The Tea Machine (11 page)

“We’ll see to it. You go on to bed, Edna,” Hubert instructed her kindly.

“Oh, thank you, sir.” She bobbed a clumsy curtsey and disappeared as quickly as she could.

“Come on.” Hubert’s face had lost its melancholy sheen and taken on the look of a reckless man. Sangfroid had seen that look many times in the Parabellum the night before a battle. It was a thing of beauty, that ephemeral moment when the rationale flees, but despair has yet to arrive and take up residence. It was the void of chance where
anything
could happen if a centurion was brave enough to act and not think. A place where life and death were played out on the dice and, in the morning, on the face of the enemy.

“I’ve got your back, matey.” She gave Hubert an imperial salute. “Mithras, give strength to our right arms!”

“Right arms!” Hubert shouted and gave a sloppy salute back.

Sangfroid braced herself, then swung both parlour doors open with great aplomb and a mighty crash. In a happy daze, she took in the whole room in an instant and saw Millicent sitting bolt upright with eyes hollowed out by tiredness and ennui. Beside her, Sophia was tight-lipped and seething. And around them perched a black-frocked murmuration of paleobotanists, twittering gossip and tidbits over their china cups. The room fell silent as she and Hubert entered.

“Ladies!” Sangfroid sailed into the parlour, her arms spread wider than an ascending eagle. This set off a whirl of excited trills. She puffed up her chest under their adoring gaze. She’d spin them a yarn they’d never forget. “Let me tell you
all about
the Urals, with its vast and wild expanses,” she declared loudly, “and amphitheatres full of mighty lions!”

CHAPTER 11

“Amphitheatres full of mighty lions!
Mighty lions?”

Why were women’s voices so much shriller in the morning? The thought rumbled through Sangfroid’s mind as the window drapes were torn open with such rattling bad humour as to split Cerberus’s heads apart. It felt as if all the hammers of Vulcan were pounding in her skull. Her eyelids flickered against the cushions where she lay face down. She carefully inched her head upwards. Then the full splendour of morning fell through the window and cut into her squinted eyes like shards of glass, and she prayed Vulcan would deliver the killer blow right there and then.

“Mighty lions!” Millicent shrilled again for added measure. Her decibel output had to be equal to the biggest, meanest, most bastard commanders Sangfroid had ever served under. How did she do it? She was tiny. A wee, wee, tiny thing. Where was all this noise coming from?

“You preformed the
dance
of the Urals.” She continued to screech like all the Harpies of Thrake. “Do you even know where the Urals are?”

“Augh. Ack.” Were the only sounds her acrid throat could utter.

“What on earth got into you last night, apart from too much brandy?” Millicent ground out the words, cold and hard. “It was
shameful.
No, shameless.” She must have thought about this, as there was a moment of blessed silence before she cried, “Shaming! In fact, it was all three.” She was not to be appeased. Millicent sailed over to her hearth and began to savagely shake coal on the embers, creating a new avalanche of hell in Sangfroid’s head.

“Ack.”

“Up, you ne’er do well. Up.” Millicent’s full attention turned to Sangfroid, now that the drapes had been ripped apart and the fire battered to buggery. “How dare you defile my mother’s Chesterfield with your drunken prostrations! Arise, you vulgarian and drag your sorry carcass to the dog’s bed, it will suit you well.”

Sangfroid creaked to a sitting position and found she had indeed defiled Millicent’s mother’s Chesterfield by passing out on it face first. There were drool marks on the vermilion silk cushions. She vaguely remembered Millicent stomping off to bed not long after Sangfroid began regaling the ladies with phantom stories of her service in the Prussian Dragoons and Ural life in general. They’d loved it! And yes, there had been a dance. A little bip-boppy thing she had picked up during some downtime on a starship circling the Wolf-Rayet nebula. The ladies had clapped along in time. It had been a wonderful evening. Wonderful. But now her face itched, her eyes burned, and her head felt like it had been kicked around a bear pit for bait.

She tried to apologize. It was usually the quickest way to make a woman happy and, hopefully, quieter.

“Ack,” she said, then coughed and tried again. “Sorry.” She needed water. Just enough to drown in.

“Sorry? Sorry?” And Millicent was off again. “You sat there and
lied
to those ladies. Blatantly
lied
.”

“No.” Her voice might be croaky, but it was warming up nicely with her growing irritation. “I sat there and
embellished
to those ladies. Embellished on
your
lies.” And she was on her feet stumbling for the door. She could not bear an argument this early in the morning, and Millicent knew that. Except…except, she hesitated, how could she know that? But her head was too fuzzy to think it through. She had a weird synergy with Millicent; she could acknowledge that much. Millicent was spooky for Sangfroid to be around. It felt as if she lived inside Sangfroid’s head half the time. She generated feelings that pushed and pulled Sangfroid in all directions at once, and that did not mix well with a hangover. She drew herself up to her full, impressive height. “Excuse me,” she said as formally as possible, “while I go and drown myself.”

