Free 20 Million Leagues Over the Sea by K. T. Hunter Page A

untrained eye.
    There were more abbreviations in it than
actual words, but that was a common enough practice. She reread the
message and allowed one eyebrow to arch slightly. Ah! She wasn't
the only one of her kind aboard! It did not surprise her all that
much. Mrs. Brightman was certainly not alone in her particular
field of endeavour. She felt a prickle in her scalp at the
possibility and wondered if she had worked for the mystery sender
in the past. That would prove an awkward reunion. She searched for
the name of the sender or the recipient, but both were smudged and
nearly unreadable. One of the operators chose that moment to
collect the stack, and she lost her chance.
    To cover her disappointment, she finished
scribbling out her own message: "Departed Safely. Clear Sailing."
Or, as someone reading it would see, "DPRT SAFE STOP CLR SLNG STOP"
The "clear" keyword was an indicator that the message meant exactly
what it said; nothing was hidden or encoded.
    "I'll take that for you, Miss," said a man on
the other side of the window. Gemma looked up into the eyes of a
tall, gaunt man. His smile was gentle, and there was a twinkle in
his hazel eyes. He studied her over horn-rimmed spectacles and
touched his fingers to his banker's visor.
    "Warrant Officer Edmund Rathbone, at your
service," he said. He pointed to the badge on his arm. "Signal
Corps. Don't worry, I'm new on this voyage, too. I'll be happy to
send that message for you, love."
    She responded, using her perfectly schooled
smile. By his accent, he was definitely of Guildford stock, but she
did not recognize his face.
    "Would you prefer to pick up your messages
here, or would you like for me to send them down the tube?" He
pointed to the pneumatic tube behind him with his thumb.
    "Here, please," she replied. "I could use the
exercise." Even though any of her messages would be in code and
therefore unreadable by most, she preferred to have them handled by
as few people as possible. If he sent them by the tube, someone
else might open the cylinder before she did.
    She thanked him and then left to find the
laboratory deck. On her way, she mulled over the enigmatic message.
It was protocol to be aware of any other Brightman sorts in the
vicinity.
    Especially if that "other" was a Watcher.
    Every Brightman Girl on a mission had a
Watcher. That was also protocol. Everyone had someone that reported
on their movements, requested aid if needed, or took steps to make
sure that the job was completed. She had heard second-hand that
sometimes those steps were less than civil. The Watchers were
silent and unseen, especially where the Girls were concerned.
    Gemma had rarely worried about her Watchers.
She prided herself on her ability to complete a job smoothly and
cleanly without intervention. She often made it a game to guess her
Watcher's identity, but the missions were so short that she often
had a limited time to puzzle it out.
    The message she had seen had been in code.
Was it from her Watcher? They were by nature unobtrusive. It would
be unusual for them to leave something so obviously encoded just
lying about. Of course, they may have wanted to remind her of their
unseen presence; they did that sometimes. It was true that she had
not given her potential Watcher much thought until now. There had
been such a rush to get her to the launch point, and then the
nerve-wracking process of the rail-gun launch, that this was the
first time she'd had a moment to consider a Watcher. A shiver
danced down her spine.
    She stuffed the question into her mental
steamer trunk. Now she had to prepare for her first meeting with
the entire Scientific Cohort. She hoped that she had met none of
them under other circumstances ... one that had found particular
items missing from his workbench, learnt that some of his reference
tables were badly skewed, or discovered his chalkboard equations
altered right after she had disappeared from his life.
    She arrived at the lift. A silver-haired
Asian man, who