Guns of Mars 45
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 12.1
The bounty man’s final leap up the canal wall was a long one. Ten or more times greater than his own height. He cleared the lip of the great trench with only inches to spare and rolled tumbling to the dust, the carbine and precious waterskin clutched tight to his chest, the saddle bag firmly looped through his leather harness.
Rising to one knee, he looked down to the canal floor. The thark had scrambled to the top of a broken outcropping with the orluk lurking beneath. Their collaboration was fully severed now. All the man could feel was a sense of relief. He’d no longer have to worry about the knife in the back that would have inevitably come. The thark’s word to him held no more worth than his own vow to the thark. Theirs was a partnership of convenience. And the orluk’s arrival neatly ended even that.
He stood looking out over the vista that lay spread out to the east. The sun was well down behind him, its last light falling on a low range to make a jagged crimson line against the darkening sky.
By his rough reckoning the city of Yttrium lay somewhere to the southeast on the other side of the spine of peaks twenty or more haads distant. On foot, he would not reach the base of those crags before nightfall. Best to march as far as he could and find what shelter there might be ahead. In the morning, a day’s hard hike should take him to the foothills of the range. There he’d search for a pass that would bring him to the city.
As he set out, he could hear the crack of pistol shots echoing up from the canyon floor. For all the good it’ll do the big green bastard, he thought.
Night closed in and he found a shallow depression where he made camp under a rocky outcropping. It was a cold camp and a hungry one. But he had water, and he was out of the wind. He regretted leaving his ape fur behind in his haste. Though the second’s hesitation it would have taken to retrieve it might have seen him food for the orluk.
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