Old Mars

Mariner CHRIS ROBERSON

THE SHIP SPED ALONG AT FULL SAIL, WITH NOTHING BUT RED sands as far as the eye could see in all directions. It had been days since they last caught sight of water.

Jason Carmody stood in the prow of the Argo, scanning the horizon with his handmade telescope, searching for easy prey. From time to time, the leatherwing that perched on the railing beside him would flap its wings and squawk petulantly, and Jason would quiet it with a strip of dried meat from the pouch that hung at his belt. If he waited too long to satiate his pet’s appetite, the leatherwing would nip at Jason’s hands with its jagged snout, to motivate him.

“ ’Ware, captain, lest the beast take a digit away in its maw,” a voice from behind Jason said.

Without turning around, Jason dropped another morsel into his pet’s waiting mouth. “Bandit prefers the dried meat, actually. But I’m sure he’d settle for one of my fingers in a pinch.”

He turned, smiling at the approach of his first officer.

“Perhaps if the beast were to eat enough of them,” the first officer said, “you’d finally have the proper number.” He waggled the three digits at the end of one arm in Jason’s face.

“Where I come from, Tyr,” Jason said, “it’s considered the height of pirate fashion to lose whole body parts. The best pirate captains have a wooden leg, or a hook for a hand, or a patch over a missing eye.”

The first officer grew serious and tapped the small stone pendant that hung from the breather that encircled his neck, covering his gills. “I am sure that, when they go to their final reward, their missing appendages are there waiting for them. As scripture tells us, the Suffocated God makes all things whole in the seas of the dead.”

Jason took in the first officer’s weathered flesh, the green of his skin marred everywhere by old wounds and scars that mapped the long years of duels, battles, and beatings Tyr had survived.

“It’s nice to think so,” Jason said thoughtfully, then grinned. “To be honest, though, I’d settle for a decent burger.”

Tyr clacked his mandibles, the Martian equivalent of laughter. “With our luck, we’d likely find nothing but the thin gruel our former jailers fed us instead.” Remembering himself, he stilled his mandibles, his forehead flushing yellow with shame, and fondled the stone pendant in repentance. “The Suffocated God forgive my blasphemy.”

When Jason had first met him, in a Praxian jail half a lifetime before, Tyr had been a priest of the Suffocated God, imprisoned for speaking out against the Hegemony that had risen to power in the southern network of Praxis. Jason had only recently arrived on the red planet when he was captured by the Praxians himself, and he and the priest had shared a cell while they waited for their turn on the executioner’s stone. They had been wary of each other at first, but gallows humor and close quarters bred first familiarity, then friendship. When, weeks later, the two had escaped imprisonment together and fled out onto the sand seas in a makeshift raft, they had become as close as brothers.

“Tyr, did you ever think that we’d one day have a command of our own, and sail—”

“Captain!” a shout from above interrupted. “Ship ahead, due east!”

Jason raised the makeshift telescope to his eye and trained it in the direction the lookout indicated. There, just cresting the horizon, was a mercantile galleon, riding fat and low on the sands.

“Breaktime is over, folks,” Jason called out to the rest of the crew. “We have work to do!”

Jason Carmody had grown up dreaming about sailing around one world but ended up sailing around another instead.

In his more sardonic moments, he blamed National Geographic. When Jason was still in grade school, he read a series of articles about a teenager who had set out to sail around the globe by himself, and done so. All through middle school, Jason studied globes and maps of the Earth, devoured books on navigation and seamanship, watched any movie or television show he could find that had anything to do with the oceans, or sailing, or exploration. In high school, while his classmates fretted about their SAT scores and agonized over which colleges to attend, Jason spent every available moment of his free time sailing small one-man boats on nearby lakes and rivers, and spent his holidays out on the Gulf of Mexico, daring himself to sail beyond sight of land and navigate back using only a compass and his wits.

The week after he graduated from high school, and after tearful farewells with his friends and family, Jason set off from Galveston, Texas, in a twenty-four-foot cutter, intending to continue sailing until he came back to port from the other direction.

But he’d not even managed to complete the first leg of his journey. He was still in the Caribbean when, under the light of a full moon, he came upon a strange vortex in the dark waters. A swirling whirlpool, it grew from nothing in a matter of moments, too quickly for Jason to change course to avoid it. One instant Jason was sailing along under a starry sky, and the next his boat hit the vortex and everything changed.

Jason had squinted his eyes, bracing for impact, and when he opened them again, he looked out onto another world.

He was on Mars, he would later learn. Not the Mars he’d seen in pictures sent back by NASA probes, though. Had he been transported to the distant past of the red planet, or its future? Or perhaps into some analogue of the fourth planet that existed in another dimension? Jason had never learned for certain. He tried to see what the Earth looked like, to give him some sense of context, but the best telescopes he had managed to construct showed him only a blurry image of a blue-green planet in the sky, and his knowledge of constellations did not extend to calculating how those same stars would appear on another world and at another time.

But those were facts that Jason would only discover later. On that first day, at that first instant, he knew only that he was somewhere he’d never seen before.

The cutter lay half-buried in fine sands, under a brilliant blue sky, across which two moons sailed in their stately orbits toward each other. Jason had stepped off the deck of his boat onto the sands, in a daze, and immediately sunk up to his waist. The grains of sand were so small, so fine, that the ground behaved more like a liquid than a solid, almost like quicksand. And as he floundered in the sands, barely able to keep afloat, he noticed the menacing silhouette of a bony ridge knifing through the red sands toward him.

Jason’s first day on his new world would have been his last, his journeys ended in the belly of a sand-shark, had a passing Praxian naval ship not hauled him on board. The crew had never seen a human before and returned to the Praxis canals in the south with Jason as much an object of curiosity as he was their captive. Despite the language barrier that separated them, when they reached port, Jason managed to communicate to his captors that he needed air to breathe. Had he taken much longer to get his message across, he would have drowned, as they began to force him down into their underwater community with them.

