Read Under the Moons of Mars Online
Authors: John Joseph Adams
They turned, and then the earth shook. Jalvar lurched forward with a stifled yell, caching his shoulder a painful thump against a metal bracket in the stone wall. Sound roared past, so loud he felt it as a thudding in his chest rather than a sound. Dust was all around them, smoking out of the junctions in the ancient stone, chokingly thick. Sojat had braced himself against the tunnel walls with all six of his limbs. Jalvar picked himself up and shook his head, wiping blood away from his nose and mouth with the back of his hand.
Sivas switched on a personal light; it underlit his face in a way that made it even more sinister than the blood, scars, and evil smile would have done otherwise.
“This is safe now,” he said, waving the hand-light. “Come! We need not run, but should not waste time either. The Watch-calots will be out in force.”
“What happened?”
“That battleship we found had full racks. That was a two-thousand pound flier bomb, hooked to a timing device. I activated it as we fled. The Heliumites manufacture good explosives; it was still as potent as the day the casing was filled.”
Jalvar flushed and clapped his hand to his sword-hilt. A two-thousand-pounder would have obliterated half the block.
“What of the woman?” he growled.
Sivas turned and stared at him. “My daughter was a Zodangan patriot too. And had much to avenge. Come, there is a safe passage to a flier landing stage not far from here. You two are the last recruits we need.”
“A
lready I feel several varieties of mold and fungus growing upon me,” Tars Sojat said, looking down past the rail of the
Air Princess
.
The Tonoolian Marshes stretched beneath them, livid green only slightly tinted with ochre. Jalvar pitched his voice to be inaudible beyond his friend’s ears, which was easy enough here at the stern of the flier with the whirr of the propellers beneath them:
“The question is, does Ras Thavas lair here, and has he gone back to his old tricks?”
“Does the calot not return to its regurgitations?” Tars Sojat said. “More to the point,
who are those men riding malagors toward us
?”
Green Men had better eyesight—as one might expect, given the size and placement of their eyes. He pointed over the stern rail. Jalvar swore and swung up his optic.
“Sivas!” he shouted over his shoulder, pitching his voice to cut through the thrum of cloven air. “Malagors to the rear!”
The
Air Princess
was a small vessel only about a hundred sofads long, ex-military of some sort, perhaps a light transport or patroler, and Jalvar thought it had been Heliumitic once. The thirty men aboard were far more crew than needed to fly it, and left everyone a little crowded. Heads turned, and curses raged as the giant malagor birds and their riders came into view. They were high in the west, diving out of the sun on the reverse of the flier’s eastward course;
there was little chance of dodging them, the more so as the
Air Princess
was old and could make only about half the speed of modern craft.
“I see them,” the Zodangan called. “Battle stations!”
Men ran to the guns; the ship had bow and stern chasers in open mounts with shields, and four lighter rapid-fire pieces with a pair to each side. All of the gun crews were Sivas’s Zodangans, not the score of panthans who made up the rest of the ship’s complement, or cargo. Jalvar felt useless, but underneath it was relief that he need not kill men doing their duty in the air patrols the warlord had established in this lawless region.
Others of the crew were handing out rifles, but the chance of hitting a man riding a malagor, or the giant bird itself, were very low. Tars Sojat felt no such compunctions, or limitations.
“What use is this toy?” he said throwing the weapon aside—and over the rail—in disgust. “You Red slugs can’t shoot, and even if you could, this piece of zitidar excrement would be a waste of skill. Get me a real rifle!”
One of the Zodangans looked questioningly at Sivas, and the commander tossed his head impatiently as he worked the helm and controls. The flier came about and accelerated as the man dashed down a companionway into the shallow hull of the flier.
Just then the bow-chaser fired with a sharp
crack
and a flash of light. The tube of the cannon recoiled with a smooth yielding stroke against the hydraulic compensators, and the breech opened with a clang. Far off amid the approaching riding-birds a tiny flick of white light and puff of smoke showed where the radium contents of the shell exploded, driving fragments of aluminum steel into the air in a sphere about it.
Useless
, Jalvar thought.
You could hit a
flier
at that range, perhaps, but Malagors? Only by accident.
The rest were swinging wide, preparing to come alongside. The flier’s crew were firing their rifles now, to as little effect as Jalvar had expected; he clipped his to a ring in the rail and drew his longsword instead.
Then the crewman came back up the stairway from the interior, carrying a rifle—but one such as the Green Men used, twelve feet long and fitted with a complex wireless sight, with a drum containing a hundred rounds of explosive bullets.
The red iris of Sojat’s eyes glinted. “A Thark rifle,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“Dead Thark,” the Zodangan grunted.
“They are dirty ulsios and lick the feet of Helium,” Sojat said, checking the action. “But they make good weapons.”
He waited a moment with the long rifle in his upper pair of hands, showing the bases of his tusks in a smile as the crew of the
Air Princess
gradually ceased their futile efforts. Then he threw it to his shoulder and began firing, a steady metronomic
crack . . . crack . . . crack
as the long slender barrel made its minute adjustments.
Not every round struck; the deck of the flier was moving, after all, and Tars Sojat was using an unfamiliar weapon that had probably lain untouched for years or decades. But every second or third shot did find its mark; the Green hordes had been known to bring down battleships that unwisely
strayed into rifle range. The long, cruelly beaked heads of the malagors began to explode as the bullets struck and the sun reached the radium bursting charges of the projectiles. One after another fluttered helplessly down toward the surface of the marsh . . . and the hungry mouths that waited below it.
“Brave men,” Jalvar said, as the last of them burst through the wall of bullets and swept down on the flier’s deck.
