20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (10 page)

"So the plan for genocide is still in place,"
the priest said. "I had hoped... but there is time yet. What do we
intend to do, if a victory is achieved, then? Or not achieved?"

It was an interesting way to ask the
question: "
What happens if we lose?
" Those unsaid words hung
in the air between the two men like the foul odour of sulphurous
eggs.

With a sharp glance at the priest, Shaw
answered, "With the payload we've devised, victory is a foregone
conclusion. We're not using simple explosives, Father. We're going
to introduce the rest of the population to the little buggers that
their friends met on Earth. We've even improved a few of them to
speed up the process."

"Diseased weapons?" Gemma asked, surprised
that the question actually escaped her lips.

"Of course. It's the best way to preserve the
existing infrastructure," Stanislav said. "For the second part of
the Mission."

"Yes, yes," Pugh said with a sneer. "The much
vaunted Secondary Mission. Which we all know to be the Primary.
Naturally, we have to have something left to steal."

A blue-coated sailor leaned into the room.
"We're ready for you down below, Dr. Pugh."

Dr. Pugh seemed relieved by the interruption.
They filed out of the room and followed the young man to the lift,
which took a couple of trips to ferry them all to the Oberth Deck.
Gemma stayed beside Dr. Pugh during the trip down.

"We did have some ideas of our own once, you
know," Dr. Pugh said to her. "Before the Invasion, that is. There
was some flirtation with chemical rockets. Some people have always
had dreams of going to the stars, and they felt that rocketry was
the key."

"Rocketry?" Gemma asked. She had heard the
term bandied about during one of her previous jobs, but she had
gleaned very little in the way of useful information.

"I'll leave it to our good physicist to
explain," Pugh replied as they exited the lift and passed the sign
for the Oberth Deck.

"Have you ridden a bicycle before, Miss
Gemma?" Hui asked.

She shook her head. "No, but I have seen them
in London."

"Well," he continued, "when I ride one, it
looks like I am pushing the pedals to move the wheels. What I am
really doing is pushing against the ground, the Earth itself, to
move forward. That thing I push against is called the
working
mass
, to use the precise phrase. I can use the brakes to slow
down or stop. And of course, there is friction on the road to slow
me down as well."

The group turned a corner in the corridor and
waited before a heavy door as their guide turned a large valve
wheel to open it.

"In space," Hui said, "a ship has no ground,
no gravity, to push against to move. So it has to bring its own
working mass, yes? In rocketry, that working mass is the fuel. It
is funneled out of the rear of the ship, which pushes it in the
opposite direction. And there is no friction to slow it down." The
door swung open as he talked, and they followed the guide through.
"Simple enough, at least in theory--"

Hui gasped, and so did Gemma as she followed
his eyes up, up, and up. This chamber seemed to have no ceiling!
They stepped deeper into the chill of the cavern before them.

It was a veritable jungle of brass and steel,
abloom with valve wheels and gauges of every size. Pipes climbed
the walls like strangler vines and ran in every direction. The few
spaces not claimed by pipes were plastered with warning signs that
shouted all the dreadful consequences of a fuel leak or a solar
flare, along with directions to the closest head. Gemma wondered
about this obsession with toilets among the crew, thinking it might
be a sign of some deficiency. Did one make water more often in
space? So far, that had not been her experience.

A cylindrical tank dominated the vast
chamber. Pipes of all sizes extended from it, running both fore and
aft. Row upon row of barrels marched beside it. Each barrel had its
own large gauge, like a cyclopean eye staring out over its fellows.
The black tank itself had its own great bank of indicators in the
shadows beneath it. A cluster of men monitored these instruments as
they consulted clipboards and muttered amongst themselves.

"In practice, it wasn't so simple," Dr. Pugh
said, picking up Hui's train of thought. Gemma thought she detected
a note of boredom in his voice. It took her a moment to remember
that he had seen all this before, and to him it was just another
cold section of the ship.

