by K. T. Hunter
He was quite chatty, and she found it expedient to act as puzzled as he was; it was not difficult. The word "Experiments" was already on her emergency list of Things to Ponder; experiments would be even more difficult to fake with nonexistent paraphernalia. Her next message back to the School would be a strongly worded one.
"Perhaps you brought some samples in your personal luggage?" Hui continued. "Minerals for your non-Mars research? Some strike plates? Perhaps some gems?" He rubbed his hands together with an excited gleam in his eyes.
"No, I am sorry."
"Oh, well," he sighed as he hunched his shoulders. "I thought perhaps they might have provided you some lunar rocks to study, at the very least. Check with Dr. Pugh. Perhaps he has a few from the last voyage." He paused and clasped his hands together, lost in thought. He shrugged. "You are already here, at any rate. Perhaps we can find something for you to do."
She cringed and was no longer afraid to do so. There wasn't as much as a slide rule at her station. She had known going into this that it would be difficult enough to convince the Cohort of her abilities; looking worse than unprepared would make it nearly impossible. She had to think, and think quickly, or she was going to be in an awkward position for a very long time.
"I have heard that we will have a tour of the Oberth Engines today," Hui said, startling her out of the dark tunnel she was thinking her way down. "Dr. Pugh saw them on the last trip, but the rest of us are new here, just like you. Isn't it exciting? I have heard that they use radio waves! Radio waves! How did they ever conceive of such a thing? I cannot wait to see it!"
She breathed a quiet sigh of relief at the change of topic. Perhaps that would give her some time to think about how she was going to handle her growing List. This wasn't the first time Gemma had had to improvise, but this job was going to push her skills to the limit.
A towering stack of books walked over to them on spindly legs. "I noticed you have some storage space to spare," the stack said in an accent that had grown up somewhere near Bangalore. "Mind if I borrow a bit?"
The stack rested itself on her workbench and revealed the man behind it. His face was nearly as brown as his lab blouse, and his black hair, frosted at the temples, floated untamed about his head like a quiet storm cloud of curls. The wrinkles of his lab blouse stored the crumbs of breakfast, and his now book-free hands were stained with ink and pencil grease.
"I could not help but overhear. So, I expect you won't need your space anytime soon. Any chance I might use your shelves? And your board?" He pointed to her gleaming glass panel. "The grease pencils are not nearly as nice as chalk, I will admit, but I could use the space."
"Ah, Dr. Bidarhalli," Hui answered before she could even take a breath to respond. "Please meet the much anticipated Miss Gemma, our geologist. Miss Gemma, this is Dr. Santosh Bidarhalli, our mathematician from Hyderabad, India's City of Pearls." Shedding his fatherly smile for a moment, he shook a finger at the other scientist. "Santosh, you remember what Pugh told us yesterday. Chalk gets in the air recycling and chokes everybody." He turned to Gemma. "Pugh told me that they learned the hard way during the lunar voyage."
A familiar voice interrupted them. "Just about time, lads," Dr. Pugh said, his lanky frame filling the doorway. "Come on to the conference room. Hui, do make sure that Llewellyn doesn't get lost on the way, if you please."
For once, she was grateful for his intrusion. It gave her some time to think. She followed Hui, Bidarhalli, and the rest back down the hall and past the lift. Feeling like a lost chick in a flock of clucking brown hens, she considered her situation. Perhaps she could barter her empty space for some time with the others' books and Bunsen burners. The curious side of her mind reveled in the thought of observing their work. She hated leaving a mission before knowing the final results of her target's experiments. They would expect her to take notes; even the most socially awkward scientist would notice if she didn't scribble something every so often. She would need pens and notebooks as well. The two members she had just met seemed amenable to such a trade. With her training as a computer, she would be right at home with the mathematician's materials.
Hui pulled out a chair for her, and she sat down carefully, with her hands folded in her lap and ankles crossed beneath her long skirt. She looked about the conference room as it began to fill with the other members of the Cohort.
There were no "Terra Vigila" posters here. Sophie didn't do any welding in this room, Gemma supposed. In fact, the only sign on the wall that she recognized was the "Lights of Blue, Go to the Loo!" one from the mess hall. Otherwise, maps of their destination covered the walls like the tattered remnants of tapestries. Some were marked with the possible locations of seas, canals, and cities that some had glimpsed through earth-bound telescopes.
