THE ICE LINE

by Stephen Baxter

 

* * * *

 

Stephen Baxter’s new novel, Ark, a sequel to Flood, will be out from Ace later this year. The author is currently working on his “Northland” alternate-prehistory series of novels, which has locations close to where he lives, in north England—as does “Ice Line,” where, he tells us, “Admiral Collingwood is a local hero!”

 

* * * *

 

Author’s Note: This story takes place some eighty-five years after the events of “The Ice War” (Asimov’s, September 2008), and is similarly loosely related to my 1993 novel Anti-Ice. In our timeline Admiral Collingwood did fight beside Nelson at Trafalgar, and Robert Fulton’s Nautilus was built and trialed, though never used in war.

 

* * * *

 

Prologue

 

I discovered the attached manuscript on January 1st 1806, a dismal New Year, when with my father’s staff I was sifting through the charred wreckage of the Ulgham manufactory. It was scribbled on odd bits of paper that themselves tell something of the author’s extraordinary story—a torn blueprint of the old Nautilus submersible machine, a warship’s victualling sheet still reeking of gunpowder, even a memorandum in my own hand, all rolled up and stuffed into a spent Congreve rocket shell, presumably in the very last moments before the Tom Paine rose for its momentous journey to the Phoebean nest and the ice line. Though I did not immediately recognize his hand, it was immediately clear to me who was the author.

 

The whole world now knows the biographies of two of the heroes of the Tom Paine—Miss Caroline Herschel, and my own father Rear Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood—but the third member of that famous crew, Ben Hobbes, has received less attention. His own account shows how he had to overcome, not merely lethal peril, but the flaws of his own heart. And in this mortal realm none of us faces a greater challenge.

 

I herewith present Ben Hobbes—his journal. The first entry is dated Thursday, December 12th, 1805.

 

—ANNE COLLINGWOOD, Morpeth, June 22nd, 1809.

 

* * * *

 

I

 

The drummers sounded battle stations, and it was a noise fit to chill the blood.

 

It was a bleak sky that hung over the Indomitable, and the other square-riggers and gun-boats of the French and Spanish navies that crowded to defend Napoleon’s National Flotilla as it toiled across the Channel, on its way to give England her worst night since the comet-fall of 1720. It was already late afternoon, so long had it taken the Flotilla to form up out of Boulogne, and I mused that the elements were showing little sympathy for the hundred and seventy thousand troops throwing up their guts in the invasion barges.

 

And, peering out from the foredeck, I saw the British ships bearing down. There are few things in the world so elegant as a fighting three-master seen head on as she leans into the wind, her canvas full set. But some of those ships were already showing the sparking of guns, and you could hear a distant pop, pop. The Royal Navy had taken a licking at Trafalgar, and one-arm Nelson was swimming with the fishes, but the English weren’t defeated yet.

 

All around me the Indomitable prepared for war. You must not believe glamorous accounts of a tar’s life. That French warship, already battered and patched from previous scraps, was crowded with men, you went shoulder to shoulder with your fellows on the working decks, and now all of them were running around and hauling on ropes and clambering high in the rigging. The shot racks were opened, the powder hatches made fast, the cutlasses and pistols handed out, and huge canvases soaked in seawater were draped in the deck spaces as firebreaks. The most ominous preparation was the swabbing of the decks and the scattering of sand, so that men would not slip on their mates’ blood. The cabin lads penned the ducks and geese in their coops, and dragged the goats and pigs to the side and dropped them in the surging water between the ships, the first casualties of the day. And the wives and whores cowered in the corners.

 

As for me, Ben Hobbes, I had signed the papers and taken Bonaparte’s gold to sail my Nautilus against the English. That slim copper hull was already hung from its hawser by the starboard rail. But I had no intention of adding my name to the butcher’s bill that day. I looked for Lieutenant Gourdon, the brute Frenchman who had been assigned by the Captain to supervise me and who, damn his eyes, had been as efficient at his task as he had been reluctant to take it on. In those frantic minutes he was distracted by his other duties, and so I took my chance and darted away below deck, seeking a place to be out of sight.

 

Below, the atmosphere was no less fraught. I hurried past the surgeon’s cabin where the tables were being scrubbed down, and the doctor himself in his leather apron lined up the blades and saws and scalpels and tourniquets. I found myself in the first gun deck—the uppermost of three on this first rate, as the British would have called the ship. Here in this wide, low space, you had teams of a dozen men gathering around each of the weapons on the starboard side—for you only fired from one side at a time—and they rushed through the complicated choreography of preparing a big gun: raising the port, ramming a powder cartridge down the barrel and then the ball, before you heave your muzzle out of the port and make the tackles for the recoil, and the gun captain takes his quill filled with powder and drops it into the touch-hole. The powder boys scuttled with their lethal supplies, and the lieutenants stalked about yelling orders, and I hurried through the space, meeting the eye of no man or boy.

 

But then Gourdon showed up, damn him, and I knew he had watched me more closely than I thought, and followed me down. “There you are, you Yankee worm!” Gourdon roared this in my face, showing teeth gapped after a boyhood of brawling in the Marseilles docks, and his long pigtail was greasy and clumped with bits of stale food, for he used it to wipe his mouth when he ate. You can speak for or against the Revolution in France and what “Emperor” Napoleon has done with it, but you’d not have found a man like Pierre Gourdon in any position of responsibility in the navy of King Louis. “You took good French money to sail yon undersea ship against the British—serving the nation that has invaded your own—and now at the crux you skulk like a rat among these guns. You are a coward and a thief !”

 

I was stung by one insult, but not the other. “Coward you may call me; but what man wants to die for a cause that isn’t his own? But thief—never! I took your government’s money, for I had little choice, once my master Robert Fulton had absconded to the English—and your officers were done press-ganging me! Look, Gourdon—why not just let me be? The Nautilus’s pinprick attack will make no difference to the outcome of this mighty conflict. Your own Emperor said so, at first, when Fulton presented a prototype of his invention. When the action’s done we’ll see to a reckoning.” I winked at him. “I have gold, lodged in a bank in Paris.”

 

A persuasive argument you might think, but he grabbed my collar and began to lug me off that deck. “For you the reckoning is now, Yankee—”

 

You can hear a cannonball before it arrives, a kind of hot descending whistle.

 

A whole section of the starboard side exploded inwards, sending one gun swiveling from its mount and skittling its crew, and there was a hail of stout French oak smashed to splinters, lethal in themselves. I saw the projectile itself—they don’t always move so fast, but the mass they pack does the damage—and it passed out of the port side hull, making an even bigger mess of the woodwork. My ears rang from the concussion, and I stepped back. I trod on a power boy, lying on the floor, his head stove in and his right leg detached and lying neatly beside him.

 

And through the gaping wound in that starboard bulkhead I saw another ship’s hull slide close, a “Nelson chequer” of paintwork and gaping gun nozzles, surely only a few dozen yards away. Beyond I saw more ships closing with stately grace—and, under that grey Channel sky, I saw something vaster than any ship, breaking the water and rising, a sleek dome from which the water poured. I thought perhaps it was a whale, but it lacked flukes and a spout and a gimlet eye. Strangest of all, I thought I saw a man riding the back of the thing as it rose, attached by a sort of harness and a metal wand. Then smoke from the cannonades drifted across my field of view, and I saw no more. Just moments after the shot, my senses were fuddled. I think if I had known that that brief impression was my first glimpse of a Phoebean—an invader far worse than any Frenchman who ever lived—I would have subsided into a greater fear yet!

 

The gun crews were responding now. Men hauled away their fallen mates, or the bits of them, the officers yelled and the crew leaders roared their orders, and the mighty cannons leapt back under the recoil, and the space was filled with heat and smoke and a stink of gunpowder. Still Gourdon wasn’t about to let me go. His meaty hand clamped to my shoulder, he dragged me away.

 

* * * *

 

II

 

My Nautilus still hung from its crane, like a trophy fish on display.

 

I clambered up a short ladder to the port in its upper hull. Soon I was sitting in my solitary couch and strapping the leather harness in place pulling a blanket over my legs. Glancing around the hull, I saw that it had been loaded with bombs—copper canisters of air—and with carcasses, Fulton’s dragged mines. Nautilus was sturdy enough around me, with her copper sheets riveted over iron ribs—and she was mine, the design as much my own as Fulton’s no matter what the popular accounts may tell you, and she had been tested and not found wanting. But whether she could withstand a cannon shot was a matter I didn’t want to explore.

 

Gourdon loomed over me, blocking out the grey sky. “The English lie to the north,” he grunted. “The square-riggers will not be able to lower their guns to fire on you, though the gun-boats might—”

 

“I know what to do. Shut up the dome, Gourdon, and let me be on the way.”

 

He leaned forward, so his brutal face filled my world. “Be sure that if you flee today, no matter where you hide, I will find you.”

 

But I grinned at him; whatever followed, at least I would be out of reach of his fists and the odor of his breath.

 

He and a seaman hauled up the glass blister and set it over my head and shoulders. Soon they were tightening the screws with a will, and the noise of battle was shut out. Then Gourdon waved and yelled, and seamen hauled on ropes, and I was lifted up in the air, and the hawser swiveled to dangle me over the sea.

 

Just for a minute, looking out of my blister, I was granted a view of the battle vouchsafed to none other, aside from those wretches climbed high in their ships’ rigging. In a fight between sailing ships, the great square-riggers close as slow and subtle as dreams. If there are formations and grand designs of admirals, it’s not visible to your basic seaman. But when the ships close on one another their walls of guns fire their iron spite at each other, and there’s a kind of friction of explosions that erupts all along the facing hulls. That day the destiny of England herself was in play and the fight was fierce, and I could see that some ships of both flags had already been reduced to drifting hulks with splintered stumps of masts and shattered hulls, and the crews were pitching the dead and dying over the side, and yet they fought on.

 

So much you might have seen in any naval action around the world for a century, as England and France, and Spain and Holland too, had slugged it out in search of empire and wealth. But today you had the added element of the National Flotilla: the huge, unlikely fleet Napoleon the Ogre had gathered in Boulogne, where the harbors had been crammed with boats gunwale to gunwale. The rumors had been that Napoleon had assembled seven army corps, with no fewer than nine thousand horses, and blacksmiths, surgeons, carpenters, grooms, harness makers, and chefs, and all the weapons, ammunition, and supplies they would need to make their foothold in England, all packed into three thousand boats. The Royal Navy had been England’s best hope of defense, and for years it had kept the French and Spanish fleets bottled up in their ports. But in October the navy had been dished by Nelson’s huge failure at Trafalgar—and Napoleon had sailed as soon as he could, despite the challenge of the December weather.

 

Now, in the gaps between the square-riggers, I saw the Flotilla boats like a dismal carpet on the water, barges and bilge keelers and other flat-bottomed types, ideal for landing on southern England’s shallow beaches yet wallowing in the choppy waters of the Channel. In amongst them were the prames, specialist gunships, three-masted and a hundred feet long, but with a shallow draught and a shallow triple keel, and smaller fighting ships like chaloupes and cannoniers and peniches. And I saw how the English gun-boats, heftily rowed by seventy men apiece, prowled among the wretched lumbering barges, smashing them to pieces. Many blue-coats would die before they ever got off this sea—and yet more would come through this trial of water and fire to land, and thus do tyrants pay for their ambitions with the lives of others.

 

All this I saw in an instant, suspended by the hawser. But then the French sailors paid out their ropes, and there was a sickening moment of falling—and I was in the water with the rest!

 

* * * *

 

III

 

The first order of business was to get under the sea, rather than bob about on it. I pulled a lever to open my keel, a hollow iron tube into which water bubbled steadily, and I imagined the stares of the men in the barges as I sank into the briny.

 

I was immediately enclosed in the sea’s own peculiar noise, which is something like the rushing of blood you may hear if you cup your hands over your ears. Balm for the soul compared to the popping of cannons, screaming of shells, and shrieking of men! I could still see traces of the battle, however—the invasion barges littering the water above like pages torn from a book, and here and there a stray shot plowing into the sea like a diving bird—and, more gruesomely, I saw bodies adrift in their own clouds of blood. I decided I would descend to two or three fathoms’ depth—Fulton had taken the Nautilus to four fathoms once, and stayed there an hour, with three crewmen on board—for I judged that such a depth should shield me from the worst of the firestorm above. I would be too deep for my leather snorkel, but I had air contained in my bombs and would not suffer.

 

As I descended I ran a hasty check of my craft; the copper hull banged and creaked, but those iron ribs were sturdy, and there were no big leaks. I tested my rudder and my fins, the latter being two horizontal flaps fixed to the vertical rudder and intended to control the angle of dive, all adjusted with levers from the cabin. I tried out my propulsion, a screw affixed to the stern of the craft that I turned with a hand crank. All worked as I and Fulton [Here the author had scratched out “Fulton and I”—A.C.] had designed and built it, and I would be able to swim about the sea as graceful as a porpoise. Snug under my blanket, my Nautilus stout about me, my mood began to improve. I wondered now at my reluctance to climb aboard in the first place.

 

The scheme was that I should assail British warships. The vessel carried mines we called carcasses. I would rise up beneath an enemy, and a spike mounted on my dome would be driven into the ship’s wooden hull. I would speed away, cranking the screw furiously, paying out a line. When I got far enough away the carcass would strike the hull; each carcass was a copper cylinder containing hundreds of pounds of gunpowder, to be detonated by a gunlock mechanism that fired on contact with the hull. All of this we had extensively tested in the course of dives in the Seine and elsewhere.