"The problem was heat," Dr. Pugh said. "Look
at it this way. You have to provide so much kinetic energy to reach
a certain velocity, and you have to get to a certain velocity to go
a certain distance in a reasonable amount of time. To get that
velocity, you have to burn very hot indeed, and that sort of
temperature tends to melt the very nozzle that uses it for
propulsion! What a dreadful pickle! So we had to figure out some
method of producing the thrust without actually melting the ship in
the process! We fought with it and fought with it and there seemed
no way round it ... until the Invasion. Once the little buggers had
been harvested by the grim reaper, we peeked into their cylinders
and found a solution."

He walked towards the tank. Most of the other
scientists had wandered off and were running up and down the aisles
of barrels by this point, so he was talking to Gemma alone. "They
had plans for other ships, ones much greater than cylinders.
Enormous ships that could move thousands of such creatures vast
distances across the stars. They injected energy into a propellant
gas," he said as he pointed up at the tank with a long bony finger,
"without touching it. Using a technology that we were already
familiar with. Radio waves."

They stopped at the last row of barrels just
before the tank itself, very near to the men monitoring the
instruments.

"The main fuel is argon gas, which is stored
in this monstrosity. We can divert it to the aft nozzles, as we are
now, for forward thrust. Later on, to slow down, we can divert it
to the forward nozzles. For Braking Day." He pointed to each set of
pipes in turn. "We convert the gas into a plasma working mass by
heating it to an incredibly high temperature using radio waves. At
the same time, we have to have electric power to produce those
radio waves. We have a different fuel for that, a variation of
helium, helium-3, also known as--"

"Tralphium!"

The word escaped Gemma's lips like a restless
hound bounding over a fence for a run out. It was the one word
(besides argon) that she had understood in his entire speech. She
could see the word scrawled across her mind's eye in chalk letters.
It had been the topic of her previous target's research. While he
had refused all possible computers and assistants, he had loved to
show off his cleverness to his new dancing-girl mistress. She had
studied it whenever she had the chance between the glasses of
champagne he pushed on her, and she had memorized every word and
symbol. Most of it had not made any sort of sense at the time, but
she still carried a clear image of it in her head.

The substance was much in demand on Earth,
and Mrs. Brightman had been keen to discover the TIA's secret
source of this very rare element. Naturally, the scientist had not
written
that
particular fact on his board. Gemma had been on
the verge of uncovering said fact when she had been pulled away for
this mission. The connection startled her. Was Brightman still
pursuing the tralphium, then? What did that have to do with
watching the captain?

She discovered that the Cohort had regrouped
at her yelp, and they were all gawking at her. She straightened her
blouse and lifted her chin, for now they were discussing a topic to
which she could contribute.

"Tralphium," she began, "an isotope of helium
in which the nucleus has lost one of its neutrons; since it only
has three particles in its nucleus, we call it Helium-3. It is not
radioactive, and it can burn cleanly when used as a fuel. Much,
much cleaner than coal. It can be fused with itself inside a
magnetic containment field, resulting in loose protons that can be
used to produce current directly. The problem is that the substance
is very rare on Earth. Helium itself is lighter than air, so free
helium on the surface just escapes from the atmosphere."

"Well-spoken," said a member of the group at
the monitoring station. "Couldn't have said it any better
myself."

They all turned to face the man, only to find
that it was Captain Moreau, his tall form emerging from the shadows
beneath the tank.

"Indeed," Dr. Pugh replied with hooded eyes.
He fixed Gemma with his stare, but she simply stared right back and
refused to wriggle beneath those pinning pupils.

"Actually," the captain continued, "the
tralphium is not our fuel, as such. We use it to generate the
electric power that then heats the argon, which is the actual fuel.
We distribute the remainder of that power throughout the ship. This
chamber is the only place we use gas. The rest of the ship gets
pure electricity! Too volatile, otherwise!" He grinned at Gemma,
who was still too stunned by his sudden appearance to respond.
"Honestly, we could use any gas. Very clever, these Martians. They
could use almost anything they picked up along the way as fuel, so
they didn't have to load up for the entire journey at once if they
didn't feel like it. At least in the larger ship designs, since the
cylinders were purely ballistic. We haven't quite figured the
collection bit out yet, though, so we still have to lug this tank
of argon with us. Thankfully it's cheap to obtain and easy to find,
unlike the tralphium. It was good enough a design to even get old
Hermann Oberth himself to give up his infatuation with chemical
rocketry."

