Mars loomed large ahead of the Daedalus, the swirling, golden sun-currents visible before the bow as they curved toward the southern pole. Already, the descent had been a difficult one, the currents playing havoc with the gaping rents in the hull. The repaired plane and rudder sails were holding for now, though James was particularly worried about the ruddersail.
“She’s dancing about like a French girl, Mr. Weatherby,” the bo’sun said, his sure hands gripping the wheel tightly. “It’ll be right impossible to keep her full on course.”
Weatherby turned to Foster, who was looking at the red planet through his glass. “Mr. Foster, go and fetch three of our strongest men to help James with the wheel,” he said.
Foster rushed off, leaving Weatherby to survey the quarterdeck. Morrow stood off to the side of the wheel, surveying the ship’s operation, the currents, everything. His posture was sure and steady, but his eyes darted about, and he murmured minute corrections to James as the ship surged forward to the red planet.
Franklin and St. Germain insisted on remaining above decks, and both used spare glasses to survey the planet before them, looking for Chance or further clues as to its destination. Finch and Anne stood ready to assist them, each carrying a handful of maps and books about Mars, in case reference was needed. The four alchemists consulted each other quietly, noting this landmark, that canal, some kind of ruin. If Mars was once indeed a verdant world, the Xan’s vengeance had been thorough, for all Weatherby could discern was sandy desert and bare rock the color of rust…or blood.
The sky around the ship began to lighten as Daedalus entered the atmosphere, and the turbulent currents became even more dangerous. Weatherby could see men on the main deck begin to stumble and pitch as the ship bucked beneath their feet. By rights, everyone should have been below decks, but with a dry landing before them—and large chunks of the lower hull destroyed in the battle—the main deck was their only real option.
“All hands! Secure body lines!” Weatherby shouted over the increasing winds. “Stay low to the deck!”
The men immediately began tying their lines around their waists, and Weatherby and Foster aided the others on the quarterdeck to secure theirs. Weatherby could see the four men on the ship’s wheel straining with the exertion of keeping their course true, and the men on the planesails were having a similar time of it.
“We’re dropping too fast!” James shouted. “We’re too heavy to be landing this far from the poles!”
Morrow simply nodded; Weatherby could see the calculations ongoing behind his eyes. He would still choose proximity to the Martian ruin to a safer landing. Weatherby frowned, looking around for something, anything to do.
The answer came in the form of a cannon that had broken clear of its lines, its carriage wheels rolling it slowly to and fro upon the gun deck, in sight of the cargo hatch. “Captain,” he said. “We can lighten the ship. The cannon, the shot, anything that we don’t need to land.”
Morrow gave a small, somewhat rueful smile. “It cannot harm us, anyway. Do it.”
Weatherby strode toward the railing overlooking the main deck. “All hands! Throw the cannon and shot over the side! Anything that is neither food nor medicine must go overboard!”
The food, of course, was certainly an added weight, given that it needed to sustain several score men for weeks at a time. But it felt wrong to Weatherby to cheat the men out of a last hint at survival. Immediately, the men got to their feet and began hurling shot over the side; the cannons took some effort, but they too began to fall to the surface, though they would not likely get all the guns overboard before landing.
Weatherby turned to James with a questioning look. “That helped a little bit, sir,” the bo’sun said, still looking quite haggard and worried.
“Mr. Weatherby!” Finch shouted. “A word, if we may?”
Weatherby turned to see the group of alchemists looking upward at the sails, smiling and pointing. “Now is not an ideal time, Doctor,” Weatherby said as he joined them.
“It is the best time,” Franklin said. “Our Miss Baker here has had a most ingenious idea.”
Weatherby turned to her. “What is it?” he said, trying to keep impatience from his tone.
Her frown showed he was not quite successful, but she went on regardless. “The sails above are not critical to this landing, are they?”
“Normally they would be, but our descent is far too rapid to make much use of them,” he said.
“Can we not attach the lower spars of the sails on the main and mizzen masts to the masts in front of them?” she asked.
Weatherby looked up, trying to picture what she was saying. Untying the lower spars from the masts, then securing them to the masts before them. As the ship fell, the sails would then catch the wind under them…
…potentially helping arrest their fall.
“It was something I saw in a copy of one of DaVinci’s sketchbooks,” Anne said, as if trying to convince Weatherby of the provenance of her idea. Yet he needed no further prodding. Weatherby quickly turned and shouted for Morrow and Foster. Thirty seconds later, the men were climbing the rigging, casting lines around each end of the spars and otherwise preparing for a major, and quite dangerous, adjustment in their sails.
The process was painfully slow, and the Martian surface continued to approach alarmingly fast. But from the moment the first sail was adjusted, the ship’s descent seemed to moderate. “Well done, Miss Baker,” Morrow said. “I doubt we’ll get them all rigged, but it may be enough.”