 

Yet, if you have followed my account this far, you will not be surprised to learn that I had no intention of swimming anywhere near a British vessel. I had no loyalty to either side in this war. Let Gourdon fume and rage—he had no control over me now. I decided I would make for the sanctuary of land—and heading not north to the threatened beaches of England, but south, to one of the tiny harbors and fishing villages that pepper the French coast. In the chaos of war I was sure opportunities for advancement of one sort or another would present themselves—and there was always the gold that waited for me in that bank in Paris, if I could reach it.

 

So I started cranking the screw, and I worked my rudders and eyed my compass (you may be surprised to know that compasses work as well beneath the water as above). I thought my future was as set as it had been for some months, ever since I had been brought into the dangerous attention of the Ogre. And yet I have found on numerous occasions in the course of my peculiar career that moments of apparent security in fact represent the greatest danger. So it proved this time!

 

I saw it rising up from below.

 

You will understand that I had my gaze fixed on what I could see of the battle above. I had no expectation of any threat from below, short of a few strands of kelp that might jam up my screw. And yet I now saw movement from the corner of my eye, a subtle shifting of shades, a pale mass that I thought looked like an immense bubble. Pillars worked beneath, but they may have been shafts of light, and there was another sort of light, a spark like lightning, which played about the upper surface of the system. I stopped cranking, my hands resting on my control levers, and I watched, curious. I had no sense of danger; it was a play of light and color.

 

But in the last instant I saw a carapace hard and pocked and scratched, as solid as I was.

 

It slammed into me from below, and I heard a crumple of copper and a great groan as iron ribs buckled, and water sprayed in from a dozen wounds. All this even as I rose on the back of this great crab-thing from the deep. I cranked hard and worked my levers, my rudders flapping like birds’ wings, but without avail. In moments I was lifted up into the air, and the Nautilus rolled, falling down the curve of that carapace, and I was suddenly in chaos, with my blanket and biscuits and other junk falling around me, and I was grateful to be strapped into my couch.

 

With a hard impact the Nautilus gained the water once more. She floated, but I was suspended upside down, and water gushed through strained seams. Dizzy, battered, I could barely think.

 

And then explosions came. I looked back. The rising island from which I had fallen was supported in the air on pillars that glimmered blue where they thrust out of the water. A French first rate took it on, her port guns blazing at the ice monster. As its supports shattered and broke, the great lens dipped, and I worried it might fall on me.

 

Then the glass of my blister smashed in. I cowered, wondering what new calamity had befallen me—but the glass had been broken, not by some natural phenomenon, but by an axe. Head and shoulders thrust through my blister, swathed in a hooded oilskin coat. I cried out in French, “Who are you?”

 

“I’m English for a start,” came the answer in that brisk language. Then the hood was pushed back, to reveal a shock of blond hair, a sturdy yet compelling face—a woman! And a young one. “And you, I presume, are Ben Hobbes, for nobody else rides around the ocean in a mechanical fish.” She smiled. “I have been looking for you. I have come to save you. And not a moment too soon, for that Phoebean is starting to look decidedly irritated.” She held out a gloved hand. “Come!”

 

I hesitated for one heartbeat. Then I grabbed her hand.

 

And that was how I met Miss Anne Collingwood! [And a true enough account given a certain narrative license. —A.C.]

 

* * * *

 

IV

 

Miss Collingwood dragged me by main force through the splintered remains of my observing blister. Though she was little older than twenty, perhaps five years younger than I, she was a woman who was stronger than she looked, and got on with the job with no squeamishness—and that first impression I had of her is as good a portrait in a few words as any I can muster.

 

More hands reached out of the gathering dusk, and I was hauled without much tenderness up and over the side, and dropped onto a soggy deck. The tars stood about me, in black coats and trousers on this unlit deck, but I glimpsed the blue of a Royal Navy officer’s uniform at the throat of one of them, a tall chap in a tricorn hat.

 

I struggled to my feet and surveyed my situation. I found that my submersible had been caught by grappling irons and lashed to the hull of this boat; I think you’d call it a sloop, but I’m no expert on Royal Navy vessels. It ran dark and low in the water, a boat that didn’t want to be seen. Now sailors whacked at ropes with axes, and they were cutting the Nautilus free. “Bosun, put her about and spread the canvas for Worthing,” called the pale officer. The sails snapped at the rigging, and with a low creak the boat turned. Looking back, I glimpsed that mighty pale dome once last time, subsiding back into the Channel waters. And beyond the fighting ships glided, wreathed in gun smoke and illuminated by their own cannon fire. I was mighty relieved as the noise of battle receded.

 

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Hobbes,” the officer said dryly. “I am John Clavell—Lieutenant.”

 

I faced him, and tried to make a good show of it, if only for the sake of the woman, but of a sudden the shock penetrated my defenses. I slumped down to sit on a barrel, feeling vaporous. “I don’t suppose you can spare a blanket.”

 

Clavell tutted at my weakness, but he handed Anne a spare cloak, which she spread over my shoulders, and Clavell dug a huntsman’s hip flask from a pocket and allowed me a sip of brandy. “You will recover,” Anne assured me.

 

Clavell was less sympathetic. “Not if you coddle the man. Not much room for that in war, Hobbes.”

 

“Is that so? Well, thanks for the ride anyhow, Admiral, and the liqueur,” I said, playing up my Yankee twang in response to his strangulated King George accent.

 

Miss Collingwood flared up. “Ben, Lieutenant Clavell is one of my father the Admiral’s most trusted colleagues. He’s risked his life to come pluck you out of the sea—”

 

“And passed up on my chance to do something about these damn French tonight.” He gazed around at the oceanic battle scene.

 

“So it would pay you to show some respect, in the days and weeks to come.”

 

Days and weeks? I stared at them, my mind racing. Needless to say I had no idea why I had been press-ganged, and not for the first time. I looked back to where that milky disc was subsiding into invisibility. I said, “I have always been suspicious of coincidences. Tell me there’s a connection between two extraordinary events: the presence of yon marine beast, and my rescue from the cold waves by a beautiful maiden and the next Nelson.”

 

It’s hard to say which of them bristled more. Anne said, “Robert Fulton said you were a faithless swindler but no fool, and I can see he’s right. Yes, Ben, we need your help to deal with the Phoebeans—one specimen of which upended you, when it should, we hoped, have been taking on the French gunships.”

 

“Phoebeans ... [Later the author had me spell the term for him.—A.C.] Some classical allusion, no doubt.”

 

“‘Phoebean’ means ‘of the moon,’ Hobbes,” Clavell said.

 

“So yon beasts are from the moon?”

 

“No,” said Anne. “Though the first savants thought so, and the name stuck. In fact the Phoebeans come from much further away—”

 

“And most of us heartily wish they’d go back there,” said Clavell.

 

“England, and indeed all mankind, faces a much more serious threat than even the rampaging of the Corsican. A second invasion—an invasion from the sky! That’s the possibility that the King’s Grand Council has instructed my father to deal with—and that’s why we need you.”

 

In actuality this strange news struck me as no more bizarre than some of the wilder ideas I had heard cooked up on the fringes of Bonaparte’s court. “I don’t see how a man who can build a sub-oceanic boat will be of much use against a pack of sailors from beyond the air.”

 

She smiled. “Oh, we want you to help us build a much stranger boat than even your Nautilus, Ben. You’ll see. And I believe you’ll find it an honor to serve.”

 

Clavell inspected me closely. “But I have a feeling you aren’t a man much motivated by honor, are you, Hobbes? You’re like your mentor Fulton, who tried to sell his inventions to British and French, whoever would open the purse widest. And I’ll say this—if Fulton hadn’t got himself killed in a French raid on the London dockyards, where he was running tests of a new apparatus, we’d have left you to drown in the Channel tonight.”

 

That was the first time I heard it confirmed that Robert Fulton was dead. He was a decent enough man, in my eyes, even if he had taken all the credit for the work of others. [I have no way of confirming the author’s allegations against Robert Fulton—who in turn had often maligned Hobbes. I myself attribute such remarks to the combative relationship of two talented individuals.—A.C.]As for Clavell’s barb about honor, my view is that if you have to choose between one empire of madmen and another, your only duty is to yourself and to your own.

 

This interval of conversation was soon over, for we were approaching our destination. The canvas was hauled in, and the boats were put in the water, and I prepared for my own first descent upon an English shore.

 

* * * *

 

V

 

Worthing, so I was later informed by Anne, is a popular resort in Sussex, and in the summer if you want bathing machines and polite company you’ll find them there. But the tide was high that winter night, for Napoleon’s admirals had chosen to land when it was so, and our boats pitched us onto a shore of shingle and sea wrack and banks of aging weed that stank like rotting flesh. As we tramped up the shingle I could see very little of the town itself, and I would learn that all along the coast of southern England that night the watchmen were dousing the lights and folk were drawing their curtains, so the country turned a blacked-out face to the invaders.

 

And a musket cracked, out of the dark. I pride myself I was first down on the stones.

 

The bosun held up a lantern and waved a navy ensign. “We are friends!” he whispered urgently. “From His Majesty’s vessel the Terrier, on urgent King’s business...”

 

Ragged-looking fellows appeared from the dark, not wearing any kind of uniform, wielding muskets that looked like farmers’ fowling pieces. I could see which one had fired the shot, for he held his musket like a club; perhaps he hadn’t had time to reload—or perhaps he didn’t know how. After a brief negotiation, we were allowed to pass.

 

Clavell hauled me to my feet, without much consideration, and we walked on. “Militia men. You would know all about that, Yankee. Raised as part of the Duke of York’s grand plan for the defense of England, along with fortifications around London, and defenses for the ports, and seventy-odd gun towers strung along the coasts of Sussex and Kent.”

 

The Duke of York, as it happened, was a son of the King. I peered at the farmers’ boys. “This, to fight off Napoleon?”

 

“They’re all we’ve got, and a doughty lot,” Clavell said, loud enough for the men to hear.

 

Well, I took a certain bitter satisfaction at the fear evident on the faces of these Englishmen, the first I had encountered on this shore, for I had seen such fear on the faces of my own countrymen when Napoleon’s army had started its march up the Mississippi in the Year Three. The British had done damn little to help us fight him off then, and if it was now their turn, a part of me thought, serve them right.

 

We reached an unprepossessing marina at the head of the beach, where a group of broughams waited, black-enameled and all but invisible in the gathering dark, with the horses snuffling in their harnesses. Anne, Clavell, and I hurried to the second vehicle in the line. Within, by the light of a lantern, an older man sat waiting for us, wearing a uniform of white trousers and a richly embroidered deep blue jacket; he said nothing as we boarded, and expressed no surprise at seeing us turn up at this rendezvous, after such a perilous journey. Before I was settled, the driver’s whip cracked, and the brougham wheeled about and rattled into motion—taking us, I judged, north and away from the coast.

 

Clavell sat by me, stiff and silent. Anne sat with the older man, and she murmured to him, “Papa.” In response he patted her hand—that’s all, a small gesture. People say the British are reserved, but I don’t hold with that; they feel as deeply as the rest of us, but see no need to shout about it.

 

Well, that single word, “Papa,” told me who I was dealing with. Rear Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood was in his late fifties, I learned later, yet he looked older, with sparse grey hair pulled back from a dour face and the lines deep around an unsmiling mouth, and he sat stiffly, as if his old bones were uncomfortable even at rest. His most striking feature was a pair of blue eyes of extraordinary paleness, like windows set in his head. Yet they flickered, restless.

 

At first he spoke to Clavell. “Went it well, Lieutenant?”

 

“We made our mission, sir, as you see,” said the junior. “But the Ogre is on his way, as we feared. Have you news of the landings?”

 

Collingwood snorted. “Well, that’s a damn fool question, my lad, as I have spent the day sitting in this rattling brougham waiting for you. We should be in London by the morn, and more may be clear then.” He turned those brilliant eyes on me. “And you are Hobbes. Do you understand where you are?”

 

“England,” says I cheekily.

 

“At least you have a trace of spirit. The south coast of England, but we head north. The road is a good one. We’ll refresh the horses at Horsham and Dorking and Kingston, but my aim is not to stop before we reach London, and we’ll beat the French to it, I trow, for even Bonaparte’s armies cannot move so fast as that. Do you know who I am?”

 

“Admiral Collingwood. But I thought Villeneuve knocked all the English admirals on the head in the Trafalgar action—including Nelson.” Thus I goaded him, to a glare from Anne.

 

Collingwood’s expression was stern. “I wasn’t at Trafalgar. Indeed, I have not been to sea for some years. Not since the Phoebean activities on Mars were detected, and the Grand Council urged the government to act, and I was seconded for the project by the Minister of War...”

 

Mars? The planet Mars? Questions bubbled in my head, but the Admiral was not a man to be interrupted.

 

“Would I had been at Nelson’s side in Trafalgar, or leading the line with him! I saved the man’s life, you know, in the action at Cape St. Vincent in ‘97, but I could not save him at Trafalgar. And if I had served we might be keeping the French at bay tonight.” All of which sounded arrogant of the man to me—but who am I to say he was wrong? “Damn this business of the Phoebeans! Sometimes I think it is a diversion we cannot afford—a war on a second front. And yet, if I had not been called home from the sea I would have seen even less of my beloved home—and, who knows? Perhaps Anne and her sisters would never have been born.”

