Old Mars

Here’s a robust and exciting sea story, complete with pirates and swordfights, except that the seas our swashbuckling adventurers are sailing are not the seas of Earth but the endless sand seas of 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.