Asimov's SF, February 2010 (19 page)

Yet, if you have followed my account this far, you will not be surprised to learn that I had no intention of swimming anywhere near a British vessel. I had no loyalty to either side in this war. Let Gourdon fume and rage—he had no control over me now. I decided I would make for the sanctuary of land—and heading not north to the threatened beaches of England, but south, to one of the tiny harbors and fishing villages that pepper the French coast. In the chaos of war I was sure opportunities for advancement of one sort or another would present themselves—and there was always the gold that waited for me in that bank in Paris, if I could reach it.

So I started cranking the screw, and I worked my rudders and eyed my compass (you may be surprised to know that compasses work as well beneath the water as above). I thought my future was as set as it had been for some months, ever since I had been brought into the dangerous attention of the Ogre. And yet I have found on numerous occasions in the course of my peculiar career that moments of apparent security in fact represent the greatest danger. So it proved this time!

I saw it rising up from below.

You will understand that I had my gaze fixed on what I could see of the battle above. I had no expectation of any threat from
below
, short of a few strands of kelp that might jam up my screw. And yet I now saw movement from the corner of my eye, a subtle shifting of shades, a pale mass that I thought looked like an immense bubble. Pillars worked beneath, but they may have been shafts of light, and there was another sort of light, a spark like lightning, which played about the upper surface of the system. I stopped cranking, my hands resting on my control levers, and I watched, curious. I had no sense of danger; it was a play of light and color.

But in the last instant I saw a carapace hard and pocked and scratched, as solid as I was.

It slammed into me from below, and I heard a crumple of copper and a great groan as iron ribs buckled, and water sprayed in from a dozen wounds. All this even as I rose on the back of this great crab-thing from the deep. I cranked hard and worked my levers, my rudders flapping like birds’ wings, but without avail. In moments I was lifted up into the air, and the
Nautilus
rolled, falling down the curve of that carapace, and I was suddenly in chaos, with my blanket and biscuits and other junk falling around me, and I was grateful to be strapped into my couch.

With a hard impact the
Nautilus
gained the water once more. She floated, but I was suspended upside down, and water gushed through strained seams. Dizzy, battered, I could barely think.

And then explosions came. I looked back. The rising island from which I had fallen was supported in the air on pillars that glimmered blue where they thrust out of the water. A French first rate took it on, her port guns blazing at the ice monster. As its supports shattered and broke, the great lens dipped, and I worried it might fall on me.

Then the glass of my blister smashed in. I cowered, wondering what new calamity had befallen me—but the glass had been broken, not by some natural phenomenon, but by an axe. Head and shoulders thrust through my blister, swathed in a hooded oilskin coat. I cried out in French, “Who are you?"

"I'm English for a start,” came the answer in that brisk language. Then the hood was pushed back, to reveal a shock of blond hair, a sturdy yet compelling face—a woman! And a young one. “And you, I presume, are Ben Hobbes, for nobody else rides around the ocean in a mechanical fish.” She smiled. “I have been looking for you. I have come to save you. And not a moment too soon, for that Phoebean is starting to look decidedly irritated.” She held out a gloved hand. “Come!"

I hesitated for one heartbeat. Then I grabbed her hand.

And that was how I met Miss Anne Collingwood! [
And a true enough account given a certain narrative license. —A.C.
]

IV

Miss Collingwood dragged me by main force through the splintered remains of my observing blister. Though she was little older than twenty, perhaps five years younger than I, she was a woman who was stronger than she looked, and got on with the job with no squeamishness—and that first impression I had of her is as good a portrait in a few words as any I can muster.

More hands reached out of the gathering dusk, and I was hauled without much tenderness up and over the side, and dropped onto a soggy deck. The tars stood about me, in black coats and trousers on this unlit deck, but I glimpsed the blue of a Royal Navy officer's uniform at the throat of one of them, a tall chap in a tricorn hat.

