Arabella of Mars (23 page)

Only Arabella and a few other waisters were left to continue fashioning drogues. Some of the idlers, including the surgeon and Pemiter the one-legged cook, took the topmen's places. She helped them to understand what needed to be done, and they set to their sewing with a grim determination entirely unlike any thing Arabella had ever seen on land or in the air. The cook's technique had only enthusiasm to recommend it, but the surgeon worked with astonishing precision and rapidity, his long pale fingers flying.

While Stross conferred with the waisters gathered in the forecastle, all the sails came down, leaving
Diana
completely bare-masted for the first time Arabella could recall. Soon a stiff breeze began to ruffle the billows of fabric around her, as the wind current was now able to slip past the ship nearly unimpeded. After so many weeks of near perfect calm on deck, other than when the pulsers were being employed, it was a very strange sensation, which pointed out how very unusual this maneuver would be.

Stross sprang to the masthead. “Listen up, lads!” he called. “If this works, there'll be a h—l of a jerk. Be prepared to hang on tight!” He then descended to the quarterdeck for a muttered conference with Richardson and the other officers.

Arabella made sure her safety line was snug about her ankle and there was a solid handhold nearby. She kept stitching; the second drogue was nearly complete.

“Crossbow men, haul away!” came the command from the quarterdeck. The waisters in the forecastle, bracing themselves against capstans, masts, and pinrails as best they could, began to haul on a line, drawing the crossbow's string with the bundled drogue back and back. Soon the line was quivering with tension, the men groaning and sweating with the effort.

“Away drogue!”

The waisters released the line, which whipped hissing along the deck, and with a great deep thudding vibration the crossbow flung the bundled drogue away downwind. The cable behind the drogue paid out rapidly as the package of linen and rattan diminished in the distance.

And then, suddenly, it reached the end of the cable. Immediately the drogue snapped open.

The deck jerked out from beneath Arabella, sending her and the rest of the drogue-makers crashing into the quarterdeck's forward bulkhead in a great untidy pile of men and rope and linen. With many shouts and curses—and Arabella using her arms to fend away any hands that approached her chest—they began to untangle themselves.

She shook herself free from the imprisoning fabric. A torrent of commands was flowing from the quarterdeck; in the rigging above, topmen scrambled to sheet home sails and bowse up the yards. Soon the force that had propelled her against the bulkhead changed direction, sending her and every other loose man and object sliding to starboard. Unaccustomed winds buffeted her face and threatened to whip the linen away into the blue.

The ship was swinging from the drogue, she knew—swinging like a vast pendulum, moving crosswise to the great current that still carried her forward at a speed of thousands of knots. Arabella hoped the linen, the stitching, the rattan, the cables, the knots would hold. The whole ship thrummed like a bowstring.

Arabella fetched up against a coaming and made herself fast there. As quickly as she could, she found her work and resumed her sewing. The second drogue must be complete, and well made, very soon. At one point she drove the needle all the way through her thumb, but though she cried out from the pain she drew it right out and kept working.

“Cast away drogue!” came the command. A moment later the cable zipped away across the deck; the pressure on Arabella's back vanished. Even as she floated up into the whipping air she kept stitching.

“Ready drogue number two!” came the cry from the quarterdeck. Nearly done!

Stross appeared above Arabella. “Come
on,
lad!” he cried, holding out a desperate hand. “We're falling free!”

She bit off the last stitch. “Here it is, sir!” She wadded up the ungainly package and thrust it at him. He and Higgs carried it away, while Arabella joined the cook in his work on the third drogue.

*   *   *

And so it went with the second drogue and the third and the fourth and the fifth. After she handed the final drogue to Stross, who looked as weary as she felt, she could do no more than float nearly insensate near the quarterdeck. The final thrum and jerk, still an impact though no surprise, barely impinged upon her consciousness as she fell heavily against the bulkhead below her. Only a few remaining scraps of linen cushioned her fall. She didn't care.

