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 paused, 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.”
Suddenly an idea occurred to Arabella. “Have these smugglers come directly from Venus?” she asked Thekhla in khoreshte dialect.
Thekhla considered the question. “I believe they must have,” she said, “as many of the materials are found only there.”
“Is the ship of Venusian make?” Arabella continued, quite seriously.
Thekhla’s eye-stalks drew together in puzzlement. “To the best of my knowledge, yes.”
“Do you know how much longer the smuggler will remain on Mars?”
“They tend to come and go quite rapidly and fly by night. They will almost certainly have departed by dawn to-morrow.”
Arabella looked to Fulton, Captain Singh, and Lady Corey, who were looking on with puzzlement. None of them spoke khoreshte dialect, not a word.
Here was an opportunity for Arabella to do something about the resistance’s most pressing problem. But if she translated what Thekhla had just said, and told them what she had in mind to do about it, they would certainly never allow it.
“What are you on about, child?” Lady Corey asked.
“It is a matter of Martian reproduction,” Arabella lied. “When the females go into huthksh, or heat, the males react by—”
“That is quite enough,” Lady Corey interrupted, as Arabella had known she would.
“Let us proceed to the urgent question of finances,” Thekhla said, impatiently, and this Arabella translated without hesitation or prevarication.
But despite the desperate urgency of the financial problem, Arabella translated it with only half her mind. The other half was engaged in planning a foolish and dangerous operation—an operation that might save the resistance, but only if she acted within hours.
She had confidence in her own abilities—perhaps too much so—and she knew that if she opened the question to debate the Council would argue until it was too late. So she would do it herself—alone, without permission, and against all common sense.
She would steal another Isambard.
* * *
Arabella’s plan, as such plans were wont to do, did not proceed exactly as she had at first anticipated. For one thing, her intent to proceed alone, with only a khoreshte pilot to take her to the surface in a pilot-boat, foundered upon the fact that even a half-grown member of Isambard’s species would be far too large for such a light vehicle to lift.
Fortunately, she had many friends in the resistance … friends who were willing to support her even in a most unsupportable enterprise. Mills, whose command of several languages was superior to her own, and her old messmate Taylor, a lean fair-haired veteran of the seagoing Navy who had engaged in many a turn-up on land as well as more formal battles at sea, were happy to lend their skills and strength to her mad idea.
Another was Churath, the captain of the cargo-carrier Kemekhta. Kemekhta was one of just three cargo-carriers the ship-yard had built, and the only one of the three to survive the Battle of Tekhmet. She was a modified khebek with an especially long deck and large cargo door, built for the express purpose of transporting items too large for the ordinary khebek. Churath, Arabella knew, was a smart and ambitious khoreshte warrior who had been disappointed to be assigned such an unwarlike vessel. When Arabella approached Churath with her scheme, the captain was delighted to participate.
One man Arabella dearly wished could have accompanied her on this mission was her dear friend Gowse, whose ability to handle Isambard and other creatures was exceptional. But Gowse, sadly, had been lost along with Fox and the other Touchstones.
The hydrogen for Kemekhta’s descent and ascent would be supplied—just barely—by the small amount of excess gas that could be spared by Diana. This Arabella obtained herself, and in some ways it was the most guilt-inducing part of the whole operation. For not only was she compelled to steal a vital war material from her own husband in the brief darkness of Phobos’s night, but—unlike Kemekhta and, for that matter, herself, she could not return it at the conclusion of her operation. On the other hand, she told herself, if the operation were successful there would be hydrogen to spare.
* * *
The smugglers’ camp lay in the Sukhara desert some days’ journey east of Sor Khoresh; local time there was about three hours later than here. These time calculations had become second nature to Arabella since her arrival at Phobos.
Thus it was that at midnight Phobos time, with Captain Singh fast asleep, Arabella slipped from their bed, collected the bag of clothing she had prepared from its hiding place, and made her way to Kemekhta’s berth.
Arabella finished buttoning her jacket, tugged on her cap, and turned back to Taylor. “How do I look?”
“Disreputable,” he replied.
