Arabella the Traitor of Mars

by David D. Levine

  Michael toyed with his near-empty glass, not looking at Arabella. “I could end this farcical resistance of yours with a word, you know,” he said. “Your letters betray your aims, your schemes, your location … and I have made powerful friends in the years I have sat in this chair.” He rapped his glass upon the arm of the chair—the chair which had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before that—and his eyes rose to meet Arabella’s. “Out of love for you, dear sister, I will not. But neither will I bankrupt this family for the sake of a scheme which, however noble its aims, cannot succeed.” He inspected the glass, raised it to his mouth, and tipped it back, draining it of its final drop of port. Then he set it down with careful finality. “I will, if you cannot be dissuaded, sell you a quantity of khoresh-wood, at a fair price. But I will not renege on my existing agreements, and if I cannot supply your entire needs, you must inquire elsewhere for the rest.”

  Arabella looked to Captain Singh, whose expression matched her own feelings of disappointment, anger, and determination. “Very well,” she told her brother. “I shall take all you can spare.” She stood then, and as a matter of course the two men immediately rose as well. “However, I find I am no longer interested in spending the next few days in your company.” She curtseyed to Michael—quite perfunctorily, without allowing her gaze to depart his face—then turned to Captain Singh. “Let us depart. I shall spend the night with Lady Corey.”

  She did not begin to cry until the door had closed behind them.

  * * *

  “Whatever shall we do?” Arabella sobbed as they walked back to Diana, arm in arm. “Our funds will quickly be exhausted if we must pay the going rate for the quantities of khoresh-lumber we require … even assuming we can find it! Every other plantation in Saint George’s Land will also have committed most or all of their production to existing customers.”

  “We will purchase what we can,” Captain Singh assured her, patting her arm, “and seek other sources for the rest. Khema’s storek can be very persuasive.”

  “Only to Martians! And, though the tree itself is a Martian native species, the cutting and drying of khoresh-wood for aerial ships is almost purely an English practice.”

  “We will consult with Fulton. Perhaps some alternative can be discovered.”

  Arabella wiped her eyes and nose with her handkerchief. “You are very good,” she said, “but I fear you may be overly confident.”

  “Recall what I have said about the necessity for the appearance of confidence, whether justified or not, in achieving one’s aims.” They reached Diana and ascended the gangplank, while airmen bustled about, making the ship ready for an immediate departure. “Proceeding as though one is assured of success can often lead to opportunities, and at the very least permits progress toward one’s goals.”

  Arabella sighed and inclined her head, acknowledging the truth of his words even though she was not very reassured. “Will you be departing immediately?” she asked.

  “Very nearly. I have no further business here. I shall, of course, convey you and your trunk to Lady Corey’s apartments in Fort Augusta first.” Diana was to rendezvous with Touchstone midair, to provide a continuous blockade against the incoming ulka smuggler; Touchstone would then land at Fort Augusta, from which Fox and Arabella would return to Tekhmet by coach.

  Arabella paused, and perforce Captain Singh, his arm linked in hers, paused as well. She turned to him and took his hands. “There is no need for you to make a detour to Fort Augusta for me. I shall simply remain on board Diana with you, for the duration of your blockade duty.”

  Captain Singh looked askance at that. “Are you certain? If we go into action against the smuggler, I cannot guarantee your safety.”

  “I understand that. But the events of this day have instilled in me a strong desire for action. I could not bear to bide my time in Lady Corey’s sitting-room, exchanging gossip with Fort Augusta society, nor to sit isolated at Tekhmet, assisting Mr. Fulton with his account-books. I wish to do something to forward the cause of the resistance, and at the moment that thing seems to me to be my work in aerial navigation.” Arabella had continued her work with the greenwood box in every spare moment since the circumduction of Mercury, and her current undertaking was to improve its abilities regarding navigation within the turbulent winds of a planet’s Horn. She felt that a better understanding of this complex topic might aid them in the defense of Mars against the Prince Regent’s fleet, and intended that any improvements would eventually be incorporated into Aadim’s design. “To spend the next few weeks of blockade aboard Diana, in the very midst of the Horn, would be invaluable to my researches.”

