Old Mars

A Man Without Honor JAMES S. A. COREY

For the exclusive eyes of George Louis, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland30 September 172–Your Majesty, I was once an honorable man.

I do not wish at this late date to recount the circumstances under which Governor Smith revoked my Letter of Marque, nor the deceptions by which I was then forced to choose between my loyalty to the crown or my honor as a gentleman. I made my choices then, and I have accepted the consequences of them. For the greater part of a decade, I have led my crew through Caribbean waters, the forces of personal loyalty, despair, and rude vengeance changing me as a caterpillar in its chrysalis into the debased, cruel, and black-hearted man that I was accused of being long before it was true. I have sunk a dozen ships. I have ransomed members of your own family. I have taken what was not mine by right but by necessity. I have no doubt that you have heard my name spoken in tones of condemnation, and rightly so, for I have made that original calumny true a hundred times over. Nor shall I pretend any deep regret for this. My loyalty and care were rewarded with betrayal, and though it be a defect of my soul, such a trust once broken with me can never be mended.

I have likewise no doubt that on this, the occasion of Governor Smith’s death, some part of the credit or blame for his demise might be attributed to me. I write to you now not to ask pardon for that which I have done or defend myself against accusations of which I am innocent. It is my sole hope that you shall read my words and through them understand better the circumstances of the governor’s death and my own role in it. I only ask that as you read this you bear in mind these two things: I swear before God that, though he had earned my vengeance a thousand times over, it was not my hand that slew the governor, and that I was once an honorable man.

Picture, then, my ship, the Dominic of Osma, as she rode upon the August waves. A hurricane had assaulted the coast three days earlier, and water and air held the serenity that only comes after such a storm or before it. The sun shone with a debilitating heat, looking down upon our poor sinners’ heads like the eye of an unforgiving God or else His counterpart, and we rode upon a sea whose blue echoed the sky. I recall feeling a profound peace as we moved between these two matchless vastnesses. I had a hold stocked with salt pork, freshwater, limes, and rum. I had a crew of men whose loyalty and ability I had reason to trust. We might have spent weeks upon the sea without sighting land or fellow vessel before I felt the first pang of anxiety.

But that was not to be.

Quohog was the first man to sight the doomed ship, and his barbaric yawp sounded down from the crow’s nest. In his accent, one of the oddest I have heard in the widely traveled Carib, the call of Ship ahoy! sounded more Zeeah loy and his further report of smoke as Awch. For those of us who had shipped with him, there could be no doubt as to the meaning of his garble, but as to the intent of it, I believe we all hesitated. Quohog had a well-earned reputation as a man who enjoyed a good joke, and none of us, myself included, would have been surprised if he had invented the sighting for the sheer joy of looking down at the deck and watching us scatter. So it was that I made no order to change our sail until I could, with spyglass in hand, climb aloft and confirm the existence of this improbable ship.

She was a merchant fluyt, that was clear, and she rode low in the water. Sails once proud hung ragged from her arms, and smoke rose from her. The gunports were open, and her half dozen cannon stood openmouthed and unmanned. She flew the tattered flag of Denmark, and her rail and sides were splintered and burned. In retrospect, I believe it was the burning that led me astray, for I had seen the leavings of many battles at sea, and I had never seen scorching of that kind from a weapon of man. I assumed instead that I was looking upon a lightning-struck ship that had through ill chance or malice been caught in the open sea during the tempest just passed. Such easy prizes were rare but not unheard of, and with pleasure at our good fortune, I called the man at the wheel to turn us in pursuit.

I can recall still the slow movement of the derelict from a pinpoint on the horizon to a mass of black no larger than a coin held at arm’s length. Her masts took shape even without the aid of a glass, and then as if between one breath and the next we were upon her. Close, the extent of the damage she had suffered became clear. The black char along her sides had reduced her higher planks to coal, and rough holes punctured her flesh. I had no doubt that she rode low not from the weight of her cargo but because she was taking on water. The smoke that rose from her was the pale white of great heat, and as we came alongside, my only fear was that the fire might reach whatever magazine the merchant possessed and detonate her powder while we were near enough to be harmed. The name on her counter was Vargud van Haarlem. I prided myself on knowing the waters where I plied my trade, and I had never heard of her. That alone should have been warning, but I was rash and, worse, curious. I ordered her boarded, gave command to my first mate Mister Kopler, and crossed to her ruined deck myself.

