Cuttlefish

by Dave Freer

  “They're supposed to meet us,” said Mother, looking around into the darkness, fearfully.

  “The train was early,” said Clara. “I heard our little conductor man tell a passenger. Who is supposed to meet us?”

  There was a pause. “I can't tell you, love.” Her mother sounded…apologetic?

  Clara twined her fingers in her mother's. “Can't or won't, Mummy?” She never called her that. It was…babyish. Her mother was too serious, too thoughtful. And always “Mother.” Her father had been the jokester, always making both of them laugh. And he'd always been “Daddy.” Yet…under the jokes, she'd always suspected that he was even more serious than her mother. It suddenly came to her that he must have been, and must have been hiding that side of himself from her. That hurt. And it worried her.

  Her mother took a deep breath. “Won't. You see, if they catch us, you won't know. And people are risking their lives for us. The less you know, the safer they—and you—will be.”

  Clara had to admit that she'd always been the one to exasperate teachers with her curiosity and her quick tongue. They wanted her to learn just exactly what was put in front of her, and not to explain why or how. It had always made her irritated in class, because understanding why made learning so much easier. And now she felt just the same. Only with added fear, and too many hidden nasty things out there. She shivered. They were still standing in the middle of the tracks, staring after the departing train. She pointed to the little iron roof of the halt. “Well…let's go over there, and wait. And you can tell me what I can safely know, at least. Please.”

  “Very well…but over there. In the bushes. I think I hear another train.” So they retreated with their valises and the trunk into what proved to be nettles, but the train was coming fast, so there was no time to move away from them.

  It was only a green tank-engine spouting sparks from the stack, with its single headlight gleaming on the silver rails, racing towards them.

  With a metallic screech, it came to halt, and four men leapt out of the cab. Their plumed shakos proclaimed them to be Duke Malcolm's own troops. That was enough to frighten Clara and her mother farther back into the nettles. “Search the station. And be quick. They might have got down at Clancree. That fool didn't know for sure,” shouted the one who had remained in the cab with the driver.

  Clara could see the gold of his epaulettes—a senior officer. Her mother pulled her down and they began crawling away from their belongings and deeper into the darkness as quietly as they could.

  Along the road to their right a vehicle approached the station, coming fast, its powerful lights cutting through the drifts of smoke and the night-mist. “They'll be caught,” whispered Mother.

  But it didn't happen quite that way. The big touring car roared up to the station, followed closely by another. And a third. The five soldiers plainly weren't expecting them…or expecting any real trouble. Their rifles weren't at the ready.

  The same could not be said of the men who tumbled out of the cars, and their weapons did not look like ordinary rifles either. They outnumbered the soldiers three to one, anyway. “Put down your weapons, and raise your hands,” said the tall man from the first car. He had a slight foreign accent. “Now.”

  The first three soldiers did what they were told. The officer, in the cab of the tank-engine, tried to draw his pistol. And one of the newcomers shot him.

  It was not a loud, dramatic bang like it was in those American Biograph shows.…It was just a stutter of noises no louder than a string of the smallest firecrackers on Guy Fawkes night. The weapon was plainly silenced in some way. But the officer fell out of the cab like a puppet whose strings had been cut. And there was blood. It was too horrific to be real. Clara knew she'd screamed. She couldn't help it.

  The one soldier who hadn't surrendered threw his rifle at the nearest of the new arrivals and ran, straight towards Clara and her mother. He fell over the tin trunk—which might have saved his life. The guns might be silenced but they ripped into the undergrowth. “Don't shoot. Dr. Calland is in there,” snapped the tall man. “Sergei, Ivan, Viktor. After him. He's unarmed now. Dr. Calland. You can come out. It is safe.”

  Some of the newly arrived men jumped down off the platform and walked into the nettles. Mother stayed dead still, and so did Clara. It didn't help. A beam of torchlight was fixed on them, and they had to get up.

  “Count Alexander Pulshikoi,” said her mother, to the tall man who had been giving orders, with a degree of coolness Clara had to admire. “What are you going to do with us?”