“Death to the Heliumites!” a Zodangan snarled; in fact the men were local auxiliaries, but he wasn’t inclined to fine distinctions.
There was a
boom
as a malagor braked itself by slapping its huge wings forward against the air. Jalvar dodged beneath the strike of the hooked beak and slashed, feeling muscle and bone part beneath his keen blade; the bird was too big and too tenacious of life to risk a thrust. The acrid scent of blood filled the air as its head fell to one side, three-quarters cut through. For a moment its thrashing was nearly as dangerous as the living thing had been, and then it toppled over the side to fall down through the air like a whirling leaf.
The rider freed his harness from the saddle snaps and jumped free at the last moment. Two panthans sprang toward him, but Jalvar shouted them back: “He is mine!”
A smile lit the face of the rider. “You are an honorable man,” he said, panting. “It will be a pity to kill you.”
With the last word he launched himself behind his point in a running thrust. Jalvar beat it aside and cut at his leg as he passed. That clashed on a parry, and then they were face-to-face, blades weaving a net of steel between them. It ended in seconds, as such affairs usually did. The patroller’s foot slipped on the malagor blood that coated the worn skeel planks of the deck, and he was off balance for an instant.
Jalvar’s blade snapped out and ripped into his forearm. The other man’s blade clanged to the deck.
“Surrender!” Jalvar said, point to throat. “And your life will be spared.”
“Never!” the man said. “You bandits will all die, and soon!”
He turned on the last word and dove over the rail. Jalvar winced, but one of the Zodangans laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. Sivas called from the controls: “Good sword! And your Green friend is a valuable man to have in a fight as well. You are worth your pay and loyal to your oaths, panthans!”
The
Air Princess
curved downward under his hands, toward a low ridge of dark rock that rose out of the marshes. The hum of the propellers sank to a low throbbing moan as the ship slowed and sank almost to the green-scummed surface of the swamp, the tips of its rudders making little wakes in the thick liquid and letting off a noxious smell of decaying vegetation. The smell and the thick wetness of the air were strange and disagreeable.
The cliff loomed closer, closer . . .
And then a section of it vanished. Jalvar blinked; one instant it was pitted, weathered rock much like that to either side—
Wait,
the Gatholite prince thought.
It is
identical
to the rock to the right there. A false image. They indeed have some capable scientist laboring for them!
Now there was a large cave. The flier eased its way inside, and there was a moment of darkness as the shield blinked back into existence behind them. Then radium lights shone, sparkling on jewel-like flecks in the rock. Within there was a huge arched ceiling of natural rock, and a rank-smelling lake beneath it; to either side the hand of man showed, in great docks and basins that had probably stood ready since this was the last shore of one of Barsoom’s dying seas. Only a few of them were occupied, by a curious collection of fliers.
Apart from a few one-man scouts, the fliers all looked to be old—well maintained, but nothing that had come out of the shipyards since Llana of Gathol was young.
Still, this is a dangerous little fleet,
he thought.
Enough to carry several thousand men; enough for a damaging raid.
Ruthless men could do appalling harm with even a few cruisers, if they did not care where their bombs landed. The Zodangan conspirators had shown that in their own city. How much more heedless would they be among their enemies?
Sivas came down to stand beside him and Tars Sojat in the bows. “Soon you will see all the secrets of the cause in which you have enlisted,” he said.
“Is that wise?” Jalvar said; a panthan would ask.
“Very,” Sivas said.
His hands touched the shoulders of the two friends. There was a slight sting. Blackness fell.
Jalvar woke and turned his head; it was the only part of his body not strapped down to the cold surface of a marble slab. His eyes tracked across an arched ceiling carved from rock, past enigmatic machines and devices and shelves loaded with instruments and bottles of chemicals that gave the air a sharp metallic scent that crinkled his nostrils.
He found himself looking at his own body on a wheeled metal gurney only an arm’s-length away. The top of his head was covered in bandages, and a monster bent over it.
Then the monster turned its head, and as real wakefulness returned, Jalvar saw that it was only a man; a young-looking man, as such things went on Barsoom, with a complex apparatus of lenses worn over his eyes that made his skull seem grotesquely large for a moment. Beneath it was a strikingly handsome face, and below that was a Red Man’s body, in superb condition but a little gaunt.
The Master Mind of Mars was at his side in an instant, a hand over his mouth.
“You do not know me, Prince of Gathol!” Ras Thavas hissed, looking over his shoulder. “For your life you do not know me, before these madmen!” Then, louder: “This one is ready! Remove the old body for storage!”
Slaves came and wheeled Jalvar’s body—
my body!
Jalvar thought with horror—away.
Sivas came into view, standing at the base of the table. Jalvar did not recognize him at first; the facial scar was missing, and the man’s skin was smooth and unmarked. Barsoomians did not show age until they reached nearly the end of their thousand-year span, but they did accumulate damage. A warrior could become more scar than skin, in time.
Something had removed Sivas’s scars. Jalvar looked down frantically; by craning his neck he could see his left hand. The fingers moved when he commanded them, everything seemed normal . . . except that the little divot that a shortsword had taken out of his second fingertip was gone. Sheer willpower forced back a scream, and Sivas nodded respectfully.
“Do not worry, Gor Kova,” he said. “Already you show less fear than most who are surprised so.”
It took an instant for Jalvar to remember his own alias; fortunately the stare of horror at his hand covered the lapse.
“Do not
worry
?” he said, with a rage that was entirely believable because it was quite genuine.
“Nothing has been done to you that has not been done to me also,” he said. “To me and my men.”
“You
chose
this! I did not!”