20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (37 page)

The sense of a man getting between a bear and
her cub flooded him, as well as the image of colossal gears
grinding away in the darkness. In his mind's eye, he saw two
figures locked in a frantic battle as they leaped through the
shadowy spaces between revolving brass plates. He saw them through
a dim red haze, like a dusty memory just recalled. But this was no
memory; it was happening now, now, and Maggie was witnessing it.
She was screaming for him to come and to bring help.

"Mr. Adebayo," he barked, "Call Dr. Pugh over
the pipephone in his office and send him, and only him, to the
orrery gearage chamber, smartly!"

He could not wait on the lumbering lift.
Christophe charged down the corridor, leaving the startled junior
officer in his wake. He plowed his way to the Ready Room.

After securing the door, he traced the
opening combination on the wooden mural and slipped into the dim
corridor behind it. After he pushed the lever to close the panel,
he snatched a charged Leyden pistol in its holster from the hidden
rack and clipped it to his belt. He then barreled full-speed down a
gradual slope, faster than he had ever run in his life, cutting
down the side of the ship, passing deck after deck and sending the
image of his location to Maggie the whole way down.

I'm coming, Maggie
. He pushed the
words out to her in his mind, but the primal shrieks in his head
grew ever shriller.
Protect her. I'm coming
.

Down, down, and down he ran, so swiftly he
nearly missed the exit to the gearage chamber. Maggie had stopped
sending him images; he could only feel her rage thrashing around
his brain. Christophe could hear a man screaming on the other side
of the door.

"Humboldt! Damn you!"

A cacophony assaulted his senses as he burst
through the opening. The giant gears rolled in and out of the light
at breakneck speed, and the howling of it nearly overwhelmed
him.

His frantic eyes pierced the shadows,
searching for movement. The gears' shadows slithered along the
floor; their grinding was as relentless as a waterfall, one in
which he felt he would drown.

Christophe shut his eyes and waited for the
man's screams to rise above the clattering once more. He looked in
that direction and found what he was looking for: a writhing,
pulsing mass pinning down the shadow of a man. The oily grey of its
flesh rippled in and out of the scant light that shone down from
the orrery's sun, and the captain could see tiny flashes of a slick
beak as the being wiggled on top of its quarry and pressed the man
down into the floor. Christophe rushed towards them with a roar. As
he approached, one sinuous limb stretched out to him, a great meaty
serpent slithering away from a nest of its fellows. It curled into
a slight spiral as the limbs left behind grasped their prey ever
tighter.

"Martians, Martians!" the man gurgled. "It's
the end!"

The lump of grey pulsed and shifted to cover
its prisoner even more and muffled his moans. The tip of the single
free tentacle flicked at Christophe. He raised his hand to it and
brushed the edge of it with his fingertips.

"Maggie," Christophe addressed it as the
delicate end wrapped itself around his fingers and held them.
"Maggie, hold him fast!" He peered around them, eyes still
adjusting to the lack of light. He ignored the whimpers creeping
out from underneath her. "Show me, show me! Where is she?"

The snake released his hand and pointed away
from them. Christophe followed its trajectory and nearly tripped
over a crumpled Gemma at its end. Kneeling by her side, he took no
time in folding back her collar and checking her pulse. It was
rapid and shallow, but it was there. Alive. He had made it in time,
thanks to Maggie's warning. He trembled with relief. He felt her
limbs, checking for injuries, wincing as she moaned when he touched
her ribs.

His hands eased underneath Gemma's tiny form
and separated it from the icy floor. He cradled her against his
chest and marveled at how small she was.

He placed a firm kiss on her forehead. He
remembered the brief warmth that they had shared not an hour ago,
and he rested his cheek against hers in hopes to feel it again. He
closed his eyes tightly for just a moment, as if he could drag her
back to consciousness by force of will the same way he could talk
to Maggie.

"Breathe, Gemma. Breathe!" he urged her,
ordered her, but her only response was a fit of coughing that
vibrated right through him. As his vision adjusted to the
semidarkness, he detected bruises forming on her face and around
her open collar. Rage crept into the edges of his vision. There was
no mistaking what this was. It was no accident. One member of his
crew had tried to murder another.