I struggled to my feet and surveyed my situation. I found that my submersible had been caught by grappling irons and lashed to the hull of this boat; I think you'd call it a sloop, but I'm no expert on Royal Navy vessels. It ran dark and low in the water, a boat that didn't want to be seen. Now sailors whacked at ropes with axes, and they were cutting the
Nautilus
free. “Bosun, put her about and spread the canvas for Worthing,” called the pale officer. The sails snapped at the rigging, and with a low creak the boat turned. Looking back, I glimpsed that mighty pale dome once last time, subsiding back into the Channel waters. And beyond the fighting ships glided, wreathed in gun smoke and illuminated by their own cannon fire. I was mighty relieved as the noise of battle receded.

"Welcome aboard, Mr. Hobbes,” the officer said dryly. “I am John Clavell—Lieutenant."

I faced him, and tried to make a good show of it, if only for the sake of the woman, but of a sudden the shock penetrated my defenses. I slumped down to sit on a barrel, feeling vaporous. “I don't suppose you can spare a blanket."

Clavell tutted at my weakness, but he handed Anne a spare cloak, which she spread over my shoulders, and Clavell dug a huntsman's hip flask from a pocket and allowed me a sip of brandy. “You will recover,” Anne assured me.

Clavell was less sympathetic. “Not if you coddle the man. Not much room for that in war, Hobbes."

"Is that so? Well, thanks for the ride anyhow, Admiral, and the liqueur,” I said, playing up my Yankee twang in response to his strangulated King George accent.

Miss Collingwood flared up. “Ben, Lieutenant Clavell is one of my father the Admiral's most trusted colleagues. He's risked his life to come pluck you out of the sea—"

"And passed up on my chance to do something about these damn French tonight.” He gazed around at the oceanic battle scene.

"So it would pay you to show some respect, in the days and weeks to come."

Days and weeks? I stared at them, my mind racing. Needless to say I had no idea why I had been press-ganged, and not for the first time. I looked back to where that milky disc was subsiding into invisibility. I said, “I have always been suspicious of coincidences. Tell me there's a connection between two extraordinary events: the presence of yon marine beast, and my rescue from the cold waves by a beautiful maiden and the next Nelson."

It's hard to say which of them bristled more. Anne said, “Robert Fulton said you were a faithless swindler but no fool, and I can see he's right. Yes, Ben, we need your help to deal with the Phoebeans—one specimen of which upended you, when it should, we hoped, have been taking on the French gunships."

"Phoebeans ... [
Later the author had me spell the term for him.—A.C.
] Some classical allusion, no doubt."

"'Phoebean’ means ‘of the moon,’ Hobbes,” Clavell said.

"So yon beasts are from the moon?"

"No,” said Anne. “Though the first savants thought so, and the name stuck. In fact the Phoebeans come from much further away—"

"And most of us heartily wish they'd go back there,” said Clavell.

"England, and indeed all mankind, faces a much more serious threat than even the rampaging of the Corsican. A
second
invasion—an invasion from the sky! That's the possibility that the King's Grand Council has instructed my father to deal with—and that's why we need you."

In actuality this strange news struck me as no more bizarre than some of the wilder ideas I had heard cooked up on the fringes of Bonaparte's court. “I don't see how a man who can build a sub-oceanic boat will be of much use against a pack of sailors from beyond the air."

She smiled. “Oh, we want you to help us build a much stranger boat than even your
Nautilus
, Ben. You'll see. And I believe you'll find it an honor to serve."

Clavell inspected me closely. “But I have a feeling you aren't a man much motivated by honor, are you, Hobbes? You're like your mentor Fulton, who tried to sell his inventions to British and French, whoever would open the purse widest. And I'll say this—if Fulton hadn't got himself killed in a French raid on the London dockyards, where he was running tests of a new apparatus, we'd have left you to drown in the Channel tonight."

That was the first time I heard it confirmed that Robert Fulton was dead. He was a decent enough man, in my eyes, even if he had taken all the credit for the work of others. [
I have no way of confirming the author's allegations against Robert Fulton—who in turn had often maligned Hobbes. I myself attribute such remarks to the combative relationship of two talented individuals.—A.C.
]As for Clavell's barb about honor, my view is that if you have to choose between one empire of madmen and another, your only duty is to yourself and to your own.

This interval of conversation was soon over, for we were approaching our destination. The canvas was hauled in, and the boats were put in the water, and I prepared for my own first descent upon an English shore.

