The Emperor of Mars

by Patrick Samphire

  By four o’clock the sun had begun to sink lower in the sky and the edge had bled from the heat.

  “We need to get going,” I said, pushing myself upright. “I don’t want to do this in the night.”

  Papa looked pale, but he nodded as he struggled to rise. “We still have a long way to go.”

  We pressed on, nobody saying much. It was hard enough to walk without wasting energy on talking, and I had nothing to say.

  Before dusk, the mountains were rising before us and we had entered the deep, sandy valley slicing through the mesa. If I was right, it should lead us to Blood’s base and Putty. Although none of us spoke, we picked up our pace. I could see Papa was struggling, but he didn’t protest. He just put his head down and kept going.

  Shadows sank into the valley, like ink filling a well, thick and cool and deepening with every passing minute. Up above, the sky was still bright from the evening sun, but the first of the stars were appearing, and I could just make out Earth as a tiny bright point above the valley wall.

  Ahead, the valley narrowed and turned to the north as the first of the mountains jutted up above the mesa.

  “The valley goes on another two miles,” Rackham said. “After that, it becomes too narrow for Blood’s machines.”

  “The map might not be completely accurate,” Papa said. “The valleys this far from Lunae City haven’t been well charted. Not many airships fly over the mountains.”

  “Which is why Blood chose it,” I said. “We have to believe the map’s right. Otherwise we’ve got nothing.”

  “The point is that your sister must have consulted the same map,” Rackham said. “This is the only route she could have found. She’ll have come this way. It doesn’t matter whether Blood is there or not. In fact, it’s probably better if he isn’t.”

  We followed the winding valley another mile, and by then the darkness had thickened so much that I could scarcely see a dozen yards in front of me. The mountains still formed jagged, high silhouettes against the sky.

  I hurried around a fallen boulder, and there the valley widened again, briefly, before high cliff walls rose and rose again to become the shoulder of a great mountain.

  There was nothing on the sand. Not even a tent.

  I’d been wrong.

  I leaned against the boulder, exhausted. This wasn’t where Dr. Blood was hiding, and, worse, there was no sign of Putty. I slid down onto the sand and held my head in my hands. I had failed. Again. Putty had figured out something I hadn’t. I just wasn’t clever enough.

  Slowly, I became aware of a sound in the night air. I hadn’t heard it at first over the pounding of the pulse in my ears. It was low and deep like the beating of hundreds of giant wings above me. It echoed heavily from the cliff walls.

  I tipped my head back, looking higher and higher.

  There. Above and ahead of me, high in the valley, were faint lights, but they weren’t stars. They were too evenly spaced, and the color of the light was wrong.

  There was something up there. Something vast. It was far bigger than any airship, bigger than some towns. It blotted out the sky.

  “What on Mars is that?” I breathed.

  Papa came limping up behind me. He’d pulled out a small spyglass and squinted through it, adjusting a dial on the top.

  “Ah! You can see it clearly in the infrared. It is still radiating the heat of the day.”

  I put the spyglass to my eye.

  “It’s a harvesting platform,” Papa said. “In the mountains of Patagonian Mars, where they harvest the air forests, there is nowhere flat enough or accessible enough for the gulpers to land and disgorge their cargo, so they use harvesting platforms. Each platform has a fleet of gulpers that delivers the harvest every day.”

  The platform must have been half a mile wide. Hundreds of giant propellers beat above it, and as many enormous balloons floated above them, suspending the enormous platform.

  “You see how it’s been modified?” Papa said. “A harvester platform is usually just a giant storage container.”

  “It’s been fortified,” Rackham said. He had his own spyglass out and was examining the platform. “There are gun emplacements around the sides and underneath it, and it’s been hardened against attack.” He looked uneasy. “If I had to guess, I’d say that the platform has been modified for war. I don’t know what weapons British Mars could deploy to bring that thing down. Lunae City certainly couldn’t. You’d have to land a force on it and take it yard by yard. I’ve fought in battles like that. I wouldn’t choose to do it again.”

