Weeks passed, and the work grew routine. Arabella learned her duties well, became conversant with the strange terminology used by airmen, and developed cordial relations with the men in her mess.
She overheard no further conversations in the head, nor were there any rumblings of mutiny among the crew on deck. Even the conversation she had heard might be no more than dissatisfied grumbling. Yet she feared that insurrection was brewing, and viewed every man with suspicion. She never found herself alone with the captain, and with no knowledge of which officers or men might be involved in the plot, she dared not share her worries with any one else.
Despite her caution and concerns, she gradually became more comfortable with her tasks and the other members of the crew. From time to time she was given new duties, which kept her on her toes.
The one aspect of airmanship she could not seem to master was that of tying knots, which for all its seeming simplicity proved far more complex in execution than her mind was capable of encompassing. She had never dreamed there were so many ways of tying two ropes together! But one day, as she struggled in vain to fix a loop in the middle of a line, her messmate Mills floated up to her with a raised eyebrow, his pink palms raised in a clear offer of assistance.
The man spoke little—his native language was some West African tongue he shared with no one else on the ship—but Arabella was sure he understood English as well as any man aboard. When he did speak, his words, though not always grammatical, were carefully chosen and to the point.
“I am to tie a bowline here,” she confessed, “but I simply cannot fathom how to do it when both ends of the line are secured.”
“Bowline on bight,” he said. With clear deliberate gestures he demonstrated the knot, his pale yellow eyes firm and kind upon hers as he made certain she understood the process.
She tried it herself then, and though the resulting knot was far more untidy than his, his bright white smile showed that she had tied it correctly.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, and with an amiable salute he returned to his duties.
* * *
The most interesting part of her day was the time she spent in the captain’s cabin, learning about navigation and the use and maintenance of Aadim the clockwork navigator. These lessons were nominally for the benefit of Binion and the other midshipmen, with herself as only a guest, but it soon became abundantly clear to all that she was by far the most adept student of the lot. Even Binion, resent the situation though he might, plainly could not deny its truth.
Though the lessons were hard—the trigonometry of sextant and compass was a particular challenge—Arabella applied herself to them with vigor and joy. Here she could exercise her mind in a way her mother, indeed all of English society, would never tolerate in a girl or even a grown woman. In these moments all shame at her continued deception fell away, replaced by anger at the opportunities denied her by her sex.
As the captain lectured patiently, Arabella could not fail to be reminded of her father, and she often reflected that he would have very much admired the captain if they had met. The two men shared a keen interest in automata, of course, but the affinity ran deeper than that—both had an actively curious intelligence, a tenacious persistence when confronted with a difficult puzzle, and a warm heart beneath a sometimes gruff exterior. But the most complex automaton in her father’s collection was a mere toy by comparison with Aadim. The more she worked with the navigator, the more impressed she became with the many clockmakers who’d designed and built his workings.
But far more impressive than those clockmakers, she realized, was the captain himself. Captain Singh’s knowledge of automata ran deep and broad as any aerial current, and he himself was responsible for much of Aadim’s design. Though the captain was no clockmaker himself, his understanding of the clockwork navigator’s mechanisms was complete and intimate. Aadim’s technical draughts were kept in a chest in the captain’s cabin, tightly rolled in a protective leather case, but the captain himself never consulted them; he knew every cog, gear, and shaft as well as he knew the names and duties of his crew.
The captain, in fact, seemed to treat the automaton as a member of the crew. He always called it “he” or by name, and in cases where the ideal set of the sails or course correction was less than certain, he seemed to respect its solutions far more than the advice of Stross, his sailing-master. This habit caused some small amount of grumbling from his fellow officers, but their complaints were muted because Aadim’s navigation was invariably swifter, more accurate, and more efficient than any of theirs.
But not only the captain’s mind was admirable to Arabella. He was handsome, to be certain, with fine symmetrical features and piercing dark eyes, and as she aided him to don his always impeccable jacket she could not fail to notice how broad and firm were the shoulders beneath his shirt. And though, as captain, he perforce held himself aloof from the men, he never failed to treat even the least of them—which would, of course, be Arabella herself—with any thing other than respect, kindness, and patience.
Under other circumstances, he might have been a man whose company she would have sought out for its own sake. But, sadly, those circumstances were not hers, and so she kept her observations of him to herself.