I am the captain, damn it
.

They should be fighting the Martians, not
each other. He should have known, had known, after listening to
Pugh's story, that Gemma was in danger from someone on the ship. He
should have stayed with her, should have taken her back to her
cabin himself.

"No more!" he howled to the cool and
unsympathetic walls surrounding them.

He had lost the man that was his brother to
this hollow beast, this metal monstrosity that plowed through empty
skies. He was not about to lose another piece of himself to
her.

"Not my crew! Not my people! Not her! Not
again, you soulless creature!
Fury
! You iron whore! No
more!"

Gemma struggled mutely in his grasp. As she
gasped for air, he could feel Maggie reaching into his mind as
easily as she had reached out for his hand. A veil of calm settled
around him, and the edge of his anger faded for a moment. He
directed his attention back to Gemma as she coughed and sputtered
without opening her eyes.

"Stay with me now," he said as he stroked her
cheek. "Stay with me. That's an order. Listen to my voice, Gemma.
Follow my voice." He shook her, just a little. She coughed and
twitched. "I am your captain, Gemma. I will be obeyed in this. You
will stay with us. With me."

Dr. Pugh emerged from the darkness near the
hidden entrance. He crossed the room in a few long strides.

"Hold the man for us, Maggie," he said to the
great lump. He paused for a moment and stared at the strange pile
of flesh. Then he left it behind and went to the entrance proper.
He pulled at the control levers. Time ground to a halt as the gears
rolled to a stop. The resulting quiet pressed in on Christophe's
ears like an avalanche of silence.

The man trapped beneath the tentacled
creature sighed one last "Martians!" before he lapsed into
unconsciousness.

Pugh stood over Christophe and rested a hand
on the younger man's shoulder.

"How is she, son?"

"Alive," he said. The word barely made it out
of his mouth. He could not disguise the tremor in his voice. "But
just. Maggie saved her, Elias. Humboldt was choking her. Choking
her! Bastard! It's my fault. I trusted the wrong man. Maggie has
him, though. We need the doctor."

"That's not Humboldt," Pugh replied as he
pointed to the figure underneath Maggie. "She has your wireless
officer. Rathbone."

"Rathbone?" Christophe asked as Gemma's
eyelids fluttered open. He gasped in relief. "Good Lord! Then
where's Humboldt? They were at the orrery door when I left
them."

Gemma finally rasped, "Humboldt… up there…
door… please… please…"

"Gemma," Christophe said, choked with
relief.

Her consciousness faded as he said her name,
and an iron fist closed around his heart.

"Elias," he said as he fought to stand up
with Gemma in his arms, "we've got to get her to sick bay. She's
alive. She is alive, thank God, thank God! But she is so very
weak."

"Take her on, son. I will handle things here
and check in on Humboldt upstairs. Have Hansard send some orderlies
to the orrery door to assist me. Maggie?"

Maggie screeched and chirped in response, and
Dr. Pugh answered her unvoiced question.

