIA would be willing to deal. An advantage of being a private
navy."

"And if they can't communicate?"

"We follow our orders. And pray."

~~~~

Gemma

At breakfast the next day, the mess hall had
a different air about it. There were no wolf-whistles as Gemma
stood in line to receive her bacon. There were no cat-calls as she
made her way back to the table that she shared with Nigel and
Caroline. There were a few respectful nods here and there from the
sailors as she passed them, but they allowed her to walk by in
peace. When she arrived at the table, she found Mr. Pritchard there
as well. The navigator was in deep conversation with the two
Booleans, and she heard intense negotiations taking place as she
approached.

"I've got a Poe, a Queen Victoria, a
Professor Aronnax, and a really nice one of Louis Daguerre
himself," Pritchard said in a voice that rolled across the room
like a lazy summer thunder. "I'll trade all of these for that
Viscount Nelson."

Nigel stroked his chin in deep thought as he
considered the offer, but he stood when he saw Gemma. Caroline
followed suit with a smile, and Mr. Pritchard stood as well. A
mountain of a man, he would have towered over the captain.