“An excellent view for such a small instrument,” she mused.
The captain quirked an eyebrow at her observation. “You are familiar with telescopes?”
Arabella’s mouth went dry and she began to stammer, then blurted out the truth. “I … my father, he, he … was an amateur astronomer.” Silently she cursed herself for letting slip her opinion of the instrument. Though this bit of information could not, she hoped, lead to the discovery of her true identity and sex, she knew that she must keep as many secrets as she could. The more the captain and the other crew members knew about her, the more likely it was that they could puzzle out who and what she really was. “But what,” she said, hoping to change the subject, “does the observation of Saturn have to do with the ship’s speed?”
The captain tapped the scale on the telescope’s side. “Why do we measure these angles?”
Why did he always answer her questions with a question? “As the ship moves through the air,” she thought aloud, “the planet appears to fall astern.” She considered the question for a moment more. “The changing angle of the telescope over time can be used to determine how fast it is receding.”
“Very nearly correct. Consider, though, that the ship does not travel in a straight line, nor does Saturn or any other planet stand still. What could be done to compensate for these issues?”
Arabella closed her eyes, her mind wheeling. This was so much harder than the simple household economics she’d had from her mother! If it hadn’t been for Michael, and the lessons in trigonometry he’d passed on from their father, she’d be completely lost.
At that reminder of her late father, and her beloved Michael who was even now, unknown to himself, in such danger, the worry and exhaustion of the last week seemed to fall upon her from a great height. Suddenly she could barely breathe, and hot tears squeezed out between her closed eyelids.
But she could not show such weakness in front of the captain! She sniffed and shook her head hard to mask the tears. “I’m afraid I don’t know, sir.” Silently she cursed her quavering voice.
The captain gave her a smile which was not quite condescending. “Do not be too disturbed at your own limitations, young man. These problems are rather difficult, but I have confidence you will comprehend them in time.” He extracted the telescope from its socket and replaced it in the cabinet with the others. “The answer is twofold. First, we take observations of several stars and planets and use triangulation to determine the ship’s position, independent of her heading. And second, the motions of the planets are incorporated into Aadim’s workings.”
He unlatched the side of the automaton’s desk and swung it open, pointing out the complex shapes of several notched wheels and explaining how they worked together to calculate the motions of the planet Jupiter. But as he did so, Arabella could not help but notice that he laid a hand on the machine’s shoulder, as though reassuring it that this exposure was necessary and would not go on too long.
Arabella nodded and tried to concentrate on the captain’s descriptions of the mechanisms. But though the automaton’s head faced the window, it still seemed to be regarding her from the corner of its glass-and-ivory eye.
*
On the seventh day after rounding the Horn, all hands were called to action stations for a gunnery drill. “Ye’ll be a powder monkey,” Faunt told her, and directed her forward to the gun deck.
The gun deck, where the ship’s cannon were housed, didn’t seem to Arabella to be a “deck” at all. The other decks—defined by the deck, or floor, between each—were long flat spaces like the storeys of a house, but the gun deck was a nearly cylindrical space just behind and beneath the figurehead, the massive khoresh-wood timber of the ship’s stem running through its axis. Three brass cannon, each the size of a man, clustered close around the stem like huge, deadly fruit. The space stank of metal and powder.
Kerrigan had positioned himself near the forward end of the deck, where a stout square door in the hull stood open before the mouth of each cannon, and looked over the twenty or so men who now crowded the space. He floated with hands clasped behind his back, looking, Arabella thought, rather like a shopkeeper in Fort Augusta awaiting his next customer.