Upon my arrival, the first thing to command my attention were the bodies of the dead. Many were sailors in the rough canvas as common to ships of the line as to merchants or pirates, but several wore the uniforms of soldiers of the colonial guard. And among them were strange, jointed objects like nothing so much as the legs of massive crabs as thick as a strong man’s thigh and as long as my own body. I instructed my men to step lightly and be ready to flee back to the Dominic, but I hardly needed to bother. I say without shame that there was something eerie about the Vargud, and I walked her decks mindful of tales of the Flying Dutchman and of plague ships that ride the ocean currents long after the crews have died. Her quarterdeck burned with a forgelike heat, but the pale flames remained oddly fixed. The sails were not of canvas, but an odd mineral weave that the heat would not consume. At the helm, the burned remains of a man stood, hands fused to the wheel. As I paused there trying to imagine what unholy conflagration could leave such damage behind it, the voice of my third mate, Mister Darrow, called out to me.

Mister Darrow was a New Englander, and though some may be his equal in seamanship, there has never been born into this world a man more laconic. To hear the alarm in his voice chilled me to the bone. I recall his precise words. Captain Lawton, you’re needed in the hold. Seeing them written here, they seem prosaic, but I assure Your Majesty that at the time they seemed a cry from Hell. I drew my pistols and ducked belowdecks, prepared, so I believed, to find anything.

I was mistaken.

To those accustomed to the hold of a ship of the line, the belly of a fluyt is an improbable thing. They are large and robust, fit to fill with crates enough to make the journey between old world and new yield a profit. In the vast interior darkness of this ship, I found only a half dozen of my own men and two things more: a pallet stacked as high as my waist with gold in the shapes and designs I had come to know as Incan, and a woman standing before it, sword in one hand, pistol in the other, and soaked by her own blood.

Looking back upon the moment, there cannot have been so much light as I remember, but I swear to you I saw her in that dimness as clear as in full day. She stood half a head taller even than myself, and I am not a small man. Her skin was the color and smoothness of chocolate and milk, her hair only half a shade darker. She wore a man’s trousers and a brocade jacket any gentleman of court would have been proud of, though it was cut to her figure. Her eyes were the gold of a lion’s pelt, and the lion’s fierceness also set the angle of her jaw.

I saw at once that she was grievously injured, but she blocked the path to the treasure with her body and would let no man pass. Indeed, as I stepped in, she shifted the barrel of her pistol neatly to my forehead, and I had no doubt that the slightest movement of her finger would end my life. Mister Darrow knelt on the deck, a junior crewman called Carter lying at his feet, hand to his shoulder.

“What’s this, then?” I asked.

“Mine,” the woman said. “What you see here is mine, and you will not have it without slaughtering me as you have my people.”

“I’ve slaughtered no one, miss,” I said, amending myself with, “or at least no one here. I am Captain Alexander Lawton.”

“Lawton?” she said, and I thought a flicker of recognition touched her expression. “The same who stood against Governor Smith?”

“And lost,” I said, making a joke of it. “I am the same.”

“Then you are the answer to my prayer,” she said. “You must return me to my ship.”

Darrow cast a glance toward me, and I shared his thought. Her wounds had no doubt rendered her subject to delusion, for we stood within her ship even as she asked to be returned to it.

“Put down your weapons, and I will do what I can,” I said. Her pistol did not waver.

“Give me your word of honor.”

Your Majesty, I find myself hard-pressed to describe the emotions that arose in me with those words. She stood outnumbered and outgunned, and she did not beg. Her words were not a request, but a demand. For years, my word of honor had been hardly worth the breath it took to speak it, and yet she insisted upon it as if it were a thing of value.

“I cannot offer what I do not have,” I said. “But I promise you will come to no harm.”

Her expression grew serious. She lowered her pistol, and as if continuing the same motion, crumpled to the deck. It was all that I could do to kneel in time to break her fall.

“Carter’s hurt,” Mister Darrow said. “Tried to part the miss there from her gold.”

“Seemed the right thing,” young Carter said.

“Will you live?” I asked, lifting the unconscious woman up.

