The Captain accepted his account impassively, giving no outward sign of what he thought of it, but Saturn never took his eye off him and Thomas could feel the older wizard's anger. His scorn and contempt.

     The others seemed sympathetic, though, and Timothy in particular gave him an encouraging wink when he came to the point in his account where he'd thrown the contaminated ruler. The instinctive, unthinking act that had turned the problem into a possible crisis. Thomas felt a wave of gratitude towards the cleric rushing through him. It was the only thing that kept him going.

     Throughout the five minutes it took him to tell it, a steady stream of other people popped in and out of the bridge bringing situation reports. The hull in the sections now in vacuum had been breached in two more places, and the airtight door leading to section four was under attack. Section four was being evacuated even as he spoke.

     "How far will this thing spread?" asked Strong when Thomas finished speaking. "Will we lose the ship?"

     "There's no way to know," replied Saturn, still glaring at the younger wizard. "If we're lucky it'll simply burn itself out in due course, but how much of the ship'll be left by then is anyone's guess."

     "What can we do?"

     Saturn gave a sigh and dropped his eye at last. "Nothing," he said. "I've already tried the only spell I've got that might have stopped it. If we were back in the University we’d gather a dozen or so senior wizards to tackle it, but here…”

     “Once we’re back in our own universe they can teleport aboard, can’t they?” asked Timothy.

     “No,” said Saturn. “They can’t. It takes a full day to teleport that distance, and by the time they arrive there may be no ship left. There may be no teleportation cubicle left for them to arrive in, and even if there is, it may no longer be working.”

     ”No longer working? What do you mean?”

     "The cancer is intensely magical, and it'll be interfering with every magic on the ship. Frankly, I'm surprised the Orb of Propulsion still works. The fact that it's in the centre of the ship, while the cancer's attacking the hull, may be a factor. The distance between them may he helping."

     "How soon before we're through the portal?" the Captain asked Prup Chull.

     "We can be there in just a few hours, but it won’t open onto our universe for nearly two days."

     "And the cancer's spreading at an inch a minute," said Saturn, his angry, accusing eye fixing on Thomas again. "Five feet in an hour. The smallest hole will be ten feet wide by then. The holes will begin joining together… If the central stairwell's breached, each deck will be isolated and we’ll be trapped in whatever part of the ship we find ourselves in.”

     “Activate the Orb of Skydeath Protection,” ordered the Captain. “Use it to put a bubble of force around the ship to keep the air in, like you did while we were searching for the portal. That’ll give us a little more time.”

     “For as long as the Orb keeps working,” replied Saturn, but he obeyed the Captain’s order and a couple of minutes later the moon trogs reported that they were no longer losing air through the holes in the hull.

     There was a knock on the door, and Borlin Bakklan entered, saluting smartly. "Yes?" snapped Strong, tensing up as he waited to hear the bad news.

     "Sorry to report that the galley's been breached," the navy man said calmly. "There's a hole in the ceiling connecting deck six and the wizard's laboratory. Commander Callan's ordered all nonessential personnel to the chapel, on the opposite side of the ship."

     "Good idea," said strong. The squad leader saluted again as he left.

     "If the blight's spreading this fast," the Captain added, "then the hull would have been breached even if this man hadn't made the mistake he did, isn't that so?"

     Thomas looked up in surprise. Was the Captain defending him?

     "Yes, that is so," agreed Saturn grudgingly, but there was still no mercy in his hard gaze.

     "What could he have done to prevent this crisis?"

     "If he'd attended to the spilled components immediately, prevented them from mixing..."

     "But Tassley was hurt!" pointed out Timothy Birch. "His first thought was for his fallen comrade."

     "As a Lexandrian wizard, he knows the danger posed by spilled spell components," replied Saturn. "He knows, or should know, that the danger posed makes the death of one wizard..."

     "So you say he should have run around with dustpan and brush while Tassley bled to death beside him?" cried the cleric incredulously. "And besides, we heard that there were dozens of spilled components. The two responsible for our present situation might have mixed before he could get to them."

     "There will be a full enquiry when we get home," interrupted Strong, giving both wizard and cleric a warning glance. "In the meantime, I suggest we employ our time more profitably. I want suggestions as to how we can slow this thing down. Gain some time for ourselves. Any thoughts, anyone?"

