Arabella of Mars(88)

Simon dropped to his knees and clasped his hands imploringly before himself. “And so now, having confessed to you that which I have been unable to admit to any other soul, I throw myself upon your mercy.” He looked up at her with an apparently sincere expression of supplication. “I have seen that your understanding of the Martians is greater even than your brother’s. It is my fervent hope that with a full understanding of the situation, you may be able to find some way to bring this violence to a close.”

Arabella looked down upon her cousin with mingled emotions of suspicion, pity, anger, and despair. Whether his story was true or not, she knew she must treat him with extreme caution, though to denounce him outright would never be believed.

Simon was correct in one thing, though: It seemed to fall to her to make peace between Englishmen and Martians. Yet even with the captain’s brave and wise assistance, she had no idea how she might unravel this deadly conundrum.

She turned her back on Simon and looked to her brother, his face insensible and racked with pain. “What am I to do, Michael?” she whispered in an anguish of uncertainty.

Just then came a horrific crash from very nearby, a great grinding thud of stone against stone, followed by the tinkle of glass and the clatter of falling plaster.

A moment later, the screaming began.





23

ROCKS FALL

Arabella raced down the hall toward the sound, Simon forgotten behind her.

She soon found herself in the manor’s grand dining room, whose great windows, now heavily shuttered, had once offered a magnificent prospect over Fort Augusta. But now a great swath of the shutters had been smashed to flinders by an enormous, craggy boulder of red rock.

The boulder lay atop one end of the Coreys’ dining table, a precious antique brought out from Earth more than one hundred years ago, which now itself lay in splinters, two of its carved and gilt legs splayed out from the wreckage like those of a thurok that had been trodden upon. The massive silver centerpiece, which Arabella had always thought in ostentatiously poor taste, had slid down the length of the now-tilted table to crash like a ship upon the rock. All was covered by dust and bits of broken wood.

The screaming came from Lady Corey. But she was not the injured party—it was Lord Corey who gasped beneath the wreckage, his face gone deathly pale beneath a coating of plaster dust. Blood was splashed everywhere.

From without, through the gap in the broken shutters, came a great clattering war-cry of triumphant Martians, accompanied by rhythmic chanting.

Arabella recalled a similar scene from the French attack, and how a second ball had come crashing in shortly thereafter. “This place is dangerous!” she cried to the men who now crowded in the door. “We must leave here at once!”

“How dare you!” replied one of the men, a prosperous plantation owner called Sykes. “Our host is injured and requires succor!”

But a long arm in a buff coat held the man back. “She is correct,” said the captain. “Our defenses have been breached, and the enemy are very likely to strike again at this same spot. We must retreat.”

“Unhand me, you heathen,” Sykes spat, and extricated himself from the captain’s grip.

“Very well,” the captain said, and backed away, deeper into the house. Arabella tried to push her way past the other men to follow him, but the press of their bodies blocked the door.

Sykes ran to Lord Corey, whose eyes had fallen closed. “I will assist you, sir,” he said, and picked him up by the shoulders to pull him from beneath the shattered table.

He came away easily. Too easily.

The upper half of his body, separated from the lower, left a long red smear upon the carpet.

Sykes looked up at Arabella in horror just as a second boulder came crashing in, sending glass and fragments of wood and plaster flying everywhere.

Arabella screamed, then coughed as a great cloud of dust burst from the point of impact. Strong arms grasped her and pulled her away, saving her from the trampling feet of the men who, up until a moment earlier, had been pressing to enter the room and were now trying desperately to leave it.

A moment later a huge slab of ceiling fell on the spot she had just vacated, spattering her and her protector with further stinging shards of plaster and stone. He shielded her with his body, his heavy buff coat serving to ward off the worst of the impact to himself.

It was the captain, of course. “Are you hurt?” he shouted over the continuing clatter of falling plaster.

“I think not, sir!”

“We must retreat to the drawing-room!”

*

Arabella and the captain gathered every one they could find, servants included, into the drawing-room, which faced only the impassable crags behind the house. They soon determined that only Lord Corey and Mr. Sykes had been killed by the two catapult-stones; all the rest were present save the inconsolable Lady Corey, the unconscious Michael, and Dr. Fellowes, who was caring for both of them in Michael’s bedchamber.

Simon, too, was present. He lurked at the edges of the gathering as though afraid of her—and well he might be—and yet he seemed unable to take his eyes off of her. To him she said nothing, favoring him instead with a withering glance, to which he replied by skulking away with a satisfyingly mortified expression.

For the last two months she had looked forward to the day when she would publicly denounce her cousin for threatening her with a pistol, imprisoning her, and setting off to Mars to murder her brother … and yet, for now, she held her tongue. For all his faults, he had indeed saved Michael’s life—whether that had been his original intent or not—and the current crisis, which threatened every one in the house, seemed far too pressing for Simon’s crimes to obtain the attention they deserved even if she should mention them.