Guns of Mars 72
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 21.3
Fully lifted by the rippling waves, he felt his feet leave the bottom and panicked. His head plunged under the water, and he fought with flailing arms to rise to the surface. The weight of his bandolier and holstered guns were drawing him farther down the shoal into the deeps of the lake. He turned, slashing at the water, until he felt his feet on firm ground once more.
Exhausted, he dropped to the black sand. He turned to lie on his back, amused by the irony of having found the source of water he sought only to drown in it. He studied the grid set in the ceiling above and found his curiosity stoked to life once more. After eating a portion of the remaining thoat meat, washed down with more water, he looked for a way up to the top of the domed chamber.
He found he could walk the circumference of the lake along the shore. It appeared to be almost perfectly circular and entirely contained in this vast cavern. He wondered at the source of the gentle waves as he could discern no spring that fed the pool. When he judged by the curved shore to that he was nearly halfway around the body, he found a niche that led him to steps hewn into the rock. These led up to a stairwell that followed along the arc of the wall in a series of flights and landings. By this path he reached a shelf of rock, a natural mezzanine that oversaw the lake below.
Crouching at the lip, he could look down to more closely examine the grid he’d seen from below. It was made up of heavy iron beams thicker around than his arms could span. These rods were crusted over with ages of rust and mineral deposits that had dripped from above. Over some sections of the grid he could see where rocks, some the size of boulders, had fallen to to be caught on the protective screen. That was the purpose then, to prevent any larger stalactites that might break from above falling into the water.
He dropped to his belly to gaze at the full expanse of the lake far below. Outside, the sun was at its zenith. Shafts of brilliant light beamed down directing from the apertures above. The light was cast back from the pearly bottom of the lake. Tendrils of vapor rose from wherever the shafts touched the surface. The water was clear as glass and he could clearly see to its depths, down to the bottom of the bowl-shaped depression.
From the center of the body, he could see the ripples emanating all about. There was a roiling of the water there, a domed shaped iris created by water rising from the rock to feed the great pool from a source deep in the shale. A kind of reverse whirlpool.
The Eye of Water.
This presented an evident mystery. If the lake was continually replenished from a subterranean source then it should have overflowed its banks long ago. The chamber below should have filled to the brim and the excess flowed out to the outer chamber and even out onto the sands.
He imagined that in its day, the people who inhabited this place were drawing daily from the reservoir as they used the water for their own use as well as for commerce. He could imagine that this endless supply of water might have been used to irrigate fields. In his mind he pictured a verdant landscape all about the dead volcano. Perhaps even dwellings, a community built from the liquid bounty that blessed this place. All of it gone, eroded by time and the elements until all that lay about the lonely mountain was dead sand.
Perhaps the level of the water remained constant through evaporation. That made no sense to him. More likely there was a drain of some kind that he’d yet to find, a channel that carried the water back underground to some vast pool or flowing river hidden deep in the mantle rock.
After retrieving the telescopticon from its pouch, he fixed it on the wavering surface below. As he conjectured, the water was free of either flora or fauna. No fish swam in it. No lichen grew in its shallows or along its shores. The water of the lake was free of any contaminants other than natural minerals deposited from its environment.
He adjusted his vision as well as the focus of the lens to study the floor of the lake. He concentrated his vision through the undulating surface to determine what composed the base of the body.
Beneath the rolling wavelets was a gleaming carpet of bones, a blanket white as snow of countless species; animal, man and thark.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
