20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (46 page)

"Mr. Humboldt," Christophe said, "stay by the
wireless and inform me the moment you hear from your contact. I'm
needed in the engine room -- Pritchard is -- Pugh is -- Mr.
Goldman, you have the conn!"

The bridge had been a balmy paradise compared
to the icy cave of the auxiliary corridor. Christophe re-armed
himself with two of the Leyden pistols as he passed through the
hidden tunnel.

As fast as he went, he could not outrun the
darkness that enveloped the tunnel as the conservation protocols
shut off power to still more sections of the ship. He felt his way
along the bone-chillingly cold walls, counting the exits down the
path to the Oberths and cursing himself for not picking up an
electric torch along with the Leydens.

"I'm coming, Maggie," he thought as loudly as
he could.

The only answer was the echo of his feet
against the slowly freezing blackness.

~~~~

Gemma

Gemma watched as Nigel set up the portable
card reader on Hansard's office table. Her teeth chattered from
more than just the growing cold in the room. Maggie had been silent
for a few minutes, probably leaving Gemma alone to absorb her news
in peace. Everything seemed off-kilter. Her entire life had been
spent in acts of gratitude to this woman. From twenty million
leagues away, Gemma had a completely different perspective of her
mistress.

Was she the only one? Had Brightman
"engineered" other Girls? Gemma had been born before the Invasion,
planned before anyone even knew Martians existed. Her trajectory
had been set before the first cylinder had launched. Perhaps some
of the other Girls would have had their real parents, their real
lives, if the Invasion had not happened. Caroline and Nigel might
have avoided the factory life. So many others -- Mr. Pritchard,
Frau Knopf -- would have known a completely different history. But
Gemma? She had been damned to her course, Martians or no
Martians.

Unvoiced words pierced her thoughts. "I can
see him by the flywheels. He is not waking! I go to his aid!"

"No, Maggie, wait, you'll be seen!" cried
another voice, one she knew but had never heard in her head before.
"They don't know you! Wait for me!"

"Christophe!" Gemma cried aloud.

"Are you all right, Gemma?" asked
Caroline.

"No, no, I'm not," she replied, the words
tumbling from her. "Something's wrong. Something's wrong on the
Oberth deck. I have to get down there."

Nigel looked up from the card reader.
"Beggin' your pardon, Gemma, but what in the world would they need
a geologist for right now? You're overwrought, that's all."

"And how d'ye know, anyway?" Caroline asked,
her face twisted in confusion.

"Call it feminine intuition."

Her breath came in rapid spurts. She could no
longer hear their voices, but she could feel the combined fear of
Maggie and Christophe writhing in her head. She had to get there.
Now.

She waddled towards the door, shedding
blankets as she went to reduce the bulk that she had to move.
Caroline grabbed her arm as she passed by, but Gemma shrugged her
off.

"I have to go, Caroline," she said. "The
captain is in danger!"

Nigel said, "But the decoding -- the other
ship--"

"This is more urgent," Gemma replied.

She opened the door in the face of bedlam.
She stared at the gauntlet of frenzy before her. The crewmen, who
had moments before been milling about in a state of ennui, were
turning sick bay upside down, pulling mattresses off the beds and
wrenching iron crossbars from them. Loose papers and books sailed
around the room. Bile rose in her throat; she knew impromptu
weapons when she saw them. One man was shouting down the pipephone
handset by the door, with the words "boarded" and "Martians"
springing from his lips.

"What the bloody hell is going on?" Caroline
shouted.

"I don't know, ladies," said Nigel behind
her, "but if you are determined to go, I won't let you move through
that mess alone. Caroline, take her other side."

The Booleans formed a protective guard around
her, and they moved through the crowd, which was so hysterical by
now that the trio might as well have been invisible. Alfieri stood
on a bed at one end, shouting for order and calm; but he, too, was
unseen. As they reached the corridor, Nigel tugged them to the
left.

"We daren't use the lifts now," he said as
they rolled down the hallway. "Even if they were working, we might
get trapped on our way. Best take the ladders, if you can manage,
Gemma."

"Whatever it takes," she replied through
clenched teeth.

Without her blankets, Gemma felt the cold
keenly in the long corridor. Here and there the gravity plates were
