Arabella the Traitor of Mars

by David D. Levine

  Suddenly an idea occurred to Arabella. “Have these smugglers come directly from Venus?” she asked Thekhla in khoreshte dialect.

  Thekhla considered the question. “I believe they must have,” she said, “as many of the materials are found only there.”

  “Is the ship of Venusian make?” Arabella continued, quite seriously.

  Thekhla’s eye-stalks drew together in puzzlement. “To the best of my knowledge, yes.”

  “Do you know how much longer the smuggler will remain on Mars?”

  “They tend to come and go quite rapidly and fly by night. They will almost certainly have departed by dawn to-morrow.”

  Arabella looked to Fulton, Captain Singh, and Lady Corey, who were looking on with puzzlement. None of them spoke khoreshte dialect, not a word.

  Here was an opportunity for Arabella to do something about the resistance’s most pressing problem. But if she translated what Thekhla had just said, and told them what she had in mind to do about it, they would certainly never allow it.

  “What are you on about, child?” Lady Corey asked.

  “It is a matter of Martian reproduction,” Arabella lied. “When the females go into huthksh, or heat, the males react by—”

  “That is quite enough,” Lady Corey interrupted, as Arabella had known she would.

  “Let us proceed to the urgent question of finances,” Thekhla said, impatiently, and this Arabella translated without hesitation or prevarication.

  But despite the desperate urgency of the financial problem, Arabella translated it with only half her mind. The other half was engaged in planning a foolish and dangerous operation—an operation that might save the resistance, but only if she acted within hours.

  She had confidence in her own abilities—perhaps too much so—and she knew that if she opened the question to debate the Council would argue until it was too late. So she would do it herself—alone, without permission, and against all common sense.

  She would steal another Isambard.

  * * *

  Arabella’s plan, as such plans were wont to do, did not proceed exactly as she had at first anticipated. For one thing, her intent to proceed alone, with only a khoreshte pilot to take her to the surface in a pilot-boat, foundered upon the fact that even a half-grown member of Isambard’s species would be far too large for such a light vehicle to lift.

  Fortunately, she had many friends in the resistance … friends who were willing to support her even in a most unsupportable enterprise. Mills, whose command of several languages was superior to her own, and her old messmate Taylor, a lean fair-haired veteran of the seagoing Navy who had engaged in many a turn-up on land as well as more formal battles at sea, were happy to lend their skills and strength to her mad idea.

  Another was Churath, the captain of the cargo-carrier Kemekhta. Kemekhta was one of just three cargo-carriers the ship-yard had built, and the only one of the three to survive the Battle of Tekhmet. She was a modified khebek with an especially long deck and large cargo door, built for the express purpose of transporting items too large for the ordinary khebek. Churath, Arabella knew, was a smart and ambitious khoreshte warrior who had been disappointed to be assigned such an unwarlike vessel. When Arabella approached Churath with her scheme, the captain was delighted to participate.

  One man Arabella dearly wished could have accompanied her on this mission was her dear friend Gowse, whose ability to handle Isambard and other creatures was exceptional. But Gowse, sadly, had been lost along with Fox and the other Touchstones.

  The hydrogen for Kemekhta’s descent and ascent would be supplied—just barely—by the small amount of excess gas that could be spared by Diana. This Arabella obtained herself, and in some ways it was the most guilt-inducing part of the whole operation. For not only was she compelled to steal a vital war material from her own husband in the brief darkness of Phobos’s night, but—unlike Kemekhta and, for that matter, herself, she could not return it at the conclusion of her operation. On the other hand, she told herself, if the operation were successful there would be hydrogen to spare.

  * * *

  The smugglers’ camp lay in the Sukhara desert some days’ journey east of Sor Khoresh; local time there was about three hours later than here. These time calculations had become second nature to Arabella since her arrival at Phobos.

  Thus it was that at midnight Phobos time, with Captain Singh fast asleep, Arabella slipped from their bed, collected the bag of clothing she had prepared from its hiding place, and made her way to Kemekhta’s berth.

