Guns of Mars 20
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 6.2
The bounty man maintained his focus on the line of riders to make certain of their number. Three of them mounted on thoats with long lances held upright. Not enough for a war party or even a raid. Most likely they were on the hunt for meat, not men. That was not to say that they wouldn’t see him and his captive as easy prey. A thoat is a thoat, as is said, and the meat of a tame one is as sweet as one taken in the wild. They would kill him for the sport of it and dine on his mount.
Their column was moving on a bearing roughly parallel to the bounty man’s little caravan. The tharks might turn west or just as likely turn east bringing them on an intersecting course with his own.
He spurred his mount ahead, pulling taut the lead line to the pack animal trotting behind. He caught up with his prisoner on a lee side of the mound of rocks.
“We need to go to ground,” he said to Kal Keddaq. “There’s a thark hunting party off to our right.”
Kal turned in his saddle and quickly spotted the mounted trio far off.
“And before you get any wild ideas,” the bounty man said as he secured the pack thoat’s lead line to a ring on Kal’s saddle. “They’re as likely as me to take your head back to your clan and claim the reward.”
“And where will we go to ground, little man?” Kal snarled.
The ridge they were on was a knife’s edge falling away either side into deep fissures, their bottomless depth hidden in shadow.
“Come on,” the bounty man said and rode past the thark along the narrow rim to take the lead.
They moved at a steady pace, but not too swiftly so as not to raise any dust or draw more attention to their movement. The slim ridgeline came to an end where it joined other elevated strips of rock to form a gradually descending decline toward the base of a range of low hills. They rode down the slope and were momentarily concealed by the landscape. The bounty man kicked his heels to the flanks of his thoat, goading it into a run which the other mounts joined.
As they neared the foot of the slope, they could see unnatural, man-made shapes in the landscape. There were the ruins of buildings built into the face of the escarpment, roofless structures with uneven lines worn away by winds and time. They were unadorned structures, functional rather than decorative and lacked the artistry and charm of the great buildings of places like the twin cities of Helium. This was a place of industry with windowless edifices along either side of a ramp that descended down the sloping plane toward a series of great circular openings, twenty of more in number, carved from the living granite into the base of a cliff.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
