Occupied though she was with navigation, Arabella could not fail to notice that the sounds of cannon were growing from a distant bang to a close roar, and the sky behind the ship, visible through the cabin’s broad stern window, was changing from the eternal clear blue of the dry air near Mars to a mottled gray streaked with smoke and spotted with drifting hunks of wreckage … and occasional Martian corpses. And the winds of the Horn, growing ever stronger as the ship drew deeper into that realm of eternal storm, now shoved Diana brutally and with cruel caprice in every direction and at every angle. Aadim’s course changes kept pace with the growing winds, though, becoming more frequent and of greater degree, and from what she could hear through the scuttle above her head the ship was driving through the Horn’s gales with unprecedented, indeed nearly supernatural, speed and directness.
Arabella was kept busy adjusting Aadim’s settings as Diana moved into new and unpredictable currents. The force of Mars’s gravity diminished as well, forcing Arabella to cling to Aadim’s desk and once, embarrassingly, his nose, lest she be thrown against a wall by an unexpected gust. Aadim, for his part, accommodated these indignities with his usual silent aplomb.
But then another blow—much louder, sharper, and more sudden than any previous—drove the ship upward, striking hard at Arabella’s floating feet and making her teeth meet with a painful click. The shouting and screams of pain that followed left little doubt that the impact had been that of a cannon-ball. But where had it struck? How much damage had it done? How many good men had been injured or killed? And then came another such impact, just as forceful.
Arabella was petrified. Diana was under attack! Part of her ached to take her place on the gun-deck, running powder to the guns and helping to aim, load, and fire them. Part of her longed to run to her captain and make certain he was safe. A shameful part of her wanted nothing but to find the deepest, most protected corner of the hold and cower there in fear. But she knew her place was here, and as Aadim’s gears ground and whined in response to each new impact she did her part and relayed the necessary course changes to the quarterdeck.
In some ways Arabella found herself in the very center of the action—her speed and precision in setting and reading Aadim’s dials could make the difference between victory and death for every one aboard. But she was also nearly completely detached from the battle raging all around. She floated in a wooden box, rattled like a dice-cup by the winds of the Horn and the blows of English cannon; all she could see through the stern window was the fog of war and the wreckage left behind the ship in her passage, and all she could hear was a bedlam of explosions, shouts, hammering, and the occasional thump of bare feet striking the deck above her head.
But though her perception of the world beyond the great cabin was limited, Arabella became increasingly aware that the battle was not going well. Again and again, louder and closer than the noise of the battle itself, she heard screams, shouts of dismay, and the crash of shattering timbers. She did her best to ignore these disturbing sounds and concentrate her attention upon Aadim’s controls and Edmonds’s voice through the scuttle.
Then, without warning, the bulkhead beside the stern window erupted with a splintering crash.
Arabella’s right side was jolted by a hundred sharp impacts. Shrieking from surprise as well as the pain, she curled into a ball in midair, instinctively protecting her face from the pelting hail of debris. But the storm passed quickly, and when she uncurled, ears ringing, she was amazed to find herself alive and not seriously injured.
The cabin was not nearly so fortunate. A tremendous ragged hole had appeared in the upper aft larboard corner of the cabin, with wind and noise coming through it from the battle without. The cannon-ball had apparently merely clipped the corner, but the wall and window were both smashed to bits; the cabin’s air was filled with deadly fragments of wood and glass, clattering and colliding in a dangerous dance. Heedless of propriety, she pulled up her blood-spotted skirt to breathe through it—to inhale those glittering particles would surely bring a slow, painful, hacking death—and pushed off the wall behind her with the other hand. Aadim!
The automaton seemed undamaged, but his green glass eyes stared forward in fixed surprise, not animated by the constant slight motions of his ever-turning clockworks. Panicked, Arabella reversed herself in the air, batting splinters away from her face, and inspected his dials … where she found, indeed, that nothing moved. Jammed.