     There was a long silence, broken only by the sounds of running feet and anxious voices filtering in from outside. Thomas, who hadn't been dismissed, just stood there, still feeling wretched despite the grains of hope Timothy and the Captain had thrown him.

     As the long, slow moments stretched past, though, a thought began to come to him. The fragment of a memory. Not one of his own, but one of Tak's. The Gem Lord had once found himself in a very similar situation, and Thomas let his mind go blank, trying to create the right conditions for the memory to come all the way.

     A spell had gone wrong. Tak hadn't made a mistake. The spell had gone wrong all by itself, as any spell is liable to do, such being the inherently unpredictable nature of magic. The result of the mishap was a cancerous blight almost identical to the one now afflicting the Jules Verne. Tak had watched in dismay as a hole was eaten in the centre of the table he'd been working on and smoking gloop had dripped into the floor, where it immediately began eroding a pit for itself in the solid stone. When the remains of the table fell over, another hole began to form in the floor where it landed, and when Tak cautiously probed it with an iron poker the black metal had melted just as Thomas's ruler had, although Tak had had the presence of mind to drop it back in the hole so as not to spread the contamination further.

     The Gem Lord had watched in horror as the blight spread, resisting or ignoring every spell he cast at it, and when it reached the wall it melted a hole in it through to the next room. A storeroom. A chest that had been standing against the wall in the next room melted open. Expensive fabrics sewn with gold and silver thread had fallen out to their doom, and then blocks of stone from the dividing wall had started to fall into the puddle of smoking liquid, making splashes that spread the blight further.

     Tak saw tiny spots appear on other walls and other sections of floor, and saw one of his assistants pulling off her robes in terror as a smoking hole appeared in the sleeve. Tak grabbed her arm to examine it, but the flesh was untouched. She'd been lucky.

     "I think we might lose the whole palace," he'd said when the other Gem Lords arrived. "We'd better get everyone out."

     Just then, though, one of the legs of the cooling trough was eaten through and it fell over, spilling dark, dirty water across the floor and into the smoking crater. To Tak's amazement, everywhere the water touched, the corrosion ceased and the bubbling liquid was frozen as solid as the stone it had originally been. He grabbed another poker and prodded experimentally at the frozen melt, and it made a reassuringly solid sound. He understood that it might only be temporary, though, and waited several minutes while the corrosion continued in the next room, eating up tables and cabinets full of rare and expensive spell components.

     When five minutes had passed and the wetted areas still showed no sign of new activity, though, he gave orders for buckets of water to be fetched and for this and the next room to be thoroughly soaked. An hour later the threat was ended, although they'd kept a careful watch for the rest of the day for any sign of continuing activity.

     "Water," said Thomas, his eyes widening with excitement and hope. "Water'll stop it!"

     "How do you know?" demanded Strong, examining him closely.

     "I heard of a situation like this happening before, to an externum. He stopped it with water. It's worth a try, isn't it?"

     Saturn was staring at him suspiciously. "I've never heard anything like that," he said. "And even if it happened, it may be a superficial similarity only. Water may have a dramatically different effect this time. It may make it worse."

     "We can try just a little bit of water," suggested Thomas. "I can go in wearing full protective gear and carrying a glassful of water. Well, has anyone got a better idea?"

     Strong and Saturn both frowned at his tone, but the Captain nodded. "Very well," he said. "Go to the airtight door between sections four and five of deck six. See if you can save the door before it's eaten through." Thomas nodded and ran.

     Even as he was taking a glass from the nearest pantry, though, and watching another being created to take its place, problems occurred to him. The water wouldn't stay in the glass in zero gravity. It would float out in lots of quivering blobs. He had to keep the water completely sealed in until he was ready to apply it. He ran to the alchemist's lab, therefore, emptied a bottle of brown earth and tipped the water into it, holding the stopper in place with his thumb. Then he sprinted around the circular corridor to the connecting corridor to deck six. He launched himself into the zero gravity, grabbing a wall fitting with his free hand, and made his way one handed to the bulkhead between sections four and five, where two moon trogs were packing up the last items of useful equipment.

     "I'm going through!" he warned. "Get out!"

     The moon trogs stared in alarm, then fled, kicking their way through the air towards the next bulkhead and through the airtight door into section one.