“Will or won’t, sir,” Carter said. “Either way, crossing her’s a mistake I’ll not make twice.”

I left Mister Darrow in possession of the burning ship and transported the woman of whose name I was still ignorant to the Dominic and Doctor Koch. Your Majesty is perhaps aware of Doctor Koch’s somewhat unsavory reputation, and I cannot claim that it is undeserved, for we were unsavory men, but when I appeared at his cabin with an unfamiliar and unconscious woman in my arms, I can truthfully report that his oath as a man of healing lent him an expression of concern better fitted to a mother dog nuzzling her injured pup. He bade me leave her with him to have her hurts attended, and swore that he would call for me as soon as she came to herself. It was not a promise that he kept, but given the circumstances, I cannot hold the fault against him.

I returned to the deck in time to hear Darrow’s dry voice agreeing that the gold the Vargud had carried was a fair load. In the sunlight, the gold shone with a richness and beauty that I had never seen before, as if the metal were alive and aware. I have seen my share of treasures, but I sensed in that moment that the riches before me were of a different order than any I had known.

I gathered my breath to order it all taken below, when the cry Zeeah loy again interrupted the proceedings. I took the speaking trumpet and called up to Quohog. The first part of his reply—Zeeah een, Catin. Ghana.—was perfectly comprehensible to one who had shipped with him. A ship of the line, and worse, one that bore the personal flag that my old nemesis Governor Smith affected. The second part, however—Eeah mantu!—escaped me at the time. I was later to understand that my brave lookout had meant He has monsters. At once, my crew and I leapt to action. The planks laid between the Dominic and the Vargud were pulled back, the lines between us cut, and we hoisted sail.

I must presume that Your Majesty has not had occasion to spend some years aboard ship with the same crew. Allow me, then, to report that there is a rapport that grows between men in long association at sea, an unspoken comprehension that outstrips the mere anticipation of orders to a point where they become almost unnecessary. Please do not think I am boasting when I say that my crew worked as a single creature with a hundred hands and a single mind between us, for in this particular, as in everything I set down here, my sole ambition is to apprise you of the facts. When I say then that it was not five minutes of the clock before we were set free of the Vargud and under way, I am being generous. The Dominic claimed a shallow draft, a proud mast, and Mister Kopler’s expert hand at the wheel. It was a combination that had seen us safely through a dozen pursuits. And yet, when I looked back across that wide sea, the governor’s ship was closing fast. The wind was not high, and I had great faith that whatever fortunate current the governor had happened upon would soon fail him, and we would make good our escape.

I was mistaken.

Over the following hour, it became clear that the governor’s ship was not only keeping pace with us, but gaining. Through my spyglass, I saw her prow cutting through the water as though driven by some invisible force. I also saw the unmistakable uniforms of the colonial guard upon her deck. There was something else, though, which I thought at first I only imagined. Upon the deck, towering over the soldiers, a massive statue stood reminiscent of nothing so much as a grotesque spider, and yet it was no spider. When I spied another such in the rigging, this one moving with the swift and sure motions of a thing alive, I recalled the objects on the Vargud that I had taken for crab’s legs. Improbable as it seemed, this was no statue, but a living thing, a beast as terrible as if ripped from the pages of Revelation. And further, one of these beasts had met its end there before the doomed ship had managed to escape its pursuers, and now two more, the colonial guard, and Governor Smith himself were racing toward me to finish the job. They carried more cannon than we did. They had many soldiers with muskets. Governor Smith had, it appeared, allied himself with the forces of Hell. There was aboard the Dominic not a word of panic, no weeping or prayer, but only the concentration that fear can bring, for we had no doubt that if we were caught, we would perish.

So much did the governor’s ship command my attention that I did not see or hear it when our guest regained the deck. I only caught a scent of blood and magnolia, took my spyglass from my eye, and she was beside me. Doctor Koch had bound her wounds in rag and gauze and strapped her left arm against her ribs, but she stood as sure as a woman uninjured. When she spoke, her voice was crisp.

“Where are we?”

I gave her our location in rough terms, and she insisted on seeing the charts. I watched her golden gaze flicker over my maps of the Carib Sea. She placed a single dusky finger on a place not far from our position.

“Here,” she said. “Take us here.”

“If we turn, they will intercept us.”