A guide to the Moon was there as well, with features that she had never seen in the newspaper articles covering the maiden voyage. On the main table sat a globe of Mars, a red-gold sphere that shone in the bright light beaming down from the ceiling panels. Books, papers, rulers, and drafting tools were scattered about the globe's base, and some were employed as weights to hold down still more maps. Bound volumes of numerical tables computed by the Admiralty Computing Service lurked beside copies of Darwin and Lyell. Gemma noted that the latter was the same edition as the one in her cabin.
A geology book amongst these fellows? Perhaps her Watcher was in this very room. If so, she thought, his disguise is superb. Most of them could not infiltrate a post office.
With much squeaking and fidgeting, they finished seating themselves. They were a room of dull brown hens, and it took a moment for the clucking to subside. A couple of them glared at her, as if she were an unexpected fly swimming in an Erlenmeyer flask of carefully distilled water. Hui and a fatherly man on her other side flashed her paternal smiles while Bidarhalli and the rest found some other scientific object to occupy their attention.
"Right," Pugh said, hunching over the head of the table. "You lot know each other, but we have a new member that I need to introduce." She could almost feel the effort he was making to avoid rolling his eyes. "Miss Gemma Llewellyn, Ship's Geologist. Miss Llewellyn, may I present the rest of the Cohort."
He gestured to the smiling man sitting to her right. He wore a clerical collar beneath his browns.
"This is Father Abramo Alfieri, our astronomer. He's on loan to us from the Vatican Observatory." Pugh's left eye twitched. "He is also the ship's chaplain. Should we need one."
Father Alfieri stood up and bowed to Gemma as he said, "I say Mass on Sunday mornings and hear confession on Wednesday evenings after tea. Of course, I am available for spiritual counsel whenever the need arises. I have a small chapel just off the mess hall for everyone's convenience."
This time the other scientists did roll their eyes. They grunted in response, but they did not interrupt him. Alfieri was a small man; he was one of the few people that Gemma had met so far with whom she could literally see eye to eye. Silver hair framed his broad smiling face. His deep-set eyes twinkled above a neatly trimmed beard.
Pugh cleared his throat and continued pointing out the other men at the table.
"Professor Yuri Stanislav of St. Petersburg, Germ Sciences. And next to him, Declan Shaw, of Trinity College. They are the G-bomb experts. That's 'germ bomb' to the uninitiated."
The two men nodded at her without speaking. Shaw shot her a look that she had encountered more than once in her travels, a derisive sneer that said he already knew about her empty workspace and that he had expected nothing more than that. The other hostile glower in the room clung to the face of the man next to him.
"Alvar Berndsen, lately of Copenhagen, is my fellow biologist. He also assists the ship's surgeon from time to time. And here is our linguist and cryptanalyst, hailing from the Ottoman Empire, Abdul-Halim ibn Saeed ibn... ibn... oh heavens, I can't remember the rest. We just call him Abbie."
"Which he doesn't particularly like," Hui whispered in her ear.
The man in ques
tion stroked his luxurious beard with a studied and silent frown. Not an angry frown, as she had seen many times before, but one of deep rumination that refused to reveal its secrets.
"Abbie deciphers and translates the information we retrieved from the Martian cylinders. I suppose you are already acquainted with our resident physicist and mathematician," Pugh continued, pointing to the Hui and Bidarhalli in turn.
Gemma didn't recognize any of these fellows from any of her previous jobs; she was thankful for that.
"Now that that's over with, let's crack on. Most of you are quite familiar with the plan, but I will review for our latecomers." He managed to say this without staring at her this time. "Our first order of business as the Cohort is to improve our knowledge of the Red Planet itself. As we get a better view of it with our telescopes, we will see what is where and revise our maps. We're not certain of their accuracy by any means. There has been some argument back home over whether the canals marked on the maps truly exist or if they are mere artifacts of our telescopes. But these," he pointed out red circles on one of the maps, "are our best guesses as to the locations of the main population centres. We have reckoned that these are the best targets for our attack run. Shaw, where are we on the payload development?"
