Guns of Mars 6

A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon

CHAPTER 2.3

Striking iron to a stone, he built a fire from his dwindling stock of houdon sticks, compressed rods of dried thoat dung. He retrieved a battered pot from the grumbling pack thoat and set it atop the fire to melt handfuls of snow. While that simmered, he gathered chunks of ice broken from the pack with the butt of his rifle. He built a stack of frozen slabs to load the pot again and again until all of the water skins were full. It was then he allowed the thoats to drink the now tepid water to their contentment. He fed them handfuls of sagga mash, a sweet mix of coarse sagga grains and fungi that would not fill their stomachs but would restore them enough for the next day’s travel. He helped himself to the end of his last stick of jerked meat before setting up their camp.

Once again, he forced the thoats to lie on either side of the pile of swollen waterskins. He then lay atop the skins to keep the wind from them as well as share whatever warmth remained within them. Covered by his cloak and huddled between the sleeping beasts, Kal fell into the deepest sleep he’d enjoyed since leaving the Geat Sand Sea behind.

Morning dawned milky as, above, the moons chased one another in their endless rotation. The sun did not so much rise and set as merely quarter the sky in a long lazy arc.

Kal was up and saddled and moving across the shadowless plain of white. He reckoned to reach the destination of the airship by a more direct path. Rather than follow around the arc of the ice rim, he would set out across it and save perhaps a day or more of riding.

Within a half day of riding over the frigid surface he realized the imprudence of his plan. With the sun’s position difficult to fix, he could not be certain he was traveling a true easterly course. And the unforgiving conditions of the polar region would not allow for mistakes. It was much colder here and made more so by a constant wind that battered Kal and the thoats no matter what direction he turned. It was only a few hours until their mouths and nostrils were rimed with ice. The reins turned stiff in his numb fingers, his limbs rigid. The heavy cloak he wrapped about himself was no shield against the wind. And the thoats had not even that much protection. They grunted and squealed in protest at every step.

Worse yet, the water skins strapped to the pack thoat froze solid, their expanding contents splitting the seams of the skins. They’d be useless as either containers or warming sacks when he stopped to make a fire.