Arabella the Traitor of Mars

by David D. Levine

  The English seemed confounded by this unexpected arrival, with every one of the undamaged ships losing precious time by turning to face her. The disabled Marlborough, Arabella realized, must have been the flag of the fleet, and with her out of action the order of command had become muddled. Touchstone took advantage of the delay by firing upon yet another ship—a solid strike amidships—while Diana continued to limp away and the khebek moved in, sniping with their little cannon like birds pecking at the English ships’ eyes.

  But the English confusion did not last long, and with a volley of signal-guns and a flash of colored flags they soon divided themselves, with most turning to face Touchstone while three resumed pursuit of Diana. Soon they began firing in earnest, with lances of flame flashing across the sky and gouts of smoke fouling the Horn’s turbulent air. “About ship!” came the command from Diana’s quarterdeck, and “Forward pulsers!” Somehow the badly damaged Marsman’s valiant crew managed the feat, bringing her broken head into line with the most prominent current and slightly increasing her speed toward Phobos.

  Arabella, for her part, made her way back to the quarterdeck, taking up a dropped cutlass as she went. Her husband gave her only a nod of acknowledgement when she arrived—there was no time for any more—but she immediately strapped herself in place, scanning the roiling, filthy sky ahead for currents which might aid or hinder them in their flight. These she reported to Watson, who nudged the wheel as required with little more than a grunt of acknowledgement—his cheery “aye aye” had been left somewhere in the wreckage abaft.

  Phobos, their destination, now lay not far above and ahead, speeding along in its orbit with a churning invisible sea of even greater turbulence—a Horn of its own within Mars’s greater Horn—in the air ahead and behind. This little Horn, Arabella thought, was at once their greatest danger and greatest opportunity. Danger because, despite Arabella’s study of these winds in recent months, they were still beyond her full understanding—beyond the comprehension of mathematics at all, she feared—and one of those unpredictable gusts could easily smash Diana against the moon’s surface or fling her away in an uncontrollable tumble. The automaton pilots carried by Touchstone and some of the khebek would be of great help to them in this, but with Aadim out of action Diana would be forced to rely upon Arabella’s brain … and, of course, Captain Singh’s considerable experience in general navigation. But there was opportunity here as well, for the English were even less prepared than any of the Martians to face the winds of Phobos.

  But first they must reach that moon’s little Horn, and the chances of that seemed slimmer by the minute. For though Diana had long been the swiftest of the Honorable Mars Company’s ships, she was now a ruined remnant of her former self and the three nearly-undamaged English ships pursuing her were gaining rapidly. Again and again guns boomed abaft and cannon-balls howled toward them, far too many of those broadsides ending in a juddering crash as the shots found Diana’s hull or spars. As the range closed, it was only the capricious winds of the Horn, spoiling the English aim, that prevented every single broadside from having full and deadly effect. Diana fired back with her chasers to the extent possible, and the khebek did what they could to assist, but even without her sextant Arabella could tell that, if current trends persisted, the English would catch them up and board them well before they entered Phobos’s trailing Horn.

  “Can you possibly make any more speed?” she asked her captain.

  “The men at the pedals are half-dead from exhaustion,” he replied, not surprising her at all. “We must save as much as we can for the final approach.” But he did what he could, sending the topmen into a frenzy of activity as he attempted to catch any transient breeze that might help and avoid any cross-current that might hinder their progress.

  Again and again the cannon boomed, fouling the air and blurring Arabella’s vision—at least, she hoped the tears that stung in her eyes were caused by smoke and not sheer despair—but Phobos still lay visible ahead … nearing, ever nearing, but not perhaps quite near enough.

  Then came a savage war-cry from the curdled air abaft, and a grappling-iron came flying out of the murk and caught upon the taffrail. “Prepare to repel boarders!” cried Captain Singh, coughing and waving smoke and floating ash from his face.

