Guns of Mars 46
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 12.2
The morning found him stiff and shaking. He was up and moving as the first light turned the brow of the mountains to a black streak across the horizon. The sun warmed him and gave him strength. By the tail end of the day he reached a road that ran north to south following the foot of the low mesa that the mountain range sat upon.
He’d have come to the road sooner but had been forced to lay up in a dry wash while a pride of banths made their way across the barrens. It was fortunate that he’d spotted them before they spotted him. The feline monstrosities, nearly twenty by his count, two males, six females and brood of young cubs, took their time crossing his path. Not that they had to hurry as they were the apex predator of the Barsoomian deserts. He had to lay for what seemed an eternity to allow for the pride to troop away over the horizon and out of sight.
The dark closed in again and he made shelter above the roadway in a narrow fissure cleaved into the face of the escarpment. He risked a lichen fire to warm him, banking it with stone to conceal its glow. Any smoke that rose through the roof of his refuge would be lost in the dust driven in by night winds from the north.
At dawn he awoke to a snarling belly and made his way out onto the roadway. It wasn’t much, a remnant of what was probably a fine highway ages before. Now it was little more than a rough track at its center, the edges of the road eaten away by subsidence or swallowed up by sand. The great granite paving stones, which measured the length of a tall man, were worn smooth by the passage of countless thoats and the iron wheels of great caravans over the millennia. The stones of the road had been quarried from the canal itself, carried here by the power of the 8th ray or by the labor of armies of slaves, the bounty man could not say. He had little interest in the past.
His future was of more concern. His immediate future, in fact. He walked along the road in anticipation of it turning east. All the while he kept his eyes on the plain beyond the road and the face of the mesa that rose above him. He was well aware that he was treading across the hunting ground of the same banths he’d seen the day before. They might be laying up to the south, bellies fat with a thoat calf they’d brought down. Or they could just as well be coming back this way, stomachs complaining and ravenous.
At midday he came to a place where the road angled inward between low hills. Through the telescopticon, he could see a gap in the peaks beyond. This was a pass through which the road would travel to the east with Yttrium lying somewhere to the other side.
He decided that he could make progress into the pass before dark if not all the way through to the other side. Anywhere was preferable to the open ground where he was easy prey for the big eight-legged cats.
The hills rose higher to either side of the roadway to form a narrowing corridor of rounded boulders and walls of shale. This made him wonder if he hadn’t traded one set of risks for another. If some predator was to set upon him in this place, there would be nowhere for him to run. There was not even any likely places to fort up and possibly stand off a hungry banth or, more damning, another orluk.
Signed First Edition collectors might be interested to see what the endpapers of the leather edition are going to look like. Here are the rear endpapers:
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
