“Aye aye, sir!” they chorused, and ran to their assignments.
* * *
Arabella’s command of the Wagala language was, she discovered, not as strong as she had hoped. But with that, a few bits of French she and the Venusian shared, and many gestures, sounds, and facial expressions, she managed to communicate the question to Ulungugga … and, she fervently hoped, comprehend the answer. “The hydrogen tanks in the hold are quite tight,” she told Fox, “but when the … gate, I suppose you would call it, is opened to fill the envelopes, the … channels that carry the gas to the balloons are subject to leakage. The envelopes themselves are somewhat permeable to hydrogen, and furthermore quite flammable in themselves.”
Fox cast his eye down the length of the ship from where they stood on the quarterdeck. Stross and his crew, assisted by a dozen or more Venusians, were managing the envelopes as they began to swell rapidly from their chests; meanwhile, the rest of the men were taking shelter behind capstans, climbing into the rigging, and otherwise dispersing themselves for the ship’s defense. “Doesn’t leave a lot of room to maneuver. How far from the gas must we be in order to fire a pistol safely?”
“I am not certain. Five feet at least, at a guess.” Here she was proceeding not from Ulungugga’s words but from her own experience with the small balloon at the palisade. “And if an envelope should be punctured, I imagine the pressure within will produce a spray of inflammable gas that could reach twenty feet or more.”
Fox sighed, tucked his pistol in his belt, and drew his sword. “It’s cutlasses and boarding-axes for us, then, unless the situation turns desperate.” He took one step away, then turned back. “A kiss for luck?”
Arabella’s hesitation before complying was, upon reflection, rather indecently brief.
* * *
The slowly waxing light of the dim Venusian sun revealed the French arraying themselves along the docks, disciplined squadrons dashing from one stack of lumber to another. But, to every one’s surprise, though they had the advantage of good cover and greater numbers they did not employ their rifles. “What are they waiting for?” muttered Fox through gritted teeth. He and Arabella crouched behind the larboard bulwark in the waist, peering out over the gunwale at the docks. All around them, Dianas waited grimly for the French assault, clutching their weapons and breathing heavily.
Arabella spared a brief glance for Captain Singh, who stood exposed on the quarterdeck, directing Stross’s men and Ulungugga’s Venusians in making the ship ready for launch. Mills stood by his side, translating his commands to Ulungugga; Arabella had been stationed with Fox to perform the equivalent task in case the Venusians should be called upon to assist in the ship’s defense. She fervently hoped that her services in this would not be required in the midst of a battle.
The envelopes now stood tall, straining at their ropes, and the ship rocked in the light and queasy fashion that indicated she was nearly ready to leap into the air. Surely only a few more minutes would be required before Diana could cast off. What, indeed, were the French waiting for?
“They cannot use their rifles either!” she suddenly realized. “They do not wish an explosion in the midst of their ship-yard!”
“At least we are evenly matched, then,” Fox growled.
Suddenly there came a shouted command, and a squad of fifteen or twenty Frenchmen charged from cover, the men in the lead carrying long planks with great iron hooks on the end. These they swiftly fastened onto Diana’s gunwales near the quarterdeck, which the men behind—bearing cutlasses, boarding-axes, and other small arms—began to scramble up.
“Larboard, amidships, abaft!” Fox cried to his men, raising his sword and charging to the defense. “Gowse, watch the bow!”
In a moment the first of the Frenchmen reached the rail, but even as he rose from his plank Fox struck him aside with his cutlass. He fell into the water below with a cry and a splash. But there was another behind him, and another and another, and three more planks fastened to the gunwales nearby; soon a great shouting brawl of Englishmen and Frenchmen had formed at the rail.