 

“Oh, Papa—”

 

“And if my own father had been flush enough to afford to purchase me a better career I’d not have ended up in the navy at all, what? Ifs and buts aside, here’s a certainty—the Phoebeans struck once before, in ‘20, and they will venture beyond the ice line to strike again—unless we make a stand now. And that’s what this is all about, Hobbes.” I understood nothing of this. “And how goes the French war in America?”

 

I shrugged. “I’ve been away some years. You must know better than me. Napoleon has his marshals camped around Manhattan. He extracts our wealth to pay for his ventures elsewhere. Every spring a new army is raised, but if we’ve dislodged him yet I’ve not heard it.”

 

“It’s a bitter conflict, so I’m told. A case of strike and run, and no quarter given. So it must be when a war is so uneven. I was in Boston in ‘75, if you want to know. Yon rebels were a damn sturdy lot, I’ll give them that, who ran the redcoats ragged. But the revolt was an upsetting of the sensible order of things, which I have always seen as my duty to prevent contaminating the English body politic. And what has been born of the French and their own dreams of liberty? The Corsican, that’s what! I wish you Americans well, you are a sturdy young nation, but it’s to be hoped you never birth a Napoleon of Boston or Rhode Island.” He glanced at his daughter and at Clavell, who looked grey with fatigue. “We really must try to sleep. Here, Clavell, there are blankets in the trunk under your seat, and flasks of water and whisky, and I think some biscuits...”

 

So we talked no more, and ate and drank a bit, and settled under our blankets as separate as bugs in their cocoons. And as we clattered through the English night, I dreamed of Collingwood’s strange blue eyes, and Anne’s brave prettiness, and the French fire descending on the country behind us, and I thought of the Phoebean as it rose from the sea under me—and of Mars! I wondered how all these strange elements would shape my life from hereon—if, indeed, I could stay alive.

 

* * * *

 

VI

 

We arrived in London before the dawn, yet the city was already busy.

 

We went in search of orders and information to the Foreign Office, and then to Downing Street, and across Horse Guards to the Admiralty, and then through St. James’s to Piccadilly. Having seen no city grander than Baltimore, I found my head quite turned around as we ran about that mausoleum of smoke and marble. All these offices of government and the military were as busy as you would expect, with runners dashing to and fro with messages, and Collingwood himself was called into Downing Street to speak to Pitt, the Prime Minister. I got a great sense of urgency, of a hub of empire thrown into crisis. But it was alarming to see carriages and broughams being loaded up with boxes of papers and elderly ministers, evidently in preparation for flight.

 

And yet away from the great temples of government, as the city woke, it must, I sensed, have felt like any other morning—the carts and drays rumbling over the cobbles, the news men and milk men yelling their wares, the water wagons spraying the streets to keep the dust down—even though Bonaparte was already charging up from the coast, and by nightfall none of this might be the same.

 

At last we reached Albemarle Street, where, Collingwood’s main home being in a northern town, he kept a house that had been bequeathed him by Nelson himself. Little was made of it while I was there, but in the days that followed, detail by detail, I deduced something of the relationship of the two famous sailors—Collingwood the senior by ten years, grave and competent, physically stronger and less prone to illness and heat, and Nelson the vain one, the glorious and imaginative one, who had had to be saved by his brother in arms more than once. How Collingwood missed him! [I have published a full account of my father’s life and achievements, including his relationship with Nelson.—A.C.]

 

Collingwood led us to a spacious drawing room where more military men waited, and the air was laden with wig powder and cigar smoke, and empty decanters stood about, for they had evidently worked through the night. A table was covered in maps, and Collingwood made straight for it with his bits of news garnered from the ministries, and he and his fellows immediately began to draw bold charcoal lines on the charts. They spoke gravely, these men of privilege and power—and every so often they would lapse into French, for many of them shared an education in a country now their enemy. As they worked runners would come bearing more messages, and Collingwood and the others would scribble notes to be taken away.

 

One oddity in this company was an older woman, plainly dressed and plain of face, perhaps in her fifties, who sat quietly by a window, her hands folded on her lap. I scarcely noticed her at the time. She was, I would learn, Miss Caroline Herschel, sister of the famous astronomer.

 

And in the middle of all this a dog bounded in, a big, loose-boned mongrel who made straight for Collingwood, to be greeted by a tickle from that stern admiral. This was Bounce, and much beloved.

 

There were a few domestics hovering, and Anne snapped out orders for breakfast, coffee and a replenishment of the whisky decanters. Then she turned to me. “You will be a guest here—at least for now; I don’t know how long we will stay. Make sure Parsons serves you with an adequate breakfast. If you need to sleep, a change of clothes ... I myself will bathe, I think, while I have the chance.” She glanced at her father, his reading glasses on his nose and leaning on the table as if bringing relief to rheumatic joints. “As for asking him to rest, I know it’s futile. If you will excuse me, sir—”

 

I nodded, too weary to cheek her, and she withdrew.

 

Clavell was at my side. “Can you read a map, Yankee?”

 

At the table, I recognized a detailed plan of the south of England, but I waved a hand. “Not with all this scribble. What’s the news?”

 

“That the Corsican has landed. Well, you knew that.” He pointed to blocks of scrawl at the Channel ports. “Seven army corps, all more or less deployed around London. Each corps comprises infantry, cavalry, artillery. The first under Bernadotte is at Chatham. The fourth and fifth under Soult and Lannes came in via Dover and Folkestone, the second and third under Marmont and Davout came through Portsmouth, and the sixth and seventh under Ney and Augereau landed at Plymouth. We believe all of these are bound for London, save Ney, who is driving north, probably intent on Bristol.”

 

“And what of your defenses?”

 

He pointed to more scribbled blocks. “Here are our army groups, as of a few hours ago, at least. You have Sir Hew Dalrymple facing west, Sir John Moore in the east, and in the centre Colonel Wellesley waiting for the second and third corps.”

 

“A colonel?”

 

“Probably a battlefield general by now, I shouldn’t wonder. A good man, from Irish nobility. Made a name for himself out in India—though his brother was governor-general there. Well, we’ll know the wisdom of that appointment soon, for I expect battle to be closed within hours, if not already. The French like to march without a baggage train; they provision themselves from the country, and it makes for a rapid advance.”

 

And, I knew from experience in America, it was hellish to have your family and your home in the way of such a locust-like advance. “What are your prospects?”

 

“As long as we had supremacy of the sea, we were protected by the Channel. And if Nelson had been at sea yesterday, perhaps Napoleon would have launched his armies east, not west, for one day there will be a reckoning between this ‘usurper’ who killed a Bourbon prince, and the crowns of Prussia and Austria and Russia ... But he is not in Germany; here he is in England, for he evidently means to settle his western flank before he confronts the east. Do you Americans still call our soldiers ‘lobster backs’? England’s a lobster with a tough shell—but it’s damn thin, and once breached what’s inside is pretty soft.”

 

“You ain’t hopeful.”

 

He shrugged. “Look at their faces—look at Collingwood’s. I am confident England will survive this brutal assault in the long run. I am less confident about the course of this day.”

 

Now Anne rejoined us. She was out of her mannish jacket and leggings, and wore a sober but flattering dress of rich purple velvet, and with her blonde hair up and powder on her face I was struck by her attractiveness—I don’t say beauty, for she was no Venus, but she had a strength and composure in her regular features, and a spark in her eyes not unlike her father’s icy blue that quite caught the breath.

 

Clavell bowed to her and asked after her health—but she took my arm, and I felt a quite unreasonable surge of pleasure. “Now I’m refreshed we have much to discuss,” she said.

 

I ventured, “You’re the first English girl I ever met, you know, and not at all what I expected.”

 

“Am I to be flattered or insulted?”

 

I glanced at her boldly. “Right now, in this fancy room, in that dress, you look the part. But not twenty-four hours past you were hauling me from the wreck of my Nautilus.”

 

“You can blame my father for that,” she said. “The Admiral never wanted his daughters to embrace the life of a gentlewoman—a round of elegance, housekeeping, dress, of neighbors and dance and music and the season—a life of nothingness. He encouraged us to study geometry and languages and the philosophies, and the practical arts—he wanted us to learn how to survive, he said.”

 

“If the Ogre is loose in England, he was wise. Well, I find it blasted attractive.”

 

She raised an eyebrow. “Be careful, sir. This is an English drawing room, and you are very forward.” She glanced at John Clavell. “You don’t want to be dueling over my honor, do you?” [I may remark that this is an abbreviated account, turned to the author’s favor, of a rather more coarse conversation.—A.C.] I had a reply ready, but she cut me off. “Ben, you must pay attention. I suspect we have little time before the Napoleonic storm hits, and it is important you begin to learn what is asked of you. Come—meet Miss Herschel.”

 

I was brought to the middle-aged lady who sat by the window, and she stood, grave, composed, her rheumy eyes very sharp. After we were introduced, she said with a sharp Teutonic accent, “You have never heard of me, but you have heard of my brother William.”

 

I gathered this was a standard opening salvo from the old battleaxe. I could not fail to know of the astronomer, immersed as I had been in engineering circles all my adult life—and you know him, he is the man who discovered the planet Uranus, a globe beyond Saturn that is the first new world to have been found since the ancients first counted the wandering stars—which is a remarkable thing. “Odd. I always imagined he was English!”

 

“We are from Hanover,” she said. “Refugees of French aggression, under the old regime. My brother found work as a musician first, actually. But gradually he developed his interests in astronomy. And when I joined him we began to make significant observations, and discoveries.”

 

Anne said, “Mr. Herschel’s most recent telescopic observations have a bearing on the case of the Phoebeans. Indeed, they were mandated by the Grand Council.”

 

I nodded. “Very well. So why am I meeting the sister rather than the brother? Where is he, at this time of crisis?”

 

Anne and Caroline shared a glance. “Not here,” Caroline said. “Fled to the north, where the Cylinder is being built.” Which was the first mention I had heard of this device! “But it is of no matter. I can explain the Martian observations to you as well as he could have. After all, it was I who made the bulk of them, and analyzed the rest.”

 

I got a whiff of the sibling rivalry which dominated the household of the famous astronomer. With my own experience of Fulton, I sympathized; this Miss Caroline wasn’t the only junior to have had her credit stolen by a more glamorous partner. But I was growing impatient, and picked on the key word. “‘Martian’?”

 

* * * *

 

VII

 

It had all begun with the first descent of the Phoebeans.

 

I learned that far from being inviolate since the Norman landing in 1066, England had suffered an invasion as recently as 1720, and not by the French or any human enemy, but by Phoebeans, a foe from beyond the sky. The key truth of these creatures is that they are animals of the cold, not the warm; they can barely stand our earthly temperatures, and it was the thaw of a spring day that year that halted their advance, not any human action. Still, after the Ice War, they persisted in the cold fastnesses of northern lands where the ice never melts.

 

The Phoebeans had fallen in a shower across the world’s northern latitudes, and other battles were fought, though England took the brunt of it. In other lands, though, across intervening decades full of the usual famine, war, pestilence, and revolt, the strange episode of the Phoebeans was largely forgotten—not in England, though. And even here their great splashing across the north was made a secret—the incident was ascribed instead to the fall of a comet—because it was hoped that the Phoebeans could be harnessed to Britain’s national interest. Typical English!—I thought.

 

Anne said, “Even as that first assault ran its course, the government established a Grand Council of philosophers to study the issue—Isaac Newton was its first president. Ben, your own ancestor, Sir Jack Hobbes, was involved in the ‘20. Accounts vary, but it seems he saved Newton’s life! And that was why he was knighted. He became a rich man, but briefly...”

 

“Ah! That explains some of my family’s murkier secrets.” Sir Jack, having dissipated one fortune in England, came to the colonies in search of another in the tobacco plantations of the southern states. He disgraced himself even by the standards of that rough and ready region, and disappeared, but the family did inherit his native cunning. I was lucky enough to convert a certain mechanical and mathematical aptitude into employment as an apprentice engineer in the dockyards of the north-east states—where, eventually, I fell into the company of Robert Fulton, with his dreams of installing modern steam engines in American boats and mines. “But I am not a ‘sir,’“ I said regretfully. “The title vanished along with my father’s older brother, and the family silver. And so I am to face the foe once matched by my ancestor, eh?”

 

I learned that the Phoebeans themselves had caused little problem on earth since 1720. In ‘45 the Jacobite rebels had tried to use wild Phoebeans from the Highlands to support their assault on English towns—an experiment that cost more Scottish lives than English. Captain Cook, probing the northern latitudes, had spotted signs of Phoebean activity in the Canadian Arctic. The philosophers of successive generations had pondered on the nature of the Phoebeans, and where they had come from. But meanwhile, it seemed, a new threat from the Phoebeans was gradually discerned.

 

“It is believed that the inner worlds are rock, predominantly, like the earth, like the dead moon,” Caroline said to me. “This is because they are warmed by the sun. But the sun’s heat falls off with distance by an inverse square law, as a Newtonian analysis shows. And there is an imaginary frontier in the solar system, called the ice line, beyond which the worlds—like Jupiter’s moons, perhaps, or my brother’s discovery Uranus—must be dominated by ice. It is cold out there, Mister Hobbes. Cold enough for the Phoebeans to prosper.”

