The English fleet drove forward along with them, two parallel planes of mighty ships in a precise square arrangement. Their great speed was made visible by the whirling blur of their pulsers and the way the pennants at their mast-heads streamed out behind. Unlike their previous formation, though, this time the ships were aligned with their keels and mainmasts in the plane, “nose to tail” as Stross had said, and Arabella realized how important Diana’s role in repeating signals would be, for the fleet’s own sails and pulsers blocked their view to fore and aft.
Soon the French ships could be made out with the naked eye, six-masted first-rates most of them, each carrying eighteen great guns or more. Their hexagonal formation stretched across the sky now, too big for the eye to take in all at once. And there, in the very center … Victoire.
There was no mistaking the armored ship as any thing else. She gleamed all over, bright silver rather than copper and wood, and she loomed broader of beam and deeper of keel than any other ship in the fleet. During a break in the action Arabella borrowed a glass and saw with her own eyes the twenty-four gaping gun-ports arranged about her figurehead, which appeared to her to be a figure of Napoleon himself, costumed as a Roman emperor and holding aloft a scepter. The iron-clad prow beneath that figurehead, sharp and shining, cleaved the air like an axe-blade. And amidships, four round turrets like the towers of a castle housed her swivel-guns—each one larger than Diana’s original three cannon!
Suddenly a distant bang of cannon rang out from Arabella’s left, and she scanned her glass in that direction to see smoke rolling from one of the French ships. This was followed by another and another, and she tensed, awaiting an incoming ball. But though long minutes passed, not even the whine of a ball sailing by reached Arabella’s ears. “They’re wasting their powder,” Faunt muttered. “We’re too far, moving too fast, for them to hit.”
Signal-flags flashed out upon the flagship’s mainmast then, and as Midgeley repeated the signal, Fox called, “Ease off pulsers two points!” The rest of the fleet, too, was slowing, as men moved from the pulsers to the gun decks in preparation for battle. Soon the ships began to pitch and yaw as well, each turning to the side, up, or down even as they retained their formation and continued to drive toward the enemy. Very soon, Arabella was certain, Nelson would give the signal to open fire and the French would begin to fall.
But Victoire was the first to speak.
Two dozen great lances of flame shot all at once from her gun-ports, followed by plumes of smoke. A moment later came the boom, loud even across this great distance, ringing low and deep like a giant banging on a huge iron box. And a moment after that … a splintering crash, and screaming, from closer by as the twenty-four ten-pound balls slammed into one of the English ships—Tonnant, she thought it was. The damaged ship’s fast-whirling pulsers stuttered and slowed then, and two of her masts began to drift crazily askew. Soon she had fallen behind, tumbling out of control as the rest of the fleet continued to drive forward at nearly their maximum speed.
“Lucky shot,” Faunt said through gritted teeth. Fox then called a command, causing Faunt to order “Slack halyard! Haul braces and sheets!”
Arabella was soon too busy with translating, and hauling on her own lines, to pay much attention to the battle. But every time she could spare a moment to look up, she saw death and destruction.
The English fleet was firing now, rapidly and in excellent unison, and the French ships were taking significant damage. One French ship exploded in an enormous sphere of flame—its pale color and the rapidity of its growth reminded her of the death of her own little balloon, and she knew the ship’s hydrogen stores had gone up. But for every English ball that struck a French ship, two or three of Victoire’s found their targets in English wood and flesh. The sounds of shattering khoresh-wood and the hoarse screams of wounded airmen filled the air all around.
Plainly Napoleon had put his very best gunners aboard Victoire. Every single broadside seemed to do serious damage to the English fleet, and her powerful swivel-guns proved deadly, picking off English pulsers and mainmasts in every direction. She also moved far more nimbly than she had any right to; clearly Fulton’s improved propulsive sails and other innovations more than made up for her great weight.
Victoire herself, though she was the target of many an English broadside, sailed placidly through the hail of cannon-balls; they glanced off her armored sides as harmlessly as a sand-storm off a shtokara’s thick shell. As near as Arabella could tell, the French flagship had taken no damage whatsoever, despite Nelson’s concentration of fire upon her. And every English ship that tried to get behind her, to her vulnerable stern, was swiftly disabled by her rapacious swivel-guns.
