Arabella the Traitor of Mars

by David D. Levine

  A long contemplative moment passed, as all three of them considered this seemingly impossible problem. Then the darkness was split by Mills’s broad grin, shining in his dark face in the starlight. “Their lanterns,” he said. “Green. They fear fire.”

  “Of course!” Arabella replied. The red sand looked gray because the smugglers’ lanterns were Venusian worm-lights, whose greenish light was dimmer than oil lamps but ran no risk of igniting the highly inflammable hydrogen. Between the Isambard and the slowly inflating balloons, the risk of explosion must be ferocious. “But how shall we make use of this fact?”

  Mills thought a moment more before replying. “The gas rises,” he said. “Light at top, burn from top down.”

  From that seed a plan quickly grew in Arabella’s mind. The danger was enormous, and the chance of success quite small. But that seemed entirely apropos to this already outlandish expedition. “Very well,” she said to Mills and Taylor, “here is what we shall do…”

  * * *

  To Arabella’s dismay, the eastern sky was already beginning to lighten as she slipped over a saddle between dunes, sliding down toward the smugglers’ camp as silently as she could. Mills’s eyes blinked down after her for a moment, then quickly vanished; he and Taylor would make their way around to the camp’s windward side and await her signal.

  Moving quickly, using every means of stealth that Khema had taught her, Arabella slipped through the night to the dark space between the ship and the Isambard’s pen. The creature now munched contentedly, rapidly diminishing the pile of dry vegetation before him, while the underfed handlers lay sleeping as though dead. Arabella crept to the large silk tube which stretched from the ship to the creature’s lower abdomen, carrying hydrogen from the Isambard to the swelling balloons, and, carefully keeping the tube between herself and the smugglers, moved along it to where it entered a hatch in the ship’s hull. There she cut several large slits in the tube with her pocket-knife. The edges of the slits fluttered in the exhalation of the colorless, odorless gas; they were not so large or so numerous that the tube sagged noticeably, but with luck they would be sufficient to cause the tube to part here once it caught fire.

  With luck. She had no way of knowing whether she had cut enough slits, or too many, or even whether such a number existed. But she did the best she could, and once she adjudged her work complete she crept back the way she had come.

  But she found her way completely blocked. While she had been busy with her knife, a line of men, extending from a tent pitched at the base of a dune to the ship’s open cargo hatch, had formed across the path she had taken.

  With quiet rhythmic grunts the men were passing a series of small caskets from hand to hand. From the sounds they were making and the set of their shoulders as they worked, the caskets—no more than a foot and a half in the longest dimension—must be exceedingly heavy, and there were dozens of them at least.

  Trapped between the Isambard’s pen, the ship, and the line of men, Arabella crouched in the sand, hoping against hope that an opening would appear before the rising sun revealed her. Yet the sky in the east was brightening rapidly. She might have only a few minutes of darkness left.

  Arabella’s heart hammered so loud in her ears she felt sure it would betray her position. But she held herself absolutely still, moving nothing but her eyes as she sought some opportunity for escape. A simple whistle from her would launch the attack, but for her own safety she dared not make that call until she had put much more distance between herself and the ship.

  Alongside the line of laborers, a group of three men—better dressed than the rest, with the bearing of officers and gentlemen—moved with lanterns, following the progress of the caskets. One of them in particular seemed especially keen on making sure that every single casket reached its destination. He paced the first casket in line, drawing nearer and nearer her position.

  He moved awkwardly, yet something in his carriage was familiar.

  And all at once she realized what she was seeing.

  He had but one leg. He walked with a crutch, clumsy in the soft sand.

  He was her brother.

  “Michael!” she cried. The sound was wrenched involuntarily from her throat.

  Michael turned to her, and the shock on his face in the pale light of dawn matched her own feelings. “Arabella!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  So much for my disguise, she thought, and I could ask the same of you. But she did not bother speaking. For one thing she was, with deep regret, certain of the answer, and for another she was busy charging at him, sand chuffing beneath her boots. Without a word she slammed into him, carrying both of them some ten feet beyond the astonished line of working men, and landed heavily atop him on a small hillock.

