Musings

PERSONAL LOG, CAPTAIN NEMO

August 14

Tomorrow we arrive off the Chinese mainland. The Maneuvering Watch will be set at 0400 and the Smallboat party will go topside at 0530. In addition to getting rid of my two "guests," Aquafina will land to take on supplies from the locals. My "guests" are certainly entertaining, in their own way. Lord Turnips, while clearly highly bred and a Person of Quality, is strangely obsessed with the planting, harvesting, and consumption of turnips. Each and every conversation one has with him eventually turns into a discussion about turnips. Their uses, their medicinal properties, their history, great events of the day that were somehow influenced by turnips. And the Brigadier, when sober, is clearly a man of dizzying intellect. He can expound on subjects as diverse as the lost world of Roiurama, the Spanish Inquisition, Icelandic sagas, or even trout slapping. And the fact he can do it while consuming large quantities of Bombay Gin, from the third hour of the morning till midnight, is even more impressive.

As we of the Nautilus would not be welcomed by the local authorities we will arrive in the no-mans land of Kowloon Walled City. We will be outside the reach of the Crown authorities, but vulnerable to the triads. The topside security watch will need to be doubled as a result.

I am still undecided on what part the Nautilus will take in Turnips and Rossaroni's scheme to thwart Marzipan. I'm not even sure I want to thwart her. Although she stole the plans for the Q-device from me, set fire to my lab, killed my parents, and had a squadron of steam frigates almost send Nautilus to the bottom; she was my wife for five years. That has to count for something. My part of the plan is to wait offshore and be prepared to send in my Marines when signalled. I have till then to decide what to do.

And I'm still unsure how they expect to get from the current year to 1966. Perhaps someone else can expound on that...