"Most impressive, Captain McCormack," said a woman who was clearly into her middle years but who wore those years well, with a noble bearing and calm countenance.
"Why thank you, Lady Denning," the captain replied graciously, tipping his head in a brief bow, his accent warmed with a lilting Scots brogue.
"Nice fireplace," Major Horsley said, tapping out his pipe on the surround. "That allosaurus I bagged would look good up there."
One by one the guests found their places or, in the case of the tardier amongst the party, were guided to them by the robo-butlers waiting with clockwork patience to serve the meal. Each place setting held a card bearing the name of one of the most prodigious of the Neptune's guests, scribed in a precise and immaculate copperplate.
Dinner with the captain had been another excuse for the elite among the Neptune's passengers to dress to impress, as etiquette dictated and social one-upmanship demanded. The gentlemen, other than the captain, were all in well-tailored black tie, the only real opportunity to personalise their appearance being through the choice of waistcoats and cummerbunds.
For the ladies, however, trying to outdo one another was the name of the game. It was all satin, silk and chiffon - this season's colours apparently sea-greens, aquamarines and turquoise-blues - extravagant bejewelled accessories, bows, lacy flim-flammeries and flamboyant feather boas. Some of the younger female guests had also gone for more daring tailoring with, in the case of Miss Finch in particular, outrageous amounts of bare flesh on display. The other more senior ladies of the party had wisely kept to more traditional, and therefore, restrained designs.
At Captain McCormack's behest, the assembled dinner guests began to take their seats, once they had found their own personalised place setting. However, as they did so, it soon became apparent to the captain that not all of his guests had yet arrived; three places remained empty.
The doors to the dining room were opened again by two automata-drones and the true host of the dinner party was admitted.
Although everyone present was there that evening at the behest of Captain Connor McCormack, it was really the owner of the Carcharodon Shipping Company, and hence the owner of the Neptune, who had assured their attendance by inviting them on the sub-liner's maiden voyage in the first place, the wheelchair-bound eccentric billionaire, Jonah Carcharodon.
Carcharodon was wheeled into the banqueting chamber by a mousey-looking young woman, who might have been attractive were it not for the thick horn-rimmed spectacles she wore. She was dressed in a flattering black dress, her blonde hair swept back from her face and held in place on top of her head with a glittering shark-shaped clip. The shark jewellery was clearly visible as she kept her head down, eyes fixed on the carpet at her feet. She gave the impression that she was shy and embarrassed at having to put herself on show in a dress that clearly demonstrated that her figure was one worth showing off.
Jonah Carcharodon, however, apparently welcomed the attention his late arrival brought him, a slight smile forming on his tight-lipped mouth. Confined to a wheelchair, grey-haired and with all of his sixty-plus years showing now on his lined face and hollow features, nevertheless there was a certain spark in the old man's eyes that hinted at the vigour and drive for life one might have expected of a younger man.
"Mr Carcharodon," Captain McCormack said, "and Miss Celeste. Welcome. Now I think we are only missing one guest. Might I suggest we all partake of another glass of champagne while we wait?"
"McCormack," Carcharodon interjected, "I think your guests have probably been waiting long enough. Let dinner be served now."
"Very well, sir," the captain demurred. He nodded to one of the robo-waiters. On cue the droid struck the small bronze gong it held in one metallic hand. "Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served."
As the last of the guests seated themselves - Carcharodon's PA positioning him at the foot of the table, facing Captain McCormack, before taking a seat adjacent to him - the serving-automata prepared to dish up the soup course from steaming silver tureens. The aroma of Thai red curry and coconut filled the room.
"You will notice a theme to this evening's meal," the captain pointed out to his guests, "a signature dish from some of the different destinations we have already visited or will be visiting on this, the Neptune's maiden voyage."
The dining room doors opened once more, this time without the aid of the droid-drudges. Standing framed in the doorway was a gentleman instantly recognisable thanks to the numerous pictures that had appeared in the popular press and on broadcasting screens throughout the realm of Magna Britannia following the calamitous events of Queen Victoria's 160th jubilee.
