Arabella and the Battle of Venus Read online

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  I

  MARS, 1815

  1

  AN UNEXPECTED LETTER

  Arabella Ashby sat at the writing-desk which had been her father’s, and was now her brother’s, staring out across the endless ranks of khoresh-trees which were her inheritance, her livelihood, and her legacy. And also, at the moment, her greatest vexation.

  The wood of the khoresh-tree, known to the English as “Marswood,” was at once the strongest and the lightest in weight of any in the solar system. It was this wood which composed the aerial ships of the Honorable Mars Company, of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, and even of the defeated tyrant Napoleon’s Marine Aérienne. Arabella’s family had been tending and harvesting these trees for generations—nearly as long as the English presence on Mars itself—and from her earliest girlhood she had climbed them, sported among them, picnicked in their shade. Yet it was only in the past few months, ever since her tumultuous return to Mars from Earth, that she had learned just how tedious their upkeep could be.

  At the moment it was tokoleth-grubs which required Arabella’s attention. The grubs had infested the southern acreage, and on the desk before her lay two offers to eradicate them—one from a Martian firm, whose tame predators were reliable but came at a grotesquely high price, the other from Englishmen, whose novel chemicals were cheaper but might damage the trees—but her thoughts would not remain focused upon them. Instead, her eye kept drifting to the Fort Augusta Courier nearby, which proclaimed in large type: ASTONISHING EVENTS. ~ BONAPARTE ESCAPES MOON. ~ GREAT OGRE FLEES TO VENUS. Though the news was months old and tens of thousands of miles distant, it occupied her mind exceedingly.

  She was still attempting to redirect her concentration to the tokoleth-grubs when Martha, her lady’s maid, entered. “Letter for you, ma’am,” she said.

  Arabella took the letter—exceedingly battered, with evidence of the seal having been broken and replaced—and her heart leapt as she recognized the hand in which it was written. It was that of Captain Prakash Singh—the commander of the Honorable Mars Company airship Diana, and Arabella’s long-absent fiancé.

  My dearest Arabella, it began, and as she read, it were as though his voice, low and steady, tinged with the subtle accent of India, and always supremely confident, breathed in her ear.

  I regret exceedingly that I must inform you that, just as we were preparing to round Venus’s horn after a reasonably profitable call at Fort Wellington, Diana was intercepted by Résolution, a French aerial man-of-war of sixteen guns, and were compelled by superior force of arms to return to the planet’s surface. The ship and all her cargo and fittings, regrettably including Aadim, have been impounded, and her officers and company are being held as prisoners of war.

  I am told that no exchange of prisoners is currently anticipated, and we may be required to remain here until the war’s end, which I devoutly hope will not be long. My officers and I have given our parole, as a matter of course, and are currently at liberty in the fortress town of Thuguguruk; the men are imprisoned in the ancient chateau above the town. I am doing what I can to make them as comfortable as possible.

  Although some of the other prisoners have sent for their wives, I must insist that you remain on Mars. Conditions here are far from pleasant; the local food is atrocious, and the climate entirely inhospitable. At any rate, as we are not yet married, it would be both unseemly and contrary to my captors’ regulations for you to join me here.

  Letters are, unfortunately, not permitted prisoners. I am not without resources, however, and I have induced one of our Venusian gaolers to smuggle this missive to the nearest English settlement, from which I hope it will reach you without undue delay. I will attempt to write to you as often as I may.

  Please know that you are ever in my thoughts.

  Your most devoted

  Captain Singh

  Captain Singh was the most intelligent, the bravest, and the most honorable man Arabella had ever known. From the very moment she had met him—she had been in disguise as a boy at the time, and mere moments from signing on with the Royal Navy—he had treated her with the utmost decency and respect, and had saved her life on that occasion and many times since. She, in her turn, had lied to him—a necessary deception as to her sex, which had been the only way to obtain rapid passage from Earth to her birthplace on Mars—but had served faithfully as his captain’s boy. In those tumultuous months she had worked diligently at her duties, fought a battle with a French corsair, nursed the captain when he was sick, and even helped to break a mutiny before her deception had been revealed. But despite her duplicity, he had shared with her his personal history and the secrets of Aadim, his automaton navigator, and they had grown close. So close, in fact, that when her brother Michael, grievously injured, insisted that she marry immediately in order to insure the continuity of the estate in case of his death, the captain had been her first and only thought. The captain—and Aadim—had agreed, in what must surely be the strangest proposal in the history of romance.

  But before the wedding could be performed, he had been called away to Venus on urgent Company business. His eagerly anticipated return, and the nuptials which would follow, had been delayed by months—months of silence from the captain, accompanied by increasingly distressing news of the monster Bonaparte’s resurgence. Her nineteenth birthday had come and gone without the slightest word from him. And now this letter had arrived.