This was exactly as she had intended. Arabella was now costumed as a man, and quite a disgraceful man at that—exactly the sort of low type to be found consorting with Venusian drug-smugglers at an isolated camp in the sukharate wilderness. Her trousers and jacket were filthy and worn, her cap battered and pulled low to hide her face, and her features were further obscured with a smear of charcoal intended to resemble some days’ growth of beard. Only her shoes might betray her origins as a young woman of quality—the one on her natural foot was half of the selfsame pair of sturdy Mars-made half-boots which had accompanied her to Earth, to Venus, and back, and the other was as close a copy as could be made—but on this point she refused to compromise, as she had seen many times that an ill-fitting shoe could lead to disaster if pursuit or escape were required.
“Thank ye, sir,” Arabella replied in a gruff low voice. “I’ll be making me way to Mars now.”
“Very convincing.” Taylor smiled briefly, then resumed a more serious mien. “We must depart right away.”
“Aye aye, sir,” she growled, touching her cap-brim.
* * *
Kemekhta was, like her khebek siblings, not much of a ship, having only one deck, two masts, and a single balloon envelope. But all the other parts were present, albeit sometimes in truncated form, and her crew of Martians—Captain Churath, her first and second mates, and five aerial sailors—was likewise somewhat abbreviated, but competent, sprightly, and enthusiastic. They all spoke very good English, and they were all very respectful of Arabella. “You are in good hands, ma’am,” said the captain, holding her hand flat above her head as though to shield her eyes from the Sun. This gesture seemed odd, as the Sun was very low in the sky behind her—with Phobos’s rapid pace through the air, it was very close to setting—but then Arabella realized that, given the construction of the Martian head, it was the closest Martian equivalent of a respectful knuckle to the forehead.
Setting off from Phobos was very much unlike launching from a planet’s surface. The gravity being so weak, it was not difficult for the crew to simply shove the ship up from her berth with their hands. This initial push was not sufficient for her to escape Phobos’s gravity, feeble though it was, but it gave her enough momentum that, in just a few minutes, she had drifted far enough away from her dock for the crew to take to the pedals without fear of damaging either the pulsers or any thing upon the Phobian surface. And the khebek’s five-sail pulsers were more than powerful enough to propel the ship to the moon’s escape velocity.
The pedals were right on the main-deck—two rows of five, to accommodate the ship’s usual full complement—and Arabella joined in pedaling along with Taylor, Mills, and the five sailors. The two officers and the captain were sufficient to handle the sails, and soon they were jouncing and jolting along through the rough tumultuous air of Phobos’s little Horn, with Kemekhta’s automaton pilot helping to guide them in their course. It was not long at all before they had left Phobos well behind—or, to be accurate, Phobos left them behind, continuing to hurtle along in its path even as they pedaled and spread sails to shed their orbital velocity for a descent to the Martian surface. This maneuver also meant that when night fell, as it did very shortly after their departure from the dock, they remained within Mars’s shadow thereafter rather than accompanying Phobos to its rendezvous with dawn a few minutes later.
Arabella and the others pedaled furiously, grunting in the dark, while the captain and her mates only muttered quietly to each other as they managed the sails. They were a tight and experienced crew, and furthermore the sort of boisterous, even joyful calls of command and response usually heard aboard a ship of the air might attract unwanted attention. So it was in darkness and near-silence that they fell toward Mars, while gray and rocky Phobos flared into bright visibility above and beyond their course.
For a tense dark hour they pedaled, working hard to bring Kemekhta into an orbit that intersected the surface near the smugglers’ port, and hoping to evade the English patrols which were a far-too-common danger. The Navy, even with the addition of the Ceres fleet, was not numerous, but Phobos’s location was no secret; even under the cover of darkness an encounter with an English ship was a strong possibility. Thanks to the khebeks’ maneuverability and the automaton pilots, the Martians escaped these encounters unscathed more often than not, but this outcome was far from guaranteed. But, by good fortune, they met no other ships before the word came down the line, passed quietly from mouth to ear to mouth to ear: “Raise the envelope!”