  Arabella finished buttoning her jacket, tugged on her cap, and turned back to Taylor. “How do I look?”

  “Disreputable,” he replied.

  This was exactly as she had intended. Arabella was now costumed as a man, and quite a disgraceful man at that—exactly the sort of low type to be found consorting with Venusian drug-smugglers at an isolated camp in the sukharate wilderness. Her trousers and jacket were filthy and worn, her cap battered and pulled low to hide her face, and her features were further obscured with a smear of charcoal intended to resemble some days’ growth of beard. Only her shoes might betray her origins as a young woman of quality—the one on her natural foot was half of the selfsame pair of sturdy Mars-made half-boots which had accompanied her to Earth, to Venus, and back, and the other was as close a copy as could be made—but on this point she refused to compromise, as she had seen many times that an ill-fitting shoe could lead to disaster if pursuit or escape were required.

  “Thank ye, sir,” Arabella replied in a gruff low voice. “I’ll be making me way to Mars now.”

  “Very convincing.” Taylor smiled briefly, then resumed a more serious mien. “We must depart right away.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” she growled, touching her cap-brim.

  * * *

  Kemekhta was, like her khebek siblings, not much of a ship, having only one deck, two masts, and a single balloon envelope. But all the other parts were present, albeit sometimes in truncated form, and her crew of Martians—Captain Churath, her first and second mates, and five aerial sailors—was likewise somewhat abbreviated, but competent, sprightly, and enthusiastic. They all spoke very good English, and they were all very respectful of Arabella. “You are in good hands, ma’am,” said the captain, holding her hand flat above her head as though to shield her eyes from the Sun. This gesture seemed odd, as the Sun was very low in the sky behind her—with Phobos’s rapid pace through the air, it was very close to setting—but then Arabella realized that, given the construction of the Martian head, it was the closest Martian equivalent of a respectful knuckle to the forehead.

  Setting off from Phobos was very much unlike launching from a planet’s surface. The gravity being so weak, it was not difficult for the crew to simply shove the ship up from her berth with their hands. This initial push was not sufficient for her to escape Phobos’s gravity, feeble though it was, but it gave her enough momentum that, in just a few minutes, she had drifted far enough away from her dock for the crew to take to the pedals without fear of damaging either the pulsers or any thing upon the Phobian surface. And the khebek’s five-sail pulsers were more than powerful enough to propel the ship to the moon’s escape velocity.

  The pedals were right on the main-deck—two rows of five, to accommodate the ship’s usual full complement—and Arabella joined in pedaling along with Taylor, Mills, and the five sailors. The two officers and the captain were sufficient to handle the sails, and soon they were jouncing and jolting along through the rough tumultuous air of Phobos’s little Horn, with Kemekhta’s automaton pilot helping to guide them in their course. It was not long at all before they had left Phobos well behind—or, to be accurate, Phobos left them behind, continuing to hurtle along in its path even as they pedaled and spread sails to shed their orbital velocity for a descent to the Martian surface. This maneuver also meant that when night fell, as it did very shortly after their departure from the dock, they remained within Mars’s shadow thereafter rather than ac
companying Phobos to its rendezvous with dawn a few minutes later.

  Arabella and the others pedaled furiously, grunting in the dark, while the captain and her mates only muttered quietly to each other as they managed the sails. They were a tight and experienced crew, and furthermore the sort of boisterous, even joyful calls of command and response usually heard aboard a ship of the air might attract unwanted attention. So it was in darkness and near-silence that they fell toward Mars, while gray and rocky Phobos flared into bright visibility above and beyond their course.

  For a tense dark hour they pedaled, working hard to bring Kemekhta into an orbit that intersected the surface near the smugglers’ port, and hoping to evade the English patrols which were a far-too-common danger. The Navy, even with the addition of the Ceres fleet, was not numerous, but Phobos’s location was no secret; even under the cover of darkness an encounter with an English ship was a strong possibility. Thanks to the khebeks’ maneuverability and the automaton pilots, the Martians escaped these encounters unscathed more often than not, but this outcome was far from guaranteed. But, by good fortune, they met no other ships before the word came down the line, passed quietly from mouth to ear to mouth to ear: “Raise the envelope!”