A loud rending noise from directly below the quarterdeck erased their optimism. “The ruddersail’s gone, sir!” James shouted.
Immediately, the Daedalus began to spin and twist in the swirling winds. “Bring the planes in line with the deck!” Weatherby shouted, extending Anne’s idea to the sails on each side of the ship. While it did little for the spinning motion, the adjustment seemed to slow the ship further.
Morrow looked over the side of the railing to the surface below. “Get the men down from the tops, Mr. Weatherby,” he said. “There’s no more to be done there.”
Weatherby relayed the order, and immediately the men clambered down, surely relieved to be freed from their dangerous duty. One man slipped on the rigging as the ship bucked ferociously in the wind, but he was caught by his body line and aided by his fellows.
Morrow, meanwhile, continued to monitor their descent, and suddenly ran toward the front of the quarterdeck. “Forty-five degrees upward on the planes!” he yelled.
To Weatherby’s great surprise, the ship’s spin began to slow, and the Daedalus even began to move forward as it fell, so that it was approaching the surface at an angle—a far better prospect than dropping down like a stone.
Of course, this was a matter of degrees. It was still going to be awful.
Weatherby looked over the railing to see the ground rushing up to greet the ship. Something caught his eye in the distance—some sort of dome shape, oddly enough, but it flashed by quickly. A Martian ruin of some sort?
A gust of wind shook the ship, and drew Weatherby’s attention back to the peril before them. They were close. “All hands brace for impact!” he yelled. “Move to the center of the deck! Stay down and hold on!”
Weatherby turned to see Anne and Morrow aiding Dr. Franklin in an effort to get him sitting upon the deck, no easy task for a man of his age and girth. But soon they were all sitting, tethered to the mizzenmast and bracing for what was to come. Weatherby looked up and saw Anne’s face regarding him. He managed a weak smile that she returned in kind, fear overcoming recent animosity for at least a few moments.
And then the ship hit the planet.
Bodies slid across the decks, both forward and to starboard, as the ship careened onto the surface of Mars with an ear-splitting crunch. Weatherby felt the body line around his waist tighten as he was thrown, wrenching his midsection and causing him to cry out as he was thrown about. The sounds of splintering wood meeting grinding rock and soil surrounded him as Daedalus plowed violently across the rust-red deserts. More crunching sounds followed—surely the bow was all but gone by this juncture—and the ship was jolted regularly as it struck boulders and rocks in its path. The screams of the men were audible above the din.
And then, after what seemed like an eternity, all movement stopped abruptly, pitching everyone forward one final time before all was still.
Weatherby was lying on the deck, which was at a slight angle against the Martian surface, noting they must not have landed evenly upon the keel. He chanced to raise his head, positioned as he was against the railing overlooking the rest of the ship.
The bow was indeed gone, an unrecognizable jumble of wood piled up against a rather large boulder. There were men there, across the bow, he knew, but there was no trace of them at all. The remains of sails, spars and rigging hung limply from the masts, while the main deck was strewn with further debris…and bodies.
The men upon the main deck were piled upon each other and tossed about, but there was movement among them, tentative and slow, and the groans and cries of the injured began to rise to Weatherby’s ears. In this circumstance, he felt that cries of pain were far more preferable to no sound at all.
Weatherby slowly regained his feet, taking in the destruction of his ship. It took a moment before he noticed that the Daedalus was sitting surprisingly low upon the ground, no more than fifteen feet. He looked over the edge and gasped when he saw that the impact had shorn the bilges and the hold clean away. Turning aft, there was a massive furrow upon the ground, strewn with wooden debris, which looked to be no less than three miles long.
And yet…here he stood.
Weatherby smiled even as his hands began to tremble. Daedalus had plummeted from the sky, but she had enough of her wings left to bring them safely to the ground.
Almost safely.
“Weatherby!” Finch shouted from behind him.
The lieutenant turned to see Finch rapidly working upon someone, with Anne and St. Germain aiding him. Dr. Franklin was just starting to sit up, so it was not him.
Morrow.
Weatherby rushed to them and saw the captain unconscious upon the deck. A piece of wood some two inches thick jutted out of his thigh, and he was bleeding profusely about the head.
“Report,” Weatherby stammered as he knelt at the captain’s feet.
“Head wound, severe,” Finch said dispassionately. “The leg will keep. I need to stop the bleeding. Have you curatives on you?”
Weatherby reached into his coat and produced three vials, his last. “Can you save him?”
“I don’t bloody know,” Finch said. “My lab?”
“Destroyed,” Weatherby said.
Finch looked up and spotted James picking himself up off the deck. “You there! Help us move him below!”