In the days that followed, Jason learned just enough of the common tongue in Praxis to offend the sensibilities of the Praxian Hegemony, who refused to entertain the notion that life might exist anywhere else in the universe but the red planet, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. He was convicted of heresy and confined to a cell, where he would await execution. It was there that Jason met the first Martian whom he would call “friend,” and the course of his life was forever changed.

But through it all, Jason cursed the editors of National Geographic. Had it not been for them, he might just have gone to college or gotten a job like any other regular person.

It was near midday by the time the Argo closed the distance to the galleon. A vicious sandstorm had kicked up, limiting visibility severely, but through squinting eyes they were able to make out the colors of the Vendish mercantile fleet flying from the galleon’s masts.

But while Jason Carmody and his crew had been approaching from the west, another vessel had evidently been approaching from the south. And though the Argo still had ground to cover before they could even parley with the crew of the galleon, much less begin an attack, the other vessel was already alongside her.

“It’s a Praxian naval corvette,” Jason said, lowering his telescope and squinting against the bright midday glare.

“Does Praxis war with Vend?” a crewman wondered aloud.

“If so, this will be the first we hear of it,” Tyr answered.

“Well, they’re certainly not friends.” Jason pointed to the galleon, whose three masts had already been splintered and split. As if to underscore his point, at that moment a sound like thunder rolled across the sands as the Praxian corvette fired from its forward launchers upon the merchant vessel.

A sudden shower of rocks rained down upon the galleon, further damaging her masts and hull, and making bloody green messes of several of the crewmen who could be seen on her deck.

“They look to make short work of her.” Tyr scratched a spot on his shoulder where his skin had grown rough and scaly in the dry air. “Your orders, captain?”

Under normal circumstances, the Argo would steer clear of any confrontation with a naval vessel if at all possible, either the Praxians in the south or the ships of the Vendish fleet in the north. But these were clearly not normal circumstances.

Jason scowled. “If we return to Freehaven without a hold full of plunder, we’ll catch hell from Rac and the other captains. We’ve been sailing light for a little too long, I think.” He looked from the naval vessel to the galleon and back again. “And that galleon must be hauling something of value if the Praxians want her so badly.”

“So the Hegemony turns to piracy, then?” Tyr mused.

“Or the crew of this corvette has, maybe.” Jason rubbed his lower lip. The naval vessel had launched grappling hooks over the deck of the galleon, and was pulling the two ships closer together, preparing to board. “They don’t appear to have noticed us.”

“With the wind at our backs,” Tyr answered, “we have the sandstorm blowing before us. And their attention is on their present prey, in any event.”

A slow smile tugged the corners of Jason’s mouth. “Once the Praxians board the galleon, their corvette won’t have much more than a skeleton crew left on board.”

“And if we hang back and let the sandstorm shield us from their notice …” Tyr clacked his mandibles together softly, chuckling.

Jason turned to the rest of the crew who were gathered on the deck of the Argo, awaiting orders. They huddled against the drying sands that buffeted them in the high winds, little puffs of steam erupting here and there from the breathers that kept their gills wet and supplied with oxygenated water.

“To your stations!” Jason drew the curved sword that hung at his waist, raising it high overhead. “Run out the catapults! Prepare to engage!”

The first inkling that the sailors aboard the Praxian corvette had of the approaching Argo was the fusillade of rocks and debris that pelted down upon them, fired from the pirates’ catapults. So intent had the Praxian sailors been on taking the galleon, though, that their first instinct was that the mercantile vessel had somehow managed to return fire. It was only when Jason Carmody and the other pirates of the Argo swung onto the corvette’s deck, the captain shouting a war cry and the others hissing menacingly through their mandibles, that the sailors realized that they were under attack by a third party.

“Pirates!” one of the sailors shouted, fumbling for the long knife sheathed at his waist. “Warn the—”

Jason silenced the rest of the sailor’s call for alarm, driving the point of his sword through the breather around the sailor’s neck and into the fleshy throat beneath. There had been a time when Jason had balked at the use of lethal force, back when he and Tyr had first been taken on board by a pirate ship and invited to join the crew. Jason had tried to carry out his duties with a minimal use of force, incapacitating if possible, killing and maiming only if absolutely necessary. But that had been half a lifetime ago, and in the years since, he had seen firsthand what the Praxian Hegemony and its faithful servants did to any who defied their laws. Jason had seen too many broken and mutilated victims of Praxian “justice” to spare any mercy now for those Praxians who meted it out.

Jason yanked his sword free of the sailor’s neck, and before the body had hit the deck, Tyr was at his side, an electrified whip coiled in one hand.

“The Suffocated God guide your passage,” the first officer muttered over the fallen sailor. Though technically he hadn’t been a priest since before Jason knew him, and there was little chance that the sailor had shared his faith, old habits died hard.

“On your right!” Jason barked, stepping alongside Tyr. A trio of sailors charged toward them, clubs and knives in hand.

Jason skewered through the belly the first sailor to reach him, halting his advance, and lashed out with a high kick that knocked loose a second sailor’s breather. As the first dropped to his knees, trying unsuccessfully to keep his black innards from spooling out through the wound, the second gasped in the dry, dusty air for breath, his eyes wide with panic.

Tyr lashed out with his whip, catching the third sailor around the neck. As the sailor grabbed hold of the whip and yanked back, clearly hoping to pull Tyr off his balance, Tyr simply thumbed a stud on the whip’s handle, and sent a bristling charge of electricity coursing down the length of the whip. The sailor jerked and thrashed, eyes rolling back in his head, and Jason caught a scent that reminded him of seafood grilling over an open flame back home.

As Tyr shook his whip loose from the sailor’s neck, Jason took stock of the situation. A half dozen of his crewmen had boarded the corvette along with him and the first officer, and a quick accounting showed that all of them were still standing, having at worst suffered only minor wounds. All of the Praxian sailors in evidence were fallen at their feet.

“It would seem that the ship is ours,” Tyr said, coiling his whip.

“Take a few men belowdecks,” Jason instructed, “and make sure there aren’t more of the ship’s crew down there that we’ll need to worry about before we move on to the galleon. We’ll have enough trouble dealing with the sailors who boarded the—”

“Captain!” one of the pirates shouted.

