As she began to understand what Aadim had come up with, her eyes widened. But her busy pencil did not hesitate.
* * *
“This is an … unprecedented course,” Captain Singh said as he read over the figures on the plank.
“That is, as you may recall, what you requested.”
“I did. Still … to dive so deeply into Venus’s planetary atmosphere, especially when we have just worked so hard to escape it, seems a very great risk indeed.”
Arabella glanced up at the great turbid ball of Venus, shielding her eyes from the Sun beyond. Unaccustomed though she was to the Sun’s glare, it was still a great relief to see his face unshrouded by clouds. And though his light struck her skin with exceptional heat, it was at least a dry heat.
“I have compared this course with our maps of the planet,” she said, “and it does make a certain amount of sense. There is a large rocky area near the equator, corresponding with the location of this instruction here.” She tapped an indication of a quite dramatic course change, conducted at a frighteningly low altitude. “The area may be very hot, even by Venusian standards, and rising air currents there could be sufficient to push us quickly into a much higher orbit. From which we can perhaps achieve the de Ruyter Current, which will bear us swiftly to Xanthus.”
“May be,” the captain repeated. “Might be. Perhaps.”
Arabella shrugged and pointed aft, where four French ships were plainly visible to the eye; a half-dozen more were concealed by the scudding clouds of the planet’s Horn, and all were drawing nearer hour by hour. “If we continue on our present course, or indeed any predictable course, the French will overtake us.”
Captain Singh said nothing, merely stroking his chin as he stared at the peculiar figures upon the plank. Finally he firmed up his jaw, raised his head, and called, “All hands about ship!”
* * *
Among the chaotic, tempestuous winds of Venus’s Horn they soon found a current which carried them swiftly southward, at a sharp angle to their original course, and into an orbit which would bring them above the rocky desert labeled ULUUMNA on the map. But their French pursuers, observing the maneuver, were able to catch the same wind, cutting the corner of Diana’s course and drawing still nearer.
Captain Singh employed every bit of his skills in navigation and command to increase the distance between Diana and the French. The course provided by Aadim, with its numerous unexpected twists and turns, proved helpful, but the winds of the Horn were, as always, so wild and unpredictable themselves that no course could be any thing more than a guideline.
Fox took on the role of chief mate, in place of the fallen Richardson. Though it seemed to Arabella that he rankled somewhat at the diminution in authority, he seemed content enough for now. He was also favoring his bandaged left arm, but never uttered a word of complaint.
Stross, as always, was a capable and decisive sailing-master, and quickly sorted out the surviving men into divisions; Faunt, Higgs, Gowse, and the other captains of divisions soon got their people organized. But the many months of imprisonment, the chase through the swamp, and the ferocious violence of the launch had taken a heavy toll.
“We have no alternative,” Stross sighed to Arabella and Mills. “We must employ some of the Venusians.” Clearly the prospect brought him no joy.
They stood on the quarterdeck, their stained and ragged clothing fluttering in the artificial wind of the whirring pulsers. Their weight, having fallen to less than half its Venusian value at the height of their escape, was now beginning to return as they drew nearer the planet they had just departed. “They are strong and willing,” Mills said. “In ship-yard, work together. Haul and lift and place. They will serve well.”
“They have done well at the pedals, so far,” Stross acknowledged with little grace. “But we have no common language! Can we get our point across as to what they must do, in the midst of maneuvers … or even battle?”
Mills said simply, “Yes,” then glanced to Arabella.
Arabella swallowed. “I believe so,” she said, trying to project a confidence she did not feel, “with Mills’s help.”
Stross was obviously not reassured, but he nodded. “Very well. I will put most of them in the waist—they can do the least damage there—and distribute the rest among the main-top and after-sails where we can keep an eye on them.”
Arabella met Stross’s eye. “I am sure they will acquit themselves well, sir. Even I managed not to make a hash of it, when I served in the waist.”
“I certainly hope so. I am seconding you to Faunt, as interpreter for the Venusians in the waist.” Arabella gulped, but Stross seemed not to notice—or deliberately ignored it—and turned to Mills. “You’ll be captain of the main-top. I shall do my best with the after-guard. Now look alive!”
“Aye aye, sir,” they replied automatically, saluted, and departed the quarterdeck.
“You will serve well,” Mills said to Arabella as they descended the ladder, their steps high and drifting in the diminished gravity.
“Thank you,” Arabella replied, grateful for the reassurance … but still not reassured.
* * *
In the next few hours Arabella, Faunt, and the Venusians—whose wide, shining eyes made them look rather startled even when they did know the command that had just been issued—somehow managed to work out a vocabulary of mutually intelligible phrases covering the most common actions: go there, haul on that, make that line fast, for Christ’s sake stop whatever you’re doing this instant. One English phrase the Venusians had no trouble with was “aye aye”—its vowels suited their tongues well, and they seemed to take pleasure in the very utterance of it. Unfortunately, it sometimes meant “I have no idea what you just said, sir.”
