Old Mars Read online

Her eyes met mine, and I felt her uncertainty of me almost as a physical sensation.

  “You would have me give the operation of my ship to you?”

  “Captain,” the toad-man said, “what alternative is there?”

  Imagine, Majesty, that our places had been reversed. That I had been aboard the Dominic of Osma but deprived of my most valued crewmen. Can I say I would not have balked at the prospect of giving gentle La’an the helm, even though we were trapped between reef waters and enemy cannon? I cannot. Control of a ship is a thing of terrible intimacy, and to deliver it into an unknown hand is a leap of faith among the faithless. Even as we both knew, she and I, that this marriage must be made, I saw the hesitance in her eyes.

  “La’an,” she said. “See these men to their stations and give them what assistance and guidance we can. Captain Lawton. If you will accompany me to the command node.”

  “A hostage to my men’s good conduct?”

  “If you choose to see it that way,” she said. And, Your Majesty, I went.

  As we passed through the vast interior of the Serkeriah, Carina Meer—for this proved to be the captain’s name—did her best to apprise me of our situation, and I will do my best to summarize here what she said to me. That body that we call Mars was once home to a vast and flourishing civilization. Great cities of living crystal filled the mountains and planes, connected by a network of canals filled with sweet water. The seven races lived together there in harmony and conflict, peace and war, much in the fashion of the nations of our own world. She told me of being a child and looking up at the vast night sky to see the brightness that, to her, was our own world, and I found myself powerfully moved by the image. Those cities now lie in shards, the canals empty and dry. The Ikkean race, for reasons known only in their own insectile councils, turned en masse upon the other six races. The soft-shelled Manae, wise and gentle Sorid (of whom La’an was the first of my acquaintance), radiant Imesqu, vast and slow Norian, mechanical Achreon, and our own cousin Humanity were driven under the surface of the planet, to live in the great caverns where the Ikkeans feared to follow. The six conquered races lived in darkness and despair until Carina’s brother, Hermeton, happened in his alchemical investigations upon a rare alloy capable of bringing enormous power. His new solar engines, it was hoped, might tame the Ikkean threat, should the alloy be found in sufficient quantity.

  To this end, the conquered races had sent their agent to the rich profundity that is Earth, to gather from the violence of our planet’s core the means of their liberty. Great was their fear of discovery, for while their power is vast, their position with the Ikkean threat is tenuous. An alliance between the Ikkean race and the humans of Earth would certainly have spelled doom to the six races. And their fears, as you will see, were not unjustified.

  But let me also say this: As I walked the iridescent halls of the Serkeriah, I felt the power of the great ship. With one such as her—only one, Majesty—I should have made myself the Emperor of all Europe. No navy could have stood against me. No army could bring me to earth. No city, however mighty, would not quail in my shadow. Imagine then the power of the enemy that had brought her makers low, and thank merciful God that Ikkean ambition has not yet extended to England. But again, I run ahead of myself.

  My crew worked manfully at their new posts. The experience of the high seas had given every man an instinctive understanding of motion and mechanics that no scholarship can best, and La’an and the few remaining of Carina Meer’s crew did their all to train my men even as we fled through the void, our very lives at issue. I will not recount in detail the discomfort we all suffered as hours passed to days and days to weeks. The Ikkean ships did all that they could to outmaneuver us, to outrace us, to trick us into turning from our path. We slept when we could, worked as we had to, and suffered exhaustion and fear with the good humor and camaraderie I had known. As the red planet grew nearer, our pursuers became more desperate. For a time, I believed we might even achieve our goal. But our enemy had numbers and experience. They wore us down as a man might grind the proudest stone to dust.

  And even at the end, surrounded as we were by the diabolical ships of the enemy, they knew to fear us. An animal cornered is at its most dangerous. So it was that I saw again Governor Smith.

