And in the lead: Fouché.
Arabella released the captains’ hands and took a step forward, raising her arms for silence. “Merci, merci, merci beaucoup!” she called, speaking directly to the imperial couple, as the applause stuttered to a halt. “Unfortunately, we must now conclude our show!”
With that, she gestured firmly to both sides, and the curtains at once whisked closed.
But, as she had stepped out of the line of players, the curtains closed behind her, and she found herself standing alone on the visible side of them.
Pandemonium immediately erupted in the audience, as the crowd of airmen rushed all at once and in every direction from their seats, heading for the swamps behind the theatre.
Napoleon let out a squawk of surprise.
Fouché reacted immediately, calling, “Tirez! Tirez-les tous!” Shoot them all!
The recently-arrived soldiers raised their rifles.
Arabella stood frozen, realizing that she was about to see her friends and shipmates slaughtered.
And then an enormous bang, a gout of flame and smoke, and a great rush of wind erupted from behind the curtain, sending Arabella sprawling in the soft dirt between the stage and Napoleon’s chair.
For a moment her eyes met the emperor’s. He seemed as stunned as she, but thanks to her youth she recovered first. She leapt to her feet, ears ringing, and jumped back behind the curtain line—the curtains themselves now flapped in smoldering tatters.
The chaos on the stage and in the audience now made the previous confusion seem positively tidy by comparison. The stage-floor was broken into jumbled, charred flinders. Small fires guttered here and there; bits of flaming canvas and silk drifted down from a smoke-blackened sky. Fouché’s men lay scattered like discarded toy soldiers among the logs, momentarily stupefied by the noise, smoke, and flame which had struck them in the face. But the airmen, who had been running with their backs to the explosion, had merely been pushed hard in the direction they were already going; most of them had fallen over, but they were already scrambling to their feet and heading off into the darkness.
Of Fouché himself there was no sign.
Arabella shook herself and stumbled upstage, seeking the basket of supplies she had been assigned to carry for the escape, which had been hidden behind scenery. But before she could find it in the wreckage, she nearly collided with Captain Singh. His eyes were wide and white in his smoke-blackened face, his costume was singed, and he struggled under the burden of two large duffel-bags. “Change in plans!” he shouted into her face—the sound was muffled, and she realized that she was somewhat deafened by the blast. “Take this!” He thrust one of the two duffel-bags into her arms—it was large and extremely bulky, but weighed little—then gave her a brief passionate kiss, seized her hand, and ran off toward the swamp.
Between the pounding speed of his long legs and the lingering effects of his kiss, she found herself quite out of breath.
They dashed into the darkness, fitfully lit by the still-smoldering wreckage of the stage and scenery behind them. As she ran, Arabella’s ears began to clear and she heard groans, shouts in French and English, and the occasional crack of small-arms fire. Barely-visible figures rushed here and there among the trees; whether they were escaping Englishmen or pursuing Frenchmen she could not say.
* * *
They ran until they had passed so far from the light that they risked running into a tree or stumbling into a swampy hole, then paused for a moment. Arabella stood bent over with hands on knees, gasping for breath, while the captain dug a dark-lantern from his duffel, along with a pistol which he tucked in his belt and a knife which he gave to Arabella. They lit the lantern and looked cautiously about until they had their bearings and were certain they were not pursued, then headed off again—still rapidly, but more prudently than their previous headlong flight.
As they went they kept a sharp eye out for paint marks left on trees by Fox—blazes indicating a safe and rapid passage through the hazards of the swamp. Several different routes had been planned out, in addition to deliberate false marks designed to lead pursuers off the trail, so they were compelled to pause and be certain of the marks before continuing. Nonetheless, they made very good time, avoiding any encounters with mud pits, tangling vines, or carnivores.
The French, however, were not so obliging.
