Khema and the other akhmok spoke briefly in some Martian tongue with which Arabella was not familiar. Working with Mills, she had made considerable progress in khoreshte dialect, but Mars was home to hundreds of languages and no one could learn them all. “My colleague here says that she knows several members of her tribe who work the docks and ship-yards and are extremely unhappy with the Company. Perhaps some among these could be recruited to our cause.”
“Ship-yard skills do not always translate to airmanship,” Captain Singh explained gently. “But still, even a landsman can eventually be educated, and a stevedore knows larboard from starboard at least. We will accept any Martian willing to be trained.”
“And any ship-yard worker,” said Arabella, “of any skill whatsoever, who might remove to Tekhmet would be welcome.” After Khema had translated their words to the other akhmok, Arabella turned to another item of concern. “On the topic of the ship-yard, have you made any progress in obtaining the khoresh-wood we require? Were the names I provided at our last meeting helpful to you?”
“The negotiations have been … delicate.” Khema contemplated her steepled fingertips. “The plantation owners you suggested are all landed gentlemen, and hence extremely conservative. So we must work through jobbers and dealers … and even with many of those we must use agents to hide our interest.”
Arabella’s spirits fell at this reminder of her brother, with whom she had not even exchanged letters in months. But from what she had heard via other friends, he was siding more and more with the Company as the plantation became more prosperous, and in fact was becoming quite a prominent Tory.
“We have, nonetheless,” Khema continued, “managed to secure contracts for six hundred loads of prime khoresh-wood, for delivery in the next three months.” This was, Arabella knew, enough wood to construct three or four khebek … and less than one-quarter of what they had hoped to obtain by this time. “Payment, however, remains uncertain. We have funds on hand for only the first shipment, of three.”
Captain Singh’s expression, already grave, became still grimmer. His capital, she knew, was already heavily committed to the cause, but his purse was not yet completely depleted. “How much do you require for the other two shipments?” he asked.
“Twenty-four hundred pounds.”
Arabella was dismayed, though not at all surprised, by the figure. It was, though a very substantial sum, not an unreasonable price for such a quantity of timber under the circumstances. “I believe I can write you a bank draft for twelve hundred pounds,” Captain Singh said after consulting his pocket-book. “That will cover the second shipment. The third … will be paid for somehow.”
Khema’s eyes spread in acknowledgement and thanks. “Some months yet remain to find a solution to that problem.”
The conversation paused then, a pause which Arabella finally broke with a question which had been in the back of her mind for weeks. “You mentioned the Ceres fleet. Has there been any news while we were on blockade?”
“Not a word,” Khema said. “Which is curious and distressing.”
“Indeed,” said Arabella. Usually the movements of an entire fleet of Naval vessels, even a smallish one, could not be obscured. Yet, though commerce from Ceres had not been completely cut off, it had greatly diminished, and no information on the fleet’s position or progress had reached Mars for months. They might be months away yet, or weeks, or even days. Captain Singh felt that, given the winds and the positions of the planets and asteroids, they were unlikely to arrive in less than two months … but this could not be guaranteed, and the lack of any information to the contrary was not reassuring. Quite the opposite.
“We will keep our feet firmly in the sand,” Khema said, using a Martian expression meaning that they would remain vigilant, “and send a Draisine courier to you immediately if the merest rumor should reach us of the fleet’s whereabouts.”
“Thank you.” Still, Arabella worried. But before she could voice her concerns, a cry came from without—a human voice calling in English, “Captain Singh! Captain Singh!”
Immediately the captain excused himself from the meeting and dashed outside, with Arabella and Khema right behind him. It was Watson, one of Diana’s midshipmen, panting hard with his hands on his knees. Plainly he had come from the ship at a dead run. “What news?” the captain asked.
“It’s Excelsior, sir!” Watson gasped back. “She’s just descending now!”
Arabella and Captain Singh looked at each other. This was the fast packet-ship which they expected to bear the news of their treason to Mars. “Return to Diana,” the captain told Watson, “and tell Edmonds to prepare to raise ship at once. We will join you as soon as we may.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Watson piped, and ran off.
“Can we be away before the news is abroad?” Arabella asked him, winding her artificial foot.
“It will depend on exactly where Excelsior docks.” He dashed out through the chandler’s front office toward the street.
“Oh, Khema…” Arabella said, taking her former itkhalya’s hard and massive hand. “I do not know when I shall see you again.”
“I shall visit you in Tekhmet as often as I am able.” She touched her other hand to her mouth-parts, then touched Arabella’s forehead. “This storek will encourage any Martians you meet to assist you. Now go.”
Arabella went. But as she exited the chandler’s office, a sudden metallic twang sounded from her foot and she fell sprawling in the dust of the street.
Captain Singh, though he was already well down the street, heard her cries and immediately doubled back. “What has happened to your foot?”
“The mainspring snapped!” Arabella diagnosed, rubbing at the abraded heel of her hand. “I must have over-tightened it in my haste.”
