Guns of Mars 60
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 17.2
“I am a product of science,” the hooded man said as he stood on the open bridge of the skiff, piloting them east toward the purple ridge of mountains that lay along the horizon.
He was turning the wheel and working the many levers with practiced ease. The craft had not been well-maintained by its previous owners. It was in need of repairs to places where its deck boards had sprung or rotted clear through. The rudder cables were covered in a patina of oxidation. The propellers below the stern rail gave a hellish squeak with each revolution. The 8th ray generator was operational but made occasional sputtering sounds.
Still, it made far better progress than they ever could on foot. They’d already traveled a distance they could not have made in a whole day. The skiff soared over the banks at the end of the basin and turned starboard to follow along the high wall of a mesa.
“What science?” Kal asked. He squatted naked on the quarterdeck behind the hooded man, scrubbing his harness and loin cloth with sand to remove the last remnants of grue from them. He had already cleaned and oiled the rifle.
“I do not know that it has a name,” the hooded man said as he steered. “If it did, I never learned it.”
“You did not come from an egg? Everything that walks or flies comes from an egg,” Kal said with a huffing sound. “I was an egg. You were an egg. We begin as a speck floating in an ovum.”
“I tell you I was not.”
“Do you mean for me to believe that you recall being born?”
“I do.”
Kal made another huffing sound from deep in his chest.
“I remember voices and lights,” the hooded man said. “I do not know what they were saying but they were harsh sounding, shouting. I was with others like me. Small, white, mewling things we were. Some looked as I do. Some were true monstrosities with limbs like insects and swollen heads. I vividly recall one with a single swollen eye in place of a face. Another was born with an entirely featureless face that died before me, asphyxiated, betrayed by its own flesh.”
“Monstrosities,” Kal muttered to himself as he scrubbed the leather of his harness clean.
“We were taken from the place of light to a place of darkness. It was cold there and myself and my siblings were cast to the sand and left to die. It was the first time I saw the stars, my first view of the greater world. We were left on a dead sea until our last hours ran out.”
“And you were all found by a kindly wanderer who took you in.” Kal could not keep the derision from his voice.
“No. No one came. We were left to survive or to die. All alone.”
“With no food or water in a desert? What did you drink? What did you eat?”
“Whatever was at hand.”
Kal stopped his work to regard the hooded man’s back.
“You ate…” he began.
“Whatever was at hand.”
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
