Arabella of Mars(51)

The sight struck daggers through her heart. “You will recover,” she whispered again and again, in as reassuring a tone as she could muster.

Though she did not know, in truth, whom she was trying to reassure.

All that day she fretted over him, doing all that she could, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. As she tended him she kept one eye on Aadim, but though the automaton did move from time to time it never seemed to be responding to her actions as it had on that first day.

It was after supper, when the officers gathered in the captain’s cabin to drink their grog, that she finally learned that the ship was in even more peril than she’d feared.

*

Richardson and the others floated above a chart of the region, spread out and tacked to the floor. From her studies with the captain, Arabella recognized the great aerial current in which Diana was now embedded, denoted by a series of arrows, along with its side-currents, eddies, and cross-winds. The ship’s position was marked with a pin, but all the officers’ attention was directed to a tiny spot, labeled Paeonia, in the far corner of the chart. The spot rested at the center of a long, looping figure-of-eight, which Arabella knew represented its motion relative to the current over time.

“At this time of the solar year,” the sailing-master said, “the asteroid should be here.” He peered at the tiny lettering inked on the figure-of-eight, then placed a second pin about an inch from the inked spot. “And, according to my observations, our current wind speed is eighty-one hundred and a bit knots.” He measured out a distance of about four inches on his calipers, laid a straight-edge against the pin representing Diana, lined it up with the arrows on the chart, and walked the calipers along it. “Here’s where we’ll be in eight hours.”

The caliper’s pointed tip rested near the straight-edge’s closest approach to Paeonia, still at least five inches upstream from the pin.

“With the men in the shape they’re in, we can pedal at no more than six or seven knots.” Stross adjusted the caliper to a tiny gap, walked it eight steps from the straight-edge toward Paeonia, and placed a third pin there.

All the officers stared at it. A gap of nearly four inches separated the third pin from the second.

“Seven thousand miles short,” breathed Richardson, then cursed quietly.

“More like ten thousand, actually,” the sailing-master said in an apologetic tone. “Accounting for the third dimension.”

Richardson cursed again, more vehemently this time.

All the officers floated quietly, contemplating the chart. Arabella, too, stared hard at the lines and pins. It was exactly like some of the navigation exercises the captain had set her, except that this time the situation was not merely theoretical. There was a cross-current on the chart that would carry them much closer to the asteroid, but to reach it would require them to cover a distance far greater than they could pedal in a mere eight hours.

“You’ve found no other asteroids in our path?” Richardson said.

Stross shook his head. “There’s two or three we might reach, but according to the charts none of them is wooded to any degree. There’s always the possibility of a wandering comet, of course, but those so seldom have any plant life at all.”

Richardson sighed. “So it’s Paeonia or nothing. And in eight hours it’ll be behind us.”

Still Arabella stared at the chart, thinking about something she’d read in one of the books the captain had loaned her. The arrows began to move in her mind’s eye, flowing across the chart, air currents meshing and colliding like gears in a complex mechanism.

“Perhaps,” suggested Higgs, the boatswain, “we’ll meet up with another Company ship.”

“Aye,” Richardson scoffed sarcastically. “We’ll pull right alongside and say ‘Pray, neighbor, might ye lend us five hundredweight of coal till Thursday next?’ And they’ll be happy to do so, as they will through sheer happenstance be loaded down with twice the amount required for their own landing.”

The boatswain’s face darkened. “No need to come it ironical.”

Richardson sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to burn the cargo, then.”

“All them fine linens?” moaned Quinn, the purser. “And the furniture and rugs, up in smoke just to fill the balloons?”

“They tried that in Earl of Wessex, remember?” the master cried. “Fat lot of good it did ’em! Burned up every stick of cargo they did, and half the decking too, and still scattered themselves all over the Juno Plain.” He sighed. “No, lads, it’s coal we need, five hundredweight at least, or else half a ton of fresh charcoal.”

“Might as well wish for a flying pony!” the boatswain shouted. “H—l, a flying coach-and-six!”

In reply the master growled and clenched his fist. Richardson’s eyes darted, all in a panic, from one angry officer to another, but only a series of ineffectual blubbing sounds emerged from his lips.

And then Arabella burst out one word: “Drogues!”

All at once the officers’ argument cut off. They stared at her as though she’d appeared from nowhere.

Arabella clapped her hands across her mouth.

She hadn’t meant to speak. She had not even realized at first that she had spoken aloud. It had only been the suddenness of the realization that had forced the word from her mouth.