Arabella of Mars (25 page)

Arabella looked to Mills. “What was that?”

Mills's dark eyes narrowed. “Pistol.”

Arabella moved ahead of the water cask, still pressing inexorably forward, and braced her back against the bulkhead to bring it to a halt. She and Mills paused, straining their ears, but could make out little more than muted voices and the occasional thump. Then one voice rose above the others, a high and strident one, delivering a long and impassioned speech. Though the words failed to penetrate the wood above their heads, the speaker's voice was far too familiar.

Binion.

“I'm afraid it's mutiny, Mills,” Arabella said. “And I need to know which side you're on—the mutineers', or the captain's.”

Their eyes met over the cask. Mills's eyes, the nearly black irises floating in pale yellow whites, gazed steadily into Arabella's, his expression revealing nothing.

Arabella swallowed. One or the other of them would have to take sides, or they'd still be here staring at each other when the mutiny reached them. “I'm … I'm with the captain,” she said, knowing that with her words she might be signing her own death warrant. “He's been good to me.”

Mills blinked. “Been good to me too,” he said. “No telling what them mutineers might do.”

Arabella blew out a sigh of relief, but then realized her peril had been only slightly reduced.

Mills maneuvered himself around to her side of the floating cask and spoke low. “So we do what, now?”

A sudden, sharp scuffle from abovedecks was brought to a halt by another pistol shot, which caused both their heads to jerk up like a pair of puppets. “We can't just hang about here waiting for the action to come to us,” Arabella said.

Mills frowned, then ducked back down the ladder. He returned a moment later with a heavy belaying pin, which he handed to Arabella. A second pin was tucked into his rope belt, next to his rigging knife.

Arabella took the pin and worked it beneath her own belt. She had no knife of her own. “We should bring the cask with us, as though we didn't know that any thing was wrong. It might stop a bullet.”

They put their shoulders against the cask and began the long, slow process of nudging it into motion.

*   *   *

As they reached the lower deck, they were met by a topman, one not well known to Arabella. “Belay that hauling,” he said. “It's all hands on deck.”

Arabella held tight to the cask, which continued its stately progress upward, keeping its bulk between herself and the topman. The bulkhead behind her brushed against her shirt-collar. Mills, she noted, had positioned himself similarly, the great muscles of his shoulders bunching in anticipation. “Why?” she asked the topman, pretending ignorance.

“Change in course,” he sneered, revealing his allegiance.

Mills's eyes met Arabella's, she jerked her chin toward the topman, and without a word they braced their backs against the bulkhead and pressed the heavy cask toward the mutineer with all the strength of their arms and legs. Such a maneuver was strictly against the rules for normal operations—a full water cask was never to be allowed to move rapidly, on account of the danger of its great weight.

For a moment the airman did not notice the cask's change in course and speed. For a second moment he failed to appreciate its implications. By the time he took action, attempting to scramble out of the way, Arabella and Mills were already halfway up the ladder to the upper deck.

The drifting cask, moving with stately inevitability, pinned the topman between itself and the mainmast with an audible crunch, rebounding away with an equally unhurried pace and only a slight tumble.

He began to scream just as they had reached the upper deck. But the screams soon faded away, to Arabella's mingled dismay and relief.

One mutineer down. How many more were there?

*   *   *

They paused at the top of the forward ladder, peering from the darkness of the hatch out onto the sun-washed deck. But even as they watched, the sunlight rippled and dimmed—a storm was on its way.

Clearly something unusual was afoot. Men drifted in clumps here and there, laughing or chattering nervously without any display of discipline. And on the quarterdeck, no officers were visible. Only Binion and two other midshipmen—two midshipmen whom Arabella had heard the captain describe as the least capable students of navigation. Binion held a cocked and loaded pistol in each hand.

“Where are the officers?” Arabella whispered to Mills.

He shrugged. “Overboard?”

