Arabella of Mars (22 page)

“Nicely done, Ashby,” said Stross, who then nodded pleasantly to Richardson.

With a visible effort, Richardson controlled his anger. “Very well,” he said through gritted teeth, then turned to the boatswain. “Mr. Higgs, you are ordered to requisition a quantity of fabric, and any other necessary materials, from the cargo, in order to create a drogue or drogues sufficient to change the ship's course and intercept the asteroid Paeonia. Mr. Quinn, you are ordered to assist Mr. Higgs and to keep proper records of all materials requisitioned. Mr. Stross, you are ordered to plot an expeditious course to the asteroid Paeonia, using any available means to do so, and bring the ship directly there forthwith. And Ashby, you are ordered to assist Mr. Stross in his efforts.” He straightened in the air, doing his best to look down his nose at the others present, though as it happened they were all floating above his eye level. “Are your orders clear?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” they all chorused.

“Come on, lad,” said Stross. “We've much to do, and little time to do it in.”

*   *   *

As the other officers left the cabin—Richardson favoring Stross with a withering look as he departed—Stross unpinned the chart from the floor and spread it out on Aadim's desk. While he was doing this, Arabella tended to the captain.

The poor man, unconscious though he might be, seemed distressed by the sounds of the argument. He had thrashed off almost all of his bed-clothes, and beads of sweat had burst out on his wrinkled brow. Arabella gently tucked the captain's blanket back in place and patted away the sweat with a soft cloth. “All will be well, sir,” she murmured low. “We'll get
Diana
to Mars safely, you'll see.”

The sound of Arabella's voice, the touch of her hand, seemed to calm him somewhat. His face relaxed a bit, though it still retained the quietly pained expression it had held ever since the battle with the French, and he lay still beneath his blanket. “Rest well, sir,” she said, and patted his shoulder.

“Ashby, come here!” Stross said, and she joined him at the desk. “Here's the situation.”

The three of them made an odd conference. Arabella trembled beneath her shirt, frightened as much by the responsibility that had been placed upon her shoulders as by the fear of discovery. Stross, the sailing-master, was a man she'd barely even encountered before the current crisis. Balding, with dark hair and eyes, his rather portly torso contrasted with the hard hands and strong arms of an experienced airman; his attitude of bluff confidence and attention to duty nearly masked the worry that lurked behind his eyes. And Aadim, though his eyes gazed woodenly out the window, seemed nonetheless to be paying close attention to the discussion, the mechanisms within his desk ticking and whirring beneath the chart.

The situation, as Stross put it, was grim. Two of the French cannonballs had shattered the hull of
Diana
's coal-store, and over half the coal had drifted away before the breach could be repaired. This coal, carefully budgeted because of its great weight, was intended to fill the ship's balloons with hot air upon arrival at Mars, allowing her to drift gently downward to a landing. Without it, once the ship entered the influence of Mars's gravity she was doomed to smash upon the surface. Returning to Earth, where they would be more likely to encounter another ship that might have coal to spare, was out of the question—the ship's stores of food and water would never stretch so far.

“So we're bound for Paeonia,” Stross concluded, tapping the pin on the chart. “It's a substantial asteroid, uninhabited but forested; there we can cut timber and make charcoal. Not so good a fuel as coal, to be sure, but adequate to the task.”

“How much time will it take to make the charcoal we require?”

Stross considered, rubbing his chin. “Some weeks, I should imagine.”

“I see.” Arabella's heart grew heavy at this news. Any delay might allow that dastardly Simon to reach her brother before she could warn him. But she must not give up hope.

“You say you have some facility with the navigator,” Stross said, breaking into Arabella's distressing train of thought. He grasped Aadim's right hand and wrenched it toward the pin representing
Diana
, the sudden rough motion making the navigator's gears shriek in protest. Arabella cringed as though she felt Aadim's pain in her own shoulder. “I know how to plot a course from here to here”—he hauled the hand across to the pin representing Paeonia—“but not how to tell the d
____
d thing to use drogues.”

“I believe it is done thus,” Arabella said. She returned Aadim's hand to
Diana
, moving it slowly and evenly to respect the gears and levers, then pressed down on the index finger to indicate the start point. A click sounded from within Aadim's mechanism. Next she opened a panel on the side of the desk, where several brass levers were labeled with the letters of the Greek alphabet.

She paused for a moment in thought, then raised the beta lever and lowered the lambda lever. Then she contemplated the gamma lever. For a transit by drogue, should it be set up or down? Down, she thought. She laid her finger upon the lever and pressed it gently downward.

The lever seemed to resist her finger, quivering gently from the motion of the gears behind it. Aadim's whole body joined in this motion, his head seeming to shift fractionally from side to side.

Curious, she thought, and tried raising the lever instead. This time it moved smoothly, locking into position with a soft click, and Aadim's head remained still.

Upon reflection, this combination of settings made the most sense.

Arabella moved Aadim's hand to the side current and pressed the index finger again to indicate the destination of the transit. Finally she returned the three levers to their initial positions and moved the hand to Paeonia, carefully setting the dial indicating displacement in the vertical dimension before pressing the index finger for a third time. Immediately a series of whirs and ratcheting sounds began to vibrate from inside Aadim's desk. “It may take some time for the calculations to complete,” she said. “The use of drogues adds quite a bit of complication to the course.”

“A very tidy bit of work,” Stross said admiringly. “How many years did it take you to learn all that?”

“I've only been studying with the captain since I came on board,” she admitted. “But my father—” She stopped herself, wary of revealing too much about her past. “He owned a great many automata,” she concluded feebly.

“I must thank the man when we return to England! What might his name be, and where might I find him?”