Gemma pondered the next logical question.
Would anyone else need the answer so badly? Should she just radio
the information she had to Brightman anyway, considering that
tralphium had been the object of her previous assignment? Surely
they would not have consigned her to two years in this great void
and her possible (even likely) demise to steal a secret within the
first couple of days?

"And where did we find the tralphium we are
using now?" The Russian saved her the trouble of asking.

"Ah, yes, the million shilling question," the
Captain replied. "Any of you that were cleared for this trip are
cleared to have some word about it, even though I can't give you
the
exact
location. But I can tell you this much: we didn't
stay a month on the Moon just to hop around like bunnies."

The MOON? Oh, crickets,
Gemma thought.
Mrs. Brightman will have the Girls working triple time!

At that moment, the dim yellowish lights in
the chamber winked off, replaced by an icy blue glow. A clanging
alarm echoed in the darkness. A voice chanted over the speaking
tube and warned them about a flare alert. Gemma jumped at the blast
of sound, as did most of the Cohort.

Dr. Pugh looked at the Captain and asked,
"The head?"

"Over there," he said as he pointed towards
the wall that they had followed into the chamber. He touched
Gemma's elbow and guided her that way. "They weren't expecting many
ladies down here. I'm afraid there's only the one closet, so you'll
have to lodge with us," he said as they hurried across the floor.
"Just don't tell Mr. Wallace."

The rest of the men scrambled into the room
ahead of them, and the trio were the last to squeeze in. The Cohort
and the monitoring group were jammed in so tightly cheek-to-jowl
that it was difficult to secure the door. Gemma found herself
wedged sideways between the captain and Pugh. It seemed that
Moreau's long arms had nowhere else to go except around her
shoulders; this had the effect of pressing her cheek firmly into
his chest. Navy blue wool and a tiny view of the door filled her
vision. Occasional voices crackled over the speaker mounted on the
wall as various departments reported to anyone listening that they
were safe.

"Flares? Already?" someone in the back
demanded, his voice fraught with anxiety. "Alfieri, aren't we at
solar minimum? I thought you didn't see any sunspots during your
last observation!"

"Oh, pipe down, Abbie," growled Dr. Pugh from
behind her. "Bidarhalli, mind my elbow!" He whispered, and
Christophe mouthed the words in imitation as he spoke, "I wonder if
Napoleon had to deal with this insanity when he took all those
savants to Egypt!"

The priest's smooth voice answered. "Yes,
yes, the sun should be quite calm now. Perhaps, being so early in
the voyage, this is merely a drill? Perhaps the captain would
enlighten us?"

The captain merely cleared his throat and
said, "So, we meet again, Dr. Pugh." He sounded as if he were some
hero in a penny dreadful greeting his arch-nemesis in a dank corner
of London.

"Fancy seeing you here, Chris -- Captain."
Even though she couldn't see his face, she could hear a hint of a
smile in the old man's voice.

"Well," Alfieri said, to no one in
particular, "with the new protocols, we should be well-shielded
here for several hours, if necessary."

A general groan at the thought of imitating a
tin of sardines for that length of time hatched among them. She
could feel the press of the young man's body in places where she
shouldn't be feeling it, but he didn't seem to be shy about the
situation at all. Pulling away from him would only nestle her
closer to Pugh, whose own shrinking reticence matched her own. She
growled inwardly. Moreau was far too jolly about the situation for
it to be anything than what he had planned. Silently, she hoped her
mission included a swift kick in the nether regions for this cad.
At the very least, she hoped her orders didn't rule it out.

The Irishman and the Russian were fussing at
each other about poking, and Pugh kept telling them to shut it.
Every time the captain spoke, she caught a noseful of spearmint, as
if he had spent the morning gargling with Doctor Norton's
Men-T-Fresh Tonic. Its strength made her eyes water, but it did
tend to mask the understink of fear and sweat in the teeming
chamber. It was getting hot, and there was little fresh air blowing
in through a vent in the corner above them. She felt a little
faint. She wished she had a fan with her, and she grunted.