  Mills and Taylor continued pedaling, to give the ship some steerage-way—theirs were the strongest legs in the crew, and they had no experience with the particular requirements of khebek-handling—while Arabella assisted in unpacking, unfurling, and rigging the ship’s single balloon. This task was not easy in darkness, but the Martians knew their work, and once the envelope was properly spread out and positioned within its net of fine silk ropes, the captain turned the gas-cock and, with a hiss, the invisible, irreplaceable stuff swiftly turned the loose flapping circle of silk into a sphere. Almost immediately Arabella felt her weight return—the ship was no longer freely falling toward the surface, but buoyed up by her balloon—but though they had long since departed Phobos’s little Horn they were still in the lower reaches of Mars’s Horn, and she and the others must perforce return to the pedals, lest the ship be blown far off course by its strong and mercurial winds.

  Eventually, though, Kemekhta drifted below the Horn and into the calmer, more predictable currents of the true planetary atmosphere. “’Vast pedaling,” the captain said, to Arabella’s great relief, and she and the other pedalers left the ship to drift in the current under balloon and sails alone. The danger of pursuit was much less, now; the velocities of the planetary breezes being so much smaller than those of the Horn or of the interplanetary atmosphere, if any ship should come into view they would have many hours to evade it.

  Arabella, Mills, and Taylor lay panting on deck while the Martians put the ship in proper order for low-atmosphere navigation. “I do not believe,” Arabella said when she had recovered her breath, “that I have worked so hard since Venus.”

  “That’s the worst of it behind us, though,” said Taylor. His eyes glimmered in the dark, reflecting the wan light of the stars and tiny Deimos. “All we need do now is find that creature, herd it aboard, and let the balloon carry us back up.”

  Arabella and Mills exchanged a look—there would certainly be much more pedaling in their future, not to mention many other difficult and dangerous tasks—but Taylor seemed sincere. “You are not concerned about the mission?” she asked him.

  “Nah,” he replied, drawing a snuff-box from his pocket and taking a pinch, followed by a stentorian sneeze. He offered the box to Arabella and Mills, who declined; he did not bother offering it to the Martians. “Handling a beast like Isambard is easy; all ye need do is tickle ’im just so and he’ll do whatever ye require. And as for them smugglers, well…” He cracked his knuckles. “’Tis much the same. They require a harder touch, is all.”

  “I admire your confidence, sir,” Arabella said with a smile.

  Taylor lay back upon the hard bench, hands clasped behind his head and elbows akimbo. “Just leave it to old Taylor,” he said, and promptly fell asleep.

  Arabella, too, tried to sleep—there would be little enough opportunity for that once they landed—but though the night was dark and the ship rocked easily in the gentle current, sleep would not come.

  * * *

  “Landfall,” said Mills, and Arabella’s eyes blinked open. Somehow she must have slept, though she did not recall having fallen asleep.

  Kemekhta now drifted very low over rolling dunes, gray in the starlight. No structures were visible, indeed no sign of life at all; the only sounds were the slight creak of the rigging and the hiss of the wind-driven sand below. Arabella joined Mills, Taylor, and three of the Martians at the pedals, bringing the ship to a halt, while the captain worked a hand-pump to draw the hydrogen out of the balloon and the rest of the crew threw out sand-anchors and hauled her down to the surface. Soon the ship’s keel met sand with a soft crunch and she settled gingerly into a protected cove in the lee of a large dune, the still partially inflated balloon gently wobbling in the breeze above.

  “Dawn is about three hours from now,” the captain said. “We will await you here until one hour after dawn.” They all understood that once the Sun was well up the chance of the ship being discovered by the smugglers was too great to be risked. “You have the signal rocket?”

  “Aye aye.” Arabella patted the satchel slung over one shoulder. Its contents included a fire-work whose bright blue flare would summon Kemekhta to their location—if she happened to spot it, and if her situation permitted it. Use of the signal rocket was a last resort and its success was not to be relied upon.

