“She went back for something that fell off the cart!” came the reply.
Casting her eye back along the cart-tracks that wobbled across the sand, Arabella soon located her assistant, struggling to drag a heavy metal lathe across the wreckage-strewn ground. “Gonekh!” she cried, and rushed toward her.
But then Gonekh jerked, fell over, and lay still, red stains spreading across her clothing.
Arabella shrieked and looked upward, soon finding the English first-rate from which the fatal shots must have come. Red-coated Marines hung in its rigging like evil, overripe fruit, aiming their rifles down toward the running figures below.
Another wordless cry of anger and indignation was wrenched from Arabella’s throat as she ran to Gonekh’s aid. But before she could move more than a few steps, something struck her from behind. She fell to the filthy sand, with a moist and heavy weight landing on top of her and driving the breath from her lungs.
A moment later the sand before her eyes fountained up from the impact of several bullets. If she had continued running, those bullets would have struck her instead.
The weight that had knocked her over was Ulungugga, the Venusian waister. “You cannot help her,” he croaked as he hauled her to her feet. “We leave now.”
Stunned from exhaustion and grief, Arabella did not protest as Ulungugga half-carried her up the gangplank, which was immediately drawn up behind them. Every one else was already aboard, or lay unmoving on the sand below.
* * *
Moments after Arabella and Ulungugga came aboard, she heard the cry “Dump all ballast!” from the quarterdeck. Immediately a shuddering, rushing hiss sounded from belowdecks and the ship shot skyward. The sand-anchors and other moorings must already have been taken up.
The ship’s precipitous rise was accompanied by shrieks and whoops from all aboard, along with cries and thuds as some people, unprepared for the sudden lurch of her departure from the ground, fell to the deck … Arabella among them. She hoped as she struggled to her feet that no one had fallen very far.
Shooting upward as rapidly as she was, Diana quickly rose above the level of the English ships; Arabella found herself looking right into the eyes of an astonished airman for a moment as she swept past him. So swift, in fact, was Diana’s rise that not a single cannon shot was fired during the brief period when she was within their firing angle. The great guns on English aerial men-of-war were designed for use in free descent, not near a planetary surface, and relied upon turning the entire ship for aiming. The individual cannon had only a few degrees of upward and downward motion within their gun-ports, so beneath the falling-line the great guns were useless on any target substantially higher or lower.
But the English ships were also equipped with swivel-guns on their decks and snipers in the tops. The crack and flash of gunfire burst out from the ships all around, and shot large and small whined past above Arabella’s head. Several of these connected with masts or the hull, sending splinters flying, and Arabella quickly ducked down beneath the gunwale, covering her head with her hands. But she could not bear not knowing what was happening. Keeping low, she scuttled aft until she could peer through the scupper.
The sight that met Arabella’s eyes was truly astonishing. Dozens of balloons loomed above, below, and in all directions, filling the murky sky like pickled eggs in a bottle of vinegar. The smaller single ones, rising rapidly, were Martian khebek; the larger ones, in groups of eight and ten, were those of the English fleet. By contrast with the khebek, these hung steady in the air or were sinking slowly, and the ships beneath them were magnificent specimens of the shipbuilder’s art, with spectacular carved figureheads and gleaming copper bottoms. And beneath those …
The town of Tekhmet, which Arabella had beheld from above so frequently in the past months, was scarcely recognizable as itself. The pleasant curving streets of Martian buildings, now devastated by bombs, resembled a vegetable patch that had been trampled by giant beasts. The ship-yard, formerly an organized bustling hive of activity, was now nothing more than a collection of cavities—some empty of ships recently departed, others filled with smoldering wreckage. Fires burned every where, spreading like spilled acid, eating up every thing they touched and blackening the air above with smoke. The sight was devastating.