  He clicked his heels and bowed. “Exactly what I said I would do, Doctor, before you were foolish enough to run away. You will be flown to Moscow. Our scientists are very keen to work with you. They are very excited about your work. It's a line that has not been pursued for some time.”

  “Flown? From here?” asked Mother.

  He smiled. The smile was all teeth and no humour. “You will fly to London in a few hours' time on the regular shuttle-flight. There you can board a good Russian airship.”

  Her mother took a deep breath. “You'd better bring our bags and my trunk. I'll need that.”

  He nodded. “It will be done. I think we need to depart from here.”

  “What about those Inniskillens?” asked her mother. “They should not be hurt. Please.”

  He smiled his false smile again. “They will not be. Merely detained along with the train driver. We cannot afford to leave them here, that is all. And they would have killed you, you know.”

  Clara could feel her mother's hand squeeze hers. Her mother obviously didn't trust him either, but there was nothing they could really do.

  They'd been whisked by car to the Dublin airship terminal, and from there—separately, to stop them doing anything rash in public, as Count Alexander had coolly explained—into a locked first-class cabin, part of a suite reserved for the Russian ambassador. The cabin had been about five times the size of the little cubby they would later share on the Cuttlefish. The other difference was that the door was open on the submarine. They could come and go as they pleased.…

  On the airship Clara had had to crawl out along the ventilation shaft to go anywhere.

  The Royal Navy commodore facing Duke Malcolm was doing his best to bluster and not to look very afraid.

  Duke Malcolm felt the Royal Navy had…delusions. They liked to pretend they were the Senior Service. That the British Empire's existence and safety rested on the Royal Navy. But these days, with the Empire crumbling and unravelling on the edges, and buckling in the middle under the weight of people and the disastrous effects of the sudden melt, it was Imperial Intelligence that held the Empire together. The Royal Navy was still the world's greatest maritime force, and her fleets could sail anywhere in the world they wished to, as they had for more than fifty years since the 1914–1915 War. Well, they could sail anywhere, if they could get the coal, as his half-brother was inclined to say. The Americans and Russians had enough coal to get them anywhere. They just didn't have the fleet, and they didn't have the munitions for a long war either. The methane burst that had accompanied the Melt had killed off half the sailors in the Russian Navy, a problem that Duke Malcolm wished the Americans had too. But neither rival had the food for their guns for a sea war, or any other war, against the British Empire.

  If Duke Malcolm had his way, they never would. This bungler would learn the hard way, that the navy, too, took orders from Duke Malcolm. And the navy saw that they were carried out. “Your ship was not on station, Commodore. You had your orders.”

  “We were waiting on the tide, Your Grace,” said the commodore, stiffly. “We'd been told that the attack was scheduled for one hundred hours.…”

  “Or on the receipt of our signal,” interrupted Duke Malcolm. “Our informer let us know that submarine was due to depart earlier than scheduled. We needed you there and ready. Not three miles from where you were supposed to be.”

  The duke signed the order he had prepared. Folded
it. Handed it to the naval officer. “Take that to Admiral Von Stael. You are dismissed.”

  The commodore opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, saluted, and left.

  Duke Malcolm wondered how far down the hall he would get before looking at the order for his own court-martial.

  He tapped the brass communicator button set into the leather of his desktop.

  “Your Grace,” his secretary's tinny voice issued from the instrument's speaker. “Shall I send in the man from the Royal Academy of Sciences?”

  “Indeed, Miss Farthing,” said the duke. “I am waiting for him.” He put another of his long black Turkish cigarettes into the cigarette holder and lit it with his desk lighter, which was amusingly crafted like a cannon. He inhaled the aromatic smoke and waited.

  Professor Browne was rather different from the naval officer. For a start he was clever enough to be afraid, and to show it. And secondly, he actually did not need to be. He was a moderately competent scientist, according to the dossier, and he played the game of politics very well. That was unusual in a scientist.

