George Martin - Old Mars

As the commodore lunged forward, aiming his sword at Jason’s midsection in a killing thrust, Jason handily sidestepped at the last moment. Natives were always surprised by how quickly Jason could move in the lower gravity of the red planet and how much stronger he was than he appeared, facts that he had long since learned to use to his advantage. Before the startled commodore could react, Jason brought his sword slamming down on the commodore’s breather, slashing the back of the commodore’s head in the process.

The commodore pitched forward, gasping for breath, dropping both sword and torch as he groped for the back of his head, where dark green blood was already welling freely.

Jason reached for the still-burning torch as it clattered away across the deck, but before he could grab it, another of the Praxian sailors, following close on the commodore’s heels, rushed at him, swinging a heavy club. For every one of the precious few moments it took Jason to fend off the sailor, he worried over where the torch would end up. Like most of the ships that plied the red planet’s sand seas, the corvette was primarily composed of a kind of lightweight concrete, sturdy enough to be a considerable weight but with enough pockets of air throughout that it was not too heavy to glide across the sands. More important, although the concrete itself was largely impervious to flame, the planks were mortared with a tarlike substance that wasn’t . Careless fire management would leave a ship as little more than a charred pile of planks and spars, its crews left stranded on the sands at the tender mercy of scavengers like the leatherwings and the sand-sharks.

So it was with a weary sigh that, as soon as he dispatched the club-wielding sailor, Jason turned to see that the commodore’s torch had come to rest atop the seam between two planks in the deck, and that traceries of flame already raced in either direction, following the mortar’s path.

“Captain!” Tyr shouted, having just returned from belowdecks, a freshly bleeding cut across his left shoulder. “Fire!”

“I see it!” Jason glanced about the deck of the corvette. He had lost two of his men in the skirmish, and including Tyr, three more were wounded, but the last of the Praxian sailors appeared to have been seen to. But already the flames had reached both fore and aft, and had leapt to the corvette’s sails, which were slowly transforming to smoke and ash.

“The Argo is out beyond the range of the Praxian launchers,” Tyr shouted. “She’ll never reach us in time!”

Jason scowled. The order for the Argo to retreat after he and the others boarded the corvette had been his. He had no one to blame but himself if it meant his death now.

“Cut the grappling lines!” Jason shouted, as he leapt over the flames, heading for the railing. “If we’re lucky, we can get the galleon clear before it catches fire, too!”

Tyr and the other surviving pirates needed no further instruction, but scrambled over the side of the corvette and onto the galleon’s deck, severing the heavy lines that held the two vessels together as they went.

Jason was the last one to leave the corvette, as the deck planks began to fall apart beneath him. Tyr and the others had already begun to shove the merchant ship away from the corvette, using long sections of the galleon’s shattered masts to push against the hull of the other ship. But as Jason thudded onto the deck of the galleon, twisting one knee badly in the process, bits of burning sail and ash rained down around him.

“We need to move this tub!” Jason shouted as he clutched his knee in agony, sprawled on the deck. “And somebody put out these flames before they spread !”

A pair of Jason’s crewmen scrambled around the deck of the galleon, stomping out the burning bits of sail, while Tyr directed the others in using the longest pieces of the broken mast to push the two vessels as far apart as possible. Black smoke intermingled with the sands that the heavy winds were blowing across from the corvette, but just when it appeared that all hope was lost, the winds shifted, blowing back over the Praxian ship, sending smoke, ash, and licking flames out over the sands instead.

Tyr helped Jason to his feet as they watched the burning pyre of a ship drift away from them across the sands. It had taken all the strength the pirates could muster to get the corvette to move, but now that it was in motion, its inertia would continue to carry it away from them. Not far, but far enough.

“Well,” Jason said, “let’s go belowdecks and see what she’s carrying.”

“Whatever it is,” Tyr answered as he helped Jason limp across the deck, “the Praxians very much wished to possess it.”

Jason was thinking back to what the commodore had said, puzzling over it, when Tyr lifted up the hatch in the deck that led down to the galleon’s hold.

As the two stared down into the hold, Jason’s mouth hung open in surprise, and Tyr tapped the drystone amulet at his breast.

“Or perhaps it is something they did not wish to possess ,” Tyr muttered, “but to destroy .”

Down in the gloom of the galleon’s hold, dozens of frightened eyes glinted up at them.

They spoke a dialect that Jason had trouble following, and it was clear they had difficulty understanding his accent, but Tyr was able to act as interpreter. They were mothers and fathers, children, grandparents, all crowded together in the cramped confines of the galleon’s hold. Rather than wearing personal breathers, as Jason’s crewmen and the Praxian sailors did, they huddled around portable dispensers that sprayed brief jets of lukewarm water from short hoses, keeping their skin as damp and their gills as oxygenated as they could manage. But all of them had taken on the greyish brown tint to their skins that suggested they were close to the point of complete dehydration and suffocation.

The drystone amulets that each of them clutched marked them as worshippers of the Suffocated God. There was some irony in the fact that they might emulate their martyred god not only in the way that he had lived but also in his manner of dying.

“They are Praxian refugees,” Tyr explained, “fleeing oppression.”

Jason could see that Tyr was having difficulty controlling his temper but seemed mollified whenever the refugees addressed him with the word that Jason recognized as meaning “Reverend.” It had been many years since Tyr had been a priest, but it was clear that it was a role that still held great meaning for him.

“They say that things have gotten even worse in Praxis,” Tyr continued. “The Hegemony continues to chip away at the freedoms of those they rule. Once, one was censured for speaking out against the Hegemony’s tenets or questioning their right to govern. Now, it seems, simply harboring private beliefs that are not sanctioned by the Hegemony is grounds for punishment.”

Jason noted the scars that many of the older refugees bore, signs of flogging, torture, and worse. Some were even missing digits at the ends of their arms or had empty sockets where eyes had once been. And all of them, from the oldest to the youngest, had the kind of haunted expression on their faces that made it clear that they had seen things that scarred their minds and souls in ways that could never fully heal.

“They made a deal with a Vendish merchant, the master of this galleon, to ferry them north across the sands to Vend,” Tyr said, his tone bitter. “They hoped to find a new home there, where they would enjoy the freedom to practice their beliefs in peace.”

Jason sneered. The mention of “freedom” in such close proximity to “Vend” was a bitter irony.

“How much money do they have?” Jason asked, acid in his tone.