Under the Moons of Mars

by John Joseph Adams

  “You are in need of employment?” he said. “And by that, I do not mean sitting in a barracks and polishing your gear.”

  Jalvar scowled; Sojat let a hand drop to the hilt of one of his array of weapons.

  “We are panthans,” Jalvar said coldly. “If we were afraid of a little risk, we would have found another way to earn our livings. And few jeds or Jeddaks hire panthans for garrison work; they use their own subjects for that. We follow the scent of war.”

  “Good,” the Zodangan said. “Then let us go—”

  A woman screamed from among the kitchens, more in alarm and anger than pain, and then there was a man’s bellow of agony. A warrior wearing the metal of the Zodangan city watch stumbled through the open doorway the woman had used, his hands pressed to his face and boiling oil and blood leaking out between them. Dur Sivas’s longsword sprang into his hand; he leapt forward with astonishing agility and thrust in a single flickering movement that drove the slender point under one arm and deep into the watchman’s body. The corpse collapsed backward into the passageway still twitching and jerking; the lights went dark, and there was a confused flicker of steel.

  “Surrender in the name of the Jed!” a man shouted. “We have this place surrounded!”

  Jalvar’s longsword was in his hand as well. He leapt ahead and crossed blades with the next man forward. Fighting reflex moved his blade as it slithered and crashed against the Zodangan warrior’s. Only flickers of light came from behind the front door, barely enough to gleam on the razor-honed blades and darting points; it was like fencing in a closet, with only instinct to guide a yard of swift death.

  This is a brave man, Jalvar thought regretfully; he was also upholding lawful authority. But no more than middling with the blade. And it is important the conspirators believe me.

  His point ripped into the other’s sword arm; blood spurted blackly. The blade fell from his hand, but his other groped for his shortsword. Jalvar lunged and ran him through the shoulder, the narrow blade of his longsword bending as the unbreakable point grated on bone. The Zodangan fell back with a cry of rage, and there was a scrimmage as other hands sought to haul him out of the way and crowd forward.

  “Follow me!” Sivas barked, adding to the confusion with a murderous thrust, as quick as a striking banth. “Those are the Watch, Zodangan calots who serve the Heliumites for scraps.”

  Jalvar darted a look aside as he and Dur Sivas backed swiftly, shoulder to shoulder. Tars Sojat was fighting in the outer doorway; it was broader than the narrow door to the kitchens, but then again there was a great deal more of him to fill it—he had had to stoop a little to enter.

  Just now he beat the blade out of a Watchman’s hand with a smashing chop that tore it free by main force, grabbed him by a strap of his harness with his upper left hand, hoisted him high, punched him economically in groin and face with the left and right lower fists, and threw the man into the faces of his comrades with a bellow of laughter that bared the long fighting tusks in his lower jaw.

  “Tars Sojat! Come!” Jalvar shouted, and the Thark backed three long strides, turned and ran.

  Dur Sivas dashed down a corridor with the two comrades at his back; he grabbed a lever and threw it. Behind them a heavy door slammed home. Seconds later they could hear the pounding of sword-hilts on metal; then the bark of a pistol, and screaming curses as an officer rebuked the luckless and reckless man who’d fired a bullet in those confined quarters.

  “Aluminum-steel from a wrecked battleship we found,” Sivas said, with a snicker in his tone; it was too dark to see more than a gleam of teeth. “We who are loyal to the true Zodanga, the Zodanga that was, knew we might have to abandon this place swiftly with the Watch on our heels. They will not break through quickly; that slab is stronger than the stone of the wall. Come!”

  It was very dark, but experienced warriors were prepared for such things. At the end of the passageway Sivas threw up his hand and peered outward through an eyehole.

  “The calots are all around us. Doubtless they are on the roof as well—a pity, there were two good scout fliers there. Well, to have forethought is to be forearmed.”

  “We should move if you know somewhere to go,” Jalvar said. “They can bring up a powered cutter and break through the door. Through the wall, if necessary. Or explosives. And I presume you have just hired us.”