 

“Then let them have those icy worlds, for no human could live there, and thank God for that!”

 

“But,” Anne said, “there is a world on the border, as you might say—”

 

“Mars,” I guessed.

 

I learned now, to my surprise, that the surface of the planet Mars can be seen from earth through the great telescopes, and for more than a hundred years banks of what may be snow and ice have been observed at that world’s poles, to wax and wane with Mars’s own seasons.

 

Caroline said, “Where there is ice, the Phoebeans may play. Even before the Ice War, the Italian astronomer Maraldi observed a strange sparking of light at the Martian ice banks—that, it was retrospectively determined, coincided with the passage by Mars of the very comet that brought the Phoebeans to the earth.”

 

“Good Lord! Phoebeans landing on Mars, do you think?”

 

“You will understand that since ‘20 Mars has been examined intensively for evidence of Phoebean activity, by astronomers under the direction of the Council.”

 

“Ah. And now you believe you have found such evidence?”

 

“Over the last few years my brother and I have observed the clear growth of a patch of ice far from Mars’s poles, quite an anomaly. I can show you the drawings. Some observers believe they see movement—I cannot be sure, but I do not dismiss such observations—and Phoebeans on Mars could surely grow to a mighty size.”

 

I saw the drift. “You fear that Mars is the Phoebeans’ Boulogne! That they are massing forces to jump to Earth!” I tried not to laugh, but failed; the grave figures gathered around the campaign maps looked on me as if I had giggled at a funeral. “The Phoebeans have Jupiter and Uranus! What would they want of little Earth, where they cannot live anyhow?”

 

Caroline shrugged. “What does Napoleon want of England? Yet he is here.”

 

“We can’t take the chance, Ben,” Anne said. “That’s what the Grand Council believes, and the Minister of War concurs—and the Prime Minister. Even as we face the French, we must deal with this incipient threat from the sky. We must ensure the Phoebeans do not cross the ice line.”

 

“Deal with it? How? By blockading Mars, as your father and his navy chums blockaded France for a decade? Oh, this is all—fantastic!”

 

Caroline said gravely, “You must absorb what has been said to you, younker. For there is a responsibility for you to bear, and much for you to learn.”

 

Maybe so, but now wasn’t the time to learn it, for Collingwood himself came stalking over from his map table, a fresh note in his hand, his face like thunder. “We must leave,” he said. “We must reach the Cylinder site at Ulgham before it is overrun by the French—and complete the mission.”

 

Anne gasped. “It is confirmed?”

 

He held up his missive. “I have Pitt’s final orders to proceed.”

 

Anne hesitated one breath, then nodded. “We’re ready, father.” She was a brave spirit, and a sturdy support for the Admiral! “But I thought we would have a little longer.”

 

“So did we all.” He drew us to the table, and showed us a big summary map. “Our defenses have folded more rapidly even than we feared. Of the army groups, two out of three buckled under the Ogre’s usual tactics, the concentrated artillery fire and the rapid infantry advances. Two of three! Only Wellesley holds out, to the south. Refugees from Kent and Sussex are already in the capital, streaming over the bridges and clogging up the movement of men and materiel. And French advance units have been seen as far forward as Richmond and Greenwich. Their drums and trumpets can be heard in the city—damn them! Wellesley must fall back, and regroup, for he is England’s last hope now.” He grasped his letter from Pitt. “And we have our own mission. Come! You too, Clavell—Hobbes—Miss Herschel ... I pray it is not too late already. Bounce! Here, boy...!”

 

* * * *

 

VIII

 

So we hurried from a household that was already decanting into a series of broughams, each driven by tough marines. But there were not enough vehicles, and I found myself jammed into a requisitioned London cab with Lieutenant Clavell.

 

As we rolled away I peered out of my cab, fascinated by London in the full daylight. Above a carpet of houses rose the threadlike spires of Wren churches, and to the east floated the dome of St. Paul’s. On this dull December morning, a pall of yellow-orange smoke from the night’s fires hung over it all. But already I could see new smoke plumes rising up, all around the skyline. This, I learned from Clavell, was the work of the Londoners themselves, or their government; the city would be burned to the ground rather than afford Bonaparte any succor.

 

We galloped north, through St. Pancras and Islington and Highbury, and out of town. My cab, an affair of lacquered black wood with padded button-leather seats and a wooden knee protector that you swung into place, was a comfortable enough vehicle for rolling half a mile down the Mall, perhaps, but Collingwood meant to make for Newcastle and beyond at a cracking pace of fifty miles per day [a pace we bettered in the event—A.C.], and though England’s turnpikes are better than most you’ll find in America, for me with my poor face blasted by the north wind it was a damn uncomfortable trip—and made worse by the fact that for most of it I had the company of the spiky Clavell.

 

That’s not to say, of course, that we were not among the more fortunate on that route. Even now the refugee flood was gathering, with the main arteries like our own fast becoming clogged with carriages and carts, and folk on foot and loaded with goods like bipedal snails—even rolls of carpet and couches on their backs, or their servants’. I wondered what the Phoebeans’ strange telescopes might make of London if they saw it that day, a city of millions of souls like an ants’ nest stirred by a burning stick.

 

And we saw worse, even on that first afternoon of traveling. In towns like Watford and Tring and Leighton Buzzard and Bletchley [spellings have been corrected.—A.C.] I saw the signs of plundering and looting, even whole districts burning, and in places the roadside was strewn with dead horses, broken carts, scrapped ammunition boxes, and silent mounds of corpses. I saw it in America, and I was not surprised to see it again. Clavell, though, looked shocked, and I felt a stab of mean pleasure at his shame—for no French soldier had yet penetrated this far. The depredation had surely been inflicted by English soldiers, reeling from their defeat and now fleeing north, a mob of armed savages driven by lust, drunkenness, and hunger.

 

We traveled through the night and for much of the next day, at the end of which we came to a bridge across the river Nene and entered into Northampton, where we would stop the night. This town was populous enough to have deterred the retreating English units, and far enough from London that the lurid news from the south seemed not yet to be believed. Again I had come to a town pretty much at ease with itself. It would learn; it would learn.

 

Clavell arranged for lodgings, supplies, and fresh horses, and Miss Herschel requisitioned a room in a hotel. Collingwood went off to consult at an army field headquarters that had been established in a cattle market, just north of the river. As Anne accompanied him, I went along. The Admiral walked with a terrible stiffness, his rheumatism not helped by the hours on the road.

 

Somewhat to my surprise, Wellesley was here. Having been given a promotion by the Duke of York to some generalship or other and made field commander of whatever forces the British could still assemble, he was falling back in anticipation of making a fresh stand somewhere in the north, his sappers blowing up every bridge and mining every road behind him. But the French were pursuing him, whole army corps having bypassed London, and it was a lethal chase that could end only in battle.

 

I actually saw Wellesley, briefly, though I was not introduced to the man, as he greeted Collingwood. A good-looking fellow in his late forties, with reddish-brown hair and a prominent nose, he wore a plain-looking uniform that was all the more impressive for its lack of ostentation. I did not hear him utter a word. Of course the whole world will know Wellesley by the time this war is won [more familiarly as the Duke of Wellington.—A.C.]; I wish I had cut a lock of his hair!

 

While Collingwood met with the general and his staff, Anne and I walked around the camp. The men were setting themselves up under canvas. A brigade of riflemen arrived as we watched, weary from the road, each man laden with a heavy pack and his weapon, either a Brown Bess musket or a Baker rifle. A cart drew up loaded with their wounded, and as a surgeon unwrapped one man’s bandaged leg you could see the flies buzzing, and I turned away before Anne did.

 

For the journey Anne had changed back into her mannish gear, of trousers and boots and jacket, and with her fair hair done up in a bun under her hat. “I suppose you think we are all cowards, we English,” she said suddenly.

 

The remark startled me. “Why do you say that?”

 

“Because since Worthing you have seen our armies fold and our citizenry flee and our towns burn. Even Wellesley, our best soldier, plots a retreat.”

 

I shook my head. “I sense Wellesley knows what he’s doing; he will pick a fight with the Ogre on his ground and his terms. And you’re no coward to flee a hurricane. I saw the French armies at work in America, remember—you Europeans have yet to have a real taste of it.”

 

She frowned. “The French campaign in America was not much mentioned here, in the newspapers. There was little respect for the American show of arms, and I suspect the French effort was belittled because of it.”

 

“And so you underestimated us, and Napoleon.”

 

I had seen some of it, as I had been in New Orleans when Napoleon’s army descended in the summer of the Year Three, a sneak landing of a force supposedly sent over to subdue Santo Domingo—this at a time when some in the government hoped that Napoleon would cede all his remaining possessions in America to Washington! I was working for Fulton then, and doing some business for him in that French territory to progress his steam engine projects, there being little enthusiasm in America, and little cash.

 

It’s difficult to remember now, but much of the world then had high hopes of Napoleon, as a champion of liberty around the globe. Well, what he was championing was the interests of his nascent French empire against the British, and once landed he burned his way inland, stirring up a ferment and liberating the slaves in each state he crossed even while his soldiers plundered. His purpose was evidently to turn North America French all over—and, ultimately, to use the mighty resources of the Atlantic realm to wage his wars against England and the monarchies of Europe.

 

“We put up a fight,” I said to Anne, “and I saw some of it; but we were a young country with a small army, and officers that were either sixty-year-old veterans of the War of Independence or political appointees, and beyond that only the militia, ill-trained and worse equipped—and we had no money to fight a war anyhow.” That was in part because of the British blockade of trade, an action I always believed would have led to war were there not bigger fish to fry. “There was a decisive battle at Savannah, after which the army was licked and only the militias remained, but Napoleon rejected peace overtures from both federal and state governments, and went on until he had sacked Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and at last besieged New York City itself.

 

“Yet the country is not subdued. The militia pretty quickly dissolved into fighters for freedom—irregular soldiers if you like, cutting at the French and melting back into the woods and the mountains. But the French strike back by executing townsfolk and farmers.” I fell silent, my head full of one image I had seen: a woodsman naked, castrated, his hands and feet cut off and his eyes put out, nailed upside down to a tree; alongside him a Frenchman in similar condition. I spared her these details. [And if he had not, for I had the stomach for it, I might have thought better of him.—A.C.] “It’s become a bitter but low-level struggle, ma’am, with atrocities on both sides. A new sort of war, not between armies, but between nations.”

 

“If Wellesley fails, so it may be here,” Anne said grimly.

 

“You’d better pray not. Of course it need not have come to pass if the British government had come to America’s aid, as requested.”

 

She bridled at that. “It is a bugbear to my father, how Jefferson’s administration railed against all things British and courted Napoleon, only to come crying for help when the Ogre turned. Anyhow the British government did send arms to the continent.”

 

“To equip an Indian army under the Shawnee! Thus hoping to create an even bigger problem for the Americans in the future. Perhaps Pitt and his predecessors should have spent the nation’s money on the Royal Navy, rather than chasing phantoms from Mars, and if so he’d have had the muscle to stop Napoleon striking across the Atlantic at us—and indeed to have given Nelson a fighting chance at Trafalgar.”

 

This irritated her, and she snapped back at me, “And what of you, Ben Hobbes? What’s your story? You bleat about the English, but did you fight the French on your own soil?”

 

I shrugged. “If you must know, I was taken captive after the siege of Baltimore. I was questioned brisk—the French inquisitors refined their techniques during the Terror, you know. I would not be alive now if they had not learned I had worked with Fulton. I was shipped off thence to Paris to work on the Nautilus and other designs.”

 

But Fulton, an honorable man, had taken against his French customers the moment Napoleon set foot in New Orleans, and soon effected an escape to England. I, left behind, did whatever was asked of me, intent on staying alive.

 

Anne was curious, confused, angry. Well, it was a confused and angry time, an age when the highest ideals of liberty and brotherhood had been wrested by a monster, and you weren’t sure who to fight. Yet my feelings at that moment were different. Her face, flushed with the cold and her strong feelings, her mouth softly open as her breath came rapid—it gave her a look of lust, not unlike the vibrant passion of the New Orleans whores who had once warmed my bed, and I imagined taking her there and then in that muddy English field! Dare I venture, she shared some of what I was feeling [I did not.—A.C.]. But she turned away, and the moment was past, and she walked briskly back to her father.

 

A fusilier not far from me, sawing steadily at the corns on his bare feet, shrugged at me and smiled as if to say, “Women! War’s easy by comparison.” But I did not dignify his familiarity.

 

* * * *

 

IX

 

We jolted over more bruising roads, doing fifty or sixty or seventy miles a day. We stopped at Nottingham and Leeds, and joined the Great North Road, and it was clear to me we were outstripping most of Wellesley’s forces and the deserters and all but the most panicky of refugees. Yet even here the country was in turmoil, for the news traveled even faster than we did, and there were ever more excited rumors of the approach of the Ogre, or of fresh French troops landing on the northern coasts.

 

On the fourth night we reached Darlington, yet another small town on yet another river. And here the pattern differed, for after one night in the town our party diverged from the main trunk road and headed off east, toward Stockton. We paused before we reached the town, our broughams and carriages pulling over from the rough road surface, the marines clambering down and blowing on their mittened hands, and the dog bounding off after rabbits. Collingwood, Clavell, Anne, and a number of the senior people formed up for a walk across the desolate country—and I was summoned too, for Collingwood said I was to meet his “Troglodyte genius of the mines.”

