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

was also wearing the brown jacket and badge of the
Cohort, waited there. An emerging smile carved even deeper wrinkles
in his face as she approached.
    "Ah, you must be Miss… Miss…"
    She recognized the accent from her time in
Shanghai. She nodded and smiled gently in return. He struggled once
more to say her name.
    "Please, call me Gemma," she replied.
    "Ah, Miss Gemma, then." He bowed slightly in
her direction. Another smile, this one of relief, broke across his
face. "I am Professor Hui Yutai, lead physicist. Dr. Pugh told us
to help you if we saw you. Have you been to the Research Deck yet?
No? I will show you the way."
    When the lift doors opened, he gestured for
her to precede him into the car. "I am sorry I did not get to meet
you yesterday when you arrived," he continued, "but I was playing
with a pet project of mine and lost track of time. If you wish,
later, I will show it to you. I am sure you will be busy with your
own experiments, though."
    Experiments , Gemma thought. Oh,
bother.
    The lift swept them away to another deck; and
when they exited, she followed Hui to the right.
    "The conference room for the meeting is that
way," he said, pointing towards the corridor to their left. "But
the laboratories are this way. Oh! And the loo is across the hall
from them. Very important to know."
    They entered a chamber bound in metal, wood,
and glass. The scientists had stuffed every inch to the gills with
all manner of contraptions for dissection and examination. The lab
reminded her of so many others that she had seen (and nicked from)
before, but never had she seen one this large. She did recognize a
few of the tools: scalpels, microscopes, and racks of tubes filled
with a rainbow of fluids. From the wall between a lab bench and a
keypunch machine there emerged another pneumatic tube. A cylinder
awaited retrieval in its receptacle. She saw more of the glass
panels like the ones on the bridge; the rectangles bore
grease-penciled equations, sketches, and words that she could not
pronounce despite all her lab experience. One was covered in a
tangle of C's and G's, A's and T's in impossible combinations that
formed a cipher text that she could not break.
    And books! So very many books! Textbooks,
bound journals, handwritten notebooks, and volumes of mathematical
tables smothered the lab. They towered in stacks on the shelves,
lurked on the corners of tables, loitered about the floor, and
generally occupied any flat surface available (real or imagined).
It was a treasure-trove of secrets, low-hanging fruit ripe for the
taking. They had not yet been defined as part of her job. The books
could wait.
    She scrutinized the men in the lab, already
hard at work, as if they had been on the ship for weeks, toiling
away at their glass panels. Some of them were European, but others
appeared to be from India and Arabia. And naturally, she was the
only female amongst them.
    He guided her farther into the laboratory.
"Here is the space set aside for you, Miss Gemma. I am afraid they
haven't brought your equipment in from the cargo bay just yet."
    Here was the only empty spot in the entire
room; it was as bare as the others were full to bursting. While the
other glass panels bore smudged equations and fingerprints, her own
pane gleamed in the bright overhead lights. She hoped that her
feeling of panic did not show on her face.
    Hui continued, "Do you remember where in the
cargo bay they stored your equipment? Perhaps I could put in a
request for you to have it moved here."
    Gemma froze as she stared at the vacant
shelves. They yawned before her in a bookless abyss. Mrs. Brightman
had mentioned nothing about equipment in her hurried briefing.
Perhaps she had thought that the Cohort would provide it all. Even
though she had been excited by the prospect of the job, Gemma was
used to being the assistant or the computer, not the actual
scientist. Her situation was getting more precarious by the moment,
and she wasn't past the moon yet. She had