Suddenly the nervousness which had vanished while Arabella was working with the automaton returned in full force. This line of questioning probed perilously close to secrets which must not be revealed. “My—my father has passed on,” she said, which had the benefit of being true. “I would prefer not to discuss him any further. It pains me to do so.” Which also, she realized, was true.

“I'm sorry, lad,” Stross said, and clapped her on the shoulder so hard that she began to tumble in the air. “Well, now. You stay here, look after the captain, and let me know straight away when the course is plotted. I'll go see how Mr. Higgs fares with the construction of the drogues.” He paused in the doorway before departing. “I won't lie to you, lad. This is as nasty a situation as any I've faced. But with your work on the navigator, I think we may have a chance.”

Arabella could only hope that his trust in her was well founded.

 

13

DROGUES

Arabella was giving the captain his water when a bell sounded, indicating that Aadim's calculations were complete. She took a slate and chalk and recorded a series of numbers from the dials on the front of his cabinet, double-checking her work because there were many more figures than usual. She then consulted a book of tables—this part was something she knew the captain would have done from memory—and wrote down the sailing order and navigation points required to implement the course. When she was done with that she again double-checked her work, then copied it out quickly but neatly on a sheet of vellum.

As she sanded and blotted the sheet, she was forced to admit that she had only a theoretical understanding of how this plan would be implemented. As an airman, her skills were limited to hauling on a rope when instructed; as a navigator, she was keenly aware of the great size of the field of navigation and the tiny proportion her own command of it encompassed. It was as though she knew how to lay out the major blocks of color that made up a portrait, and understood the general principle of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but must rely upon others to execute the actual brush strokes.

She was deeply concerned about Richardson's abilities in this area. The man was plainly more interested in maintaining his own authority than he was in the actual running of the ship. The other officers, and the men who reported to them, were doing their best to work within the constraints that the acting captain laid upon them, but she feared that at some point their practical knowledge and Richardson's orders would collide. Arabella hoped that would not occur in the middle of a difficult navigational maneuver.

She gently laid a hand on the captain's shoulder before leaving the cabin. He looked even more thin and pale than he had even that morning. Despite her best attentions, and the nourishing broth that the surgeon fed him several times a day from a kid-leather squeeze bag, he seemed to be fading rapidly. “The head wound is healing well,” the surgeon had said. “I've seen men recover from worse. But whether or not he regains his senses … that's in the Lord's hands.”

Fighting to keep the tears from her eyes, Arabella silently pledged to do every thing in her power to keep the ship and crew alive until he returned to his proper place on the quarterdeck.

*   *   *

She emerged on deck to a scene that would have been humorous in its domesticity, had not the situation been so perilous. Dozens of airmen, rough-handed muscular men, worked closely and diligently with needle and thread, plying their needles through heaps of shining white linen tablecloths instead of the usual sails or shore-going clothes. Other men were employed in bending canes of rattan into hoops and pounding out brass grommets. And the ship's carpenter, assisted by two of the most senior airmen, was busily cursing over a strange assemblage of wood, iron, and cordage.

“Have you the sailing order?” Stross called out from where he hung by the rail in close conference with the purser.

“Aye, sir,” Arabella replied, and with a kick propelled herself across the deck to hand him the paper. He looked it over with a skeptical eye. “It'll be close,” he muttered. “Very close.” He tapped the page. “If that cross-wind isn't exactly where the charts say, we might miss the asteroid completely.”

Arabella floated at attention, unable to reassure Stross. Although she had confidence in Aadim's calculations and her own transcriptions, she had no idea how practical the resulting course might be.

Stross peered hard at the paper, then shook his head. “We'll need five drogues, lads,” he called out, “not four!”

The men with the needles groaned at this new intelligence, but the purser cried out as though in pain. “Lord's sake!” he said. “At this rate we'll go into the red for sure!”

“Better that than dead,” the sailing-master replied. He folded the paper and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “Ashby, can you ply a needle?”

“Aye, sir,” she admitted. Though she despised needlework, thanks to her mother she had considerable experience with it.

“Report to Mr. Higgs, then, and be sure to make every stitch tight!”

“Aye, sir.” But, despite the direct order, she did not leap to comply, finding it very difficult to tear her gaze from the great cabin's door.

Stross must have seen her reluctance, because he reassured her, “The captain will get along without you for a few hours.” Then he pursed his lips and shook his head. “If it's much longer than that … well then, it won't really matter.”

*   *   *

Arabella was somewhat embarrassed to discover that many of the men were both faster and tidier with needle and thread than she was. Her mother, she knew, would be terribly disappointed in her. She soon shook off this attitude, though, and concentrated her efforts on working as rapidly as possible. Stross and the other officers continually admonished them to work faster, faster, for they had only a few hours until the current carried them irrevocably past the asteroid. But at the same time, they must be sure to make the seams as strong as possible, for the drogue would bear the entire weight of the ship.

Richardson, she noted, remained imperiously on the quarterdeck, looking out over the work but not taking any part in it.

*   *   *

Soon they had the first of the drogues completed. A great cone of white linen, its open base was formed of a ten-foot circular loop of bent rattan, and it measured twenty-five feet from base to tip. Two of the topmen quickly lashed together a rope harness to attach it to a sturdy cable, the other end of which they carried below.

The carpenter and his men, meanwhile, had managed to cobble together a sort of crossbow from a long, springy plank and several yards of cordage. This they had fastened to the forecastle deck, arranged to fire its projectile just larboard of the figurehead.

Arabella, still stitching as fast as she could, stole an occasional glance over one shoulder as Stross and Higgs packed the drogue into as compact a bundle as possible and placed it in the improvised crossbow's basket. They then called all available waisters—those not currently occupied with stitching—to the forecastle, while a series of commands from the quarterdeck sent the topmen scurrying aloft.