  One of the afterguard cut the grappling-line with a boarding-axe. But a second and a third followed quickly, then yet more, far too many to prevent, and their lines drew taut, a sound of rhythmic grunting coming from the ship now becoming sketchily visible behind them as her crew pulled the two ships together. The quarterdeck became crowded with Dianas—all propriety abandoned in this desperate hour—breathing heavily and clutching cutlasses and pistols as they awaited the English boarding-party.

  Captain Singh put a hand on Arabella’s shoulder. “Do you have a knife,” he murmured, “if that should prove necessary?” Any one who had not known him as well as she did might have mistaken the desperate steel in his voice for perfect calm.

  “I have a cutlass,” she replied, deliberately mistaking his meaning, and taking it up she turned with the others to face aft. All might be lost, but she would not meet her fate with silence or deference.

  And then came a familiar ba-ba-ba-bang—Touchstone’s eight guns—followed by the howl and crash of an incoming broadside; the grunting in the fog abaft changed to shouts and shrieks of pain and rage, and the grappling-lines fell suddenly slack.

  “Cut those lines!” cried Captain Singh, and Dianas leapt to comply, Arabella among them. “Pulsers ahead, double time! Stern-chasers, fire!”

  The pulsers below the taffrail stepped up their pace, whirling past with a rapid whoosh-whoosh-whoosh that pressed Arabella’s stomach against the rail even as she continued to saw away at a grappling-line with her cutlass. Meanwhile, men leapt to the stern-chasers, aiming and firing as fast as they could. The two small cannon threw very little weight of metal, but their proximity made the noise deafening.

  A stray wind shoved Diana hard a-larboard then, momentarily clearing the air. There, falling abaft, lay the English ship which had just attempted boarding, her forecastle a ruined mess of wood and silk and blood. And above lay dear Touchstone—battered, wounded, with a huge ragged hole in her lower hull where the mizzen-mast had once been rooted, but still fighting, even as the two undamaged English ships turned to attack her. And they were not alone in doing so … three more of the English fleet had followed Touchstone and were closing fast from the other side. Captain Fox might have saved Diana, but in doing so he had put his own ship in grave danger.

  “Make course for Phobos!” Captain Singh called.

  “But we must do something to help Captain Fox!” Arabella cried to him.

  “We cannot,” he replied, the expression on his face as grave as ever she had seen. “Weak as we are, if we make the attempt I fear both ships will be lost.” He shook his head. “We can at best seize the opportunity for escape he has offered us.”

  “Aye aye,” Arabella replied miserably, and resolutely turned her gaze to the breezes ahead. “Ten points a-larboard,” she said to Watson.

  “Ten points a-larboard,” he acknowledged, turning the wheel.

  Even as Diana limped away, the English men-of-war closed in and englobed Touchstone, hammering her with a horrific series of broadsides from every direction simultaneously. The plucky little bantam of a ship fought back as best she could, but it was plainly a losing battle.

  Suddenly Touchstone broke free of the surrounding English ships, her ragged pulsers whirling as she dove toward the surface of Mars in a desperate bid for freedom! But the English followed, continuing to pound her with broadside after broadside, and a fortunate shot severed the port mast.

  With two masts gone, Touchstone became almost completely unmanageable, and her downward course rapidly decayed into an uncontrolled fall. The English pursued for a time, but soon broke off the chase, lest they too be caught below the falling-line with deflated envelopes.

  When Arabella los
t sight of Touchstone she was still spinning rapidly downward, smoke and fragments of wreckage spiraling behind her as she fell ever faster.

  14

  PHOBOS

  Darkness fell, again.

  Arabella floated in the doorway of the small, crude shack she shared with her husband, looking up at Mars as the Sun was eclipsed behind the planet’s limb, vanishing with a rapidity that still astonished her despite the many times she had witnessed it since landing here. How many would that be? Three eclipses a day, approximately, so nearly a hundred … in addition to a hundred conventional nightfalls, with the Sun setting below the moon’s horizon.