  He was sweating copiously, and it was not a warm day. “Sit down, Professor,” said the duke with far more affability than he'd shown the Royal Navy officer. “Now, tell me, what do you have for Imperial Security about this Calland woman? So far we've only been responding to the Russians trying to remove her. The affair involves, plainly, science. Presumably something she knows about, that cannot merely be duplicated from a formula. What is it, Professor? If we know the answer to that, perhaps we can step ahead.”

  The scientist rubbed his forehead with a large brightly coloured handkerchief. “It's difficult to guess just what she has discovered, Your Grace. It must, as you say, be something complex, that she has a grasp of, which makes it more difficult to guess, as her specialty was apparently synthetic dyes. But by researching the two Russian scientists she's been in correspondence with, we think it may possibly be an alternative to the Birkeland-Eyde process.”

  “Enlighten me, Professor Browne,” said the duke, sitting back and drawing deeply on the ivory mouthpiece of his cigarette holder, preparing to try to understand whatever scientific jargon the fellow came up with. Both the Russians, and now the Underpeople, the water rats that lived beneath London, had gone to great lengths for this Dr. Calland. She must know something very valuable, for the risks and effort and resources given to transporting her. Not just a new shade of maroon for King Ernest's pantaloons.

  It was easier to understand than he thought it was going to be.

  “It is the process by which we make nitric acid,” explained the professor. “It's the feedstock for synthetic fertilizers and some explosives. As an alternative to naturally occurring nitrates like Chile saltpetre.”

  Now, a little too late, it all began to make sense, especially considering the slow bubbling war with Chile and Peru. No wonder the Russians wanted her! No wonder the Underpeople had helped her.

  The British Empire controlled all the major natural sources of saltpetre. The source of nitrates that fed the army and navy's guns, as well as providing fertilizers…fighting a war without that, as the German Kaiser Wilhelm had found out, was a sure way to lose.

  Duke Malcolm steepled his fingers and nodded. “Find out more about this woman, Professor, among your colleagues and her fellows. Try and find out more about the direction she's been working on too. Follow it up hard and fast. Expense is no object. In the meanwhile, if you'll excuse me, I need to authorize pursuit.”

  First Mate Werner came down to the engine room as Tim's stomach was about to start digesting itself. “Mr. Engineer, we need some labour for the tick-tock,” he said.

  Tim found himself “volunteered.” He didn't really mind, even if he was rather wary of the first mate. The mate was supposed to be a great submariner, but he had quite a temper, Tim had been told. Still, it would be a change from greasing fast-moving brass shafts, thinking about food, and feeling guilty because he could think about food, when he was feeling so miserable and worried about his mam and his home. But his mam had said he'd better join a sub crew because at least they could afford to feed him. And she was only half joking when she said it. Food was always short, and always expensive, in the tunnels.

  They used strong cotton-tape slings to carry the heavy tick-tock up from the storage hold to the escape hatch. The heavy iron oval's inner works had to be wound up and set before being sealed, and put into the escape lock. Tim watched in fascination as the first mate did the preparation. There were cogwheels and springs and wires and a bullhorn and a modified Victrola. The precisely machined brass setscrews were positioned, and the three clockwork motors wound.

  First Mate Werner stood up. “Seal it and put in the lock,” he said, dusting off his hands.

  Tim had been standing reading the dials and labels on the device as the mate worked. “Um. Isn't the arming switch supposed to be down, sir?” he asked.

  The first mate gave him a poisonous look, but one of the engineers standing next to Tim packed up laughing. “He's right, Mr. Mate. You nearly forgot to arm the thing.”

  “So I did,” said the mate, and he leaned down and flipped the switch. “Seal it and launch it, boys. Well spotted, lad.”

  They screwed the seal-plate shut, loaded the device, and flushed the tick-tock out of the escape hatch to swim away behind them. The tick-tock's little fins would carry it off, and soon it would start its work, while they crept on their way and lay silent, waiting.

  The first mate tapped him on the shoulder as they turned to go back to the engine room. Tim thought he was in trouble, but all the mate said was, “Boy. You better go and tell the passengers that we're going to be on utter silence soon. We don't want them undoing the tick-tock's good work, eh?”