 

And it was a mine I was taken down into, entirely to my surprise! We were met at a hut by a site manager, black in the face with coal dust, and we descended by ladders and galleries deep into the earth—down, down we went, more than three hundred yards below the crust. Men shuffled to and from their shifts at the faces, and I saw clanking carts dragged along iron rails by boys and ponies. In that cold, dank, dark place, nobody spoke or sang. A place of dismal subterranean labor!

 

And in one place I saw something that evoked unwelcome memories. Lying in a deep, shallow gallery cut into a seam was a kind of dome, shallow, downturned, its upper carapace milky. I could see no reason to encounter a Phoebean monster down here—perhaps this was a salt dome, or other geologic feature.

 

At last Collingwood paused, and his men gathered around, and I saw that we were poised above a pit. Men stood about, and the place was illuminated by lanterns suspended high from a beam, as if to shed light but little heat. Down in the pit, blocks of ice stood proud of heaps of straw. (I wondered from whence they got the ice.) And in the straw lay lumpy rocks, pale, rather like eggs, and I thought I saw something stir—small and furtive, like a mouse, yet it had a certain mechanical grace that was like no living thing. All this glimpsed in shadows.

 

It was evident we were waiting for somebody, and Collingwood grew impatient. “Mr. Watt? Are you here in the dark? ‘Tis Cuddy Collingwood come to call!” At last a fellow came lumbering out of the shadow, in his late sixties perhaps, short, heavy-set, and evidently not in the best of health, for he wheezed and coughed throughout. Collingwood introduced him to me with a kind of flourish. “I am sure an engineer like you, Hobbes, will have heard of James Watt! The steam engineer par excellence.”

 

But I disappointed him in my non-recognition.

 

Watt, wiping oily hands, spoke with a Scotch accent so broad I could scarce comprehend it, and I offer only a rough translation here. “Ah, well, my days of glory with the steam are long behind me. Though, Hobbes, you may have heard of my work on the Newcomen engine—how I increased its efficiency manifold with my separated condenser, and, by applying it to steam pumps, vastly increased the depth to which mines such as this could be reached—no? But if I had not been diverted by my work on the Phoebeans—”

 

As if on cue there was a sharp crack from the pit, almost like a musket shot, and everyone turned. As I looked down I saw that one of those eggs had shattered into shards, like an over-heated pot.

 

Anne came to stand by me, close enough that I could smell her rosewater and powder. It was a welcome human closeness in that place of dank darkness and strangeness. She pointed. “I love to stand over such nurseries, and watch.”

 

“Nurseries?”

 

“We collect the eggs from the big queens we have caged in the Highlands. Follow it for a few hours and you can see their ontogenesis, or part of it.... See, the egg fragments will recombine to form a disc, like that one.” And I saw it, like a telescope lens of smooth white ice nestling in the straw. “And then, if we are lucky—oh, look in the corner!” There was another disc. And I saw how a ring of pillars not a foot high, slim as pencils, shot up around the rim of the disc, and then the disc itself slid up, somehow supported by the pillars, until it roofed over them so it was like a toy of some colonnaded Greek temple. And then the pillars, still upright, slid back and forth under the lens-roof, and the whole assemblage slid through the straw—not mechanical, yet not like life—our kind of life, anyhow. It was closest to a crab of anything terrestrial, I suppose.

 

“That’s how they’re born,” Watt growled. “Let it loose in the stuff of the earth, the water and the rock, and it will grow as big as you like.”

 

It was a nursery, I saw—a nursery of Phoebeans, there in the English ground! I demanded, “Why would you encourage the growth of such dangerous monsters? I thought you claimed to be at war with them, Admiral!”

 

Watt answered, “For their energy, sir—for their sheer power. You can control ‘em, you know, with a tickle of electric. And you can always bank a fire under them and let Newton’s Calenture seize up their limbs. Use them right, use them as draught animals, and the energy they deliver far exceeds any steam engine I could dream up! And it’s to this I’ve devoted my declining years.”

 

Collingwood clapped me on the back. “And, Hobbes, it is by using their own energies against them that I intend to thwart the Phoebeans’ empire-building. Energy and empire, my lad! Those are the words that will characterize this new century of ours.”

 

Anne pouted. “Not ‘liberty,’ father? Or ‘rights’?”

 

Once more I wondered to what insane adventure I was becoming committed.

 

Collingwood grasped the old engineer’s slumped shoulders. “And I’ve come to collect you, James. It’s time. I have Pitt’s own instructions.” He patted his breast pocket. “You must come to Ulgham.”

 

Watt looked troubled. “The Cylinder? But so much is untried.... Must we do this so soon?”

 

“I’m afraid so, for the French are on the way.”

 

And that was the first a wide-eyed Watt had heard of Napoleon’s invasion of England. It’s the same with many an obsessive thinker, so I’ve learned—Fulton had something of it about him—his own work fills up the world for him, until the devil comes knocking at the door.

 

A runner came to find Collingwood. Lieutenant Clavell took the message, read it by lamplight, handed it to the Admiral, then gave me a tug on the sleeve. “Come with me, Hobbes. We’ve a little scouting to do. It’s the French. An advance party’s been spotted.”

 

“What use will I be?”

 

“There are naval officers among ‘em.... I’ll make our apologies to the Admiral.”

 

And so he led me away, and I looked back at Anne over her pit of Phoebean crab-babies, and wondered if I would see her again!

 

* * * *

 

X

 

A silent marine led Clavell and me and a couple of companions across the country about a mile, and brought us to a ridge of high ground. And here, lying on damp English grass, we gazed down upon the French party. They had been spotted by Collingwood’s scouts, for, as small a force as he commanded, each time we stopped he had his men roam the country for signs of the French. And tonight that cautious strategy had paid off.

 

There might have been fifty of them, gathered around a handful of fires. Horses grazed where they had been tied beneath a copse of trees. There were no farm buildings nearby, but the field was roughly walled, and I saw they had stolen a couple of young sheep they were skinning with their knives. Their voices drifted on the night, coarse French jokes drifting across the north English country.

 

“Clearly a scouting party,” murmured Clavell, into my ear. “See how they’ve made ready for the night in that copse.” They had used loose branches and dead leaves to make shelters. “It’s the way the French armies work, living off the land—you know that. If you’re unlucky they’ll take apart your house and your furniture to make their bonfires. It can’t be a coincidence they’ve come this far and fast. After all, we’re ahead even of Wellesley’s advanced units. There are navy officers among ‘em. I hoped you might recognize them.”

 

“It was a damn big flotilla that crossed the Channel, Lieutenant!”

 

“Nevertheless you were with it, and now you are here, and now they are here. Take a look.”

 

He handed me his glass; I peered through the eyepiece. There was indeed at least one French navy officer among the gossiping troopers—and, to my shock, I knew him. “Gourdon. I was under his command on board the Indomitable—from which the Nautilus was launched. I’d recognize that bloated fool anywhere, and that ugly pigtail.”

 

Clavell considered this. “Here’s what I conclude, then. You must have been seen when you were picked up by the Terrier. The Ogre and his marshals are devils for detail, and they must have wondered why you are so important that the Royal Navy sought you out on the night England was invaded. Or perhaps they know something of Collingwood’s project, and of his employment of Fulton, and Fulton’s connection to you. There are spies everywhere! Either way they have risked this small party of men to track you down and find out what you’re up to—and why you’re so valuable.” He glanced at me, his eyes invisible in the dark as he whispered. “You’re an important man, Hobbes.”

 

“So it seems. Anyhow, either way, they’ve found us.”

 

Clavell shook his head. “Our diversion to the mine has fooled them—they should have watched our tracks more carefully. Find us? Not yet, they haven’t—”

 

And he was proved wrong in a devastating instant.

 

There was a roar, like thunder—but the sky, clouded, had contained no hint of a storm. I had been in a land war before, and I had heard rumors of the new technologies, and had an inkling of what was coming, and I ducked down against the ground, my arms wrapped over my head. Out of the corner of my eye I saw streaks of light scrawl across the sky, like miniature suns, or Phoebean comets, flying with a banshee wail. And then the shells fell around us. I felt the detonations shake the earth, and hot metal hailed, and men screamed. A barrage of Congreve rockets, the latest thing!

 

When it was over I got up, coughing. The air was full of smoke and the stink of gunpowder. Glancing at my companions, I saw that two men lay unmoving, another was little more than a bloody splash in a crater, and the last was hovering over Clavell, who lay on his back with a piece of blackened, twisted metal protruding from his gut. And I, lucky Ben Hobbes (or perhaps I was just the quickest to duck), was entirely unharmed!

 

Clavell spoke, and my ears were ringing so I had to bend close to hear. “Cleverer than us, Ben, the damn French! Split their forces, and their scouts saw us, and got us with a lucky shot.”

 

“Nothing lucky about it,” I opened. “Rockets take some aiming.”

 

“Probably one of our own batteries, stolen from the abandoned defenses of Portsmouth or Plymouth, for the French have nothing like ‘em...” He coughed, and groaned as the metal in his gut twisted.

 

The marine pulled at him. “Sir—we have to go. That main party will be coming for us.” He was an honest lad with an accent that was strange strangulated to my ears—a Newcastle boy he was, one of Collingwood’s own “Tars of the Tyne.”

 

Clavell feebly pushed him away. “No, Denham. Too late for me. Take Hobbes back to the mine, and warn the Admiral.” He eyed me, his face a bloody mask. “For you’ve won, haven’t you, Ben? If there ever was a competition between us for the attention of Miss Collingwood ... and you have a chance, don’t you? You could slip away. Denham here couldn’t stop you. Go, seek your fortune elsewhere and leave the French and English to smash each other to pieces....”

 

I had a bubble of spite, even though he was evidently a dying man. “Maybe I have the right. You press-ganged me into this, remember.”

 

“True. But if you don’t help Collingwood finish his Cylinder, in the long run all of us will be lost, all our children....”

 

“I have no children.”

 

“Nor I ... I have nephews ... I had hoped...” He peered at me, his eyes oddly milky. “Are you still here, or a bad dream? Go, man, if you’re going...!” He coughed, and blood splashed from his mouth and over his tunic.

 

I hesitated for a further second. But if you are reading this manuscript, you know what choice I made. Damn my sentiment! [And God be thanked for the grain of honor that lodged in you, Ben Hobbes, for if you had made another choice, as poor Clavell said, all would have been lost.—A.C.]

 

* * * *

 

XI

 

We raced back to the mine. Over my shoulder, I could hear the French drums as they marched after us.

 

Collingwood’s party, evidently drawn by the noise of the rocket fire, had come to the surface. Anne was at her father’s side, that brave jaw stuck out, her eyes clear. Watt was with them, and the marines were preparing the carriages. Miss Herschel, who had chosen to stay in her brougham under a heap of blankets, peered out, curious and anxious by halves.

 

Collingwood took in our condition at a glance, and he could hear the French approach as well as I could. He said calmly to Denham, “The Lieutenant and the rest?”

 

“Lost, sir. I tried to make him come—”

 

Collingwood put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “All right, Geordie. But the French are coming—Mr. Hobbes?”

 

“They are perhaps fifty. No artillery but well equipped with muskets and rifles from what I saw—”

 

“And Congreve rockets,” Anne murmured.

 

“Perhaps we can take shelter in the mine,” I said.

 

“And let them smoke us out, or starve us, or bayonet us in the dark like pigs in a sty? Not much of an option, Mr. Hobbes,” said Collingwood.

 

“But it need not come to that,” said James Watt. He stood, hands on hips, eyeing the country to the east, from which direction the French were marching. “As it happens we’re planning a little open-cast mining just that way.... Mr. Hobbes, do you see the bent elm yonder? How long would it take for the French to reach that point, do you think?”

 

It took us a few seconds of estimation, for the French seemed to be walking at a comfortable pace, confident of trapping us. We settled on five minutes.

 

Watt grunted. “Not long to prepare. Admiral, do you have a decent timepiece on you? Count out the five minutes. When it’s done, call down to me.” And with that he hurried off, back into his mine workings.

 

Anne frowned. “What’s he up to?”

 

Collingwood allowed himself a grin. “I think I know.” He took his watch from his breast pocket and snapped it open. “Five minutes, then. In the meantime we should prepare for the eventuality that he fails.” He marched around the site, surveying the military potential of a handful of broughams and other conveyances, the ditches and shabby huts of the mine works, his few marines and their paltry firearms. He hefted his own musket. “Let’s use what cover we have. Make sure we have a run back to the mine—we should not get separated.” The men, seeking cover, melted into the shadows of the vehicles and the workings. “Anne—”

 

“I will fight.”

 

“If you must, you will, I know that, child. But for now, please take Miss Herschel into the safety of the mine.” He handed her his own musket. “It’s an order, Miss Collingwood.”

 

“Yes, sir.” And so they parted, without an embrace or a soft word, yet it was as tearful a moment as I can remember in my own soulless life. [The author exaggerates.—A.C.]

 

The Admiral turned to me. “We have spare firearms, at least.” He tossed one to me. “Do you know how to load it, Mr. Hobbes?”