Father Alfieri fidgeted in his seat and interrupted before Shaw had a chance to reply. "So, the suggestion that we might parley with them has been put aside?"
Pugh sighed. "Once again, Father, we don't think they'd be very keen," Pugh replied. "I know the Church has a vested interest in increasing its flock, but from what we can tell, the Martians evolved for War, not theological debate."
"So the plan for genocide is still in place," the priest said. "I had hoped... but there is time yet. What do we intend to do, if a victory is achieved, then? Or not achieved?"
It was an interesting way to ask the question: "What happens if we lose?" Those unsaid words hung in the air between the two men like the foul odour of sulphurous eggs.
With a sharp glance at the priest, Shaw answered, "With the payload we've devised, victory is a foregone conclusion. We're not using simple explosives, Father. We're going to introduce the rest of the population to the little buggers that their friends met on Earth. We've even improved a few of them to speed up the process."
"Diseased weapons?" Gemma asked, surprised that the question actually escaped her lips.
"Of course. It's the best way to preserve the existing infrastructure," Stanislav said. "For the second part of the Mission."
"Yes, yes," Pugh said with a sneer. "The much vaunted Secondary Mission. Which we all know to be the Primary. Naturally, we have to have something left to steal."
A blue-coated sailor leaned into the room. "We're ready for you down below, Dr. Pugh."
Dr. Pugh seemed relieved by the interruption. They filed out of the room and followed the young man to the lift, which took a couple of trips to ferry them all to the Oberth Deck. Gemma stayed beside Dr. Pugh during the trip down.
"We did have some ideas of our own once, you know," Dr. Pugh said to her. "Before the Invasion, that is. There was some flirtation with chemical rockets. Some people have always had dreams of going to the stars, and they felt that rocketry was the key."
"Rocketry?" Gemma asked. She had heard the term bandied about during one of her previous jobs, but she had gleaned very little in the way of useful information.
"I'll leave it to our good physicist to explain," Pugh replied as they exited the lift and passed the sign for the Oberth Deck.
"Have you ridden a bicycle before, Miss Gemma?" Hui asked.
She shook her head. "No, but I have seen them in London."
"Well," he continued, "when I ride one, it looks like I am pushing the pedals to move the wheels. What I am really doing is pushing against the ground, the Earth itself, to move forward. That thing I push against is called the working mass, to use the precise phrase. I can use the brakes to slow down or stop. And of course, there is friction on the road to slow me down as well."
The group turned a corner in the corridor and waited before a heavy door as their guide turned a large valve wheel to open it.
"In space," Hui said, "a ship has no ground, no gravity, to push against to move. So it has to bring its own working mass, yes? In rocketry, that working mass is the fuel. It is funneled out of the rear of the ship, which pushes it in the opposite direction. And there is no friction to slow it down." The door swung open as he talked, and they followed the guide through. "Simple enough, at least in theory--"
Hui gasped, and so did Gemma as she followed his eyes up, up, and up. This chamber seemed to have no ceiling! They stepped deeper into the chill of the cavern before them.
It was a veritable jungle of brass and steel, abloom with valve wheels and gauges of every size. Pipes climbed the walls like strangler vines and ran in every direction. The few spaces not claimed by pipes were plastered with warning signs that shouted all the dreadful consequences of a fuel leak or a solar flare, along with directions to the closest head. Gemma wondered about this obsession with toilets among the crew, thinking it might be a sign of some deficiency. Did one make water more often in space? So far, that had not been her experience.
A cylindrical tank dominated the vast chamber. Pipes of all sizes extended from it, running both fore and aft. Row upon row of barrels marched beside it. Each barrel had its own large gauge, like a cyclopean eye staring out over its fellows. The black tank itself had its own great bank of indicators in the shadows beneath it. A cluster of men monitored these instruments as they consulted clipboards and muttered amongst themselves.
"In practice, it wasn't so simple," Dr. Pugh said, picking up Hui's train of thought. Gemma thought she detected a note of boredom in his voice. It took her a moment to remember that he had seen all this before, and to him it was just another cold section of the ship.