  “That’s what Dr. Blood meant when he said he had something more spectacular in mind than floating up the Martian Nile on a boat,” I said. “He’s going to hatch Putty’s dragon and then come flying in on that thing.”

  He’d declare himself the Emperor of Mars, and anyone who put up a fight would have to deal with that flying fortress. One way or another, there was going to be a bloodbath.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” a voice hissed from the darkness.

  I spun. Putty was peering out from behind a boulder.

  It was like someone had splashed clean, cold water over my sweating face. I rushed over and grabbed her up in a hug.

  “Putty! Thank God you’re all right.”

  She wriggled free. “Not for long. Do you think you’re the only ones who have infrared spyglasses? Why are you just standing out there?”

  I met Rackham’s eyes. Hellfire! We’d been staring up at the platform, and none of us had thought that someone might be staring back down at us.

  I grabbed Papa and dragged him into the shelter. Putty’s stolen crawler was folded up neatly against the rock wall.

  “I’ve been figuring out how to get up there,” Putty said. “I’m going to wait until it’s completely dark, then I’ll float up there in a balloon. I’ll have to wait until the sand’s cooled, though, so the balloon won’t show up against the heat of the sand. The timing’s going to be critical.”

  “Do you even have a balloon?” I said.

  She stared at me. “Who doesn’t have a balloon?”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t sneak on board that thing. It’s too dangerous. We’re taking you home. The government can deal with this.” Somehow. It was too big for us.

  “Rothan Gal is up there,” Putty said stubbornly. “Don’t you even care about him? And they’ve got my egg. I’m not going without it.”

  “I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” Rackham said. He was staring up at the platform through his spyglass again. “We’ve been seen. They’re coming for us.”

  21

  Captured!

  I snatched the spyglass back from Papa. Through the infrared view, I saw small, warm specks dropping from the platform like hail, falling into the night air. They were people. Soldiers.

  Giant black wings snapped open above them, and they swooped down like shark kites spotting their prey. There were ten, then twenty of them, and they were heading right for us.

  “What do we do?” I demanded.

  Rackham was gripping his rifle. “What do we do? We surrender.”

  “We can’t surrender!” Putty protested. “Not to them. They stole my egg.”

  “We can’t fight them.” He laid his rifle on the ground and stepped out onto the sand, hands carefully raised.

  “You’re a coward!” Putty said.

  “I’m alive,” Rackham said. “Because I know when to fight, when to flee, and when to surrender. This is a time to surrender.” He turned his one-sided smile on Putty. “At least you’ll be getting onto the platform.”

  She turned to me. “Edward?”

  My chest felt so heavy, I could scarcely get enough breath to speak.

  “He’s right,” I said. “We can’t fight this. We’ve lost.”

  * * *

  They took us up onto the platform in a couple of small fliers. We were surrounded by armed men in clockwork armor, and we didn’t stand a chance.

>   Up here, the scale of the platform was even more intimidating. It was as though someone had made a fortress entirely from metal and then lifted it into the sky. Metal towers ran on rails around the edge of the platform, with enormous guns jutting from them. In the center, reaching above the deep bulk of the platform itself, was what looked like a palace built of steel. It must have been a hundred feet tall. A great dome made of glass panels rose above it.

  The interior of the platform had been transformed as well. Inside the giant storage tanks that had once held the harvested forests, a city had been built. I glimpsed corridors and open squares and hundreds of doors, but apart from the guards who were shepherding us along, I didn’t see anyone.

  “This place is crazy,” I muttered. Dr. Blood had built himself a capital city in the air but he hadn’t populated it with anyone. Who would want to live somewhere like this? Everything was bare metal. Only once or twice did I catch sight of anything decorated. It was like the whole place was an iron dungeon. Gas lamps burned along the walls of the hallways, but most of the metal city was in shadow.