  With darkness came a sudden chill, and she drew her shawl more closely around her shoulders. Phobos, she thought, might be their salvation, but it was still a small, cold, miserable place.

  Between herself and the horizon—so close as to barely be deserving of the name, looking more like the edge of a deck save that it curved gently away with no rail nor gunwale in sight—lay nothing but barren gray rock, relieved only by hardy mosses and lichens and the rough, scattered structures that clung to the rock like the lichens’ larger, artificial cousins.

  Many of these hovels, including Arabella’s own shack, had been built from the wreckage of ships which had failed to make safe rendezvous with Phobos due to the treacherous winds which surrounded it—a wreckage which littered the moon’s surface in sad profusion. Diana herself, with Aadim out of commission, her sails and yards devastated, and her crew weary and disheartened, had barely escaped that fate; had not one of the khebek thrown her a line, pedaling fiercely to pull her safely into port, she would surely have careened uncontrolled into the rocks.

  Once the resistance had landed safely on Phobos, they had been astonished to find the khoreshte satrap Tura there ahead of them … and welcoming them with open arms! “Phobos has been a possession of Sor Khoresh since time immemorial,” she had explained. “Why do you think we have our khebek, and our famous khoreshte pilots, and why do you think we refused to give them up for any treaty? And now that the accursed English fleet has in fact arrived—I must confess I doubted your tale—and attacked khoreshte territory, I am happy to offer you the temporary loan of this small piece of my property for the purpose of harassing them.” And so they had taken the moon without a fight, along with its small population, its ballistas, and its other engines of aerial defense.

  The darkness deepened as even the air-glow which followed the Sun vanished, leaving Arabella peering up at the vast black globe of Mars which blocked so many of the stars. At least this darkness made the concepts of “up” and “down” seem less arbitrary; Phobos lacked gravity almost completely, having less than one per cent that of Mars, and when the planet shone brightly in the sky, rolling huge and red overhead like an ominous storm cloud, it was easy to feel as though one were suspended head-down. But during an eclipse, if one ignored the sensations of free descent one could imagine oneself upon a planet’s surface.

  As Arabella’s eyes adjusted to the dark, glimmers of light came into view on the planet overhead. Most likely these were Martian settlements of one sort or another; the English occupied only seven per cent of the surface, and Arabella had no idea over which portion of the planet they were passing at the moment. But she had confidence that soon Aadim would be able to answer that question with definitive precision. And when he did …

  In the darkness she felt her lips draw back from her clenched teeth in a fierce grimace. For once Aadim’s mechanisms could determine Phobos’s orbital position and calculate a reliable ballistic path through the winds between the moon and the planet’s surface—and she was working every day upon that very problem—the massive ballistas which so effectively defended the moon from English ships would become weapons of offense as well. Boulders the size of carriages would rain down upon Company House, Government House, armories, ship-yards, ports, and …

  … and Woodthrush Woods?

  Perhaps. For though she loved her family plantation, if Michael had betrayed the resistance he must be punished. Punished most severely.

  The Ceres fleet had plainly received intelligence regarding the resistance’s activities before their arrival at Mars. They had not reported to Fort Augusta first, as Captain Singh had originally ordered; instead they had struck directly at Tekhmet, a facility which was meant to be a most confidential secret. Very few outside the resistance had known even of Tekhmet’s existence, to say nothing of its location in the deep anonymous desert; of those who had known, Michael was one of the few having both desire and opportunity to reveal that information to the Navy. “I could end this farcical resistance of yours with a word, you know,” he had said to her once, and though she had known that the threat was meant seriously she had felt—had hoped, to be honest—that he would never follow through.

  Arabella had exchanged no letters with Michael since before the catastrophic rout which had been dignified in retrospect with the name “Battle of Tekhmet.” In part this was due to the practicalities of the situation—since the resistance had shifted its headquarters to Phobos, no ships went to or from Fort Augusta except under the most exigent of circumstances. But this, she knew, was only an excuse … she knew that she was highly regarded in the resistance, and if she had truly wished communication with her brother, some means would have been found to bring it about. She was forced to confess, if only to herself, that she had not written to him because she did not wish her suspicions—her very strong suspicions—regarding him to be irrevocably confirmed. And he had not written to her because … well, to be honest, she did not know. But he had not, or at least had not succeeded in doing so.