For the fifth time the ship swung through the air, hanging impossibly from a great bag of linen. The force on Arabella's back grew, changed direction, then slacked away.

She opened her eyes. The cable stretching away to the final drogue now pointed well to starboard, no longer taut and straight but slack, a long gentle curve that grew more and more pronounced as the drogue at its end began to fold and tumble like a flower losing its bloom.

The air calmed. The ship drifted.

Diana
floated, turning slowly, in the immense blue bowl of the air.

“Where's that d
____
d cross-current?” cried Richardson from the quarterdeck.

Stross, floating beside the acting captain, turned to face Arabella, annoyance on his face warring with fear welling up from far below.

The other officers, and then the men, followed Stross's gaze.

It seemed that every man on the ship was staring at Arabella. Her breath seemed to catch in her throat. “I—” she began, then choked off. “I checked the figures twice.…”

“We should never have trusted that godforsaken machine!” Richardson shouted. “Useless f
____
g thing! Now we're stranded in midair!”

“At least we tried,” Stross said. The annoyance and fear in his face had faded, replaced by weary resignation.

“This is
your
fault!” Richardson shrieked, rounding on Stross.

“I don't recall hearing any better suggestions from you!” Stross replied with considerable heat.

“We might've tried the pedals at least!”

So this is how it's to end
, Arabella thought.
Drifting and bickering until we smash upon the Martian sand.
She closed her eyes against the unpleasant sight and touched the locket at her throat.
I'm sorry, Michael, I did what I could. Please don't trust Simon.…

And then something changed.

It took her a moment to realize what had happened. The arguing had stopped. Even the muttering of the men had ceased, leaving a silence in which the gentle sough and creak of the rigging could plainly be heard.

Arabella opened her eyes.

Captain Singh hung in his cabin hatchway. Thin—oh, so painfully thin—with his skin still ashen and his head still bandaged, he floated with his night-shirt tail drifting above his bare feet and his hands gripping the coaming on either side. But though his face was sallow and drawn, his eyes were bright and alert.

She was so very, very happy to see him so that her breath caught in her throat. If only she could embrace him, to properly express her joy!

“Gentlemen,” the captain said, his voice no more than a whisper but plainly audible in the stillness, “what was all that banging-about just now?”

Stross swung himself over the quarterdeck rail, stopping himself with one foot on the deck exactly in front of the cabin. He drew himself up to attention in the air and saluted smartly. “We are attempting to intercept the asteroid Paeonia so as to make charcoal, sir. We have deployed drogues in order to reach a cross-current; however we are currently stranded.”

“Glass,” the captain whispered, and extended a hand. One of the midshipmen immediately appeared with a telescope.

The whole crew waited as he peered about in all directions.

“Observe, gentlemen,” he said, and pointed off the larboard beam.

Stross accepted the glass from the captain. Richardson and the other officers on the quarterdeck used their own instruments.

Then Stross laughed aloud. “Aha!” he cried, pointing. Other men with telescopes began to shout and cheer, clapping each other upon the back.

Arabella shaded her eyes and peered in the indicated direction. At first she saw nothing.

And then she realized what she was seeing.

Motion in the air. Scraps of cloud, tiny bits of drifting matter, even the shimmering air itself, all whipping past so rapidly the eye could barely perceive it.

The cross-current.

“To the pedals, lads!” Stross cried. “We'll be set in that current in less than half an hour!”

But though the men streamed past her, laughing and jostling, toward the lower deck, Arabella forced her way through the crowd to the captain's side. The surgeon was already there, peering into the captain's eyes and feeling with his fingers for the pulse in his neck.

“I'm very glad to see you up and about, sir,” Arabella said. Though this small expression of sentiment seemed entirely inadequate, it was, she thought, what Arthur Ashby the captain's boy would say. “If you please, sir, I could fetch you some broth from the galley.”

“Thank you, Ashby,” the captain whispered. “I should like that very much.”

