Arabella of Mars(56)

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.”