V

Worthing, so I was later informed by Anne, is a popular resort in Sussex, and in the summer if you want bathing machines and polite company you'll find them there. But the tide was high that winter night, for Napoleon's admirals had chosen to land when it was so, and our boats pitched us onto a shore of shingle and sea wrack and banks of aging weed that stank like rotting flesh. As we tramped up the shingle I could see very little of the town itself, and I would learn that all along the coast of southern England that night the watchmen were dousing the lights and folk were drawing their curtains, so the country turned a blacked-out face to the invaders.

And a musket cracked, out of the dark. I pride myself I was first down on the stones.

The bosun held up a lantern and waved a navy ensign. “We are friends!” he whispered urgently. “From His Majesty's vessel the
Terrier
, on urgent King's business..."

Ragged-looking fellows appeared from the dark, not wearing any kind of uniform, wielding muskets that looked like farmers’ fowling pieces. I could see which one had fired the shot, for he held his musket like a club; perhaps he hadn't had time to reload—or perhaps he didn't know how. After a brief negotiation, we were allowed to pass.

Clavell hauled me to my feet, without much consideration, and we walked on. “Militia men. You would know all about that, Yankee. Raised as part of the Duke of York's grand plan for the defense of England, along with fortifications around London, and defenses for the ports, and seventy-odd gun towers strung along the coasts of Sussex and Kent."

The Duke of York, as it happened, was a son of the King. I peered at the farmers’ boys. “This, to fight off Napoleon?"

"They're all we've got, and a doughty lot,” Clavell said, loud enough for the men to hear.

Well, I took a certain bitter satisfaction at the fear evident on the faces of these Englishmen, the first I had encountered on this shore, for I had seen such fear on the faces of my own countrymen when Napoleon's army had started its march up the Mississippi in the Year Three. The British had done damn little to help us fight him off then, and if it was now their turn, a part of me thought, serve them right.

We reached an unprepossessing marina at the head of the beach, where a group of broughams waited, black-enameled and all but invisible in the gathering dark, with the horses snuffling in their harnesses. Anne, Clavell, and I hurried to the second vehicle in the line. Within, by the light of a lantern, an older man sat waiting for us, wearing a uniform of white trousers and a richly embroidered deep blue jacket; he said nothing as we boarded, and expressed no surprise at seeing us turn up at this rendezvous, after such a perilous journey. Before I was settled, the driver's whip cracked, and the brougham wheeled about and rattled into motion—taking us, I judged, north and away from the coast.

Clavell sat by me, stiff and silent. Anne sat with the older man, and she murmured to him, “Papa.” In response he patted her hand—that's all, a small gesture. People say the British are reserved, but I don't hold with that; they feel as deeply as the rest of us, but see no need to shout about it.

Well, that single word, “Papa,” told me who I was dealing with. Rear Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood was in his late fifties, I learned later, yet he looked older, with sparse grey hair pulled back from a dour face and the lines deep around an unsmiling mouth, and he sat stiffly, as if his old bones were uncomfortable even at rest. His most striking feature was a pair of blue eyes of extraordinary paleness, like windows set in his head. Yet they flickered, restless.

At first he spoke to Clavell. “Went it well, Lieutenant?"

"We made our mission, sir, as you see,” said the junior. “But the Ogre is on his way, as we feared. Have you news of the landings?"

Collingwood snorted. “Well, that's a damn fool question, my lad, as I have spent the day sitting in this rattling brougham waiting for you. We should be in London by the morn, and more may be clear then.” He turned those brilliant eyes on me. “And you are Hobbes. Do you understand where you are?"

"England,” says I cheekily.

"At least you have a trace of spirit. The south coast of England, but we head north. The road is a good one. We'll refresh the horses at Horsham and Dorking and Kingston, but my aim is not to stop before we reach London, and we'll beat the French to it, I trow, for even Bonaparte's armies cannot move so fast as that. Do you know who I am?"

"Admiral Collingwood. But I thought Villeneuve knocked all the English admirals on the head in the Trafalgar action—including Nelson.” Thus I goaded him, to a glare from Anne.