Guns of Mars 40
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 11.1
The bounty man watched the chase, concealed behind the carcass of his dead mount. He saw the great beast lope into the light to snatch up the bawling pack thoat in its champing jaws. The animal’s feet left the ground with a violent jerk as it was taken up in the fanged mouth. The skins strapped to the pack frame exploded under that awful pressure sending a cloud of the precious water to wash over the orluk’s snout. The weight of the thoat and its burden did nothing to slow the massive predator’s charge. The orluk, still moving at speed, raised its broad head and shook it once, twice and the thoat sagged to lay unmoving in its jaws.
The orluk was as impressive an animal as it was terrifying. Eight legs propelled a long muscular body of mottled gray flesh beneath a segmented shell of ebon carapace. A spiked tail was extended behind it as it ran. Its head was broad and flat, attached without a visible neck to its torso and dominated by a horrible mouth that opened gate-like to expose the hundreds of wicked teeth that filled it end to end. The oddest feature, to the bounty man’s mind, was a fringe of yellow hair or fine pin feathers that ran like a beard all along its lower jaw.
The beast finally released its bite and the thoat fell tumbling to the dust, spine snapped in two, to be left in the wake of the orluk’s attack. Unburdened now, the orluk increased its velocity toward the fleeing thark.
The man peered through the cloud of red dust raised by the orluk’s advance. It had turned away now and was thundering after other quarry. The thark was racing for the western wall, toward the scree covered slope that banked up along the crater’s edge. Kal rode full out, standing in the stirrups and whipping his mount with the flat of his saber. The orluk seemed to move at an easy gallop but its greater strides would soon catch it up to the thark.
That was the end of their partnership, the man decided. He shouldered the water skin, his saddle bag and, rifle in hand, trotted toward the shear face of the eastern wall.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
