Old Mars

Kidd had originally thought that the secret terms of the king’s pardon compelled him to remain close to Sexton to prevent him, Kidd, from escaping. He now believed that the real reason for this requirement was so that Kidd could protect Sexton from being run down by a coach, falling into a canal, or simply forgetting to breathe.

“Please, Dr. Sexton,” Kidd called over his shoulder. “We are already late, and Mr. Yale is a busy man.”

“Just a moment, Mr. Kidd,” Sexton replied, stooping to inspect a weed that grew in the crack between two foundation stones of the building they were passing.

“Captain Kidd,” Kidd muttered under his breath. He no longer bothered correcting Sexton, but the omission still rankled, especially given how insistent Sexton was upon his own title of Doctor.

“This is the ship?” said Edmonds, Kidd’s old shipmate.

“Aye,” Kidd replied.

The grizzled old sailor stood silent for a long time, casting a practiced eye on the little ship as she bobbed in the Thames. Edmonds had responded eagerly enough to Kidd’s call for a quartermaster; they’d served together upon the Sainte Rose, and Kidd would trust him with his life.

“This’d be the strangest ship I’ve e’er served upon,” Edmonds said at last.

To that assertion, Kidd merely nodded. “I’ll not argue with that.”

The ship was tiny, barely seventy feet from stem to stern, and would carry a crew of only sixty men. But not only was she small, she seemed … spindly. Everything possible had been done to lighten her weight—bulkheads were screens woven from rattan rather than solid wooden panels, carved rails had been replaced by simple ropes, and canvas sheeting took the place of hatch covers. And Kidd knew of many other changes invisible to the eye, such as the deck planks planed down to half their usual thickness.

“But sweeps?” Edmonds asked, incredulous, pointing to the row of oarlocks on either side. “In this day and age?”

Kidd set his chin. “I’d not sail without them. Wind and waves cannot be trusted, but a man at an oar can always be counted on to pull a ship out of trouble. Sweeps have saved my skin more than once.”

He did not mention that the sweeps that would be fitted to those oarlocks were made to push air, not water. Sexton had designed them to Kidd’s specifications, but Kidd could but hope they would work as well as Sexton promised—along with every other one of the thousand untried, theoretical pieces that made up the strange little ship.

Edmonds left off his critical inspection of the ship and turned to Kidd with a questioning eye. “D’ye think she’ll really swim?”

Kidd nodded. “She’s a strange one, all right, but there’s a reason for it, and if you’ll sign on with me, you’ll learn what it is.”

“Aye, but do ye trust her?”

There came a long, considering pause then.

It didn’t really matter what Kidd thought. He was bound by the terms of his pardon to sail with Sexton, no matter the circumstances, and not to reveal the reason. But still, he felt he owed his old shipmate an honest answer.

Though many of Sexton’s designs seemed completely daft at first, the man had an enormous brain, and where Kidd could follow his logic, it seemed unassailable. And Kidd himself had supervised the ship’s construction and provisioning, using the best men and materials the king’s money could buy. If he could assemble a whole crew as good as Edmonds …

“I trust her well enough to sail in her myself,” Kidd said. “And it’ll be a long, long journey.” In miles, at least, he added silently, though Sexton theorized it would take but two months all told. There were no plans to land upon Mars, merely to survey it for a later expedition.

Edmonds pursed his lips a long moment, then with a firm nod of his chin he stuck out his hand. “If she’s good enough for Captain Kidd, she’s good enough for me.”

With genuine pleasure, Kidd took Edmonds’s hand and shook it. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Edmonds. Welcome aboard the Mars Adventure.”

Kidd shielded his eyes from the rising sun, trying to ignore the babble of the crowd on the wharf as he inspected the ship’s bizarre rigging.

He had warned the king that rumors would begin to spread once the crew was hired, and, indeed, in the last few weeks the press of the public for more information on the strange ship, with her secret mission and her infamous captain, had become intense. But Kidd kept a tight rein on his men and kept Sexton busy with his drafts and charts, so that little real news had gotten out. But when they’d begun to inflate the balloons after sunset last night, word had traveled fast and the rabble had begun to gather almost immediately.

Soon everyone would know the secret of the Mars Adventure.