Nelson’s strategy had succeeded—it had separated the French flagship from the support of her flanks. But it had not accounted for the deadliness of Victoire herself.
“Signal from the flagship!” Midgeley called from the mainmast head. “Engage the enemy more closely!”
“Repeat that signal!” Captain Singh called back, then ordered Fox to comply.
Diana, of course, did not engage the enemy directly, nor was she attacked; she enjoyed a frigate’s immunity, so long as she did not herself fire upon the French. But as the English ships moved in close, hammering the French with their great guns and being hammered in turn, Diana too found herself in the thick of the battle: repeating signals through the smoke, reporting her own observations to the flagship, and occasionally even towing a disabled ship, whose pulsers or masts had been shot away, out of immediate danger. Aadim’s help, Arabella knew, was invaluable to Captain Singh in maneuvering through the chaos.
Smoke swirled everywhere, sometimes reducing visibility to just a few cables’ length, and every thing stank of gunpowder and char and blood. The boom of great guns, shrieks of cannon-balls through the air, crash of shattered wood, and moans of injured men came from every direction, English and French mixed indistinguishably together. Two or three balls even struck Diana, sailing in without warning from out of the smoke, but these were plainly not deliberate and had come from some distance away; the blows were glancing and did little damage.
Suddenly Fox shouted out a series of unexpected commands, bringing Diana hard about and calling all available hands to the pedals. Arabella was immediately swamped with Faunt’s orders, raising and lowering sails and canting yards to accomplish the course change with great haste. Clearly something significant had happened, but what?
A moment later the answer began to come clear, as a rapid series of cannon blasts sounded from the smoke in front of them, accompanied by flashes of flame. From the sound and what little she could see, it seemed to Arabella that two great ships must be pounding each other severely, shot after shot slamming in both directions, at close range, with relentless, disordered haste.
Then, as they drew nearer the melee, a gust of wind blew the smoke clear for a moment, and Arabella saw that the two combatants were very great ships indeed: Victoire to sunward, and Bucephalus to skyward. They stood very close, their figureheads practically touching, both ships’ great guns and swivel-guns and stern-chasers flashing with fiendish rapidity, hammering each other with hot metal.
It was a horrific and amazing sight.
The noise alone seemed sufficient to kill, and the stench of powder and blood was inescapable.
And Bucephalus was losing. Losing very badly.
Her pulsers were a wreck, completely incapable of turning. Three of her six masts had been shot away completely, and two of the others were shattered. Her sails were in tatters, her deck torn to splinters, and so much blood hung in the air that in places it seemed a red fog. Yet, gamely, she fought on, firing every remaining gun again and again and again.
Victoire, for her part, seemed nearly undamaged, with both pulsers still intact and only one mast broken. Her sails were torn, and her armored hull was stained and dented, but by comparison with Nelson’s flagship she was almost completely whole. All four of her mighty swivel-
guns pounded Bucephalus relentlessly.
Bucephalus’s return fire was diminishing, and appeared to have little effect despite the close range. The ships stood nose-to-nose, and the only part of Victoire that was at all vulnerable was the space between her dual pulsers. But the only way to attack that space would be to get behind her, and between the power of her guns and her surprising maneuverability no English ship seemed capable of that.
“Make way!” came a voice from behind Arabella. It was Gowse, gleaming with sweat and eyes red from the smoke—she supposed that she herself must look little better—swinging a weighted line over his head. He let it fly, and it sailed across the space between Diana and Bucephalus, where a man on the quarterdeck caught it and began hauling away. The light line soon pulled across a heavier line, which Bucephalus made fast to her capstan.
“Idlers and waisters to the pulsers!” shouted Fox. “Back pulsers! Smartly, now!”