 

“Learned it at my mother’s knee,” I said, putting on the Yankee vowels.

 

“That must have been a formidable knee.”

 

“But, Admiral—Mr. Watt’s five minutes?”

 

“Lord!” He had entirely forgotten, and he checked his watch. “Thirty seconds left.”

 

“Here they come!” cried Denham.

 

Seeking cover, I lay flat on the cold ground and crawled under a brougham. And I saw them come, silhouetted against the dim December afternoon sky, fifty men marching in step, and I heard their drums clatter and the brittle peal of trumpets. The French do like their music.

 

And as they started past that bent old elm, Collingwood called down: “Now, Mr. Watt!”

 

Nothing happened—not for long seconds. My own heart hammered, while the French unit marched as graceful as you please past that elm, and I saw them readying their muskets.

 

And then, for the second time that day, I heard a sound like thunder, but this time it came not from the sky but the ground. The drumming packed in, and the French stopped their march, and looked down at their feet, disturbed. Even at my distance, a good two hundred yards, I felt the ground shudder and the fittings of the brougham above me rattled and clattered.

 

And the crust of the earth broke, just as if a mighty fist had punched upward and out of it, and I saw pillars of ice slide into the air. Then the dome rose, the icy carapace of a Phoebean soaring upward along its slim legs. So this was how James Watt used the Phoebeans—this was how they made his mines for him! But this beast had erupted right beneath the French party, and they were raised up and scattered, and when they fell those wretches hit hard with screams and the crack of bone.

 

Denham shouted: “At ‘em, lads!” And the marines dashed over the English mud, muskets and sabers ready, to finish off the Phoebean’s work.

 

But I thought I saw a French naval officer, burly and pigtailed, running off into the dark.

 

* * * *

 

XII

 

We returned to the Great North Road, passing through Durham and Gateshead and on to Newcastle, where the Roman route cuts through the city walls to cross the river Tyne. We arrived just six days after leaving London. By now every town and village we saw was in a ferment of preparation and evacuation, and that was nowhere more true than in Newcastle, where that late December Thursday a row of ships of the line were moored at the Quayside, their sails neatly reefed, and they were being unloaded of their guns.

 

We did not stop, but we were inevitably slowed by the bustle, and I looked around with some curiosity, for this was the site of my own ancestor’s escapades during the Ice War—where the main force of Phoebeans, marching south around a tremendous Queen, was resisted by the townsfolk. I saw the ruins of the castle, smashed to splinters by a Phoebean. Collingwood himself pointed this out to me, for he was traveling with me in my battered London cab now that my companion Clavell had been left in his grave at Darlington—and Collingwood, it turned out, had been born in that city, in a cut not far from the Quayside. Well, that day the city was battening down for another siege, with every man and woman carrying guns or powder pouches or barrels of provisions, and small boys knocking holes in house walls with broom handles.

 

But Newcastle was also the eastern terminus of the Wall that the Romans built to span the neck of the country and keep out the hairy Caledonians. And when we left the city, following the road through a northern gate, Collingwood bade me look to the west to see what I could of the preparations being made there. Since the Ice War, the Wall, which was now called the Geordie Wall, had been extended and heightened, and turned into a mighty barrier against the advance of any Phoebeans who might come strolling this way from the north. The old Roman mile forts had been turned into gun towers and ammunition dumps, and before the Wall’s northern face the Roman vallum, a huge ditch and earthwork, had been deepened and spiked with blocks and iron bars. All this was decades old and dilapidated, but now frantic work was going on all along the Wall.

 

Collingwood said, “They’re turning the Wall around. Can you see? They have stripped the ships on the river of their big guns, and are fixing them here to replace the rusting veterans of the Ice War. They’re digging out a new vallum before the southern face, too. It’s here that Wellesley plans to make his stand—or specifically further west of here, near a fort called Housesteads, where the Romans built their Wall to follow a natural ridge. Wellesley believes in using the land as an ally, and in that, evidently, he has the instincts of the Caesars’ generals.”

 

“There are worse plans, no doubt,” I murmured. “But I can see one obvious flaw—which is that if I were Napoleon, I would try to flank Wellesley by sending a corps or two through the Wall’s obvious weak point—Newcastle itself !”

 

Collingwood nodded soberly. “The man will surely have a go. But he won’t find much of a welcome in Newcastle, any more than in London. The Geordies will fight, Hobbes—every wall will be loopholed to facilitate musket fire, every street barricaded, every house will hide an assassin. We have learnt the lesson of you Americans and how you have resisted the French. Now it is our turn.” He said this with a cold certainty, all the more impressive for its lack of passion—I reminded myself that this area was Cuddy’s own, and he knew the grit of the people.

 

But we, intent on our own mission, pressed on north.

 

In the country north of Newcastle I saw more evidence of the Ice War of ‘20. The ground was slashed by a vallum they called Newton’s Dyke, but it was overgrown now and bridged to take the road. And the ground here was cratered, as if mighty rockets had fallen; these pits had been left by Phoebeans, birthed in the ground and bursting thence. It must have been a tremendous sight!

 

And we passed through another town in a ferment of preparations, called Morpeth—where Collingwood had his home, and I imagined how Anne’s heart would skip a beat at the closeness of her family. But even here we did not stop. Instead we followed a minor track out of town to the north-east, until we came to a village called Ulgham, a little rural place with nothing remarkable to it but an inn run by the local blacksmith. And from here we turned down a lesser track yet toward what appeared to be the head of a small coal mine.

 

That name, by the way, which I prevailed upon Anne to spell for me, is pronounced “Uff-am,” and it comes from a rather lovely Saxon phrase meaning “a vale haunted by owls.” And you might remember it, unless I and Collingwood and Miss Caroline Herschel are all incinerated in the next few hours, for by the time you read this it has probably become the most famous name in the world.

 

For it is here, in that small mine, that Collingwood had built his Cylinder.

 

We clambered down from our carriages, relieved to have stopped moving. Miss Herschel seemed barely conscious, and poor rheumatic Collingwood could hardly walk, but he went stomping off in search of managers and staff—and William Herschel, who should have been here.

 

We had already completed a long journey. But when I was taken into the installation—guided by an enthusiastic James Watt, who would not allow me to rest before seeing his works—I learned that a much longer jaunt was planned.

 

I call it an “installation.” What word would you have me use? Was it a mine? Shafts had been dug into the earth, and indeed a little coal extracted, but the pits were needed for their subterranean climate of cool and damp—and, it seems, to contain the tremendous explosions that were to be generated here.

 

Was it a factory? It had the trappings of one, with workshops for the working of metal and rubber and glass and the manufacture of engines, and stores of provisions such as sheet metal and iron ore, and rutted trails where wagons had repeatedly passed, and a multitude of workers who dwelled in poor-looking huts, and young women working as clerks and secretaries in the offices. Watt introduced me to more toiling troglodytic engineers here, with names with which you may be familiar if you are a student of such industries: Richard Trevithick, the Cornishman who had once built a road carriage pulled by a steam engine, and John Wilkinson, known as “Iron Mad,” said Watt, the ironmaster who made the first iron boat, and would be buried in an iron coffin! Thus, so Watt said, the industrial genius of the nation had been concentrated in this place.

 

And Watt proudly showed me an engine that made ice, with a series of pumps that expanded and compressed vapors, thereby removing heat from a volume—a process, he said, he had got from an American engineer called Oliver Evans, who I met once, but who unfortunately did not patent his work before he shared it with Watt! Manufacturing and engines, then—but clearly this place was not just a factory.

 

Was it a farm? Watt took me along galleries that overlooked pits where Phoebean eggs nestled and ice crabs scraped, watched over by boys with sticks in case any of those unearthly beasts began to grow unwieldy. Watt himself had his main office here, with a wall of windows overlooking the largest pit. Yes, a farm of Phoebeans.

 

But it was only as James Watt led me toward the heart, babbling in his rich Scots brogue, that I saw the true nature of the place.

 

One last gallery opened out into a pit, tall, roughly cylindrical, wide, with ladders fixed to its faces, and a disc of December sky above. And here stood an engine—or so I thought of it at first glance. Picture the boiler of some great steam engine, sat on its end; it was perhaps three yards wide and six tall. I could see it was constructed much as the hull of my Nautilus had been, of copper sheeting laid over ribs of iron, and there was the hand of Fulton. It was capped by a conical section, crudely welded in place, and metal vanes protruded from the lower hull. The walls were pierced by discs of glass, securely bolted. And at the cylinder’s waist were hatches, almost like gun ports. All this buried in the earth!

 

Watt, not a natural orator, directed my attention to points of detail. “The nose cap is to deflect the flow of the air, much as the nose of your Nautilus pushed the water around her slim body. Of course it will only be necessary for the first miles of the ascent, and then may be discarded to afford a fresh observation port, forward-looking. The vanes too will act like rudders during those crucial first minutes, but will have little utility later, in the outer void—”

 

“What ‘outer void’?” But I already knew the answer. “This isn’t a steam engine, is it, Mr. Watt?”

 

“No, Ben, she is not,” said Anne Collingwood, and she slipped her hand in mine; I had not noticed her approach, so absorbed had I been. “I think you know what she is—don’t you?”

 

This place was a mine and a factory and a farm—all of these things. But it was also, I saw now, a graving yard. “This is a ship,” I breathed.

 

“Yes. A ship of Space. And in this ship my father, for he will command her himself, will sail to Mars, and study the Phoebean nest there, and return in glory to report to the King himself on their activities! Come—let me show you inside—and you will know what we want of you.”

 

I was too astonished to resist.

 

* * * *

 

XIII

 

A hatch was set in the ship’s midriff. To get to it we walked around a gallery, and crossed by a ladder that bridged the gulf between pit wall and Cylinder. I had a bit of vertigo for I am no lover of heights, but I suppressed it, driven by curiosity, and a desire not to appear weak before the lovely Anne.

 

When we reached the ship I noted that the hatch opened outward, and would be sealed by a rubber collar. Inside, the Cylinder was indeed like a greater version of my Nautilus, with the same reassuring smell of copper and rubber and oil—but much wider and turned on its end, and illuminated throughout by lanterns. The interior was divided into decks by sections of open mesh flooring, although a solid deck of polished oak blocked off the bottom of the compartment. Oddly, there was carpet affixed to some of the walls, and bits of furniture bolted to the decks—chair, tables, hammocks, cupboards, even a big navigator’s table of the type I had seen on the Indomitable. In a middle deck, I saw a ring of guns, naval weapons surely but of quite small bore, and sacks of shot and powder fixed to the walls nearby. These guns faced outward, their muzzles set against the hatches I had spotted in a ring around the hull, and I wondered what enemy ships they were meant to repel.

 

Thus, a ship designed to swim in Inter-planetary Space! I had never conceived of such a thing. But I was an engineer, and I inspected it and tried to understand how it would work.

 

Anne was watching me. “What do you think of her?”

 

“I think she looks mighty expensive. I can see where the money has been spent that might have built the navy ships to turn the war....”

 

“You can see the hand of your mentor Fulton.”

 

I grunted. “I immediately see he has left issues to resolve.”

 

“Such as?”

 

“This hatch, for one thing.” I pushed it back on its hinges. “My understanding is that the worlds swim in a vacuum—is that not the best philosophical thinking?”

 

“Else the planets through friction would spiral into the sun.” She rapped on the hull. “The vessel is meant to contain its air.”

 

“Then this hatch is a weak point. Anne, what do you understand of pressure? My Nautilus was built to withstand the greater pressure of the water outside its hull, which would overwhelm the air pressure within.” I mimed squeezing an orange. “But in the case of your Cylinder, the greater pressure will come from the air within—the hull will seek to pop like a soap bubble. And here you have a hatch that longs to blow outward, on its hinges! Have your engineers rebuild this, Anne. Have the hatch open inward—and let it be shaped to sit in its frame so that the outward pressure of the air forces it closed, not open.” I glanced around at the small portholes. “I may take a look at those windows too, before we’re done.”

 

Again she took my hand, and the simple physical touch thrilled me. “There can scarcely have been a stranger ship built in all human history. Yet you grasp her essence, immediately. This is precisely why we needed you here, Ben—for just such insights, once we lost Fulton. Please, let me show you more....”

 

So we clambered up and down ladders affixed to the interior of the curving hull. I was struck again by the squares of carpet affixed to the walls, and the way every chair and couch and cot was fitted with harnesses, and how there were little latches on the tables that could be used to fix plates and cups in place. At first I imagined that these were precautions in case this ship of Space should roll and pitch like an invasion barge in a Channel storm, but Anne tried to explain to me that while there are no storms in Space (or so the philosophers opine) a much stranger phenomenon will occur. “The Cylinder will be beyond the clutches of the gravity of earth, Ben. The engines’ push will be brief—like the great thrust applied to a cannonball in the breach.” She said no more, for now, of how that great thrust would be generated. “But after that the Cylinder, and all her contents, will fall freely between the worlds. And a crewman will bounce around inside this hull like a mouse in a hollow cannonball! It’s all to do with Newton’s calculations ... Now can you see why there is carpet on the walls?”

 

I saw, and I was astonished anew.