     Thomas waited until they were safely through, then braced himself against a wall mounted cabinet and opened the door, tensing himself up for whatever he would see on the other side. There was breathable air. The globe of force generated by the Orb of Skydeath Protection was holding the air in, but he knew that the Orb could fail at any time and he cursed himself for not getting a Necklace of Vacuum Breathing. He was flustered and panicking, he realised. Making stupid mistakes because of the crippling shame and guilt he was feeling. He took a moment to get himself under control. No more mistakes! He had to get this right!

     He pulled himself though the door and closed it again behind him, examining it for the spot of corrosion they'd seen in the scrying mirror. There it was. Less than an inch across, and yet it had been several minutes since it had first been reported. The blight must be slowing, he thought jubilantly. Maybe the horror was ending of its own accord.

     He decided to apply the water anyway. The stopper hadn't managed to hold all the water in, a few tiny blobs were appearing around the bung and breaking away, but most of it was still safely contained. He removed the stopper and dashed the contents against the pit in the airtight door, where most of it splashed away to scatter through the air, hitting walls, floor and ceiling in other places. Some of it landed on his skin and he felt a moment of screaming panic as he imagined the blight eating into his flesh. His face melting away to reveal his naked skull...

     His hands were unaffected, though, and when he carefully touched his face with the tips of his fingers he felt nothing but normal, smooth skin. He breathed a sigh of relief, then examined the door. The pit seemed to have ceased all activity, and a careful examination with a pencil showed it to be as dead as it appeared. It had worked! He turned and gave a thumbs up sign to the empty air, knowing the others had to be watching him in the scrying mirror, and then he kicked his way over to the nearest pantry to get some more water.

☆☆☆

     Back on the bridge, Strong barked a string of orders. Saturn and the soldiers outfitted themselves with Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing, and within the hour the last spots of blight had been extinguished. More than half the ship was open to space by then, the air only held in by the Globe of Force, but all the ship's magics had miraculously survived and the Jules Verne was still handling normally.

     The Captain ordered everyone to those parts of the ship that were still airtight, in case the spell Saturn had cast on the Orb lapsed prematurely, and a few hours later they arrived at the location of the portal. The next day and a half were tense. Everyone was aware that the danger might not be over, that the blight might come to life again, or that the ships magics might still fail, and it was with great relief that the portal blinked back into existence exactly when it was supposed to and the ship passed through into its own universe.

     Strong ordered everyone except a skeleton crew back to Tharia through the teleportation cubicle, but before Thomas could go to the hanger deck Strong called him into his cabin for a few private words.

     "Saturn's out for your head on a silver platter. You know that, don't you?" Thomas could only nod. "From what I've heard, though, and from what little I know of wizard magic, there was little you could have done to avert the danger, and your mistake in spreading the contagion did not significantly increase the danger the ship was already in. What's more, even if you hadn't hit upon the secret of beating the blight, it seemed to be dying anyway, and would probably have burned itself out before the ship became unviable. There will be an enquiry, of course, and Saturn's told me he intends to press for a harsh sentence for you, but I want you to know that I'll be speaking up for you. I'll make sure they know all the facts, and I hope to persuade them that you've done nothing for which disciplinary action needs to be taken."

     Thomas nodded unhappily. "Thank you, Sir." He felt he ought to say more, but he couldn't think of anything that wouldn't sound grovellingly apologetic. "Thank you."

     "You've done nothing you should be ashamed of. Yes, you made a silly mistake, but it's one any of us might have made, even Saturn himself, and as for leaving Tassley to bleed while you swept the floor, well, if I can goad him into saying that in the enquiry the others might dismiss the rest of his testimony out of hand. I really don't think you have anything to worry about. Nothing more than a black mark on your record, anyway."

     "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Encouraged by the Captain's words, Thomas found the strength to look up, to meet his gaze. "Sir, I promise you that nothing like this will ever happen again. I've had a bad fright. My wife's aboard, as you know, and I intend to learn from this. I will never, ever, do anything so stupid ever again."

     "I'm sure you won't," said the Captain, and Thomas was astonished to see the ghost of a smile on his face. "I've made some bad mistakes in my time, and I remember the effect they had on me. Very well, you may go."

     Thomas left, feeling greatly relieved, and Lirenna was waiting for him with Timothy and Matthew when he arrived on the hanger deck. She hugged him, the two men patted him on the shoulders reassuringly, and when they were ready the four of them entered the teleportation cubicle together.