20 Million Leagues Over the Sea

by K. T. Hunter

  As Maggie "spoke", Curiosity and Hysteria were at it again. Curiosity won this round and stuffed Hysteria into a mental corner in the back of her head. Gemma could sense no malice in Maggie's movements or unique method of speech, and she began to relax a little more (perhaps it was the gin talking) and watched the researcher continue her work. Two chains of Code appeared in impossibly tiny hand -- or tentacle, as the case might be. Each was labeled, but she could not discern the letters printed there. Arrows pointed from the set to a third chain. As she looked more closely, she saw that the last chain seemed to contain a very specific blend of the codes above. It was labeled clearly as "C. Moreau".

  He was a bespoke hero, after all.

  She gritted her teeth as she sat up to read the labels on the other chains. The leftmost of the top two bore the label "E. Pugh". That confirmed it; Pugh was his father, after a fashion. That was no surprise.

  The second was labeled "Nobody". That wasn't a proper name in any language that she knew. Was it a label for an unknown person? But why would they use Code from someone they didn't know? No, knowing Dr. Pugh, that was not the case. Perhaps Maggie was not given the person's name. Or it was an alias, then, for a secret within a secret, Christophe's mysterious "other father". Or, perhaps, another mother? Or to partially "blind" the process?

  She looked at Maggie, as if to ask her a question, when she noticed that the creature had put down the grease pencils and had picked up, of all things, a pair of knitting needles. They were longer than normal, probably to accommodate her longer limbs, but they were, for all intents and purposes, knitting needles. The makings of a woolen scarf tumbled from them, and the letter "M" scrolled out from the end. Was the Martian knitting a scarf for her "son"? The sight of it was so absurd that Gemma could not help but laugh, even though her ribs screamed as she did so.

  "So, even you could not escape the Knitting Circle of Doom, eh?" Gemma remarked with a chuckle.

  Maggie gurgled at her in what Gemma assumed must be her version of a laugh.

  "Space is cold," the voice in her head said again. "I must keep my little bud warm."

  Gemma gazed at the creature for a moment in a mixture of amusement and befuddlement. The warmth of the last drops of gin glowed within her as she drank them. Only the pressing pain in her ribs kept her from guffawing at the thought of the tall, lanky Christophe as an infant cradled in Maggie's tentacles. The mental image was far too ridiculous to hold any terror or disgust in it.

  Gemma had nothing to fear here.

  This is why she could not find Orion, no matter how hard she had searched through Pugh's office. Orion was not some formula, or a file, or anything so mundane. Orion was flesh. Orion was alive. Orion was Christophe Moreau, the master and commander of the Thunder Child's Fury. That infuriating man, the one who had made her laugh, the one that earlier today she had so wanted to kiss. They were one and the same. Orion had been in front of her, all along.

  And just when she didn't need to find it, it had presented itself to her. But there was something more to it than just churning out people like fabric from a jacquard loom. Why would Brightman be interested in that? Had her former mistress even understood enough about Orion to know what she really wanted? Had she known that a Maggie was required to carry it out? Without a Martian, this knowledge was useless.

  A new thought left her cold. She knew what happened to the older students, now. Was this how she planned to continue her work when the first ones aged out? Create fresh ones out of the old?

  She could not let it go. Gemma set her computer's mind to work on the problem. There was nothing else to do but moan or watch Maggie stitch more rows on the scarf.

  "Where else have I heard that name, Maggie?" she mused aloud. "Orion. Orion. Oh, it's as bothersome as 'Moreau'! Must have been back during that astronomy job last year at Oxford. What did the professor say? The constellation of Orion was associated with Osiris? That Egyptian fellow?"

  "Yes," the voice replied. "Pugh told me the story. His wife, Isis, brought Osiris back to life after his brother killed him."

  Gemma remained silent as she ran through the possibilities. Rathbone, for all his insanity and anger, was right. The greatest wonder out here was not the ship. The Fury was just a vehicle. It was going to wondrous places, yes, and it was terribly complicated; but it was still only a horseless carriage on a different road. This was something altogether different, something orders of magnitude greater.