While they drilled and trained, the cloudy ball of Venus drew nearer and nearer, growing from a huge mottled globe to a roiling curved plain. Even as it did, though the men and Venusians at the pedals worked themselves to exhaustion, the pursuing French continued to narrow the distance between them. Arabella felt as though Diana were about to be crushed between the two.
The clouds below grew still closer, gaining definition, turning from a hazy mass to a heaving, mountainous cloudscape. Then the ship slipped beneath the cloud-tops. Soon she was completely embedded in seething gray blankness, the French ships vanishing from view. The sudden dampness of the air struck Arabella like the slap of a hot wet towel in the face.
Suddenly, and far earlier than Arabella had expected or felt prepared for, Fox began to bellow a barrage of commands from the quarterdeck. “‘Vast pulsers! Heave to!” he cried, and the captains of the divisions, including Faunt, quickly translated this into specific commands to haul on lines, set sails, and so forth to retard the ship’s forward progress. This was swiftly followed by “Strike the jib!” and “Brace all up on a larboard tack!”
Slowly, majestically, the ship yawed one hundred and eighty degrees, swinging about until she was sailing pulsers-first, the hot foggy breeze now coming from abaft. The sensation was remarkably disorienting, and Arabella hoped the French would be equally disoriented by this maneuver—one which Aadim had apparently devised himself. It certainly did not match any thing she recalled from the sailing manuals she had studied.
“I don’t like this,” Faunt muttered through clenched teeth. “Feels like we’re falling into our own grave.”
“I have confidence in Aadim’s course,” Arabella replied, though in truth she had her misgivings. Still, what they had seen so far showed that Aadim seemed to understand the ship’s new capabilities; this maneuver, in which they returned immediately to the planet they had just left only to depart again, would not even have been possible without hydrogen. A coal-fired ship would never have been able to re-inflate her balloons for a maneuver such as this without expending the coal needed for a safe landing at the end of the voyage. But, with the Venusians’ help, they had drawn the lifting gas back into its tanks upon achieving the Horn, and used the same gas a second t
ime for their current descent; they would use it again, for a third time, if they reached Earth.
When they reached Earth, she corrected herself.
Suddenly they fell below the clouds. The landscape revealed below was gray and black and lifeless, a broad rocky desert, and a blast of furnace-hot air immediately struck the ship. Diana shuddered and rocked as though held in some ancient’s trembling hand.
“Idlers and waisters aft!” Fox called. “Set all sails!”
At once Arabella, Faunt, and every other hand not directly involved in the management of the sails rushed to the quarterdeck, crowding against the taffrail in an overheated, gasping mob. The ship pitched back; the rising air from the baking rocks below filled her sails; and she leapt forward, up, and back into the clouds in a great rush that pressed Arabella, the Venusians, and all the others together most uncomfortably.
A moment later they burst out of the clouds again … and nearly collided with a descending French warship! Arabella had a glimpse of the French airmen’s startled faces as they flew past, but it was over in a moment; in any case, Fox’s and Faunt’s bellowed commands sent her and her Venusian comrades scrambling back to the waist, to help set the sails and catch the winds of the Horn to make good their escape.
* * *
Days passed. Endless days—literally endless, in that the sun never set—of pedaling, pedaling, pedaling, with little to eat, less to drink, and only the occasional snatch of sleep. And always the French drew nearer.
They had lost many of the pursuers with their dramatic maneuver over the Uluumna desert; some of them, Fox claimed, had surely smashed to flinders on the surface, while others had simply fallen behind. But four still followed, their pulsers turning with steady persistence. Diana was the Mars Company’s swiftest ship, and lightly loaded, but her people were battered and weary; the French warships were fully crewed with rested, well-fed airmen, and in a duel of pedals they must, inevitably, win. Diana’s only hope—a hope which seemed slimmer by the day—was to reach English-held Xanthus before the French intercepted her.
Water was their most critical lack. Their stolen ship had not, of course, been provisioned for a long voyage, and for water they had only what small amount the Venusians had brought with them. So they were on short rations, and in the dry heat of the interplanetary atmosphere—the dry heat which had been so very welcome after months on Venus’s muggy surface—every one was parched and irritable.
Arabella still wore her tattered, bloodstained “Cesario” breeches, though she had found a better shirt in the small collection of clothing the escapees had brought with them. The dress from her satchel she had given to Withers to make into bandages.
“I am sorry to interrupt your sleep,” Captain Singh called up to her one day, “but your services as translator are required.” She blinked and pushed herself away from the dark nook between the bulkhead and the deck above where she slept, drifting down toward the captain in a state of free descent.
There were no watches—each member of the crew simply worked until they could work no more, then slept until they were required to work again—and, lacking hammocks, every one was compelled to find a place to sleep wherever they could. In Arabella’s case, that was a corner of the great cabin, one that was out of the way when the captain required the cabin for navigation or for meetings with his staff. She had no difficulty sleeping through any conversation; indeed, she felt she could sleep through a full-blown aerial battle.
Still blinking and rubbing sleep from her dry eyes, Arabella pushed off the aft bulkhead of the upper deck and sailed with Captain Singh along its echoing length. The space was empty of cargo, though gently snoring bodies occupied most of the corners.
