Under the Moons of Mars (10 page)

In
A Princess of Mars
, John Carter escapes the Green Men of the Warhoon horde only to find himself lost and starving in the desert. He seeks aid at a giant building, four miles square and two hundred feet high, and is allowed inside by a wizened old man. Carter is able to read the man’s mind, though the man has no inkling of this. The man tells Carter that the building is an atmosphere plant that supplies air to all of Barsoom, and that the doors can be opened only through the use of a secret code, and that this code is revealed to only two men on Barsoom at any given time. At this point Carter reads the man’s mind and learns the code. As the two of them say good night, Carter again reads the man’s mind and learns that the man intends to murder him in his sleep, since the man now suspects that Carter has learned too much. Carter escapes the building, and much later, when the atmosphere plant fails, he’s able to use his knowledge of the secret code to spring the doors and save all of Barsoom. Our next tale shows us this key event in Barsoomian history from an entirely different point of view—that of a very unusual and talented young member of the Warhoon.

“G
et up!” snarled three-armed Gar Kofan, silhouetted against the light of Barsoom’s two moons.

Kaz slowly rose, brushing sand off his gun belt. “It is foolish to stand when someone is shooting at you,” he said sullenly.

“They weren’t shooting
at
you,” Gar Kofan said, cuffing him lightly on the side of the head. “It was a warning shot. We’ve found the Jedwar’s party.”

Kaz looked back toward their wagon. He’d rather be back inside, poring over the insides of an electric range finder.

His people, the Warhoons, were unpredictable and violent, Kaz had always felt. Even more violent than their mortal enemies, the Tharks. They’d spent the last few days watching men fight to the death in the arena in the ruins of what had once been some glorious city. And now they were moving across the wastes once more, looking for new victims and plunder.

Kaz hated this. He’d rather be back in Warhoon.

He’d rather be fixing things.

Or yell at you for ducking when bullets flew.

They could cuff him as much as they wanted, or call him coward. He wasn’t about to stand still and be shot.

Any other young runt of a Warhoon with a single name like Kaz would have been killed long ago for thinking this way. But unlike any of his kind, Kaz could fix things—weapons in particular—and so he was tolerated by his tribe.

But more importantly, he was tolerated by
Gar Kofan
.

Gar Kofan did that mostly because he couldn’t give up his only apprentice. Gar Kofan was old, and one of his eyes was milky white and blind, from an old duel. He stood hunched over, and he was missing an entire arm, leaving him with only three. His remaining hands now shook whenever he tried to fix small machines, and it was difficult for him to see small things, even when they were right in front of him.

Kaz knew that Gar Kofan needed him more than he needed Gar Kofan. Gar Kofan was really a warrior, not a tinker, and the machines often frustrated and stumped him and left him cursing and throwing them against the wall. Kaz was the far better tinker, because he understood the machines.

With Gar Kofan’s past reputation as a fighter and his skill (he had taken the name of Kofan in the usual manner: by killing a Kofan Jedwar), they had built a good life in Warhoon. And so, although Gar Kofan had only three arms and was going blind, Gar Kofan would cheerfully kill anyone who threatened Kaz.

Gar Kofan had turned to tinkering with machines and fixing the electric range finders on rifles after he’d lost his arm. He had taught Kaz all he knew, since the day two years ago when he found Kaz loitering around his wagon and asking questions about how everything worked.

Soon Kaz had gained a spot in the back of the wagon to sleep on, a knife and pistol of his own, and food.

And life was . . . acceptable, Kaz thought.

At least when people weren’t shooting at him.

The Jedwar, Aav Kanan, had designs on becoming a jed, if possible. He was always roaming the wastes, looking for new conquests, or new ways to raise his stature. One day, everyone knew, Aav Kanan would challenge a jed and kill him to take his position.

“Gar Kofan?” Kaz asked, as he followed behind. “Aav Kanan never comes out here to the northwest. It’s filled with Zodangan or Helium scouts who would strike at us from the air.”

Gar Kofan glanced up. “Then there must be something important enough to bring him out here.”

And that was all he would say about that.

In the rocks among an outcropping nearby, a small council had gathered around Aav Kanan, who gestured at them to approach. “Hurry up, cripple,” he snarled at Gar Kofan. “We don’t have much time before the attack.”

Kaz climbed up the ridge behind Gar Kofan and Aav Kanan, struggling to keep up. Even infirm and half blind, Gar Kofan’s days as a warrior left him energetic and strong enough to outpace him. When Kaz managed to catch up, Aav Kanan was pointing in the distance at a canal and the high trees that ran along its sides.

And at the massive building that squatted there.

Two hundred feet high and dominating the landscape for miles, it was a building that brought a smile to Kaz’s lips. Unlike the city of Warhoon—stripped down, crumbling, reused by a people who had no idea how it had even been built—this building gleamed with purpose. It had been built and it had been maintained, and whoever
had
built it . . . their craft, their
purpose
seemed to call out to Kaz.

