Arabella the Traitor of Mars Read online

  Arabella was not certain how she felt about this. “My intention is to return to my family plantation on Mars as soon as possible.”

  “Do not dismiss the favors of a Prince so lightly, Mrs. Singh. His attentions can lead to greatly improved prospects for you and your husband.” She set down her tea and looked into Arabella’s eyes with great sincerity. “I warn you, he is fickle. But he is also manipulable. If you appeal to his self-importance, if you can convince him that his interests align with yours … there is no end to the opportunities he can bring to you.”

  “Why are you telling me this? I am no one.”

  Lady Hertford sat back in her chair. “At the moment.” She took up her tea-cup and regarded Arabella over its painted rim. “But you have a bit of celebrity, and a certain provincial charm, and your husband is poised for greater things.” She sipped her tea. “Consider it a favor from a friend.”

  “I … I see.” Arabella raised her own tea, and was discomfited to find the liquid trembling in the cup. She steadied it with the other hand and sipped. “I will give your advice due consideration.”

  “Please do. Remember, Mrs. Singh … a pawn can become a queen, if she reaches the last rank.”

  * * *

  Eventually the gentlemen finished their port and cigars and joined the ladies in the withdrawing-room. Captain Singh—resplendent in his best Mars Company captain’s buff coat, a sight very dear to her eyes—was deep in conversation with Dundas and another gentleman as they entered the room, but as Arabella approached he shook their hands and the three men parted.

  “The Right Honorable Mr. Dundas was my dinner companion,” Arabella said to her husband as she took his arm, “and he did mention that he would be speaking with you after dinner. But who was the other? He seems vaguely familiar.”

  “That was Mr. Reid.”

  She smiled up at her husband. “You are moving in very rarified circles, Captain.”

  “Indeed.” But his mood, always reserved, now seemed even more so.

  “You are troubled.”

  “I have been offered a very great opportunity.”

  But before he could clarify this statement, the Prince came puttering up, bringing his conveyance to a wheezing, steam-spitting halt before the two of them.

  “I am so terribly sorry I was not able to chat with you myself over port,” the Prince said to the captain, acknowledging Arabella’s presence with a nod. “The Princess’s wedding plans have become all-encompassing. But I see that you did manage to talk with Messrs. Dundas and Reid. I do hope you found their conversation enlightening?”

  “It was … intriguing.”

  “I must emphasize that this topic is not yet suitable for general conversation. But I am given to understand that you are eminently suited for the task at hand, and I hope to be able to discuss it with you in person later this week-end. Now, if you will excuse me, I see that Lady Hertford requires my attention.”

  But when the Prince engaged the lever, the little steam engine let out a choking clatter and the chair refused to budge. The Prince immediately called for an engineer, and there was an awkward period of silence while the servants went in search of one. “May I examine the mechanism?” Arabella asked the Prince.

  “I imagine so. But be aware—the steam can be frightfully hot.”

  Arabella knew very little of steam power, but she was familiar with the basic principle. And, as she bent and peered at the engine’s shining brass, she saw that the system of wheels and jointed rods that connected it with the chair’s wheels was not dissimilar to clockwork movements she had seen before. But the steam cylinder, with its valves and fastenings glistening as though with dew, was more mysterious.

  Before she could complete her examination, a frock-coated gentleman with a large leather satchel of tools emerged from the kitchens and none-too-gently directed her aside. After a few brisk adjustments, too rapid for her to follow, the engine resumed its previous rhythmic chug and the Prince, waving a cheery farewell, directed his machine away.

  For a moment Arabella and the captain stood alone. “You must explain what that was all about,” she said to him.

  “It has been a long evening,” he said, consulting his watch. Indeed, the hour had grown quite late. “Perhaps we should retire.”

  This scarcely seemed a response, but the expression on Captain Singh’s face did not invite further discussion. Without a word she put her arm through his and they departed the room, saying good night to the company as they passed.