  One could do more with this than create new people. One could copy a person.

  One could bring the dead back to life.

  One could be a god.

  And that's when the lights went out.

  ~~~~

  Christophe

  "Damn that Wallace!" Christophe spat into the yawning darkness of the Oberth deck. "Damn him, damn, damn, damn him! Five more, five!"

  Christophe seethed as he held the lifeless body of Chief Nesbitt. The engineer's uniform was soaked in the blood that poured from the gash in his throat. The poor fellow hadn't even had time to cry out. Christophe screamed for him, another crewmember lost to a useless and brutal death. And if the power was not back online soon, he would lose the rest of them.

  He had to find Wallace. He had to find Wallace and end this madness.

  Pugh called from one dark corner. "Christophe! A live one! Over here! Call Hansard!"

  Nearly blind with fury, Christophe made his way to the pipephone and called sick bay.

  As he hung up, Pugh said, "I think he got all the on-duty engineers. Where is that bastard?"

  "There's only one place he could be," Christophe replied as he jogged towards the corridor. "Elias, have the master-at-arms and his men meet me at the Iron Wind. They're already closer than we are."

  "Can't Pritchard just stop him from the bridge?"

  "No! It's designed to launch independently! Get Pritchard and the off-duty engineers down here to look at the Oberths. I'm for Wallace."

  "Are you armed?"

  "Leyden pistol's been on me ever since before the Rathbone incident," Christophe called behind him as he patted the holster at his side.

  He broke into a full run, his long legs like pistons driving him towards whatever awaited him.

  ~~~~

  Gemma

  Maggie jolted when the lights flickered back on at half-strength, as if she had been bitten by a snake. Her knitting soared across the room and smashed into the wall.

  "What is it?" Gemma asked aloud.

  "Christophe!" Maggie's manly voice said in her mind. "There is danger. Someone has harmed the ship." She rolled towards the door into the mysterious corridor. "I have to go help him. Stay here, where you are safe."

  Gemma stirred in the bedclothes and attempted to stand. "Is it Rathbone? I should go with you."

  "No, no, it isn't," Maggie protested with raised tentacles as she opened the door. "It's someone I didn't expect. Please stay, child. Rest. I do not fear him."

  Maggie latched the door behind her, leaving Gemma alone in the dimly lit chamber. The room felt all the emptier for the alien's absence, much to Gemma's surprise. She could hear the creature rolling herself down the hall. The skittering sound of her movement through the corridor was unmistakable.

  Here, here was Caroline's ghost! Here were the eyes that had watched her in the hallway and followed her through the ship! And thankfully so, Gemma thought, for that had enabled the creature to save her from Rathbone.

  She had to find out. She had to find out why Maggie would save her, a stranger, one who reviled her kind more than any other thing in the universe. Why would Maggie protect her more than any Watcher ever had and risk exposing herself to the crew of the Fury in the process? Gemma had to know. Her instincts told her that if she did not help Maggie now, she would never have the chance to find out.

  The insect sound of Maggie's movement was louder than ever; the background hum of the engines had faded into an eerie silence. She had grown so used to the ever-present drone that she had learned to tune
it out. Now the lack of it was louder than thunder.

  She struggled to stand and yelped at the coldness of the floor when her bare feet landed on it. Every muscle protested as loudly as Maggie had as she reached for the clothing that Frau Knopf had left. Grimacing all the while, she discovered that it was a pair of trousers instead of her usual skirt. It took her a few minutes to wrestle herself into them, but she managed it.

  She rummaged about for her shoes and stockings and fumbled her frozen feet into them. There was a cool edge to the air. Gemma snatched up one of the smaller blankets and draped it over the loose shirt as she shuffled out the door and into the unknown country of the corridor.

