Old Mars

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.