Mills and Taylor continued pedaling, to give the ship some steerage-way—theirs were the strongest legs in the crew, and they had no experience with the particular requirements of khebek-handling—while Arabella assisted in unpacking, unfurling, and rigging the ship’s single balloon. This task was not easy in darkness, but the Martians knew their work, and once the envelope was properly spread out and positioned within its net of fine silk ropes, the captain turned the gas-cock and, with a hiss, the invisible, irreplaceable stuff swiftly turned the loose flapping circle of silk into a sphere. Almost immediately Arabella felt her weight return—the ship was no longer freely falling toward the surface, but buoyed up by her balloon—but though they had long since departed Phobos’s little Horn they were still in the lower reaches of Mars’s Horn, and she and the others must perforce return to the pedals, lest the ship be blown far off course by its strong and mercurial winds.
Eventually, though, Kemekhta drifted below the Horn and into the calmer, more predictable currents of the true planetary atmosphere. “’Vast pedaling,” the captain said, to Arabella’s great relief, and she and the other pedalers left the ship to drift in the current under balloon and sails alone. The danger of pursuit was much less, now; the velocities of the planetary breezes being so much smaller than those of the Horn or of the interplanetary atmosphere, if any ship should come into view they would have many hours to evade it.
Arabella, Mills, and Taylor lay panting on deck while the Martians put the ship in proper order for low-atmosphere navigation. “I do not believe,” Arabella said when she had recovered her breath, “that I have worked so hard since Venus.”
“That’s the worst of it behind us, though,” said Taylor. His eyes glimmered in the dark, reflecting the wan light of the stars and tiny Deimos. “All we need do now is find that creature, herd it aboard, and let the balloon carry us back up.”
Arabella and Mills exchanged a look—there would certainly be much more pedaling in their future, not to mention many other difficult and dangerous tasks—but Taylor seemed sincere. “You are not concerned about the mission?” she asked him.
“Nah,” he replied, drawing a snuff-box from his pocket and taking a pinch, followed by a stentorian sneeze. He offered the box to Arabella and Mills, who declined; he did not bother offering it to the Martians. “Handling a beast like Isambard is easy; all ye need do is tickle ’im just so and he’ll do whatever ye require. And as for them smugglers, well…” He cracked his knuckles. “’Tis much the same. They require a harder touch, is all.”
“I admire your confidence, sir,” Arabella said with a smile.
Taylor lay back upon the hard bench, hands clasped behind his head and elbows akimbo. “Just leave it to old Taylor,” he said, and promptly fell asleep.
Arabella, too, tried to sleep—there would be little enough opportunity for that once they landed—but though the night was dark and the ship rocked easily in the gentle current, sleep would not come.
* * *
“Landfall,” said Mills, and Arabella’s eyes blinked open. Somehow she must have slept, though she did not recall having fallen asleep.
Kemekhta now drifted very low over rolling dunes, gray in the starlight. No structures were visible, indeed no sign of life at all; the only sounds were the slight creak of the rigging and the hiss of the wind-driven sand below. Arabella joined Mills, Taylor, and three of the Martians at the pedals, bringing the ship to a halt, while the captain worked a hand-pump to draw the hydrogen out of the balloon and the rest of the crew threw out sand-anchors and hauled her down to the surface. Soon the ship’s keel met sand with a soft crunch and she settled gingerly into a protected cove in the lee of a large dune, the still partially inflated balloon gently wobbling in the breeze above.
“Dawn is about three hours from now,” the captain said. “We will await you here until one hour after dawn.” They all understood that once the Sun was well up the chance of the ship being discovered by the smugglers was too great to be risked. “You have the signal rocket?”
“Aye aye.” Arabella patted the satchel slung over one shoulder. Its contents included a fire-work whose bright blue flare would summon Kemekhta to their location—if she happened to spot it, and if her situation permitted it. Use of the signal rocket was a last resort and its success was not to be relied upon.
“Very well, then. Good luck.” The captain gave another of those peculiar salutes. It seemed very apropos to the resistance, a combination of English gesture and Martian physiology, and Arabella returned it in kind, holding her hand horizontal at the level of her eyebrows.