“There’s a wishing well in the garden.”

Sangfroid would have loved to slam the door on the way out, but she was an old pro at hangovers and knew not to make that rookie mistake. The hallway smelled of cooked bacon, and it made her stomach protest, which seemed to be the morning’s theme. She met Hubert coming carefully down the stairs. He looked a lot sprucer than Sangfroid felt in that he’d had a shave and managed to wet down his hair, but he had the eyes of a suffering man.

“Mornin’,” Sangfroid rasped.

“Ack,” Hubert rasped back, then cleared his throat and pointed to the stairs. “Toilette, wash, stuff. Left, end of corridor. Your clean uniform is set out.” With that he limped off towards the breakfast room.

Hubert had directed Sangfroid to his father’s suite of rooms. The washstand was neatly laid out with the late Mr. Aberly’s personal grooming tools. It was an astonishingly kind gesture on Hubert’s behalf. The water was tepid but Sangfroid stripped and washed thoroughly, then turned her attention to the curious array of implements set out on the dresser before her. Quaintly antiquated as it was, Sangfroid soon found her way around the manicure set. Frontline troops were resourceful, and she had a thousand uses for anything pointy. She liked the cologne. The sharp cedar tang did a lot to refresh her pallid sinuses and sting some colour back in her flesh. She pulled on her freshly laundered and thoughtfully mended uniform, satisfied to be back in her own skin.

When Sangfroid stepped out onto the landing, she felt revitalized and ready to face breakfast. The door to Hubert’s bedchamber lay ajar. Sangfroid hesitated. The multimetre Hubert had removed from the Amoebas sat in full view on a bedside table. What else had he purloined? And how might this kleptomania affect both their timelines?

Sangfroid nudged the door open a little farther with the toe of her boot. She hesitated at the threshold and gave the room a cursory glance. She felt guilty for snooping, though it turned out she was right to do so. She noted at least two more objects that she would hazard weren’t from this world. One she knew to be a bio-thermometer—she’d seen enough of them in the medical wards—and the other was the small gyroscope that had so entranced Millicent on her first visit.

“Hubert, you naughty boy,” she murmured and entered the room feeling fully justified in doing so given Hubert’s indiscretions. “What else have you got squirreled away here, ’eh?”

It was a large room, bigger than Sangfroid’s entire living quarters on the Quintus Prime. She wondered momentarily if she was now classified MIA and if her quarters had already been re-allocated to the next boob to fill her Decanus boots. She hoped Gallo was still around to collect her things. She’d get some good gear, and Gallo would no doubt sell or gamble away the rest of her crap. Gallo was practical like that. She’d raise a beer to Sangfroid’s memory, then sell her spare pants.

She gave Hubert’s room a 360-degree examination and approved. Good solid, no-nonsense furniture. The bed was old and mahogany and nearly six foot wide. If it were hers, she’d fill it with all the floozies she could buy. She’d be hard put to break a fine bed like that with a tumble or two, but she’d love to try. Beside the bed stood a dresser, its top littered with coins, fossils, lumps of curious rock, and all sorts of other boyish things. Hubert had never outgrown collecting what Sangfroid classified as junk.

There was a huge armoire stuffed with tweed suits in an exciting palette of brown. Next to the tweeds hung rows of white cotton shirts, and to the left of those, trays of starched collars, bow ties, and cuff and collar studs. She was amazed that all this gear was Hubert’s alone. All Sangfroid had to her name was two uniforms and a ceremonial toga for feast days.

Life onboard the Quintus Prime was frugal. It was a dilapidated old turd tub of a ship. A small city rattling around in space with all the beauty and grace of an iron lung. It wheezed along, dragging over one million troops and support staff to wherever they had to go in order to kill things. It had shops, bars, casinos, and brothels. It had sports arenas and circuses. It also had hospitals and crematoriums, as well as a vast fleet of assault craft to help fill both up as fast as possible. But it was home,
her
home, and had been since she was a child soldier.

Am I really dead?

She remembered that last night at the casino tables. Gallo had been on a mean streak with the dice and treated them all to gallons of plasma ale with her winnings. According to Sangfroid’s fading memories, they’d been drinking when the mayday from the Amoebas had come through. Suddenly they were sober, grabbing their gear, and running for the assault ships that would carry them into battle.

She perched on the edge of Hubert’s bed. Sangfroid didn’t understand these timeline thingies. How could a person be in one place at one time and die only to pop up in another place and time hale and hearty? If it were truly possible why did anybody have to die?
We could all live forever, right? Maybe that’s why the gods keep these timelines apart?
This time travel science had the stench of disaster all over it. She hoped Millicent and Hubert knew what they were doing. It took a big pair of centaur balls to mess with the gods.