“If we continue without turning, they will overtake us. One will not be better than the other.”

“Is that where you were fleeing to the first time you were caught?” I asked.

“It is,” she said. “And it is our only hope now.”

I hesitated, I admit. Only a few hours earlier, I had seen this same woman ask to be returned to the ship on which she stood. I had carried her exhausted form in my arms. I had no cause to believe her in her right mind or to trust her judgment if she was. She sensed my reluctance and turned her eyes to me. In the dimness of the hold, when she had been half-mad with pain and fear, she had been a handsome woman. In the light of the Caribbean sun, she was unmatched. A joyful recklessness took me, and I smiled as fully and honestly as I had in years.

“Mister Kopler,” I called. “Hard to starboard!”

The Dominic groaned under the sudden change, her flanks and spars bent by the weight of the sea and the power of the air. The governor’s ship changed course as well, bringing her closer and closer to us. I could read the name on her side now. The Aphrodite bore down upon us so near I saw the puffs of smoke and heard the reports of rifles as the soldiers on her deck took aim on us, hoping for a lucky shot. The great spiderlike beasts were chittering and crawling along her yardarms and masts. Though she was not yet at broadsides to us, I saw her gunports beginning to open. The moment was very nearly upon us when flight would no longer be an option, and the battle would be joined.

Beside me, the woman’s attention was fixed not upon the doom bearing down upon us but at the clear waters on which we rode. Your Majesty will not, I think, have made the journey to the Caribbean. But as a man who has known many seas, let me assure you that no European sea, not even that nursery of civilization, the Mediterranean, can compare with the glasslike clarity the Caribbean can on occasion achieve. If one can train one’s eyes to see past the reflected sky, it is as though we rode upon empty air. I looked down with her at the mottled green of the ocean floor, nearer here than I had expected it to be, when, without warning, she let out a whoop of the purest joy. Far below us, that which I had taken for the ocean’s bottom moved, turning slowly up toward us. The sea boiled, and the dismayed cries of the Aphrodite carried across the waves. Four great, arching walls rose up from the water, reaching, it seemed nearly to the sky. Then, like Poseidon closing his fist around us, the arching walls met and blotted out the sun.

A roaring sound filled the world louder than anything I had ever heard, and I felt a sensation of terrible weight, as though divine hands were pressing down upon every atom of my being. Around me in the sudden gloom, I saw my men pressed slowly to the deck, and heard the protests of the Dominic as the wood all around groaned. I feared to see the ocean lapping at the rail, but the weight, whatever it was, appeared not to affect our buoyancy.

The woman slipped to the deck as well, borne down by the same terrible heaviness. Her face was an image of triumph, and it was the last thing I saw before darkness took me.

There is a gulf between worlds, Majesty, greater than any ocean. Its emptiness is only relieved by an unsetting sun that burns in the blackness and an unimaginable profusion of stars. Those ships that sail that upper abyss are greater than any leviathan of the lower waters that I once knew. How can I adequately describe the glory of the vessel into which I woke? How can I tell you of the grace of her lines, the power that permeated her? Imagine stepping into the vast nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where instead of stone, every arch is fashioned of living crystal that glows with light and power the improbable blue of a butterfly’s wing. Imagine the poor Dominic of Osma, which had housed myself and my men these many years, lying on her side like a child’s toy abandoned beside a stream while outside the vast window, the stars shine steady and unblinking as you have never seen through Earth’s fickle air.

And the enemy. As beautiful as the doomed Serkeriah was, her pursuers were her echo in grotesquerie. Inhuman and insectlike, they swarmed through the void, the thousand filthy talons of a single demonic hand. Their carapaces were lit from within by a baleful light that spoke of brimstone and sulfur. Serrated claws reached out from each of these unclean bodies in a design that promised that to be touched by one was to be not merely cut, but infected. And it was on one of these, Your Majesty, that the Right Honorable Governor Smith rode with his diabolical masters.

But I precede myself, for I knew none of this in my uncanny sleep. Indeed, I knew nothing until an unfamiliar voice reached me and called me to myself.

“Captain,” the strange voice said. “Please, Captain. Wake up!”