  “Very well, then. Good luck.” The captain gave another of those peculiar salutes. It seemed very apropos to the resistance, a combination of English gesture and Martian physiology, and Arabella returned it in kind, holding her hand horizontal at the level of her eyebrows.

  * * *

  Arabella, Mills, and Taylor set off across the sand, scuffing along through the dark. Almost immediately the habits of Arabella’s youth returned, automatically directing her feet to the more stable sand at the windward base of each dune, and she soon began to outdistance her companions. She went back and pointed out the better path, but even with this advice they still struggled. Part of their problem was that they lacked Arabella’s trained eye—she suspected that even in full daylight they would not be able to spot the subtle indications she could—and part of it was simply their greater weight. But even with her advantages, Arabella was out of practice and not so lithe as she once had been, not to mention that her clockwork foot was not designed for this activity, and she soon found herself slogging along at the same speed as her old messmates.

  Following first the sounds of voices and then the smells of breakfast cooking, they eventually reached the smugglers’ camp. Moving cautiously and quietly, they climbed a dune and looked down upon the camp from its summit.

  The smugglers’ ship stood on her sand-legs in the midst of the camp, with her mainmast fully rigged and three balloon envelopes already swelling in preparation for a dawn launch. The smugglers themselves—though the ship had come from Venus, they were all human—bustled about purposefully, plainly eager to be on their way. But, critically, the ship’s equivalent of Isambard had not yet been loaded aboard. A huge creature, larger even than Diana’s own Isambard, he lay on his stomach in a pen near the ship, breathing heavily, ignoring the piles of fodder that two of the smugglers shoveled toward him with pitch-forks.

  “Him” was the pronoun which Arabella mentally applied to the creature, the same as Diana’s Isambard. And though Ulungugga had used the same masculine pronoun, in Wagala Venusian as well as in English, he had assured Arabella that this would not prove an impediment to the successful mating of the new creature to Isambard. This seemed odd, but as Ulungugga himself had given birth to a fine healthy gaggle of young on the voyage from Venus to Earth, Arabella was prepared to accept his assertion with puzzled equanimity.

  Arabella gave careful consideration to the creature as he lay prostrate, his thick black tentac
les splayed out across the sand, which appeared gray in the dim light of the smugglers’ lanterns. Mars’s gravity was less than half that of Venus, Arabella knew, but this poor beast would have been cooped up in the ship’s hold all the way from Venus, in a state of free descent without any possibility of healthful exercise. It was no surprise that he could barely move, and had little interest in food, though the smugglers were strongly encouraging him to eat by word and action. Shortly after launch they would require him to produce a large quantity of hydrogen, to make up the gas inevitably lost in inflating the balloons, and before this could occur he must be well fed.

  The situation was beneficial to Arabella in that the creature would be more easily absconded with from his pen than he would be from the ship. But the smugglers were paying him the very strictest attention, and would continue to do so up to the moment of launch, and even if she could manage to get the creature away it would be extremely difficult to march him across the desert to where Kemekhta lay waiting.

  The two smugglers feeding him, Arabella realized now, were not human like the rest of the crew. They were Venusians, and they were in a very bad way. For one thing, they were naked—Arabella had rarely before seen a naked Venusian, as they had both a very sophisticated sense of fashion and powerful taboos against nakedness. For another, their flesh hung in loose folds—they looked as though they were starving. And, perhaps worst of all, their skin was dry, cracked, and flaking in the Martian desert air. Venusians, accustomed to a very hot and wet climate, suffered terribly in the cold dry Martian air and must be wetted down several times a day. These poor individuals were being horribly abused! Even the creature for which they cared, which did not look particularly healthy, was in better condition than they.

  “We require a distraction,” Arabella said to Taylor and Mills as they slipped back down to the base of the dune. “Something which will cause those smugglers to entirely abandon this camp—and their Isambard, and his handlers—and will last long enough that we can summon Kemekhta to this location.”