  Dawn came then, as swiftly as night had fallen, and Arabella hung blinking in the sudden light. The starry sky cleared to blue; the black globe of Mars changed to mottled gray, with an orange-red crescent growing from the planet’s eastern limb; and the little birds called pooteeweet began to chitter from their nests among the lichens. They were unique to Phobos, so far as Arabella knew, and to them this sudden dawn, coming every seven and a half hours, was entirely normal. She took a breath, let it out, and returned to her toilette, which had been momentarily interrupted by the fall of night. It was nearly time for the Council meeting.

  * * *

  The Council met daily now, as after the disastrous Battle of Tekhmet nearly every Martian in the leadership had moved to Phobos for safety’s sake. Arabella and Captain Singh joined in these meetings, as did Fulton—who had survived the destruction of his hydrogen manufactory and ship-yard, and was now even more determined to prove the value of his inventions. Lady Corey, too, was present at most Council meetings … clad all in black and speaking infrequently, but nonetheless determined to support the resistance in any way she could, in honor of the late Captain Fox.

  Despite Khema’s air-sickness, which afflicted her constantly in Phobos’s state of near free descent, she remained the Council’s head; however, her many duties often kept her from the daily meeting. In her absence, as to-day, her lieutenant, the khoreshte akhmok Thekhla, led the meetings. But the meetings were conducted in English—that being the only language that all the Martian nations had in common—and, as Thekhla’s English was limited, Arabella found herself perforce deeply involved in most of her conversations.

  “The English made another attempt upon us last night,” Thekhla said, and Arabella translated. “Three ships this time. The attack was repulsed by ballista fire, as usual, but all three ships escaped. We suffered no casualties. More stones are being brought from the quarry even now.”

  “Has there been any new word from the surface of Mars?” Captain Singh asked.

  “With the nights being so short,” Arabella translated from Thekhla, “there has been little opportunity for an exchange of letters.” What little communication there was between Phobos and the Martian surface was provided by khoreshte pilot-boats, which ascended and descended under cover of darkness. “But questioning of the most recent ship-load of refugees continues.” She pa
used, listening intently to an exchange between Thekhla and one of the other Martians which incorporated some unfamiliar vocabulary. “There has apparently been open fighting with the Ceres fleet in some of the southern princessipalities.”

  “If only we could support them from the air,” Captain Singh muttered to Fulton. Fulton humphed, frowning, and stroked his chin contemplatively.

  Diana, still under repair from the Battle of Tekhmet, was not yet available for missions to Mars’s surface. The light unarmed pilot-boats which provided the thin thread of communication that still existed between Phobos and the Martian surface were little more than two-person hot-air balloons with a small three-sail pulser, entirely incapable of combat. And the khebek fleet, though the damage they had sustained in the battle had been largely repaired, were trapped upon Phobos by a shortage of hydrogen. For though that invaluable gas was not nearly so perishable as hot air, it did tend to leak away over time—Arabella understood from Fulton that this had something to do with the small size of the hydrogen molecule, which was also responsible for its great lifting power—and with the hydrogen manufactory destroyed they had no way to replace it. Diana had Isambard, but his capacity to produce hydrogen was little greater than Diana’s needs; Fulton had been attempting to engineer some means of making hydrogen with the facilities available upon Phobos, but to no avail so far. They had even considered refitting the khebek to use hot air rather than hydrogen, but even if such a feat were technically possible—Fulton was doubtful—the quantities of coal required made the idea completely unworthy of consideration.

  “Word has also reached us,” Thekhla continued, interrupting Arabella’s melancholy contemplations, “that another Venusian drug-smuggling ship has arrived, carrying still more supplies of the drug and further means of production.”