  “What of your work at the Institute?”

  “The more experienced students are fully capable of training the newer ones for a few weeks.”

  The captain’s proud, impassive face relaxed slightly into a small smile. “Be careful, my dear. If you train them too well, you are in danger of making yourself unnecessary.”

  Arabella found her own lips drawing themselves into a matching smile, but as her mind continued to work she felt her expression go serious. Suddenly she reached for her husband, grasped him about the waist, and pressed his broad, warm chest against her own. “I could not bear to let you go and face the smuggler without me,” she said, her voice muffled against the wool of his uniform jacket. “Every time we part, whether by my initiative or yours or some other’s, it seems that some awful thing happens to one or another of us.”

  Captain Singh’s long, strong hand stroked Arabella’s shoulder. “Very well,” he said. “But you will be required to fill and wind my lamps, boy second class Ashby.”

  “Of course, my maharaja.”

  11

  BLOCKADE

  All around Arabella the great cabin rocked and shuddered as the whole ship was shaken by the chaotic winds of Mars’s Horn, and the needle of the wind-speed dial on the side of Aadim’s desk twitched and jerked like a nervous shareth’s tail. Although this agitation was unpleasant, it was far from unusual, and Arabella strove to ignore it and concentrate her attention upon her calculations. But then a sudden jolt dislodged her pen from Fuller’s Patent Free-Descent Inkwell, sending it spinning across the cabin trailing drops of shimmering ink. With a disgusted sound she unstrapped herself from her seat and pursued the stray instrument across the cabin, mopping up the drops from the air with her pen-wiper.

  Once she had retrieved her pen and cleared the ink from the air, she found herself by the cabin’s broad window, holding herself steady against its jamb with one hand. The inconstant, unpredictable winds pushed the ship this way and that, making her sway and drift in the air. But the sky without the window was as pale and blue and clear as ever, for the air near Mars was generally too dry to form clouds no matter how tempestuous it became. This lack of cloud, of course, made the currents invisible—except to the very most practiced eye, and even then not all the time—which made navigation difficult. Finding some way around this conundrum was the entire point of her presence here.

  But despite days of effort, embedded in the very midst of the winds she studied and equipped with the finest instruments available, she was no closer to finding a solution than she had been on the ground. In fact, loath though she was to admit error, she was beginning to come to the conclusion that hers was a fool’s errand—that the winds of the Horn were simply too fickle and arbitrary to be predicted by observation and mathematics.

  But, in the spirit of tekhmet, she refused—she simply refused—to admit defeat. So she continued her studies, and helped out where she could, and worried along with every man aboard that the smuggler would simply pass them by. For though they knew his destination and the approximate date of his arrival, the sky was very large and Diana was but one ship.

  For a moment longer she stared upward through the window, hoping but not expecting to be the first to spot the smuggler as a tiny white spot against the sunward sky’s untroubled blue. But there was nothing there—nothing save Phobos
, sailing serenely above them on its eastward path. So rapidly did that tiny moon travel in its orbit that it rose in the west and set in the east, catching up and passing the Sun every seven and a half hours.

  In her mind’s eye the invisible air around Phobos swirled with waves and eddies, the already-turbulent air of the Horn further disturbed by the moon’s rapid passage, like the froth behind a hand drawn through a rushing stream. Those eddies had, so far, resisted all the efforts of better mathematicians than she to describe and predict their capricious motions. Yet, somehow, the khoreshte pilots could navigate those tumultuous currents, guiding ships to a safe berth on Phobos many times each day.

  How did they do it? She had not yet had the opportunity to question one—they were constantly occupied, and not numerous—but she had discussed with Mills his occupation as a grumete for the Portuguese slavers in West Africa, navigating small boats through the treacherous surf. “No rules,” he had said. “No path, no plan. You must feel the wave.”