They all stared for a long, silent moment.

“There was only one doorway in, that I can perceive,” Aav Kanan said mildly, breaking the silence.

“Do you want us to try and tinker the doorway open?” Gar Kofan asked.

Kaz saw straightaway this was not Aav Kanan’s intent. Not if he was planning to attack so soon.

“I want you to set the detonator for a very large explosion that will disable the doors,” Aav Kanan said. “You will throw it inside that structure when the doors open. There is a guard or a keeper, who comes out once in a great while. The next time he does, we will be nearby to throw the bomb inside, thus wrecking the door’s closing mechanism, and we will storm it and take our plunder and be gone before the next flier comes overhead. The Red warriors might be able to fly, but their stupidity is that they keep regular schedules.”

Gar Kofan snorted, along with all the other warriors, but Kaz remained silent. Schedules, he thought, were perfectly sensible things. He had to admit, however, if you were guarding something valuable, it was foolish to be predictable.

The Red warriors—if indeed they had built this great building—had assumed the impenetrable walls were all the protection they needed. The flier patrols were an afterthought.

One the Warhoons would exploit.

Back in the wagon, Gar Kofan and Kaz set to building a powerful explosive and fitting a timer to it, while Aav Kanan paced around muttering about time.

If time was of such essence, Kaz thought, then maybe Aav Kanan shouldn’t have sent for them at the last minute.

But it was not in the nature of Warhoons to plan too far ahead.

A strange warrior once fought a great fight in the arena when Kaz was just out of the egg. Kaz thought about him often, and was thinking about him as he worked on the bomb. The man had been neither Green nor Red, but almost colorless. Someone had said the stranger called himself Jan Kahrtr, an odd enough sounding name.

Normally Kaz paid no attention to the bloodshed out in the arena. He had too many rifles to fix. But seeing this oddly colored stranger, who must have traveled from some far corner of Barsoom, had set Kaz’s imagination ablaze. How big was Barsoom? What other people roamed its surface, traversed the great canals that stretched forever over the horizon?

What other great, ruined cities lay littered under the two moons? And what secrets might they give Kaz?

He thought about that a lot.

It was a shame the Kahrtr man had died from the blade of a Zodangan. Kaz had hoped the man might live, so that he could visit his cell and ask him where he came from.

There was a rumor that Kahrtr was now a Prince of Helium, and had been the one who led the Thark attack on the Zodangans, but who knew if that was true?

The bomb was crudely made of Zodangan explosives, probably stolen by Tharks and traded northward. Kaz always questioned anyone who traded things to him, trying to ascertain where they came from. It was a shame, he thought, that Warhoon couldn’t make explosives of their own. They could use them to divert canals, blow open ancient tunnels, and explore old ruins, or just help fight enemy clans . . . but Warhoons were uninterested in science and building things. So there was no chance of it.

Aav Kanan’s warrior slowly crawled along the ground and hid behind a bush. And waited.

And waited.

The night wore on, and Kaz found himself wanting to drift off and sleep. But he wanted to see what was coming, and no one had cuffed him and ordered him back to the wagon, so he forced himself to stay alert.

And then it happened: A crack of light broke out from a cut in the wall as a door slowly opened. In the light, a frail, old Red warrior slowly walked out. He looked up at the moons and bowed to them, and then took in a deep breath of air with what looked like great satisfaction.

The moment the Red turned his back, the hiding warrior sprinted forward. As he threw the bomb, the old man half-turned, saw him, and moved to run back inside.

That was when a rope Kaz hadn’t noticed on the ground leapt up, the noose catching the old man by the foot. On the other end of the rope, Warhoon warriors pulled quickly and dragged the old man away from the building.

Nothing happened for a long moment. Then, just as Aav Kanan turned toward Kaz, fury on his face, a distant thud indicated that it had worked. A faint trickle of smoke leaked out from around the door, and the Warhoons cheered.

But that cheer died soon enough as they approached the door and tried to force it open.

Kaz swallowed nervously. This was not good.

The old man on the ground laughed. “There is no explosion on Barsoom that could break that door, or even those walls. You fools.”

Aav Kanan’s attention flicked away from Kaz, and Kaz felt a surge of relief. Very carefully, and so as not to draw attention, he stepped back as Aav Kanan stalked over to the old man.

“How do we get it inside?” Aav Kanan demanded.

“You can’t,” was the reply. “I’m the keeper of the plant, and I will not let the likes of you in.” He spat.

Aav Kanan hit him, and Kaz heard the man’s brittle old ribs crack. He screamed in pain. They always did. But Aav Kanan was just getting started.

The beating continued, and Kaz wondered how the old man was able to take so much of it.

“What is inside?” Aav Kanan finally asked, bent close to the old man’s crumpled face.

“The most precious thing you can imagine,” the keeper of the complex said. And he laughed.

Aav Kanan snarled and struck him with a tremendous punch to the side of his head. The old man lay still on the ground.

The warriors left him there and returned to the door. But nothing would budge it.