* * *
One day Arabella was engaged in holystoning the deck—a tedious and common chore which involved hooking herself to the deck with a leather strap, scrubbing the wood with a pumice stone, and wiping up the resulting dust with a damp washing-leather before it could float away—when a cry of “sail ho!” came up from the lookout on the starboard mast. Immediately every man rushed to the starboard rail, including the other men holystoning, so she too unhooked herself and did likewise. But peer though she might, she saw no sign of any sail.
The men around Arabella fidgeted and murmured uncertainly. “What are we looking for?” she asked her messmate Hornsby, who floated beside her, shielding his eyes from the sun.
“’Nother ship,” he muttered, still staring off into the distance. “Rare in these parts, and troublesome.”
“Troublesome? How so?”
“There!” he cried, pointing downward. Arabella looked in the indicated direction and this time managed to discern a tiny, wavering speck, barely visible against the blue of sky and small, scudding clouds. It might be a hundred or a thousand miles off; without landmarks, she had no sense of distance.
“What’s so troublesome about that?” Arabella asked again. “It’s much too far away to bother us.”
“Aye, and if she keeps her distance, there’s no worry. But it’s her angle on the bow I’m worried about.” Arabella knew from her lessons with Aadim that “angle on the bow” referred to the angle between the line of Diana’s course and a line drawn from Diana to the other ship. “No Marsman would come at us from below like that; she’d be ahead or astern, on the same course as we.” He pointed again, measuring with his eye. “If the angle changes with time, we can all breathe easy. But if it don’t … that means our courses intersect.”
“But surely we can easily avoid a collision, with so much warning and so much space to maneuver?”
Hornsby took his gaze from the distant speck and fixed it upon Arabella. “Unless she means to engage us. And who’d want to do a thing like that?”
Suddenly the reason for the crew’s agitation became clear. “Pirates,” she breathed.
“Or worse,” said Hornsby.
“What could be worse than pirates?”
“Could be a French frigate. Our little guns haven’t a chance against a full-blown man of war.” Again he peered into the distance. “Mind you, she don’t swim like a frigate. Might be a corsair, though. Nearly as bad.”
“What kind of ship is that?”
“No particular rig. Corsair’s just what the French call a privateer.”
The naval terminology was making her head spin. “What might be the difference between a privateer and a pirate?”
“Pirates take honest men’s cargo for their own profit, and if they’re caught they hang. Privateers do the same, but they have a license—a letter of marque, it’s called—from the French, and they share what they take with Bonaparte, all legal-like. They’re better funded, better equipped, and just all around more dangerous.”
“Avast that lolling about!” cried Kerrigan from the quarterdeck. All the men returned to their duties, along with Arabella. But though she did her best to concentrate on her holystoning of the deck, a part of her attention was always directed to the men and officers peering over the starboard side, eyes and telescopes trained on the unknown airship.
It seemed to her that the direction of their gazes—the angle on the bow—was not changing with time. And the expressions on the officers’ faces betrayed concern.
* * *
During the midday meal, Arabella’s mess talked of nothing but the approaching ship and what might occur if she did prove to be an enemy. Of the group, only Gosling and Young had seen action, and the others peppered them with questions.
“There’s no sinking a ship in the air,” Gosling declaimed, stabbing the air with his finger. “No battle is over until every man on one ship or t’other’s dead or captured.”
“Nay,” said Young. “When I were in Columbine we met with a French frigate. Cap’n Clive shot away her pulsers and we got away clean.” He took a bite of his biscuit, chewed noisily. “Nary a casualty on either side.”
Hornsby shook his head. “It’s a dangerous tactic, getting in close enough for a shot like that. Ye might find yer own pulsers shot to h—l. And if neither ship can pedal away, well then it’s hand-to-hand combat, with the survivors left to piece together one good ship from whatever’s left.”
“But Diana’s such a fast ship,” Arabella said. “We are traveling at a rate of over seven thousand knots! Why can’t we simply outsail them?”
Young grinned, though without humor. “It’s not so simple, lad.” He carefully placed two bits of biscuit in the air above the mess table. “This is us, and that’s them.” Then he blew a puff of breath at them, causing both bits to waft gently in the same direction. “We’re both in the same current of air, ain’t we? That’s what’s moving at seven thousand knots, carrying both of us along with it. For either ship to outrace the other, both being in the same wind, means pedaling. And though she’s fast for a Marsman, Diana can’t out-pedal a corsair with one-tenth the tonnage.”