Any of a thousand things, she knew, could be the cause. But to open his access panels to assess and repair the problem now, with the cabin filled with flying debris, would surely only make matters worse. And every moment she remained here risked injury to her person.
“I must leave you!” she shouted to him, though her words were muffled by the continued ringing in her ears as well as by the fabric held across her mouth. “I shall return as soon as I may!” And then she pushed off Aadim’s desk with her flesh and blood foot, propelling herself through the clattering air to the cabin door. A moment later she was through it, closing and dogging it behind her, coughing from exertion and from the smoke and tiny particles she not been able to avoid inhaling.
Faunt was there, and Ulungugga. “Are ye injured?” Faunt yelled in her face.
“Not badly,” Arabella gasped, wiping debris from her face. Glittering bits of glass sparkled with dangerous beauty in the air around her, and she noted with a curious calm that blood was seeping from a gash on her hand. “But Aadim is hopelessly jammed.”
Faunt’s expression immediately darkened. “Tell the cap’n,” he said to Ulungugga. “I’ll get her to the surgeon.”
“Aye aye,” Ulungugga croaked, and sprang away.
* * *
The infirmary was a riot of noise and stink, with men whimpering or screaming all around and the smell of blood and powder thick in the air. “You have been extremely fortunate,” Dr. Barry said, cleaning her eyes with a soft cloth soaked in alcohol. It was cold, and stung terribly.
“Agh!” Arabella said, batting the cloth away and blinking the painful stuff from her eyes. “Must you? I am right enough. These other men require your attention far more than I.”
He looked dubiously at her, the cloth still poised for further action, but then shrugged and lowered it. “Very well. But if you feel any thing in your eye, you must not rub at it. If this should occur, come back to me at once.”
“Aye aye, sir,” she replied. Naturally her eye immediately began to itch, but though her hand began to rise, she held it back with a strong effort of will. “Am I discharged?”
He still seemed unconvinced, but after a further moment’s consideration he shook his head and gestured her brusquely away. “Go,” he said, and turned back to a man who was white, trembling, and clutching his blood-soaked leg with both hands. Behind his back, Lady Corey cleaned blood from a saw; meeting Arabella’s eyes, she shook her head fractionally.
Arabella swallowed hard and departed.
* * *
Arabella came out on deck to find a situation yet more chaotic and charnel than the infirmary. The tumultuous air was choked with smoke, and she could see barely a hundred yards in any direction; within that short distance, the only things visible were bits of floating wreckage, some of them flickering with fire. A man’s body, missing one arm, drifted just off the bow-sprit; a long thread of blood trailed from the ragged shoulder. But beyond the range of view, the battle continued, betrayed by sounds of violent action and flashes of orange flame.
Moving cautiously across a deck heaving from the Horn’s storms and cluttered with broken spars and tangled cables, she worked her way to the quarterdeck, where, coughing, she called up for permission to ascend.
No voice replied … at least, none that she could hear over the screams and explosions. Nevertheless, she ascended, heart in her mouth.
But her very worst fears, at least, had not come to pass, for there stood Captain Singh, still alive and active and in possession of all his limbs—though his jacket was badly
torn and stained with blood. He stood tall in his leather straps, booted feet firmly planted upon the deck, as he called commands in every direction. Of Edmonds there was no sign; the wheel was manned by little Watson.
“Captain Singh!” Arabella called into a momentary lull, and the expression of relief on his face at the sight of her briefly lightened her heavy heart. But his mien immediately returned to weary determination.
“I thank Heaven you are well,” he shouted back at her—the distance between them was no more than a few yards, but between the tumult of the battle all about and the ringing in her ears she could barely make out his words. “What of Aadim?”
“Jammed!” she called back, making her way to him. “Not beyond repair, I think, but we must clear the cabin first.”
He nodded grimly. “I feared as much. I have pulled back from the battle for now, but we must return soon … the khebek are being slaughtered.” He gave her a stern assessing glance. “Can you navigate the Horn without Aadim’s assistance? You have made a great study of the winds—at this point I dare say you may understand them better than I.”