  “Yes, we can use men like you! And the calots will curse the intellects of their first ancestors if they try to blow their way through. Quiet now. It will be unfortunate if I do this in the wrong order and it has been some time since I practiced. Yes, here it is—”

  He pressed a carving in the wall in a particular rhythm. The stone was old, but something went click behind it. Noiselessly a section of the worn stone floor drew back, revealing a ladder leading downward. A waft of noisome dank air came upward.

  “This leads to the sewers, and there are connections to the pits beneath the palace that the puppet Jed’s calots think were stopped. Quickly, quickly!”

  They sheathed their swords and scrambled downward. The tunnel beneath had a dark trickle down its center; there were radium maintenance lights, but it had been a very long time since anyone maintained them. Only one in four or five was still lit, shining dimly through dust and dirt. The ceiling was high enough that Jalvar could have walked upright, but he stooped anyway. Sojat bent forward and loped along on his legs and the long middle set of limbs, his long limber neck letting him see easily forward and the high tubular ears on the top of his head cocked forward.

  “Quickly!” Sivas said again, and he picked up the pace into a slow run, one hand stretched out to touch the wall. Then as they came to a T-shaped junction: “Right here.”

  They turned, and then the earth shook. Jalvar lurched forward with a stifled yell, caching his shoulder a painful thump against a metal bracket in the stone wall. Sound roared past, so loud he felt it as a thudding in his chest rather than a sound. Dust was all around them, smoking out of the junctions in the ancient stone, chokingly thick. Sojat had braced himself against the tunnel walls with all six of his limbs. Jalvar picked himself up and shook his head, wiping blood away from his nose and mouth with the back of his hand.

  Sivas switched on a personal light; it underlit his face in a way that made it even more sinister than the blood, scars, and evil smile would have done otherwise.

  “This is safe now,” he said, waving the hand-light. “Come! We need not run, but should not waste time either. The Watch-calots will be out in force.”

  “What happened?”

  “That battleship we found had full racks. That was a two-thousand pound flier bomb, hooked to a timing device. I activated it as we fled. The Heliumites manufacture good explosives; it was still as potent as the day the casing was filled.”

  Jalvar flushed and clapped his hand to his sword-hilt. A two-thousand-pounder would have obliterated half the block.

  “What of the woman?” he growled.

  Sivas turned and stared at him. “My daughter was a Zodangan patriot too. And had much to avenge. Come, there is a safe passage to a flier landing stage not far from here. You two are the last recruits we need.”

  PART III

  THE TONOOLIAN MARSHES

  “Already I feel several varieties of mold and fungus growing upon me,” Tars Sojat said, looking down past the rail of the Air Princess.

  The Tonoolian Marshes stretched beneath them, livid green only slightly tinted with ochre. Jalvar pitched his voice to be inaudible beyond his friend’s ears, which was easy enough here at the stern of the flier with the whirr of the propellers beneath them:

  “The question is, does Ras Thavas lair here, and has he gone back to his old tricks?”

  “Does the calot not return to its regurgitations?” Tars Sojat said. “More to the point, who are those men riding malagors toward us?”

  Green Men had better eyesight—as one might expect, given the size and placement of their eyes. He pointed over the stern rail. Jalvar swore and s
wung up his optic.

  “Sivas!” he shouted over his shoulder, pitching his voice to cut through the thrum of cloven air. “Malagors to the rear!”

  The Air Princess was a small vessel only about a hundred sofads long, ex-military of some sort, perhaps a light transport or patroler, and Jalvar thought it had been Heliumitic once. The thirty men aboard were far more crew than needed to fly it, and left everyone a little crowded. Heads turned, and curses raged as the giant malagor birds and their riders came into view. They were high in the west, diving out of the sun on the reverse of the flier’s eastward course; there was little chance of dodging them, the more so as the Air Princess was old and could make only about half the speed of modern craft.

  “I see them,” the Zodangan called. “Battle stations!”

