She wished that he would reveal more details about his inner life. Perhaps, she sometimes dared to hope, beneath his smooth professional veneer he might harbor some warm feeling toward herself. But though she must respect the captain’s desire to keep his life private—he certainly offered her the same courtesy—she realized that his reticence only made him more intriguing and mysterious, and seemed to draw her into wanting to know more.
The man was already intriguing enough, with his deep brown eyes, his musical accent, and his charming and very polite mannerisms. Some of the crew, she knew, considered him little more than a sort of performing ape, resenting his rise to the position of captain. But though she’d encountered this attitude toward foreigners as much on Mars as she had in England—her own mother harbored a particularly virulent strain of it—she herself had spent so much time among Martians that she held no predispositions against any thinking being, no matter their birthplace, color, or shape.
Indeed, so far was she from prejudiced against Captain Singh because of his race that sometimes, in idle moments, she found herself musing on what sort of life they might build together. He was in every way, she reflected, far superior to the foppish dandies to whom her mother had insisted on presenting her back in England.…
She shook herself and returned her attention to her duties. Such a gulf separated them—a gulf of status and breeding and, of course, hidden gender, as well as of color and creed—that such a notion could never be any thing more than a distracting fancy.
She needed to bend her thoughts toward Diana. All her efforts must be dedicated to getting the ship, captain, and crew back into peak operating condition, so as to resume the journey to Mars with all possible dispatch. Every day that passed put her further behind Simon.
Above all, she must not despair. Even if Simon arrived at Mars days or weeks before she did, it would take him some time to convince Michael to leave off the running of the plantation and go hunting with him. There was still time for her to warn her brother of the deadly danger their cousin posed. But that time was slipping away with every turn of Diana’s spring-wound glass.
*
Arabella was far from the only one who felt the pressure of passing time. Diana and all her sister ships of the Honorable Mars Company made their money by speed, by the swift conveyance of cargo from the place where it was produced to the place where it was needed. The officers and crew, too, must be fed and watered, and the ship’s stores were far from inexhaustible. Every man knew in his bones that Diana must finish her repair and resupply and be on her way as soon as ever she could, and the officers drove them hard.
So it was that the men, exhausted though they might be from their labors at charcoal-making, grew restive, muttering direly to each other about short rations and lost bonuses. The exhilaration that had followed the corsair’s defeat bled away, as day by weary day the men pedaled back and forth to Paeonia with load upon load of charcoal. They ate their diminished meals in sullen silence, and whispered complaints passed from hammock to hammock among the watch below.
Even the charcoal, the very substance that ensured their survival, served only to worsen the crew’s foul mood. The filthy stuff, far bulkier than the coal it replaced, soon overfilled the coal room, and lumpy burnt-smelling bags of charcoal had to be stowed in every unused corner of the ship. Every man and every thing smelled of it; greasy black powder drifted into every corner and begrimed every bodily crease. The biscuits and salt beef came from the galley seasoned with the gritty stuff. It crunched between Arabella’s teeth.
The very air, it seemed, tasted of charcoal, and the weary, filthy, red-eyed men smoldered beneath its smoky pall.
As the mutterings increased, Arabella’s earlier concern about a possible mutiny returned. Though she had neither heard nor seen any further sign of dissent in the ranks since that overheard conversation in the head, she feared the conspiracy had continued unseen. But who were the conspirators?
She tried to investigate without seeming to do so, asking veiled questions and straining to overhear muttered conversations, but learned nothing concrete—if there was a plot in train, the plotters were very good at keeping quiet about it. And though she kept an attentive ear open at all times for that grating voice she had overheard in the darkness, never did she hear it upon the deck or below it.
Perhaps, she thought—she hoped—the rumblings of mutiny she’d overheard had been nothing more than talk.
She should tell the captain, she knew. But the man had such a strong respect for personal responsibility—in fact, a nearly Martian sense of okhaya—that she knew any report of questionable behavior from a member of the crew would be met with sharp skepticism. And as she had no certain knowledge of which member of the crew it might be … serious charges should not be brought up lightly, and if she told him of her fears without absolute, objective evidence it might diminish her in his eyes. And that was something she devoutly did not wish.
So she continued to wait, and watch, and listen.