  * * *

  As soon as the bedchamber door closed behind them, Arabella turned to Captain Singh, regarding him with an unspoken question upon her face.

  “I have been presented with a very substantial opportunity,” he repeated, then hesitated. “I was not able to discuss this with you in the withdrawing-room because my role as a government agent is not supposed to be known to you.”

  Shortly after Napoleon’s escape from the far side of the Moon, Captain Singh had been sent to Venus on Mars Company business … or so the world had thought. The actuality was that he had been recruited by the Government as a secret agent and sent to Venus to investigate the Great Ogre’s plans there. But he had been captured and imprisoned there, and Arabella had traveled thence to aid his escape. Eventually they had discovered, investigated, and defeated Napoleon’s secret weapon, the armored airship Victoire, and along the way, with great reluctance, the captain had taken Arabella into his confidences. But he had never received authorization to do so.

  Eventually Arabella’s silence compelled the captain to speak once more. “Messrs. Dundas and Reid, from their lofty positions in the Admiralty and Company respectively, are aware of my dual role as captain and agent, and they told me that they were very favorably impressed by my performance in the Marieville prisoner-of-war camp and in the subsequent Battle of Venus. They say that they are now in search of a man to lead a very significant operation on Mars, and that my combination of navigational expertise, demonstrated leadership ability, and experience of the Mars trade makes me uniquely suited for the position.”

  “Why, that is wonderful news! Why are you so hesitant?” For his countenance and attitude were not at all what she would have expected from a man who had been so lavishly praised by his very highest superiors.

  “For one thing, I am only one of several men under consideration … though I am the only one of them on Earth at this moment. For another, they … they questioned my loyalty to Crown and Company, due to my … origins. I assured them that I am entirely devoted to my adopted country and to the Company in whose service I have spent my entire adult life, but they did not seem completely convinced. And … and they were not entirely forthcoming about their plans. I gather that the operation will involve both command of multiple airships and negotiations with the Martians, but further details will only be provided to the man selected to lead the operation. Although I understand that confidentiality must be maintained, something in their unspoken demeanor leads me to wonder with some … unease, what lies beneath that cloak of secrecy.” He shook his head. “I should not even be telling you this much.”

  “Of course you should not.” She embraced him then, and his arms wrapped around her shoulders. “But you know that I am discretion personified.”

  “I seem to recall that, on Venus, your ‘discretion’ eventually brought practically the entire crew of Touchstone into our confidences.”

  “And if I had not done so, we would still be there, and Napoleon’s armored fleet would certainly have conquered the entire solar system by now.”

  He sighed, his chest pressing and relaxing against hers. “You are a most vexing young person, boy second class Ashby.”

  “And you are honorable to a very fault, my maharaja.” She held him more tightly. “Do they require an immediate response?”

  “I must give them my reply before we all leave Brighton.”

  “Well, then, that will be no sooner than to-morrow. So let us sleep upon the question.”
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br />   But sleep did not come, at least not for a while. And even after Captain Singh was gently snoring away, Arabella found herself staring into the bright eye of Earth’s enormous moon, wondering what the morrow would bring.

  2

  SNOW

  What the morrow brought, as it turned out, was a great storm of snow, which left the grounds and the hills beyond coated in a gleaming blanket of purest white, in places several feet in depth.

  Arabella, taking a few steps onto the path beyond the door, found the experience extremely peculiar. The crunch of the substance beneath her foot—the artificial one, alas, did not transmit the sensation well, and in fact she was extremely concerned about her balance—was rather like that of the very dry sand called torokoshke, but, unlike any sand, the snow compressed into a solid mass under pressure, forming a firm friable plate in the shape of her boot-sole. Whether compressed or not, the snow was slippery underfoot, and its chill to the touch was quite remarkable—a nearly painful, crystalline sensation, which immediately melted away to water beneath her fingertips. “Is it edible?”

