by K. T. Hunter
"Dr. Pugh."
"Yes, Gemma?"
"Why do you care? I mean, why do you care to turn my abilities to a higher purpose, as you said?"
He blinked at her and did not speak for a moment. When he finally did, he asked, "What happens to you Girls when you are too old to ply your trade? When your charms fade? You won't be young forever, Gemma. You will need somewhere to go." He cleared his throat. He waved her on. "Now, go, child. I'm busy."
She turned to go, leaving him to puzzle over the scene and herself to puzzle over the enigma of Dr. Elias Pugh.
With the first free time that she had had in a while, she wasn't sure what to do with herself. She had not yet picked up her wireless messages for the day. After what she'd seen, a good brisk walk to the command deck might be refreshing.
Once there, she received a folded message from one of the junior officers through the window. The stack of waiting messages was quite tall, with the attached grease pencils dangling from the sides of the frames. She couldn't see around the window into the bridge, but she could hear the edge of panic in their voices. They might not know everything, but they had all felt the rumble of the explosion.
"I wasn't the glitch for this mission, after all," Gemma whispered aloud to no one.
It was not quite time for tea, so she headed back to the privacy of her stateroom to decode the message. She grabbed her grease pencil and her volume of Lyell and set to work.
She decoded it, letter by letter, thinking more about the situation around her than the message. She ran her fingers up and down the lines of text, counting, and wrote another letter on the mirror.
The blackened walls of the gun control room and the blood on its floor tugged at her mind. Was it sabotage? Was it an accident? The only thing she did know was that she was not the cause. She thought about Dr. Pugh and his strange -- and somewhat endearing -- need for her to assist him. She thought about the captain and the hollow look in his eyes.
When she scribed the last letter onto the glass, she stepped back and read the message there. Then she reread it, her mouth agape in growing horror.
NAUGHTY ARTEMIS. STOP PLAYING SHANGHAI. FIND ORION.
Gemma had not yet informed Brightman of the incident with Humboldt. In fact, she had not intended to, after the crew's positive reaction. What good would such a report serve? How else would she find out, being so far away?
Gemma had managed to convince herself that it would be impossible to smuggle two people aboard.
But someone had reported back to Brightman. Only Brightman would know about the Man from Shanghai.
Someone was Watching.
~~~~
Christophe
Christophe stared into the blank page of his log and tapped the pen against the desk. The words to describe what had happened would not shake themselves loose from his stunned mind.
Thorvaldson needed more details than Rathbone's hurried missive. But how could he distill the acrid stink of smoke, the drying crimson mud on the floor, and a man's agony into something so small as words? What alchemy transformed such heavy thoughts into invisible waves that flew back to Earth? How could he say that their only defence was now useless? That they were sorely unprepared for this battle? That this great iron beast had tried to devour yet another member of his crew? That the lunar voyage had been just an appetizer for her? That this was all a big mistake?
Grateful to be alone so no one could see his trembling hands, Christophe set it down, word after word, until the page was full.
~~~~
Gemma
There is a Watcher here.
The thought nailed her to the spot. It crawled across her skin like a mass of angry spiders. Who was it? Was he -- or she -- searching for Orion as well? Or were they to ensure that she did not abandon her mission? How long did she have before they took action against her?
The brief peace that she had found on the ship was now shattered into as many jagged pieces as the console that had shredded Cervantes. A peace she didn't know she needed was gone.
When she was able to move again, her mind set to work. She was used to playing with her Watcher's identity, as a game to alleviate some of the ennui of her more humdrum assignments. But this was not going to be a game. She examined her first clue: the message itself.
On further study, she saw something that she had not noticed earlier. Part of the message, the header, did not seem quite right. She couldn't put her finger on it, but something was not the way it should be. It wasn't wrong enough that she couldn't decrypt it, of course, but something did not fit.