But on inspection, the situation proved to be even worse than she had feared. Not only had the mainspring broken, but in the resulting fall she had snapped the foot’s shank. The device was certainly too badly broken to be mended with the time and materials available here, and might be completely beyond repair.
“I will carry you,” Captain Singh said, and despite her strident objections he did exactly that.
* * *
Immediately upon their landing at Tekhmet, they gathered the most prominent citizens at Common Hall to give an account of their last few disastrous days. “I doubt we shall be able to return to Fort Augusta again,” Captain Singh admitted, “even in disguise.” He gestured to his distinctive brown face and Arabella’s missing foot. She was walking with a crutch; the broken artificial foot remained in Diana’s great cabin.
“But the wood!” Fulton fumed. “I must have more khoresh-wood! And you were supposed to negotiate for it!”
“Khema is doing the best she can,” Arabella replied. “My own … contacts, are of less use now than I had hoped.” Her spirits, already low, sank still further at this reminder of her brother. “In any case, finances are currently our chief constraint … we have obtained contracts for more wood than we can actually pay for.”
The company fell silent then, as every one considered the resistance’s fiscal situation and their own personal role within it. Every one present, Arabella knew, had already pledged all they could, and several of them were enduring substantial financial hardship because of it.
Captain Fox broke the impasse by delicately clearing his throat. “I continue my correspondence with Lady Wilde,” he said. “She is, I believe, working her way toward open support of our cause, and it is my hope that she may bring her husband—and his ten thousand a year—with her.” But they all knew that process could take months, and the silence returned.
“I have written Khema a draft for twelve hundred pounds,” Captain Singh said at last. “That is the very last that I can spare, but I hope that it will be sufficient to secure the current contract.”
“And what of the future?” Fulton demanded, barely mollified. “The ships, once constructed, must still be fitted out!”
�
�We will find a way,” Captain Singh replied levelly. “Do not despair. Remember, tekhmet means resolution.”
No one had any thing to say to that.
* * *
Later, back in their bedchamber, Arabella and Captain Singh discussed the replacement of her artificial foot, which was indeed entirely beyond repair. “We still have the draughts,” he said as he massaged liniment into the abraded skin of her stump. “And some of your students at the Institute are extremely skilled. It will not take nearly as long to build a second one as it did the first.” He paused, considering the idea. “We might, indeed, build two at the same time, so as to have one in reserve in case of further loss.”
This statement brought to mind an idea which had been nibbling at the back of Arabella’s mind for some months. “When last I met my brother,” she said, “I wished that we could somehow produce these clockwork limbs in quantity, so that every one who lacked a leg might receive the same benefits as I. If we were to turn our attention to this now, especially with Fulton’s assistance…”
Though Arabella was becoming more and more intrigued by the idea the more she considered it, Captain Singh shook his head. “It is a very … promising notion,” he acknowledged, “but we have neither the time nor the facilities for such speculative efforts—not when the Ceres fleet could arrive at any time. We must concentrate our energies upon undertakings which directly aid the resistance.”
“I do not disagree. I was thinking of the many who may lose limbs in the battles to come.” Her brain continued to churn. Once one had worked out how to craft a complex part, such as a gear or cam, from raw metal, making ten or twenty more, just the same, would be ever so much simpler than the first.
“We would do better to try to prevent those losses in the first place. And for that we need money, guns, and experienced officers.” He sighed. “Ships we can build, and landsmen—lands-Martians—we have in plenty. Given time they can be trained up to ordinary airmen. But what I would not give for ten skilled pilots.”
At that statement something seemed to click in Arabella’s mind. “We can build them.”
“Pardon?” Captain Singh was genuinely astonished.
“You know that I have been working upon improvements to the greenwood box—giving it the means to assist in navigation within the Horn—and have seen some success. If these improvements could be added to Aadim … a moderately-trained steersman could navigate the Horn without requiring a pilot at all!”
Captain Singh’s eyes widened fractionally, and Arabella recognized instantly that his active brain had seized upon the idea. “The khebek is a smaller, simpler ship than any Marsman,” he said. “With only two sails, the calculations are more straightforward. And I have felt for some years that Aadim’s workings could be greatly simplified. I understand the geometries so much better now than I did when I first began his construction.” His eyes grew distant as his excitement increased. “A much less complicated mechanism … fewer moving parts … and yet more capable.”
Arabella felt exhilaration rising in her own breast. “And if we could build one for each khebek…”
“Which would be ever so much easier if we build it in as the ship is constructed, rather than to add it after the ship’s completion as I was required to do with Diana…”
“We could have a whole fleet of ships as brilliant as Aadim!”
“And armored!”
Arabella seized her captain then and kissed him passionately.
Then they got out pen and paper, and sketched plans and notes long into the night.
12
EVACUATION
Arabella threw down her file in disgust. “It is no good at all!” she cried. “We must absolutely start over from the beginning.”
The ruined gear lay upon her work-bench, seeming to stare back at her like an accusing eye. The idea of casting gears from brass had seemed so promising, but the hand-work required to file the teeth into their final shape was so great that the expected improvement in efficiency had become a net loss.