They came to the gun deck, undogged the hatch, and slipped within. Fox, Mills, and Ulungugga floated there. “Sorry to wake you, Mrs. Singh,” Mills said. “The science is beyond me.”
The gun deck was vastly larger now than it had been when Arabella had served as powder-monkey. Where before it had held three four-pounder cannon, the space was now crowded with twelve eight-pounders—three groups of four, fresh-cast, still shining and smelling of hot brass. Each cannon, Mills pointed out, was connected by a flexible lead pipe to a small cylindrical device perforated with holes; there was one such for each group of four. This was the item for which her translation services were required.
Between Ulungugga’s understanding of the devices, Mills’s superior command of the Wagala language, the captain’s scientific knowledge, and Arabella’s attempts to put the others together they managed to come to a mutual comprehension of their function: they were fire-safes—or so she translated from Ulungugga’s pronunciation of what she believed was a French term—designed to replace the function of the slow-matches which other ships kept burning for the ignition of the cannon during battle. These devices, apparently invented by Fulton, were intended to provide a source of ignition to the cannon without risking a hydrogen explosion.
“But surely,” Arabella said when she understood this, “the detonation of the cannon itself is an even greater danger?” She knew from experience that each cannon shot resulted in a great lance of fire and smoke being expelled from the gun’s muzzle along with the projectile.
The guns, Ulungugga explained, were only to be fired while the pulsers were in use; their rushing wind would draw any stray hydrogen aft and away from the guns. The fire-safes were intended to prevent explosion while the ship was not under way.
At least, she gathered, that was the theory. Diana and Victoire were among the first to be equipped with this device—Arabella realized that Napoleon must be furious that the honor of this invention’s debut had been stolen from his wonderful secret weapon by a ragged mob of English prisoners-of-war—and their weapons had never yet been fired in anger.
“So,” Fox said, “if we fire at the French, we run the very real risk of blowing ourselves up in the process.”
“So it seems,” said Arabella. “However, I gather that the French ships—lacking the benefit of this new device, and having to make do with slow-match—are even more likely to explode.”
“This may explain,” Fox mused, “why they have not even lobbed any ranging shots in our direction.”
Captain Singh straightened in the air and clasped his hands behind his back. “Still, we must make a decision. If it were to come to battle, would we fight, or would we surrender?”
“Fight,” said Fox immediately, and Mills and Arabella echoed him without hesitation. Ulungugga merely blinked, uncomprehending.
“And if we fought without practicing first, would we win?”
They were all stunned into silence by the implications.
“Exactly,” the captain said after the silence had gone on long enough. “Mr. Fox, select your gun crews and begin drill at your earliest convenience.”
Fox’s eyes widened, but he touched his forehead and said, “Aye aye, sir.”
* * *
But in order to exercise the guns, they had no choice but to take some men from the pedals, and as they prepared for the first round of drill the French gained still more quickly. Arabella, serving once again as powder-monkey, peered glumly through the gun-port at the air ahead. Xanthus was still invisible somewhere in the distance.
It seemed more and more likely they would have no choice but to turn and fight. Four ships of the line full of well-fed, well-rested, well-trained Frenchmen against one refitted Marsman whose crew was ragged, exhausted, thirsty, and barely practiced. But they owed it to the King, and their own pride and dignity, to make the attempt.
They had only enough crew to man three guns, one in each group of four. Each gun crew was half human and half Venusian. The Venusians, who had installed the guns, took to the handling of them quite quickly, and proved strong and able in their initial practice of running them in and out in dumb-show. But now the crews would fire the guns in earnest for the first time … and they would learn whether or not there were any substantial hydrogen leaks nearby.
Now came the moment of truth. All three guns were loaded and ready.
Arabella covered her ears, as did every one else—the Venusians, lacking visible external ears, held their hands much further back on their heads than she had expected.
Fox looked them all over, hesitated a long moment, then called “Fire!”
Gowse and the other two gun-captains pressed the firing-studs on their fire-safes.
The bang which followed was so great that Arabella feared the hydrogen had exploded. But it was merely unfamiliarity, after so many months away, and the fact that even three eight-pounders were so much greater in force than the four-pounders Diana had formerly carried. She could not imagine the sound which would result from all twelve guns firing simultaneously.
Fox leaned into the gun-port, shading his eyes, and Arabella leapt to another and likewise peered through the sulfurous smoke. Two of the barrels soon flew into splinters; the third shot missed, but it was still a promising start.
The gun crews gave a ragged, coughing cheer. But amidst the cheering and the ringing of her ears, Arabella thought she heard another sound. Others did as well, and the cheers quickly stuttered to a halt.
There it came again: a distant, echoing boom.
Were the French firing at them? Had they come so close already? Was this, suddenly, to be Diana’s last stand?
But no: the boom came again, this time distinctly from ahead.
Arabella looked to Fox, who peered intently forward, waving his hat in frustration at the smoke which clouded his view. But then came a cry from without: it was Watson, stationed as look-out at the bowsprit-head: “Sail ho!” he called in his high, carrying voice. “Thirty … no, thirty-three sail of ship!”
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 32