Perhaps the message wasn't even authentic. That would be even worse. If it were not Brightman, or her Watcher, that had sent it, then there was someone else on board who knew what she was, someone who knew Brightman's code. The extra copy of Lyell in the Cohort Conference room strengthened that possibility.
She paced her room; she was a restless tiger in a shrinking cage. The Fury on any other day felt like a colossal vessel, but now it shriveled about her.
Her intestines melted into jelly as realization washed over her again. Alone with her anxiety, her nerves rattled like dry leaves in a frigid winter gale. There was no one to turn to here, no Philippa, no Mrs. Brightman, even. She found herself wishing for Pritchard's deep rolling voice or Nigel's wit or Caroline's cheerfulness to distract her. But she could not let them see her fear. She could not reveal its source. She must present a placid surface to them. She must bury the maelstrom.
Authenticating the message was the only way to move forward. But how?
Crickets, she thought. Blast Humboldt for starting all this.
Humboldt. She remembered something Nigel had said about him earlier, something about him working with the wireless messages and the analytical engine. Would he have a full record of the message? As much as she wanted to avoid the cretin -- the only person on the ship that was possibly more boorish than the captain -- Humboldt might be her only hope.
She retraced her steps to the command deck, except this time she headed for Informatics. She wasn't sure where Humboldt would be this time of day, but Informatics was the best place to start.
Sure enough, he was there, slaving away over a cardpunch machine. There were a few other Booleans present, but Nigel and Caroline were not among them. Perhaps their shift had ended for the day. That was fine with Gemma. This would be easier without them. The fewer people that knew about her little issue, the better.
She timed her footsteps with the regular clack of his typing so that he could not hear her approach. As she moved closer, Gemma surmised that this must be his normal station, as the wall behind it fairly groaned with the CDVs of pubs that hung upon it; The Blind Beggar, The Dove, and Dirty Dick's at the top overlaid pictures of The George and The Grapes. And, of course, there was the inevitable row of Sophie the Steamfitter cards lined up below them. She patted her skirt pocket and felt the weight of the cards she had received that morning. The Falcon and the Badger and Tentacle, absent from the wall, were in her stack. She straightened her spine and took a deep breath before tapping him on the shoulder.
Humboldt yelped and nearly fell out of his seat. He cringed at the sight of her.
"Oh, it's you."
"I apologize for the intrusion, Mr. Humboldt."
He turned back to his work and started typing again. Gemma retrieved her small stack of CDVs. Her fingers brushed the edge of the burnt one as she pulled them out of her pocket. She had nearly forgotten it in the chaos of her latest message. She left it hidden and rifled through the stack to find the two pub cards.
She dangled the Badger and Tentacle in front of Humboldt's face. His fingers froze after one last agitated CLACK, and he looked up at her with suspicion dancing in his eyes.
"I believe we started off on the wrong foot, Mr. Humboldt. I've come to make amends," she said with the sweetest voice she could summon. "I've brought a peace offering for your collection."
He tapped his fingers on the edge of the keypunch and stirred in his seat.
&
nbsp; "Are you certain, Miss Llewellyn? M'pride is still bruised." He rubbed his hip and continued with a pout, "Not to mention m'arse."
Ah, the negotiations begin, Gemma thought. Good.
She waved the other pub card in front of him in the most tantalizing way possible, as if she were wafting the enticing fragrance of bacon towards him.
"I'll make you a deal, Mr. Humboldt. If you keep your hands off me, I'll keep my boots off you. Agreed?"
He gave the cards a hungry look. "What else you want?"
"A favour."
She set the CDVs down on the right side of his desk and showed him the ciphertext message.
"Mr. Davies has informed me that you are archiving the wireless messages on the keypunch machine for the analytical engine."
"Yes," he replied. He lowered his voice so that the others in the room could not hear. "Actually, I'm working on a way to archive them on the keypunch as they come in, so we don't have to do it manually, and I don't get stuck with it. Don't tell the other blokes, though. If it don't work -- well, me pride has taken enough of a beating lately, you see."