Jason turned quickly in that direction. Through the sand that gusted all around them, he could see across to the galleon, lashed by grappling hooks to the side of the corvette.

An entire detachment of Praxian sailors were surging over the railing from the galleon, murder in their eyes.

“Never mind.” Jason flashed Tyr a quick smile. “You get the idea.”

There had been a time when the mere sight of a pink-skinned figure breathing air had been enough to give Jason’s opponents a moment’s pause, usually just enough for him to gain a tactical advantage against them. But enough stories had circulated in the years since of the so-called human who sailed the sand seas aboard a pirate vessel, that Jason had largely lost the element of surprise. That he’d grown older in the interim, and no doubt needed that moment’s advantage now more than ever, was a cruel irony that was not lost on him.

So it was with a labored sigh that Jason met the sailors’ charge. Not one of them even blinked when they saw his skin, his hair, or his lack of gills.

He felt like a once-popular TV star, now reduced to offering autographs to uninterested passersby at a boat show …

If taking the corvette had been comparatively easy, at the cost only of a few minor injuries, defending it from the returning sailors would clearly come at a higher price. The corvette’s crew outnumbered the pirates three to one, and though Jason had always boasted that each of his crewmen was worth any three other fighters combined, proving that boast was more difficult in practice than it had been in theory.

While Tyr and two other pirates dealt with the sailors who had been belowdecks manning the launchers, the rest contended with those who had returned from taking the galleon. And Jason himself faced the master of the corvette, who bore the rank insignia of a commodore in the Praxian navy tattooed on his forehead. At the end of one arm, the commodore carried a sword, and, in the other, a burning torch.

Jason was surprised to see the open flame. The natives of the red planet typically used fire only for manufacturing purposes, most often in foundries on rocky atolls far from their aquatic homes in the canal networks. It was not entirely unknown for fire to be used as a weapon, but it was far from common.

“You are either brave, mad, or a fool,” the commodore said in a heavy Praxian accent. “But whichever it is, you will die!” To punctuate his words, he lunged forward with his sword, aiming it squarely at Jason’s chest.

“Everything dies, commodore.” Jason parried the Praxian’s lunge and flashed a smile. “So I’m certain I’ll die eventually.” Jason riposted, thrusting his own sword at the commodore. “But not today!”

The commodore hissed menacingly as he sidestepped Jason’s sword, barely avoiding the thrust.

“You, a pirate, would protect these … these heretics?” The commodore’s anger was almost palpable. “But why?”

Heretics? Jason scarcely had time to think, as the commodore swung the torch he bore at Jason’s head.

Jason danced back out of the way, feeling the warmth of the torch on his face. Had he been a native Martian, the heat itself would have been enough to dry his eyes for an instant, forcing opaque nictitating membranes to slam shut, momentarily obscuring his vision. No doubt that was the reason the commodore took the risk of fighting while carrying an open flame. But Jason’s eyes simply stung and watered, and though his lids squinted against the heat and smoke, he never lost sight of his opponent’s position.

But he allowed the commodore to think that he had.

Eyes half-lidded, one hand groping erratically through the air in front of him, Jason feinted with his sword, aiming well clear of the commodore’s body. He could hear the soft clacking of mandibles as the commodore chuckled to himself, sure now of an easy victory.

As the commodore lunged forward, aiming his sword at Jason’s midsection in a killing thrust, Jason handily sidestepped at the last moment. Natives were always surprised by how quickly Jason could move in the lower gravity of the red planet and how much stronger he was than he appeared, facts that he had long since learned to use to his advantage. Before the startled commodore could react, Jason brought his sword slamming down on the commodore’s breather, slashing the back of the commodore’s head in the process.

The commodore pitched forward, gasping for breath, dropping both sword and torch as he groped for the back of his head, where dark green blood was already welling freely.

Jason reached for the still-burning torch as it clattered away across the deck, but before he could grab it, another of the Praxian sailors, following close on the commodore’s heels, rushed at him, swinging a heavy club. For every one of the precious few moments it took Jason to fend off the sailor, he worried over where the torch would end up. Like most of the ships that plied the red planet’s sand seas, the corvette was primarily composed of a kind of lightweight concrete, sturdy enough to be a considerable weight but with enough pockets of air throughout that it was not too heavy to glide across the sands. More important, although the concrete itself was largely impervious to flame, the planks were mortared with a tarlike substance that wasn’t. Careless fire management would leave a ship as little more than a charred pile of planks and spars, its crews left stranded on the sands at the tender mercy of scavengers like the leatherwings and the sand-sharks.

So it was with a weary sigh that, as soon as he dispatched the club-wielding sailor, Jason turned to see that the commodore’s torch had come to rest atop the seam between two planks in the deck, and that traceries of flame already raced in either direction, following the mortar’s path.

“Captain!” Tyr shouted, having just returned from belowdecks, a freshly bleeding cut across his left shoulder. “Fire!”

“I see it!” Jason glanced about the deck of the corvette. He had lost two of his men in the skirmish, and including Tyr, three more were wounded, but the last of the Praxian sailors appeared to have been seen to. But already the flames had reached both fore and aft, and had leapt to the corvette’s sails, which were slowly transforming to smoke and ash.

“The Argo is out beyond the range of the Praxian launchers,” Tyr shouted. “She’ll never reach us in time!”

Jason scowled. The order for the Argo to retreat after he and the others boarded the corvette had been his. He had no one to blame but himself if it meant his death now.

“Cut the grappling lines!” Jason shouted, as he leapt over the flames, heading for the railing. “If we’re lucky, we can get the galleon clear before it catches fire, too!”

Tyr and the other surviving pirates needed no further instruction, but scrambled over the side of the corvette and onto the galleon’s deck, severing the heavy lines that held the two vessels together as they went.

