Arabella of Mars(53)

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.”