* * *
Arabella, Mills, and Taylor set off across the sand, scuffing along through the dark. Almost immediately the habits of Arabella’s youth returned, automatically directing her feet to the more stable sand at the windward base of each dune, and she soon began to outdistance her companions. She went back and pointed out the better path, but even with this advice they still struggled. Part of their problem was that they lacked Arabella’s trained eye—she suspected that even in full daylight they would not be able to spot the subtle indications she could—and part of it was simply their greater weight. But even with her advantages, Arabella was out of practice and not so lithe as she once had been, not to mention that her clockwork foot was not designed for this activity, and she soon found herself slogging along at the same speed as her old messmates.
Following first the sounds of voices and then the smells of breakfast cooking, they eventually reached the smugglers’ camp. Moving cautiously and quietly, they climbed a dune and looked down upon the camp from its summit.
The smugglers’ ship stood on her sand-legs in the midst of the camp, with her mainmast fully rigged and three balloon envelopes already swelling in preparation for a dawn launch. The smugglers themselves—though the ship had come from Venus, they were all human—bustled about purposefully, plainly eager to be on their way. But, critically, the ship’s equivalent of Isambard had not yet been loaded aboard. A huge creature, larger even than Diana’s own Isambard, he lay on his stomach in a pen near the ship, breathing heavily, ignoring the piles of fodder that two of the smugglers shoveled toward him with pitch-forks.
“Him” was the pronoun which Arabella mentally applied to the creature, the same as Diana’s Isambard. And though Ulungugga had used the same masculine pronoun, in Wagala Venusian as well as in English, he had assured Arabella that this would not prove an impediment to the successful mating of the new creature to Isambard. This seemed odd, but as Ulungugga himself had given birth to a fine healthy gaggle of young on the voyage from Venus to Earth, Arabella was prepared to accept his assertion with puzzled equanimity.
Arabella gave careful consideration to the creature as he lay prostrate, his thick black tentacles splayed out across the sand, which appeared gray in the dim light of the smugglers’ lanterns. Mars’s gravity was less than half that of Venus, Arabella knew, but this poor beast would have been cooped up in the ship’s hold all the way from Venus, in a state of free descent without any possibility of healthful exercise. It was no surprise that he could barely move, and had little interest in food, though the smugglers were strongly encouraging him to eat by word and action. Shortly after launch they would require him to produce a large quantity of hydrogen, to make up the gas inevitably lost in inflating the balloons, and before this could occur he must be well fed.
The situation was beneficial to Arabella in that the creature would be more easily absconded with from his pen than he would be from the ship. But the smugglers were paying him the very strictest attention, and would continue to do so up to the moment of launch, and even if she could manage to get the creature away it would be extremely difficult to march him across the desert to where Kemekhta lay waiting.
The two smugglers feeding him, Arabella realized now, were not human like the rest of the crew. They were Venusians, and they were in a very bad way. For one thing, they were naked—Arabella had rarely before seen a naked Venusian, as they had both a very sophisticated sense of fashion and powerful taboos against nakedness. For another, their flesh hung in loose folds—they looked as though they were starving. And, perhaps worst of all, their skin was dry, cracked, and flaking in the Martian desert air. Venusians, accustomed to a very hot and wet climate, suffered terribly in the cold dry Martian air and must be wetted down several times a day. These poor individuals were being horribly abused! Even the creature for which they cared, which did not look particularly healthy, was in better condition than they.
“We require a distraction,” Arabella said to Taylor and Mills as they slipped back down to the base of the dune. “Something which will cause those smugglers to entirely abandon this camp—and their Isambard, and his handlers—and will last long enough that we can summon Kemekhta to this location.”
A long contemplative moment passed, as all three of them considered this seemingly impossible problem. Then the darkness was split by Mills’s broad grin, shining in his dark face in the starlight. “Their lanterns,” he said. “Green. They fear fire.”
“Of course!” Arabella replied. The red sand looked gray because the smugglers’ lanterns were Venusian worm-lights, whose greenish light was dimmer than oil lamps but ran no risk of igniting the highly inflammable hydrogen. Between the Isambard and the slowly inflating balloons, the risk of explosion must be ferocious. “But how shall we make use of this fact?”