  It was smaller and darker than any other passageway she had seen so far. It was wide enough to allow something of Maggie's size to move about, but no more than that. The door to Maggie's nest was in the lower portion of a gentle slope that crossed the decks above and below it. Gemma could not recall seeing anything like it on the schematics and was unsure of which direction to take. She cocked her head from side to side until she heard the familiar skittering and scratching. Otherwise, the narrow tunnel was empty, with neither sailor nor map to point the way. Not even a spider troubled the cold shadows that draped across the space at odd angles.

  Gemma, slipping between pools of faint light, padded towards the sound of Maggie's path. Breathing was a chore through her tender ribs, and she limped up the course with cantankerous knees that were keen on getting back to bed. She passed door after unmarked door underneath the snaking tracks of what appeared to be the hidden network of pneumatic tubes. She could still hear Maggie in the distance, but she could not see her. The occasional cross-corridor -- possibly in the area between decks -- interrupted her path. Gemma felt that Maggie may have turned down one of those, but she still heard the sound down the long hall, though it grew ever fainter. Maggie did not dawdle.

  Racks of tools and weapons decked the walls. One happened to be in the light as she loped by it, and she could see firearms hanging from it. Their odd appearance stopped her in her tracks. Dull matte black rectangles hung in the place of conventional revolvers. Except for their triggers, they did not resemble anything that Gemma had ever seen before, not even when she had assisted a weapons development specialist three years before.

  One of the slots was empty.

  As she gazed at the spot where it should have been, her foot slipped on something in the floor. She held her breath as she stooped to pick up the scrap of paper that was so out of place in this otherwise scrupulously clean back alley of the ship.

  Jagged and creased as it was, she could make out the undeniable lower half of Sophie the Steamfitter, the mate to the scrap she had found in the wreckage of the heat ray. Goose pimples raced across her scalp as fury rose in her throat. She could almost taste her anger.

  "Accident, my arse," she swore. "Is anyone on this bloody ship an actual sailor?"

  She stuffed the card into the pocket of her trousers and hobbled on, as Maggie's version of footsteps had almost faded entirely.

  "Crickets!" she muttered. "I'm rescuing a Martian. Will wonders never cease?"

  Muffled voices in the space ahead spurred her on, but she saw no one. She only found the odd vent here and there in the wall that showed glimpses of the main corridors through tiny slits. She heard sailors' voices filtering through the registers, and apprehension skulked behind their words. They talked of sheltering in the head.

  Has there been a solar flare? Gemma asked herself. Am I safe here?

  The corridor stretched on forever, but a commotion around the corner ahead drove her forward. She could hear an unearthly screech echoing down the cold and empty metal tunnel, reaching for her like the Man from Shanghai had, and then she felt it searing her thoughts.

  Maggie was screaming.

  The force of her suffering nearly knocked Gemma down to the floor. Maggie wasn't just screaming. She was in agony.

  Gemma willed herself into a lurching, running, hurtling pell-mell around the corner and into the cross-corridor. At the end of it was an open door, and beyond it the cavern of the cargo bay. Silhouetted in the opening was a man bent over a boneless grey mass. He placed one of the strange weapons she had seen a moment before on a rack just inside the door.

  Maggie's tentacles convulsed and seized, and her beak clacked loudly with her twitches. Icy claws tore at Gemma's pounding heart; she was too late, too late to help Maggie. With a howl of fury, Gemma seized the first tool she could reach from the rack and launched herself at the man.

