by K. T. Hunter
Wallace continued, "His death is unfortunate, to be sure. But even death has its uses." He leaned over the table and scratched at the grain of the wood with a short stubby finger. "A hero may keep the wolves of a world war at bay a little longer, Captain. This will suit our true mission. Just wait. You will see. Victory is relative."
Wallace droned on about history and victory. Christophe tuned him out and recalled his younger self, lying in a hammock on the deck of the Kiwi, staring at the stars and dreaming about sailing among them. He had imagined the parades and the parties for his crew upon their triumphant return. Now he wanted to visit that younger Christophe, shake him out of that hammock, and order him to keep his bare feet planted on that teak deck. Now he knew. He knew what space was. Cold and empty, empty except for darkness and death. His great adventurer's theme had become a funeral march.
Wallace tapped the list in front of him with his fountain pen and recalled Christophe's attention to the matters at hand.
"We need to inform his next of kin," the Cultural Officer said.
Christophe shut his eyes and stared into the darkness behind his lids, trying to do something, anything, to hold on to himself. "I am his next of kin. So is Dr. Pugh."
"No wife?"
"The Fury was his life entire," Christophe said with a shake of his head.
He might have been talking about himself. He opened his eyes and forced them to focus on Wallace. He had to have captain's eyes now.
"Personal effects?"
"Everything he owned is in his stateroom. He led a sailor's life. He traveled lightly."
Wallace nodded as he checked off another line on his list. "We'll need to move them so that the new first mate can take possession of his cabin. You do realize you will have to appoint an acting first mate, yes?"
Christophe nodded. He was indeed aware of that need, but he had tried to put it from his mind. It would be too final.
There was so much to do. A death was the end of the story for some, and the beginning of another chapter for others. He would have to grit his teeth in the face of this shifting wind, put his hand on the wheel, and steer once more. Gemma's harsh words of yesterday still echoed deep inside him. She had been right; deep down he knew she had been right even as she had said it. That didn't make hearing the words any less excruciating.
"I think that can wait until after the memorial service, can it not?" Dr. Pugh asked. "The crew needs some time--"
"The crew needs to keep doing its job, Dr. Pugh," Wallace said. "We need a first mate on the job now. They need their chain of command." He jotted down a few words in the margins of his paper. As he wrote, he said, "However, I think we can wait on the change of quarters until after the memorial service. Will that be acceptable, Captain?"
"Yes, Mr. Wallace. That would be acceptable." He could not, would not, give in to this sinking weakness in the pit of his stomach. There was too much to do, and he would do his friend no honours by staring into space for the rest of the journey. "I will recommend Mr. Pritchard."
"And the memorial service? Do you agree that the suggested service in the protocols--"
"Yes. I know the protocols only too well. It's much like the burials at sea. Your people thought of everything."
"Just prepared for every conceivable contingency, Captain. We can pull it together today and have it, say, tomorrow evening after the day shifts come off duty?"
Christophe nodded wearily. How could a man's life boil down to lines on a checklist?
Mr. Wallace checked his next item with a determined stroke of the pen. "Any progress on the investigation into the actual cause of the explosion?"
Dr. Pugh chimed in. "The findings are still preliminary. We haven't found any evidence of an explosive device. It appears that the mechanism itself was misaligned. Nesbitt believes one of the valve gears was loose. We haven't ruled out sabotage, but we have nothing to support it, either. Not yet."
"Very well. Let me know the instant your people have anything else to report. How is Hui coming along on the alternative weapon? Will we be able to defend the ship, should it become necessary?"
"At this point, who knows? He is putting every possible hour into it."
Christophe replied, "I'm giving them until Braking Day to have something workable. If not, we may have to consider aborting the mission."
Dr. Pugh's response was dry. "Either that, or invite the tentacle-heads over for tea. But I don't think they'll be very keen."
