Guns of Mars 65
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 19.1
An airship quartered the sky from morning into the afternoon. It passed unhurried in a deliberate pattern of search.
The bounty man watched from the concealment of a depression as the vessel moved back and forth across the sky in what was obviously a predetermined scheme. It was not a hunting party. Not for animals, in any case. That they were searching for him there was no doubt.
At the first sound of the distant purring of a motor, he’d led his thoats into the deepest arroyo he could find. It was narrow and very dark at the bottom. The floor and walls grew thick with growths of deep crimson lichen. The animals were content to remain there in the cool confines away from the blistering sun. They munched the mossy growths when they were not dozing.
The bounty man watched from the lip of the drongo as the ship soared this way and that, cruising at its minimum speed. It banked close enough that he could see the shapes of men bent over the gunwales, eyes fixed on the ground below. As it neared, he retreated into the depths of the depression to join the thoats slumbering on their feet.
The turning props of the ship grew louder as he waited, the banth hide flung over him to conceal him further. The airship’s shadow passed over his bolthole. The steady whine of its generator filled his ears. He crouched, clutching tight the reins of the thoats and willed it to pass him by.
It continued on, out of sight, the whirring of its engine fading as it continued its fruitless search along the eastern reaches of the broken plain.
It could only be the kin of the men he’d encountered on his way to Yttrium. The old man had warned him. It was apparent he’d left the city not a moment too soon. At this point they could only guess at the direction he’d taken. They had calculated how far he might have come across the open land and, for now, concentrated their search in that area. The airship allowed them to spread their hunt over a wider area. He counted his blessings that they did not pursue him on the ground. It was far more likely that a mounted pursuit might run across him by chance or cross the tracks of his mounts than the crew of the airship ever spotting him in the maze-like progression of fissures that were riven across this land.
But there was the possibility that men were approaching on the ground as well as overhead. He would hold here until nightfall, he decided. The airship could not search effectively by night. And anyone looking for him in the draws and fissures would be forced to camp. It was more dangerous for him to proceed in the dark. He could easily run across a slumbering pride of banths. He determined it was worth the risk to gain ground on the men after him. In the morning he’d find another dark place to hole up in. Eventually, they would weary of the chase and go back to Yttrium and leave him to his quest.
It was very late in the day when he spied the airship turning north back toward the mountain pass and the city beyond. The first moon hung low on the horizon at the start of its nightly course. Lying at the lip of the depression, he trained his telescopticon on the vessel as it passed close. He had the lens hooded with a scrap of cloth and presented no silhouette. The last rays of the sun caught the open deck of the ship as it banked about. Through the lens he could see armed men aboard. On the quarterdeck he could see the large ebon figure of a First Born, his head wrapped in a cloth dressing. The brother of the black he’d slain, the one the old man had warned him of.
And, at the helm of the ship, an odd figure worked the wheel. A hooded man whose exposed skin, of his hands and face, shone like alabaster in the light of the setting sun. The bounty man watched until the airship was out of sight against the black peaks to the north. He was safe for now, but he had to assume they would return the next day. He further scanned the ground between him and the range, but saw no dust or campfire or any other evidence of men on the ground hunting for him.
After watering his animals, he led them both on foot along the depression in a generally southern direction. As he marched, he kept his ears and nostrils open for any sign that he was not alone on the fractured steppe.
He moved at a steady pace throughout the night. A dry chill fell upon the land, but he and his mounts were always down in some gully or runnel and thus sheltered. In the hours before dawn he found a narrow crack that ran under a brow of rock. They could spend the day here, shaded from the sun, invisible to the searchers in the sky. He fed the beasts, and they fell into a deep sleep soon after they’d completed their feeding. The bounty man did the same after a meal of dried meat and hard bread that he ate cold.
He was awakened by the hum of the airship motor. He clambered to a place at the rim of the gully and could see the ship moving about far to the west in its now familiar pattern of search. As he snapped open his telescopticon, a sudden gust blew grit into his eyes. When he’d cleared it from his lids he looked again to find the vessel. It was a mere mote above the horizon, its exploration carrying it away to the east from him.
Across the baked expanse between him and the airship dust devils danced in the sunlight. They whirled back and forth raising a haze of swirling grains beneath them. He turned then to the west and saw that the sky was dark with a roiling cloud of dust that rose to the top of the sky to form a moving maelstrom of sand. Within the swirling cone he could see flashes of anvil lightning blooming.
It was a storm and it was swiftly turning day to dusk as it loomed closer.
As he ducked back down to the thoats to mask their eyes against the abrasive gale, he thought with a grin of how this sudden tempest would inconvenience those hunting him. Possibly even leave them dead or stranded. Either way, he’d no longer have them hounding him on his way to the Eye of Water.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