  So Tim made his way up to the cabin. It went with being the youngest and smallest on the sub. You got to run all the errands. Even ones to girls with flouncy dresses and puff sleeves. He didn't know that much about girls of any sort, not that he didn't want to, and nothing at all about the frilly ones, except that he did not like that kind.

  He knocked, quietly. She—the girl he'd met in the gangway earlier—opened the door without leaving her bunk. She held a finger to her lips and pointed to the sleeping woman with the pale, tired face below her. Great! thought Tim sourly. I might as well have left them alone.

  She swung down from her bunk and came out of the cabin and into the walkway. “What is it?” she asked in a whisper.

  Tim looked at the girl with her lace-trimmed dress. Felt awkward, as he usually did with girls. “Message from First Mate Werner. We've launched a tick-tock. You're to keep dead quiet,” he whispered back.

  “Oh. A what?” she asked, eyes bright with curiosity.

  “It's a kind of decoy,” he explained quietly. “They're using underwater microphones to try to find us, see. So the tick-tock is a wind-up fake noisemaker. It's somewhere behind us. It's not going to help if you make a racket.”

  “A clockwork mouse to distract the ship-cat.” She grinned, making her look both nicer and younger. “All right.” She paused. “Mother is asleep. And I'm starving. And bored. Bored stiff. Can I come with you? I won't make a sound, I promise.”

  He shook his head and pointed back at her cabin. “No. You'd just be in the way,” he said. Honestly! She thought this was a jolly good party or something. It wasn't a game.

  Clara climbed back up onto her bunk, feeling more than slightly irritated. He wasn't that old. She was nearly fifteen…well, more than halfway to fifteen. She was as capable of doing anything as he was. After all, she'd got them off the airship.

  The Mensheviks had obviously thought that being several hundred feet above the ground and having a locked door was enough to keep their prisoners trapped. She and her mother were prisoners, there was no doubt about it, but they were being treated well—as if they were needed, but not to be trusted.

  The cabin, with its wood-panelled walls, deep leather armchairs, hunting scene prints, a little viewi
ng bay window with a velvet-cushioned seat, heavy maroon-and-gold damask curtains, and a small roll top writing desk, wasn't what Clara had always thought of as a cell.

  It was one, though.

  Except that there was a polished brass gridded vent above the bed. The grid was held in place with two large screws. It wasn't a very big vent, but the truth of it was that Clara wasn't very large herself yet. Everyone said she'd grow. She spotted the grid right away. And pointed because…she was rather suspicious that someone might be listening.

  Her mother's eyes widened slightly. They had taken the pistol from her mother's handbag. She had seemed almost relieved to lose it. But they hadn't taken her nail file. The big brass screws turned easily. The square duct behind it wasn't very much bigger than the vent. Mother wasn't going to fit down it. It was even going to be tight for Clara. Mother took a page out of her diary. She wrote: “I need to know if they're listening. If they are, keep crawling, and stay hidden. When you get a chance, get out and go to this address: 14 Brunel Close. Near the Strand. And ask to speak to your grandmother. By name.” She paused, and then wrote and underlined: “If they are not listening, come back!”

  Then she hugged Clara, very quickly, as if she was afraid to hold on for too long, and then made a stirrup with her hands for her daughter to get up and squeeze through the hole.

  The next opening on the ventilator channel was onto the main suite. And Clara could hear, and even see, quite clearly, what was happening. Unfortunately she could not understand it. They were talking something foreign. She'd learned some German, French, and Portuguese at school, naturally, but not whatever language this was, presumably Russian. But she could count the men sitting there—the five who had brought them aboard, and the man that Mother had called Count Alexander. The count was talking to one of them, as they sat and drank some kind of wine. At this time of morning! The other four were playing cards and smoking. It made her want to sneeze. People weren't supposed to smoke just anywhere on an airship! Even she knew that, and she'd never been on one. There was a special room for it, as far from the gasbag and as insulated as possible. Trying to control her nose Clara began to wriggle her way back along the channel. It was nearly as difficult as not sneezing. She eventually could prevent the sneeze no more, and muffled the hachoo desperately into her arm. If they heard her, they gave no sign of it. The men just went right on talking.