On several occasions the sound of tramping boots through the muddy undergrowth reached their ears, and Arabella and the captain were compelled to shut the lantern-slide and secrete themselves in the bush. Once the searching troops came close enough that she held her breath, heart pounding, and gripped her knife with sweating fingers … but they passed by, muttering amongst themselves. Another time the pursuers were distracted by a noise nearby, and set off in a different direction—which was followed by a tumult of thrashing foliage, rifle shots, and shouts in French and English. Arabella and the captain cast worried glances at each other as they fled the scene. Had the French surprised and arrested the Englishmen they encountered? Or had both groups stumbled into a nest of some native predator?
There was no telling. They pressed on toward the rendezvous.
21
OVER THE WALL
Eventually they arrived at the small clearing which Fox had discovered for their rendezvous, not far from the palisade which divided the swamp from the ship-yard.
As Arabella and the captain had been among the last to leave the theatre, and as they had been delayed several times on the way, she expected to find most of the people here already. But the group of fatigued, mud-spattered airmen that she beheld in the clearing numbered no more than forty-five—forty-five out of over a hundred who had presented and attended the performance, and very few of them officers. Stross was here, as was Liddon, but Richardson was among the missing—he was reported to have been shot in the head before even leaving the theatre.
The loss of Richardson saddened Arabella to a degree surprising to her. He had proven himself worthless as a commander when Captain Singh had lain unconscious after Diana’s battle with French corsairs on the way to Mars, but he had never had any thing but the best of intentions. She wondered now what he might have made of himself had he lived.
Diana’s usual complement was over sixty. Forty-five might be sufficient to launch and fly her—but how many to fight her, if it came to that? And how many more would they lose in recapturing her?
Captain Singh waded into the ragged crowd of men, leaving Arabella momentarily alone. She sank wearily down onto a muddy rock, panting from exhaustion and heedless of the filth which soiled her breeches—though glad, yet again, that it was breeches she was wearing and not a dress. More than once in her headlong flight through the swamp she had dodged through brambles or thorny vines, which would surely have caught her up if she had been dressed conventionally.
Stross, she saw, was doing his best to marshal the mixed group of Dianas and Touchstones into some kind of order, and distributing the rifles, boarding-axes, and other supplies as men arrived with duffels. Brindle, too, had arrived ahead of them, as had little Watson … his arm in a sling and his face wet with tears. Arabella roused herself from her rock and went to him.
“Oh, Mrs. Singh!” Watson gasped as she approached. “I am so very, very sorry!” His sling, she saw, had been quickly assembled from torn fragments of his costume—the very costume which had tripped him. Arabella imagined that tearing it to bits must have been quite satisfying.
“Do not apologize, sir. We have come this far; all will be well.”
“Oh, no, ma’am!” he cried, tears gushing anew. “For my collar-bone is broke, and I cannot perform my part in the escape!”
Before she could gain any clarification on this statement, a sudden shout from the other side of the clearing drew her attention. It was Fox, half-carrying a scorched, sodden and prostrate Lady Corey! They were accompanied by Gowse, leading Isambard on a leash, and several other Touchstones. She and Watson dashed over to welcome the new arrivals.
Isambard, she noted, was nearly half again as large as he had been the last time she had seen him.
Arabella took the insensate Lady Corey from Fox’s arms and helped her slide to the ground without injuring herself. Someone pressed a water-skin into Arabella’s hand; she nodded her thanks and encouraged the great lady to sip from it.
Captain Singh, meanwhile, embraced Fox, whose grin was broad and white in his filthy face though his shoulders sagged from exhaustion. “Was it you,” Captain Singh asked, “who produced the explosion?”
“It was Isambard,” Fox replied, gesturing at the creature. “Gowse and I conceived a distraction, in case one should prove necessary; we brought Isambard backstage and encouraged him to fill the space beneath the stage with his gas. When Fouché and his men reappeared, I dashed upstage with my little flint and steel and—” He gave a small gesture with his fingers. “Boom. Perhaps a somewhat larger boom than we had anticipated.”
“A very effective plan, sir, in any case, and I am very glad to see you … and Isambard.”