Jason was the last one to leave the corvette, as the deck planks began to fall apart beneath him. Tyr and the others had already begun to shove the merchant ship away from the corvette, using long sections of the galleon’s shattered masts to push against the hull of the other ship. But as Jason thudded onto the deck of the galleon, twisting one knee badly in the process, bits of burning sail and ash rained down around him.

“We need to move this tub!” Jason shouted as he clutched his knee in agony, sprawled on the deck. “And somebody put out these flames before they spread!”

A pair of Jason’s crewmen scrambled around the deck of the galleon, stomping out the burning bits of sail, while Tyr directed the others in using the longest pieces of the broken mast to push the two vessels as far apart as possible. Black smoke intermingled with the sands that the heavy winds were blowing across from the corvette, but just when it appeared that all hope was lost, the winds shifted, blowing back over the Praxian ship, sending smoke, ash, and licking flames out over the sands instead.

Tyr helped Jason to his feet as they watched the burning pyre of a ship drift away from them across the sands. It had taken all the strength the pirates could muster to get the corvette to move, but now that it was in motion, its inertia would continue to carry it away from them. Not far, but far enough.

“Well,” Jason said, “let’s go belowdecks and see what she’s carrying.”

“Whatever it is,” Tyr answered as he helped Jason limp across the deck, “the Praxians very much wished to possess it.”

Jason was thinking back to what the commodore had said, puzzling over it, when Tyr lifted up the hatch in the deck that led down to the galleon’s hold.

As the two stared down into the hold, Jason’s mouth hung open in surprise, and Tyr tapped the drystone amulet at his breast.

“Or perhaps it is something they did not wish to possess,” Tyr muttered, “but to destroy.”

Down in the gloom of the galleon’s hold, dozens of frightened eyes glinted up at them.

They spoke a dialect that Jason had trouble following, and it was clear they had difficulty understanding his accent, but Tyr was able to act as interpreter. They were mothers and fathers, children, grandparents, all crowded together in the cramped confines of the galleon’s hold. Rather than wearing personal breathers, as Jason’s crewmen and the Praxian sailors did, they huddled around portable dispensers that sprayed brief jets of lukewarm water from short hoses, keeping their skin as damp and their gills as oxygenated as they could manage. But all of them had taken on the greyish brown tint to their skins that suggested they were close to the point of complete dehydration and suffocation.

The drystone amulets that each of them clutched marked them as worshippers of the Suffocated God. There was some irony in the fact that they might emulate their martyred god not only in the way that he had lived but also in his manner of dying.

“They are Praxian refugees,” Tyr explained, “fleeing oppression.”

Jason could see that Tyr was having difficulty controlling his temper but seemed mollified whenever the refugees addressed him with the word that Jason recognized as meaning “Reverend.” It had been many years since Tyr had been a priest, but it was clear that it was a role that still held great meaning for him.

“They say that things have gotten even worse in Praxis,” Tyr continued. “The Hegemony continues to chip away at the freedoms of those they rule. Once, one was censured for speaking out against the Hegemony’s tenets or questioning their right to govern. Now, it seems, simply harboring private beliefs that are not sanctioned by the Hegemony is grounds for punishment.”

Jason noted the scars that many of the older refugees bore, signs of flogging, torture, and worse. Some were even missing digits at the ends of their arms or had empty sockets where eyes had once been. And all of them, from the oldest to the youngest, had the kind of haunted expression on their faces that made it clear that they had seen things that scarred their minds and souls in ways that could never fully heal.

“They made a deal with a Vendish merchant, the master of this galleon, to ferry them north across the sands to Vend,” Tyr said, his tone bitter. “They hoped to find a new home there, where they would enjoy the freedom to practice their beliefs in peace.”

Jason sneered. The mention of “freedom” in such close proximity to “Vend” was a bitter irony.

“How much money do they have?” Jason asked, acid in his tone.

Tyr repeated the question to the refugees, who answered him with confused expressions and bewilderment.

“They don’t understand,” Tyr said. “None of them have ever held or used currency before.”

In Praxis, all things were held in common, apportioned by the ruling Hegemony to each according to his needs. At least, that was the theory. In practice, most of the population lived in crushing poverty, assuming that it was simply their lot in life.

“Ask them what they have of value,” Jason clarified. “They must have traded something precious to this merchant in exchange for passage—jewelry, heirlooms, goods. How much of that is left?”

Tyr relayed the question. The refugees looked from one to another, then answered.

“They gave everything they had of value to the Vendish merchant,” Tyr translated. “They have nothing left.”

Jason slammed a fist into the open palm of the other hand, seething with frustrated rage. He was angry at the Vendish merchant who had agreed to ferry the refugees and angry with the refugees themselves for clearly being duped.

“This ship wasn’t sailing them to freedom in Vend!” Jason shouted. “They were heading toward slavery!”

Tyr answered in a low voice, speaking for himself, not for the refugees. “Captain … Jason … they’ve been through so much already …”

“No,” Jason shot back, “they should know. You know what I’m talking about. Tell them!”

Tyr’s mandibles quivered, the native equivalent of a sigh. And then he turned back to the refugees, and in patient tones explained to them the reality of the situation.

Jason could follow little of what Tyr was saying, but it hardly mattered since he could guess. It was well-known on the sand seas that it was against the law in Vend to be a vagrant. And anyone who set foot in the waters of Vend was considered a vagrant if they could not establish proof of residency. Anyone who was apprehended on charges of vagrancy could buy their way out if they had sufficient funds to secure lodging. But if not, they would be arrested on the spot, declared guilty without a trial, and sold into indentured servitude. In theory, an indentured servant could eventually earn their way to freedom; in practice, it never happened.

It was easy to see what the master of this galleon had intended. The few trinkets and baubles he’d taken from the refugees might have had some minor value, but the real prize would come when they reached Vend. It was a common practice for the portmasters of Vend to make deals with ship captains to “arrange” for an unwanted or problematic crewman to be arrested for vagrancy, with the portmaster sharing the proceeds from the sale into indentured service with the captain who had supplied them. Some pirate captains even engaged in the practice, taking prisoners from among the crews of ships that they defeated and transporting them north to be sold into service. It effectively amounted to a kind of slave trade, but one that was entirely legal under the laws of Vend.