Mr. Wallace pinned them both with his steely gaze. "That will be up to the Admiralty. So far, I don't see a reason to abort our mission. Not our true mission." He set his pen down beside the checklist. "We have to keep the world united for as long as possible. Many of the old arguments are surfacing again, gentlemen. The Invasion and the Hague Treaty have held things in check for a while, longer than we could have hoped, but the effects are starting to fade. Without external enemies to distract us, the Treaty is just so many words on paper. War would have been a nightmare even before the Martians. We did our best to collect their technology, but it was impossible to confiscate it all. Word has it that Germany has detailed battle plans, ready to go at a moment's notice. Russia has created their own version of the Black Smoke, even though it violates the very first Hague Convention of '99! France has improved upon the walking machines and dabbled with the Heat Ray. No more metal breastplates and horsehair helmets for them. The days of Napoleonic formations are over. How much worse will war be now?"
Wallace rapped his knuckles on the table. "We have to keep their eyes on us, on this ship, for as long as possible, until we can find some other way to quell the tensions." He showed them another page inscribed with his precise penmanship. "I've written an article on Cervantes' heroic sacrifice that will be published in every newspaper around the world. We can get considerable mileage out of this incident. Considerable. And if anything else happens?" He shrugged. "Pressing on in the face of adversity? Even better." He jogged his papers into a neat stack. "I suggest we meet again later today with Father Alfieri to go over the final details of the memorial service. Any objections?"
When Mr. Wallace finally left the room, Christophe shuddered at the man's calculating demeanor. It chilled him to the bone to think that the death of the sea-hardened, sunbaked first mate, the finest man and most capable sailor he had ever known, would be just another tool to someone back on Earth. He was too shaken to even rage about it, as he had the day before. At least Gemma had had Cervantes' best interests in mind.
"True mission?" Christophe asked. "True. Mission. Elias, do you know anything about this?"
Pugh shook his head and leaned back in his chair to stretch his impossibly long legs out beneath the table. He stared up at the ceiling, as if he could find the secrets of the universe written there.
"No," he replied without looking at the captain. "But I should have guessed. Why else send only one ship, instead of waiting for the fleet to be finished?" He mumbled something harsh under his breath. "Well, there's nothing we can do about it now. We are well on our way." Then he sighed deeply and placed his hands behind his head, continuing his study of the ceiling.
"Something else has come to my attention, Elias, that may have something to do with the explosion. It may be small, but I didn't want to mention it in front of Wallace, just in case. Not yet, anyway."
"You don't trust him. Don't blame you. What's going on?"
"Frau Knopf reported to me this morning that some of the emergency cold rations are missing from the cargo bay. The count is off from last week's inspection. Not enough to be a crisis, but enough to get her notice. Not that anything escapes it. What do you reckon, Elias?"
"Can't be because Maggie was feeling a mite peckish," Elias replied, still boring holes into the ceiling with his eyes. "I see no great cause for concern. Wouldn't hurt to poke around the cargo bay. Perhaps they just got moved."
"Or maybe we have a stowaway. Maybe one of the Shackleton lot decided to tag along. I'll have the lads in charge of the bay hav
e a look round when they have a moment. It's a lot of ground to cover."
Pugh sat up in his chair. His voice shifted to a more fatherly tone. "How are you holding up, son?"
Christophe took a deep breath and stared down at his hands, clenched into white-knuckled fists. He flexed them, feeling where his fingernails had nipped his palms. Without looking up, he asked the question that had been haunting him since the day before.
"Yesterday, when we -- when I -- why did you ask Miss Llewellyn to be there?"
"You wouldn't listen to me. I thought you might listen to her. Lately, you seem to have become rather attached to that young lady," Pugh admitted.
Christophe straightened in his chair and grasped the edge of the table. "Attached? Who said--"
"Maggie."
Christophe snorted. "Maggie talks too much."
The scientist pegged him with a knowing look. "Maggie doesn't talk at all, son."