“And I you. Did the dress arrive intact?”
Captain Singh glanced at the confused Arabella, and at the duffel which still rode on her shoulder. “It did, but there is a complication … Watson has broken his collar-bone.”
Fox and Singh looked at each other for a moment, then both turned to Arabella. Their gazes were intense, and combined concern, fear, doubt, and desperation.
“Sirs?” she queried, worried and uncertain. “What is the matter?”
The two captains exchanged another glance; then Captain Singh bent down to where Arabella knelt with the half-conscious Lady Corey. “Watson—and Isambard—had been a key element of the next stage of our escape. But with a broken collar-bone he cannot perform his part.” He stopped and looked down for a moment, then returned his gaze to her face. “None of us had wanted to ask this of you, but now we must. Will you take a great risk for the sake of our escape?”
“Any thing,” Arabella replied, though her heart pounded and her hands, despite the oppressive heat of the evening, suddenly felt chill. “Any thing at all.”
“Very well. Here is what you must do.…”
* * *
The duffel-bag which Arabella had carried through the swamp proved to contain her own Venusian silk dress, along with Lady Corey’s stained one. They had been carefully picked apart and reassembled with tight, delicate stitches into a new shape: a teardrop-shaped balloon envelope, about twelve feet across. This was enclosed by a net of silken ropes, which converged on a harness like the one from which Arabella had been suspended during the falling-line ceremony on her departure from Earth so many months ago. The whole assemblage formed a balloon for one person—a vessel of extremely low tonnage. And Arabella, despite her height and the muscle she had gained from pedaling, weighed far less than any of the other airmen or officers who had reached the rendezvous.
Arabella now stood tethered to the balloon, which swelled gradually behind her. Gowse was engaged in tickling Isambard, encouraging him to produce his gas, which Stross was shepherding into the envelope through what had once been the sleeve of Arabella’s dress. The process was made far more difficult by the necessity of utter silence and darkness, for fear of attracting French attention.
Above them, at a remove of some hundred yards, loomed the palisade marking the edge of the ship-yard. This sturdy wall of wood, some fourteen feet in height and topped with pointed stakes, stretched the entire width of the neck of the peninsula upon which the ship-yard was located, and had but a single door in it. Guards, carrying lanterns, paced the wall’s top.
“Your weight will be greatly reduced,” Captain Singh whispered to her as he looped a coil of rope over her shoulder, “but not canceled completely. You will need to jump as hard as you can in order to achieve the top of the wall. Watson, with practice, was able to reach fifteen feet in this gravity, but he weighs somewhat less than you.”
“I will do my best,” she said. Her teeth chattered as she spoke; she clenched them together again. She would not show fear.
“Above all else, you must take care to keep the balloon away from the guards’ lanterns. Hydrogen, as you know, is highly inflammable.”
“I am keenly aware of that.” Her hair and clothing still stank of smoke from the explosion which had scattered Fouché’s men.
Arabella felt a tug on the ropes which connected her to the swelling balloon. She looked over her shoulder and saw that three men were now required to hold it down. “Not much longer,” said Stross. Captain Singh went to help him manage the ungainly thing.
Fox approached her then, holding a boarding-axe more than two feet long, whose wickedly sharp blade was balanced with an equally cruel spike. “Do not hesitate to use this,” he said, pressing it into her hands.
Perhaps Fox misjudged her expression of hesitation—despite her several hand-to-hand fights, firing of cannon, and too much experience having pistols aimed at her, she had never directly attacked another person with any sort of weapon—for cowardice, for he suddenly grabbed her shoulders and gave her a firm, encouraging kiss on the lips. “Good luck,” he whispered, and before she could recover from her shock he vanished away into the dark.
Surely her pounding heart, her tingling lips, and the burning flush she felt upon her face were the result of anxiety over the coming action. Surely.