But worse was yet to come. For the flames were already licking at the hydrogen manufactory, and even as Arabella watched the thing she feared most was beginning to occur. With a tremendous boom, loud even at this distance, the nearest corner of the manufactory to the fire exploded, sending visible pressure waves washing through the filthy air and fragments of roof and beam spinning upward. A moment later came a second explosion, and then a third—each one more devastating than the last, as each damaged the structure more severely, causing yet more hydrogen to spill into the air, feeding the fire, and leading to yet more and larger explosions. Soon the entire manufactory had burst into bits in a paroxysm of explosions, reducing one of Fulton’s most amazing engineering achievements to a smoking, shattered ruin in less than a minute.
Arabella could only hope that Fulton and his manufactory workers had escaped before the disaster.
“Idlers and waisters to the pulsers!” came the command from the quarterdeck, and for a moment Arabella’s old habits came to the fore, compelling her to rush below with the other waisters. But she immediately corrected herself, and reversed her course for the great cabin where Aadim awaited her.
Shaken and unnerved she might be, but she had her orders, and she would not fail her captain as she had failed Gonekh.
* * *
Aadim sat, imperturbable as always, facing away from the great curved window at the cabin’s stern. He was, she reflected as she unrolled the chart of Sor Khoresh upon his table, somewhat the worse for wear from when she had first met him. The callous treatment he had received in the hands of the French had left the painted wood of his face and hands scarred and chipped, and the hurried modifications she and Captain Singh had made to him since their arrival on Mars had added significantly to his bulk with little attention to aesthetics. A large box of gears and levers, close kin to the automaton pilot, had been crudely bolted to one side of the desk which formed his lower body; it spoiled his symmetry and hid some fine inlay work, but added considerably to his navigational capabilities within Mars’s Horn.
They would likely need every one of those new capabilities before this day was out.
Quickly she laid in the course Captain Singh had requested, a low-altitude path to Tekh Shetekta. But before she could press down Aadim’s finger upon the chart a second time to begin the calculations, the ship was jolted hard by a sudden impact, throwing her across the cabin. Bruised and shaken, she ignored the shouts, cries, and thundering footsteps that followed the blow and hauled herself back to Aadim’s desk. But when she pressed on the finger, a dull click was the only response she received.
Cursing, Arabella threw open the access panel on Aadim’s desk and inspected the clockworks therein. Feverishly she worked to find the problem, swinging hinged brass assemblies aside and inspecting the gleaming works thus revealed with a lamp and a practiced eye. There were so many moving parts within, and nearly any one of them could have been jarred loose by a blow like the one the ship had just received. Or even worse … Aadim’s mechanisms extended throughout the ship, and if the damage were elsewhere there would be little she could do to repair it in the midst of battle.
Outside the window the pulsers whirled, the great triangular sails rushing past more than once per second as the men and Venusians belowdecks literally pedaled for their lives. Beyond the spinning pulsers lay the English ships, their own pulsers whirling as they rose in pursuit. Lifted by hot air as they were, rather than the more buoyant hydrogen used by Diana, they could not match her speed of ascent … but their crews were far more numerous, and battle-hardened by years of war with Napoleon. By dint of vigorous pedaling they would quickly overcome Diana’s advantages in maneuverability, and once they matched her a
ltitude their great guns would come into play. Each one of the English first-rates threw twice or more Diana’s weight of metal.
Watson burst in the cabin door. “The captain asks, have you the course?” he half-shouted.
“Hold this” was all the reply Arabella offered, handing him the lamp and putting her head entirely inside Aadim’s desk. Was that a sliver of wood jammed in the mechanism?
It was! And, with the aid of a pair of fine needle-nose pliers, Arabella was able to prise it free. It must have been knocked loose by the impact from the inside of Aadim’s case.
Quickly she put every thing back in place. Then, holding her breath, she pressed down upon Aadim’s wooden finger … and with a satisfying whir his gears began to turn.
“Tell the captain I shall return momentarily with his requested course,” she told Watson as she closed and latched the access panel. Watson knuckled his forehead and hurried off.