 

14

PAEONIA

Diana
was soon safely moored at the asteroid Paeonia.

Arabella had never seen an asteroid before. Asteroids, she knew, were the islands of the air, great floating mountains of rock ranging in size from less than a mile to hundreds of miles in diameter. Thousands of them drifted in the skies between Earth and Mars, yet so great were the distances involved that to encounter even one in a voyage was a rarity. If not for the French attack,
Diana
would not have come close enough to this one to make it out with the naked eye.

Paeonia proved to be a highly irregular sphere some ten miles across, but from where
Diana
floated nearby it seemed more a ball of foliage than of rock, the solid surface entirely invisible beneath a tangled canopy of branches and leaves at least fifty yards deep.

“I thought asteroids were rocky,” she said to Stross one day after she had assisted him in sending off a work crew. Eight men pedaled an aerial launch—little more than an open wickerwork frame with a small pulser at the back and a pair of sails for steering—away from
Diana
toward the great green expanse of Paeonia.

“Most small asteroids are entirely barren,” Stross explained, “but the ones over five miles or so carry a small force of attraction, and draw drops of water and bits of organic matter to themselves from the atmosphere. Over time these build up into a layer of soil, loose and sandy to be sure, but if any seeds should happen to be carried into the air from the surface of Earth or Venus they may find purchase there. Once established, they generally colonize the entire surface.” He gestured to Paeonia. “Fortunately for our purposes, this one bears a fine crop of oak and elm, both of which make tolerably good charcoal.”

Arabella herself, unlike the rest of her mess, was not detailed to charcoal-making duty—as captain's boy, she was tasked with caring for him through his recovery. Though she would have liked to visit the asteroid, with its endless net of twining branches playing host to twittering birds and birdlike things, she was not too sorry to be missing the work of sawing, stripping, and hauling vast quantities of wood, the piling up of damp sandy soil around a stack of logs, or the endless pedaling of the air-pump which kept the slow-burning logs in their caul of soil just barely alight. The work crews returned at the end of each shift weary, exhausted, and filthy.

She had to admit that she took a certain malicious pleasure in seeing Binion covered with soot and half-dead from fatigue. When he saw her smirk, he spat “bum-boy” at her, but seemed too exhausted to do any thing else.

Richardson continued as acting captain. But with the real captain now awake and improving, he seemed paradoxically less concerned about asserting his own authority, and his relations with the other officers grew much more cordial. It was as though the weight of the mantle of responsibility had caused him so much discomfort that he'd snapped at his subordinates.

*   *   *

Though conscious, the captain was still extremely weak, and even in a state of free descent he could not bear to remain on the quarterdeck for more than an hour or two. He spent most of each day in his cabin, slowly building up his strength and sleeping frequently. From time to time Arabella noticed him gripping his head with an expression indicating severe headache, but she never once heard him complain of it.

Arabella continued to tend to the captain's needs, changing his bandages, bringing him soup from the galley, or doing any other thing he required. But, paradoxically, now that he was conscious their relations became more distant than they had been while she was caring for his unconscious body. For as long as he was awake, she must work to maintain the fiction of Arthur Ashby, captain's boy. It was only while he slept that she could gaze upon his face and entertain fancies entirely inappropriate to her supposed sex and station.

And so they discussed the theory and practice of aerial navigation, the workings of Aadim and automata in general, and the sights he had seen during his travels. But though she gently inquired into his personal history, the captain proved as resistant as Arabella herself to discussing his family and his early life. All he would say was that he had joined the Honorable Mars Company at the age of eighteen, sailing on
Swiftsure
as navigator's mate.

She wished that he would reveal more details about his inner life. Perhaps, she sometimes dared to hope, beneath his smooth professional veneer he might harbor some warm feeling toward herself. But though she must respect the captain's desire to keep his life private—he certainly offered her the same courtesy—she realized that his reticence only made him more intriguing and mysterious, and seemed to draw her into wanting to know more.