“Can’t we change course? Find some other wind?”
“This ain’t the Horn, lad, where the winds blow every which way. We’re in the trades. Nearest other wind might be a hundred mile off.”
Taylor angrily punched the air. “It’s the g______d waiting I can’t stand! On the sea, ye can’t see another ship until she’s hull-down on the horizon.” As his tattoos attested, Taylor had served as a seaman for years before joining Diana. “But out here … it could be weeks from first sight until she gets within cannon range.”
“Be careful what ye wish for,” Gosling admonished. “From what I hear at the scuttlebutt, she’s closing fast. We could be in battle within five days.”
At that all the men, including Arabella, fell silent, morosely chewing their salt pork.
* * *
As the other ship drew near, they drilled and drilled, spending hours each day at gunnery practice. While Arabella’s and the other gun crews strove to increase their rate of fire, the topmen dashed from sail to sail, and all the other men slaved at the pedals. The other ship was now clearly visible to the unaided eye, though not yet close enough to make out her provenance.
“What is the point of trimming the sails while pedaling?” Arabella asked the captain during one of their increasingly rare sessions together. She understood enough of aerial navigation now to know that the trim of the sails was normally adjusted only when passing through an unfavorable wind or to catch a favorable one, but now there was no hope of finding any wind better than the one in which they were embedded.
“When we pedal,” the captain explained, “the ship gains a bit of way, which the sails can use to change her course. A good ship, with a strong and experienced crew, can turn one hundred and eighty degrees in less than ten minutes. And we must turn the ship smartly and accurately if we are to bring our cannon properly to bear upon the enemy.”
Arabella swallowed. “So she is indeed an enemy?” The other ship’s behavior, drawing directly closer and closer, had been seen by all the men as an ill sign, but some still held out hope she might be another Marsman, bending her course to match Diana’s out of a need of supplies or succor.
“She is no Company ship,” he replied, his expression grim. “We’ve signaled with cannon, and she has failed to respond in kind.” He stared past Arabella’s shoulder, his gaze directed through the hull at the other ship’s location. “And, as such, I am sorry to tell you that this will be our last session together until … until after we are well clear of her.”
“I see,” Arabella said, and swallowed hard.
* * *
That night, swaddled in her hammock between the warm and snoring bodies of the other men, Arabella could not sleep despite her body’s exhaustion.
What would the coming days bring? Would there be battle, or merely an encounter with another, albeit strangely uncommunicative, merchant ship? And if there was battle, what then?
It was not only concern for Arabella’s own safety that kept her mind awhirl with desperate trepidation. After so many weeks aboard Diana, she had formed good working relationships with most of the crew, and despite her continued deception of them she considered many of them friends or at least comrades. The captain, too, had earned … her trust and professional loyalty, she told herself. If the other ship did indeed prove to be a pirate or corsair, any of them might be injured or killed in the coming action.
But worst of all, if Arabella was killed, or if Diana was delayed or thrown off course, she might not reach Mars in time to prevent her wretched cousin Simon from carrying out his nefarious scheme. He would deceive the gentle-hearted Michael and do him in … and then, by the inexorable laws of entail, Mother, Fanny, and Chloë would be left penniless. As well as Arabella herself, of course.
From beneath her stiff and grimy shirt she drew the precious locket with her brother’s portrait. Though the portrait was barely visible in the slivers of light that crept in through gaps in the decking above, still in the dimness that well-loved and well-remembered face seemed clear, and she thought with fond reminiscence of the warm and happy day on which the portrait and its fellow had been painted. “I will save you, Michael,” she whispered. “Somehow.”
She kissed the locket gently before secreting it away.
* * *
Suddenly a thunder of drums startled Arabella awake. Despite every thing, she’d managed to drift off.
“Action stations!” cried a voice—Kerrigan’s—as the drums’ booming rattle continued to echo throughout the ship. A clamor of other voices repeated the command. “Action stations! Action stations, ye lubbers!”
Heart pounding, Arabella scrambled from her imprisoning hammock. All around her other men did the same, a confusion of limbs and scattered clothing flying every which way through the dimness. Warm and pungent bodies struck her from every direction as she struggled to roll up her hammock at the same time as every other man.