"Brilliant idea, Mr. Humboldt," she replied, and if she were honest with herself, she would think that he was very clever indeed. Perhaps he wasn't as thick as she had thought. "But for now, I just need to retrieve a copy of this message, if you can find it. Can you do that for me?"
He took the paper from her hand and studied it. "It'll be hard to find."
"But not impossible?"
"Aw, no, Miss. I can try to match this string of numbers here. Just takes longer, that's all." He squinted at her. "Will this make us square, then? I'm pulling lots of extra duty here, you see. I'm missing out on all the best card games."
She produced her most beatific smile for him. "I promise, Mr. Humboldt, that I will speak to Nigel on your behalf, if you are able to find it."
"It might take some time, though, Miss L. I've got a stack of Mr. Wallace's messages to work through." He pointed to the stack of pages to his left.
"What in the world would a Cultural Officer have to report? Did we not bring enough monogrammed handkerchiefs or something?"
"Oh, you'd be surprised at how many messages he sends. They are all encoded, o'course, everyone's is, but you don't always need to know what they said. Plenty o'juicy stuff to be found anyway, if you know where to look."
"Oh, really?"
As Mrs. Brightman would have said, Information is where you find it.
"Honestly!" Humboldt replied.
She deliberately widened her eyes and focused all of her attention on him. It was one of her better intelligence-gathering techniques, and it defeated torture hands-down.
"It's all in the higher-level data," he continued. He pointed at the partial header in her message. "Metadata, as we call it here in Informatics. Who he sends messages to, when he sends 'em, how often, how long they are, how the message is laid out. I can tell you who's sending messages to his wife and to his sweetheart and when, I can. I can tell you who's reporting on a regular basis, or who is supposed to and is constantly late."
He leaned closer and whispered, "Wallace sends loads of messages. Mostly at night, ship's time. To lots of different people. He thinks we're just typists, but we Booleans are more than that. We recognize patterns, see? That's how we write code. We see patterns in data and tell the A.E. what to do with 'em. Don't underestimate your Booleans, Miss Llewellyn. Even without the actual text o' the message, we know things. And sometimes we can guess the rest." He tapped the side of his nose and waggled his eyebrows at her. "Everyone's got a pattern, Miss L. Everyone. If you know a body's pattern, you can read 'em like a book. And when they break that pattern, you can tell even more."
"What do you mean?"
She decided to let this little fountain of knowledge babble for as long as he wished. His talk of patterns interested her, and his description of the engine code tickled her inner computer. Mrs. Brightman was quite fortunate that more scientists could not access these machines, at least not yet; they would remove the need for her Girls.
"Like if the cipher text pattern changes," Humboldt said. "Either the sender is talking to someone new, or his code's been broken. But so far, Wallace's hasn't changed." He pushed his chair back and spread his hands as he spoke. "Just imagine, Miss L, what would happen if everyone had one of these engines! It would change everything! Even more than the Invasion changed us. Personally, I think that's why the TIA has a monopoly on their use. You have to have a license to have one, you see, not to mention a herd of Booleans to run it. They want to control how fast the world changes, methinks."
Gemma did imagine, as he carried on. A host of analytical engines would certainly put Mrs. Brightman out of business, and quickly. But she couldn't tell the Boolean that. She merely nodded with astonishment at his cleverness.
"Another obstacle is the data storage. Them cards are a right pain in the arse, having to feed 'em in every time a body wants to run a programme. If we could access our data more quickly, I doubt if even the TIA could prevent universities and banks and governments from building their own."
He adjusted his hunter green jacket and sat up straighter in his chair. He picked up the CDVs and rested them next to one of the Sophie cards.
"I'm on the job, Miss. I like the one of the Badger and Tentacle especially. M'cousin Jules runs it, you know! Them cards in particular are rare. Even I couldn't get one before we left." He smiled at her. "But I have to let you know, it'll take a while to do what you're asking. You run on and do some science or something. I'll let you know when I find anything."