  Men ran to the guns; the ship had bow and stern chasers in open mounts with shields, and four lighter rapid-fire pieces with a pair to each side. All of the gun crews were Sivas’s Zodangans, not the score of panthans who made up the rest of the ship’s complement, or cargo. Jalvar felt useless, but underneath it was relief that he need not kill men doing their duty in the air patrols the warlord had established in this lawless region.

  Others of the crew were handing out rifles, but the chance of hitting a man riding a malagor, or the giant bird itself, were very low. Tars Sojat felt no such compunctions, or limitations.

  “What use is this toy?” he said throwing the weapon aside—and over the rail—in disgust. “You Red slugs can’t shoot, and even if you could, this piece of zitidar excrement would be a waste of skill. Get me a real rifle!”

  One of the Zodangans looked questioningly at Sivas, and the commander tossed his head impatiently as he worked the helm and controls. The flier came about and accelerated as the man dashed down a companionway into the shallow hull of the flier.

  Just then the bow-chaser fired with a sharp crack and a flash of light. The tube of the cannon recoiled with a smooth yielding stroke against the hydraulic compensators, and the breech opened with a clang. Far off amid the approaching riding-birds a tiny flick of white light and puff of smoke showed where the radium contents of the shell exploded, driving fragments of aluminum steel into the air in a sphere about it.

  Useless, Jalvar thought. You could hit a flier at that range, perhaps, but Malagors? Only by accident.

  Another clang as the loaders rammed a shell home and secured the breech. The gunner worked the screws with his hands while he peered through the sights, and the weapon swung smoothly; then there was a crack as he pushed the firing contact. A few seconds later the bows of the Air Princess rose as Sivas worked the controls, shifting her buoyancy and sloping her course upward. The lighter flanking guns were firing, a rapid pom-pom-pom sound, and one malagor and its rider plummeted toward the ground in several pieces.

  The rest were swinging wide, preparing to come alongside. The flier’s crew were firing their rifles now, to as little effect as Jalvar had expected; he clipped his to a ring in the rail and drew his longsword instead.

  Then the crewman came back up the stairway from the interior, carrying a rifle—but one such as the Green Men used, twelve feet long and fitted with a complex wireless sight, with a drum containing a hundred rounds of explosive bullets.

  The red iris of Sojat’s eyes glinted. “A Thark rifle,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

  “Dead Thark,” the Zodangan grunted.

  “They are dirty ulsios and lick the feet of Helium,” Sojat said, checking the action. “But they make good weapons.”

  He waited a moment with the long rifle in his upper pair of hands, showing the bases of his tusks in a smile as the crew of the Air Princess gradually ceased their futile efforts. Then he threw it to his shoulder and began firing, a steady metronomic crack . . . crack . . . crack as the long slender barrel made its minute adjustments.

  Not every round struck; the deck of the flier was moving, after all, and Tars Sojat was using an unfamiliar weapon that had probably lain untouched for years or decades. But every second or third shot did find its mark; the Green hordes had been known to bring down battleships that unwisely strayed into rifle range. The long, cruelly beaked heads of the malagors began to explode as the bullets struck and the sun reached the radium bursting charges of the projectiles. One after another fluttered helplessly down toward the surface of the marsh . . . and the hungry mouths that waited below it.

  “Brave men,” Jalvar said, as the last of them burst through the wall of bullets and swept down on the flier’s deck.

  “Death to the Heliumites!” a Zodangan snarled; in fact the men were local auxiliaries, but he wasn’t inclined to fine distinctions.

  There was a boom as a malagor braked itself by slapping its huge wings forward against the air. Jalvar dodged beneath the strike of the hooked beak and slashed, feeling muscle and bone part beneath his keen blade; the bird was too big and too tenacious of life to risk a thrust. The acrid scent of blood filled the air as its head fell to one side, three-quarters cut through. For a moment its thrashing was nearly as dangerous as the living thing had been, and then it toppled over the side to fall down through the air like a whirling leaf.

  The rider freed his harness from the saddle snaps and jumped free at the last moment. Two panthans sprang toward him, but Jalvar shouted them back: “He is mine!”