Suddenly the confusion and clamor stilled, every man stopping with bated breath. Arabella too paused, straining her ears toward the sound she thought or feared she’d heard above the men’s noise.
And then it came a second time.
The ringing distant boom of cannon.
With renewed vigor the men scrambled to ready themselves for battle.
* * *
Arabella fought her way through the tumbling crowd of floating men, up the ladder, and on to the deck to stow her bedroll. She emerged into a scene of furious chaos, topmen scrambling up the masts while most of the crew milled about on the deck. Despite all their drill, in the actual event they were acting more like a herd of frightened shokari than seasoned airmen.
For Arabella’s own part, though she knew where she was needed, as she shoved the tightly rolled bundle of all her possessions in beside the others she paused for a brief moment to glance at the sky.
The other ship now hung well above the beam, twice as big as even Earth’s enormous moon. A sleek four-master she was, the great cross of her sails showing she was pointed directly toward Diana, and rippling at her stern Arabella saw the French colors—blue, white, and red—marking her as no mere pirate but a deadly corsair. Even as Arabella watched, a quadruple flash and burst of smoke showed at the crux of that cross—four guns to go with her four masts. A long moment later came the rolling bang-ba-bang-bang of the report.
Someone shouted, “Hit the deck!”
Arabella dove below the rail, holding firmly to the edge of a scupper. A long, howling wail marked the passage of a cannonball through the air somewhere above her head, with others a bit farther off.
She had just time to think they’d gotten lucky when the deck gave a violent jerk beneath her hands and a monstrous shattering crash assailed her ears.
An incoherent babble of shouts and screams followed, including a long high shriek of pain that made the hairs stand up on the back of Arabella’s neck. She could not stop herself from looking.
The ball had struck not fifty feet from where she cowered beneath the rail, tearing a long splintering gouge across a stretch of deck that Arabella had holystoned just ten hours earlier. Fragments and slivers of golden khoresh-wood, some longer than her arm, sped tumbling through the air in every direction.
One of them had impaled an airman, the jagged splinter thrust like a sword right through his stomach. Screaming, his face contorted in agony, he rotated in midair, grasping tight to the splinter with both hands as though this could somehow halt his tumble.
His name was West. He was proud of his fine white teeth, and he carved the most delightful little figures from Venusian scalewood.
Red drops gouted from the wound, scattering into the air as he twisted and tumbled in pain.
Paralyzed by this horrific sight, Arabella could do no more than gape, holding firm to the edge of the scupper. She knew her place was on the gun deck. Her crew needed her. Yet to budge from this spot would expose her to a fate as bad as West’s, or worse. Her fingers clamped trembling to the wood.
But one voice made itself heard above the chaos: Kerrigan’s. “Action stations!” he called, firm and clear. “To your posts, d—n you!” Arabella looked to the quarterdeck.
The captain stood there, feet planted on the deck as firmly as though Diana were a ship of the sea, long brass telescope fixed to his eye. A stout leather belt at his waist, fixed by straps to two turnbuckles abaft the wheel, held him in place against whatever maneuvers the coming battle might bring.
If any one could carry them through this chaos, it would be he.
If any one could.
The captain lowered the telescope and cast a stern glance across the deck, assessing the condition of his ship and crew. For a moment he and Arabella locked eyes. The message of his stark expression was plain: Get to your station!
She leapt with alacrity to the forward ladder, hauling herself hand over hand down the guide rope to her action station in the gun deck.
* * *
The situation in the gun deck was chaotic, all three gun crews struggling to free the cannon from the chains and bindings which kept them secure when not in use. Not one of the three gun crews was entire; West, the captain of number two, was now writhing on the deck above, leaving that crew floundering and leaderless. For her own part, Arabella hung back, recognizing that adding another body to the scrum around the guns would slow rather than speed the process.
Another bang and jarring shudder ran through the ship’s frame. Arabella risked a glance through the nearest gun-port, but the corsair was nowhere to be seen. Plainly the other ship had the advantage; Arabella prayed that situation would not continue long.
At last one of the officers, not Kerrigan, appeared on the gun deck and began chivvying the men into some semblance of order. At his command Arabella clapped on to one of the hawsers and helped to haul the number three gun into position to be loaded. As soon as it was ready she sprang away for the magazine.
