George Martin - Old Mars

“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.