Arabella, far outmatched in strength and reach, dashed about at the edges of the melee, doing her best to watch for French surprises and call the defenders’ attention to them. On one occasion she subdued a French soldier whose back was turned, using a two-handed blow of her cutlass hilt to the head. But though he fell, the jarring impact made her drop her sword, and as she fumbled for it a second Frenchman sprang up before her, eyes wild and teeth bared, his boarding-axe raised for a killing blow. Disarmed, defenseless, all she could do was cower before him … but then a blade slashed him down from behind, spraying Arabella with blood, and he too fell to the deck.
It was Fox who had saved her. But he could spare no more than a moment’s attention for her, as two more French soldiers assaulted him from behind. He fought them fiercely, eventually beating both of them down, but sustained a grievous gash to his left forearm in the process.
While Fox fought the two Frenchmen, Arabella scrambled to retrieve her fallen sword. All around her the combat raged in fierce, deadly earnest; blood pooled upon the deck, and soaked the sleeves and breeches of her “Cesario” costume.
Then a hoarse cry from her right called her attention. It was Gowse: a second party of Frenchmen was attempting to board at the bow, using grapnels and boarding-pikes. She glanced back and forth, and quickly realized that while Gowse’s people were outnumbered, Fox’s party could spare no men either. Without hesitation she rushed forward.
A moment later she found herself straining to remove a grappling-hook from where it had lodged at the rail. But it was deeply embedded in the khoresh-wood of the bulwark, and the weight of the ascending Frenchmen pulled it still deeper. She peered over the rail … and her eyes met the fierce, angry gaze of a French soldier. The man was hatless, with dark eyes in a red face; clutched a dagger in his teeth; and was clambering up the boarding-rope like a swift and agile monkey. He was no more than four feet away.
Arabella chopped with her cutlass at the French line where it fastened to the grapnel; the tough cordage frayed, but refused to part. Again and again she hacked at it, cursing with vehement passion.
The Frenchman had climbed to within arm’s reach. He pulled the dagger from his teeth …
Just at that moment the rope parted. “Salope!” the man cried, and he and the others on the line fell into the black water between Diana and the dock.
But two more lines nearby still held strong, and the Frenchmen upon them were already battling with Gowse’s men. Arabella did what she could with her cutlass to fend the climbers off.
But there were too many, too strong, too disciplined. The defending Englishmen were weary from lack of sleep and the long run through the swamp. One after another the Frenchmen won through to the deck, and though Arabella and the rest of Gowse’s people managed to defeat each one as he arrived there were always more fresh troops behind him. The cause seemed lost, but they had no alternative—they battled on, would keep fighting until the last of them fell.
Just then there came a cry—a command repeated down the deck in English and translated into Venusian. “Cast off!”
The deck lurched beneath Arabella’s feet, sending her stumbling … just as a French cutlass swished through the space where her head had been. But before the Frenchman could press his advantage, he too, was thrown from his feet by the tilting deck. Ten, twenty, thirty degrees to larboard the ship heeled, and all about Arabella defenders as well as attackers cried out, clutching at whatever they could to prevent themselves from falling overboard … or failing to do so, and tumbling into the void.
Clearly something had gone wrong with the ship’s launch. But from here there was nothing Arabella could do about it; it was all she could do to hold tight to the pinrail at the mainmast’s base.
Diana rose from the water like the infant Achilles, drawn up by one heel with his baby arms flailing. Beyond the rail Arabella saw the ship-yard, dozens of half-built ships
spread out beneath them in the gray dawn light like fish on saw-dust in a fishmonger’s stall.
And there—not far at all from where Diana had lain docked—that ship, well away from the rest, must be Victoire. Her hull gleamed, clad all in shining steel from a prow like an axe blade to a stern that bore two enormous sets of pulsers; amidships she resembled a castle, a great rectangular fortress with steel walls, a peaked steel-clad roof, and four rounded turrets at the corners.
But before Arabella could discern any further details, a further torrent of shouted commands came from the quarterdeck and the ship lurched to the right, dashing many men who had just regained their footing to the deck again. Several of them fell screaming over the rail, their voices swiftly descending to be lost in the distance below.