There is, as I am sure Your Majesty knows, no greater impetus that could call a man back from his own unconscious depths than the fear that those entrusted to his care and command might be in need. I roused myself only with a great effort of will, for my awareness had entirely left me until then. But when I managed to pry open my resisting eyelids, two surprises waited. The first was the man who spoke the words. Kneeling, he was still as tall as I might have stood. His hunched body was covered in a soft, tawny pelt, and his countenance, while expressive of distress and an almost unimaginable kindness, nevertheless seemed most like that of some serene, gentle, and unaccountably furry toad.

The second surprise was that his words were not directed to me.

“What is our situation, La’an?” the woman asked. It would be a mistake to call her voice weak. Rather, it was the voice of a strong person compromised by sleep or illness.

“The alloy you brought us has been recovered, Captain,” the toad-man said, “but the Ikkean fleet is in pursuit. And the crew …?”

“The crew is gone,” the woman said, regaining her feet. “We were attacked on the sea, and I alone survived. Only blind chance and these men preserved me.”

The toad-man made a distressed chirping deep in his throat, looking around at the motley lot of us. And ragged we were, Majesty, even for such a normally tattered bunch. Young Carter lay splayed out upon the crystalline deck, and Quohog beside him, like two men asleep. Mister Kopler had risen to his knees, his eyes wide as saucers as he took in the great structure that surrounded us. Doctor Koch, his head down, scuttled among the fallen men, his eyes blind to all wonders in his haste to care for the men. And I, I confess, sat in awe, struck dumb by the marvelous and terrible fate that had befallen us. When the woman rose to her feet, I found my own, more from a vestigial sense of propriety than from the conscious exercise of will. Only Mister Darrow seemed unaffected by our otherworldly surroundings. He, with the calmness of an attorney before the judge, tugged his forelock to the woman.

“My pardons,” he said. “This alloy you were speaking of. That wouldn’t be the Incan gold, would it?”

The woman and toad-man both turned, he startled and she amused.

“You are correct,” she said. “It is not true gold, but the rare alloy formed in the volcanic crust of some worlds.”

“See now,” Mister Darrow said, turning to young Carter, who had only just regained consciousness. “I told you how it was too light. Real gold’s got heft to it.”

“You’re very clever, sir,” Carter said. “So. Are we dead, do you think?”

“Not yet,” the woman who captained that strange vessel said. “But we shall be soon. Uncrewed, the Serkeriah cannot outrun my enemy.”

“Madam,” I said, “I fear I have underestimated both you and the severity of your plight. My men and I know nothing of how to man a vessel such as yours, but we have many years at sea together, and that unity of purpose is a power not to be discounted.”

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, ruffians 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 sorry 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.

Unsteady after the wreck, I clambered out to the wide, red dunes of the planet. We had fallen not far from one of the great ruined cities. Its spires and towers reached toward the sky, lightning still playing about their outstretched tips. A great canal, wider than any river save the God-like Amazon, curved to the south, the waters low against its walls, black and sluggish. Carina Meer came to my side, her arm on my shoulder.

“One day,” she said, “I will make all of this bloom. I swear it.”

It was frantic work, preparing this last leg of our journey. Half of our remaining crew manned improvised barricades, keeping the Ikkean survivors of the wreck at bay with Martian ray pistols and their own good steel blades. The other half gathered the Incan alloy that had been scattered by the wreck and rigged the now crippled floating cart on which it had rested. One corner of the failing platform dragged a trail in the dust when they moved it. Doctor Koch tended to the wounded and La’an said words over the fallen. As the sun rose among the vast ruins of the Martian city, we affixed ropes to the listing cart, and, with the straining muscles of our bodies, we began to haul our cargo toward the horizon. How strange it felt to breathe air no man of Earth had ever breathed, to feel the dreamlike lightness of my flesh and dig my feet into the ruddy soil of another world. We had traveled farther than any subject of the empire had ever gone, farther even than the great general of Macedon whose name I bear could have dreamed, across the starry void, driven by powers too vast to contemplate. And still the fate of our mission rested on the effort of strong English backs and the willingness of men as unalike as a baboon from a bumblebee to make common cause. Our goal, the Palace of the Underworld, loomed in the distance, gray and massive and wreathed by ghostly flames of St. Elmo’s fire.