So the refugees had sailed away from one form of oppression, and had been heading right toward another.

From the howls of despair that they began to make, Jason could tell that Tyr had managed to get that point across.

“So what shall we do with them, then?” one of the pirates asked, once Jason and Tyr were back above deck.

The Argo had sailed up alongside the galleon, as the winds that had whipped up the sandstorm gradually died away, and now the entire crew had been made aware of the nature of their “plunder.” It simply remained to decide what they would do about it.

“What is to decide?” another pirate asked. “They are none of our lookout. The wind and the sand-sharks will see to them soon enough.”

Jason had to admit that the crewman was right about one thing, at least. From the deck of the ruined galleon, he could see the signs of sand-sharks skimming through the fine grains of desert sands, searching for prey. If the refugees were foolish enough to try to travel across—or rather through—the sands, they would not last long. Even assuming that their portable dispensers had enough water within them to keep the refugees from suffocating and desiccating in short order, the sand-sharks would make a meal of them soon enough.

But while that crewman, at least, seemed perfectly content to leave the Praxian refugees to their own devices, it was clear that others among the pirates were not as sanguine about the possibility. And his first officer in particular.

Tyr clutched the drystone pendant that hung from his breather, a haunted look on his face. Jason imagined that he must be remembering his own family and friends whom he had been forced to leave behind when the two of them escaped from a Praxian prison half a lifetime ago, and thinking about what horrors they might have endured because of their faith in the years since. In the faces of the despairing refugees, Tyr no doubt saw all of those people reflected.

“We could return them whence they came,” another said.

“Back into the oppression they narrowly escaped?” Tyr scoffed. “We would be condemning them to agony and death. Perhaps instead we could ferry them on to Vend. At least there they would have a chance at life.”

Another crewman made a gesture that carried much the same nuance as a human spitting on the ground in disgust. “At least the Praxians believe they serve a greater good. Those Vendish devils serve nothing but their own profits.”

“It would be a mercy to kill them ourselves and be done with it,” another pirate put in.

A ripple of nods among the other crewmen showed this would be an acceptable solution to the ethical dilemma for many of them.

Life on the red planet was hard and had produced cultures that tended to make hard decisions. But life on the sand seas was harder still.

“No,” Jason announced. “They’re coming with us.”

The crewmen all turned to him, some with confused looks, some with expressions of defensiveness.

“Come with us to where?” Tyr asked. “You don’t mean to return them to Praxis, do you? Or ferry them to Vend? Either way you’ll be consigning them to oppression, death, or worse.”

Jason crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head.

“No, they’re coming back with us to Freehaven.”

The angry muttering from some of the crewmen made it clear this was not a solution they would have preferred. Jason hoped that it wouldn’t come to a vote.

Every member of the Argo’s crew had signed the Articles of Freehaven, the list of rules and regulations that governed the life of pirates on the red planet, both aboard their ships and at home in Freehaven. The Articles outlined, among other things, how plunder was to be spread among all the members of the crew, with a portion being set aside to contribute to Freehaven’s community coffers, to be doled out to residents in times of need. But perhaps more important, the Articles also specified who would lead, both ship and community, and when.

Jason was the captain of the Argo because he had been elected to the position by the crew, though they were technically the crew of the Sand-shark’s Tooth before Jason became her master and gave the ship a new name. Likewise, the headman of Freehaven was the captain who had been elected by the community at large to govern them.

But simply because Jason had been elected once did not mean that he held the post for life. Just as he had challenged the authority of his ship’s previous captain, so too might his crew challenge his. One method would be for enough of the crew to be dissatisfied with his command that they mustered the quorum necessary to call for a vote and simply elected a new captain. That was how Jason had come to command.

The other method, a holdover from the pirates’ less egalitarian days, would be for one of the crew to challenge Jason to single combat, with the winner of the duel being the one who had proven himself fit for command. This latter method had seldom been used in recent generations, and never during Jason’s time as a pirate, in large part because the rules required that the combat must be to the death; but it was kept in the Articles as a tribute to the early pioneers who had risen up out of the waters and sought the freedom of the high sands, proving their worth not by persuasive argument but by the strength of their sword arms. It was the last vestige of a time before Freehaven had truly earned its name.

When Jason could see the ruins of the buried city from the deck of the Argo, it meant that they were almost home.

“Where is that beast of yours?”

Jason turned to see Tyr approaching. He had spent much of his time in recent days belowdecks tending to the needs of the Praxian refugees, leading them in recitations of scripture, sharing memories of happier days, and so on.

“You mean Bandit? I’m sure he’ll turn up sooner or later,” Jason answered. “He always does.” His leatherwing pet had flown off before their fight with the Praxian corvette, and Jason hadn’t seen him since. But it was hardly unusual. His “pet” was only one step removed from a wild animal and clearly valued its independence.

Tyr joined Jason at the railing and looked out over the buried city as it drifted slowly by. They could hear the muttering of some of the other crewmen, who still rankled at the presence of the Praxian “rabble” belowdecks.

“We were a better people once,” Tyr said to Jason in a low voice, glancing sidelong at the disaffected crewmen. “A great people. But the drought that dried our world, I fear, dried out the wellsprings of compassion in too many of us.”

When he had first arrived on Mars, Jason had been surprised to discover that the dominant life-form of a desert world was aquatic. But he had soon learned that, when life had first evolved on the red planet, Mars had been entirely shrouded in deep oceans. Complex civilizations had flourished in the ancient waters of Mars, vast city-states woven in a complex web of trade and cultural exchange.

But just a few thousand years before Jason’s arrival, that had all changed. The oceans had begun to recede, slowly at first, then more quickly with each passing year. Skeptics among the populace had argued that what they were experiencing was a natural cycle and that the waters had ebbed and flowed many times before. But the more forward-looking had seen what lay ahead if the seas continued to shrink. And they had a solution.