The ship righted herself then, wobbling and trembling to a proper vertical, and Arabella rushed to the larboard rail, peering to either side. Only one of the boarding-planks at the gunwale amidships was still attached, and even as she watched Fox kicked that one free, sending it and the screaming Frenchman who clutched to it tumbling down to the water. To her right, a good number of attackers still clung to the ropes, desperately clambering upward but meeting fierce resistance at the top. She dashed forward to assist in the defense, but by the time she reached the bow Gowse and his men had dealt with the last of them.
Gasping, Arabella slumped to her knees, then pitched forward to the blood-soaked deck; her cutlass fell clattering beside her. She lay prostrate and panting, the smell of blood and steel filling her nose and her ears roaring.
It seemed she had barely caught her breath when a toe nudged her and she opened one eye. It was Faunt, the captain of the waist, who looked nearly as bad as she felt—his clothing was slashed and bloodstained, and one eye was bruised and nearly swollen shut—but his face bore a fierce grin nonetheless. “Captain’s compliments,” he said. “Yer wanted on the quarterdeck.”
Arabella groaned and dragged herself to her feet.
22
AN UNUSUAL COURSE
Once she managed to haul herself up the ladder to the quarterdeck, Arabella felt herself an intruder—ragged, blood-soaked, and bone-weary, while the men on the deck were nearly unmarked by the recent fighting. But Captain Singh immediately embraced her, heedless of both propriety and of the blood that smeared his already-stained uniform coat. “I am so glad you are safe,” he murmured into her ear.
“No gladder than I am to find you safe as well,” she replied, closing her eyes and resting her head briefly on his shoulder. She was so very tired.
“We have lost too many this day.” He squeezed her shoulders, then released her and returned to his usual composed and confident mien. “But we cannot rest now. Observe.” He handed her a telescope and pointed aft and starboard.
Arabella extended the glass and peered over the taffrail. The docks below now blossomed with balloons, inflating as she watched like so many poisonous mushrooms. Soon there would be eight, ten, perhaps even twelve ships rising in pursuit.
And, unlike their recent escape, once they were no longer above the ship-yard these pursuers would not hesitate to fire cannon upon them. An explosion at this height would be unlikely to do damage to any ship other than Diana.
“I see,” she said, returning the glass to her captain. “What can we do?”
“I have already ordered all hands to the pedals.” Indeed, behind him the great pulsers were already beginning to turn. “Diana is the fastest ship in the Honorable Mars Company’s fleet, but with a weary, inexperienced crew and so many determined ships in pursuit our advantage is diminished. Therefore, I desire you to consult with Aadim and find the swiftest route to English-controlled airlanes.” A small, strange smile quirked one corner of his lip then. “You have always been a most … unconventional young woman, Mrs. Singh, and I encourage you to indulge your most atypical tendencies. An unexpected course change or unprecedented maneuver may be our only hope for escape.”
“I shall do my best, sir.”
“I expect nothing less.”
* * *
Giddy with exhaustion, alone in the great cabin with Aadim, she found herself speaking aloud to him … though, in truth, she had no idea whether or not he could even hear her, never mind understand her words. He had “eyes” that reacted to light, and instruments for the detection of wind speed and the ship’s location and orientation in space, scattered throughout the ship, but no “ears” that she knew of, and the inner workings of his inhuman consciousness were as mysterious to her as the distant songs of angels. But, as Captain Singh had often said, describing her problems to Aadim helped to focus her own thoughts if nothing else.
“We are here,” she said, tapping Aadim’s wooden finger on a chart of the wind currents near Venus, which she had clipped onto his desk. “And we must make our way hence as quickly as we may.” She adjusted the dial indicating displacement in the vertical direction, then tapped the finger in a second location.
She was not happy with her observations of their current position, but they would have to do. She had had time for only two sightings by sextant—Saturn and Polaris, which were not the ideal—and those had been made hurriedly, and in terrible conditions.