"The problem was heat," Dr. Pugh said. "Look at it this way. You have to provide so much kinetic energy to reach a certain velocity, and you have to get to a certain velocity to go a certain distance in a reasonable amount of time. To get that velocity, you have to burn very hot indeed, and that sort of temperature tends to melt the very nozzle that uses it for propulsion! What a dreadful pickle! So we had to figure out some method of producing the thrust without actually melting the ship in the process! We fought with it and fought with it and there seemed no way round it ... until the Invasion. Once the little buggers had been harvested by the grim reaper, we peeked into their cylinders and found a solution."
He walked towards the tank. Most of the other scientists had wandered off and were running up and down the aisles of barrels by this point, so he was talking to Gemma alone. "They had plans for other ships, ones much greater than cylinders. Enormous ships that could move thousands of such creatures vast distances across the stars. They injected energy into a propellant gas," he said as he pointed up at the tank with a long bony finger, "without touching it. Using a technology that we were already familiar with. Radio waves."
They stopped at the last row of barrels just before the tank itself, very near to the men monitoring the instruments.
"The main fuel is argon gas, which is stored in this monstrosity. We can divert it to the aft nozzles, as we are now, for forward thrust. Later on, to slow down, we can divert it to the forward nozzles. For Braking Day." He pointed to each set of pipes in turn. "We convert the gas into a plasma working mass by heating it to an incredibly high temperature using radio waves. At the same time, we have to have electric power to produce those radio waves. We have a different fuel for that, a variation of helium, helium-3, also known as--"
"Tralphium!"
The word escaped Gemma's lips like a restless hound bounding over a fence for a run out. It was the one word (besides argon) that she had understood in his entire speech. She could see the word scrawled across her mind's eye in chalk letters. It had been the topic of her previous target's research. While he had refused all possible computers and assistants, he had loved t
o show off his cleverness to his new dancing-girl mistress. She had studied it whenever she had the chance between the glasses of champagne he pushed on her, and she had memorized every word and symbol. Most of it had not made any sort of sense at the time, but she still carried a clear image of it in her head.
The substance was much in demand on Earth, and Mrs. Brightman had been keen to discover the TIA's secret source of this very rare element. Naturally, the scientist had not written that particular fact on his board. Gemma had been on the verge of uncovering said fact when she had been pulled away for this mission. The connection startled her. Was Brightman still pursuing the tralphium, then? What did that have to do with watching the captain?
She discovered that the Cohort had regrouped at her yelp, and they were all gawking at her. She straightened her blouse and lifted her chin, for now they were discussing a topic to which she could contribute.
"Tralphium," she began, "an isotope of helium in which the nucleus has lost one of its neutrons; since it only has three particles in its nucleus, we call it Helium-3. It is not radioactive, and it can burn cleanly when used as a fuel. Much, much cleaner than coal. It can be fused with itself inside a magnetic containment field, resulting in loose protons that can be used to produce current directly. The problem is that the substance is very rare on Earth. Helium itself is lighter than air, so free helium on the surface just escapes from the atmosphere."
"Well-spoken," said a member of the group at the monitoring station. "Couldn't have said it any better myself."
They all turned to face the man, only to find that it was Captain Moreau, his tall form emerging from the shadows beneath the tank.
"Indeed," Dr. Pugh replied with hooded eyes. He fixed Gemma with his stare, but she simply stared right back and refused to wriggle beneath those pinning pupils.
"Actually," the captain continued, "the tralphium is not our fuel, as such. We use it to generate the electric power that then heats the argon, which is the actual fuel. We distribute the remainder of that power throughout the ship. This chamber is the only place we use gas. The rest of the ship gets pure electricity! Too volatile, otherwise!" He grinned at Gemma, who was still too stunned by his sudden appearance to respond. "Honestly, we could use any gas. Very clever, these Martians. They could use almost anything they picked up along the way as fuel, so they didn't have to load up for the entire journey at once if they didn't feel like it. At least in the larger ship designs, since the cylinders were purely ballistic. We haven't quite figured the collection bit out yet, though, so we still have to lug this tank of argon with us. Thankfully it's cheap to obtain and easy to find, unlike the tralphium. It was good enough a design to even get old Hermann Oberth himself to give up his infatuation with chemical rocketry."