Arabella, Faunt, and the Venusians immediately scrambled belowdecks, where they sorted themselves into the available seats in a mad rush. Lady Corey was there as well—as her action station was in the cockpit, assisting the Navy surgeon, she was considered an “idler”—but neither of them had any time or breath for conversation, engaged as they all were in pedaling with every ounce of strength to haul the disabled Bucephalus away from Victoire. Diana’s timbers groaned from the strain, but soon Arabella felt the joined ships begin to shift. Arabella grinned fiercely and pedaled still harder. The flagship could yet be saved!
And then there came a crash, and a jerk, and suddenly Diana was tumbling—tumbling backward, away from Bucephalus. Cries of dismay, and more distant cries of triumph, sounded from abovedecks.
“Waisters to action stations!” came Fox’s voice through the scuttle. Arabella, Faunt, and the Venusians returned abovedecks to manage the sails … and saw a horrific sight. Bucephalus hung in the air above, torn quite in two, with men and barrels and coal spilling from both broken ends. The crack of small-arms fire sounded from Victoire’s tops; floating bodies jerked as the bullets struck them.
“Bear a hand, man!” Faunt shouted in her face, and Arabella realized that she had been hanging stupidly in the air, stunned and appalled by the carnage. She shook it off and forced herself to perform her duties.
“Vice-Admiral Collingwood signals from Royal Sovereign,” Midgeley called down to the quarterdeck. “He is taking the flag and requests assistance!”
Arabella looked around. Royal Sovereign was not far away. She had already taken heavy damage; her pulsers still turned, but fitfully, and two masts hung broken. Coal drifted in a black cloud from a great rent in her hull.
Victoire, still appearing nearly undamaged, was turning swiftly to face the new flagship, plainly intending to do to her what she had just done to Bucephalus. But as she turned, Arabella saw that Bucephalus had not died in vain—before the end she had managed to destroy both of the swivel-guns on Victoire’s starboard side. The forward turret had blossomed outward like a huge, grotesque metal flower; the aft one was more intact, but smoke streamed from its ports and it stood silent and unmoving.
But, like Nelson himself, Victoire might have lost an arm or two but she was still fighting. Both pulsers still turned, and she was driving hard toward the Royal Sovereign. Surely she would have no trouble bringing down that already-crippled ship, and once she had done so—having taken both the admiral and the vice-admiral out of action—the battle would surely be lost.
Still, the loss of two gun-turrets might be significant. Begging Faunt’s leave, Arabella rushed aft to report her observation.
“Don’t worry about us, girl!” Faunt called after her. “I’ve picked up a few words of their jabber!”
* * *
When Arabella arrived at the base of the quarterdeck ladder she found a vociferous argument in progress between Captain Singh and Lieutenant Cotterell, the master gunner who had come over to Diana from Nelson’s fleet.
“Victoire will be past us in minutes!” Cotterell was shouting. His face was beet-red. “If we wait until she passes, then strike without warning—all twelve guns, right between her pulsers!—we might destroy her with a single broadside! It is England’s last hope!”
The expression on Captain Singh’s face was thunderous, and Fox’s mien was no less displeased. “We have been treated fairly by the French,” Captain Singh said. “They have respected our frigate’s immunity. For a frigate to strike a ship of the line from behind, without herself first having been fired upon, would be an act without honor. I would never bring discredit upon the Honorable Mars Company—indeed, upon England herself!—with such a despicable, cowardly attack.”
“Perhaps we could open hostilities with a shot across her bow,” Fox offered. “That would make it a fair fight.”
“And a short one!” Cotterell countered. “Once we’ve fired at that monster she’ll be free to shoot back—and she’ll blow us right out of the sky without even pausing!”
“If you please, sirs!” Arabella called up from the waist. “I have some information that may be of use!”
Cotterell, Fox, and Captain Singh all looked down from the quarterdeck. “Of course, Ashby,” Captain Singh said, momentarily forgetting to call her “Mrs. Singh.”
Arabella pushed off of the deck, caught herself on the quarterdeck’s forward rail, and saluted. She quickly reported what she had seen, that Bucephalus had destroyed the swivel-guns on Victoire’s starboard side.
“If we approach her from that side…” Fox said, his eyes brightening.
