Arabella of Mars(42)

But far more impressive than those clockmakers, she realized, was the captain himself. Captain Singh’s knowledge of automata ran deep and broad as any aerial current, and he himself was responsible for much of Aadim’s design. Though the captain was no clockmaker himself, his understanding of the clockwork navigator’s mechanisms was complete and intimate. Aadim’s technical draughts were kept in a chest in the captain’s cabin, tightly rolled in a protective leather case, but the captain himself never consulted them; he knew every cog, gear, and shaft as well as he knew the names and duties of his crew.

The captain, in fact, seemed to treat the automaton as a member of the crew. He always called it “he” or by name, and in cases where the ideal set of the sails or course correction was less than certain, he seemed to respect its solutions far more than the advice of Stross, his sailing-master. This habit caused some small amount of grumbling from his fellow officers, but their complaints were muted because Aadim’s navigation was invariably swifter, more accurate, and more efficient than any of theirs.

But not only the captain’s mind was admirable to Arabella. He was handsome, to be certain, with fine symmetrical features and piercing dark eyes, and as she aided him to don his always impeccable jacket she could not fail to notice how broad and firm were the shoulders beneath his shirt. And though, as captain, he perforce held himself aloof from the men, he never failed to treat even the least of them—which would, of course, be Arabella herself—with any thing other than respect, kindness, and patience.

Under other circumstances, he might have been a man whose company she would have sought out for its own sake. But, sadly, those circumstances were not hers, and so she kept her observations of him to herself.

*

One day Arabella was engaged in holystoning the deck—a tedious and common chore which involved hooking herself to the deck with a leather strap, scrubbing the wood with a pumice stone, and wiping up the resulting dust with a damp washing-leather before it could float away—when a cry of “sail ho!” came up from the lookout on the starboard mast. Immediately every man rushed to the starboard rail, including the other men holystoning, so she too unhooked herself and did likewise. But peer though she might, she saw no sign of any sail.

The men around Arabella fidgeted and murmured uncertainly. “What are we looking for?” she asked her messmate Hornsby, who floated beside her, shielding his eyes from the sun.

“’Nother ship,” he muttered, still staring off into the distance. “Rare in these parts, and troublesome.”

“Troublesome? How so?”

“There!” he cried, pointing downward. Arabella looked in the indicated direction and this time managed to discern a tiny, wavering speck, barely visible against the blue of sky and small, scudding clouds. It might be a hundred or a thousand miles off; without landmarks, she had no sense of distance.

“What’s so troublesome about that?” Arabella asked again. “It’s much too far away to bother us.”

“Aye, and if she keeps her distance, there’s no worry. But it’s her angle on the bow I’m worried about.” Arabella knew from her lessons with Aadim that “angle on the bow” referred to the angle between the line of Diana’s course and a line drawn from Diana to the other ship. “No Marsman would come at us from below like that; she’d be ahead or astern, on the same course as we.” He pointed again, measuring with his eye. “If the angle changes with time, we can all breathe easy. But if it don’t … that means our courses intersect.”

“But surely we can easily avoid a collision, with so much warning and so much space to maneuver?”

Hornsby took his gaze from the distant speck and fixed it upon Arabella. “Unless she means to engage us. And who’d want to do a thing like that?”

Suddenly the reason for the crew’s agitation became clear. “Pirates,” she breathed.

“Or worse,” said Hornsby.

“What could be worse than pirates?”

“Could be a French frigate. Our little guns haven’t a chance against a full-blown man of war.” Again he peered into the distance. “Mind you, she don’t swim like a frigate. Might be a corsair, though. Nearly as bad.”

“What kind of ship is that?”

“No particular rig. Corsair’s just what the French call a privateer.”

The naval terminology was making her head spin. “What might be the difference between a privateer and a pirate?”

“Pirates take honest men’s cargo for their own profit, and if they’re caught they hang. Privateers do the same, but they have a license—a letter of marque, it’s called—from the French, and they share what they take with Bonaparte, all legal-like. They’re better funded, better equipped, and just all around more dangerous.”

“Avast that lolling about!” cried Kerrigan from the quarterdeck. All the men returned to their duties, along with Arabella. But though she did her best to concentrate on her holystoning of the deck, a part of her attention was always directed to the men and officers peering over the starboard side, eyes and telescopes trained on the unknown airship.

It seemed to her that the direction of their gazes—the angle on the bow—was not changing with time. And the expressions on the officers’ faces betrayed concern.

*