Her traversal of the length of the ship had a nightmare quality. Shattered fragments of khoresh-wood spun and tumbled everywhere, a deadly litter of aerial flotsam. Men cried out in pain or floated limp in the air. Drops of blood spattered every surface; the very air tasted of iron. Bang-bang-ba-bang, came the quadruple report of the French guns, followed shortly by the howl of cannonballs through the rigging. A clean miss, this time, but as the ships drew closer together Diana could not continue that luck.
At the magazine a new man worked nervously with the wooden scoop and bucket, filling the charges much less rapidly than his predecessor. Arabella, wondering what had become of the previous man and hoping the new one would learn his job quickly, grabbed a charge from the loose floating pile and leapt away.
Returning to the upper deck from the magazine, she was shocked to find sunlight streaming in through a ragged hole in the hull. Smoke and slivers of wood made the sunbeams seem as sharp and hard-edged as the rough fragments that tumbled in the air within them, seeming to glow and flicker as they passed from shadow into light. A knot of frightened, confused men were trying to tend to the several wounded, their pandemonium of shouts and screams making the scene still more infernal.
Then Higgs, the boatswain, appeared, sticking his head down from the main-deck above. “Get those wounded clear!” he shouted. “Where there’s one ball, a second won’t be far behind!”
At once the men changed tactics, dragging the screaming wounded aft to the sickbay, and Arabella dashed down the ladder to the lower deck, hoping to find a clear path to the gun deck. A moment later, true to Higgs’s word, a second ball came crashing in behind her.
Most of the crew on the lower deck were laboring at the pedals, grunting and straining more feverishly than she’d ever seen before. Binion exhorted them to still greater effort, hammering the drum brutally, but she paid him no mind as she shot the length of the deck and made her way to the gun deck.
“There you are, d—n you!” cried the officer as she tossed the charge to Gowse. “Where are the others?”
Arabella looked around. All three guns were now unshipped and awaiting their charges, but she was the only powder monkey in sight. “I don’t know, sir!” she cried, even as Gowse and the rest of his crew rushed to load the number three gun.
“D—n!” the officer swore again. “Well, hop to your duty, lad!”
Arabella hopped, speeding off to the magazine again. Behind her she heard the officer shouting to someone to find him two more powder monkeys.
* * *
Back and forth Arabella dashed, gun deck to magazine and back again and again. Forward, the gun deck was a sunlit Hades of smoke and noise and furious shouting, three hard rectangular shafts of light from the gun-ports sweeping the scene as Diana swerved and tumbled in her attempt to avoid the corsair’s shots. Abaft, the magazine was a dark Hades of quiet, desperate activity, two ill-trained crewmen gingerly scooping the dangerous powder into measured charges as quickly as they dared. Between, the upper and lower decks were a raucous Hades of flying fragments, tumbling casks, and airmen slick with sweat or blood scrambling hither and yon. A dozen holes or more pierced the hull, each a deadly forest of smashed timbers which had to be navigated past.
On each traverse Arabella was forced to find a new route, as new damage or crowds of men or debris blocked her path. At one point she was nearly crushed by two crates that floated free, knocked from their lashings by cannonballs when the ship suddenly changed course and sent them crashing toward the starboard hull. Only her sharp eye and the fortunate presence of a heavy floating barrel, which she could use to change her course with a strong kick, had saved her then. Another time she collided with an airman who’d fallen unconscious at the pedals—struck in the head by flying wreckage or simply passed out from exhaustion—and drifted from his station unexpectedly.
When she arrived at the gun deck, she joined with her crew to get the number three gun loaded and aimed. It was hot, furious work, full of shouting and swearing and peering through the ports in hopes of spotting the other ship. And when the corsair did appear, pulsers whirling as she moved rapidly against the clouds beyond, a great wordless growl burst from the gun crews as they strove to haul the heavy guns into position before she could get away again.
To Arabella’s eye the French ship did not seem damaged at all.
“Fire!” cried the officer, and Arabella leapt away to fetch another charge of powder. Behind her the immense triple crash of Diana’s guns was followed by a groan of disappointment—another miss.
Exiting the gun deck she found her way blocked by a tangled knot of splintered wood, with a deadly cloud of nails spewing from a shattered cask like an angry swarm of chakti. A harsh, sharp smell of sawdust and iron assaulted her nose. Quickly she sprang off the coaming of the gun deck hatch, sailing with tucked arms and legs up the companionway to the upper deck just as the nails clattered against the bulkhead behind her.