Mills thought a moment more before replying. “The gas rises,” he said. “Light at top, burn from top down.”
From that seed a plan quickly grew in Arabella’s mind. The danger was enormous, and the chance of success quite small. But that seemed entirely apropos to this already outlandish expedition. “Very well,” she said to Mills and Taylor, “here is what we shall do…”
* * *
To Arabella’s dismay, the eastern sky was already beginning to lighten as she slipped over a saddle between dunes, sliding down toward the smugglers’ camp as silently as she could. Mills’s eyes blinked down after her for a moment, then quickly vanished; he and Taylor would make their way around to the camp’s windward side and await her signal.
Moving quickly, using every means of stealth that Khema had taught her, Arabella slipped through the night to the dark space between the ship and the Isambard’s pen. The creature now munched contentedly, rapidly diminishing the pile of dry vegetation before him, while the underfed handlers lay sleeping as though dead. Arabella crept to the large silk tube which stretched from the ship to the creature’s lower abdomen, carrying hydrogen from the Isambard to the swelling balloons, and, carefully keeping the tube between herself and the smugglers, moved along it to where it entered a hatch in the ship’s hull. There she cut several large slits in the tube with her pocket-knife. The edges of the slits fluttered in the exhalation of the colorless, odorless gas; they were not so large or so numerous that the tube sagged noticeably, but with luck they would be sufficient to cause the tube to part here once it caught fire.
With luck. She had no way of knowing whether she had cut enough slits, or too many, or even whether such a number existed. But she did the best she could, and once she adjudged her work complete she crept back the way she had come.
But she found her way completely blocked. While she had been busy with her knife, a line of men, extending from a tent pitched at the base of a dune to the ship’s open cargo hatch, had formed across the path she had taken.
With quiet rhythmic grunts the men were passing a series of small caskets from hand to hand. From the sounds they were making and the set of their shoulders as they worked, the caskets—no more than a foot and a half in the longest dimension—must be exceedingly heavy, and there were dozens of them at least.
Trapped between the Isambard’s pen, the ship, and the line of men, Arabella crouched in the sand, hoping against hope that an opening would appear before the rising sun revealed her. Yet the sky in the east was brightening rapidly. She might have only a few minutes of darkness left.
Arabella’s heart hammered so loud in her ears she felt sure it would betray her position. But she held herself absolutely still, moving nothing but her eyes as she sought some opportunity for escape. A simple whistle from her would launch the attack, but for her own safety she dared not make that call until she had put much more distance between herself and the ship.
Alongside the line of laborers, a group of three men—better dressed than the rest, with the bearing of officers and gentlemen—moved with lanterns, following the progress of the caskets. One of them in particular seemed especially keen on making sure that every single casket reached its destination. He paced the first casket in line, drawing nearer and nearer her position.
He moved awkwardly, yet something in his carriage was familiar.
And all at once she realized what she was seeing.
He had but one leg. He walked with a crutch, clumsy in the soft sand.
He was her brother.
“Michael!” she cried. The sound was wrenched involuntarily from her throat.
Michael turned to her, and the shock on his face in the pale light of dawn matched her own feelings. “Arabella!” he said. “What are you doing here?”
So much for my disguise, she thought, and I could ask the same of you. But she did not bother speaking. For one thing she was, with deep regret, certain of the answer, and for another she was busy charging at him, sand chuffing beneath her boots. Without a word she slammed into him, carrying both of them some ten feet beyond the astonished line of working men, and landed heavily atop him on a small hillock.
“How could you?” she shouted in her brother’s face, even as he lay stunned beneath her in the cool sand. “How could you throw in your lot with these villains?”
“Villains?” he replied, catching his breath and shoving her off of himself. “These men are on the King’s business!”
“The King is mad,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “These men serve Lord Reid, and Lord Reid serves only Mammon.”
Michael struggled to rise, but his crutch was of little use in the soft sand. “We all serve Mammon, in one way or another. You yourself came all the way to Mars for the family fortune.”