She swallowed. “I will do my best.”
“We can ask nothing more.” And without another word he turned to Watson and said, “Take us back to Marlborough’s last known position.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Watson replied, his young voice cracking, and called out, “Set jibs and spankers! Pulsers ahead! Cheerly, now!”
Surely it was only Arabella’s own weariness that made the grunts of the men at the pedals seem so tired and dispirited. But she could not deny that the ship moved sluggishly, what with her sails torn, yards all askew, and rigging clogged with wreckage.
And it was in this condition that they were moving to intercept a fully-armed man-of-war?
“One point aloft,” Arabella said to Watson, noting a curdling whorl forming in the filthy air ahead.
“Aye aye, ma’am,” he replied, and nudged the wheel up a bit.
* * *
The dark, curdled air of the battle, Arabella found, actually made immediate navigation easier, as the winds of the Horn could plainly be seen in the drifting smoke and wreckage. But navigation in the broader sense was nearly impossible, and she and the captain were forced to rely upon their intuition and interpretation of vague clues. Was that distant boom an English broadside? Should they divert toward it, or remain upon their current course? And with the winds as capricious as they were, could the direction of the sound even be relied upon? The solar compass, never the most reliable instrument, was useless this close to Mars, so they could not even be certain which direction was north. At least sunward and skyward were plain, as there was no question in which direction the murk was brightest.
And then a stray current blew a momentary hole in the fog, and Arabella realized the situation was even more desperate than she had thought.
There lay Marlborough, her copper pocked with the wounds of many tiny khebek cannon-balls but otherwise quite hale and whole. And beyond her lay the rest of the fleet, nine ships all told, running close-hauled and in tight formation. They stood with their sterns together, their great guns facing out, and though the storms of the Horn battered their formation the English Navy had the skill and discipline to hold it. Against this deadly ball of khoresh-wood and iron the swarming khebek were nothing but an annoyance; though they persisted valiantly, and dodged most of the broadsides aimed at them, it was a game they could never win. They were simply too badly outnumbered.
“Move to engage Marlborough,” Captain Singh barked to Watson. “Ready the guns!”
“Aye aye, sir!” he replied. “Pulsers ahead! Smartly now!”
The fog of war closed in around them again, but Arabella now had a firm grasp on the English fleet’s location, and the frequent hammer blows of their broadsides provided all the information she needed to navigate directly toward them. But Diana, too, had been seen, and the sound of those fusillades changed noticeably … the howl of cannon-balls after each bang no longer diminished to one side or the other, but rose steadily in loudness, dropping suddenly in pitch as the balls passed by. The range was as yet too great, and the visibility too poor, for those balls to strike except by chance, but that chance could not be dismissed and was growing greater by the minute. “Evasive maneuvers!” Captain Singh commanded Watson, and Arabella did her best to assist, trying to keep the ship on general course toward the English even as she jigged and dodged and the Horn’s mercurial winds seemed determined to send her tumbling away completely.
Then came a boom of English cannon that was starkly different from those before. It was accompanied by an orange flash in the smoke directly ahead; the sound was distinctly multiple, a b-b-b-bang of eight guns or more; and the shriek of cannon-balls rose steadily and did not budge from its position in the sky ahead. “Get down!” came the cry from the lookout at the bow-sprit head, and Arabella hauled desperately on her straps with both hands, laying her body flat on the deck as quickly as she could. A moment later came a shivering, tearing crash from above, as a full flight of hot metal tore through the main-topsail, reducing half its yard to splinters.
“They have our bearing now,” Captain Singh said. He was, Arabella noted, still standing tall in his straps. “But we have theirs! Fire!”
“Fire!” repeated Watson immediately. A moment later Diana’s great guns spoke, a fearsome blow upon Arabella’s ears and body—her leather belt wrenched her waist as the deck jerked beneath her, sending the breath from her lungs with a painful gasp.