* * *
Arabella shot out of the companionway into a bright, airy, screaming maelstrom. Blinking against the unaccustomed light, she caught herself on a stay and took a moment to orient herself.
The deck was a tangled mess of spars, sails, and rigging that smelled of gunpowder and blood. One of the main yards lay diagonally across Diana’s waist, a shambles of rope and Venusian silk that blocked her passage and her view. Above, the mainmast still seemed whole, though several topmen floated limp and bleeding against a background of roiling smoke.
And then, rising above the larboard rail like some malevolent moon, the corsair hove into view. Near enough that Arabella could easily make out the rapacious grins on the faces of her crew, she turned as she climbed, yawing about to bring her guns to bear on Diana’s midsection. The French ship was not undamaged—one mast was little more than a mass of splinters held together by shreds of silk—but plainly she was still very much able to maneuver. Abaft, her pulsers whirled like a windmill in a gale.
The corsair’s four gun-ports gaped, black and malevolent, seeming to grow larger as the ship swiveled herself to point directly toward Arabella.
With a shriek, Arabella flung herself away from those four hideous maws, flying aft, hiding herself in the tangled silk of the fallen yard. A moment later the corsair’s quadruple report sounded, the flash of her guns just visible through the waving silk, almost immediately followed by a shattering crash as the balls struck Diana. The ship jerked at the impact like a wounded living thing.
Arabella disentangled herself from the imprisoning fabric, finding herself on the far side of the wreckage. She was near the quarterdeck now. Abaft, officers on the quarterdeck orbited the sun of their captain, who stood, still strapped in place, pointing and calling out commands.
Arabella looked over her shoulder. From here the French ship could not be seen at all.
The quarterdeck was officers’ country, inviolate—no mere airman could enter that sacred space uninvited. Nevertheless, Arabella sprang from her position immediately, sailing through the stinking, littered air directly toward the captain. “The corsair!” she called as she flew, pointing behind herself. “She’s right over there!”
Kerrigan whirled to face her, anger showing on his blood-spattered face, but the captain called back, “Where?”
Catching herself on a stay, Arabella pointed through the obscuring silk. As though to confirm her observation, the unseen corsair’s cannon sounded again, directly in line with her pointing finger.
For a moment Captain Singh’s brow furrowed in furious concentration. Then he said, “Ashby, report to the magazine. Tell them to provide you with an explosive charge. Carry it to your gun and instruct your captain to target the enemy’s magazine. I will endeavor to provide him with a clear shot.”
Before she could even reply “Aye, aye, sir!” the captain had already turned away, barking commands to his officers.
* * *
Arabella hauled herself down the rail to the after hatch, squeezing past two men armed with cutlasses against an anticipated boarding attempt, belowdecks to the magazine. There she relayed the captain’s order to the wan and trembling men in charge.
“This is the only one left,” said one of them, handing her a ball equipped with a ropy fuse. “Best make good use of it.”
“Aye, aye,” Arabella said, and took the precious, deadly thing, along with a charge of powder.
Recalling the nails and other wreckage in her path, Arabella realized she’d have to return via the upper deck. Tucking the ball under one arm and the charge under the other, she propelled herself with legs alone back up the after companionway and out into the light.
The scene here was little different than before—scrambling airmen below, smoke and wreckage above, the corsair still hidden from sight by the fallen yard—but even as she made her way forward she heard a repeated call of “Hold fast! Hold fast for maneuvers!”
She was just then passing the mainstays, thick diagonal ropes that held the mainmast in position, but with the ball and charge under her arms she had no hands free. At the last moment she reached out one foot, snagging the last stay and bringing herself to a sudden halt. Juggling her deadly cargo under one arm, she twined her legs and the other arm around the tense and heavy cable and held tight.
“Strike all starboard and larboard sails!” came the captain’s next command. “Strike mains’l! Sheet home main royals and t’gallants! Pulsers full ahead!”
All around topmen scrambled to obey. First the main-sail vanished, then with fierce and rapid action the sails far above snapped into position, bellying backward against Diana’s forward motion through the air. A deep thrum sounded through the stay to which Arabella clung, making her whole body vibrate, and the mainmast creaked alarmingly from the great pressure placed upon its upper reaches.