“I came for you!” she cried, but then a thud behind her caught her attention. She turned toward the sound, then immediately ducked—one of the smugglers had dropped his casket and was leaping toward her. But he was from Venus, and in Mars’s lesser gravity he misjudged his leap; he sailed over her, crashing into Michael and knocking both in a tumbled heap.
Continuing the momentum of her duck, she curled into a ball and rolled away, springing to her feet some distance away. Several other men had dropped their caskets and were charging toward her, teeth bared and arms outstretched.
One of the caskets, she noted, had come open in the fall.
Gold coins spilled from the open lid. Hundreds of them.
Without hesitation she put both her forefingers in her mouth and gave a piercing whistle.
Immediately, with a rushing hiss, a flaring rocket rose from beyond a dune to her left.
Time seemed to come to a halt then, as every one—the onrushing smugglers, Michael, the two officers, and even Arabella herself—watched the rocket as it rose, caught the breeze, arced over in a fiery parabola, and met the top of the ship’s main balloon, exploding there with an eye-searing flare of bright blue light.
Arabella, knowing what was to come, was the first to break this paralysis, throwing herself to the sand and clapping her hands over her ears. A moment later came a tremendous whooshing bang as the balloon’s hydrogen caught fire, the envelope’s silk shredding instantaneously into flaming strips. The rush of hot air from the explosion pressed Arabella’s body into the sand and nearly deafened her, despite her hands on her ears, but she was better off than the men who had been standing, many of them staring at the rocket as it descended. They now lay stunned on the sand, with flaming fragments of silk, rope, and wood falling all around them from the lightening sky.
Arabella stood, ears ringing, and looked around. There lay the line of caskets—thousands and thousands of pounds’ worth of gold coins, surely the ill-gotten proceeds of the ulka trade, bound for Lord Reid’s coffers. There stood the Isambard, moaning in fear, swaying on his tentacles as he peered wide-eyed at the flaming wreckage all about himself. There stood the Isambard’s handlers, blinking in astonishment. And there stood the ship, her rigging and both of the remaining balloons dripping with fire. The silk of one balloon envelope parted as she watched, relieving the pressure within … preventing an immediate explosion, but sending a pale jet of flame shooting off to windward.
But that jet of flame caught the breeze and bent back toward the ship, where it met the stream of hydrogen, lighter than air, that rose from the place Arabella had cut the silken tube. Flame instantly ran down that invisible stream like a midshipman sliding down a ladder. The tube immediately caught alight, then flared in a brief soft explosion … which severed the tube, extinguishing the flame in the process, and knocked down several smugglers who had just recovered their footing.
It was a better outcome than Arabella had hoped for. Better than she had deserved, she had to confess.
Now freed from the ship and spurred forward by the explosion, the Isambard bellowed and charged off, with the tattered, smoldering end of the tube still attached to his hindquarters. His tentacles, built for swampy ground, floundered in the soft sand, and the unfamiliar gravity hampered him still further—but all of this panicked him even more, driving him thrashing forward at considerable speed. His two handlers rushed after him as though their survival depended on the Isambard’s continued presence and good health, which it no doubt did.
Arabella followed the Isambard and his handlers as best she could, even as explosions continued to sound behind her, sending flaming wreckage and panicked smugglers flying in every direction. But just as she was finding her stride, something snagged her ankle—the flesh and blood one—and she sprawled face-first in the sand.
It was Michael, who held her ankle in a death grip. “How can you betray your King?” he shouted at her from the ground. “Your family? Your very planet?”
“Mars is my planet!” she replied. “And as for my family … is this your money?” She gestured to the caskets that still lay in a line on the sand.
“This money came from the weak!” he spat back. “Martians and Englishmen alike, weak men voluntarily paying to weaken themselves still further, and it is bound for England!” He grinned then, and the flaring firelight and the rising sun made of his face a very devil’s mask. “This gold will buy me the first Dukedom of Mars!”
“Then you are not my family!” She kicked at him then, the hard metal of her artificial heel knocking his hand loose from her ankle and making him cry out in pain. “And the Prince Regent is not my King!”
