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Chapter 9 - Strangeways, Here We Come

"'Please relax,' said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines one of which is on fire, 'you are perfectly safe.'" - Douglas Adams 

A thundering report echoed through the passageway, followed by the clanking of debris.

Frieda spun, the Derringer trailing wisps of smoke from its barrel, and ran over to the open door.  “We are running short of time” she said, peering into the passageway, “we had better decide our plan of action.”

She turned back and went over to where Hargrove lay, moaning, in the pool of blood, and helped him to his feet.  The Marxist detective suddenly seemed in a great deal more pain, and required more support than he’d first appeared to need.  There was a frantic, odd moment of bodies clashing, balances shifting, and then Hargrove was standing.

“Yes, exactly!”  he said.  He coughed nervously and glanced around the room, his gaze again resting finally on Frieda.  The look lingered there longer than was strictly necessary.

“The captain”, he said, tearing his eyes from Frieda’s body and picking up his beloved Webley.  “Yes.  We shall have to move him!”

There was a loud rumbling sound from the doorway. 

“…ill be Revealed to those who put their Faith in the Word;” dust filled the air as Serapion surged to his feet “be Baptised in the will of the Lamb and the light of Ho…”  He trailed out and looked around, as he slowly realized what had just happened.

Hargrove restrained McGuiness as the burly engineer stepped forward, his newly restored wrench twitching. 

“No, proud worker, foundation of the revolution, leave him; we may need him.  I have an idea.”  The engineer grimaced at Hargrove, who didn’t seem to notice, and the wrench gave a last disappointed twitch.

Hargrove, naturally, hadn’t a clue what do next.  What the hell, worrying about plans was a bourgeois trademark; revolutions are borne of action, not endless jaw flapping.  They would, of course, succeed, and the rest was detail.  His investigative instincts, however, had organizational skills of their own. 

He was preparing to invent a great plan of action when Serapion strode up to the Captains cryotube, and peered in. 

“Foulness.  Foulness and filth, he will Repent this,” he rumbled. “This unnatural perversion of the Will and the Path is the beginning of an end, it should not be tolerated by any who seek the Salvation of Him!”

The creaking sounds that Serapion’s voice seemed to be causing in the cryogenic chamber was starting to really worry Hargrove, but there was no stopping him now that he had clearly beginning to hit his stride.  

“He will want atonement, He will ask for who would stand up and cry OUT!  OUT FILTH, and let shine the light of Him!” 

The last “out” seemed to have done the trick.  Indeed, the translucence of the cylinder now seemed marred with a light spider web of reflected light.  A small trickle of a thick viscous liquid made its way down the edge of the glass.

“Serapion,” Hargrove began, urgently, “I think that perhaps we..”

Serapion spun, crozier spearing the air in front of Hargrove, who backpedaled frantically.  “Feudal detective, you are out of your depths here.  Like so many of the great mysteries your sad little collective can’t fathom.  This obscenity…”

The dull thud of the forgotten engineers wrench connecting solidly with thick bone rang through the chamber, and Serapion Bishop of Thmuis slumped forward in a spray of blood.  Hargrove stumbled further back and slipped on a patch of a slippery mix of glucose and blood, his head ringing nastily off edge of the captain’s desk.

McGuiness smiled an evil gap toothed grin as Hargrove glared at him from the floor.  He held up his empty hands.  “Not me, ya great stuffed stomach, not me.”  His affectionate chuckle echoed in Hargrove’s newly aching head as his vision finally cleared enough to make out Frieda casually going through the Bishop’s pockets.

“I ken even know how she bloody got the thing, if yae want the truth of it,” McGuiness continued, “An for that matter, I’d bloody like too have a look at where that gun goes.”

“Oh my love,” Frieda said, crossing to help Hargrove up off the floor again.  “It was great thinking, dear, to distract him.  And what do we do now?”

“Ahem,” Hargrove managed, in his best detective’s cough. “er…now, we must extricate this ship from the shoals of its despair – and that control panel may have the answers we need!  McGuinness, faithful revolutionary upon whose backs the people will rise, what does that panel control?”

The engineer spit vaguely in the direction of the Marxist Detective, but turned to study the panel.  “Nae, that’s not right,” he muttered.  Flipping a few switches, he studied the ensuing readout.  “It shouldn’t be here.  The captain’s quarters, fer god’s sake, not the bloody bridge.  Still.”    He straightened fixing Hargrove with an intent glare.

“You want off this bloody shoal?  It says here ‘Full Reverse’, but I’ve no idea why there’d be controls in bloody here.”

Hargrove looked at Frieda, whose return gaze spoke of the silk sheets they’d ruined whilst he’d studied briefly with her grandfather in France.  “Yes!  Hit it,” they said, in near perfect unison.

“Yer sure?  Okay, here it goes…”  The engineer hit the release and pulled the long handled lever .  A button lit, and, shrugging, the engineer hit that too.   Nothing happened.  A second dial was dimly lit near the edge of the panel, labeled in a strange language.  McGuiness glared at it, then turned it fully clockwise.

A door hissed shut, sliding from the wall, closing them in – a door which seemed separate from the cabin door, which was still open.  The lights flickered, and went out, replaced a split second later by the red glow of the emergency lighting.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then all hell broke loose.  The floor dropped out from under them, and lurched hard sideways, throwing them into the floor and scattering them into the sparse unmoving furniture.  A steady thrumming pulsed through the floor and walls of the room.  The panel which the engineer had operated flipped up and into the wall, exposing a second panel beneath the first, and a large numbered dial which had flipped down from the ceiling began to slowly spin to report a stream of steadily increasing numbers. 

After the initial assault, the lurching smoothed, and the thrumming reduced to a background hum.

The three picked themselves up off the floor.  The engineer studied the panels as the other two struggled up together, throwing them an annoyed glare as Frieda subsequently struggled out of Hargrove’s helpful embrace.

“Well I dinnae ken what the hell that was” McGuiness grunted, frowning.  “None of this makes any bloody sense.”

Frieda’s eyes had taken on a strange glow.  “But I recognize it.  This is a submarine” she said, “and we’re in it."

“What have you done?” said a weak voice from under the cracked cryogenic cylinder.   “My god, what have you done?”

Do ticks live underwater?  Will anyone think of a reason for any of this to be happening?!  What the hell was in the crate, and will Frieda miss it? 

On to Chapter 10