By the time that places like the buried city before them had been lost to dry land, a complex system of canals had been constructed, linking points of extremely low elevation where, it was hoped, the waters would be retained even if they disappeared from the rest of the globe. The populace relocated to these new sanctuaries, leaving their old homes behind but retaining as much of their former cultures as possible as they continued to exchange goods and ideas along the narrow canals that connected their new homes.

And for a few generations, it appeared that the worst was behind them. The oceans had receded drastically, but there were still waters in the canals and in the low-elevation sanctuaries. Life continued much as it always had, albeit under considerable strain.

But the drought that had dried their world had only slowed, not stopped, and in time some of the canals became shallower and shallower, until in the end they were no longer navigable by the aquatic residents of the sanctuaries. What had been a globe-spanning system that connected every living person on Mars became fragmented networks, isolated from one another, separated by the unforgiving sands.

Now all that remained of the once-proud globe-spanning culture were ruins like this buried city, where crumbling statuary, the spires of the highest roofs, and the tallest columns were all that rose above the sands, like an orchard of tombstones.

Jason looked from the ruins to Tyr, a solemn expression on his face.

“Your people can be great again, you know. If enough of you want it.”

The Argo had reached the anchorage outside of Freehaven, and while the crew prepared to leave the ship, Tyr led the refugees down the gangplank onto the stone docks, and from there down into the waters of the oasis. There were nearly a dozen other sand ships at anchor, nearly all of those who called Freehaven home, some of them in the process of unloading their most recent plunder, others preparing to sail out onto the sands again.

When the engineers of several millennia past had constructed the network of canals that connected the areas of lowest elevation, there were a handful of likely spots that were too far distant from the others to be included. One such was the lake the first pirates had named “Freehaven.” It was several days’ sail across the high sands from the nearest point in any of the canal systems, its location a closely guarded secret. Shielded from view by the ruins of the buried city to the east and by a mountain range that ran from southwest to northeast, it could be approached only from the south, and even then captains had to be careful to navigate clear of the many hidden baffles and traps that had been set by the inhabitants just beneath the sands. Any who tried to approach Freehaven without knowing the circuitous route to take would find themselves stranded out on the sands, their hulls shattered to splinters, at the mercy of the pirates’ defenses.

Jason was on deck, in the process of strapping on the complex breathing apparatus that allowed him to move through the streets of Freehaven without drowning. The building he called home was pressurized with breathable air within and air locks in place of doors, but with enough standing water in indoor fountains and pools that his native friends could visit him without running the risk of drying out or suffocating. But in order to reach his home, he had to pass for a considerable distance beneath the waters, as he did when he wanted to join in with the daily life of the Freehaven community.

So it was that Tyr already had the refugees over the docks and down into the waters by the time that Jason was able to join them, his ditty bag slung over his shoulder, a transparent globe-shaped helmet completely enclosing his head. The knee he had injured aboard the galleon was better but had not healed entirely, and so he was thankful to get underwater and take his weight off it.

Tyr had already removed his encumbering breather, and the refugees were glorying in the sensation of breathing freely for the first time since they boarded the Vendish galleon some weeks before.

“Finally!” A voice echoed through the material of Jason’s helmet, loud enough to carry through the waters. “You bring us something of value, pink-skin!”

Jason cupped one hand palm forward and the other palm back, and waved his arms to spin himself around in place. It was sometimes difficult for him to discern one Martian voice from another underwater, but he knew exactly who had spoken this time.

“Rac,” he said. Inside the helmet, the name sounded like a curse in Jason’s own ears. But his words were being picked up by a microphone beneath his chin and amplified through speakers incorporated into the outer shell of his breathing apparatus, at a volume that the natives could perceive, and he wasn’t sure if the venom in his voice was lost in the process. “How nice to see you.”

“That’s Captain Rac, I remind you.” The water before Rac’s face rippled with waves, the visual cue that his mandibles were clacking with laughter. He stood with his crew, who were in the process of preparing to put out to the high sands.

It was custom when at home in Freehaven for all residents to be treated as equals, their ranks and titles only evoked when they were aboard their ships. But one major exception was the captain who was selected by the others to govern Freehaven itself, who was regarded as the commander of the entire community.

Rac approached, giving the refugees gathered nearby an appraising look. “And here I thought you always disapproved of selling prisoners to the Vendish. This is a sorry rabble you’ve netted, but still will their sale swell the coffers of Freehaven.”

Jason bristled, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Tyr take a defensive posture. They had first come to blows with Rac on the pirate ship that had taken them on board after their escape from Praxis, on which Rac had served as a junior crewman. He had resented the fact that the pink-skinned outlander and the defrocked priest had been welcomed as members of the crew and not sold into slavery, and tensions between them had only been prevented from erupting into a duel to the death by the intercession of the Articles, which forbade crewmen from doing harm to one another.

In the years since, Rac had gone on to get command of his own ship, as Jason had his, but the enmity between them had only faded, never truly vanished. They argued frequently, especially since Rac had been elected by the others as the head captain of Freehaven, and never more so than when the subject of selling prisoners into indentured servitude was discussed.

“These are not prisoners,” Jason sneered, fighting the urge to draw his sword. “They are our guests.”

The waters in front of Rac’s face swirled and ebbed as his mandibles vibrated with laughter. “Very funny, pink-skin! Like that beast you call a pet, I imagine?” He laughed even harder, the waters practically becoming a whirlpool.

Jason took a step forward. “No, Rac. I’m serious. You’re not touching them.”

The water rippled in a brief chuckle. Then Rac grew serious. “Have they signed the Articles?”

Jason shook his head inside the bubble helmet. “No, of course not. Look at them. They couldn’t handle the life of a pirate.”

“If they have not signed the Articles of Freehaven, then they are not residents of Freehaven.” Rac pushed up off the ground and drifted through the waters closer to Jason until he was within arm’s reach of the refugees. “And if they are not residents, then they must be classified as plunder. And no one man can keep a ship’s plunder all to himself. It must be divided among the crew and among the other residents.”

“They are free individuals!” Jason shouted. “You can’t just treat them like property!”