taking a tea break, as they bounced every few steps until they made
it to the ladder shaft.

Nigel helped her lean into the shaft and wrap
her shaking hands around the first rung. She might as well have
been palming ice. She leaned back, almost into him, and pulled the
loose sleeves of the linen shirt down over her palms. She leaned in
again, and he came with her, taking the rung above hers.

"Pardon my being forward, but I'd rather you
not fall. You might slip your grip, in this condition."

She nodded, and they placed their feet on the
ladder together, his one rung below hers. They began their climb
down, like a turtle with a Boolean shell. Caroline followed them a
moment later.

Gemma was grateful for the awkward
arrangement when she missed a step a few yards down. Nigel braced
and caught her, giving her a moment to breathe and set her feet
aright. Her heart hammered against her screaming ribs as she prayed
to Alfieri's God that they weren't too late.

Their progress was slow. The lights flickered
like strobes of continuous lightning as they descended. More than
once, they went out completely. They were sinking into a cave deep
into the ship, and during those frightful moments it was darker
than space itself in that cramped vertical corridor. At least
outside the ship they would have had the stars to navigate by. In
here, they had to see with their feet. The moments drug by,
heartbeat by heartbeat and step by step on that long ladder.
Despite the blossoming chill, drops of sweat poured off her brow
with every movement she forced her throbbing muscles to take. Just
a few hours ago the ship had seemed too small; how could it have
grown so large again?

She could not hear any voices in her mind
now, and that inner silence was worse than any scream. That silence
shoved her down through the agony of the climb. All three of them
were breathing hard out of a mixture of effort and fear, and she
could feel the knocking of Nigel's heart against her back. The air
in the tube was stale and tasted of oil and metal.

She stumbled once, twice, and each time Nigel
caught her, preventing a wild plunge down into the unseen depths
below them. She had not guessed that he was so strong, but he held
on for both of them. The normal roar of the engines had died out
hours ago, but as they neared the Oberth deck, they could hear
another sort of roar: that of a howling mob.

Breathless, they dismounted the ladder and
nearly collapsed onto the deck. Gemma drove herself towards the
yawning cavern of the engine room with the panting Booleans close
behind.

Maggie was not on the floor, and Pugh was
nowhere in sight. Gemma's eyes followed the target of the mob's
rage up, up, up the pipes that climbed the far side of the chamber.
High in the shadows near the ceiling, tentacles fluttered in and
out of the light. Shrill whirrs and shrieks pierced the air and
ricocheted off the walls, and mist poured out of Maggie's beak as
it clicked in the chilly air.

Gemma knew what the crewmen saw: a hideous
alien, a snarling Martian, an intruder. They saw the tentacled
beast that stalked the dark crannies of their minds, the one that
had murdered their families and altered their world forever. She
knew they heard Maggie's howls as threats and feared for their
lives. She knew they craved revenge against the one Martian within
reach.

Fully extended, tentacles grasping, beak
clicking, skin glistening, Maggie was truly terrifying. In fact,
Gemma had forgotten in a short time how fearsome the alien's
appearance could be. In her own eyes, all she could see was Maggie:
her rescuer, the scientist, Christophe's mother, the loyal Terran.
That was something she could not unsee. Gemma could hear her now.
She heard in her heart the terrified screams of a hurt and hunted
friend, one who screamed in Jennie's voice; she could not unhear
them. Gemma pressed forward into the fray.

"Stop!" she cried, fighting to be heard above
the din. "Leave her alone! She's one of us!"

"Have you gone barmy?" Caroline shrieked as
she picked up a crowbar someone had dropped and shook it in
Maggie's direction. "Bloody hell, we've been boarded!"

Gemma pushed the Boolean's arm down. "How?
From where? We haven't met any cylinders! Think, Caroline! Use your
brain! She is with us!"

"With us?" Nigel cut in, snatching up a
massive wrench in his white-hot fist. "Did Rathbone damage your
noggin?"

"Listen to me! Listen!" Gemma screeched as
she pulled them both away from the throng. She could barely hear
herself above the roar of the crewmen and Maggie screaming in her
mind in terror for help. The crowd grew of its own accord, like a