  The letter’s flimsy, crumpled paper trembled in Arabella’s hand as she read it over a second time and then a third, searching in vain for some particle of hope therein. Surely there must be some mistake! Surely he had already been released, and was even now making his way back to Mars! But no matter how hard she stared at her fiancé’s firm, even handwriting, no matter how tightly her fingers gripped the paper, no succor could be found.

  Her husband-to-be was a prisoner of war.

  This matter could not be allowed to stand.

  * * *

  Arabella was just rising from her seat when the door opened, admitting her brother Michael. Still wearing the large floppy hat and fur-lined leather coat which were his habitual garments when riding the plantation’s boundaries, he rushed to her as quickly as he could, his crutch thumping on the floor-boards. The wrappings on the stump of his leg, she noted automatically, were due for changing.

  “I am informed,” he gasped as he clumped across the floor, “that you have received a letter from Venus.”

  Wordlessly, she held out the letter, the expression on her face forestalling any further questions. He
read quickly, then let his hand drop, the letter rattling against his thigh and his eyes filling with solicitude. “Oh, dear Arabella…”

  “Do not be concerned for me,” she said, though her voice trembled. “So long as my captain is alive and healthy, I will be well.”

  “You are very pale, Sister. Pray take a seat, and I will send for lureth-water.”

  She sank back into her chair—realizing as she struck the seat how weak her knees had become—and watched numbly as Michael moved to the bell-pull in the corner. Lureth-water would help, she supposed, though what she truly craved at the moment was a full ration of good Navy grog. “If only those fools on the Moon,” she muttered, half to herself, “had managed to keep Bonaparte locked up.”

  At the end of the War of the Sixth Coalition, Napoleon had been completely defeated, forced to abdicate and sent into exile on the far side of the Moon. But after less than a year of exile he had somehow managed to escape, decamping to Venus with a substantial contingent of soldiers and airmen. No one seemed quite certain why he had chosen that planet rather than returning in triumph to Paris, from which King Louis had already fled with an army at his heels, but there Napoleon was—he had already taken the Venusian continent of Gomoluk, and seemed quite intent on taking the entire planet.

  Martha returned, with a pitcher and two glasses on a tray. Arabella sipped at hers without tasting. “I do not understand,” her brother said, “why the Company sent your fiancé to Venus at all, under these conditions!”

  “Nor do I.” She drummed her fingers on the table, then rose and paced to the window. “But he assured me, before he left, that his assignment was of the utmost importance.” The khoresh-trees stretched to the horizon, rank on rank, like the tall masts of so many aerial clippers. They reminded her of the scene at the docks in London, where she had met her husband-to-be for the first time.

  Arabella turned and strode toward the bell-pull. “I shall go into town, and importune the Company and the government to intercede on his behalf.” But before she could reach it, Michael stayed her with a touch on her arm.

  “Pray do not disquiet yourself, Sister,” he said. “I am sure they are already doing all that they can.”

  She paused momentarily, then continued to the corner and gave the embroidered ribbon a firm tug. “Perhaps. But if there is any thing which can be done to encourage them to further action, I intend to discover it and do it.”

  * * *

  His Excellency General the Honorable Sir Northcote Parkinson, Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort Augusta, proved to be a frail old man who affected an old-fashioned powdered wig. “My dear girl,” he said after the preliminaries had been discharged, “I am afraid that the situation is far more complicated than you imagine.”

  Arabella sat rigidly on a stiff high-backed chair, wearing her best gown—finest Venusian silk, luminous white, trimmed in ribbons of pomona green—with gloved fingers knotted in her lap. Weeks of supplication, insistence, and pure unalloyed obstinacy … visit after visit to first Company House and then Government House … had finally obtained her an audience with the Governor-General himself, one of the most powerful men in the entire Honorable Mars Company, and His Majesty’s representative on Mars. She had not expected him to be so thin and stooped.

  A drop of perspiration trickled down the back of Arabella’s neck, and she shifted in her chair. A robust fire roared in every fire-place of Government House, for the comfort of the English, but for her part she found the heat oppressive.

  Lord Parkinson adjusted his pince-nez upon his nose. “You are aware, of course, that a state of war does not at this time exist between the governments of England and France.”

  “Of course, Your Excellency. But as my fiancé is being held as a prisoner of war by the French…”

  He silenced her with an upheld index finger. “Officially he, along with the other English subjects unfortunate enough to have been in Gomoluk when Napoleon captured the territory, are not prisoners of war but détenus, or hostages. Many of these are prominent landholders, Company factors, and other significant individuals. Even my own counterpart on Venus, Lord Castlemare the Governor-General of the Presidency of Gomoluk, is being held under house arrest. And their fortunes, their safety, indeed their very lives, are the subject of negotiations being held even now at the very highest level.” He removed his pince-nez, closed his eyes, and shook his head with weary resignation. “For the Company to intervene at this delicate moment, even indirectly, would be considered an act of war.”