The remaining balloon burst then, in a tremendous roaring explosion that sent Arabella rolling across the hard ground and left her deaf and half-blind from the sand in her eyes. Shaking her aching head, spitting out sand and ash and wiping her face, she sat up …
… and beheld Kemekhta, settling gently to the sand in the path of the fleeing Isambard. Thank Heaven, they had seen the blue flare!
Even as the khebek touched the ground her great cargo door, which had been constructed for just this purpose, thudded to the sand, forming a ramp up which the panicked beast ran headlong. But the Martians waiting on deck were ready for him, and quickly surrounded him, petting his leathery hide to soothe his shattered nerves and giving him cool water to drink. The two starving Venusians followed, and the Martians gave them water as well.
But the mission was not yet over. “Mills!” Arabella cried, struggling to her feet. “Taylor! To me!” She stumbled back toward the smugglers’ ship, now a nearly unrecognizable heap of flaming wreckage, continuing to call, “To me! To me!” as she went.
She found a casket in the ashy sand. It was terribly heavy, and shifted awkwardly as she lifted it, but she managed to clutch it to her breast and stagger toward Kemekhta with it. Taylor soon reached her, then Mills. “Gold!” she cried. “Bring as much as you can!” They immediately set to with a will, and once the Martians had the Isambard under control they joined in as well.
The surviving smugglers did not take this theft well at all. But the captain and officers of Kemekhta were looking out for Arabella, and two cannon-balls from that quarter soon put paid to the opposition, scattering the wreckage of the smugglers’ ship still further across the blackened desert.
The last few smugglers were left waving impotent fists at Kemekhta as she rose from the desert, with dozens of heavy caskets safely stowed aboard and the Martians struggling to calm the still-agitated Isambard. Among the survivors below, Arabella noted, was one better dressed than the others, with only one leg.
This one did not bother shaking his fist at the rising khebek. He merely glared … directly at her.
She met his gaze and, without looking away, she untied her cravat, unbuttoned her shirt, took off her locket—the silver locket bearing Michael’s portrait in miniature, which she had never once removed since she was sixteen years of age—and dropped it over the rail.
* * *
“You stole an Isambard,” Khema said.
“I stole an Isambard,” Arabella acknowledged.
“You risked your life,” Captain Singh said, “and the lives of your friends, and an irreplaceable khebek. And her crew.”
“I did.”
Fulton’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “And to what end?” he managed eventually. “A single such creature cannot produce nearly enough hydrogen for our entire khebek fleet.”
“A single creature, yes. But if they are bred…”
Lady Corey goggled at the very notion. “Do you propose to turn Phobos into a … a cattle-farm for these tentacled monstrosities?”
“If that is what is required to put our fleet back in the air,” Arabella insisted. “And I did bring along the Isambard’s handlers, Venusians who were very badly abused by the smugglers, to help care for the creatures.”
Khema considered this intelligence. “Are they willing to join the resistance?”
“Ulungugga says that their health is much too fragile for that,” Captain Singh said. “He says they were very close to death when they arrived, and their recuperation will require years. The only humane thing to do is to return them to their homes on Venus. It is, at least, approaching inferior conjunction.” This meant that Venus was between Mars and the Sun, so the journey should not be unreasonably long.
Khema’s eye-stalks pressed against each other. It was an expression Arabella had never before observed in a Martian. Aggravation? Exasperation? Wonderment? “I propose to delegate Captain Churath and Kemekhta to this task,” she said after a time. “She and her crew are obviously not happy in their role here, and I cannot think of any assignment which offers a more appropriate … reward for their actions last night.” Now her eye-stalks directed themselves at Arabella. “And as for yourself … I cannot imagine what reward, or punishment, would be appropriate for you.”
“I only ask to continue my work at the Institute,” Arabella said, with complete sincerity. “There is considerable work yet to be done on the automaton pilot, and many new students.”
Khema looked to Captain Singh. “Will you promise to keep her from getting in trouble again?”
“That is a promise no one can make.”
Again Khema’s eye-stalks pressed together. “I am afraid you are correct.”