"You know what I mean. Anyway, there is no need to worry on that account anymore."
The air of concern that Pugh had carried with him the past few days grew heavier. "If you must blame anyone--"
"She's so ... so very cold. She's not who I thought she was."
"Who did you think she was?"
"A lady."
"Oh, that she is. At least, the lady that she was taught to be." Pugh shifted his lanky frame in the chair. "She never lied to you about that, son. You only saw what you wanted to see. Cold? Perhaps. Practical? Logical? Definitely. One must have some store of logic to be a computer."
"A computer? I thought she was a geologist."
"That bit is a lie. But I try not to blame Llewellyn for that." Pugh took out his pocket watch and fidgeted with it. "Let me tell you something about her 'college'. They do teach science and mathematics, but to create computers, not scientists. Computers that infiltrate laboratories and take what Brightman wants."
"Why would anyone send their children to such a place?"
"No one 'sends' their children there. It's not just a school. It's an orphanage. It's a prison. The beast that runs the place is as heartless a creature as you'll ever find. She raised our Gemma, if you can call what she did raising. The girl has known nothing else. Gemma doesn't know how to love, Christophe. She can't know. She's never known what it's like to be loved. Petunia Brightman doesn't have a maternal bone in her body. Believe me, she would have been far better off being raised by Martians."
Christophe sputtered, "How do you know this?"
"I make it my business to know these things."
"Sounds like you know from personal experience."
"I do. Very personal." He sat up, his chair groaning in protest, and leaned over the table. "Did you ever wonder why I had no computers of my own? Why I never made use of the Admiralty Computing Services for my work? Besides the fact that I was afraid you'd try to get under their skirts?"
Christophe bit his lip at that and shrugged.
Pugh continued, "It was bloody inconvenient, doing a lot of the computation myself before we got the analytical engines, but computers are far too dangerous. Before the Invasion, my mentor made heavy use of them. One of my tasks was to oversee their work. One particularly bright computer caught Aronnax's eye, a certain Petunia Brightman. Except we knew her as Pearl Addison. We were engaged in a line of inquiry that was severely confidential."
Christophe frowned. "You rarely mention your research from that time. But you were both biologists. What could have been so confidential before the Invasion?"
"It was secret because such research was highly controversial. Still is, actually. We researched the inheritance of traits, specifically that of genius. You've heard it called 'eugenics'. That research was why I was picked for the TIA study of Martian Code, you know. Aronnax's main source of funding was the Wollstonecraft Foundation."
"One of the founding organizations of the TIA."
"Precisely. Addison -- that is, Brightman -- was fascinated by the topic. She rose in the ranks of the computers, and she soon created the computing plans that they used to plow through mounds of data. She could do more than calculate. She understood the meaning behind the numbers, and she devoured any literature on the subject she could lay her hands on. She had a keen mind, and her charms won over Aronnax, even though he was a confirmed lifelong bachelor. She seduced him, she stole his secrets from him, and then she abandoned him. She sold the information to his fiercest rival and started her purported school off the profits. Years of work, lost to a fair face." Pugh sighed at the memory. "He never really recovered from that betrayal. He lived on, for a while, but he was never the same. I think that when he did die, it was of a broken heart."
"Why would anyone do such a thing?"
"Only Brightman herself knows. She had tried to make it as a scientist in her own right years before, but she could never break out of the computer harems. She was stymied at every turn. The scientific community has not been kind to those of the fairer sex."
"But there are lady scientists, aren't there? What about Madame Curie? Or the botanist that designed our Gardens? Alice Eastwood?"
"Yes, they are out there. Eastwood did a smashing job on our Gardens, and Curie has done some wonderful work with radium. But society doesn't seem to be interested in a woman doing pure research, doing science for the sake of science. Curie had a difficult time getting funding for her radium until a journalist convinced people of her desire to treat cancer with it or some such maternal nonsense. Yet even she had more of a place than Brightman did. Somewhere along the way, Brightman decided that if she could not join them, she would beat them, and make her living by taking from those who had rejected her."