  “How could you?” she shouted in her brother’s face, even as he lay stunned beneath her in the cool sand. “How could you throw in your lot with these villains?”

  “Villains?” he replied, catching his breath and shoving her off of himself. “These men are on the King’s business!”

  “The King is mad,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “These men serve Lord Reid, and Lord Reid serves only Mammon.”

  Michael struggled to rise, but his crutch was of little use in the soft sand. “We all serve Mammon, in one way or another. You yourself came all the way to Mars for the family fortune.”

  “I came for you!” she cried, but then a thud behind her caught her attention. She turned toward the sound, then immediately ducked—one of the smugglers had dropped his casket and was leaping toward her. But he was from Venus, and in Mars’s lesser gravity he misjudged his leap; he sailed over her, crashing into Michael and knocking both in a tumbled heap.

  Continuing the momentum of her duck, she curled into a ball and rolled away, springing to her feet some distance away. Several other men had dropped their caskets and were charging toward her, teeth bared and arms outstretched.

  One of the caskets, she noted, had come open in the fall.

  Gold coins spilled from the open lid. Hundreds of them.

  Without hesitation she put both her forefingers in her mouth and gave a piercing whistle.

  Immediately, with a rushing hiss, a flaring rocket rose from beyond a dune to her left.

  Time seemed to come to a halt then, as every one—the onrushing smugglers, Michael, the two officers, and even Arabella herself—watched the rocket as it rose, caught the breeze, arced over in a fiery parabola, and met the top of the ship’s main balloon, exploding there with an eye-searing flare of bright blue light.

  Arabella, knowing what was to come, was the first to break this paralysis, throwing herself to the sand and clapping her hands over her ears. A moment later came a tremendous whooshing bang as the balloon’s hydrogen caught fire, the envelope’s silk shredding instantaneously into flaming strips. The rush of hot air from the explosion pressed Arabella’s body into the sand and nearly deafened her, despite her hands on her ears, but she was better off than the men who had been standing, many of them staring at the rocket as it descended. They now lay stunned on the sand, with flaming fragments of silk, rope, and wood falling all around them from the lightening sky.

  Arabella stood, ears ringing, and looked around. There lay the line of caskets—thousands and thousands of pounds’ worth of gold coins, surely the ill-gotten proceeds of the ulka trade, bound for Lord Reid’s coffers. There stood the Isambard, moaning in fear, swaying on his tentacles as he peered wide-eyed at the flaming wreckage all about himself. There stood the Isambard’s handlers, blinking in astonishment. And there stood the ship, her rigging and both of the remaining balloons dripping with fire. The silk of one balloon envelope parted as she watched, relieving the pressure within … preventing an immediate explosion, but sending a pale jet of flame shooting off to windward.

  But that jet of flame caught the breeze and bent back toward the ship, where it met the stream of hydrogen, lighter than air, that rose from the place Arabella had cut the silken tube. Flame
instantly ran down that invisible stream like a midshipman sliding down a ladder. The tube immediately caught alight, then flared in a brief soft explosion … which severed the tube, extinguishing the flame in the process, and knocked down several smugglers who had just recovered their footing.

  It was a better outcome than Arabella had hoped for. Better than she had deserved, she had to confess.

  Now freed from the ship and spurred forward by the explosion, the Isambard bellowed and charged off, with the tattered, smoldering end of the tube still attached to his hindquarters. His tentacles, built for swampy ground, floundered in the soft sand, and the unfamiliar gravity hampered him still further—but all of this panicked him even more, driving him thrashing forward at considerable speed. His two handlers rushed after him as though their survival depended on the Isambard’s continued presence and good health, which it no doubt did.