“She’ll just turn and demolish us with her great guns!” Cotterell interrupted. “You’ve seen how quickly she turns! It’s those d—d pulsers of Fulton’s!”
“Pulsers which Diana shares,” Captain Singh mused. “We may be able to move faster than Victoire expects.”
“Fast enough to get behind her—to her one vulnerable spot—before she destroys us?”
“Perhaps not,” the captain acknowledged after a moment’s thought.
“To strike from behind, without warning, is our last chance!” Cotterell gestured dramatically at Victoire, driving hard toward the crippled Royal Sovereign. “It is now, or never at all!”
Captain Singh did not respond at once, merely tapping his chin in concentration. His face showed that he was weighing three distasteful options: utter defeat, a dishonorable attack, or an honorable attack certain to fail.
If only there were some way to guarantee the success of such an attack … some stratagem, some maneuver …
“If you please, sirs,” Arabella said again, nearly surprising herself.
Cotterell glared at Arabella, plainly not pleased by the interruption, but Captain Singh nodded acquiescence.
“While aboard Touchstone, I built a navigational calculator—a simple clockwork—and with it I worked out a maneuver which I believe may greatly improve our chances in an honorable fight.”
“Who is this girl?” Cotterell sputtered.
“My wife,” Captain Singh said. That shut Cotterell up.
“I do not recall you mentioning any such maneuver before,” Fox commented drily.
“I … I did not share it with you at the time,” Arabella admitted, her gaze dropping to her feet. “I did not wish to be … complicit in privateering. In any case, it proved unnecessary.”
“Describe it,” said Captain Singh.
“It … it is complicated. It involves simultaneous yaw, roll, and back pulsers, but it permits reversing the ship in just a few lengths. If, having opened battle honorably with a shot across Victoire’s bow, we drive in at our best speed along her damaged starboard side, we may be able to use this maneuver to strike at her pulsers before she can strike at us. I have the written sailing orders in my reticule.” Then she realized an important consideration, and her spirits fell. “But they were created for Touchstone, a four-masted ship.” Diana, of course, had only three masts, and many aspects of the maneuver, such as setting two masts’ sails hard a-larboard while simulta
neously sheeting home the other two, could not be executed with three.
Fox glanced at Victoire, which had already drawn nearly abreast of their position. Royal Sovereign hung helpless directly in her path; no other English ships capable of moving under their own power were any where nearby. “Can you convert the orders to three masts in … five minutes?”
“No,” Arabella admitted miserably. Without the help of the long-lost greenwood box, she doubted she could perform the conversion in five hours.
Captain Singh looked directly at her. “Can Aadim?”
Arabella looked back, feeling her jaw sag open. Could Aadim? “Perhaps.”
The captain’s gaze turned upward, to where Victoire gleamed nearly undamaged. “I will move Diana into position for an honorable battle. If you can perform the conversion before Victoire opens fire upon Royal Sovereign, we will use your maneuver. Otherwise we will proceed without it.”
An action which would almost certainly result in Diana’s destruction and England’s defeat. “I understand, sir.”
“Five minutes,” Fox repeated.
“Aye aye, sir,” Arabella said. She saluted, reversed herself in the air, and dove toward the great cabin.
25
ARABELLA’S MANEUVER
The great cabin, when she reached it, was a shambles. One of the cabinets had come open during Diana’s recent violent maneuvers, and papers, pens, and inkwells drifted everywhere. She slammed the cabin door behind herself to prevent any of the objects from escaping and causing havoc in the rest of the ship, then batted her way through them to reach her duffel-bag, which was stuffed in one of the cabin’s upper corners. Flinging the duffel’s contents every which way, she quickly located her battered reticule, and from it extracted a torn, stained, and much-folded paper bearing the sailing-order she had worked out so many months ago aboard Touchstone.
“Aha!” she cried in triumph, then worked her way through the drifting papers to Aadim, who sat ticking quietly and staring straight ahead as always. Quickly she threw open the doors on the front of his cabinet, exposing the full array of levers, dials, and knobs through which he could be directed …
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 35