  Feel the wave, he had said. It reminded her of a conversation she had had with Captain Singh some months ago, over dinner on the long passage from Mercury. “I may understand the currents, and the sails, to a greater degree than you,” he had said. “But my knowledge is entirely intellectual, whereas your navigation is more … intuitive. It is as though you can feel the ship, whereas I must think of her motions.” This had led to an interesting discussion on the differences between men’s and women’s mentality, and consideration of the degree to which their different approaches were determined by their sex as opposed to their individual constitution and upbringing, but she had given it no further thought until this moment.

  But now, as she hung in the air, feeling the changing tensions in the muscles and tendons of her arm as the ship was pushed this way and that by the Horn’s mercurial winds, she realized that this might point the way to a solution.

  The apparatus alone would be difficult to build. To combine its measurements with the navigational calculations would be thornier still. And to extrapolate from the conditions of the air in the vicinity to predict the winds ahead … at the moment, she had no idea how that might be done. But still, it was a start.

  Pushing herself away from the shuddering window jamb, she sailed across the cabin to the navigational table. There she strapped herself in, drew out a clean sheet of paper, and began to sketch a new mechanism.

  The ship’s continued motions made her lines irregular. But she smiled at this, and sought to incorporate the irregularities into her work.

  * * *

  For days Arabella labored endlessly, often forgetting to sleep or to eat, as was her habit when engaged in a difficult intellectual exercise. Much of her work was entirely theoretical, and Captain Singh grew accustomed—or so he said—to creeping about the cabin so as not to disturb her as she gazed sightlessly at the wall or out the window, deep in thought. At other times she could be found performing such peculiar actions as tying a string around a cannon-ball as though it were a Christmas package, pushing it gently through the air of the cabin, then bringing it to a halt with a careful tug on the string. Sketches of gears, levers, and cams crowded the navigational table and drifted in the air like gently-falling snow.

  Her days became disordered, unconnected with the bells that governed the crew’s lives. She slept only when she could not keep her eyes open any longer, and often found herself working while Captain Singh slept or vice versa. He was remarkably indulgent of her in this. “I am glad,” he said, “that you have found a productive task to occupy your mind during the endless boredom of blockade. I wish that I could do the same.”

  It was easy to work for ten or twelve hours at one stretch, as the Sun did not rise and set as he did for those who dwelt upon a planet’s face. But, unlike in the spaces between planets, here in the Horn above Fort Augusta the planet Mars did sometimes interpose himself between Diana and the Sun, and the ship was plunged into night for a time. Thus it was that, one day, she opened her eyes after one of her forced, unwilling naps to find herself in unaccustomed darkness.

  For a moment she blinked, disoriented, thinking herself caught in a dream of Mars or Earth. But the floating sensation of her limbs and the tension of the band which kept her in her hammock reminded her that she was still in free descent, still aboard Diana. At once her mind began to spin, returning to the problems which had occupied her attention for so many days.

  And then the Sun returned, rapidly and in full force as was his recent habit, as Diana moved in her orbit from the cone of Mars’s shadow to the eternal day of the interplanetary atmosphere. Arabella grunted, shutting her eyes tight against the sudden glare and pulling her coverlet up over her face.

  But a moment later the annoyance of the light was joined by another, more significant interruption—a sudden cry of “Sail ho! Sail f——g ho!”

  “Where away?” came Captain Singh’s voice in reply, from the quarterdeck just the other side of the planks above her hammock.

  “Below! F——g below! Two points off dead sunward!”

  A moment later Captain Singh cursed as well—a highly unusual occurrence—followed by a series of commands, of which the most urgent was, “Idlers and waisters to the pedals! Smartly now!”

  Shouts and cries came from above, accompanied by the slaps of feet upon the deck and the hissing rattle of lines being hauled upon. The ship spun dizzyingly on her axis for a moment as the men at the pedals began their labors before the stays’ls and spankers were fully set, but after further shouting the situation was corrected and the ship surged forward, driven by the pulsers which creaked and rushed outside the cabin’s stern window. All during this time Arabella was disentangling herself from her suddenly-recalcitrant hammock and struggling into her dress.

