Stross grinned and nodded toward Arabella. “I’m sure Ashby can explain it.”
Richardson looked at Arabella with an expression of undiluted malevolence. She glanced toward Stross for assistance, but his face held nothing but a studied, beatific calm. The other officers looked on with a mixture of shock and frank curiosity. Trembling, she closed her eyes. It’s no worse than reciting Martian history for Khema, she thought, and began to speak, quoting from Thompson’s Guide to Aerial Navigation. “An aerial drogue is a construction of sturdy, windproof fabric, typically conical or hemispherical, whose open end is fastened to a cable attached to an airship. The drogue is generally propelled downwind by means of a gun, catapult, or other mechanism. The ship can then employ the drogue as an anchor point so as to proceed in a direction nearly perpendicular to the wind.” She swallowed and opened her eyes. All of the faces but Richardson’s had changed to expressions of amused satisfaction. For his part, Richardson ignored Arabella and glared at Stross. “That is the general principle, at least.”
“Nicely done, Ashby,” said Stross, who then nodded pleasantly to Richardson.
With a visible effort, Richardson controlled his anger. “Very well,” he said through gritted teeth, then turned to the boatswain. “Mr. Higgs, you are ordered to requisition a quantity of fabric, and any other necessary materials, from the cargo, in order to create a drogue or drogues sufficient to change the ship’s course and intercept the asteroid Paeonia. Mr. Quinn, you are ordered to assist Mr. Higgs and to keep proper records of all materials requisitioned. Mr. Stross, you are ordered to plot an expeditious course to the asteroid Paeonia, using any available means to do so, and bring the ship directly there forthwith. And Ashby, you are ordered to assist Mr. Stross in his efforts.” He straightened in the air, doing his best to look down his nose at the others present, though as it happened they were all floating above his eye level. “Are your orders clear?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” they all chorused.
“Come on, lad,” said Stross. “We’ve much to do, and little time to do it in.”
*
As the other officers left the cabin—Richardson favoring Stross with a withering look as he departed—Stross unpinned the chart from the floor and spread it out on Aadim’s desk. While he was doing this, Arabella tended to the captain.
The poor man, unconscious though he might be, seemed distressed by the sounds of the argument. He had thrashed off almost all of his bed-clothes, and beads of sweat had burst out on his wrinkled brow. Arabella gently tucked the captain’s blanket back in place and patted away the sweat with a soft cloth. “All will be well, sir,” she murmured low. “We’ll get Diana to Mars safely, you’ll see.”
The sound of Arabella’s voice, the touch of her hand, seemed to calm him somewhat. His face relaxed a bit, though it still retained the quietly pained expression it had held ever since the battle with the French, and he lay still beneath his blanket. “Rest well, sir,” she said, and patted his shoulder.
“Ashby, come here!” Stross said, and she joined him at the desk. “Here’s the situation.”
The three of them made an odd conference. Arabella trembled beneath her shirt, frightened as much by the responsibility that had been placed upon her shoulders as by the fear of discovery. Stross, the sailing-master, was a man she’d barely even encountered before the current crisis. Balding, with dark hair and eyes, his rather portly torso contrasted with the hard hands and strong arms of an experienced airman; his attitude of bluff confidence and attention to duty nearly masked the worry that lurked behind his eyes. And Aadim, though his eyes gazed woodenly out the window, seemed nonetheless to be paying close attention to the discussion, the mechanisms within his desk ticking and whirring beneath the chart.
The situation, as Stross put it, was grim. Two of the French cannonballs had shattered the hull of Diana’s coal-store, and over half the coal had drifted away before the breach could be repaired. This coal, carefully budgeted because of its great weight, was intended to fill the ship’s balloons with hot air upon arrival at Mars, allowing her to drift gently downward to a landing. Without it, once the ship entered the influence of Mars’s gravity she was doomed to smash upon the surface. Returning to Earth, where they would be more likely to encounter another ship that might have coal to spare, was out of the question—the ship’s stores of food and water would never stretch so far.
“So we’re bound for Paeonia,” Stross concluded, tapping the pin on the chart. “It’s a substantial asteroid, uninhabited but forested; there we can cut timber and make charcoal. Not so good a fuel as coal, to be sure, but adequate to the task.”
“How much time will it take to make the charcoal we require?”