 

That navigator’s table was an expensive affair, and though a big compass was set in its surface I saw there were fine-looking Harrison chronometers, and that cupboards nearby were stocked with sextants and other equipment of the type, which the sailors use to measure the angles of the stars in the sky. “Nobody knows if a compass will work between the worlds,” Anne said. “Or what meaning ‘north’ or ‘south’ may have! But the navigator will be able to track the curving path of the ship as she sails from Earth to Mars and back again, by mapping the shifting positions of the stars—and indeed Sun, Moon, Mars, and Earth itself.”

 

“But why carry a navigation table at all?”

 

“I beg your pardon?”

 

“It would be futile to spread canvas in the windless vacuum of Space—wouldn’t it? Then I cannot understand the good of all that patient charting and star-bothering if the ship cannot be controlled.”

 

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “A good question. And that is why this ship of reconnaissance has a gun deck.”

 

Now I learned that the cannon mounted amidships were not, after all, for fighting Martian men o’war, but for steering! The Cylinder would have no rudder. But to deflect her course the crew would fire a cannon shot, in the opposite way she was desired to turn, and the recoil would do the rest—I myself had seen the violence of recoil of a cannon fired in anger. Of course this was a rough and ready method of steering, for a cannon’s fire is scarce repeatable one ball to the next; but after such a shot you could take more measurements of the stars, and fire again, to tinker with your course in a secondary way. And thus the Cylinder would be steered to Mars and back, to the put-put of cannonballs fired off into the endless immensity of Space! All of this the architects of this strange mission were quite confident about, it seemed.

 

The cupboards were well stocked with clothing and blankets and the like, but I did wonder how the crew would keep warm in Space, for everybody knows how cold it can be if you climb a high mountain. But Anne explained that the problem would be to keep cool, rather than hot; the sunlight, to which the Cylinder would be exposed continually, would be more intense than on the clearest summer day. There was, however, an ingenious little heating system devised by Watt that ran on the combustion of oil; this at least would suffice to boil a kettle!

 

The galley, by the way, was a cleverly compact affair, and quite well stocked with meat and beans in sealed cans, and dried fruit that would keep, and such familiar comestibles as ship’s biscuits. The crew would be three, Anne said—and the stock of food was intended to support them for a journey that might last years!

 

Regarding the more delicate matter of what emerges daily from the other end of a human being, Anne showed me an ingenious closet fitted with valves and levers, which should suck one’s daily offering out into the vacuum of Space, without exposing tender flesh to that airless condition. I made a mental note to check the integrity of the gadget. With liquid waste the situation would be different. It was recognized that a water tank sufficient for the trip would fill the hull and beyond, and so there was an elaborate system of filters, of sand and fine cloths and other materials, that would enable the urine produced on Tuesday to be drunk again on the Wednesday! This was based on systems developed over the years by desperate miners stuck down the shafts by rock falls and the like. I admit I gagged at the thought, and even Anne, who never liked to show weakness, wrinkled her pretty nose at the idea. [This last detail is entirely the author’s invention.—A.C.] That business of the water, though, prompted me to think about the air that would be needed to keep that brave crew alive between the worlds.

 

She led me at last to the lowest deck of that copper hull, and we stood on the stout oak bulkhead. I saw three big brass bolts set on threads that penetrated the bulkhead, the bolts to be turned by twisting wheels. “And this,” she said, “is the Cylinder’s greatest marvel of all—the secret of how she will be able to thrust herself out of the atmosphere. All the crew will have to do is turn these wheels.”

 

For this marvel we had to thank the restless brain of James Watt. It had been Watt’s suggestion to use the Phoebeans’ brute strength in mining. But he became intrigued as to how that great strength was generated, and to what further uses it could be put.

 

Anne said, “It’s well known, and first observed by Newton, that if a Phoebean gets too hot he soon ceases to function. Newton called it a ‘Calenture,’ and it is profoundly useful in controlling the animals. It was Watt who first tried the obvious experiment of seeing what happens if you melt a Phoebean altogether.” She grinned. “He blew up his laboratory, and nearly took himself with it! It seems obvious, Ben. The stuff of which Phoebeans are built is like ice, but it is of a more exotic variety—Watt and his peers call it anti-ice. The tremendous energy of a Phoebean is somehow stored in the anti-ice—as energy is stored in your own muscles. And when you melt the ice, all that energy is released, in a flash. It’s as well for Watt that he first experimented only on a tiny crab.” She eyed me. “Perhaps you can see how this is relevant to the problem of firing the Cylinder into the air.”

 

I nodded, and glanced down uneasily at the wooden bulkhead. “There are Phoebeans down there.”

 

“There will be, on the day of the launch. Clutches of young crabs will be loaded in, before they have a chance to grow. The crew will turn these wheels to drive a spring piston down onto the crabs, crushing them in a sort of funnel. Then a flintlock mechanism—Watt will give you the details—will cause an oil fire to blaze, and the anti-ice fragments will immediately melt. The detonation chamber is ingeniously shaped. The expanding gases will be thrust from a nozzle. The ship will be blown into the air—”

 

“Like a Congreve rocket.”

 

“Exactly that. The crew will be protected by the spring under this platform. It will last only seconds—but when it is done, the Cylinder will already be hurled beyond the air, and en route to Mars!” She studied me. “You seem uneasy. It has all been tested, on smaller models—Watt is sure of his design.”

 

“No doubt. But the wretched Phoebean chicks will not enjoy the experience.”

 

Again she took my hand. “I have suffered the same doubts, dear Ben. But my father says there is a sort of justice in using the Phoebeans’ own lethal energy agin them. There is much to be done to make the rest of this unwieldy vessel work—and little time. My father wants to launch in seven days.”

 

I thought that over. “On Boxing Day!”

 

“The Cylinder must be lofted and away before the Ogre can get his hands on her, and use this technology for his own purposes. You see why you must help us, Ben. With Fulton gone, you are perhaps the only man in the world who knows how to build a vessel to submerge in the sea—and here we are striving to build a ship that can be submerged in Space!” She released my hand and drew back. “Oh, we can keep you here by force, but you cannot be compelled to work. It is your choice.”

 

And I considered that choice. In the middle of the Napoleonic invasion, I was probably as safe here as anywhere in England, at least for now. And I could see at a glance that without my intervention Cuddy and his wretched crew would not survive the launch to see the top of the air, let alone to view the strange landscapes of Mars. Besides, I am an engineer; I enjoyed defining novel problems and solving them—and what was more novel than this?

 

And here was Anne, staring at me almost hungrily.

 

I took her hands now. “If you will look on me forgivingly—if you will promise to speak to me daily—then I will stay, dear Miss Collingwood.” And perhaps, a cunning side of my mind considered, I might win more than that if I impressed her.

 

But dear Anne suspected nothing of this base calculation. [Yes, I did.—A.C.] She flung herself at me and hugged me. “Oh, thank you, Ben! Thank you! I must tell my father!”

 

* * * *

 

XIV

 

So began one of the stranger weeks of my life—though what is to follow will surely be much stranger still!

 

Encouraged by my tentative contract with Anne—a man must have a dream!—I threw myself with a will into the design of the Cylinder. I found myself profoundly dissatisfied, and demanded a list of changes before the shot could be fired, beginning with that ludicrous hatch. Watt’s concern was his precious anti-ice rocket chamber, so my area of expertise and his overlapped but little, and he gave me my head; but many of his juniors protested loud and long at my meddling. But I stood my ground, pointing out it was futile to ask my advice if it wasn’t to be acted upon, and I won all these petty wars.

 

I checked over the design of the water filtering system, such as it was; I wouldn’t have been keen to sup it myself, but simple calculations and measurements showed that it ought to be sufficient to provide potable water daily for three people, with a little excess for washing. The air that they should breathe, though, was a greater worry. It soon became apparent that virtually no thought had been given to this aspect of the design—perhaps because air cannot be seen we take its provision for granted, but to the engineer of a submersible boat it was the first concern. I immediately set the engineers to making copper bombs, simple spheres of compressed air, of the type I had carried on the Nautilus. But even as this work progressed I remained concerned about this issue, and some others, which seemed to me to challenge the viability of the whole enterprise.

 

While this went on Collingwood was kept informed with the progress of the war. There were daily dispatches from Newcastle, and more irregularly from Edinburgh, to which the King, Pitt, and his government had decamped. Wellesley had indeed made his stand at the ancient Roman fort at Housesteads on the Wall. Though Napoleon had a portion of his force bogged down trying to burn through Newcastle, he pitched his main effort at Housesteads, and over those dying days of the Year Five he threw his men again and again at Wellesley’s positions.

 

The French under the Corsican fight a brutal but effective method of war, with fast marches and dispositions, mass artillery fire, and then an advance of the infantry in blocks. But Wellesley had come up with a way of countering him. He spread his forces thin along his defensive positions, and you might think he was asking for trouble. But he had the advantage of the higher ground and the cover of the Wall and the ridge it stood on, and every musket in the line he commanded had a line of fire to a Frenchman in his block—every shot counted—whereas the French got in each other’s way, and only the front rank could fire back. Wellesley’s boys held their fire until they closed, and followed up with spirited bayonet charges. And after several days of destructive stalemate it seemed clear to all observers that Wellesley was holding his own, and was even daring to make forays against the French positions.

 

Meanwhile, according to a dispatch Collingwood showed me from Edinburgh, the French might have reached their high water mark in their American adventure, too. An army of combined British, Canadian, American, and Indian regiments was striking down the length of Lake Champlain, a deep trench between the mountains that runs a hundred miles south of Montreal toward Albany and New York State. A hothead of an American general called Jackson, who once fought the British at age thirteen, was making a name for himself as he ran the French positions ragged.

 

And in the American action—Collingwood himself read me out a passage, but I scarce believed it—the British were experimenting with the use of Phoebeans, big ones culled from the herds in the Canadian Arctic. He even showed me a newspaper sketch of a cavalry officer riding the back of a brute the size of a church, and he had a kind of harness of copper wires and electrical “cells” through which he delivered shocks to the electrical effluvium that controls the beast, and hence goaded it to march this way and that! Well, I had seen something similar in the Channel. I had to puzzle out the meaning of the “cells”—they are the invention of an Alessandro Volta, who has found that if you dip copper and zinc into brine you get a flow of electric—or somesuch!

 

“Wellesley, you know, is keen to get his hands on such beasts,” Collingwood confided to me. “He saw elephants used in war in India—deuced difficult to control, but deploy them right and they can spread panic. Give me my Elephants of Ice!—so he’s said. Well, once the French retreat starts, and if the winter cold lasts, he’s sure to have his way....”

 

He shared this with me in his rather chilly office in the Ulgham installation on the morning of Christmas Eve, only two days before the launch was due. He had called me here, along with Miss Caroline Herschel, who sat bundled up in a heap of blankets. I was glad of the meeting, for my technical concerns remained, and I felt the need to express them to the Admiral. But we shared mugs of hot tea, and sat in battered old armchairs before the fire in the hearth, and his dog slept contentedly at his feet, and old Cuddy seemed in contemplative mood.

 

“There will be some, though,” he said now, “who will question the morality of exploiting the Phoebeans in war, and indeed as beasts of burden. For they are self-evidently intelligent.”

 

“Self-evident, is it?” I asked.

 

“They organized themselves for their first strike on Newcastle, during the Ice War—though some dispute that conclusion. And the naturalists in the Arctic have mapped very complex behaviors, with communities of them clustering around the great queens.”

 

“There is also evidence,” Caroline Herschel said in her grey Germanic, “of swarming and clustering in the concentration on Mars, though it is at the limit of visibility. And evidence, from an examination of astronomical records, that the comet that delivered the first Phoebeans here in the year 1720 was not a random visitor, but may have been directed to make a close approach—presumably by Phoebean activity.”

 

Collingwood said, “They tell me it’s not an intelligence of our sort—or of a dog’s or cat’s or monkey’s. An individual Phoebean seems to be a dumb brute. It’s when they get together that the cleverness emerges, rather as ants in a hive, themselves stupid, are capable of great feats of organization. It’s all rather exciting, philosophically, even if the Phoebeans pose a threat to us. We are not alone, under God; there are other minds than ours. But what sort of minds? Can we ever speak to them? What kind of heaven do they imagine?”

 

“A cold one,” I suggested.

 

“And what of their philosophies? The younger set today are in a ferment over liberty and rights and whatnot, and I suppose they have a point. But what can our observations of Phoebean society tell us of the nature of liberty, eh? Can a Phoebean ever be free—any more than an ant can?”

 

“Interesting questions though these may be for future generations,” I said gently, “perhaps we should turn to the more urgent matter of the launch of the Cylinder—in two days! There are a number of issues—”

 

“The foremost of which,” he said gently, “is the crew.” He really was an impressive man when he turned those glass-blue eyes on you. “As you know, I will travel myself. I could scarce delegate such a mission to any other commander—though it will be the smallest crew I ever ran! I am far from in perfect health, but my rheumatism should not be a hindrance when floating around in the air, and I dare say my intellect and my eyesight are as keen as ever they were. After so long at sea I can double on most tasks—I could even serve as surgeon if there’s a toothache or two....”

 

“Perhaps that is the easier part of the selection.”

 

He permitted himself a small smile. He turned to Caroline Herschel. “Madam, there is the question of your brother—for he, Hobbes, was scheduled to serve as our Inter-planetary navigator. Oh, I can certainly take the readings, for the Cylinder will be a steadier ship than most I’ve served on. But the calculations are a matter of geometry in three dimensions that would tax my brain; it is more akin to evaluating planetary orbits than courses on the ocean. We need an astronomer! And who better than William Herschel, discoverer of a planet? That was the plan. Indeed the navigation table was designed for his use.”