  Arabella followed the Isambard and his handlers as best she could, even as explosions continued to sound behind her, sending flaming wreckage and panicked smugglers flying in every direction. But just as she was finding her stride, something snagged her ankle—the flesh and blood one—and she sprawled face-first in the sand.

  It was Michael, who held her ankle in a death grip. “How can you betray your King?” he shouted at her from the ground. “Your family? Your very planet?”

  “Mars is my planet!” she replied. “And as for my family … is this your money?” She gestured to the caskets that still lay in a line on the sand.

  “This money came from the weak!” he spat back. “Martians and Englishmen alike, weak men voluntarily paying to weaken themselves still further, and it is bound for England!” He grinned then, and the flaring firelight and the rising sun made of his face a very devil’s mask. “This gold will buy me the first Dukedom of Mars!”

  “Then you are not my family!” She kicked at him then, the hard metal of her artificial heel knocking his hand loose from her ankle and making him cry out in pain. “And the Prince Regent is not my King!”

  The remaining balloon burst then, in a tremendous roaring explosion that sent Arabella rolling across the hard ground and left her deaf and half-blind from the sand in her eyes. Shaking her aching head, spitting out sand and ash and wiping her face, she sat up …

  … and beheld Kemekhta, settling gently to the sand in the path of the fleeing Isambard. Thank Heaven, they had seen the blue flare!

  Even as the khebek touched the ground her great cargo door, which had been constructed for just this purpose, thudded to the sand, forming a ramp up which the panicked beast ran headlong. But the Martians waiting on deck were ready for him, and quickly surrounded him, petting his leathery hide to soothe his shattered nerves and giving him cool water to drink. The two starving Venusians followed, and the Martians gave them water as well.

  But the mission was not yet over. “Mills!” Arabella cried, struggling to her feet. “Taylor! To me!” She stumbled back toward the smugglers’ ship, now a nearly unrecognizable heap of flaming wreckage, continuing to call, “To me! To me!” as she went.

  She found a casket in the ashy sand. It was terribly heavy, and shifted awkwardly as she lifted it, but she managed to clutch it to her breast and stagger toward Kemekhta with it. Taylor soon reached her, then Mills. “Gold!” she cried. “Bring as much as you can!” They immediately set to with a will, and once the Martians had the Isambard under control they joined in as well.

  The surviving smugglers did not take this theft well at all. But the captain and officers of Kemekhta were looking out for Arabella, and two cannon-balls from that quarter soon put paid to the opposition, scattering the wreckage of the smugglers’ ship still further across the blackened desert.

  The last few smugglers were left waving impotent fists at Kemekhta as she rose from the desert, with dozens of heavy caskets safely stowed aboard and the Martians struggling to calm the still-agitated Isambard. Among the survivors below, Arabella noted, was one better dressed than the others, with only one leg.

  This one did not bother shaking his fist at the rising khebek. He merely glared … directly at her.

  She met his gaze and, without looking away, she untied her cravat, unbuttoned her shirt, took off her locket—the silver locket bearing Michael’s portrait in miniature, which she had never once removed since she was sixteen years of age—and dropped it over the rail.

  * * *

  “You stole an Isambard,” Khema said.

  “I stole an Isambard,” Arabella acknowledged.

  “You risked your life,” Captain Singh said, “and the lives of your friends, and an irreplaceable khebek. And her crew.”

  “I did.”

  Fulton’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “And to what end?” he managed eventually. “A single such creature cannot produce nearly enough hydrogen for our entire khebek fleet.”

  “A single creature, yes. But if they are bred…”

  Lady Corey goggled at the very notion. “Do you propose to turn Phobos into a … a cattle-farm for these tentacled monstrosities?”

  “If that is what is required to put our fleet back in the air,” Arabella insisted. “And I did bring along the Isambard’s handlers, Venusians who were very badly abused by the smugglers, to help care for the creatures.”

  Khema considered this intelligence. “Are they willing to join the resistance?”

