Arabella the Traitor of Mars by David D. Levine

Author:David D. Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

11

BLOCKADE

All around Arabella the great cabin rocked and shuddered as the whole ship was shaken by the chaotic winds of Mars’s Horn, and the needle of the wind-speed dial on the side of Aadim’s desk twitched and jerked like a nervous shareth’s tail. Although this agitation was unpleasant, it was far from unusual, and Arabella strove to ignore it and concentrate her attention upon her calculations. But then a sudden jolt dislodged her pen from Fuller’s Patent Free-Descent Inkwell, sending it spinning across the cabin trailing drops of shimmering ink. With a disgusted sound she unstrapped herself from her seat and pursued the stray instrument across the cabin, mopping up the drops from the air with her pen-wiper.

Once she had retrieved her pen and cleared the ink from the air, she found herself by the cabin’s broad window, holding herself steady against its jamb with one hand. The inconstant, unpredictable winds pushed the ship this way and that, making her sway and drift in the air. But the sky without the window was as pale and blue and clear as ever, for the air near Mars was generally too dry to form clouds no matter how tempestuous it became. This lack of cloud, of course, made the currents invisible—except to the very most practiced eye, and even then not all the time—which made navigation difficult. Finding some way around this conundrum was the entire point of her presence here.

But despite days of effort, embedded in the very midst of the winds she studied and equipped with the finest instruments available, she was no closer to finding a solution than she had been on the ground. In fact, loath though she was to admit error, she was beginning to come to the conclusion that hers was a fool’s errand—that the winds of the Horn were simply too fickle and arbitrary to be predicted by observation and mathematics.

But, in the spirit of tekhmet, she refused—she simply refused—to admit defeat. So she continued her studies, and helped out where she could, and worried along with every man aboard that the smuggler would simply pass them by. For though they knew his destination and the approximate date of his arrival, the sky was very large and Diana was but one ship.

For a moment longer she stared upward through the window, hoping but not expecting to be the first to spot the smuggler as a tiny white spot against the sunward sky’s untroubled blue. But there was nothing there—nothing save Phobos, sailing serenely above them on its eastward path. So rapidly did that tiny moon travel in its orbit that it rose in the west and set in the east, catching up and passing the Sun every seven and a half hours.

In her mind’s eye the invisible air around Phobos swirled with waves and eddies, the already-turbulent air of the Horn further disturbed by the moon’s rapid passage, like the froth behind a hand drawn through a rushing stream. Those eddies had, so far, resisted all the efforts of better mathematicians than she to describe and predict their capricious motions.

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