Old Mars

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.”