She didn’t remember when she’d started talking to Aadim. It was something the captain did sometimes, she knew, especially when performing difficult navigational calculations. He claimed that talking the problem through helped him focus his mind upon the task at hand and not forget any of the levers or settings. But it certainly seemed that he sometimes waited for an answer from the patient, sturdy automaton.
As she moved Aadim’s finger along Diana’s curving path, she noticed that the motion was not smooth as it should be, though she kept her hand upon Aadim’s wooden one as gentle and firm as before. Pausing, she checked that his shoulder joint and follower-cams were properly adjusted and oiled, which they proved to be. But still the pointing finger seemed to resist the path the manuals dictated.
“You’re trying to tell me something,” she said. But the automaton’s green glass eyes only stared back at her, as rigid and impassive as ever.
Again she returned Aadim’s finger to the beginning of its path, the entry point to the planetary atmosphere. But as she moved it gently to that point, she paid careful attention to the slight jerks and tugs the navigator’s wooden hand gave to her own as the gears and mechanisms within his desk ticked and whirred away.
Was there a slight tendency to the southeast?
Closing her eyes, gentling her breath, Arabella gave the automaton’s hand free rein, as though trusting a horse to return to the stable on its own.
The slight tug she felt steadied, pulling gently but firmly in a southeasterly direction. She allowed the finger to drift as it seemed to wish, until with a slight distinct click it came to a trembling halt. A slight nudge in any direction from that point met resistance.
Arabella opened her eyes. Aadim’s finger had come to rest at a node on the chart where three prevailing winds of Mars’s planetary atmosphere came together. From there, the combined wind current would carry Diana directly to Arabella’s family plantation. Assuming, of course, that the charts were accurate, which the manuals had warned might not be the case in all seasons of the year.
She would certainly never have noticed the node if she’d followed the path dictated by the manuals. It was well outside the area authorized for atmospheric entry by all the charts and tables.
But the manuals were designed to bring the ship to Fort Augusta, not to a khoresh-wood plantation some miles away.
It would be tricky to bring Diana round Mars’s Horn to that small node. But the more she studied the charts, the more necessary it seemed.
She could not be certain this entry point would work. But with the information available to her, it seemed the best choice.
“Very well,” she breathed. “We shall try it your way.”
Did Aadim’s painted eyebrow quirk slightly? Did his head incline, ever so gently, in acknowledgement? Or were those simply the accidental motions of a complex and temperamental machine?
Arabella met Aadim’s unblinking gaze for a long, uncertain moment. Then she shook her head and set about finding a sailing order through the turbulent Horn to the new entry point.
*
Of all the many strange feelings Arabella had experienced in the last few weeks, perhaps the strangest was when Captain Singh invited her to join him on the quarterdeck to observe the descent to Mars.
After many hours in the great cabin, calculating and recalculating the sailing order with Aadim and trying to remember the details of the drying-sheds for Stross—whose conduct toward her remained coldly civil, which pained her after the avuncular warmth he’d shown when she’d been captain’s boy—she’d felt the ship begin to shake and jerk as Diana entered the outermost fringes of Mars’s Horn, and had emerged to witness with her own eyes the navigational path she’d plotted so many times on Aadim’s desk.
The planet loomed below them now, no longer a globe ahead, but rather a vast red-gold dome that spread out to both sides beneath the ship’s keel. Already Arabella felt a slight but undeniable drift toward the deck as the planet’s gravitational attraction began to be felt.
“Miss Ashby,” the captain called, and she turned to see him standing—yes, standing, not floating—near the wheel on the quarterdeck above. “Please do join us here for the rounding of the Horn.”
She paused at the foot of the ladder. On her first aerial voyage the quarterdeck, whose name she had not even known, was a place she had never visited, nor even seen. Then, for the last two months and more, she’d been a mere captain’s boy, and entry into officers’ territory was a privilege granted but rarely and grudgingly. But now she was something other than what she had been—part passenger, part navigator, and entirely ex-airman—and apparently this new person was one to whom an invitation to the quarterdeck was extended as readily as an invitation to tea.