He looked somewhat different to how he had appeared live, across the empire on the night of June the sixteenth, on that occasion bloodied and bruised, his hair out of place, his clothes dishevelled. Such was not the case now. Also in black tie like the other male guests, he, however, had chosen to embellish the standard black and wine outfit with a striking rough gold silk waistcoat and contrasting burgundy cravat, held in place with a rose-cut diamond pin. And in his right hand he held his trademark cane with its bloodstone-set tip.
All eyes turned to the last dinner guest to arrive.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Captain McCormack," Ulysses Quicksilver announced. "Am I late?"
As the dandy scoured the faces of those already seated around the table his beaming smile was met with politely returned similar expressions from some, indifference from others and indignant disgust from a small minority, which, however, included Jonah Carcharodon. If there was one thing the shipping magnate could not stand - as might be guessed if the rumours that he had invested his entire personal fortune into the building of the Neptune, were to be believed - it was being upstaged.
"Ah, Mr Quicksilver. We thought you weren't coming," Carcharodon chided. "We were about to start without you."
"No need to worry," Ulysses replied. "I'm here now, so the party can begin."
"So, Mr Sylvester, I take it your employer was too ill to travel with us on this historic voyage."
"I am afraid so, Mr Carcharodon," confirmed a slickly turned out young man, his hair swept back, glistening with hair-oil.
Everything about him, from his hawkish demeanour to his sharp dress sense, screamed go-getter businessman to Ulysses. This was a man on a mission, with a career on the up. To be acting as the representative of someone as powerful and influential as Josiah Umbridge, founder and owner of Umbridge Industries - the Empire's foremost industrialist, with numerous steel mills and factories to his name - attested to that fact. And Ulysses sincerely doubted that Dexter Sylvester was spending the entirety of the cruise relaxing either. He would doubtless be networking with influential passengers as well as continuing to do whatever it was he did for Umbridge Industries from afar, sending in his work by remote difference engine transfer, the Neptune being equipped with all the most up-to-date radio-telegraph-electronic-communication transmitter terminals and receivers.
In time the dessert course followed, crème brûlée with a warm berry coulis. As those around the table tucked into the sweet, Ulysses Quicksilver considered his fellow dinner guests. After a number of weeks on ship, thanks to his affable charm and personable way with all and sundry, Ulysses had managed to gain the relaxed acquaintance of a host of the ship's staff as well as of the other passengers. As a result, he already knew enough about practically everyone around the table to make him realise that there was a lot more he would like to know. It seemed that no one who had been invited on the Neptune's first circumnavigation of the globe was entirely without something of a history all of their own. But then, as a novelist friend of Ulysses' from his school days at Eton had once pointed out to him, "Everyone is the protagonist in their own life story, everyone a hero with a tale worth telling. There are no secondary characters in real life."
He started to mentally compile a dossier on each of his fellow guests, containing every piece of gossip, fact, observation and rumour he had p
icked up on each of them thus far. And as seemed fit, he began with their nominal host the captain, seated at the head of the table.
Captain Connor McCormack was, as might be expected, the most experienced, trusted and capable captain in the Carcharodon fleet. Hence, naturally, he had given up command of the Nautilus - up until the construction of the Neptune the flagship of the Great White Line - to take over command of the new super submersible-liner. He looked every part the maritime hero and yet there was a slightly detached world-weariness about him that his eyes could not hide. Ulysses suspected that seeing out his days as the captain of a luxury passenger liner was not the path he had seen his career taking when he was on the first rung of the ladder.
Although financially, and in terms of glory-seeking, his choice of career path could not be faulted, Ulysses had seen such world-weary expressions before, in those pensioned off from the army, who until that point had only lived to serve, fighting for Queen and country. Their prime purpose in life denied them, such men felt neutered now that they were not on the front line facing the enemies of the Empire in honest battle. Perhaps it wasn't active duty at sea that Captain McCormack yearned for now; in another life Ulysses could have seen him taking command of a starship charting unknown waters out beyond the bounds of the solar system, a pioneering space adventurer searching for life on other worlds.
