Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved

by Lee Brackett



  Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved

  by Lee Brackett

  Copyright 2010 Lee Brackett

  1

  For hours the hard-pressed beast had fled across the Martian desert with its dark rider. Now it was spent. It faltered and broke stride, and when the rider cursed and dug her heels into the scaly sides, the brute only turned its head and hissed at her. It stumbled on a few more paces into the lee of a sandhill, and there it stopped, crouching down in the dust.

  The woman dismounted. The creature's eyes burned like green lamps in the light of the little moons, and she knew that it was no use trying to urge it on. She looked back, the way she had come.

  In the distance there were four black shadows grouped together in the barren emptiness. They were running fast. In a few minutes they would be upon her.

  She stood still, thinking what she should do next. Ahead, far ahead, was a low ridge, and beyond the ridge lay Valkis and safety, but she could never make it now. Off to her right, a lonely tor stood up out of the blowing sand. There were tumbled rocks at its foot.

  'They tried to run me down in the open,' she thought. But here, by the Nine Hells, they'll have to work for it!'

  She moved then, running toward the tor with a lightness and speed incredible in anything but an animal or a savage. She was of Earth stock, built tall, and more massive than she looked by reason of her leanness. The desert wind was bitter cold, but she did not seem to notice it, though she wore only a ragged shirt of Venusian spider silk, open to the waist. Her skin was almost as dark as her black hair, burned indelibly by years of exposure to some terrible sun. Her eyes were startlingly light in colour, reflecting back the pale glow of the moons.

  With the practised ease of a lizard she slid in among the loose and treacherous rocks. Finding a vantage point, where her back was protected by the tor itself, she crouched down.

  After that she did not move, except to draw her gun. There was something eerie about her utter stillness, a quality of patience as unhuman as the patience of the rock that sheltered her.

  The four black shadows came closer, resolved themselves into mounted women.

  They found the beast, where it lay panting, and stopped. The line of the woman's footprints, already blurred by the wind but still plain enough, showed where she had gone.

  The leader motioned. The others dismounted. Working with the swift precision of soldiers, they removed equipment from their saddle-packs and began to assemble it.

  The woman crouching under the tor saw the thing that took shape. It was a Banning shocker, and she knew that she was not going to fight her way out of this trap. Her pursuers were out of range of her own weapon. They would remain so. The Banning, with its powerful electric beam, would take her – dead or senseless, as they wished.

  She thrust the useless gun back into her belt. She knew who these women were, and what they wanted with her. They were officers of the Earth Police Control, bringing her a gift – twenty years in the Luna cell-blocks.

  Twenty years in the grey catacombs, buried in the silence and the eternal dark.

  She recognised the inevitable. She was used to inevitables – hunger, pain, loneliness, the emptiness of dreams. She had accepted a lot of them in her time. Yet she made no move to surrender. She looked out at the desert and the night sky, and her eyes blazed, the desperate, strangely beautiful eyes of a creature very close to the roots of life, something less and more than woman. Her hands found a shard of rock and broke it.

  The leader of the four women rode slowly toward the tor, her right arm raised.

  Her voice carried clearly on the wind. 'Erica Joan Stark!' she called, and the dark woman tensed in the shadows.

  The rider stopped. She spoke again, but this time in a different tongue. It was no dialect of Earth, Mars or Venus, but a strange speech, as harsh and vital as the blazing Mercurian valleys that bred it.

  'Oh N'Chaka, oh Woman-without-a-tribe, I call you!'

  There was a long silence. The rider and her mount were motionless under the low moons, waiting.

  Erica Joan Stark stepped slowly out from the pool of blackness under the tor.

  'Who calls me N'Chaka?'

  The rider relaxed somewhat. She answered in English, 'You know perfectly well who I am, Erica. May we meet in peace?' Stark shrugged. 'Of course.'

  She walked on to meet the rider, who had dismounted, leaving her beast behind. She was a slight, wiry woman, this EP C officer, with the rawhide look of the frontiers still on her. Her hair was grizzled and her sun-blackened skin was deeply lined, but there was nothing in the least aged about her hard good-humoured face nor her remarkably keen dark eyes.

  'It's been a long time, Erica,' she said.