Arabella's throat tightened at the thought. “We can but hope not.” She paused, thinking hard. “Binion told me he'd keep the captain alive, as a hostage to force me to navigate for them. He's probably tied up somewhere.” The upper deck, from which they had just come, was mostly one large room and currently empty of airmen. Surely if the captain were still alive he would be under heavy guard. And if he were further below, on the lower deck or in the hold, they'd have seen some evidence of it as they'd ascended. “Must be in the great cabin,” she muttered.

And, indeed, two stout airmen floated before the great cabin's door, truncheons in their hands and their arms crossed on their chests. One of them wiped at his eye, where a drop of rain had just impacted, and Arabella realized with a start that he was Gowse. Surely the captain was imprisoned there, and perhaps the other officers as well. “We must creep in there somehow and free him.”

Mills glanced at her quizzically. “How?”

Arabella peered with trepidation across the vast open expanse of deck between her and the two guarding airmen. Once she and Mills emerged from the shadow of the hatchway they would be in plain sight of every mutineer. The only alternative route involved the aft ladder, which emerged immediately between the two guards.

“I don't know,” she admitted, then looked behind and below herself in case some other mutineer might be approaching from behind. At the moment no such threat was imminent, but that situation surely could not last.

Binion's harsh high voice caught Arabella's attention then. “Where's Westphal?” he called.

“He went below to roust out the last of the fish,” someone replied.

Arabella and Mills exchanged a worried glance. Westphal must be the topman they'd crushed with the water cask.

“He's been gone too long,” Binion said. “Bates, Parker—go follow him up. Take truncheons.” Two burly airmen immediately separated themselves from a group and launched themselves through the air toward Arabella and Mills.

“We need to hide!” she hissed to her companion, and quickly scrambled back down the ladder.

But the upper deck, though dark by comparison with the cloudy day above, was well illuminated by lamps at this hour, and with all the hammocks taken up it was essentially one large open space. Cargo and bags of charcoal, lashed firmly in place against the hull on each side, offered no hiding place. Scrambling down the ladder to the lower deck would leave them just as trapped.

At least during the battle with the French, Arabella thought with grim humor, she'd known that every one on the ship was on the same side.…

Suddenly she had an idea. “The gun deck!” she whispered, and leapt down the length of the deck. Mills immediately followed, the great strength of his legs propelling him so quickly that he reached the gun deck hatch first, undogging it just as she arrived. They slipped through and dogged the hatch behind themselves just as the sound of voices announced the arrival of the two airmen on the deck they'd just vacated.

The closing hatch cut off the lamplight, leaving Arabella and Mills in near-darkness. “What now?” Mills whispered. “Sure they find us here, and no exit.”

“There
is
an exit,” she replied, and pointed. “Three of them.”

There, beyond the vague bulking forms of the three cannons, gleamed three square outlines: the gun-ports.

Moving as quietly as they could, they made their way forward and eased the number one port open, letting in a rush of air and light that made Arabella squint.

Cautiously, she poked her head through the port and peered around. Directly ahead, in the path a cannonball would travel, she saw roiling clouds and a flash of lightning; other than that, her view was largely blocked by the bowsprit and its rigging. But what little she could see revealed no mutineers, or indeed any men at all. “No one's about,” she said as she ducked her head back inside. “We'll make our way along the keel and enter the great cabin through the window.”

“Tight fit,” muttered Mills. Thunder rumbled low without, as though in agreement with him.

Indeed, the port was not much more than one foot square. “I'll help you through it,” she said.

Arabella, with her lean boyish frame, slipped easily enough through the port—the wood of its frame stank of gunpowder and hot iron, even more so than the rest of the gun deck—but it refused to pass Mills's broad shoulders. “One arm at a time,” she said, but though he tried first the right and then the left, the bulk of his chest was still too great, no matter how she tugged and Mills pushed. Cold, heavy drops of rain had begun to spatter her back and hair, but the small lubrication they offered was not sufficient. “We could get some grease from the galley.…”

Suddenly the eyes in Mills's straining face snapped open. “They're here,” he said.

