Read Under the Moons of Mars Online
Authors: John Joseph Adams
“You are relying on this bandit scum to act honorably,” Tars Sojat grumbled a xat later.
“No, I am merely hoping that they are,” Jalvar said. “Also that when they learn the truth they will find it too unsatisfying to merely shoot us. They will want to feel us die upon their steel.”
“Or possibly take us prisoner and torture us for a cycle or so,” Sojat said with gloomy relish; Tharks were perhaps a little less given to that themselves these days, but for most Green Men torturing prisoners was one of life’s main amusements. “Our rapid healing would give them
weeks
of laughter.”
Ras Thavas’s quarters were well-appointed; there were half a dozen rooms, besides the kitchens and servant’s quarters, all carved from the living rock and the walls covered in rich hangings, where they weren’t a scatter of books and instruments. Thavas swore that his slaves were loyal; two of them were keeping watch on the window. This entranceway led to doors made of double-leaved skeel.
“They do not need me anymore,” Ras Thavas said. “They will not attempt to break down the doors, they will merely use an explosive device. What a tragedy, if my intellect were lost to Barsoom!”
Ras Thavas had already lived more than a thousand years; he remembered the launching of the first flier. His current body was not the one which had broken his egg so long ago, though it was distinctly odd to think of the Master Mind of Mars as a merry, playful hatchling in any case.
“So,” Jalvar said, laying his hand on the locking device. “We must persuade them otherwise.”
Jalvar thrust the door open and ducked. Two bullets slammed into the wood, splintering it but not penetrating; skeel was
hard
. Then he thrust out his hand from behind the protection, with his sword in it.
Sivas stood at the head of his men. “Gor Kova, you calot! How much did the Heliumites pay you?” he growled.
Nobody violated the Barsoomian honor code by shooting down a man armed with a sword; he had earned that much, at least for a moment, by showing himself where they
could
shoot him down.
“Nothing,” he replied proudly. “My name is not Gor Kova, any more than you were called Dur Sivas by your parents. I am Jalvar Pan, son of Llana of Gathol and Pan Dan Chee the Orovar, a Prince of Gathol and great-grandson of John Carter, Warlord of Mars!”
A howl of rage went up from the assembled insurgents; he thought he saw looks of alarm exchanged farther back, among the panthans. His companion stuck his head around the door and leered, an alarmingly effective expression for a Green Man with shining white tusks and red-pupiled eyes.
“And I am Tars Sojat of the Thark horde, grandson of Tars Tarkas, destroyer of Zodanga, you ruin-haunting, incubator-destroying ulsios,” he added. “Do you have any families here I might slaughter after we kill you all?”
Sivas’s face lost its usual cunning. Instead it twisted in a scream of unbearable hatred. He bounded up the stairs with his longsword in his hand.
“For Zodanga! Death to them! Death,
death!
” he screamed.
Steel clashed; there was only room for one, and no room for fancy footwork at all. Jalvar and Sivas stood within arm’s reach of each other, Sivas on the lower step, and point and edge wove a deadly tapestry between them. Sivas was confident as well as mad with rage; he had
beaten Jalvar nine times in ten when they sparred.
Within seconds both men were bleeding from minor wounds. Sivas’s men raved behind him, giving him no room to retreat—not that he had shown the slightest desire to do so.
Jalvar used a daringly minimal parry that rang the Zodangan’s sword upward just a hair from the line of its thrust and counterthrust in turn.
The narrow point speared through Dur Sivas’s eye and stopped only when it punched into the rear of his skull; even the Master Mind’s perfectly engineered hormad body could do nothing to save him from such a blow.
I
let
you win those sparring matches,
Jalvar thought.
Farewell, Dur Sivas. You were a brave man, if an evil one, and you deserved a warrior’s death.
Jalvar raised his sword in salute and then stood, motionless except for a slight fighting smile, blood dripping from his blade and arm as the corpse of their leader tumbled backward.
There was a moment of silence, and then a scream from below: “The Heliumites! The warlord’s fleet!