Still, several of the other innovations she had developed for the rapid construction of automaton pilots, with the help of Captain Singh and the graduates of the Institute, had borne fruit. Fifteen of the devices had already been completed and installed in khebek, and seven more lay in various states of assembly on the benches around her, each being diligently shepherded toward completion by a team of Martian technicians. But many more would be needed, and Arabella and Captain Singh were constantly in search of ways to produce them more rapidly and with higher quality.
The automaton pilot, despite the anthropomorphic implications of its name, was more closely related to Arabella’s greenwood box than to Aadim. It was in appearance a simple affair, a trapezoidal brass frame filled with clockworks and having no semblance whatsoever of humanity. Also, relative to Aadim, every bit of extraneous mechanism had been pared away, including all functions of interplanetary navigation … all the device’s components were concentrated upon navigating near Mars, in particular in the winds of the Horn. And flexibility had been discarded in favor of ease of operation, to permit successful use by a Martian with minimal training.
But despite its simplicity, in some ways the automaton’s capabilities rivaled Aadim’s. At the heart of the machine lay a block of lead, suspended in a steel cage by wires from its six faces. These wires led to mechanisms that used the block’s motion relative to the ship—which, by Newton’s inexorable laws of inertia, reflected in reverse the ship’s motions relative to the fixed stars—to calculate from the general course laid in by the operator a sail-plan which compensated for the winds in the ship’s immediate vicinity.
The design was full of compromises. The mechanism sometimes jammed, sometimes produced impossible results, and sometimes refused perfectly good settings. At times Arabella felt that the clockworks, however well she understood them, were deliberately resisting her desires, like a willful adolescent. But still she did not truly believe the device was self-aware as Aadim was.
“I am going for a walk,” she declared to Gonekh, “to clear my head.”
Gonekh, although still one of the youngest of the Martian technicians, had proven herself so invaluable that she was now Arabella’s chief assistant. She was already a skilled machinist and would some day, Arabella was certain, become the first Martian inventor. But she still spoke very little, preferring to communicate via precisely-rendered diagrams and through the elegance of her manufactured items.
She strode off along the dusty street, allowing her feet—the natural one and the new artifical one—to follow their habitual path while her mind worried at the technical problem of gear manufacture. If casting would not work, perhaps the raw discs could be ganged together, so that several accurate gears could be machined simultaneously …
“Ahem.”
At the sound Arabella looked up and stopped short, inches from crashing into Fox, who stood in her path with a bemused expression. “Oh!” she cried.
“You really should watch where you are going, ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat.
“I beg forgiveness,” she said, genuinely flustered at her own inattention but nonetheless pleased to see Fox, who had been away from town for several weeks on a scouting cruise. She took his arm and they continued walking together. “When did you return?”
“Just now. We landed in Khoresh Tukath day before yesterday, but before returning here I wanted to make sure dear Touchstone was properly victualed and watered.” His expression fell serious. “And well provided with shot and powder.”
“Did you learn any thing on your cruise?”
He shook his head. “There is barely any traffic from any of the asteroids any more.” His gaze drew inward. “I never would have thought the English could keep a whole fleet secret, but I suppose that if one is willing to give up commerce for a time…”
“That is worrisome. But Captain Singh calculates that they are still unlikely to arrive for some weeks.”
“I know; I h
ave just come from discussing this with him. But the skyward breezes have been quite brisk of late.” He paused, and Arabella paused with him. “I am concerned,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I believe that we are in more danger here than Captain Singh acknowledges, and I suggest that you consider removing to Khoresh Tukath.”
“Impossible! The Institute shares too much—people and materials—with the hydrogen manufactory, and that absolutely cannot be moved.”
“I did not mean the Institute. I meant yourself. For safety’s sake.” He took her hands and looked into her eyes with deep sincerity. “I will be shifting Lady Corey and our household thence later to-day, and I strongly advise you to accompany her.”
“I will not!” She pulled her hands from his grip. “Our work on the automaton pilots is too important. Even if—especially if—the arrival of the Ceres fleet is imminent, we must concentrate all our attentions upon that until the last possible moment.”
“Your devotion to the cause is admirable.” He inclined his head in respect. “But I fear the last possible moment may be too late.”
“I thank you for your concern, sir, and I shall give your suggestion due consideration.” But she stepped back from him as she said it, and both of them knew her mind was made up.
For a moment Fox seemed about to follow her … but then he, too, took a half-step backward. “Very well. But I am certain you would be welcome chez nous.”
“I thank you for your most generous offer, but please do not be too worried. In case of danger we are prepared to evacuate to Tekh Shetekta.” Tekh Shetekta, an uninhabited but defensible canyon in the deep khoreshte desert, was the place they had chosen as a fallback position in case Tekhmet was exposed. Arabella curtseyed. “Good day, sir.”
He lifted his hat. “Good day to you, ma’am.” But as she turned away, he called out, “If you wish to accompany Lady Corey, I expect that she will depart from Common Hall no sooner than three o’clock. We can have your things sent along later.”
Arabella the Traitor of Mars Page 17