Captain Singh returned then. “The balloon is as full of gas as we can make it. We will give you a push in the necessary direction, but you must thrust with your legs as hard as you can, and you may need to swing yourself to one side or the other to avoid the guards. Are you ready?”
She was not in the least ready. “Yes.”
“Cheerly now…” Captain Singh whispered harshly to the men holding the balloon, while he, Stross, and Fox all laid hands—quite firmly and improperly—on Arabella’s breeches-clad legs and bottom. “Make ready.… Shove off!”
The balloon snapped upward, jerking Arabella’s harness sharply, while the men holding her lower limbs pushed her up and forward. She met their thrust with a firm shove of her legs … and in a moment she was sailing upward!
Her passage into the air was as unlike the stately ascent of an airship as could be imagined. The balloon wobbled above her like an undercooked pudding, and she swung wildly forward, then back as she ascended. It was all she could do to retain her hold upon the boarding-axe.
The top of the wall, with its pointed stakes reaching upward like claws, loomed closer and closer. Vicious though those spikes appeared, she feared that her trajectory, which in its swaying, irregular fashion was beginning to curve into a parabola under the inexorable assault of Venus’s gravity, might terminate below them. Gripping the axe in her left hand, she pulled herself upward with her right, hauling on the balloon’s silken ropes with all her strength. It did only a little good.
The wall drifted closer. The guards, fortunately, did not seem to have yet noticed her silent, unprecedented aerial approach … but that would avail her little if she did not achieve the wall’s top.
She was now about four feet from the wall. The palisade’s rough, unpeeled logs hovered before her at eye level … then began to slip slowly upward. She was drifting down!
Acting almost without thinking, she pulled hard on the balloon ropes with her right hand while swinging out with the axe in her left. A most unladylike grunt of effort escaped her lips, but the axe’s spike bit deeply into the wall!
The sound of her exertion and the thunk of the axe immediately brought cries of alarm in French, and the sound of boots pounding on wood.
Abandoning her hold on the balloon ropes, Arabella hauled herself up with both hands on the axe handle. That effort, combined with the balloon’s lifting force, propelled her rapidly upward—so rapidly, indeed, that the axe, firmly embedded in the wood, was pulled from her hands as she ascended! A moment later she found herself staring into the astonished eyes of two French soldiers, who looked at her with utter bafflement as she rose befo
re them like some unprecedented moon.
Arabella pulled with both hands on the ropes, brought her knees up to her chest, and kicked both of them in the face.
With a strangled cry of “Merde!” they went over the low railing behind them, plummeting twelve feet or more to the dirt below. But other guards were already dashing toward her, as she sailed in a gentle arc over the top of the wall. It looked to be a near thing whether they would reach her before she could drift past their reach.
There was nothing she could do to move any faster. And as for striking back, she had lost the axe.
Up, up, she sailed, over the wall and its walkway, then began to drift downward—already her feet were only six feet from the ground within the palisade. Shouting to each other in French, the guards converged on her position. One of them held his lantern high.
Too high.
“No!” Arabella cried, but it was too late. The lantern’s flickering flame seemed to reach out to the gas leaking from her balloon envelope.
With an enormous flash and a brief sudden blast of heat and noise, the balloon exploded, leaving a shocked Arabella to plummet to the earth. But the fluttering, flaming fragments of her Venusian silk dress slowed her passage somewhat, and the ground was soft. Though she struck hard, she did not feel any thing break. The guards nearby seemed as stunned as she.
Shaking her ringing head and struggling free of the harness, she ducked out from beneath the falling shreds of smoldering fabric and ran at the best speed her wobbling legs could manage toward the gate in the wall. Shouts in French sounded behind her, far too close.
The door was shut with a bar. She slammed into the wall beside it, put her shoulder under the bar, and pushed upward with her legs.
Immediately the door erupted inward, admitting a mob of shrieking English airmen armed with pistols, cudgels, axes, and the righteous anger of men long imprisoned. “For the King!” cried Gowse, in the lead, and fired first one pistol and then another with deadly effect.
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 29