  Picture me if you will, Majesty, standing the wide bridge of the Serkeriah. Captain Carina Meer stood frowning down at the wide pool in which our vessel and our enemy’s were charted in light as if by angelic hands. The smell of burning flesh still hung in the air, mute witness to our previous engagements. Gentle La’an and Mister Kopler stood their stations beside me, each coordinating one-half of the great organism that our combined crews had become. And then we were joined. Through what magic I cannot say, but the wide pane of crystal before me shifted and changed, and like an enchanted mirror from fairy tales, the glass reflected not my own visage, but Governor Smith’s. The years had treated him gently. His mouse-brown hair was only touched by gray at the temple, his skin taut with the fat of rich feasts. His smile was the amiable one I had known once and allowed myself to count, however mistakenly, among my friends.

  “Captain Lawton,” the governor said, “I was hoping to find you home.”

  “Governor,” I replied.

  “Your captor’s cause is lost. The criminal Carina Meer will be taken into custody by my allies, and her crimes will be answered. The only question remaining is how. I see that our guesses were correct. You and your men have been pressed into Captain Meer’s service.”

  “I am no slaver,” Carina Meer said. “It is the Ikkeans who take slaves and force others to their will.”

  “Be that as it may,” the governor went on, “I have a proposition, Captain Lawton. My allies would prefer a clean transfer of the prisoner and her stolen goods. The ship itself is of no interest to them. If you and your men would be so good as to secure the person of Carina Meer and open your locks to our envoys, the Serkeriah will be yours by right of salvage.”

  “I cannot believe you are sincere,” I said.

  “On the contrary,” the governor said. “I give you my word of honor, and as we both know, I never break my word.”

  It was true, Majesty. However devilishly he might construct his promises, however Mephistophelian his skills in breaking the spirit of a bargain, Governor Smith’s word of honor had not been sullied, not even in the act of destroying mine. If he promised me the great ship that traveled between worlds in exchange for Carina Meer and her alloy, then the ship would be mine. I had no doubt.

  Shall I say, then, that I hesitated? It is, after all, the action expected of a man of my repute. Shall I say that given the prospect of defeat on one hand and freedom and limitless power on the other, that my base nature swayed me? It did not. My reply to the governor was immediate, crude, heartfelt, and medically improbable.

  The Ikkean boarding assault began at once.

  To board a vessel in the abyss between the worlds is no easy thing. The attacking craft flew toward us, their infernal engines burning at the full. Cruel mouths pierced the ship’s skin and spat out their warriors into the halls and domes of the Serkeriah. A great many, I believe, were lost in that first hour as my men and hers cut down the invaders even as they spilled forth. They were massive creatures, Majesty. But their vast arachnid bulk belied their terrible speed. From devices carried on the ends of their legs, they produced rays of purified light that could burn a man down in a few moments. And beside these devils from the pit were the colonial guard, in duty servants to the crown, but in truth the creatures of Governor Smith.

  We fought them in the corridors and halls, the radium stores and the ship’s vast eight-chambered heart. Doctor Koch drove them briefly back to their ships with a noxious gas he fashioned with the Manae engineer Octus Octathan. And Quohog, young Carter, and Mister Darrow contrived to salvage a cannon from the ruins of the Dominic of Osma that blew a dozen Ikkeans into yellow sludge and cracked bits of carapace. It is with great pride that I report my men, ruffian
s and blackguards all, fought like heroes of old. Their guns fired without pause, and their swords wove a flashing net of steel through which even the Ikkean horrors feared to pass. But such vigorous defense also left us terrible losses, and again and again we fell back. Near the end, I stood with Captain Meer, my own cutlass in one hand and a contrivance of glass and silver that burned with emerald light in the other, holding back the enemy. To this day, I can feel her back against my own as we stood our ground. For one moment, the stench of smoke and death parted and the scent of magnolia came to my nostrils. I hope when my time comes to die that will be the last memory my failing mind recalls.

  Of course, we were overwhelmed. The cost to the enemy, I credit myself and my crew, was great, but at last the sheer force of numbers swamped us all. I was struck to the ground, then bound ankle and wrist, and roughly hauled to a prison chamber with the rest. There we lay, almost a hundred of our mixed crew. A quarter, perhaps, of my own men had perished, and their bodies were stacked against one wall with the bodies of Carina’s people. These were men whose dreams I had come to know, whose fates had been bound to my own. Many of them were not good men, not kind or merciful or gentle, but they were mine and they were lost. Captain Meer lay bound beside me. A wide bruise covered her exposed shoulder and her lip had been cut by an enemy blow. I called out to Mister Kopler and Mister Darrow and was reassured to hear their voices.

