Guns of Mars 84
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 26.1
They crept toward the narrow entryway that led out into the sunlit crater. The bounty man had never explored this part of the great chamber. He removed his boots before he and the thark moved silently over the tiles into the mouth of a long corridor.
A vestige of the musky odor of the fascii hung in the air in the confines of the passage. It was pungent and sweet to a sickening degree, a rancid stink that clung to the stone walls and low ceiling. The floor was sticky with the residue of countless marches, excretions of sap left behind beneath the tread of the walking plants.
At the end of the stone channel, all was blinding sunlight. They came as far as they dared to the end of the tunnel. From that vantage they could see the wavering limbs of the plant men. They were upright and swaying lazily in the heat haze, their hideous fanged flowers splayed to catch the rays of the sun.
Upon returning to the cool interior of the cavern, the man pointed up at the entry arch.
“If we could pull out the keystone, the whole thing would come down. It ought even to collapse a good section of tunnel. We’d trap them in the crater where they’d wither and die.”
The thark craned his neck to look up at the curved artifice atop the entryway carved in a bas relief of shafts of grain and extinct fruits or tubers. It was constructed of massive blocks of heavy, fluted stone, resting upon a larger stone cut at angles so as to take the weight of the arch.
“Pull that out?” The thark grimaced. “It must weigh four thousand ahn or more.”
“Closer to six,” the man said with a shrug.
“They are a persistent breed. They will not die easy.”
“They are that.” The bounty man nodded with a grimace.
“We should just burn them out.”
“Not without containing them first. If we set them ablaze now, they will rush to their only path of escape. They will charge to the pool to extinguish themselves.”
“So be it,” Kal snorted.
“They might contaminate the water with their poisons. And we’ve no guarantee that we will have exterminated all of them. Let only one survive and they will propagate. If we can trap them in the crater they will die there for lack of moisture. All of them.”
The thark nodded, eyeing the massive key block as he did so.
“All then, for us to accomplish this,” he said bitterly, “is to shift a stone fifty times our combined weight.”
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t require further thought,” the man said, his expression sour.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