James scurried over and, with Weatherby’s help, moved Morrow into the great cabin, where they laid him upon his dining table. The odd angle of the ship made working more difficult, and Finch swore a great deal as he administered curatives and struggled to save Morrow’s life. In that, however, he had the help of not only Anne, but the Count St. Germain as well—and despite no longer having his miraculous little stone, the Known Worlds’ foremost alchemist was no mere orderly.
Weatherby and James left the doctor to his work, staggering out of the great cabin and up onto the main deck. There were other wounded, some severely. “James, please ask Miss Baker to come out and tend to the others,” Weatherby ordered.
A few minutes later, Anne had enlisted two of the men to help her begin a triage of wounded. The butcher’s bill had grown larger on the landing—six dead, another eight unaccounted for, and a score wounded.
Including the captain.
Weatherby walked slowly up to the quarterdeck, his mind reeling. He was greeted there by Franklin. “How is Sir William?” he asked.
“We cannot yet say,” Weatherby said dully, looking out over the wreckage of the Daedalus.
Franklin regarded the young man closely. “Was it not the great Bard who said, ’Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them?’”
“I believe it was, sir,” Weatherby replied. “Twelfth Night, if I’m not mistaken.” He had no notion of how he had managed to remember that.
“Well, then,” Franklin said, “I feel the only question before you now is whether you were born to it or shall merely arrive at it now. For I have no doubt, Thomas, that you possess your share.”
Weatherby turned to regard the old alchemist with a wan smile. “Whether or not I possess it, I suppose this is my lot.”
“Cagliostro is out there,” Franklin said, laying a grandfatherly hand on Weatherby’s shoulder. “We must finish what we came here to do.”
Weatherby nodded soberly. “So we shall.”
Finch tells me that Morrow will live, but that he is not likely to regain consciousness for several days. So it is that, in the space of mere hours, I have gone from second lieutenant to acting captain. It is roughly mid-morning here on Mars, and soon I will lead a force of men on an overland march to the Martian temple, accompanied by Dr. Finch and the Count St. Germain. There we will hopefully find Cagliostro and, I pray, stop him from whatever evil plot he has in mind. It is doubtful we will make it in time, for our best estimates put us at least six hours away from the temple. But we must try.
This is not how I expected to serve King and Country. My zeal and enthusiasm of mere months ago seems cocksure and foolhardy now. I do not feel up to this task, but I must see it through regardless.
I can think of nothing more to write herein. Should this serve as my last entry in this journal, Father, know that your son goes now to do his duty, with naught but love for you and Mother and my darling sisters in my heart.
God save us all.
Lieut. Thomas Weatherby, HMS Daedalus
Shaila Jain looked down at the datapad in her gauntleted hand, re-reading the last words of Weatherby’s journal one more time as she stood between the two rovers that would take her and her colleagues into the unknown. The journal entry had appeared shortly before lunchtime, and the monitoring program she created picked up every word.
Weatherby was on Mars.
Or was he? Yes, Greene insisted that space-time quantum mechanics allowed for the possibility—and she was the one who put him onto the theory. But seriously? Sailing ships? Alchemy? An 18th century Royal Navy officer walking around Mars?
She watched as Greene and Stephane loaded the last of the survey equipment onto the rovers, their now-heavier pressure suits making the job that much more difficult. Diaz had insisted they go outside with the suits on, just in case the newly quirky planet decided it wanted its old atmosphere back. Moments later they were off, with Shaila and Stephane in Rover Two and Yuna and Greene riding with Diaz in Rover One. They tore across the Martian landscape, making a straight line for the edge of the sensor outages—and from there, if they were lucky, right to the pyramid.
Stephane was reading the journal entry as Shaila drove. “How could they go from space to Mars without burning up?” Stephane asked. “Does that not generate a lot of heat?”
“Normally, sure, but ’normally’ might not apply here,” Shaila said. “I mean, what’s a frigate doing in space in the first place?”
“True,” he allowed. “And we could be breathing the Mars air ourselves right now if we wanted. Do you really think they are out there, waiting for us?”
Shaila paused a moment before responding. “Caution and objectivity, Steve—I mean, Stephane,” she said. “Keep your head on straight and gather the facts as we find them.”
“You believe he is there.”
Shaila turned to him, expecting to see one of his infuriating Gallic grins. Instead, he looked dead serious. “Caution and objectivity,” she repeated. “We’re scientists out here, right?”
“Of course,” he said, sounding disappointed. “There could be anything out there. But still.” He seemed to choose his next words carefully. “There is something I want to say.”
Shaila checked to ensure their comms weren’t being broadcast to the other rover before responding. “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t do it. No professions of undying love or anything like that.”
She was surprised by his sudden burst of laughter. “Well, you are certainly feeling better about yourself today, yes? At least this is a good change.”