  “You should have accepted his offer,” Carina Meer said.

  Young Carter’s voice said, What offer was that? but I ignored him.

  “When you surrendered to me aboard the Vargud, I promised that you would come to no harm,” I said. “I am fairly certain that Governor Smith would not have respected that. I had no choice.”

  She turned to me as best she could. Her eloquent smile carried sorrow and amusement, admiration and despair.

  “And if you had made no such promise?” she asked. “If your somewhat tarnished sense of honor had not restrained you, would you then have betrayed me?”

  I was silent for a time. I understood then only by my vague animal unease the dexterity with which the astonishing woman could unmake me as I knew myself and resurrect a different man in my place. Young Carter muttered: Because if there was an offer, it might have been nice to hear what the terms were, before Doctor Koch hushed him. I heaved a great sigh.

  “I would not have,” I confessed. “Though it would have saved my men their lives and me my own, I would not give anyone into the power of Governor Smith and his new allies.”

  “Consider, then, that though you have lost your honor, something must still constrain you,” she said. “Honor is a burden that may be shifted or forgone. From goodness, I think, there is no escape.”

  What can I say, Majesty? I had that day suffered blows to my body and my soul. I had faced the charging mandibles of vast spider-beasts and said silent farewell to men as near to me as family. How strange, then, that the thing to destroy Alexander Lawton, Scourge of the Caribbean Sea, should be delivered so gently, so kindly. I lay in our crowded prison, my eyes to heaven, and confronted for the first time the proposition that the loss of my honor might not also be the loss of my soul. For so many years as a youth, I strove to protect and celebrate my honor, that in the end it became my weakness. My love for my good name was the vulnerability that Governor Smith had used to shatter me. My years upon the seas, my flaunting of law and decency, all of it became a pettiness. Would you expect the thought to bring joy? That the light of goodness might spill over me like some abstract and spiritual dawn? It did not. On the contrary, it stung. Like Achilles, I had gone to my tent to sulk, and with a gentle rebuke, Carina Meer suggested that the choice had been beneath me.

  “Madam,” I said, “your optimism is misplaced.”

  In my worst moments, Majesty, I can still see the surprise and the hurt in Carina Meer’s expression at my gruffness. I think she might have gone on, pressed me to better explain myself, but I rolled my back to her and kept my own counsel instead. For a time I lay thus, pouting for my wounded masculine pride and regretting bitterly that I had ever come across the Vargud van Haarlem. Nor would I report this to you now had not this conversation had some bearing on the issue that has prompted me to deliver this account to you. Indeed, even so, I was sorely tempted to omit it. Whatever sins may remain marked against my soul, I can at least claim that a lack of candor is not among them.

  “Captain Lawton, sir?” Mister Kopler said, his voice pulling me back to myself. I was astonished to find there were tears in my eyes. I coughed and wiped them away as best I could against my shoulder.

  “Mister Kopler,” I said. “You’ve freed your hands, then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You win this time,” Mister Darrow said, grudgingly. “I got a cramp in one thumb, or I’d have beat him, sir.”

  “Let us hope there will be no call for a rematch in our immediate future,” I said. “For now, make haste. We have a ship to recapture.”

  Boarding and taking a ship requires a very different logic than reclaiming one from within its own brig. In the first instance, all sides are armed, and all know the battle has begun. In the second, customarily speaking, only one side has the advantage of weapons and the other the knowledge that the struggle exists. Of the two, I much prefer the direct battle, not because I disdain stealth, but because weaponry is robust and surprise fragile. Once an alarm is raised, the usual balance is restored, and rarely to the benefit of the escaped prisoners. The first guards to come to us—an Ikkean spider-beast and two grenadiers in the governor’s service—we overcame quickly and without incident, and with their weapons, we stole forth into the ship that had been our own. The brig in which we had been imprisoned lay far to the stern, a good distance from the bridge, but not from either the hold where the precious Incan alloy was stowed or from the vast engines that acted as mast, sail, and rudder to the Serkeriah. Time was short, and Captain Carina Meer took one force to the hold while I took the other to capture the engines. It might have seemed natural that each of us should take their own, but in practice, both groups were made from the crew of the Dominic of Osma and the Serkeriah in nearly equal proportion.