To the captain's right sat a man whom Ulysses had never met until that night, although he had seen his name mentioned in various newspaper articles surrounding the same debacle that had resulted in Ulysses finding himself the subject of a fair few column inches. Perhaps it was for this very reason that Professor Maxwell Crichton, Emeritus Professor of Genetic Adaptation and Bio-Diversity in Evolutionary Biology at the Natural History Museum and one-time colleague of the much maligned Professor Ignatius Galapagos - although he had been at pains to distance himself from any connection there might have been between them both in the self-same articles - that he had taken up the offer of a world cruise, away from the hounding of the popular press and their unwelcome speculative approach to reporting so-called facts.
And he looked like a man hounded and on edge. Somewhere around his mid-fifties, he had a thin, wiry frame that spoke of an academic's neglect of the body's basic needs, such as a regular three square meals a day. Myopia, possibly also the result of prolonged hours of study by weak lamplight, was rectified by a pair of wire-framed spectacles. The hair on his head was white-grey, short and with a tendency towards spikiness, and he steepled his fingers before his face, elbows on the table, when he spoke in earnest about all subjects under the sun - from politics and religion, to the actions of terrorist groups around the world and his own boundary-challenging work in the field of evolutionary biology. But despite the fact that he was now supposed to be relaxing over supper with convivial company, Professor Crichton still appeared hollow-eyed and anxious. Ulysses half expected him to glance back over his shoulder at any moment. Although, now that Ulysses came to think about it, the professor was actually spending a fair amount of time glancing at another of the captain's guests, one Lady Denning who was sat opposite him, shooting her dark looks over the tops of his glasses from beneath beetling brows.
Like Crichton, Ulysses turned his scrutinising gaze on Lady Josephine Denning. Again, she was someone Ulysses knew of only by reputation, until this evening. She didn't have the same staid qualities as Professor Crichton but she was, nonetheless, a leader in her own scientific field, that of marine biology. Ulysses had heard it crudely put that what Lady Denning didn't know about fish wasn't worth knowing. The title had come from her marriage to Lord Horatio Denning, who, although his family estates lay in the north of England, had spent much of his time on his yacht sailing around the Mediterranean. It was there that he had met a certain struggling postgraduate research scientist on an expedition to catalogue sea cucumber populations off the coast of Sardinia. His money and hereditary title had brought the, by then, Lady Denning the influence and attention she needed to make more of her work. But this had all been a long time ago now. Tragically Lord Denning, more than twenty years his wife's senior, had died only two years into their marriage, poisoned by a carelessly prepared plate of fugu whilst holidaying in Japan. Lady Denning had never remarried. Now in her sixties, she carried herself with all the grace and poise of a woman born to good breeding, not one who had simply married into it. A strict regimen of yoga and a diet heavy with oily fish had also meant that she had maintained her figure and looks far beyond that which her years might have suggested.
A man who did not appear to be wearing as well was the ship's chief medic, Dr Samuel Oglivy, seated to Lady Denning's left. Ulysses guessed him to be in his mid-forties, not significantly older than Ulysses himself, but the waxy appearance of his skin and his hollow-eyed expression spoke of a man who was not well. Looking at Dr Ogilvy, Ulysses couldn't help calling to mind the expression, 'Physician, heal thyself.' But then he already knew that Ogilvy was not a well man, in more ways than one, and it wasn't down to seasickness as the doctor claimed. In fact, if he were not careful and continued on his current course of action, his condition could prove fatal.
Opposite Ogilvy sat John Schafer, still fresh of face and bright of eye, the style of his hair and the cut of his clothes more up-to-date that any of the rest of them. Ulysses, himself a follower of fashion, still preferred to create his own style; it worked for him anyway. The young man could not hide the look of blissful happiness on his face, nor could he keep from clasping the hand of his sweetheart sitting beside him. In turn, Constance Pennyroyal could not take her eyes from her handsome beau, constantly snatching shared glances with him from beneath fluttering eyelashes. The two of them were leaving much of the food placed in front of them unfinished, so full were they with each other.
Then there was Constance's maiden aunt and chaperone, her stern glances and puckered mouth letting everyone know her opinion of such public displays of affection.
"Ladies and gentlemen, if I might have your attention?" Schafer spoke over the general hubbub of conversation.
"Certainly, Mr Schafer," Captain McCormack said. "Please, feel free to speak."