A very dark question occurred to Christophe, one that disturbed him even more than Gemma's behaviour of the day before. "Do you think that Miss Llewellyn is here to steal from us? Is that even her real name? Do you think she could be a--" He stopped, not wanting to utter the word that perched on the tip of his tongue. It was a dangerous word. He picked up a stray fountain pen on the table and rolled it through his fingers. "That's a very serious charge."
"I try to hold her in a different category than Brightman. That woman's methods certainly show in Gemma's behavior, however. Most of her previous jobs involved computing, you know."
"She's never mentioned it."
"I'm sure she has mentioned very little. I'm certain she listens very well, though. Part of her charms. And part of the danger, for Brightman systematically and methodically drains them of any capacity for warmth or affection. And yet somehow she fills them with eternal gratitude towards her for saving them from an orphan's life. They have no other higher power than their headmistress, no other god before her. The TIA propagandists could learn a great deal from her methods." Dr. Pugh shook his head in disgust. "Brightman may train computers, but in the process she creates machines."
Christophe tossed the fountain pen back onto the desk. "There are days when I think it would be easier to be a machine. If love did that to Aronnax, what use is it, then? What use is there in loving?"
Pugh caressed the watch with his long fingers. He popped it open and handed it to Christophe with a slow hand.
"A great deal of use, son. Don't avoid love. It's what holds us together in this savage world. Just don't let it kill you, all the same."
Christophe looked at the photograph that he had seen many times over the course of his life, the one of Pugh's late wife and child, the family that he had lost in the Invasion. He gave Pugh a puzzled frown. "There's something else you aren't telling me."
Pugh flashed him a brief glimpse of a smile. "I've had my eye on Brightman for some time. Partly because of Aronnax." He pointed to the watch. "Partly because of her."
"Your wife?"
"My daughter."
"Your daughter?"
"I don't think she died in the Invasion."
"What? But I thought--"
"More than one person turned the Invasion to their advantage, Christophe. A crisis can ferret out the best and the
worst that humanity has to offer. Brightman harvested the Invasion Orphans for her own uses. The Martians left her quite a crop. But, perhaps even worse, she did not limit herself to orphans."
Christophe looked at him with growing horror as he pushed the watch back to Pugh. "Why have you never told me this?"
"What possible good would it have done you? You didn't need the distraction. I wasn't with my wife when the Invasion hit. I was in Paris, settling Aronnax's estate. By the time I was able to get back to Woking, it was too late. I found my wife but not my child. She was simply gone." He snapped the pocket watch closed. "I've been trying to locate my daughter ever since. In the intervening years, I've discovered that Brightman was in Woking at that time. Collecting. There is a strong chance that my child is among Brightman's so-called students. It's been difficult to confirm that, though. My daughter was still a babe in arms when the Invasion came, so we would not recognize each other now. Brightman has a network of people that keep her cache of students incredibly secure, so it has been a chore to access them."
"How could she have gotten away with this for so long? I mean, to hire out so many girls that leave their employer all of a sudden, so often? Surely someone would have noticed."
"Even the legitimate computers do not last long. Many march out of the laboratory and straight down the aisle. At least, that is what most people expect to happen. It's even easier when they never use the same name twice. That's what happens when you put people beneath your notice, Christophe. They become invisible. It gives them a kind of power over you, if they only realize it. And if they do realize it, as Brightman did, then it's Katy-bar-the-door." He rolled the watch between his hands. "To stick to the point, some of the Code of Life research that we've done might help me confirm my suspicions. I once hired a man to track the Girls in the field and get a sample from them, like a lock of hair, so I could find someone with enough Code in common with me. There were two likely girls left of the right age. One is reportedly deceased. Killed in Action, as it were. He tracked the other one to a laboratory in Shanghai."