A moment later a bell sounded and Arabella copied down the sail-plan from the dials on the front of Aadim’s desk. This course would not have been possible a year ago, she reflected as she hurried up the companion ladder with the paper clutched between her teeth. It was, in fact, only within the past few months that they had completely incorporated the capabilities of Diana’s hydrogen balloons into Aadim’s calculations.
* * *
“Here is the course, sir,” Arabella said as she presented the paper—slightly damp and tooth-marked—to her husband.
“Thank you, Ashby,” he replied absently, taking the paper and reading it over. Immediately he translated the sailing-plan into instructions to Edmonds, who relayed them to the captains of divisions and thence to the crew.
Edmonds spun the wheel hard as the larboard stuns’ls flashed out, sending the ship into a steep, diving turn propelled by the still-whirling pulsers. Arabella clung to a backstay as the deck tilted precipitously beneath her feet, the world seeming to spin around as the ship turned through twelve points—more than a third of a circle—while rapidly losing altitude.
For a moment they seemed to be driving directly toward the pursuing English fleet, and even as the enemy ships came into view ahead they began firing, gouts of flame and smoke reaching out toward Diana. But Diana could descend far more swiftly than they, by drawing hydrogen from her balloons back into her tanks, whereas the English were forced to either rely upon the slower cooling of their hot air or take the risky choice of venting it. She quickly dropped below their range, leaving their shots to whine overhead and damage only a few sails and lines.
“It will take them a little while to match our altitude change,” Captain Singh remarked to Edmonds, nearly conversationally. “We should take this opportunity to chastise them.”
“Aye aye, sir!” Edmonds replied with enthusiasm, then cried, “All hands rig for pitch!” Arabella had never heard this command before, and grasped her backstay more tightly, wondering what might follow. Her answer came a moment later, as he called out, “Set main-royals and t’gallants! Haul up on the for’ard balloon-stays! Idlers and waisters aft!”
This unprecedented and perilous series of directives had the effect of tilting the ship back upon her heel by a good twenty degrees, leaving every one holding tight for their lives to whatever they had happened to be closest to when the order “rig for pitch” had come. For, unlike the usual circumstances of aerial battle, they were still well below the falling-line, and a fall overboard would be rapidly fatal.
But the maneuver brought Diana’s great guns, located in her bow and facing strictly forward, up to target the nearest ship of the English fleet. “Fire!” cried Edmonds, and at once the cannon spoke, deafening Arabella even as the ship jerked beneath her from the force of the discharge. Flames lanced toward the English fleet, and a moment later the lead ship’s bow shattered under the impact of Diana’s twelve eight-pound balls, to resounding cheers from Diana’s people. “Fire!” cried Edmonds again, and a second English ship suffered the same fate.
But two such salvos were all they had time for, as Diana continued to drift forward and down, passing below the English fleet and taking them above the range of her guns. Soon Diana had settled back to her original attitude, and the pulsers began to spin again—the idlers and waisters returning to the pedals from the after end, whence they had crowded to help tilt the ship backward with their combined weight—driving the ship forward toward Tekh Shetekta.
But though Diana and her English adversaries were no longer able to harry each other with their great guns, their chasers and rifles were still in play, and many a ball pinged and whined through the air in both directions. As the distance between them grew—Diana again descending more rapidly than the English—Arabella’s confidence grew as well. They were still badly outnumbered, and though the English were struggling to turn and give chase to the rapidly-receding Diana, they would soon get themselves in order. “Do you think,” she asked Captain Singh, “that, having seen how we pitched the ship to attack them, they will do the same to us?”
“They may attempt it,” he replied, examining the damaged ships through his telescope. “But I doubt they have practiced the maneuver as we have.” He lowered the glass. “I devised it last month, while you were occupied with the automaton pilots.”
Arabella considered this as she watched the English forming up on their leader. They did not appear to be attempting to duplicate Diana’s maneuver, but with the greater number of men they could put to the pedals they were no longer falling behind, and indeed were already beginning to catch Diana up. But not all of them, she realized, were attempting to do so. “Some of the English fleet are separating from the main force,” she observed to her captain.