thing alive, like an amoeba dividing itself beyond control. People
poured in as word got around the ship. Where was Christophe?

Clipboards and tools sailed through the air,
but they all fell short of Maggie's perch. They took their time
falling back to the deck, almost fluttering like metallic feathers
in the diminished gravity. Some shouted for a Leyden pistol, others
for a pitchfork from the stable deck. Gemma shuddered; she had
lived in danger and violence all her life, but it had all been
singular, one on one, nothing at all like this howling whirlwind of
madness and hate.

She returned her gaze to Maggie, and for the
first time she saw a limp Dr. Pugh cradled in her tentacles. He was
safe from the trampling of this wild herd, but Gemma still feared
the flying missiles. One would eventually find its mark.

"I am afraid," she heard Maggie's voice say
in her head. "Why do they fear me? I mean them no harm. Where is my
bud? I don't want to hurt them! Where is Christophe?"

Gemma's ribs berated her as she projected her
voice again into the furor. "Listen! Stop! Don't!"

But she might as well have screamed at the
stars, for all she was heard. Slapping makeshift weapons from angry
hands, Gemma hurled herself into the fray. She shoved and elbowed
her way through a sea of navy blue coats and howling faces to the
wall that Maggie clung to, with Caroline and Nigel in her wake. One
sailor began to scale the web of pipes towards Maggie. Gemma
scrambled to reach his ankles and bellowed for him to come
down.

"Stop!"

A thunderclap of a voice boomed over the
speakers. The uproar paused, as if a needle had been scraped away
from a gramophone record of the sounds of war. The single word
echoed off the walls of the vast Oberth chamber.

"This is your Captain. Put your weapons down
and come to attention," the voice commanded. Hands released hammers
and wrenches, which took their time falling to the floor, as if
they were sinking in molasses. The crew faced the speaking tube by
the engine control panel, where a glowering Captain fixed them with
his eyes.

"Better," he said.

He marched toward the mass, but as he neared
them he bounced. Gemma found her own stance on the deck was rather
tenuous, and the darkness grew around them, shade by shade.

In the sudden silence, one sound hovered over
them: the echo of a wrench turning a bolt to the tune of
Pritchard's swearing in the distance.

"Y'all pipe down, now," Mr. Pritchard
muttered. "Man's tryin' to work over here."

Christophe gazed up into the darkness and
said, "You can come down now, Maggie."

Cries of "Maggie?" and "It has a name?" rang
through the chamber until Christophe called the crew back to
attention. Some of them struggled to stand still as Maggie made her
way down the network of pipes. Gemma watched her as she deftly
navigated the steel web whilst keeping the unconscious Dr. Pugh
steady and safe in a nest of rubbery limbs. Gemma felt someone's
gaze upon her, but Caroline and Nigel were staring straight ahead.
It was the captain who was studying her. She nodded at him, sharing
what she knew was his relief that Maggie was unhurt -- and that
Gemma herself was not more injured than she already was.

Maggie crossed the cold deck using two free
tentacles as makeshift legs, holding both her body and Dr. Pugh up
as she moved. She stopped next to Christophe in full view of the
barely restrained mob.

Gemma could almost hear their thoughts: had
the Captain repeated the failure of the maiden lunar voyage? Had
they been boarded? Or worse, had they been betrayed by the captain?
A tear of frustration escaped down Caroline's cheek; seeing her
beloved Captain Moreau defending one of those creatures was almost
too much for the Boolean to bear. But, to her credit, she held her
ground and neither buckled nor ran.

Christophe cleared his throat. "As you can
see, we are in no danger. We have not been boarded. You have not
met the Enemy. You have, rather, just met the ship's ghost."

A murmur rolled through the assembly.

"Silence!" Christophe bellowed. "Maggie is as
much a member of this crew as Dr. Pugh or Miss Llewellyn. She even
designed parts of the ship! I promise you all, I will give you more
details when the present crisis is -- I said, stand at
attention!"

But the command was impossible to obey, as
their feet had just left the deck entirely. They all floated --
even Maggie -- like newly-deceased spirits as the gravity plates
finally gave out. The lights dimmed a little more, and it was fully
night on the Oberth deck. The few active flywheels, one by one,
wound down like exhausted watches.