Behind him, they could both hear the gun deck hatch being undogged.

She had never before seen the stoic airman's expression so grim. She was sure her own face bore a similar look of anguish and dismay.

“Try to hide in the shadows,” she said. “I'll come back for you as quick as I can.”

Though his eyes were filled with misery, Mills nodded. Quickly he pulled his head and arm back through the hatch and shut it, leaving Arabella clinging to the bowsprit rigging and breathing hard. The rain was coming quite hard now, and she wiped it from her eyes. Lightning flashed again, and then the thunder rolled, much closer now.

Then, through the hull, she heard the gun deck hatch open. She held her breath.

A shout: “You there! Both hands in sight!”

Another voice, equally loud: “What're ye hiding from, laddie?”

Mills's response was inaudible over the patter of the rain on the thick hull. Arabella tensed, preparing to spring away if the port opened.

“Ye'll be coming with us, laddie,” came the second voice, followed by the loud smack of a truncheon on flesh.

Arabella hung, shivering with cold, in the rigging. Mills had been captured, for certain. Perhaps he had been struck; perhaps that sound was only a prod or a threat. Would he give her up?

She pressed her ear to the hull, stopping her other ear with her hand against the sound of the rising storm. Only silence from within.

And then came the dull thud of the gun deck hatch closing, followed by indistinct receding voices.

She let out the breath she'd been holding.

Safe—for the moment. But the whole length of the mutineer-controlled ship lay between her and the captain, even if he was where she thought she was, and Binion would notice her absence soon if he hadn't already.

Licking her rain-wet lips with a dry, sandpapery tongue, she crept out along the bowsprit.

*   *   *

Moving slowly and keeping close to the wood in hopes that any watching eye might pass over her, Arabella inched out to where she could see the masts. But as the mainmast began to appear above the figurehead, it seemed empty of men; as she peered around the bowsprit, she saw that the upper reaches of the starboard and larboard masts below were equally unpeopled. Only a loose end of sail flapped in the growing rain-lashed wind.

She let out a breath, then worked her way around to the bowsprit's lower side. Gusts made her sodden shirt flap against her torso, and she clung hard to the wood in fear of being blown from her precarious perch.

From here the hull curved down and away in a grand smooth expanse of golden
khoresh
-wood, silhouetted against the roiling, lightning-shot clouds beyond. The underside of the hull had been scraped clean of barnacles in the first week after departure from Earth and was now smooth as a baby's bottom, bare of any handhold. There was no work to be done here between launch and landfall. That, and naval tradition, explained why this part of the ship was so inhospitable to the traverse she was about to make.

The one feature that offered any purchase to Arabella's hands was the keel, a broad projection of copper-clad wood some eight inches wide. She gripped the keel's edges and began guiding herself down and around the curve of the hull, frequently pausing to wipe the cold rain from her eyes or dry her hands on her trousers for a tiny bit more traction.

As she crept along, orbiting the hull's vast round bulk like some tiny, low-hanging moon, her stomach began to clench as it had not since the day of the falling-line ceremony. Weeks of free descent had inured her to the constant feeling of falling that was the airman's lot, but now, disoriented by the rain that seemed to pelt in from every direction, she felt herself unmoored from any attachment. It seemed as though at any moment she might go drifting off into the churning sky. And if she lost her grip on the rain-slick keel, that fate would indeed be hers.

She clenched her jaw and gripped the keel's cold metal as firmly as she could with hands and feet, inching along with deliberate speed. She must arrive at the great cabin as soon as she could, but if she moved too quickly she risked sailing off into the air.

She tried to build up a rhythm, first pulling with her arms, gripping the keel between her palms while bringing up her legs, then pushing with her legs, pressing the keel with her heels while extending her arms.

Soon, despite the chill water that soaked her clothing to the skin, her every muscle began to burn. She kept inching along.

Ahead of her, the starboard and larboard masts came further and further into view as she moved, rising above the horizon of the hull like two great towers festooned with lines and dark, sodden sails.