Old Mars

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.