Guns of Mars 52
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 13.4
Kal did as he was invited and filled his growling belly with a joint of bloody meat, washed down with sour water offered from the stranger’s canteens.
“You know my name,” Kal said, dropping a leg bone stripped clean to the sand. “By what are you called?”
“I am called Bhar-Bhartee,” the strange creature said from where he crouched on the other side of the fire.
“That is a number not a name.” Indeed it was eighty-eight in the traditional manner of counting.
“Yet, that is what I am called.”
“I’ve not met your breed before. From where do you come? You are not of the whites though you are pale.”
“I may be the very last of my kind,” Bhar-Bhartee offered without further explanation.
Kal pondered this as he took another swig from the canteen. The dregs of it were bitter and he spat them out to hiss on the embers.
“Your water tastes like banth piss,” he said, tossing aside the empty vessel.
“And you would have better?” the pale man said.
Without response, the thark rose. He drew his saber and poked it into the fire to skewer a flaming tile of lichen. He held this before him to light his way as he walked into the surrounding dark and out onto the canal floor. His host followed.
He approached the broken body of the pack animal slain by the orluk earlier that day. A myriad of eyes glowed red in the dark about the cadaver. They scattered as Kal approached with his torch. He lay the burning patch on the sand. In its dying glow he pulled an undamaged water skin from the pack frame and offered it to the other.
Bhar-Bhartee turned the tap and upended it to fill his mouth.
“It is pure,” he said after swallowing a long draught.
“The purest in this world,” Kal said, taking the skin from the man’s hands to drink a long pull himself.
“What is its source?”
“I do not know. But you and I shall find out.”
Bhar-Bhartee eyed the thark, his eyes slits. A pale hand moved to rest atop one of his pistols.
“Understand,” Kal began. “There is a fortune to be made for you far greater than my hetman has promised. And a destiny for me far more pleasing than a life spent siring welps with that unpleasant bitch.”
The pale hand relaxed its grip on the holstered weapon.
“I do not know the location of this place only in which direction it lies,” Kal said, repressing any sign of his relief that his words were having an impact. “Only that I will know the place when I see it, of that I can assure you.”
The pale hand slid from the butt of the pistol.
The thark smiled then and offered his new partner another drink.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