There are no words to describe the desperation of those hours. The rope bit into my hands and the flesh of my shoulder as I pulled along with my men. Even the callused palms of a life at sea were unequal to the terrible task we performed. My body trembled with effort, my very ligaments creaking like the timbers of a ship. With every hour, new assaults were made upon us, and the great spiders moved with an alacrity on this, their native soil, that made them seem even more nightmarish and monstrous. Again and again, our mixed crew threw them back, blades dripping with yellowish ichor, our own wounds leaving matching trails across the sand. Until my dying breath, I will recall with pride the common will of my crew as we forged across the bloodied dunes.

The Palace of the Underworld had grown to almost twice its height when the enemy’s flying scouts appeared.

Imagine if you will, Your Grace, the vast Martian sky, as purple as a lilac, with the same sun that shines on Westminster and London here taking on a wholly foreign aspect, with wide tendrils of rainbow snaking from its centrally glowing orb. See, if you will, the vast ruins that had once been the pride of seven races with their crystal hearts laid bare by storms and war; the massive, dying river, slow as an old man’s blood; the bleeding and desperate crew hauling the hope of survival on a half-shattered cart that struggled and failed to rise from the ground like a wounded moth. The air was thin and held the scent of metal and spent gunpowder. The heat of the sun oppressed as powerfully as a tropical noontime. Now hear the familiar cry of Quohog—awch loy—smoke ahoy. Picture a storm of dragonflies, each as large as a man’s arm. They rose in the east, thick as the billows of a vast conflagration, and spread out across the sky. I heard Carina Meer’s cry when she caught sight of them and saw the blood drain from her tawny face.

“We must hurry,” she said. “The central hive has discovered us. If we are not safely belowground when their fighting force arrives, there will be no hope.”

“Must say,” Mister Darrow said between gasping breaths. “I’m beginning to dislike these buggers.”

Young Carter chuckled. “See what you did there? Bugs. Buggers. A bit funny, that.”

“I do what I can in the service of levity,” Mister Darrow intoned solemnly, and we drove our shoulders into the lines as if to break our backs. Time became a lost thing; only the strain, the agony, and the distant Palace of the Underworld remained in our collective and narrowed consciousness.

As we neared our object, the landscape shifted. The desert sands gave way to a low and purplish scrub brush, and small, insectlike lizards scuttled fearlessly about our feet. The vast and buzzing swarm of enemy scouts blotted the sun, and we labored in shadow. The landscape divided itself between labyrinths of cutstone gullies and sand-swept plains. We knew not how soon the enemy forces might arrive, but only pressed forward with failing strength. What had once seemed wealth enough to please a king was a burden heavier than hope. The only advantage that I, in my weakened state, could perceive was that the harassment by Ikkeans had waned as we drew farther away from the Serkeriah, and those crewmen who had taken the role of protectors were able to relieve those of us who hauled the lines. I myself was permitted a few moments of rest and recuperation. Blood streaked my arms and breast, and sweat stung where my skin had rubbed raw. And yet, for all my discomfort, I saw that we were close to our aim. The Palace of the Underworld towered above us. Its vast stonework resembled nothing so much as a great cathedral, and the living energy that played madly along its surface appeared auroral and deep. Mister Kopler paced the long line of men, exhorting them to pull, to work, to crack their spines with their muscle’s strength, and the tooth-baring effort in every countenance very nearly moved me to displace one of the more rested crewmen for the sheer joy of the toil. Sisyphus damned had no greater task than did we, only we had hope and determination and the love of our fellows, be they Carib or English, Sorid or Manae. So narrow as that is the difference between perdition and redemption.

Carina Meer appeared beside me. I can put it no other way, for in my flickering consciousness, there was no approach, only her sudden presence. Somewhere in our endeavors, she had suffered a cruel cut across her collar and a bright and painful-looking burn along the knuckles of her left hand, but she made no complaint.

“Captain Lawton,” she said to me. “May I speak with you?”

“Of course,” I replied, turning toward her. I knew even then what would be the subject of our conversation. We stepped a bit apart from our joint crew and stood under the blue shade of a vast outcropping of stone.

“We will not achieve our goal before the enemy finds us,” she said. “Nor shall we be able to continue carrying this burden in the midst of a full attack.”

“I had suspected as much.”

“If you and your men will go ahead, then,” she said. “Tell my brother that I am in need of reinforcements, and I will guard the gold against all comers as I did before.”