  “But Napoleon has already—!”

  Again he silenced her, this time by patting the air between them. “I understand your perspective, but please do hear me out. It may appear to you that Napoleon has already initiated hostilities, by taking control of territory under Company jurisdiction. But it is important to understand the distinction between the Company and the government.” He folded his hands primly upon the desk before him. “You were born and raised on Mars, I collect?”

  Arabella seethed at the Governor-General’s condescension, but fought to keep her temper in check. Displays of strong emotion had already set her back several times in her long struggle to reach this point. “I was, Your Excellency.”

  “Then all your life you have understood John Company to be the government, and the government to be the Company. We even wage war against the local satraps and principalities. But the Company rules Mars and Venus—portions of Venus, I should say—only as representative of His Majesty and His Majesty’s government back home. And only the king himself may declare war upon another sovereign power.”

  “By which you mean France.”

  “By which I mean France.”

  “But Napoleon is not Emperor of France,” Arabella insisted. “He was deposed by the Sénat after the capture of Paris! Is mere escape from captivity sufficient to transform a criminal into an emperor?”

  “Perhaps not. But the loyalty of his marshals, generals, and admirals … may very well be.” He spread his delicate white hands in a gesture of resignation. “As I have said, the situation is complicated.”

  Arabella bit her lip, to prevent an unseemly comment from escaping. “But surely some diplomatic solution…”

  “Please do rest assured that the Company is already doing every thing in its power to bring Diana and her company safely home.” His watery blue eyes above the pince-nez met hers levelly.

  “Which you may not describe in more detail.”

  “Regrettably.” But his face and voice betrayed no regret at all, only annoyance at her importunity.

  At that moment an aide appeared and whispered rapidly into the Governor-General’s ear. Immediately the great man rose, saying, “Unfortunately, my presence is required elsewhere.”

  “I thank you, Your Excellency, for your kind attention.” Her tone, she thought, was sufficiently civil for propriety; she took what pride she could in that small accomplishment.

  “Your servant, miss,” he replied mechanically, but his eyes and thoughts were already directed elsewhere. He cleared his desk of papers, stuffing them hurriedly in a drawer, and then he and the aide departed, conferring urgently between themselves.

  She remained in her chair for some time, breathing hard through her nose, lips tightly pursed … for she had not failed to note that, though the Governor-General had removed his private papers from the desk, he had not taken the time to lock it. Perhaps it had been due to the haste of his departure, or perhaps he had not thought of a young woman as any kind of threat—or, indeed, worthy of any consideration at all.

  For a moment she hesitated. Then, glancing all about, she stepped to the other side of the desk and pulled open the drawer.

  Most of the papers therein were meaningless or pedestrian. But one—a brief note, hastily scrawled, dated the previous Tuesday—struck Arabella like a thunderbolt. Talleyrand has recalled Savary to Paris, it said, for insufficient severity. His replacement, Fouché, departs Paris for Venus on Indomptable, sailing at the full moon
.

  In recent weeks she had studied the gazettes assiduously for any news of the war. Talleyrand, she had learned, was Napoleon’s chief diplomat, who had taken charge in Paris on Napoleon’s behalf after the departure of King Louis, and Savary was Napoleon’s minister of police—and, as such, the man responsible for the treatment of prisoners of war, including her husband-to-be. From all accounts he was a man of honor. But Fouché, known as “The Executioner of Lyon,” was an entirely different matter. During the Terror he had dispatched hundreds; his methods were brutal even by the standards of that horrific time. It was said that at Nantes he would take the poor unfortunate Royalists out on the river, tie them in pairs, male and female, and drown them together, calling this Le Mariage de Nantes.

  Arabella had to bite her knuckle to prevent herself from crying out. Even so, a gasp escaped from her.

  “What’s that?” came a voice from without, accompanied by the sound of footsteps.

  Panicked, Arabella stuffed the paper back into the drawer and pushed it closed. Then she ran, half-blinded by tears, from the room and down the corridors, ignoring the concerns of those she passed. Once she achieved the cool air outside Government House she paused, gasping, hands on knees. The back of her fine dress was soaked with perspiration.

  Fouché—“The Executioner of Lyon”—was to replace the honorable Savary as her captain’s gaoler. And he would be sailing for Venus within the month … might already have departed.

  What might such a monster do to a prisoner accused of espionage?

  * * *

  A solicitous older couple soon approached her, asking what was the matter. She quickly straightened, doing what she could to put her face and dress in order, and explained that she had received some bad news but was in no need of further assistance. She curtseyed, not meeting the strangers’ eyes, then hurried down the steps, bound for the tea-house where Martha and Gowse awaited her.