  “Ulungugga says that their health is much too fragile for that,” Captain Singh said. “He says they were very close to death when they arrived, and their recuperation will require years. The only humane thing to do is to return them to their homes on Venus. It is, at least, approaching inferior conjunction.” This meant that Venus was between Mars and the Sun, so the journey should not be unreasonably long.

  Khema’s eye-stalks pressed against each other. It was an expression Arabella had never before observed in a Martian. Aggravation? Exasperation? Wonderment? “I propose to delegate Captain Churath and Kemekhta to this task,” she said after a time. “She and her crew are obviously not happy in their role here, and I cannot think of any assignment which offers a more appropriate … reward for their actions last night.” Now her eye-stalks directed themselves at Arabella. “And as for yourself … I cannot imagine what reward, or punishment, would be appropriate for you.”

  “I only ask to continue my work at the Institute,” Arabella said, with complete sincerity. “There is considerable work yet to be done on the automaton pilot, and many new students.”

  Khema looked to Captain Singh. “Will you promise to keep her from getting in trouble again?”

  “That is a promise no one can make.”

  Again Khema’s eye-stalks pressed together. “I am afraid you are correct.”

  15

  THE FINAL ASSAULT

  Arabella floated in her workshop, contemplating the automaton pilot which sat, more or less, upon the work-bench before her. The frame was fastened to the bench by clips, but as the air within the shop was quite still she had allowed some of the disassembled parts to float free. At the moment she was considering a revision to the arithmetic accumulator, which might permit a more rapid computation … sufficiently rapid, she hoped, to accommodate certain changes in the wind which the current version of the automaton could not predict quickly enough to make use of. But suddenly her ruminations were interrupted by two of the baby Isambards, which charged in the door squealing happily, chasing each other through the air.

  “No!” Arabella cried, quickly shielding the floating mechanisms with her arms. “Shoo! Shoo!” She gestured ineffectually at the creatures, even as the trailing one caught up with the leader, grappling it with further happy squeals as they bounced off of a wall. Tentacles flailed every which way, and the sight was so endearing and ridiculous that, annoyed though she was, she could not help but laugh at the creatures’ playful antics.

  “Sorry, ma’am!” said Taylor, following his charges through the door and gathering them up in his arms. “These little’uns are hard to
keep hold of!” These “little ones” were of the most recent litter, but even so had already grown to the size of large dogs. Taylor could barely hold on to both of them at once, and in a few days they would be too large for him to manage more than one at a time. Their older siblings were already hard at work in the pens, eating their weight in straw every day and producing thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen for the growing khebek fleet.

  Arabella, still laughing, assisted Taylor in shepherding the juvenile Isambards out of the workshop, then straightened her dress and returned to her work. But though the playful creatures had, fortunately, done no damage to the delicate mechanisms, Arabella’s concentration had been completely shattered. She decided to reassemble the automaton sufficiently for stability, then take a walk to clear her head.

  A “walk” upon the surface of Phobos, of course, was more of a “drift.” There was, to be sure, a slight downward pull, but for Arabella this amounted to little more than an ounce of weight, insufficient for a true walking motion. Instead, exactly as on the deck of a ship between planets, she propelled herself by gentle pushes from one place to another, using the guide ropes strung between the major structures to keep herself from drifting off into the air. Unlike a ship, though, if she did happen to drift away, Phobos’s gravity would eventually return her to the moon … but it would take hours to drift back down, and she would most likely be intercepted by a passing khebek first. Thanks to Fulton’s ingenuity and Michael’s money, there were always at least two or three khebek visible on maneuvers close by.

  The khebek fleet, indeed, had now grown to over fifty ships. With the destruction of Tekhmet, no more iron could be produced, but Fulton had managed to rescue several large loads of usable iron plate from the wreckage of the refinery, as well as an entire ship-load of Venusian silk fabric and cordage. And with the drug-smugglers’ gold, they were able to purchase khoresh-wood, powder, and shot from Sor Khoresh. At this rate the resistance would be able to assemble and equip perhaps a dozen more khebek before the materials ran out.