Guns of Mars 63
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 18.2
The men were making steady progress toward his position. They climbed from ledge to ledge up the natural ladder of rock to where he lay watching them.
Kal Keddaq leaned out to train his rifle on the men. He sighted on the lead man, a broad-shouldered red man festooned with ammunition belts. A squeeze of the trigger and the man vanished from sight leaving only a splash of blood on the rocks. The others paused for the space of a breath, craning upwards to follow the drifting trail of gun smoke to its source.
The thark took a bead on a second man and dropped him screaming, the meat of an upper leg blown away.
Kal rolled then to lie on his back with the sheltering rock beneath him. There were shouts and curses from below but no returning fire.
They meant to take him alive. Their eagerness to reach him was to capture, not kill, him. The hooded man had shared the story of his bounty with this mob. They intended to return him alive to his clan and collect. That left them at a distinct advantage because Kal had no such conditions. He would add every last one of them to the bands that ringed his arms and live to flee.
Not only flee but catch up to his former partners and make them pay for their betrayals. Each left him to an undesirable fate. He could never forgive that. The bounty man and the weird wormling called Bhar-Bhartee would both die.
Of course, given the opportunity, Kal would have acted just as they had. He was a thark. The life of a man, a hundred men, meant nothing to him. Same for his word. A vow to a man, be he red, black or cadaver-pale, was empty and meaningless. Honor and reputation were only of value from one thark to another. All others were dross.
The shift and clatter of rocks reached him. He rose and moved low off the broad shelf of rock. He would lead them across the knife edge of the ridge beyond. There, in the natural fortifications of fissures and defiles, he could lay ambushes to further frustrate pursuit. Eventually, they would become discouraged by the reduction of their numbers and withdraw.
Or, Kal had to concede as he clambered up a steep wash, he might stoke their anger to a degree that they disregarded his worth. They’d kill him then and damn the fortune in gold for his return.
So, he would have to either kill them all or elude them in the rockbound labyrinth that lay above. Either was an easy enough task for a thark of the western tribe. Night would come and he would be gone no matter the cost to the men climbing after him.
And then on to the east and the sweet day on which he would have his enemies, both of them, at his mercy.
He led them past the broad ledge where he and the pale one camped the night before. From the shadows within a narrow cleft he trained the long rifle at the men as they exposed themselves on the naked rock.
A slug turned the lead man’s head to crimson mist causing the rest to flatten on their bellies while Kal fled deeper into the crevasse. He followed a stiff wind which blew down the channel to where it opened up. One wall fell away to leave only a narrow ledge that ran about the curve of the monolithic slab that rose high into the white sky. He would have to move fast now, exposed as he was on this singular track. Though where it led was a question he could not answer. It might take him to more level ground or peter out to nothing leaving him stranded with an impossible climb above and a deadly fall to jagged rocks on below.
A scrabble of booted feet reached him around the bend of the path behind him. The thark dropped to a knee and steadied the rifle in his hands, a lower hand raised to provide further support, its opposite appendage splayed on the rock.
A figure came about the curvature of the rock at a trot. Kal allowed him to approach a few more steps. A second man followed close behind. The thark’s rifle boomed, the heavy round striking the rock face and sending a shower of splinters to strike the pair. One man cried out with a piteous shout, arms windmilling until he got a grip on the other’s arm. Their combined weight carried them both screaming off the ledge to the broken spires of shale far below.
Other men’s voices echoed off the face of the escarpment, the dismay for their lost comrades plain though their words were not. The thark allowed himself a sneering grin as he reloaded his weapon. Once charged, and certain he had discouraged pursuit, he moved away at the best speed he could make along the treacherous pathway.
A wind of blistering heat rose up the sheer wall of the drop off to his right as the day wore on. The path ahead was broken in places making his progress slow as he made his way over the gaps by either risky leaps or braving the rock face to make a cautious way using shallow hand and foot holds. He was assured now that his back trail would be free of his pursuers. They could not possibly follow him over the wide breaks in the narrow ledge that were a stretch for him to jump but impossible for men.
Now his main concern was that this torturous path should on more stable ground. He did not wish to have to retrace his steps back the way he came should the ledge dwindle to nothing, or he come to a gap too wide for him to continue. Also, he didn’t savor the idea of being exposed in this place come night.
The shadows had grown long as the day waned on. The trail reached a sharp curve around which the way ahead was out of sight. A rocky redoubt that stretched above at an outward angle. He could see open land beyond the massive bulge of shale-striped granite. It was the other side of the heights where a broken land of hills and swales stretched to where a pale blue range defined the horizon.
The ledge that ran about the outcropping was nearly the same width as his sandaled feet. He was forced to cling to the rocks with all four hands as he made his way about shifting his feet forward with fretful care.
The trail came to a broad shelf on the opposite side of the redoubt. This lay before a great crack that split the face of the escarpment. The interior of the fracture was lost in darkness. Kal was first alerted to the scent of putrefaction emanating from the shadows within. Something, more probably many things, had died in those black recesses.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