Rac scoffed. “Freehaven is the only home of the truly free. All others are slaves of one kind or another, whether to wealth or to ideology.”

“Freedom should be everyone’s birthright!” Jason countered.

The crews of the other ships that were loading and unloading at the dock had taken note of the exchange, and many of them had lingered, waiting to see what transpired, including many of their captains.

“Watch yourself, pink-skin,” Rac said. “You come close to violating the Articles with that kind of talk.”

Jason looked around at the faces of the assembled residents, seeking out the other captains. He could see that more than a few of them were clearly sympathetic to his position but that others were decidedly not.

“And as Captain of Freehaven,” Rac went on, addressing himself to the assembled crowd, “I claim Freehaven’s portion of the Argo’s plunder now.” He grabbed the arm of the nearest refugee, a woman just entering the age of maturity, and motioned for his crewmen standing nearby to approach. “And since your contributions to the coffers have been inadequate for some time now, leaving the Argo in arrears under the terms of the Articles, Freehaven’s portion will include all of this rabble.”

As Rac’s crewmen rounded up the confused refugees, preparing to escort them onto Rac’s ship in preparation for transporting them north to Vend, Tyr came alongside Jason, bristling with barely restrained rage.

“You must do something,” Tyr said in a quiet voice.

Jason had gone completely still and quiet, trying not to let his emotions overcome his judgment, trying to work out a solution.

“Captain,” Tyr urged again. Even at home, he was ever the first officer, never entirely comfortable treating his captain as an equal.

Jason realized that his hand gripped the handle of the sword at his side so tightly that his palm ached.

Tyr grabbed Jason’s shoulder. “You know what will become of them in the north.”

He could try to convince enough of the other captains to form a quorum, Jason knew, and call for an election in the hopes of ousting Rac as the head of Freehaven. But that would take time, and Rac would have long since sailed away before he had time to speak to enough captains to make a difference. And there was no guarantee that the next captain elected to succeed Rac wouldn’t feel the same way about the slave trade.

Tyr tightened his grip on Jason’s shoulder.

“Captain Rac!” Jason called out, pulling away from Tyr and stepping forward, drawing his sword. “I challenge you, by the First Article, for the right to lead Freehaven.”

All eyes swung first in Jason’s direction, then to Rac, who stood with his arms folded over his chest, the water before his face swirling with mirthless laughter.

Jason stood atop the shoulders of a headless statue that was buried to the waist in the sands. A short distance off, just outside of arm’s reach, Rac crouched on top of a broken column that rose like a tree leaning in a high wind.

Tradition demanded that, as the challenged, Rac had the choice of venue for the single combat. It was hardly surprising that he would choose the drystone dueling sands of the buried city.

“Your freak muscles won’t do you much good here, pink-skin,” Rac scoffed. “Jump as high and far as you like, and chances are they will be there waiting when you come down.” He pointed at the sands that surrounded them, where the threaded traces of sand-sharks passing by rippled all around.

Jason’s right knee still ached from the injury he’d taken aboard the galleon days before. From a way off, he could hear the sound of Rac’s partisans laughing at his barb. Some half dozen sand ships drifted at anchor all around them, their decks crowded with nearly the entire population of Freehaven. Aboard Rac’s own ship, the Praxian refugees were herded together, shackled in chains, gasping for breath as they passed their portable breathing dispensers from one to another.

Tyr and the rest of Jason’s crewmen were on the deck of the Argo, their expressions solemn and tense. If Jason’s challenge to defeat Rac failed, the Argo would be electing a new captain. Either Jason would prevail, or he would die. There was no third option.

Jason could see that Tyr was praying, arms raised overhead. It was upon a drystone just like the one Jason stood atop that Tyr’s god had been martyred. And it was for much the same reason that the inhabitants of Freehaven had selected the buried city as one of their principal dueling grounds in generations past. There was no escape for a Martian from this place, nowhere to hide. The sun bore down mercilessly from above, and the sands held dangers of their own. Once a Martian’s breather ran out, he would die of suffocation and dehydration in short order.

But the weapons that the combatants carried ensured that neither of them would have to wait quite that long.

“Rac, there’s still time for me to withdraw the challenge,” Jason called out. “We don’t have to do this. Just let those people go, and we can …”

The rest of his words were drowned out by the high-pitched pop of a whip snapping only inches from his face, the dry air crackling with the electrical discharge from its tip.

“I’ve heard enough of your talk for one lifetime,” Rac shouted. “Shut up and die.”

As the challenged party, Rac had been given the choice of weapons, as well. So naturally he had chosen one that least suited Jason’s talents.

“All right,” Jason snarled. He flicked the whip he held in his right hand, allowing it to uncoil and hang down past his feet. “Enough talking.”

Jason raised his arm overhead in a slow swing, the whip trailing through the air, then pulled back with a jerk after making a complete circle, sending the tail of the whip racing ahead, only to snap back just as it reached the column atop which Rac stood.

Rac’s mandibles quivered with laughter as he leapt nimbly from the column to a rooftop that rose above the sands, just in time to avoid Jason’s lash.

“You never could get the hang of it, could you, pink-skin?”

Since arriving on the red planet, Jason had made full use of the increased speed and strength that he enjoyed relative to the natives of the low-gravity world. But tasks that called for finesse and a light touch, requiring him to rein in his strength, were actually more difficult for him. The whips, which the natives were able to manipulate like sinewy snakes beneath the water and like lightning in the air above, had always presented Jason with difficulty.

But he wasn’t about to give up yet.

Rac’s own whip shot through the air again, and as it whistled toward him, Jason managed to step to one side, almost—but not quite—managing to avoid it. The whip’s tip grazed his bare shoulder, sending a shock of pain across his chest, accompanied by the acrid tang of cauterized flesh. It was almost enough to make him lose his grip on his own weapon. But even a full charge wouldn’t have been fatal, assuming it had struck him in the same spot. A shock to a limb he could survive, but one to his trunk might well stop his heart from beating, and one to his head could fry his brain.

