“Nay,” said Young. “When I were in Columbine we met with a French frigate. Cap’n Clive shot away her pulsers and we got away clean.” He took a bite of his biscuit, chewed noisily. “Nary a casualty on either side.”
Hornsby shook his head. “It’s a dangerous tactic, getting in close enough for a shot like that. Ye might find yer own pulsers shot to h—l. And if neither ship can pedal away, well then it’s hand-to-hand combat, with the survivors left to piece together one good ship from whatever’s left.”
“But Diana’s such a fast ship,” Arabella said. “We are traveling at a rate of over seven thousand knots! Why can’t we simply outsail them?”
Young grinned, though without humor. “It’s not so simple, lad.” He carefully placed two bits of biscuit in the air above the mess table. “This is us, and that’s them.” Then he blew a puff of breath at them, causing both bits to waft gently in the same direction. “We’re both in the same current of air, ain’t we? That’s what’s moving at seven thousand knots, carrying both of us along with it. For either ship to outrace the other, both being in the same wind, means pedaling. And though she’s fast for a Marsman, Diana can’t out-pedal a corsair with one-tenth the tonnage.”
“Can’t we change course? Find some other wind?”
“This ain’t the Horn, lad, where the winds blow every which way. We’re in the trades. Nearest other wind might be a hundred mile off.”
Taylor angrily punched the air. “It’s the g______d waiting I can’t stand! On the sea, ye can’t see another ship until she’s hull-down on the horizon.” As his tattoos attested, Taylor had served as a seaman for years before joining Diana. “But out here … it could be weeks from first sight until she gets within cannon range.”
“Be careful what ye wish for,” Gosling admonished. “From what I hear at the scuttlebutt, she’s closing fast. We could be in battle within five days.”
At that all the men, including Arabella, fell silent, morosely chewing their salt pork.
*
As the other ship drew near, they drilled and drilled, spending hours each day at gunnery practice. While Arabella’s and the other gun crews strove to increase their rate of fire, the topmen dashed from sail to sail, and all the other men slaved at the pedals. The other ship was now clearly visible to the unaided eye, though not yet close enough to make out her provenance.
“What is the point of trimming the sails while pedaling?” Arabella asked the captain during one of their increasingly rare sessions together. She understood enough of aerial navigation now to know that the trim of the sails was normally adjusted only when passing through an unfavorable wind or to catch a favorable one, but now there was no hope of finding any wind better than the one in which they were embedded.
“When we pedal,” the captain explained, “the ship gains a bit of way, which the sails can use to change her course. A good ship, with a strong and experienced crew, can turn one hundred and eighty degrees in less than ten minutes. And we must turn the ship smartly and accurately if we are to bring our cannon properly to bear upon the enemy.”
Arabella swallowed. “So she is indeed an enemy?” The other ship’s behavior, drawing directly closer and closer, had been seen by all the men as an ill sign, but some still held out hope she might be another Marsman, bending her course to match Diana’s out of a need of supplies or succor.
“She is no Company ship,” he replied, his expression grim. “We’ve signaled with cannon, and she has failed to respond in kind.” He stared past Arabella’s shoulder, his gaze directed through the hull at the other ship’s location. “And, as such, I am sorry to tell you that this will be our last session together until … until after we are well clear of her.”
“I see,” Arabella said, and swallowed hard.
*
That night, swaddled in her hammock between the warm and snoring bodies of the other men, Arabella could not sleep despite her body’s exhaustion.
What would the coming days bring? Would there be battle, or merely an encounter with another, albeit strangely uncommunicative, merchant ship? And if there was battle, what then?
It was not only concern for Arabella’s own safety that kept her mind awhirl with desperate trepidation. After so many weeks aboard Diana, she had formed good working relationships with most of the crew, and despite her continued deception of them she considered many of them friends or at least comrades. The captain, too, had earned … her trust and professional loyalty, she told herself. If the other ship did indeed prove to be a pirate or corsair, any of them might be injured or killed in the coming action.