  Dr. Blood wanted to be the new Emperor of Mars, but this palace of his wasn’t anything like the incredible Ancient Martian palaces that had once lined the banks of the Martian Nile and hung from the slopes of Tharsis Mons.

  Eventually, the guards took us down to a line of cells deep in the platform. The metal walls here were vibrating as the gigantic springs that turned the propellers above the platform slowly unwound. Somewhere down here, a furnace would be burning, producing steam to wind more springs. It was certainly hot enough, and I could smell oil and smoke in the stuffy air.

  The guards pushed Putty and me into one cell and slammed the iron door behind us, cutting off the light from the corridor. I slumped against the wall. Only a faint glow-panel spilled weak green light across the cell, but it was so run-down, I could hardly see my own hands.

  “Can you get us out of here?” I asked Putty, without much hope.

  “I’m not talking to you,” she said. “You ruined everything. I was going to get my egg back and rescue Rothan Gal and stop Dr. Blood, but you ruined it. You got us caught. You’re not even my brother anymore.”

  She turned her back on me. Her shoulders hunched and her head ducked down.

  “Are you crying?” I asked.

  “Shut up.”

  I levered myself up, went over to her, and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “I was trying to rescue you. I didn’t want you to get hurt. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

  She pulled away. “You should have thought about that earlier. You should have helped me. That’s what brothers do. They don’t pretend you don’t exist. They don’t leave you out of everything fun.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I muttered again, but she didn’t answer.

  With a sigh, I crossed to the door. It was made of solid steel and fixed so tightly into its frame that I couldn’t have slid a sheet of paper into the gap. There wasn’t even a lock on this side of the door.

  “There are bolts on the other side,” Putty said. Her voice was so flat I hardly recognized it. “There’s no way out.” She hadn’t even turned to look at me.

  I dropped to the floor and rested my head on my knees. I’d ruined everything, and it couldn’t be fixed. There was no one to rescue us this time. I had failed.

  * * *

  The light didn’t change in the cell, nor did the slow vibration of the colossal machinery in the heart of the platform. We could have been in there for hours, or even most of a day. Neither Putty nor I said a thing. I didn’t know what Putty was thinking, but I couldn’t stop myself going over and over everything in my mind and wincing at every mistake I’d made. There were a lot of them.

  I had drifted into half sleep when the sound of the bolts shooting back jerked me awake. I was so confused, I didn’t know where I was. The sounds of the bolts had been gunshots in my dream, and I flinched back so hard, I banged my head into the metal wall.

  When I could see again, Mina was kneeling in front of me.

  “What do you want?” I growled. “Come to tell us some more lies?”

  She looked away, her dark hair falling across her face, hiding her expression. “That’s not fair.”

  “Really? Because the way I see it, I can’t think of a single thing that you told me that was the truth.”

  “It wasn’t all lies.”

  I pushed myself up. I couldn’t tell whether the floor was thrumming from the gigantic engines deep in the platform or whether I was just shivering with fury.

  “You betrayed us! You pretended to be my friend. You pretended you liked me, but all you wanted was to steal from us. We trusted you.”

  Her hands were clenched into fists. “You don’t understand. My father was going to have Apprentice kill you. I couldn’t let that happen. I told him I’d get what he needed instead.” She looked up at me with those deep, brown eyes.

  “So it was all for our sake, was it? That’s fantastic. We’re so grateful.” I shook my head. “You really think I’m going to believe that?”

  “Not just yours. His.”

  I blinked. “Whose?”

  “Apprentice’s,” she said.

  “What?” I wasn’t keeping up with this. Talking to Mina was sometimes like talking to Putty. “He’s a monster. Why on Mars would you care about him?”

  She looked away again. “Because he’s my brother. I couldn’t let him do … something like that.”

  I stared at her. Her brother? Apprentice had tried to kill us over and over again.

  “Wow. You really have a lovely family, don’t you?” I sneered. “You fit right in.”