He grunted and raised his telescope again. “They are pursuing our khebek,” he muttered darkly. Even an unaided eye could see that the greater part of the fleet was now rising upward in pursuit of the ascending khebek, while the three most heavily-armed first-rates were continuing to drive toward Diana with all the force of their rapidly-spinning pulsers. “I had hoped to distract them with a larger prize, but Admiral Thornbrough is apparently too wily for that stratagem to succeed.”
“So what can we do?”
Captain Singh’s expression was as grim and determined as she had ever seen upon his face. “We must turn and attack.”
Arabella was astonished. “One ship against three?”
“One frigate-class ex-Marsman against three first-rates, to be specific. But we do have a few advantages.” He turned to Edmonds. “Fox and hounds, Mr. Edmonds.”
“Aye aye, sir. Fox and hounds.” He then bellowed to the men at the pedals to put their f——g backs into it, and offered similar friendly encouragement to the gunners and topmen. Abandoning the course Arabella and Aadim had just worked out, Diana immediately turned about and drove upward, heading directly toward the three English ships. They were still well above her altitude, but descending rapidly.
“What shall I do?” Arabella asked, still clinging tightly to her backstay.
“Once we dispatch these adversaries, we will immediately ascend to the winds of the Horn. I will require Aadim’s assistance then … and no one understands his new mechanisms as well as you. You will remain on the quarterdeck to appraise the currents until your services are required below.”
“Aye aye, sir,” she replied.
Shortly an airman appeared with the leather belts and straps which would hold the officers in place on the deck in free descent; these were not yet needed but would soon be. Arabella quickly strapped herself in place, but deliberately did not fasten the second set of safety buckles, for she anticipated that a rapid departure might be required.
Diana became a riot of noise as she and the English rapidly drew nearer each other. Belowdecks, men chanted and grunted rhythmically at the pedals and powder monkeys dashed back and forth to the gun-deck. Aloft, topmen called back and forth as they positioned themselves for rapid action with the balloons and sails. In the waist, men and Venusians—and a few of the brave, in
experienced Martians whom Arabella had brought with her from the ship-yard—rigged fearnought screens: lengths of dampened burlap stretched across the hatches, to prevent splinters and sparks from getting below. All the while Chips the carpenter and his crew hammered and sawed away in the forecastle, making hasty repairs to a great gash in the hull there. This must be the result of the impact that had temporarily disabled Aadim. Despite the rushing air of their rapid ascent, powerful scents of powder, sawdust, and sweat assaulted Arabella’s nose.
Distant bangs and flashes of flame were coming from the English now, but the shots howled far overhead. Captain Singh, more sparing of his shot and powder, held his fire.
And then, suddenly, some invisible line was crossed and they were in the midst of battle.
All three English ships let fly at once, their simultaneous broadsides forming a continuous wall of flame and smoke and noise that momentarily obscured the ships themselves. “Get down!” some one shouted, and Arabella ducked down where she stood, covering her head with her hands. A moment later came the rising screams of incoming cannon-balls—many of which diminished as quickly, falling in pitch as they flew past, but some ended in shattering crashes that shook the deck beneath Arabella’s foot and rattled her stump in its straps.
“Return fire!” cried Captain Singh, and the deck jerked again, accompanied by the thunderous roar of Diana’s twelve eight-pound guns. As Arabella raised her head, she heard the cries of injured men—none appeared to have been struck by shot directly, but flying splinters could be just as deadly—and the shouts of carpenters and captains of divisions struggling to repair the damage to ship and course. Then a second command to “Fire!” obliterated those sounds as well.
The sky all about was a mass of smoke and flame and destruction, with howling shots and spinning fragments of khoresh-wood flying at unpredictable intervals out of the murk. The noise and confusion were far greater even than in the midst of the Battle of Venus—the number of ships had been greater there, but the quarters here were far closer, and the influence of Mars’s gravity added the fear of falling to all the other perils of aerial battle.
Arabella the Traitor of Mars Page 19