  * * *

  Arabella came out on deck into a scene of controlled chaos, with topmen leaping from mast to yard while Venusian waisters dashed hither and yon, all fully engaged in pressing the ship forward at her best speed toward a prey determined to escape them. A rumble from below the forecastle told Arabella the guns were being run out, even as powder monkeys dashed across the deck bringing gunpowder to them. At the center of all this activity stood Captain Singh, the calm eye of the storm, braced to the deck in his leather harness and peering forward through his glass. “Starboard half a point,” he said to Edmonds at the wheel.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Edmonds replied.

  Arabella, following her captain’s gaze, looked ahead and down to where their quarry—a distant fleck of white, brilliant against Mars’s night side—was descending rapidly and just inflating her single large balloon envelope. Requesting and receiving permission to ascend to the quarterdeck, she held tight to the forward rail—there was no harness here for her—and asked her captain, “Are you certain that is the smuggler?”

  “No one but a smuggler would use a course like that,” he muttered, still with one eye to the telescope. His expression was thunderous. “Approaching from skyward.”

  It was certainly an unusual course, Arabella thought. A ship from Earth nearly always approached Mars from its sunward side. But this ship must have gone well past Mars, then looped back to approach the planet from its skyward side, hiding in its shadow the whole way. It must have taken considerable skill and effort to remain in Mars’s cone of darkness for so many days, avoiding the easier curving path dictated by orbital mechanics. Only at the last moment, as they neared their destination on the planet’s surface, were they forced out into the light.

  “Can we catch them?”

  “He’s a cocky one, I’ll give him that,” Captain Singh said, “waiting to fill his envelope so far below the falling-line. He risks a very hard landing indeed … but he also stole a march on us.” He collapsed his glass with a brusque, disgusted gesture. “Avast pulsers!” he called. “We could dive after him with pulsers full ahead, I suppose,” he commented to Arabella as the ship slowed. “But to pull out at the bottom of such a dive is a maneuver I have never practiced … unlike
that fellow there.” He gestured with the closed telescope toward the descending smuggler. “I should have known we could not beat an experienced player at his own habitual game.”

  Belowdecks, Arabella knew, the men at the pedals would be collapsing against the handlebars, gasping from the effort just ended. “So what shall we do now?”

  “We return to Fort Augusta, to report the sad news of our failure to the Council,” he replied. “Then I suppose we must make an attempt to interdict the drug on the ground.” His expression became pensive then. “It is unfortunate that we will have at most two more weeks to move about town freely. Once the news of our treason arrives from England, we will be required to recruit agents to act on our behalf while we remain out of sight.”

  Arabella, not knowing what to say, took her captain’s hand then. But though he accepted her touch, his gaze did not budge, remaining fixed on the planet below.

  * * *

  They met with the Council in a store-room at the back of a chandler’s shop in Fort Augusta, one of several rendezvouses used by the Council. There they found Khema; another akhmok, named Thekhla; and half a dozen other Martians of various tribes. One of the latter had a very bad crack on the carapace of her arm, bound up with steel wire and oozing a clear fluid. All seemed far more downcast than they had been at their last meeting, which had not itself been particularly cheerful.

  “We are sorry to hear that the drug-smuggler was not stopped,” Khema said after receiving Captain Singh’s report, “but, given that the Ceres fleet may arrive soon, our immediate concern is the production of aerial vessels. How many ships do you have ready to launch?”

  Arabella and her captain exchanged a concerned glance. “As of our last visit to Tekhmet,” Arabella said, “we had six complete khebek, with more under construction, and the hydrogen manufactory was finally producing at full capacity. But recruitment and training of the crews has been difficult, particularly in the areas of command and navigation. Martians with aerial experience tend to be loyal to the Company.”