So fierce was the sound of the battle, so dense the murk ahead, that the effect of the shot—if any—was imperceptible. Nonetheless, Captain Singh followed that broadside with a second, and then a third, while continuing to drive forward. So battered was Arabella by the tumult and agitation of the many forces converged upon Diana that she was barely able to assist at all, but she did what she could, keeping a sharp eye on the swirling smoke ahead and advising Watson to nudge the wheel one way or the other.
And then one of those swirls was suddenly parted by the bow-sprit, jib, and sprit-sail of an English man-of-war, thrusting directly toward them out of the fog at extremely close range.
Arabella could not help but scream.
“Fire!” cried Captain Singh, and, “Back pulsers!”
Immediately Diana’s cannon boomed, and Arabella would have sworn she felt the deck twist beneath her as the men below strove to reverse the spinning pulsers’ motion. The sails, yards, and masts ahead—still all that could be seen of the English vessel—flew into flinders, a sudden storm of deadly fragments that threatened the Dianas as much as the English airmen.
And then the two ships collided with a sickening, lurching crunch.
Arabella was hurled forward into her straps, again driving the breath from her lungs in a painful gasp. Men flew across the deck, well-secured casks wrenched from their places, and yards tore from their masts at the sudden impact. All about her bedlam ruled, the already-tumultuous noise of the battle now joined by continued tearing and wrenching sounds as the two ships ground into each other, screams of injured or enraged airmen, and frantic shouts from officers and men on both ships as they attempted to manage this new, surprising situation.
“Back pulsers, double time!” reiterated Captain Singh. “Get us free of that ship! And prepare to repel boarders!”
Venusian waisters, grim airmen of the afterguard, and even some courageous Martian technicians took up axes and moved forward, where Chips and his men were already hacking at the tangled morass of splintered wood, raveled rope, and torn silk where the two ships could barely be distinguished one from the other.
And then there came another crash and another lurch—a series of crashes and lurches, indeed—and yet more shouts, curses, and cries of pain from the murk ahead. But before Arabella could make sense of this new and inexplicable development, a cry of “Marlborough! Marlborough!” came from beyond the wreckage, followed by a chilling war-cry from a hundred throats as the English airmen swa
rmed aboard—clambering over the tangled timbers with cutlasses in their teeth, flinging grappling-irons and hauling themselves hand-over-hand along the cables, or simply leaping fearlessly from one ship to the other through the murk. Rifles cracked and flashed in the rigging of both ships.
Two Dianas came out on deck then, bearing armloads of cutlasses and pistols from the arms locker below; waisters and topmen immediately converged upon them, taking up arms and charging forward with war-cries of their own.
“Victory or death!” cried one of the Marlboroughs, clinging to a yard aloft and waving his cutlass left-handed. Victory or death indeed, Arabella thought, and without further consideration she unbuckled herself and leapt down to join them.
“Ma’am?” cried the man with the cutlasses as she took one from his nerveless fingers. She did not bother to reply; instead she took the sword and slashed away her encumbering skirts, then jumped forward into the melee.
Victory or death, she thought. She could cower on the quarterdeck or join her shipmates in battle, but either way she would not likely survive—her entire planet would not likely survive—if Diana were lost. She had no choice but to give her utmost.
Others were as surprised by her sudden appearance and her attire as the man with the cutlasses had been. One English airman, all eyes and teeth in a face smeared with blood and soot, gaped stupidly when she came into view, giving an opportunity for the Venusian with whom he was grappling to slit his belly open. Another, clinging to a top-shroud above the deck and taking careful aim at the quarterdeck with his pistol, actually shrieked when she leapt up to his level, catching herself upon a ratline directly in front of him. So disconcerted was he by her unexpected advent that he did not even seek to defend himself as she smacked the pistol from his hand with the flat of her cutlass, then struck him hard on the head with the sword’s heel on the return stroke. He lost his grip and floated away then, stunned or unconscious … she neither knew nor cared which. She reversed herself in the air and, pushing off on the main-yard, propelled herself back down to the deck where the fighting was thickest.
Arabella the Traitor of Mars Page 21