 

“Let us be more precise,” said Caroline. “I designed it for his use. As I compiled the various astronomical, mathematical, and other tables he would need to carry out the task.”

 

“Herschel should have been here, you know, Hobbes. That was the plan. He knew it! Oh, I’ve heard there have been sightings of the man in Birmingham, where he met with his Lunar Society friends. I have sent missive after missive—”

 

“Won’t come,” Caroline said, and she sat plump in her chair, a cheerless bonnet on her head, her rather delicate hands folded in her lap. “My brother will wait until the Cylinder is launched, or exploded. Then he will emerge from nowhere and claim all the credit. Well, let him have it. For he will soon discover that without me to make his observations for him, his fame will evaporate like dew.” [I cannot tell if this is a calumny on William by a frustrated sister, or a valid reflection on his character. I am inclined to the former view, and to guess at a similarity with the Hobbes-Fulton relationship. I leave the question to other biographers. In any case, as the author records, my father proceeded quickly to the nub of the lady’s remarks.—A.C.]

 

“And why, madam,” Collingwood asked, “is he to lose your support so suddenly?”

 

She snorted. “Do not be coy, Admiral. It does not suit. This meeting of yours is a press-gang, is it not?” She cackled. “I will serve as your navigator. I am younger than William, and will eat less, and am more able than him, and more to the point I am here.”

 

“It will be a mission of the most extraordinary danger—”

 

“I am in danger is this world, with the Ogre on the loose. Decision made. Discussion over. Proceed to the next item.” And she looked starkly at me.

 

Suddenly I understood why I was here. I held up my hands and made to stand. “Oh, no.”

 

“Hear me out, Benjamin,” said Cuddy. “Please! Sit and listen. I would not set to sea without a ship’s carpenter, and a blacksmith and a sailmaker.... There’s not a ship been built yet that doesn’t need running repairs, and that’s even if she doesn’t run into a war. And yon Cylinder is as experimental a vessel as has been launched since Moses took to the Nile in a bulrush crib. I need an engineer, Ben.”

 

“Then take Watt. Or Trevithick, or Wilkinson—”

 

“Once we are aloft—if we get aloft—their work will be done, the anti-ice expended. No, Ben, I need a man to run the inner systems of the ship. To keep the air contained and fresh, to keep us warm or cool—”

 

“It would have been Fulton.”

 

“And Fulton longed to go—to become one of the immortals, Ben! But Fulton is dead. And so I turn to you. What choice do I have? But I have seen your work, this last week. You’re a better engineer than Fulton, I daresay—”

 

“There’s not much doubt about that!”

 

“—and a better man than you yourself believe. There’s none I’d sooner have travel with me to Mars than thee. No,” he said, holding up his hands. “Don’t speak now. Let it stew the night. Think of all you have to gain—the wonders you will see, the unending fame attached to your name—you’ll probably get a knighthood like your ancestor, if it’s legal!”

 

“And you will offer me the hand of Anne, I suppose?”

 

But he was a gentleman, and he recoiled at that unseemly remark. “That would be Anne’s choice, not mine.” [Thank you, Papa.—A.C.]

 

“You try to recruit me. Yet you have not told me the full truth of the mission, have you?”

 

He inclined his head. “Indeed not. Ask your questions, sir.”

 

“I have concerns about the breathing. You have read my reports. I have ordered the loading of bombs of compressed air. But I cannot see how a practical cargo of bombs, without filling up the hull and stringing ‘em along behind, could get you more than halfway to Mars and back! I have worked the numbers. I am sorry to return a negative report, but that’s how it is.”

 

Collingwood glanced at Caroline, and I thought she smiled. “And your other issues?”

 

I had them and I listed them, and I won’t bore you with them here—save one, the most critical, which was my inability to discern any apparatus that would return the crew to the safety of the ground of Earth after its scouting mission among the planets. “Is there to be a Montgolfier balloon stuffed in that cone on the nose, perhaps?”

 

He said gravely, “Good questions. And certainly you deserve to know the true nature of the mission—and I haven’t told it yet, even though I’ve asked for your commitment. Then you will understand why a ship half-full of your air bombs will be quite enough, and why a means of landing on the Earth again is scarce relevant.... But you must give me your word that whether you come with us or stay on the ground, you will not breathe a word of it to Anne until after the launch, for she knows nothing of it. Is that clear?”

 

Confused, disturbed, I nodded. “My word.”

 

“Very well.” And there, in that shabby office, on a cold Christmas Eve, he revealed to me at last the full truth.

 

Miss Caroline Herschel was apparently dozing in her chair. But when he was done she started awake. “A press-ganging! Hee hee!”

 

[I cannot recall my father so distrusting me before. O Papa, you could have told me!—A.C.]

 

* * * *

 

XV

 

It is Christmas Day—today! And I never spent a stranger one, and I daresay I never will.

 

“We must give her a name,” says Anne, and the roaring fire in Watt’s office gives her cheeks a pretty glow. “Papa, you can’t send a ship off into the sea of Space with no better name than the Cylinder!”

 

We are making a Christmas of it, as best we can; here am I, Anne, Collingwood, Miss Herschel—and Watt and Trevithick and Wilkinson and Denham, and a host of other fellows, and the young women from the offices and drafting rooms, and the dog begs for scraps from the table. Yes, today we are a sort of family, and Anne has organized the chattering girls to deck the room with cut-up silk and gold paper, and big tables meant for the inspection of blueprints groan under the weight of cold pies and hunks of brawn and chicken, and there is port, too, and sherry. When I ask her how she acquired all this provision, she says she went and robbed it from the French at Housesteads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she did.

 

And if I look through the windows I can see down into the Phoebean pit, where the crabs scuttle and the anti-ice eggs lie dormant in the straw, and you could almost think it a Bethlehem scene.

 

“A name?” says Collingwood. “I had rather thought of calling her after the Badger, my first command.”

 

“Oh, Papa, what a dull choice!”

 

“And what would you suggest, my dear?”

 

“How about the Ogre?” Watt says in his Edinburgh brogue, and his friends laugh, raucous.

 

“Or the Wellesley?” ventures Trevithick.

 

“Well, that would do,” says Anne, “but there are other sorts of hero. How about the Tom Paine?”

 

And Collingwood sputtered into his cup. “That rabble-rouser?”

 

“Oh, come,” says Watt, “be a sport, Admiral. After all, are we not striking a blow for the freedom of all mankind from the tyranny of the Phoebeans?”

 

And then begins another of their interminable discussions on the nature of the Phoebeans. Collingwood picks a ship’s biscuit from a plate. “Are the weevils in this biscuit free? Are they a democracy? Do they vote on the best course of action, and mount revolutions and coups, even as I—” He takes a big gruesome bite out of it.

 

They laugh, and on the talk goes.

 

And I sit, my glass in hand, as close to Anne as decorum allows. I am half facing the wall of windows that fronts the office, overlooking the Phoebean nest, and so I see her twice, the girl before me, and reflected in the windows behind. She has her pretty dress on for the day, her London dress. I never saw a fairer sight—and nor will I again, if I choose to climb aboard the HMS Tom Paine with Collingwood and Caroline Herschel, for my view will be full of old and sagging flesh, wobbling around in the strange conditions of Space!

 

Yes, I am still wrestling with my decision. Wisely, the Admiral is not pressing me. I have the feeling that he will go to Mars with or without me, perhaps with some poor soul such as Watt to take my place. But the Hobbes-Fulton systems [another correction, from Fulton-Hobbes!—A.C.] need running, and nobody else could do it; without me the mission will fail—and Collingwood will go anyway! Can I let him die for nothing?—and Miss Herschel, come to that. And can I allow a world to come to pass in which such as Anne must live under the ice boot of the Phoebeans?—if people survive at all. These are the issues. And yet, and yet—I want to live! As I gaze on Anne (and, to her gentle credit, she lets me) I wrestle with the rights and wrongs of it, the pros and cons.

 

And it is because I look on her, and on the windows behind her, that I happen to be the first to see the assassin. He must have crawled along the track outside the office, under the window ledge and out of sight. Now he raises himself up—and I recognize him, for it is of course Gourdon, who has followed me all the way here from the deck of the Indomitable that night in the Channel—and he aims his musket.

 

I stand, and cover my face with my sleeve, and hurl myself at the wall.

 

Falling amid splintering glass and broken frames, I collide with the Frenchman, grabbing his arms, and the two of us tumble back into the pit. We land hard, for it must be six or seven feet deep, and I hear Phoebean crabs slither out of the way, and his musket goes off with a crack. I hear voices raised in alarm above me, and somebody screams.

 

My universe, from spanning Inter-planetary Space, is suddenly reduced to the smallest of dimensions—me, and the Frenchman under me. I pin his arms back. I smell the wine on his breath, and see pox scars on his nose, and—that odd, repulsive detail!—smears of burgoo porridge and bread crumbs on the filthy ponytail. “You don’t give up,” I say to him in French.

 

“Never, you sack of shit,” he says to me. “I was flogged for failing to catch you at Stockton! My mission was abandoned as we closed with Wellesley’s forces. But I am not here for France. I am here for myself, American.” He is bigger than me, and stronger, and more determined, and now he begins to force his arms down, and I find myself being lifted, unable to hold him. He will kill me and others in the next seconds, unless I act.

 

I let go one arm. He pushes back more easily now, mouth open, laughing. But I have a free hand, and I scrabble in the straw, and my fingers close on a smooth lump of ice—an egg, a Phoebean egg. I take this egg and ram it into his mouth. It is big, but it jams in there, and now I push my hand under his jaw to keep it closed, I push and push. He claws my wrist and gurgles, and his eyes bulge as he chokes.

 

But it is not the suffocating that kills him. It is the detonation as the egg bursts, prompted by his body’s warmth, shattering into pieces that would later reassemble into a crab. The glass-hard shards burst from his cheeks and skewer his tongue, and lance up through his throat into his brain.

 

He twitches and falls back, and blood and ice spews from his mouth. I let him go and pull back, kneeling over him, drenched in his gore. Now they are here, Collingwood and Denham and the rest. Collingwood pulls me off the man and to my feet, while Denham takes his musket and checks he is dead.

 

And here is Anne, dear Anne at my side, clutching me despite the blood that will soak her London dress. “Oh, Ben! I thought you had sacrificed yourself. You saved us—my father—you saved us all!”

 

“As you have saved me,” I say to her, and my voice is raw. Her beloved face swims before me. “Make me a promise,” I say. “That when I bring your father safe home from Mars—you will marry me.”

 

And she answers me with a kiss, into which I fall like a comet.

 

* * * *

 

Epilogue

 

To this account I might add the personal details that my father packed a bag of acorns, so that Mars might grow oak trees with which to build English warships in the future. And that his final words before he sealed the hull of the Paine, which I heard myself, were these: “Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world will talk of hereafter.” And so it will.

 

I need not recount the events of the mission of the Tom Paine here. Suffice to say that in the months that followed a world at war watched through the eyes of the astronomers—including William Herschel, who was remarkably ever-present once his sister had consigned herself to the dark—as that brave spark followed step by step the course my father had designed, and yet kept secret from me. Glinting in Space, its cannon sparking, the Paine arrowed at Mars—and, in a remarkable feat of navigation by Miss Herschel, plunged through the thin Martian air and rammed that crawling nest of Phoebeans. The anti-ice explosion was bright enough to be seen by the naked eye on this world, a man-made star in the sky.

 

It was no scouting mission. There had never been an intention to loop around Mars and return to the earth—as I, had I been a grain more technical, should have deduced. Rather, it was a bold Nelsonian gesture that ended the life of cautious Cuddy Collingwood.

 

And nor need I summarize the events of the war on earth, as they unfolded after that strange Christmas. Geordie’s Wall in England, and Manhattan in the Americas, did indeed prove the limits of Napoleon’s ambition in the Atlantic realm. Napoleon is not done; at time of writing he has raised a new “Grande Armee” and has marched east, to confront the continental powers. Perhaps it will be the land that will defeat him, or the people—or the Phoebeans, for the Russians have approached the English over importing ice beasts from Canada to be loosed in their own Arctic wastes. Defeated he will be, I am sure—but his like will surely rise again in the future, as will the Phoebeans, despite my father’s brave enforcement of the ice line. The worlds turn, and bring problems for generations to come, that are the same and yet different.

 

But this account is not of Napoleon or any Phoebean, but of Ben Hobbes. He must have scribbled the last pages in the dark, during that feverish, sleepless Christmas night after the French assassin was killed. Only now, with hindsight, can I understand the warmth that came into my father’s clear eyes when we announced our engagement to the company! But that dear moment was the end of our story, not the beginning.

 

So I sit in our home in Morpeth, with Bounce at my feet who looks up at every footstep, pining for his master after all these long years. I wonder how it would have turned out if somehow Ben could have returned to e arth, and to my arms. If, i f ! Such speculations are futile, for this is the only world we have, and it is up to us to make the best of it we can—as Ben Hobbes did, and my own Papa, and it is a consolation to me that they were together at the end, for I loved them both.

 

—A.C.

 

Copyright © 2010 Stephen Baxter