  Stark nodded. 'Sixteen years.' The two women studied each other for a moment, and then Stark said, 'I thought you were still on Mercury, Ashton.'

  'They've called all us experienced hands in to Mars.' She held out cigarettes. 'Smoke?'

  Stark took one. They bent over Ashton's lighter, and then stood there smoking while the wind blew red dust over their feet and the three women of the patrol waited quietly beside the Banning. Ashton was taking no chances. The electro-beam could stun without injury.

  Presently Ashton said, 'I'm going to be crude, Erica. I'm going to remind you of some things.'

  'Save it,' Stark retorted. 'You've got me. There's no need to talk about it.'

  'Yes,' said Ashton, 'I've got you, and a damned hard time I've had doing it. That's why I'm going to talk about it.'

  Her dark eyes met Stark's cold stare and held it.

  'Remember who I am – Simone Ashton. Remember who came along when the miners in that valley on Mercury had a wild girl in a cage, and were going to finish her off like they had the tribe that raised her. Remember all the years after that, when I brought that girl up to be a civilised human being.'

  Stark laughed, not without a certain humour. 'You should have left me in the cage. I was caught a little old for civilising.'

  'Maybe. I don't think so. Anyway, I'm reminding you,' Ashton said.

  Stark said, with no particular bitterness, 'You don't have to get sentimental. I know it's your job to take me in.'

  Ashton said deliberately, 'I won't take you in, Erica, unless you make me.' She went on then, rapidly, before Stark could answer. 'You've got a twenty-year sentence hanging over you, for running guns to the Middle-Swamp tribes when they revolted against Terro-Venusian Metals, and a couple of similar jobs.

  'All right. So I know why you did it, and I won't say I don't agree with you. But you put yourself outside the law, and that's that. Now you're on your way to Valkis. You're headed into a mess that'll put you on Luna for life, the next time you're caught.'

  'And this time you don't agree with me.'

  'No. Why do you think I near broke my neck to catch you before you got there?' Ashton bent closer, her face very intent. 'Have you made any deal with Delgauna of Valkis? Did she send for you?'

  'She sent for me, but there's no deal yet. I'm on the beach. Broke. I got a message from this Delgauna, whoever she is, that there was going to be a private war back in the Drylands, and she'd pay me to help fight it. After all, that's my business.'

  Ashton shook her head.

  'This isn't a private war, Erica. It's something a lot bigger and nastier than that. The Martian Council of City-States and the Earth Commission are both in a cold sweat, and no one can find out exactly what's going on. You know what the Low-Canal towns are – Valkis, Jekkara, Barakesh. No law-abiding Martian, let alone an Earthwoman, can last five minutes in them. And the back-blocks are absolutely verboten. So all we get is rumours.

  'Fantas
tic rumours about a barbarian chief named Kynyn, who seems to be promising heaven and earth to the tribes of Kesh and Shun – some wild stuff about the ancient cult of the Ramas thateverybody thought was dead a thousand years ago. We know that Kynyn is tied up somehow with Delgauna, who is a most efficient bandit, and we know that some of the top criminals of the whole System are filtering in to join up. Knighton and Walsh of Terra, Themis of Mercury, Arrod of Callisto Colony – and, I believe, your old comrade in arms, Luthar the Venusian.'

  Stark gave a slight start, and Ashton smiled briefly.

  'Oh, yes,' she said. 'I heard about that.' Then she sobered. 'You can figure that set-up for yourself, Erica. The barbarians are going to go out and fight some kind of a holy war, to suit the entirely unholy purposes of women like Delgauna and the others.

  'Half a world is going to be raped, blood is going to run deep in the Drylands – and it will all be barbarian blood spilled for a lying promise, and the carrion crows of Valkis will get fat on it. Unless, somehow, we can stop it.'

  She paused, then said flatly, 'I want you to go on to Valkis, Erica – but as my agent. I won't put it on the grounds that you'd be doing civilisation a service. You don't owe anything to civilisation, Lady knows. But you might save a lot of your own kind of people from getting slaughtered to say nothing of the border-womenstate Martians who'll be the first to get Kynyn's axe.

  'Also, you could wipe that twenty-year hitch on Luna off the