Her smile would, I think, have convinced another man that her offer was what it seemed to be, but I had worked the figures in my own mind as well. The demise of the Serkeriah could not have gone unnoticed by our allies underground, nor would the activity of the Ikkeans who followed in our wake. That no relief had come could only be a sign that there was none to be had, and this, then, was Carina Meer’s gambit to save my life and the lives of my men.

“There is another alternative,” I said. “Allow me to call for parley. If Governor Smith is the guide to these creatures, they may well be swayed by him, and honor will not permit him to refuse.”

“And what is it you would say to him or his masters?” she asked.

Now came my own turn to smile.

“Whatever comes to hand,” I said. There was a moment’s distrust in her eyes. For the first time since I had collected her from the Vargud van Haarlem, I was asking that she put herself wholly within my control, and I take it as no insult that she hesitated.

Our preparations were not lengthy, and when they were complete, I used the rags of Doctor Koch’s pale shirt and the branch of a strange and rubbery Martian tree to signal our intention.

It was something less than an hour before Governor Smith appeared upon the plain that I had chosen for our final confrontation. Carina Meer stood at my side, and our joint crew, reduced by half, sat or stood by the tarp-covered mass behind us, the blood-darkened hauling ropes trailing from it on the dusty soil.

They emerged from the gully to our east. Governor Smith and five Ikkean battle spiders. For the first time in a decade, I faced my nemesis in the flesh. His velvety black jacket was smeared with the dust of Mars and his disarranged hair stood at rough angles from the elongated egg of his skull. His expression was the same pleasant cipher I had known when I first had the misfortune to cross his path, but I venture to say this: There was something different in the set of his eyes. I recognize that I am not now nor was I then an impartial observer of the man, and still I ask that you believe me when I say there was in him something like madness.

“Good morning, Captain Lawton,” he said. “Captain Meer. You have led me quite a merry chase. My congratulations on a game well played. I am pleased that we can end this like civilized men.”

“That remains to be seen,” I said. “We have not yet addressed the matter of terms.”

“Terms? You are charming, Captain Lawton. The terms are that you and your allies will throw down weapons, or, by all that is holy, you shall not live to see another sunrise on any planet.”

“All that is holy,” I spat at him. “From a man who has joined himself to the devil.”

“Say rather,” he replied with his mocking smile, “that I have joined myself to the victors. An ambassador, if you will, though without the official title as yet. Someday soon the Ikkeans will rule both worlds, and their friends will rule with them.”

Carina Meer’s laugh was the platonic ideal of contempt.

“Unacceptable,” I said. “You may have the advantage, but you have had that before only to see defeat. I insist upon guarantees of clemency.”

The Ikkean at Governor Smith’s side chattered, a horrible high-pitched sound with a thousand knives in it. I believe that Governor Smith flinched from it as much as did I.

“Captain Lawton, I made an offer to you before. Your aid in return for control of the Serkeriah.”

I nodded. Behind me, young Carter said, Oh, was that the offer then?

“You are a clever man,” the governor continued. “And I see that I was stingy in my price. Our situation is somewhat changed, and so is my proposal. Order your men to drop their lines and take into custody the rebel forces of Captain Meer. I will guarantee your safe return to our home world, and further, a full pardon. I will see to it that your good name is restored and your honor unquestioned in any corner of the British Empire. I will champion your cause personally.”

I froze, Your Majesty. What a prospect it was! What vengeance it would be to use Governor Smith, of all men, as the agent of my social redemption. To be made right in the public eye. My honor restored. It was like the promise of love to the unrequited. For a moment, I was in the fine houses where once as a young man I supped. I recalled the delicate eyes of a young woman who loved me once, before my fall from grace. To see her again, to kiss those near-forgotten lips …

“It is not enough,” I said. “I require a confession, written in your own hand and before witnesses to say it was not coerced. You will admit to all the subterfuge and deceit that brought me low. That, and pardons for not only myself, but all of my men. Would you suffer that price, Governor?”

His eyes narrowed, and he let out a sound like the hiss of an annoyed serpent. I could feel the gaze of Carina Meer upon me and did not turn to her. My men and hers stood silent. A thin breeze stirred the dust about our ankles.

