by K. T. Hunter
The gears were whirring faster, and still faster; Rathbone must have mucked with the controls. She could sense him moving above her, having gotten past Mars at last. Her reserves were running low; but still the drive to get to the floor, no matter the cost, seared her brain. Rathbone was fumbling his own way through the strange maze, but he was learning fast and closing in.
Bruises from their bout blossomed across Gemma's body, and they screamed for relief. Panting with fatigue, she eyed Rathbone's silhouette, only to find him not on his gear but hurtling towards her, aiming at her, and she could no longer move fast enough to escape him. They fell, locked together, off the side of the circle, and plummeted to the floor.
They sang a chorus of pain as they landed in a heap. Gemma's skull bounced off the hard deck. Before she could recover her wits enough to scuttle away, Rathbone pinned her to the floor. He straddled her and squashed her beneath him. He was so much taller than she was that her legs could not get purchase behind him. Squeezing her sides between his bony legs, Rathbone wrapped his long fingers around her slender throat, pushing into the tender flesh there so deeply that she thought he would rip right through her skin.
"You'll follow Cervantes out the airlock," he growled as he pressed down upon her like a boulder. What little air made it past his fingers squeaked and squealed in her throat. Screaming was beyond her power now. "You and that Humboldt. She wants you both gone. You'll all be gone, before too long. But she wants you first, you little minx. She wants Pugh to hurt, hurt bad, before it's all over, and taking you out first will pierce him right through. Orion's mine to find, now, and they'll be too busy looking for you to worry about who's looking for some stupid file."
He was pressing the very life out of her. She writhed beneath him, but in his frenzy, he was much too strong for her. She could not move. Her ribs could not expand enough for her to inhale. The space around her grew ever dimmer as Rathbone's words descended into something akin to madness.
"We were supposed to find Orion," he snarled through his clenched teeth. "I had the wireless. You had the scientists." He leaned low, nose brushing her forehead and sweat dripping onto her, choking off any last hope of another breath. "There's something here, something more than this stupid ship. When we launched we had plenty of time to find it, but now, time's out. Time's out for everybody. I've got to find it and get out before--"
A primal screech cut him off. Some dark and solid mass collided with him and ripped him off Gemma's body. She rolled over twice from the force of it. It landed on top of him several yards away. She wheezed and gasped, trying to breathe past the burning in her side, like a drowning woman who had broken the surface of the sea at last.
The last thing she saw, before the world went completely black, in the dim light filtering down from the orrery above, was the giant squid from her nightmares, pinioning a shrieking Rathbone beneath its meaty tentacles.
~~~~
Christophe
Christophe fumed his way to the command deck, searching for Mr. Rathbone. He was irritated at the man's interruption, but he stuffed the feeling down into a dark corner of his brain. He had commanded enough ships to know that captains rarely enjoyed a moment's peace.
The warrant officer was not there. Christophe caught the eye of Mr. Adebayo and fired off an inquiry.
"Sir, we haven't seen him," the midshipman replied. "Not since the memorial service. He didn't leave any sort of message for you. He's supposed to be back on duty in half an hour, though."
Christophe shook his head in puzzlement, about to answer, when a sudden buzzing sounded in his head.
"Humboldt, you rake," he hissed to himself.
A queasy wave rolled through his stomach, and he felt the urgent need to locate Gemma. He was not sure whether to run to the orrery or Ladies' Country first, but he had to start somewhere. He reached for the speaking tube when he received a sudden flash in his head from Maggie. Maggie called to him, called to him the way she did when words were not fast enough.
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 fac
e. 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.
"Upset her?" Gemma asked, fighting the panic rising in her aching chest.
The beak clicked twice in response, and the round blue eyes above it blinked. In Gemma's mind, she thought she heard the Man from Shanghai whisper, "Yes."
Pugh walked between her and the creature he called "Maggie" and continued in a gentle voice. "Don't worry about your change of togs. We did not watch! Maggie handled that for us. She thought that one of Christophe's old sailing shirts might be more comfortable than that scratchy old jacket. Especially with those bandages." Embarrassment coloured his laugh as he witnessed disgust and horror spread across her face. "Not to worry, Llewellyn. She was very careful to avoid injuring you further. Trust me, if she can dress a squirming two-year-old," he said as he cast a meaningful nod at Christophe, "she can handle an unconscious patient. She's quite good at it, actually."