“I’m very glad to see you up and about, sir,” Arabella said. Though this small expression of sentiment seemed entirely inadequate, it was, she thought, what Arthur Ashby the captain’s boy would say. “If you please, sir, I could fetch you some broth from the galley.”
“Thank you, Ashby,” the captain whispered. “I should like that very much.”
14
PAEONIA
Diana was soon safely moored at the asteroid Paeonia.
Arabella had never seen an asteroid before. Asteroids, she knew, were the islands of the air, great floating mountains of rock ranging in size from less than a mile to hundreds of miles in diameter. Thousands of them drifted in the skies between Earth and Mars, yet so great were the distances involved that to encounter even one in a voyage was a rarity. If not for the French attack, Diana would not have come close enough to this one to make it out with the naked eye.
Paeonia proved to be a highly irregular sphere some ten miles across, but from where Diana floated nearby it seemed more a ball of foliage than of rock, the solid surface entirely invisible beneath a tangled canopy of branches and leaves at least fifty yards deep.
“I thought asteroids were rocky,” she said to Stross one day after she had assisted him in sending off a work crew. Eight men pedaled an aerial launch—little more than an open wickerwork frame with a small pulser at the back and a pair of sails for steering—away from Diana toward the great green expanse of Paeonia.
“Most small asteroids are entirely barren,” Stross explained, “but the ones over five miles or so carry a small force of attraction, and draw drops of water and bits of organic matter to themselves from the atmosphere. Over time these build up into a layer of soil, loose and sandy to be sure, but if any seeds should happen to be carried into the air from the surface of Earth or Venus they may find purchase there. Once established, they generally colonize the entire surface.” He gestured to Paeonia. “Fortunately for our purposes, this one bears a fine crop of oak and elm, both of which make tolerably good charcoal.”
Arabella herself, unlike the rest of her mess, was not detailed to charcoal-making duty—as captain’s boy, she was tasked with caring for him through his recovery. Though she would have liked to visit the asteroid, with its endless net of twining branches playing host to twittering birds and birdlike things, she was not too sorry to be missing the work of sawing, stripping, and hauling vast quantities of wood, the piling up of damp sandy soil around a stack of logs, or the endless pedaling of the air-pump which kept the slow-burning logs in their caul of soil just barely alight. The work crews returned at the end of each shift weary, exhausted, and filthy.
She had to admit that she took a certain malicious pleasure in seeing Binion covered with soot and half-dead from fatigue. When he saw her smirk, he spat “bum-boy” at her, but seemed too exhausted to do any thing else.
Richardson continued as acting captain. But with the real captain now awake and improving, he seemed paradoxically less concerned about asserting his own authority, and his relations with the other officers grew much more cordial. It was as though the weight of the mantle of responsibility had caused him so much discomfort that he’d snapped at his subordinates.
*
Though conscious, the captain was still extremely weak, and even in a state of free descent he could not bear to remain on the quarterdeck for more than an hour or two. He spent most of each day in his cabin, slowly building up his strength and sleeping frequently. From time to time Arabella noticed him gripping his head with an expression indicating severe headache, but she never once heard him complain of it.
Arabella continued to tend to the captain’s needs, changing his bandages, bringing him soup from the galley, or doing any other thing he required. But, paradoxically, now that he was conscious their relations became more distant than they had been while she was caring for his unconscious body. For as long as he was awake, she must work to maintain the fiction of Arthur Ashby, captain’s boy. It was only while he slept that she could gaze upon his face and entertain fancies entirely inappropriate to her supposed sex and station.
And so they discussed the theory and practice of aerial navigation, the workings of Aadim and automata in general, and the sights he had seen during his travels. But though she gently inquired into his personal history, the captain proved as resistant as Arabella herself to discussing his family and his early life. All he would say was that he had joined the Honorable Mars Company at the age of eighteen, sailing on Swiftsure as navigator’s mate.