John Carter is come!
”
The air split with the rumble of bombs and the whirring of the great propellers of the battleships of Helium.
J
alvar Pan woke eagerly, even when the grogginess of cold sleep still held his mind a little. The long voyage between the worlds was over, and soon he would be the first Barsoomian—or mostly Barsoomian—ever to set foot on the soil of Jasoom, of Earth.
“Prince Jalvar, you must come to the bridge immediately,” Tars Sojat said.
He nodded; whatever he needed to know would be best seen there. The corridors were more active than he had seen them since they rose from the shipyard at Helium; the whole crew would be awake now, of course. More sober looks greeted him on the bridge; even so, for a moment he lost himself in the sight of Jasoom turning like a great blue-and-white shield through the viewports that wrapped around half of the semicircular compartment. Then he swung himself into the commander’s chair. A circular screen lit, and a familiar Jasoomian face confronted him.
“Admiral Julian!” Jalvar said.
The face of the commander of the Peace Fleet of the Anglo-American Co-dominium was that of a man in his middle years by the fleeting standards of Earth, hard and competent, but there was a haunted look to his eyes. The bustle of a warship’s bridge showed behind him, and on a bulkhead two crossed flags, one starry, the other made up of overlapping crosses.
“Prince Jalvar. I wish I could greet you in the name of the peoples of Earth, but instead I must warn you to turn back.”
“We cannot,” Jalvar Pan said. “We need to recharge our tanks of the Ninth Ray; the reserve is not enough to allow us to return to Barsoom.”
Julian’s face grew still more grim. “Earth is under attack.”
“The whole of Jasoom? But under attack from where—ah!”
Jalvar had studied Jasoom closely, of course. Its single huge moon was hollow, and inhabited by several intelligent species, one of them very similar to Barsoomian and Jasoomian humans. For that matter, Barsoom’s main moon,
Thuvia, was also peopled; John Carter had traveled there.
And it was on Jasoom’s moon—Luna, they call it—that the ship called the
Barsoom
that they tried to send to us was wrecked. Deliberately wrecked; but I thought that the man who did so perished there!
Julian followed his swift thoughts. “The traitor Orthis has not wasted the last twenty years; and he was always a brilliant engineer. Mad with a spirit of revenge, he has armed the inhabitants of the hollow interior of our moon, the savage Kalkars and Va-gas, and a great fleet has attacked us in the past few days. Even now transports are landing millions of them, burning and killing and destroying, and Orthis’s perverted genius has equipped them with terrible weapons. Earth is helpless before them; this fleet is its only armed force, and it is intended to put down bandits, not fight wars. We have been too long at peace. I blame myself for leaving Orthis alive when the
Barsoom
left the moon to return to Earth.”
“Blame those leaders who would not let you build more ships of space,” Jalvar said.
“I do, prince,” Julian said, and smiled with a warrior’s grim cheer. “But they are mostly dead now, and those who aren’t will be shortly.”
Jalvar nodded respectfully. “I would join your fight,” he said. “But the
Jasoom
is an exploratory vessel, not a warship. We have only a few light guns and torpedoes.”
“I thank you for your offer. I would advise you to return to Mars immediately, but . . .”
But we need to refurbish, resupply, and take on more Ninth Ray. We were counting on the aid of Earth’s shipyards and factories. Now . . .
“I can only advise you to make for the estate of an old friend of the family,” Julian said.
He transmitted coordinates in the Earthly system of longitude and latitude, then bade a curt goodbye; Jalvar
could hear him beginning to give orders even as the screen blanked.
“Well, it seems we’ll be landing in the middle of a war,” Jalvar said.
Tars Sojat patted his sword-hilt and barked the cruel laughter of the Green hordes.
“What a pity! Who is this friend that Jalvar sends us to?”
“I know the name,” Jalvar said. “John Carter told me of him; the kinsman of the warlord’s here on Jasoom who wrote the tale of his adventures on Barsoom, and who he visited, also told this man’s story.