“Done,” he said at last. “You have my word of honor, I will fulfill my part of the compact. For now, you will fulfill yours.”

At that moment, as Providence had it, a change came upon the Palace of the Underworld, and a gout of green fire rose from it, up into the purple Martian sky. A cheer rose from the crew behind me and I saw Carina Meer settle a degree into herself.

“I will not,” I said. “You sad, small-hearted pig of a man. Do you believe that you frighten me? I have ridden the most tempestuous waves in the seas. I have stood with naked steel in hand against men a thousand times your worth. Who are you to pardon me?”

“What is—”

“That fire you observed was the signal from those of my crew and Captain Meer’s not present that they had arrived in safety at the Palace of the Underworld. All the time that you have wasted preparing for these negotiations and conducting them, our men have been taking the alloy beyond your reach.”

When young Carter and Mister Darrow threw back the tarp to uncover the mound of rough Martian stone, the astonished gape of Governor Smith’s mouth was a thing to behold. I could see where the dentist had removed one of his molars, so profound was his surprise.

“False parley!” he shouted, and pulled a pistol from his belt. Murder glowed in his eyes. “There is no shred of honor left in you, sir.”

“You are a fool,” Carina said. She lifted her chin, haughty as any queen. “Honor is a petty, meaningless thing if men such as you have it.”

Governor Smith shifted his pistol, pointing it at her forehead, his finger trembling on the trigger. Carina narrowed her eyes in disdain but showed no sign of fear.

“Save your childish outrage,” I said, stepping forward to draw his attention. “You haven’t the will to fire. You’re a coward and cheat, and every man here knows my words are as the gospel on it. I would no more accept pardon from you than drink your piss. If you have honor, then honor be damned. You are nothing, sir. You. Do. Not. Signify.”

And then, Your Majesty, as was my hope and aim, the Honorable Governor Smith turned and shot me.

Was it a desperate ploy that brought the pistol’s ball to my own belly rather than chance the death of the woman whom I admired above all others? Perhaps. But it was a successful one. The blow was not unlike being struck by a mule’s hoof, though I am sure you have never had the ill fortune to experience such. I stumbled back and fell, unable to maintain my feet. I believe that Governor Smith had time enough to understand that his temper and impetuous violence had left him vulnerable, though God alone will have leisure to clarify this with him. Before he could call out to his demonic allies for aid, Carina Meer leapt forward and crushed the man’s windpipe with a single strike of her right elbow. He stumbled back, my echo in this as in so many things.

The battle was immediately joined, and Carina Meer and what remained of our joined crew assaulted the Ikkean warriors. But we sat for a moment, he and I, our gazes locked. Blood spilled from my punctured gut. His face darkened as he struggled vainly to draw breath. And then his eyes rolled back and his body sagged to the Martian ground, and that, as they say, was that.

When the skirmish ended, Doctor Koch and Carina Meer were with me immediately. We had won the day, but only at peril to our lives. The massed Ikkean forces were descending upon us, and despite my entreaties, Carina and my men refused to leave my wounded body behind as the burden it was. Mister Darrow fashioned a rough litter from the legs of the defeated Ikkeans, and then …

Oh, Your Majesty, and then so much more. Shall I recount to you the battle at the edge of the Palace of the Underworld, and how young Carter saved us all by scaling the massive spider-ship as though it were rigging, his dagger in his teeth? Or the fateful meeting with Hermeton, brother to Carina Meer, and the fearful duplicity of his plan to defeat the Ikkeans? Shall I describe to you the great caverns below the Martian surface and detail the mystery and madness of the Elanin Chorus? The death dwarves of Inren-Kah? The hawk-men of Nis? The Plant-Queens of Venus? Like Scheherazade to her Caliph, I believe I could beguile you with these tales for countless nights. But to what end? I set forth here to explain my role in the death of Governor Smith, and I have done so.

Your Majesty, I did not slaughter the governor, but I was instrumental in his death. I broke the laws of custom and honor, rejected his offer of clemency, and drew his ire to myself in defense of a woman and of a world, both almost strangers to me but already of inestimable value. I did this knowing that I might die, and accepting that risk because there is a better and nobler thing than to be the servant of honor. I know this, for I have become it. And I was once an honorable man.

Yours,

Captain Alexander Augustus Lawton, Citizen of Mars