George Martin - Old Mars

Moorcock is no stranger to Mars, having visited there with a series of novels, written under the name of Edward P. Bradbury, that sent a swashbuckling Earthman to an ancient, habitable Mars: Warriors of Mars, Blades of Mars , and Barbarians of Mars . Now he takes us back to Mars in the company of a notorious outlaw on the run for his life, deadly pursuit hot on his heels, who blunders into a situation where he’s forced to race against time to save the entire planet from being destroyed, with only a few short hours left on the clock …

MAC STONE WAS IN TROUBLE. HE HEARD THE STEADY SLAP-slap-slap of the P140 auto-Bannings and knew they’d licked the atmosphere problem. That gadget could now find a man, stun him, or kill him according to whatever orders had come from Terra. If necessary, the bionic “wombots” it carried could follow him into space. The things worked by popping in and out of regular space the way you bunch up a piece of cloth and stick a needle through it to save time and energy. Human physiology couldn’t stand those instant translations—in and out, in and out through the cosmic “folds”—but the wombot wasn’t human; it moved swiftly and easily in that environment. Flying at cruising speed for regular space-time, the wombot could cross a million miles as if they were a hundred. The thing was a terrible weapon, outlawed on every solar colony, packing several features into one—surveillance, manhunter, ordnance. If Mac were unlucky, they’d just use it to stun him. So they could take their time with him back at RamRam City.

Why do they want me this bad? He was baffled.

They had him pinned down. In all directions lay the low, lichen-covered Martian hills: ochre, brown, and a thousand shades of yellow-grey almost as far as he could see. You couldn’t hide in lichen. Not unless you could afford a mirror suit. Beyond the hills were the mountains, each taller than Everest, almost entirely unexplored. That was where he was heading before a wombot scented heat from his monoflier and took it out in a second. Four days after that, they hit his camp with a hard flitterbug and almost finished him off. Nights got colder as the east wind blew. Rust-red dust swept in from the desert, threatening his lungs. It whispered against his day suit like the voices of the dead.

If they didn’t kill him, autumn would.

Mac plucked his last thin jane from his lips and pinched off the lit end. He’d smoke it later. If there was any “later.” The IMF had evidently gotten themselves some of the new bloodhound wombots, so compact and powerful they could carry a body to Phobos and back. Creepy little things, not much bigger than an adult salmon. They made him feel sick. He still hoped he might pick the site of his last fight. He had only had two full charges left in his reliable old Banning-6 pistol. After that, he had a knife in his boot and some knucks in his pocket. And then his bare hands and his teeth.

They had called Stone a wild animal back on Mercury, and they were right. The Callisto slave-masters had made him into one after they pulled him from a sinking lavasub. He’d been searching for the fabled energy crowns of the J’ja. The rebel royal priests had been planning to blast Spank City to fragments before the IMF found the secret of their fire-boats and quite literally stopped them cold, freezing them in their tracks, sending the survivors out to Panic , the asteroid that liked to call herself a ship. But the J’ja had hidden their crowns first.

So long ago. He’d been in some tough spots and survived, but this time it seemed like he’d run out of lives and luck.

You didn’t get much cover in one of the old flume holes. They’d been dug when some crazy twenty-second-century Terran wildcat miners thought they could cut into the crust and tap the planet’s plasma. They believed there were rivers of molten gold down there. They claimed that they heard them at night when they slept curled within the cones. Someone had fallen into a particularly deep one and sworn he had seen molten platinum running under his feet. Poor devils. They’d spent too long trying to make sense of the star-crowded sky. Recently, he’d heard that the inverted cones were used by hibernating ock-crocs. Mac hoped he wasn’t waking anything up down there. He doubted the theory and did his best not to think about it, to keep out of sight and to drop his body temperature as much as he dared, release a few dead fuel pods and hope that the big Banning bloodbees would mistake him for an old wreck and its dead pilot and pass him by.

“You only need fear the bees if you’ve broken the law.” That familiar phrase was used to justify every encroachment on citizens’ liberty. Almost all activities were semicriminal these days. Mars needed cheap human workers. Keep education as close as possible to zero. The prisons were their best resource. Industrial ecology created its own inevitable logic.

Sometimes you escaped the prisons and slipped back into RamRam City, where you could live relatively well if you knew how to look after yourself. Sometimes they just let you stay there until they had a reason to bring you in or get rid of you.

And that’s what they appeared to be doing now.

Slap-slap-slap .

Why were they spending so much money to catch him? He knew what those machines cost. Even captured, he wasn’t worth a single wombot.

Wings fluttering, big teeth grinding, the flier was coming over the horizon, and, by the way it hovered and turned in the thin air, Mac’s trick hadn’t fooled it at all. Good handling. He admired the skill. Private. Not IMF at all. One guy piloting. One handling the ordnance. Or maybe one really good hunter doing both. He reached to slide off the pistol’s safety. Looked like he was going down fighting. He wondered if he could hit the pilot first.

Stone was a Martian born in the shadow of Low-Canal’s massive water tanks. The district had never really been a canal. It had been named by early explorers trying to make sense of the long, straight indentations, now believed to be the foundations of a Martian city. But it was where most of AquaCorps’s water was kept. Water was expensive and had to be shipped in from Venus. Sometimes there would be a leakage, and, with kids like him, he could collect almost a cup before the alarms went. His mother lived however she could in the district. His father had been a space ape on the wild Jupiter runs, carbon rods rotting and twisting as they pulled pure uranium from the Ki Sea. He’d probably died when the red spot erupted, taking twenty u-tankers with it.

When he was seven, his ma sold Mac to a mining company looking for kids small enough to fit into the midget tunnelers working larger asteroids and moons that were able to support a human being for a year or so before they died. His mother had known that “indentured” was another word for death sentence. She knew that he was doomed to breathe modified methane until his lungs and all his other organs and functions gave out.

Only Mac hadn’t died. He’d stolen air and survived and risen, by virtue of his uninhibited savagery, in what passed for Ganymedan society. Kru miners made him a heroic legend. They betrothed him to their daughters.

Stone was back on Mars and planning to ship out for Terra when his mother sent word that she wanted to tell him something. He’d gone to Tank Town with the intention of killing her. When he saw her, the anger went out of him. She was a lonely old woman lacking status or family. He’d only be doing her a favor if he finished her off. So he let it go. And realized that she’d been holding her breath as he held his, and he turned and laughed that deep slow purr she knew from his father. This made her note his tobacco-colored skin, now seamed like well-used leather, and she wept to read in his face all the torments he had endured since she’d sold him. So he had let her die believing a lie, that they enjoyed a reconciliation. What he said or thought didn’t mean much to the Lord she believed in.