Their destination, too, was no more than an educated guess. The indicated location was a largish asteroid called Xanthus, which orbited between Earth and Venus and had only entered Venus’s vicinity in the past month; to the best of their intelligence it was still held by the English, and they had chosen it as the closest and best destination to which to escape. But if Napoleon had captured Xanthus recently, they might be sailing directly back to captivity.
“Now, we have the advantage of carrying no cargo.” She moved one of the levers on the side of Aadim’s desk to the furthest extremity of its range. “But many of the crew are exhausted, and the Venusians’ abilities at the pedals are an unknown quantity.” She moved another lever to the three-quarter point, then after further reflection back to two-thirds.
A rattle and a thump sounded from the deck above, accompanied by shouting, and briefly she was paralyzed by alarm. A moment later, though, she recognized the sounds of the larboard mast being swayed-out and set in its socket in the lower hull. This was a normal part of departure from any planet … but in this case it was far earlier than usual, and many of the shouts she heard were in Venusian language. Clearly there would be no falling-line ceremony on this voyage. She shook her head and tried to concentrate upon her navigation, as with a sliding thump the larboard mast was seated and the action shifted to the starboard side of the ship.
One after another Arabella puzzled out the proper settings for the fastest possible transit. Wherever there were two or more plausible alternatives, she deliberately chose the least obvious one; in one case, having no solid information, she closed her eyes and set the dial by hazard. And, always, she let herself be guided by the navigator himself; if the purring clockworks within the desk seemed to resist the motion of some lever, or encourage a different setting, she accepted the hint without question.
The question of how to account for the hydrogen was the most difficult one, and she spent some time puzzling it out. Finally she set the lever indicating coal supplies all the way to the right. “You should imagine that the coal supplies are infinite,” she said as she worked. “I wish there were some way I could indicate that the weight of the hydrogen tanks is much less than that of the coal-stores and launch-furnace they replace.”
She had no idea, of course, if her words had any effect. But she took some comfort in the fact that Aadim’s mechanisms did not seem to protest her settings.
At last, all being as much in readiness as she could manage, she held her breath and pressed down Aadim’s finger for a third time. At once the works beneath the desktop began to whir and ratchet—a very familiar and welcome sound, yet also somewhat different than she recalled; a bit noisier, perhaps, and somehow more urgent. Perhaps, she reflected, there was a bit of saw-dust in the gears. Or perhaps the seriousness of
the task, which she had communicated to Aadim through the settings of his levers and dials, had encouraged him to think even harder than usual, and this thought was audible in the sound of his works.
As she waited for the calculations to complete, lulled by the sound of Aadim’s gears, she closed her eyes for just a moment.…
“I had worried about you,” Aadim said. His voice was very like Captain Singh’s, and for some reason she was not in the least surprised to hear it, though he had never spoken before.
“And I about you,” she replied.
He turned to her and tilted his head to one side, a movement of which she had not even been aware he was capable. “The French were not kind to me. But I am not without my resources, and I was able to maintain my integrity.” His lips did not move as he spoke. “I must say that some of the changes they have made to the ship are quite intriguing.” He paused, whirring. “This man Fox is also intriguing.”
“He is.” Arabella sighed. “Also maddening.”
“Many of the best are.”
Suddenly the sound of a bell announced the completion of the calculation, and Arabella raised her head from a sleeve wet with saliva. She had fallen asleep on the deck while awaiting the result.
She sat up—the force of gravity, she noted, had diminished perceptibly—and wiped her mouth with her hand. Aadim sat as he ever had, vibrating slightly from the turning clockworks within. His green glass eyes were fixed straight ahead, as usual, and he showed no sign of having moved—and certainly none of having spoken—since she had initiated the current set of calculations.
“Are you navigating my dreams now?” she asked him.
No reply.
For a long moment Arabella gazed into Aadim’s blind green eyes, which did not shift or acknowledge her in the slightest. Eventually she shrugged, shook her head, and took up a scrap of wood and lead pencil with which to copy down the course displayed on the dials at the front of Aadim’s desk.
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 31