  The next few moments blurred into a haze of pain. The promise that the stars had made to her seemed so far away. She would have to kill again, after all.

  ~~~~

  Christophe

  The trek across the ship took ages, but Christophe finally arrived at the cavernous cargo bay that housed the Iron Wind. He slipped into the chamber and stole over to where the vessel hung suspended over its own airlock. The black Leyden pistol felt heavy in his hand as he crept through the shadows of the towering crates. The sudden eruption of the slaps and thuds of harsh blows urged him forward.

  A shocking sight met him as he rounded the last stack of containers. Wallace was there, pinned beneath the last person he expected to see. Despite her injuries, Gemma clutched a hammer in her hands, held high above them both. She was an angry succubus, ready to bash in the head of her unconscious victim. Her face was a harpy's mask of twisted fury, and her loose hair was a mass of pure bedlam about her head. Her forehead shone with a mixture of sweat and blood trickling down from her scalp.

  "Gemma!" Christophe roared as he ran closer to them. Her rising arms froze at his call. "No! We need him alive!"

  "No, we don't!" she snarled back. Wallace was limp and still beneath her. Christophe could not tell if the man was still breathing. "Do you know what he's done? This bastard killed Cervantes! And Maggie!"

  "Llewellyn! No!" He bellowed at her as he continued to close the distance between them. He could still feel the pressure of Maggie in his head, even though it was silent. "Maggie's alive! Just hurt!"

  She froze, but she did not look up.

  "I know what he's done," Christophe said. "If he dies, we all die! Let him go! That's an order!"

  "Shove your orders! Shove me out the airlock! It would be a mercy! I've had enough!"

  The hammer rose even higher.

  Christophe squeezed the trigger of the Leyden pistol without further hesitation. Tiny balls of light shot across the remaining distance and struck Gemma in her already battered ribs. With a sharp shuddering twitch, she collapsed, the wooden shaft of the hammer still grasped in her right hand. Her fists clenched; waves of spasms washed over her muscles as the electricity carried by the steel-encased glass arced through her body and down into the man beneath her. Wallace, unconscious and unfeeling, twitched just as madly.

  Christophe crossed the floor and loomed over her. He watched the seizure ripple through the fallen woman without touching her. His mouth was a hard, grim line as he watched the familiar stages of the Leyden Effect play out. Gemma's eyes rolled back in her head. He watched the agonized contractions on her face and her rapid intakes of breath until both she and Wallace were still.

  He had exorcised the demon, for the moment.

  He knelt down and pressed his fingers into her neck. A ragged pulse still beat there. He checked Wallace next. He sighed in relief as he felt the man's heartbeat. Bruises covered the man's face, and a thin stream of blood trickled from his nose. Bile rise in Christophe's throat as he realized that he had rescued the villain in distress from the damsel.

  He studied the crumpled figure next to him. This fallen form was not the Gemma Llewellyn that he had come to know. She was not the bold woman that had put everything on the line to rescue a child. The beastly snarl that had defied him was not the soft smile from the gazebo. The person curled up on the cold deck was a complete stranger.

  As he heard the clatter of the master-at-arms in the distance, he wondered if the G
emma he knew even existed. He pulled out his pocketknife, unfolded it, and sawed off a lock of her hair. He stuffed the bundle into his pocket before the master-at-arms could see him.

  One limp tentacle peeked out from behind a stack of crates. Christophe holstered his pistol as he ran to Maggie and pulled the limb out of sight of the incoming crew. Her beak clicked at him; she was coming around quickly. He looked down at his jacket and saw the stains left by Nesbitt's blood leering at him.

  "You've had enough," he growled into the forest of shadows. "So have I."

  ~~~~

  Gemma

  "Thank you for rescuing me," said the Man from Shanghai.

  Gemma started awake at the ghost's voice. Rescue? she thought.

  "Not to worry," continued the whisper as it faded, "Wallace is with me. Pritchard is on the job. We'll save the ship, as you saved me."

  "Maggie?" Gemma mumbled as she opened her eyes, expecting to see the hieroglyph-splashed walls of the Martian's nest once more. Instead, the bandaged visage of Mr. Humboldt greeted her.

  "Maggie?" he asked. "Who's Maggie?"

  "Ahhh!" she shrieked.

  "Oh, no, it's just me, Miss L," Humboldt said as he patted her hand. "You're in sick bay, love. You look like something the Martians dragged in. Decided to fight them all on your own?"

  Every single joint ached. The pain she had felt upon her last waking was nothing compared to this. Her bruised ribs throbbed and screamed. This was becoming far too common. She struggled to remember what had happened to her this time. The last few hours were a fog in her brain. A fleeting image of a furious Christophe came to mind.