"Very well. Pax?"
"Pax."
After they shook hands on it, Gemma left the chamber in a slight daze. Humboldt was not as dim as she had reckoned.
Could he be? No, surely not, she thought. If he were her Watcher, why would he agree to help her?
She could not help but feel anxious, though she did feel better for having taken some sort of action. Had she just tipped her hand to the Watcher that she was looking for him? She got a firm grip on her thoughts and decided to believe that she had just added a new ally to her growing list. The ghost of the Man from Shanghai retreated into the shadows of her memory, as he always did when she patched up an ill-conceived kick on her part.
She looked up at the clock next to the lift. It was getting late. Her belly reminded her that between decoding her message and visiting Humboldt, she had missed both tea and dinner. Even though she was tired, she knew that her unsettled mind would not allow her to sleep. She could not bear the thought of pacing in her cabin until Pugh called for her.
She touched the slip of CDV in her pocket. The corridor was empty; only the night crew was on duty by now, and most of them were on the command deck. She paused at the lift and took out the card. Looking up at her was the upper half of a portrait of Sophie the Steamfitter.
Did it belong to one of the gun crew? Or perhaps to Cervantes himself? Or did someone else leave it behind? Perhaps it slipped out of a pocket whilst the panel was open? It was difficult to tell by the card. Sophie cards were ubiquitous on the Fury. Except for the burn and tear across the bottom, there was nothing unique about this one. She considered showing it to Dr. Pugh, but she didn't feel ready to do that just yet.
She took the lift to the laboratory deck. She would take advantage of ship's night and search once more for the Orion file, as her mistress demanded. She walked by the open door of the laboratory and saw Bidarhalli's back blocking one of his panels, the one with the ridiculous equations that never changed.
They reminded her of her brief time in a Belgian laboratory. In her guise as "Claire Bisette", she had deliberately miscalculated entries in a ballistics chart. She had not lied when she had told Pugh that Brightman was not in the habit of destroying technology; but even her mistress broke habits every now and then. Not stealing the data had been a strange sensation for her, and only her gratitude to Mrs. Brightman had assuaged her smarting pride as she had typed the mistakes whilst the tr
ue numbers danced behind her eyes. It had been a delicate business, mucking the figures up just enough to skew the researcher's results but not enough to be immediately obvious. She had been overjoyed to leave that mysterious job behind her. Filching a formula was not a problem, as it also sated her own inquisitiveness, but deliberate errors went against her grain.
Bidarhalli studied a piece of paper, followed the lines of the equation with his grease pencil with an absentminded hum, and then wrote a character in the column to the right of the equations. It was so quiet that she could hear the pencil squeaking against the glass.
So, she was not the only one that had discovered the trick to safer decoding. She held her breath, prayed that the man would not hear her, and squinted at the distant panel. It was no good; the plaintext was in Hindi. Gemma knew many languages, but Hindi was not among them.
She took the lift to another deck and paced the corridor. In the quiet of ship's night, she could hear the voice of the Fury. A steady background drone hummed like a busy washerwoman, punctuated by skittering and scrabbling from the vents that was faint enough to hide behind the busy noises of ship's day. She wondered if she were hearing some of Humboldt's algorithmic bugs in the air ducts.
She paced for what seemed like hours, and still her mind refused to settle. Could Bidarhalli have sent that mysterious message on the first day? Or did he use encoded messages as a matter of course, like most of the Cohort? If so, why decode it when everyone else was off duty, if the plaintext was not readable to anyone but him? Could he be her Watcher?
Her heart raced like a wild horse with no rider to restrain it. She wanted nothing more than to run, but there was nowhere to go. She stood still and pulled the reins on her breathing to get it back under control. The ship seemed so cramped and close. If only she could take a turn outside ... it had been so long since she had seen the sun ... other than the one in the orrery ... Nigel's little garden ...