  The captain, having grown up in India and spent much of his adult life in the air, was as ignorant as she. But one of the Prince’s set—the Duke of Argyll, she thought, though she could not at the moment recall his name—had come out to stand beside her, and laughed at the question. “Of course!” he said, and digging up a handful he popped it into his mouth. “Just be careful,” he said, with white crumbs dissolving on his chin, “that it be the pure white stuff.”

  “I shall keep this in mind,” she said. Hesitantly she scooped up a small quantity of snow with two fingers, licked at it delicately, then put it in her mouth. The result was much more a feeling than a flavor; it had a prickly texture, reminiscent of the pins-and-needles sensation she sometimes felt in her extremities upon arising from sleep, which quickly evanesced to pure, cold water.

  “Wonderful packing stuff,” the Duke remarked, impenetrably, bending down again and taking up a double handful. This he quickly compressed into a ball between his hands, which he then threw with some force against a pillar some five feet away. To Arabella’s surprise it exploded into a puff of white, leaving only a few stray flakes where it had struck.

  “My goodness!” Arabella cried out, delighted, and immediately followed suit, forming her own ball of snow and throwing it toward the same pillar. But hers was not sufficiently well made, and fell into fragments before reaching its target. Immediately she squatted to form another, this one with more snow and more tightly packed.

  Soon the three of them were making and throwing snow balls at the walls, the trees, and each other—Arabella found the impact of the first one to strike her a vast surprise, but hardly painful at all, and retaliated with gusto—laughing and exclaiming “Aha!” with each new attack. Captain Singh, hesitant at first, soon joined in with great enthusiasm, dodging Arabella’s missiles with alacrity and flinging his own with great precision. She had rarely seen him so happy.

  So great was the hilarity that the Duke was soon compelled to beg off, with hands on knees and the air fogging around his head, until he was recovered enough to stand again. “Haven’t had so much fun since I was a boy in Inverness,” he gasped when his breath returned. “And now I don’t have to shovel it, ha ha!”

  Arabella, decades younger and not long removed from work aboard Touchstone and Diana, was not so exhausted by the exertion, but did find herself breathing heavily. The cold air, she discovered, burned in her breast in a way she had not encountered since her girlhood adventures in the Martian desert, and when combined with Earth’s unaccustomed gravity the sensation was surprisingly enervating. Her hands, too, tingled from the cold and wet, and the toes of her natural foot, despite its sturdy Mars-made half-boot, had gone nearly numb from chill. “Shovel it?” she asked, uncomprehending.

  The Duke, seemingly baffled at her ignorance, mimed shoveling—an action with which Arabella was achingly familiar, from her time shoveling coal aboard Diana. “Shovel the snow. Off of the paths. So one can walk upon them? Pretty, yes, but the stuff can be a frightful nuisance. This deep, even carriages can’t get through.”

  Suddenly a thought struck her—a thing she recalled from her reading—and the chill seemed to penetrate to her heart. “The snow will remain upon the ground until the weather turns warm, will it not?”

  “I imagine so,” said the Duke, brushing snow from his jacket sleeves.

  Arabella gazed off toward the hills, considering the hundreds and thousands—perhaps millions—of cubic feet of snow she could see, and the Lord only knew how much more lay beyond that. “The weather, though, has been most uncommonly cold. What if it does not go away for weeks, or months?”

  “A week, perhaps. Two at the most. Any more would be highly unusual.”

  “The current system of weather is highly unusual,” observed the captain, his breath coming out in a cloud above the hand which stroked his chin contemplatively. “Due to the volcanic eruption.”

  “Humph,” said the Duke. “Well, if we are compelled to remain in Brighton for a time, as guests of the Prince, that is not such a terrible fate.”

  Arabella and the captain exchanged an anxious glance, then—he was, no doubt, concerned about Diana and her crew—but, as there was nothing to be done about the situation, they brushed themselves off and returned inside.

  * * *

  Compelled to remain they were; the roads to London, all agreed, were completely impassable. But the pavilion was well stocked with foodstuffs, well equipped with entertainments, and fully occupied with the Prince’s guests, so no one feared either starvation or boredom.