  I wish I could say that the assault upon the engines went without fault, but the great, throbbing mechanisms—a dozen in number and each larger than a ship of the line—were encompassed by passages and cul-de-sacs so convoluted and complex that there could be no clean fight. Several times, I found myself cut off from my men, in desperate melee with the black grublike beings larger than a man that the Ikkeans used as slaves on their ships. I did not know for several months the origin of those repulsive half insects, and now that I have learned it, I wish I had not. Somewhere in the fury of battle, an alarm was raised, and our advantage evaporated.

  When Carina Meer arrived with the alloy on a floating cart, the Ikkean soldiers were already on their way. The combined intelligence of Doctor Koch and Octus Octathan devised a temporary barricade by restricting the passageways leading to the engines down to the diameter of a coin, but by blocking the means of ingress, they had also stoppered our hope of escape. I saw no salvation, but I kept all despair from my demeanor. I walked the defenses, giving heart and cheer where I could. What few weapons we had reclaimed we trained upon the narrowed halls, and through the thin passages we heard the voices of men, the chittering of great spiders, and at last the slow, deep gnawing of a new passage being ground out.

  When I returned to deliver the foul news to Carina Meer, she stood at another of the floating charts of light such as I had seen her use on the bridge. Only here, instead of the bright mark of the Serkeriah surrounded by the ruddy glow of the Ikkeans, the ship stood alone but spiked through with the enemy until she looked like nothing so much as the back of a cat covered in burrs. And curving below, the vast convex surface of Mars itself.

  “We are trapped, and the enemy coming,” I said.

  “The Ikkean ships have all attached to the Serkeriah,” she said.

  “I am sor
ry to hear it,” I said.

  “It may yet work to our advantage,” she replied, then reached into the play of light and volume to indicate a feature on the face of the world I had not noticed. It seemed hardly larger than a child’s thumbnail, but it was gray amid the redness of the world. “This is the Palace of the Underworld, the fortress and gateway to the caves in which my people survive. This is where my brother waits now, and where I must deliver the alloy if there is to be any hope of freedom for my people.”

  “Carina,” I said, for by now I had no hesitation in using her Christian name, “unless we are to carve a window in the flesh of the ship and drop it from here, I cannot see how this can be done.”

  I have never understood, not then and not now, how a woman’s expression can be at once so very serene and utterly reckless.

  “Directly,” she said.

  Mourn, Your Majesty, for the doomed Serkeriah. There was no nobler ship on sea or in sky than her, and we, her displaced and desperate crew, spiked her rudder. By the time the Ikkeans understood our dreadful intent, it was too late. The evil, parasitic ships tried to disengage, but the speed and violence of our descent confounded them. What few made the attempt were shattered in our fiery wake. The others clung tight and were smashed against the planet’s rocky skin even as we reversed the shrieking engines and slowed from a fatal speed to one merely apocalyptic.

  The Serkeriah died around us, the great crystalline plates shearing away as she bounced. One of the enormous engines came loose from its moorings and streaked off ahead of us before turning up toward the purple sky and detonating. The wind that beat against me smelled of overheated iron and tasted of blood. When the great ship lifted her head one last time toward the doubled moon, then came to rest, spent, destroyed, and noble as a bull defeated in the Spanish ring, Carina Meer’s hand was in my own. Somewhere in the indigo shards and twisted metal, the wooden bones of the Dominic of Osma also lay. To the best of my knowledge, they remain there still, our two ships, nestled together in sacrifice and death like the knuckles of a husband and wife strewn in the same grave, and around them the bodies of their fallen enemies.