Guns of Mars 79
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 24.2
The sun was high as he stepped from the grand entrance and out onto the broiling sand. He had the full waterskin slung under arm and his carbine on his shoulder as he trudged away from the mountain in a direct line.
He reasoned that, while any fauna would steer clear of the Eye of Water no matter how tempted, some brand of edible animal must range even on as desolate a plane as this.
With the mountain at his back, he walked farther into the desolation. He scanned through the wavering heat haze at an uninterrupted horizon. This place was a lifeless cauldron that no degree of optimism was going to populate with wildlife. Not a bird crossed the sky. Not a reptile, like a darseen, crawled on the surface. No mounds of sand ants rose to interrupt the featureless surface of crushed rock.
Sweat streamed from every pore as he resigned himself that his carbine proved to be nothing but a useless burden on this hike. There was no game here. He undid the spigot on the waterskin and held it above his head for a good dousing. Water was the one thing he could afford to be generous with. It ran through his hair and down his bare shoulders raising whisps of vapor off his baking skin. He let it run until there was a puddle beneath his feet, the water being quickly absorbed by the thirsting sand.
He took the skin to his chapped lips to take a long drink from the water. As he capped it and lowered it back in place on his shoulder he felt a subtle movement at his feet.
In the damp sand beneath his feet something under the surface was roiling the surface. He tipped the skin to allow more water to stream down. Spiny legs emerged from the muck, clicking and swaying. They were followed by the fat bodies of eyeless beetles that rose from the sand to wallow in the shrinking pool. Scores of them, as big around as a clenched fist, formed a squirming pile as they fought one another for what remained of the vanishing moisture.
The bounty man smashed at them with his carbine butt. A greenish, creamy slime sprayed from where he fractured their shells. He mashed five of them before the others burrowed away out of reach, the sand smooth as before.
The carbine slung over his shoulder, he scooped up the dripping carcasses into his arms and trotted back to the mountain.
He skewered the beetles on the cleaning rod of his rifle and held them out to roast slowly over a fire. They proved to be bland but filling. They had a citric aftertaste that remained no matter how much he rinsed out his mouth. But he kept them down and awoke the next morning with no ill effects. He could live on these for now until he figured out a way to hunt farther afield.
And that led to the greater challenge he faced. Yes, he’d located the magnificent bounty of the Eye of Water. But it had been a torturous trek on his way to it. Here he sat on a rich resource set at the very center of a desert hell. He had no means of transportation, either beasts of burden or an airship, to bring his water to market. And to reveal its location meant losing it to rivals. And unless he wanted to spend his remaining days subsisting on bugs, he’d need to work out a solution.
He started the new day with a breakfast of more beetles raised by dousing the sand just outside his refuge’s entrance. He then retrieved some clay amphoras from a stack in what might have been a larder in its day. He carried them to the shore of the lake and cleaned out their interiors with handfuls of wet sand. These he filled with water and capped them. He built a stack of the amphorae just inside the entrance.
It was well into the afternoon by the time he’d completed this task and so he called it a day.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