"It's just that now would seem to be the perfect time for Constance and I to make an announcement," the young man went on. A sudden silence descended over the dinner guests, accompanied by a look of bewilderment from the Major and a gasp of understanding from Glenda Finch. "I am delighted to say that, earlier this evening Constance agreed to become my wife."
Further gasps rose from the assembled guests accompanied by hearty congratulatory comments, a chinking of glasses and smatterings of applause.
"That's simply wonderful news," Miss Finch spoke up. "I'm sure your families will be delighted."
If the look on Miss Whilomena Birkin's face was anything to go by, it looked like the gossip columnist had got her facts wrong again.
Ulysses knew all he needed to know about Miss Glenda Finch, from what he had read in her column in and her none-too-subtle approach to investigative journalism that he had experienced over his enforced drink with her at the bar. She was unsubtly throwing herself at him even now, laughing at every vague witticism he could be bothered to construct and touching his arm or hand almost every time she directed a comment at him, which he found annoying. It annoyed him because he was annoyed with himself for actually enjoying the attention she was showing him. Carcharodon's PA might be the more traditional English Rose, a beauty buried within a shell of shyness and poor self-esteem, and the more intriguing challenge, but there was something appealing about Glenda Finch's brash approach and her clumsy attempts at seduction, all for the sake of a story. But then she was behaving just as flirtatiously towards Major Horsley, seated to her right.
In turn, the Major appeared to be revelling in the attention of a not unattractive young woman with a taste for plunging necklines. Retired army officer turned big game hunter, living off an army pension and apparent personal family fortune, Major Marmaduke Horsley had never been marr
ied to anyone in his life, other than Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Everything there was to know about the Major was there for all to see on the surface. A man like him couldn't hide his opinions if he tried, and he wasn't inclined to try in the first place. A bluff and hale character with a laugh as big as his belly - army muscle long ago turned to fat, the legacy of too many mess dinners and an aversion to physical activity - he was like everyone's incorrigible favourite uncle. There was something of the seasonal gift-giver about his appearance, as well as his manner, his red face bulging with purple veins, from his bulbous, port-swollen nose to his cheeks and unapologetic white whiskers of sideburns and moustache.
And finally, facing Ulysses from where he had been placed between Dexter Sylvester and Miss Birkin was the highly-respected global-trotting travel writer, Thor Haugland. The accent of his homeland apparent in his cultured tones, his command of English was better than that of many Englishmen Ulysses had met, and English was only one of seven languages spoken by the Norwegian. Should the conversation ever falter, with the way in which he turned any comment or question into an excuse to relate another of his many overseas adventures, Haugland would be able to keep the dinner entertainment going single-handedly. And despite his high-brow, pseudo-intellectual approach, there was no doubting his abilities as a storyteller; even the most insignificant experience was related with attention gripping skill and, in the process, turned into an intriguing anecdote. Miss Birkin certainly seemed happy to hang on his every word, rather than confront the reality of her charge's hasty - and possibly rebellious - engagement. As was Miss Celeste.
And then there was Jonah Carcharodon. Strangely, Ulysses realised, although in many ways he was the most publicly recognised figure amongst the party, after Ulysses himself, he was the biggest unknown as far as the dandy adventurer was concerned. Rumours abounded, but the actual facts behind those rumours remained frustratingly clouded by a fog of contradictions, uncertainties and downright lies. The Great White Shipping Line was an undoubted global success but there were still persistent rumours that the building of the Neptune had almost sunk the company. Everyone knew that Carcharodon was confined to a wheelchair but no one seemed to know why. It was popular knowledge that Carcharodon was an eccentric billionaire but nobody knew what he spent his considerable fortune on. He had given many interviews over the years but still no one seemed to know anything of real substance about the man. He remained a mystery. What Ulysses knew from his own investigations was that Carcharodon was the owner of the shipping company that bore his name and the host of this party, a grumpy old sod with an eye for pretty young assistants, who didn't like being upstaged on his own boat, and that was about it. At this moment, as the Umbridge Industries man was trying to ask him another searching question, Carcharodon appeared to be berating his put-upon assistant.
Leviathan Rising Page 3