  She raised her chin. “I told you the truth, you know. We were both orphans. He was my big brother, and he looked after me. He was brilliant. You should have seen him. He was an apprentice mechanician in Lunae City, and he could build anything, even when he was no older than you. He made wonderful things, but he couldn’t make enough money to support us. No one would give him a real job, not a half-breed orphan like him. That was why I became a thief, to help us get by. Then he got a job on a harvesting platform as an assistant engineer, and he met our dad. But when he came back, he’d … changed. You’ve got to understand. All we ever wanted after our mother died was to find our dad. We wanted to be a family, so when Nicholas found him—”

  “That’s your brother?”

  “Yeah. That’s his name. Nicholas. Not ‘Apprentice.’ When he found our father … You know. We just wanted our father.”

  “You wanted to please him?”

  She nodded. “We had to. You wouldn’t get it. You’ve always had a family. We didn’t have anything or anyone. Orphans out here, most of them don’t survive at all.”

  “And how about now?” I said. “How about now that you know your father is a murderer? Now that you know he’s mad?”

  Her shoulders hunched and she stared down at the floor.

  “I don’t know. But I have to look after my brother, the same way he looked after me. I have to.” She took a deep breath. “I’m letting you go. You can get your dad and Rackham and rescue Rothan Gal. You can get away. I know where the airships are. Father’s distracted with that dragon’s egg. He won’t chase you. You’ll be all right, all of you.”

  The cell door was open. The corridor beyond was empty. We could be away, back to Mama, Jane, and Olivia. We could go back to Lunae City or Valles Marineris. She was giving us back our lives.

  “No,” I said. “That was what I wanted”—it still was—“but now I’ve seen this place.” I shook my head. “This is too much. It’s not just about rescuing Rothan Gal anymore, or Putty’s egg, or escaping from your father. If we don’t stop him now, if he uses this platform, a lot of people are going to die. He could destroy Lunae City. He could probably threaten large parts of Mars before anyone could get together enough of a force to defeat him. They wouldn’t see him coming. This is our only chance to stop him. This is down to us now.”

>   “And I’m getting my egg back,” Putty said from behind me. “So are you going to help us or not?”

  * * *

  Papa and Rackham were being kept in separate cells. Papa looked dazed when we let him out, but Rackham came within an inch of taking my head off with a right hook as I swung his door open.

  “You got out,” he grunted, lowering his fists.

  My heart had leaped out of my throat and done a double somersault. I finally managed to swallow it again.

  “Yep,” I croaked.

  Rackham caught sight of Mina behind us in the corridor. “Want to lock her up?”

  I shook my head. “She’s helping us.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Your choice.”

  “She’s going to show us where Dr. Blood is. He’s been preparing to wake Putty’s egg.”

  “You trust her?”

  I looked at Mina standing there at the other side of the corridor, hunched up as though she wanted to disappear into the metal wall.

  “Yes,” I said reluctantly. “I do.” I wondered if I was making another big mistake.

  “Then let’s move out.” He turned a hard gaze on Mina. “If you try anything, anything at all, I will kill you.”

  There was one more cell in this block with its door barred. “Who’s in this one?” I asked Mina. “Is it Rothan Gal?”

  “It’s been locked as long as I’ve been here,” she said. “I haven’t seen inside.”

  I pulled back the bolts and peered in.

  “Careful,” Rackham warned.

  The glow-panel had failed completely in this cell, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, I saw a shape lying motionless against the far wall.

  I crossed and knelt down by the man. At first, I thought he was dead he was so motionless, but then he groaned and shifted, as though the light from the doorway was hurting him. He had an arm across his face, and his ragged robes obscured his features, but I could tell from his height that he was a native Martian.

  “Help me get him up.”

  Rackham took one arm while I took the other, and together we propped him against the wall. His head lolled loosely and his hair fell across his face, hiding him. Even sitting slumped he was almost as tall as me. Standing, he would have towered over even Rackham.