While Jason recovered his balance and lashed out with his own whip, Rac had already alighted on another roof, and by the time Jason’s whip cracked in empty space, Rac had leapt to the top of another ruined statue. The sand-sharks below circled hungrily, tracking their movements, and, overhead, a flock of leatherwing scavengers wheeled silently, patiently.

Rac’s whip swept forward again, and Jason jumped off the top of the column with as little force as he could manage, aiming to come down on top of a temple roof that jutted out of the sands at an angle. But he misjudged the distance, overcompensating for the strength of his jumps, and failing to take into account the diminished strength of his injured knee, and almost fell short. His arms pinwheeling on either side, as if he might somehow swim through the thin air, he just managed to grab hold of the roof’s edge with his free hand and dangled for an instant off the precipice, almost losing hold of his whip in the process.

As Jason scrambled to pull himself up onto the canted roof, he heard a whistle and crack, followed by a riot of pain in his left leg. He lost his grip on his whip, which went tumbling down to the sands below, where it was instantly swallowed whole by one of the sand-sharks. Jason collapsed forward onto the roof, his leg spasming and twitching violently, having received almost a full charge from Rac’s whip.

He managed to roll over onto his back, just as Rac’s whip whistled and popped above him once more. A second slower, and it would have caught him square in the face.

Jason was struggling into a sitting position as Rac landed lightly on the other side of the temple roof, some fifteen feet away. Rac’s whip snaked in his grip as he swung his arm back and forth, building up speed, slowly stalking toward the place where Jason lay.

“I should have killed you the first moment I laid eyes on you,” Rac said, swinging his whip in a wide arc overhead, slowly at first but faster with every rotation. “You’ve been nothing but a pain in my side ever since.”

Jason couldn’t stand, his left leg still rendered useless and twitching by the shock. His arms and hands still worked, but without a weapon in them, he was unable to strike back. Rac could keep his distance and hit Jason with his whip as many times as it took to kill him, or drive him off the roof, whichever came first. Of course, if Rac managed to hit Jason’s head, it would only require one shot.

Unless Jason managed to even the odds a bit.

“Good-bye, pink-skin,” Rac said, mandibles clattering with vicious laughter. “You won’t be missed!”

Rac swung his arm forward, then back, sending the tip of his whip snapping straight toward Jason’s head. Just at the last instant, as the whip whistled toward his face, Jason reached up with blinding speed and grabbed hold of the whip with both hands, gripping as tightly as he could manage.

Jason’s arms shuddered and twitched with the charge, but he kept hold of the whip. His mind reeled with the pain, but he held on.

“Fool,” Rac cursed, and yanked back on the whip with all of his strength.

Jason chose that moment to pull the whip toward him, and, in a test of brute strength, even in spite of the pain he was enduring, he came out on top. Rac swore angrily as the handle of the whip was pulled out of his grip.

Using the last of the strength and control in his now almost-entirely-numbed limbs, Jason swung the heavy handle of the whip back over his head, letting go when it was at the top of its arc. Rac’s whip sailed out over the ground, landing on the sands just long enough to draw the attention of a pair of sand-sharks, who each took hold of one end and devoured it down to the center in mere moments.

Jason flopped back onto the warm, dry surface of the temple roof, his arms shuddering uncontrollably on either side. He was having difficulty breathing, but somehow held on to consciousness.

A shadow fell across Jason’s face as Rac loomed over him.

“Pity we can never reach whatever world you come from, pink-skin.” Rac leaned closer. “If it is filled with the likes of you, we could conquer the lot in no time.”

Rac reached down, and his fingers closed on Jason’s shoulders. Rac lifted him partially off the surface of the roof, and began to drag him bodily toward the edge.

“Whatever afterlife awaits creatures like you,” Rac said, “I hope it is a disappointment to you.”

Rac leaned as he struggled with the weight of Jason’s body, but just as he approached the edge of the roof, Jason used the only limb still under his control. He kicked out, snapping one of Rac’s legs at the joint. As Rac howled in pain, Jason hooked his leg around Rac’s other leg, and pulled.

Still howling in pain and rage, Rac went plummeting over the edge. Jason collapsed back onto the roof, eyes closed, unable to move another muscle. But when Rac’s screams ended with a soft thud, quickly followed by the sound of gnashing teeth, Jason allowed himself a bitter smile.

Another shadow flitted across his face, and he felt sharp claws digging into his abdomen.

“Oh, come on,” he said. Surviving single combat with a devious enemy, only to be a meal for a scavenging leatherwing? Where was the justice?

But instead of feeling the pain of the leatherwing’s snout biting into his soft tissue, eating him alive, Jason felt a tug at his belt, as the leatherwing tried to get at a pouch that hung there.

He opened his eyes and managed a weary smile.

“You know, Bandit, if you’d shown up just a few minutes ago you might have helped me …”

The sun was just beginning to pink the sky in the east as the Argo caught sight of water, dead ahead.

“Are you certain about this course of action, captain?” Tyr asked, warily eyeing the leatherwing that perched on Jason’s shoulder.

“You can be a great people again,” Jason answered with a smile. “You just need a few obstacles moved out of your way.”

Tyr’s mandibles clacked with a dry chuckle. “I’ll signal the rest of the fleet.”

As his first officer went to relay his orders to the dozen ships that sailed in their wake, Jason looked across the sands at the network of canals just now coming into view.

It hadn’t been easy, but once he’d become head of Freehaven, he’d been able to convince enough of the other captains to back his plans. Now, months later, they were finally being put into motion. Praxis would be first. They would cut off the Hegemony from any outside trade, then launch strike teams in amphibious assault, arming Praxian dissidents while dismantling the Hegemony’s ability to suppress dissent.

It would not be easy, and it would not be quick, but in time the Hegemony would fall.

And once the people of Praxis knew the meaning of “freedom,” they would turn their attentions north, to Vend. And once the choke hold the Vendish wealthy had on the rest of the population was broken, Jason would continue sailing, routing out oppression wherever he went. He would sail clear across the world if he had to. But Jason wasn’t worried. He’d sailed around the world before.