  No one save Arabella. For her, this extended party was a return visit to the heavy, overheated, enervating, tedious Hades of her unwilling sojourn at Marlowe Hall, the family residence in England—not so very many years ago, but it felt like a lifetime. Here she found herself surrounded by her betters—or so they considered themselves—whose interests extended no further than billiards, gambling, horses, and gossip. The Prince’s fascination with the latest developments of science and engineering was promising, but she soon learned that his attitude was that of a patron rather than an active participant; he cared only for the results which could be attained and not the means by which they were achieved. And very few of the Prince’s entourage shared even that level of interest—except to a shallow, fawning degree.

  The pavilion, despite its grandiosity, soon became oppressive to her. Heated to a near Venusian degree, brilliantly lit by searing gas flames, and every where decorated with pretended branches and leaves, it seemed to press in upon her from every side. But going out of doors proved impractical. Though she managed to equip herself with a fur wrap and gloves—a sad approximation to her long-lost, beloved thukhong—the cold, wet air chilled her bones in a way that the crisp dry cold of even the deepest Martian winter never had. And her artificial foot, satisfactory though it was upon carpet or even upon rough ground, frequently betrayed her upon the snow and ice, bringing her many blows to her dignity and some serious bruises. She worked with the captain upon improvements, but though they did equip their shoes with cleats to enhance traction, no change they made to the foot itself with the limited resources available seemed to improve its overall stability.

  One good thing that came out of Arabella’s imprisonment was an acquaintance with Kiernan, the Prince’s chief coachmaker, to whom she had been directed while seeking materials to enhance her artificial foot. Because of the Prince’s enthusiasms, the coachmaker’s usual duties—which already united the skills of carpenter, tailor, and shoemaker—had been extended to many other conveyances and devices, such as the Prince’s Merlin chair. To Arabella’s disappointment Kiernan had no personal experience of steam power himself—the steam engine was the responsibility of a Scottish engineer, who held its secrets tight to his chest—but he and his workmen had fashioned the chair’s frame, wheels, and steering mechanism, and his workshop was to Arabella a wonderland of tools and materi
als, inhabited by bright, energetic minds of a mechanical bent. Kiernan himself, a heavyset man with thick gray hair and hands as hard as a huresh shell, had a ready wit and a tendency to rough humor, which Arabella found refreshing.

  Kiernan’s workshop was but a small part of the Royal Stables, a vast building in some ways even more lavish than the pavilion which it served. Surmounted by an enormous segmented glass dome, eighty feet in diameter and sixty-five feet high, the structure held stalls for sixty-one horses. The grand circular space beneath the dome, floored with sawdust and smelling, not unpleasantly, of horses and hay, was amazingly light at all hours of the day, and though it was heated, even the Prince’s patent stoves could not raise it to the same near-Venusian unpleasantness as the house itself. A second level of galleries, above the stables themselves, gave a splendid view onto the arena, and was luxuriously equipped for the viewing of riding exhibitions and the display of prize animals.

  Perhaps most importantly to Arabella, the stables were connected to the pavilion by a long underground passage, which meant that she could visit this blessed space—so cool and so uninhabited by the Prince’s set—without risking bruises or chills from the slippery snow outside. According to Kiernan, the widely-known rumor that the passage had been built so that the Prince could have secret rendezvouses with a former mistress was false. It had, instead, been constructed so that the Prince could enjoy riding his horses while avoiding the ridicule of his subjects, his girth at that time having already grown to a quite outrageous extent.

  Of course, that had been ten years ago, and the Prince was now even larger and goutier. Kiernan had worked out an apparatus—a sort of platform, raised by screws—which enabled the Prince to be lifted from his Merlin chair and lowered gently into the saddle. In this way he could be seated upon a horse in motion, but it could scarcely be called riding, and though the Prince had been suitably grateful for Kiernan’s work and every one had applauded his ingenuity, the public reaction to the invention had been scorn and hilarity, and the experiment had not been repeated.