Burroughs
, was that the name? His was a strange tale—he was raised in the wilderness, by creatures not unlike our great white apes—and the man is a mighty warrior.”
Tars Sojat frowned. “Are not these Jasoomians short-lived? That was several of their lifetimes ago.”
“Most of them are. Not all. John Carter is one, and evidently this man is another. He has many names.
Tarzan
is one of them.”
T
he
Jasoom
’s great length pressed its landing struts into the tawny grass of the pasture; it had crushed a few odd-looking flat-topped trees. Not far away was a lake of water confined by a dam, bordered with more trees. A neat village of cottages lay beyond it, and beyond that a sprawling red-tiled mansion surrounded by very beautiful gardens, obviously the estate of a nobleman despite all the differences of detail. Surrounding all were tilled fields of
unfamiliar crops, and others where odd-looking four-limbed beasts grazed. It was a lush landscape by Barsoomian standards, and not far distant loomed a primeval forest such as the red planet had not known for over a million years.
Only in the Valley Dor, at the end of the River Iss, is there anything like this. Yet their Earth has so much of it!
Prince Jalvar Pan felt the heavy tug of Jasoom’s gravity holding him as he strode down the landing ramp, but his hormad body made nothing of it—he was as nimble now as he had been in his normal existence on Barsoom.
The air was thicker than normal, but not impossibly so—this was a high plateau, six thousand sofads above the level of Jasoom’s impossibly abundant seas. It smelled pleasantly of growth and greenness, and a little less so of burning from the wrecked Kalkar battleship that burned some distance to the westward, sending a plume of black smoke into the odd blue sky.
“Kaor!” Jalvar said to the master of the estate.
“Welcome,” the man said in English. Jalvar spoke it himself, and all the
Jasoom
’s crew had learned a fair amount.
“And thank you of disposing of
that
,” the man said, nodding toward the smoke-plume.
“They did not anticipate our shielded torpedoes,” Jalvar said. “The Flying Death, we call it; invented by Phor Tak of Jahar. Not sporting, but they fired on us without warning.”
“The Kalkars are dull-witted enough. But that does not matter; there are more than enough of them, well-armed, and we have little to resist them with. Nairobi has already fallen, I hear.”
The man spoke sternly, but without fear. He was Jalvar’s height, six foot two in the Earthly measurement system. Apart from that he looked not unlike John Carter, with dark hair—worn to the shoulders of his Jasoomian garments—and gray eyes. A great scar crossed his forehead, and others showed on
his face and hands; he smiled slightly as he greeted Tars Sojat with calm friendliness, weird though the Green Man must appear to an Earthling. His grip was strong and precisely judged, and he moved like a hunting banth.
This is a warrior,
Jalvar decided.
Despite what Admiral Julian has said of Earth’s decadence.
Several young men of the same stamp stood behind the man, and their women; one was strikingly lovely, with long blond hair, but cradled a rifle with casual ease. The troop behind them all looked formidable as well, and half-familiar to Barsoomian eyes. They were black of skin and sharply handsome of feature like the First Born nation of Barsoom, and wearing little but loincloths and feather headdresses that made them seem more homelike still. They were heavily armed as well, with long spears as well as firearms, and they looked at the Barsoomians and their great ship with alert interest.
“My Waziri warriors,” the Earthman confirmed, indicating them. “I have kept up the old ways with them, and the authorities winked at it, since I am their chief and responsible for public order in this district. Now that may save us, or at least let us sell our lives dearly.”
Jalvar nodded. “I and my crew are at your disposal. The
Jasoom
cannot leave atmosphere again without extensive refitting, but we can sail anywhere on this world, if you know of a place of refuge. We can take several hundred, at a pinch, Lord . . .”
“Forgive me, Prince Jalvar,” the man said. “I am John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. My wife, Lady Jane, my son, Korak . . . there will be time later, I hope.”
A black warrior came up, trotting easily despite the sweat that poured from his face.
“Tarzan!”
he said, addressing the tall gray-eyed man, and then more in a language that Jalvar had not studied.