  A smile lit the face of the rider. “You are an honorable man,” he said, panting. “It will be a pity to kill you.”

  With the last word he launched himself behind his point in a running thrust. Jalvar beat it aside and cut at his leg as he passed. That clashed on a parry, and then they were face-to-face, blades weaving a net of steel between them. It ended in seconds, as such affairs usually did. The patroller’s foot slipped on the malagor blood that coated the worn skeel planks of the deck, and he was off balance for an instant.

  Jalvar’s blade snapped out and ripped into his forearm. The other man’s blade clanged to the deck.

  “Surrender!” Jalvar said, point to throat. “And your life will be spared.”

  “Never!” the man said. “You bandits will all die, and soon!”

  He turned on the last word and dove over the rail. Jalvar winced, but one of the Zodangans laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. Sivas called from the controls: “Good sword! And your Green friend is a valuable man to have in a fight as well. You are worth your pay and loyal to your oaths, panthans!”

  The Air Princess curved downward under his hands, toward a low ridge of dark rock that rose out of the marshes. The hum of the propellers sank to a low throbbing moan as the ship slowed and sank almost to the green-scummed surface of the swamp, the tips of its rudders making little wakes in the thick liquid and letting off a noxious smell of decaying vegetation. The smell and the thick wetness of the air were strange and disagreeable.

  The cliff loomed closer, closer . . .

  And then a section of it vanished. Jalvar blinked; one instant it was pitted, weathered rock much like that to either side—

  Wait, the Gatholite prince thought. It is identical to the rock to the right there. A false image. They indeed have some capable scientist laboring for them!

  Now there was a large cave. The flier eased its way inside, and there was a moment of darkness as the shield blinked back into existence behind them. Then radium lights shone, sparkling on jewel-like flecks in the rock. Within there was a huge arched ceiling of natural rock, and a rank-smelling lake beneath it; to either side the hand of man showed, in great docks and basins that had probably stood ready since this was the last shore of one of Barsoom’s dying seas. Only a few of them were occupied, by a curious collection of fliers. Apart from a few one-man scouts, the fliers all looked to be old—well maintained, but nothing that had come out of the shipyards since Llana of Gathol was young.

  Still, this is a dangerous little fleet, he thought. Enough to carry several thousand men; enough for a damaging raid.

  Ruthless men could do appalling harm with even a few cruisers,
if they did not care where their bombs landed. The Zodangan conspirators had shown that in their own city. How much more heedless would they be among their enemies?

  Sivas came down to stand beside him and Tars Sojat in the bows. “Soon you will see all the secrets of the cause in which you have enlisted,” he said.

  “Is that wise?” Jalvar said; a panthan would ask.

  “Very,” Sivas said.

  His hands touched the shoulders of the two friends. There was a slight sting. Blackness fell.

  Jalvar woke and turned his head; it was the only part of his body not strapped down to the cold surface of a marble slab. His eyes tracked across an arched ceiling carved from rock, past enigmatic machines and devices and shelves loaded with instruments and bottles of chemicals that gave the air a sharp metallic scent that crinkled his nostrils.

  He found himself looking at his own body on a wheeled metal gurney only an arm’s-length away. The top of his head was covered in bandages, and a monster bent over it.

  Then the monster turned its head, and as real wakefulness returned, Jalvar saw that it was only a man; a young-looking man, as such things went on Barsoom, with a complex apparatus of lenses worn over his eyes that made his skull seem grotesquely large for a moment. Beneath it was a strikingly handsome face, and below that was a Red Man’s body, in superb condition but a little gaunt.

  “Ras Thavas!” Jalvar blurted; he had seen the eccentric scientist more than once, before he dropped out of common knowledge again.

  The Master Mind of Mars was at his side in an instant, a hand over his mouth.

  “You do not know me, Prince of Gathol!” Ras Thavas hissed, looking over his shoulder. “For your life you do not know me, before these madmen!” Then, louder: “This one is ready! Remove the old body for storage!”

  Slaves came and wheeled Jalvar’s body—my body! Jalvar thought with horror—away.