"Take this ruffian down the passage to the
brig door and wait for me there. Keep him quiet if you can, m'dear.
I'll be there directly." He shook his head. "Pah! Martians on the
ship, indeed! What rubbish."

~~~~

Gemma

"Whatever shall we tell the crew?" asked the
Man from Shanghai. "I'm sure the rumours are flying even now."

No, no
, Gemma thought in the midst of
a haze of pain.
That is not right. He doesn't speak. He never
speaks. I never hear his voice
.

Even the act of thinking was a Herculean
task. The spike of agony in the side of her skull drove even deeper
into her brain. She could hear voices, but their words made no
sense.

"No matter what we tell the crew," the other
voice replied, sounding much like Dr. Pugh, "we will have to tell
her. And what to do with Rathbone? He has seen even more than she
has."

Frozen hailstones disguised as words
plummeted onto her eardrums, and she winced as each one bounced
around in her skull. Lost in a fog of them, she could not recall
anything but the searing pain in her head, her neck, her sides…

Broken
, she thought again.
Ribs
broken. Rathbone. Rathbone broke them
.

She was still alive. The last thing she
remembered was the weight of Rathbone crushing the life out of her.
The airlock
. He was going to chuck her out the airlock,
along with Humboldt.

Now all she knew was that it hurt to breathe,
even to think, but at least she could do both now. She had blacked
out. How long had she been insensible? What secrets had she
spilled? She hated being out of control, even for a moment.

Control. She had been under Rathbone's
control, struggling for breath. That was her last memory. What had
happened next? She had seen, or thought she had seen, a writhing
mass of snakes ripping the man away from her.

No, no
, she thought,
not snakes. A
Martian
. But that vision had to be a hallucination, an artifact
of asphyxiation.
A Martian on board
? The Invaders were no
more than preserved specimens.

Her eyelids were heavy, so heavy, and she
could not yet open them. She shifted her body in a vain hope of
finding a comfortable spot, and a groan escaped her from the
effort.

"She's coming round," cried a voice that
definitely belonged to Christophe.

Sudden warmth pressed against her cheek, the
one that was not throbbing. The heat of it solidified into a hand
that cradled half her face. Her eyelids finally yielded to her will
and opened. The world was a blur, entirely occupied by a single
face. Gemma blinked, slowly, to allow her eyes time to focus. They
finally decided to get to work and revealed Christophe's face,
steeped in a mixture of relief and concern. Repelled by the shower
of anxiety falling over her, she shrank back into the pillow. His
other hand followed her, and he brushed a stray lock of hair from
her forehead. He winced at her act of revulsion, and one side of
his mouth twisted down as her face clenched in pain.

"Gemma," he murmured, "sweet Gemma. I was so
worried--"

"Where… where am I?" she asked, shifting her
shoulders a little. She could see little except for a soft white
glow beyond Christophe's face.

"Safe. In a nest, of sorts." When she started
to speak again, he shushed her with great gentleness, brushing the
unbruised side of her face with the back of his hand. "Rest, rest,
my dear. Rathbone's in the brig. You're safe."

She could feel fabric brushing her skin as
she tried to move. Tight bandages swaddled her ribs, and some other
soft cloth -- not the rough wool of her scientist's uniform --
kissed her upper limbs. She glanced down and saw that she was
wearing a very loose shirt of Egyptian cotton. She could also tell
that beneath the blankets that warmed her from her waist down she
wore very little else. The laces down its front were slightly
loose; for a brief moment, she thought she was hallucinating that
the
Fury
was a pirate ship of old. She narrowed her eyes in
irritation as she realised that someone had to have undressed
her.

As Christophe retreated from her curled lip,
a shadow crept up over his head and curled around his shoulder. A
grey mass waggled in the air, like one of Medusa's wilder curls.
For a moment, Gemma thought she was hallucinating yet again. She
gasped as the strange reptile slithered over his shoulder and up
the side of his face. Gemma choked back a shriek as it caressed the
edge of his ear.

He turned at the touch. Gemma expected him to
scream. He should have screamed, struck out, clawed at the
serpentine limb with vengeance in his heart. Instead, he gazed at
it with great affection. He turned his eyes back to Gemma, and an
open-mouthed grin spread across his beaming face. That expectant,
hopeful smile reached from his chin through his clear green eyes
and across his forehead all the way up to his high hairline. The
warning cry that was tearing a path out of her chest screeched to a
silent halt.

"Have I gone mad?" Gemma demanded. Some of
her restrained shrillness leaked out with the question. "Or have
you?"

"Oh, neither," said the voice of Pugh from
somewhere beyond Christophe. "At least, not because of this. Miss
Llewellyn, may I present to you someone who is very eager to make
your acquaintance. This is Maggie."

The sinuous tip was eclipsed as another,
greater, shadow rose up behind Christophe's grin.

"Try not to scream, my dear child," Pugh
said. "We don't want to upset Maggie."

The greyness grew and grew, until it nearly
touched the ceiling. A sharp beak glistened in the midst of the
rolling flesh as the fiend loomed over the comically grinning
Christophe, who only emitted a squeaky "ha" as Maggie reared up
over him.