“Do what you can,” Richardson said, clapping the master on the shoulder, “and put your trust in God.”
“I shall endeavor to do so,” the master replied, closing his eyes and dipping his head.
*
The conversation stuck in Arabella’s head, especially because of the unanswered questions it raised. For the whole rest of that day, in between her other chores, she did what she could to remain within earshot of the master and the other officers, trying to overhear and piece together some idea of the ship’s situation.
If nothing else, the task distracted her from the captain’s deteriorating condition. Despite all her attentions and the surgeon’s care, he seemed to be growing thinner; though his twitching and trembling continued, its frequency and strength were diminishing; even his mahogany brown skin, now dry and clammy, had paled to a weathered gray.
Every half an hour she dribbled water on his lips and waited for the dry and leathery tongue to lap it up. At these moments the captain’s face seemed at its most animated, merely asleep rather than unconscious, but when the water was gone it returned to a disturbing, ashen mask of himself.
The sight struck daggers through her heart. “You will recover,” she whispered again and again, in as reassuring a tone as she could muster.
Though she did not know, in truth, whom she was trying to reassure.
All that day she fretted over him, doing all that she could, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. As she tended him she kept one eye on Aadim, but though the automaton did move from time to time it never seemed to be responding to her actions as it had on that first day.
It was after supper, when the officers gathered in the captain’s cabin to drink their grog, that she finally learned that the ship was in even more peril than she’d feared.
*
Richardson and the others floated above a chart of the region, spread out and tacked to the floor. From her studies with the captain, Arabella recognized the great aerial current in which Diana was now embedded, denoted by a series of arrows, along with its side-currents, eddies, and cross-winds. The ship’s position was marked with a pin, but all the officers’ attention was directed to a tiny spot, labeled Paeonia, in the far corner of the chart. The spot rested at the center of a long, looping figure-of-eight, which Arabella knew represented its motion relative to the current over time.
“At this time of the solar year,” the sailing-master said, “the asteroid should be here.” He peered at the tiny lettering inked on the figure-of-eight, then placed a second pin about an inch from the inked spot. “And, according to my observations, our current wind speed is eighty-one hundred and a bit knots.” He measured out a distance of about four inches on his calipers, laid a straight-edge against the pin representing Diana, lined it up with the arrows on the chart, and walked the calipers along it. “Here’s where we’ll be in eight hours.”
The caliper’s pointed tip rested near the straight-edge’s closest approach to Paeonia, still at least five inches upstream from the pin.
“With the men in the shape they’re in, we can pedal at no more than six or seven knots.” Stross adjusted the caliper to a tiny gap, walked it eight steps from the straight-edge toward Paeonia, and placed a third pin there.
All the officers stared at it. A gap of nearly four inches separated the third pin from the second.
“Seven thousand miles short,” breathed Richardson, then cursed quietly.
“More like ten thousand, actually,” the sailing-master said in an apologetic tone. “Accounting for the third dimension.”
Richardson cursed again, more vehemently this time.
All the officers floated quietly, contemplating the chart. Arabella, too, stared hard at the lines and pins. It was exactly like some of the navigation exercises the captain had set her, except that this time the situation was not merely theoretical. There was a cross-current on the chart that would carry them much closer to the asteroid, but to reach it would require them to cover a distance far greater than they could pedal in a mere eight hours.
“You’ve found no other asteroids in our path?” Richardson said.
Stross shook his head. “There’s two or three we might reach, but according to the charts none of them is wooded to any degree. There’s always the possibility of a wandering comet, of course, but those so seldom have any plant life at all.”
Richardson sighed. “So it’s Paeonia or nothing. And in eight hours it’ll be behind us.”
Still Arabella stared at the chart, thinking about something she’d read in one of the books the captain had loaned her. The arrows began to move in her mind’s eye, flowing across the chart, air currents meshing and colliding like gears in a complex mechanism.