The soft splash of water drew her attention to a separate door leading from Hubert’s bedroom. She guessed a bathroom lay beyond, and Hubert had left the water running. Sangfroid gave the door handle a rattle. It was locked. The splashing on the other side ceased. Sangfroid frowned. Water taps did not turn themselves off.

Now, where would a brainiac like Hubert leave the key?
A nearby chair had the impression of two shoe soles on the cushioned seat cover. Sangfroid smiled and reached for the top of the doorframe and found Hubert’s hiding place. She slotted the key into the lock and carefully opened the door. All was silent, no more watery splashes, not even a drip. Sangfroid stood blinking at a single blue eye that blinked back at her.

A pink squid sat in a copper bathtub surrounded by various apparatus from the Amoebas lab. The sunlight shone through the open window, and a light breeze danced along the healthily glowing pink flesh. The squid was content and happy, though Sangfroid had no idea why she should think that? And she was
huge
!

Sangfroid thundered downstairs taking three steps at a time, flew past Edna and startled her into dropping a duster, and burst into the breakfast room where Millicent and Hubert were eating in silence. The atmosphere was frigid. Millicent looked murderous, and Hubert woebegone. Sangfroid had no time for the Aberly’s domestic drama. She needed answers. She needed information. She needed the Fates to weave her a new life, one where she’d never met these two.

“Right, you,” she shouted, pointing at Hubert. “What in Hades do you think you’re doing?”

Millicent’s fork clattered to her plate, while Hubert’s sat suspended with a piece of sausage on it, inches from his open mouth. Millicent recovered first.

“Has something interesting happened in the Urals, Decanus Sangfroid?” she said frostily. “Perhaps they’ve invented a new dance?”

“Something interesting is happening in Hubert’s dressing room,” she returned just as coldly.

Hubert went white.

“Did you really think you could hide her? This is insanity. Don’t you understand what she could do to your planet?” she bellowed.

“What on earth are you talking about?” Millicent looked alarmed. “Who is in Hubert’s dressing room?” Her confusion told Sangfroid that she had no part in this…this squid abduction, and that gave her some relief. At least one of them was possibly sane. She turned her withering gaze upon the sole culprit. Hubert stared back, wide-eyed and ashen.

“Weena is upstairs,” Sangfroid said.

“Who on earth is—Weena!” Millicent was on her feet immediately. “Weena? The little pink squid.” She looked at her brother in horror as he wilted in his seat.

“Little pink squid my a—” Sangfroid caught her angry glare and changed tack mid sentence, “atoms! She nearly fills the room. She’s a Colossal, for Jupiter’s sake. A
Colossal
, not a miniature squid. They don’t come in miniature. A Colossal! She’ll soon be as big as this house.
Colossal!
” She knew her voice was borderline hysterical, but she had to get it through to them. “Big-As-A-House!” And she widened her arm span as far as she could stretch to underscore her point.

“Hubert.” Millicent turned to her brother. “Is this true? Is there a Colossal space squid in this house?”

Hubert hung his head. “I couldn’t leave her there. They were hurting her.”

“How could this have happened? I was there with you, and you most certainly did not have Weena with you when we returned.”

Hubert did not reply.

“Hubert, I demand an answer,” Millicent said sternly. “Were you secreting space squid?”

Sangfroid knew the answer but waited for Hubert to confess; better it came from him.

“I went back and got her later,” Hubert admitted wearily.

“You what?” Millicent was flabbergasted and sank into her chair. “You went back without me?” Her eyes held so much hurt Sangfroid actually flinched. She did not like to see her upset. Deflated after her initial announcement, Sangfroid sat down at the table and listened to Hubert’s leaden-voiced confession.

“I went back many times, Millicent. At first I wanted to explore the laboratory and to do that I needed to converse with Weena. She helped me understand things. Over time I became more aware of her plight; those experiments were pitiless, and…and I began to worry and care for her.” Hubert looked wretched. Millicent reached for his hand. It was obvious she understood what he was really saying. “I couldn’t leave her there,” he said softly. “She asked me to bring her here, to this timeline. So I did.”

“They’re planning an invasion.” Sangfroid dropped her head onto the table. The crisp linen tablecloth was clean and cool against her overheated brow.

“Why do you think that?” Hubert asked. “Squid are peaceful creatures. Your Roman Empire attacked them first.” His voice gained an edge Sangfroid didn’t appreciate.

She looked up. “We did not. They came after our ships.” She straightened in her seat. Truth was she had no idea of the political reasoning behind the wars Rome waged. Insight wasn’t something the common soldier was entrusted with.