Shaila felt her face go red. “Right. Sorry. Anyway. What’d you want to say?”
“I was simply going to say that when we are both done here, I mean on Mars, that I would like to invite you to visit me in France. You have never been?”
Shaila blinked. “You’re making travel plans?”
She could see him shrug inside his pressure suit. “It seems right, you know, that when you are going off to face something big like this, that you plan ahead for after. It gives you something to look forward to.”
“Ummm…yeah. Makes sense, I guess,” she said, trying to fumble through an already awkward conversation. “All right. When this is over, you can show me France. Right now, we’ve a job to do.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” He folded his arms against his chest in seeming victory.
Thankfully, Shaila only had to endure another five minutes of embarassed silence before they arrived at their first checkpoint. The rovers pulled to a stop about a hundred meters from the estimated border of the affected area. The sensor packs had a range of about five hundred meters, so it seemed safer to get out and walk—slowly—just in case whatever was in there was still frying electronic devices.
“On your feet, people,” Diaz said, clambering out of the rover. “Everybody gets a sensor. And Jain, this is for you.” Diaz handed her a zapper.
“Really?” she asked.
“Just in case,” Diaz said.
“Of what?”
Shaila saw the colonel frown. “If I knew, maybe we wouldn’t need ’em, Jain.”
“Aye, ma’am.” She strapped the zapper to her suit’s utility belt.
Standing a few meters apart, the five astronauts began walking slowly toward what they believed was the affected area. It didn’t look like much at all, really—a flat rust-red plain with the Australis Montes mountain range off in the distance. The AOO sensor poles were visible all over the horizon, as usual. Shaila’s portable sensor pack wasn’t picking up anything at all.
Just another day on Mars, apparently—aside from the heavier gravity and breathable atmosphere, of course.
Diaz stopped them about five meters away from the imaginary borderline. “OK, that’s far enough. You have our test subject, Dr. Greene?”
“Got it right here,” Greene said. He opened a bag and pulled out the oddest piece of exploratory equipment in the history of space travel: a holocam, sandwiched between two standard-issue JSC daybed pillows and held together with duct tape. The pillows were Stephane’s addition to Shaila’s original solution.
Greene flipped the camera on. “You getting the readout, Dr. Hiyashi?”
Yuna was looking at a datapad. “The camera is transmitting perfectly. Ready to go.”
Greene weighed the camera in one hand for a moment, then reached back and threw it into the area, right past one of the blacked-out sensor towers. Even with the heavier gravity, the device was still pretty light compared to Earth. The camera traveled about fifteen meters, then rolled another five meters or so before coming to a halt in a cloud of dust. On their datapads, the McAuliffe crew saw a brief interruption in the camera’s transmission—less than a second—where it whited out, much as Greene’s holocam had done the first time he and Shaila encountered the EM lines. But other than that, the camera was functioning normally.
Diaz had Greene and Yuna repeat the process twice more, each time advancing another twenty to twenty-five meters into the area. There were no further white-outs, and the camera continued to function perfectly. It wasn’t even fully rad-hard.
“It would appear that whatever rendered our sensors blind yesterday is no longer in effect,” Yuna finally reported, “though we cannot say for sure if another incident is forthcoming.”
“Let’s hope not,” Diaz said. “For now, I think we’re good. Let’s get back to the rovers and keep going. But if anyone so much as catches a hint of static or systems interruption, speak up fast.”
A few minutes later, Rovers One and Two were off again. There was a brief glitch in the sensor packs as they crossed into the area, but the electronics held up fine otherwise, and Shaila was starting to wonder whether this was just one big screw-up, somehow. That didn’t last too long, however. As they progressed into the affected area, both the local gravity and atmospheric pressure continued to climb. Greene theorized that the other dimension, for want of a better word, was overlapping theirs.
Just as Greene was about to launch into a discourse on the many-worlds theory of parallel dimensions in quantum physics, Yuna interrupted—just in time, in Shaila’s opinion. “I’m picking up something,” Yuna said. “There seems to be both a large amount of liquid water and a great deal of inert organic material about 1.6 kilometers away, just over that little ridge to the northwest. It appears to be in the same position as that unidentified shape in the MRO image we got from Houston.”
“Roger that, divert to investigate,” Diaz said.
The two rovers swooped off course and headed toward a slight rise in the plain, covering the distance in less than a minute.
“Full stop!” Diaz shouted.
Shaila hit the brakes hard, pulling alongside Diaz’ rover just in time to avoid a collision and wondering what the hell happened.
Then she looked up.
About fifty meters away, a large, unnaturally straight ditch filled with water stretched off toward the mountains.
In it, listing to one side, was the wreckage of a three-masted sailing ship.