And then, with a mighty groan, the whole ship pivoted around the remaining sails of the upper mainmast.
The clouds above wheeled dizzyingly past. Arabella felt herself slide down the stay until her feet pressed against the deck with a force nearly as great as Earth’s accustomed gravity. The French ship rotated into view above Arabella, the crew staring back, astonished at Diana’s unprecedented maneuver.
In just a moment they would be in Diana’s line of fire. And Arabella held the explosive charge.
* * *
Arabella released her hold on the stay and began making her way forward. Pressed against the deck as she was by the ship’s rotation, it was almost like walking on a ship at sea—a pitching, yawing ship, under attack, on a heaving sea. Yet she knew she must reach the gun quickly or the whole perilous maneuver would be for naught.
Rushing from mast to rail to hatch, dodging flying spars that clattered against the deck in a flutter of silk, Arabella reached the forward companionway with the corsair not quite yet in the line of fire. She flung herself down the companionway and into the gun deck. “Explosive shot!” she shouted to Gowse, handing him the ball and charge. “Target the enemy’s magazine!”
Grimly he nodded, then began shouting to his crew to load and aim the gun—no easy task with the ship’s rotation still pressing them against the deck. Arabella hauled and sweated along with them, getting the charge well seated and the gun aligned to face the corsair, even now rotating into view.
Gowse peered out the gun-port, eyeballing the distance to the target. “Fifteen hundred feet?” he shouted, to which his second assented with a nod.
Carefully Gowse trimmed off six inches from the shell’s fuse, then lit the end with a slow-match. Even as it began to sputter sparks and smoke, he rammed the ball down the gun barrel, followed by a wad. “Run up, boys!” he called, and Arabella and the rest of the crew hauled on the ropes that snugged the gun tight against its port.
Now Gowse sighted carefully along the gun’s barrel, calling out instructions to haul it right or left, up or down. Exhausted though they were, Arabella and the crew obeyed.
Through the gun-port, they looked down upon the corsair’s deck, the leering upturned faces of her crew peering back with rude malevolence.
“Fire!” cried Gowse. His second brought the slow-match to the touch-hole.
With an almighty bang and a gout of smoke, the gun jerked back against its stays.
This time Arabella remained with the gun. Ears ringing, the tang of burnt powder on her tongue, she peered out the gun-port and through the smoke, hoping against hope.…
Just for a moment the smoke cleared, showing the still-sputtering ball as it crashed through the corsair’s deck, well aft.…
And then a great ball of flame came rushing out of the hole, followed almost immediately by a roaring crash so loud that even Arabella’s already deafened ears rang.
A gust of black smoke rushed through the gun-port, making Arabella choke and completely obscuring her view. Shouts, screams, and confusion followed, men coughing and colliding in the sudden dark. Heedless of exposure, Arabella pulled up her shirt and breathed through the fabric.
Gradually order returned. The force which had pressed them against the deck eased, then vanished. The smoke began to clear, and Arabella quickly tucked her shirt under her belt again. All the men gathered around the gun-ports, peering through the filthy, cluttered air.…
And then someone called, “Huzzah!”
Soon all the rest joined him, including Arabella. The corsair had been blown completely in two, smoky flames guttering in the wreckage. The Frenchmen, stunned or dead, floated everywhere. The only sound that penetrated the ringing in Arabella’s ears was the crack of small arms fire, Diana’s marksmen and the few surviving privateers trying to finish each other off.
The men on the gun deck cheered and clapped each other upon the back. From somewhere a flask of whisky appeared and was passed around. Even Arabella took a swig of the harsh, burning stuff.
And then Watson, one of the young midshipmen, appeared in the hatch. “Damage report!” he called in his small piping voice. “How many casualties?”
Gowse and the two other gun captains tallied the men and materiel lost or damaged during the battle. The gun deck had caught only one ball from the corsair, which had wounded three men but not killed any. “The captain’ll be pleased to hear that, I’m sure,” said Gowse.
At that the midshipman looked grave. “Haven’t you heard?” he said.
Arabella’s heart, so recently lightened by victory, suddenly felt as heavy as lead.
“Quarterdeck took a hard hit just before that last shot,” the midshipman continued. “The captain was struck in the head by flying wreckage.”
He swallowed. The whole gun deck fell silent, all the men focused on his small pale face.
“We don’t know if he’ll make it.”