Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

What in the hell do you say?

There was a pause. All weapons were checked. There were rifles and a few rounds of ammunition. Hippogryph still carried his flintlock. The rest of the tools-knives, clubs, spears-were all traditional. These were checked and made ready.

Yarnall raised his hand. “If none of you mind, I’ll take the lead.” He shrugged. “I’ve been on borrowed time here anyway. if anyone gets killed, let it be me.”

“I don’t know-”

“Listen.” Yarnall was grinning broadly through two days of stubble. His eyes squinted against the driving snow. “I got through the full day! I beat the Implementor! The only thing that I ask from you is that when you nail those bastards, do it good. Do it solid.”

Robin Bowles nodded soberly, black beard, black hair caked with ice until he looked like a mountain man. “All right.”

In a thin line they entered the maze of ancient ice.

Yarnall held up a hand to bring them to a halt. Frankish Oliver came up tight behind him, and they conferred. Max couldn’t hear. Then Yarnall turned.

“Let’s break into teams. I want one force to cross this open space, while the other team circles around to approach from the other side. A pincers. What do you think?”

Johnny Welsh raised his hand. “Listen, everybody. I’d like a chance to lead. I’m just a funny fat man, but if we’re coming down to the line… I’d like to be some use. There may not be another chance. If you need a decoy, what the hell-I’ve always been an odd duck.”

Kevin, a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, raised a skinny arm. The skin from the deflated corpse of a sea lion made him look a little less like a walking skeleton. “Me too. First group.”

“Any other volunteers?” There were, and the group split into halves. Max moved forward to join the first group. Eviane hung back, pulled at his hand imploringly.

There was work to do, Max thought, squeezing Eviane’s small hand. Dangerous work, but they were heroes all.

Heroes all.

Max’s breath sounded rough in his throat. He was too aware of his hurts. Muscles hurt everywhere… as if he’d been in a match, a rough match against an inept and overpowered opponent, a match that had lasted for days.

He was worried about Eviane. Getting into a part-that he could understand. It came to him now that he had never seen her leave it.

How were the others doing?

Kevin was doing fine. The kid had seemed all sticks and parchment a few days before. Now he was whalebone and rawhide. The wind blew snow into his thin face, fluttered the furred edges of his parka, and he barely seemed to notice. Kevin had taken the lead in their column.

The two groups of Adventurers moved in a modified pincer movement through the tumbled blocks of the city. The oddly angled blocks rose twenty stories tall. At first Max had thought that they were composed of ice. Now he saw that they were stone, ancient blocks of stone sheathed in ice, carved with hieroglyphs unlike anything he had ever seen.

Kevin clutched his war club and sidled up to the edge of an abutment, poking the club out and waving it gently as if trying to draw sniper fire. Nothing.

He looked back at them, sugarcube teeth showing in a wide smile. He was nervous, but trying not to show it.

Just a Game, right?

Right.

They peered out across the space separating them from the central citadel.

Most of the chunks of wreckage seemed to have been abandoned ages before. He guessed that the ice on the blocks was as layered as a cross-cut redwood. Lights showed in a central cornplex of buildings. Somebody lived there, or something. The presence of life in the midst of this black desolation was no comfort at all.

Behind him, Eviane was wheezing. She was a little better than she had been a half-hour before, no longer paralyzed with fear, but she was still baggage.

There was movement in the ruins.

The thing that shambled through the ruins was man-shaped, but had no head. It was huge. It reminded Max of one of the Goons in an old Popeye cartoon. It stumbled through the ruins making odd sniffing sounds, poking in the shadows. It wasn’t exactly alert, but it was tenacious, consistent. It kept moving constantly.

But without a head-?

There was another movement in the plaza. A door on the far side opened, and a line of human beings trudged out. They were naked. They walked as if they were asleep.

Robin Bowles asked Kevin for his binoculars. He focused them through the snow on the line of slow marchers.

He grunted in surprise.

“What is it?” Kevin asked.

Bowles dropped back down into the snow beside him. “It looks like Mik-luk. He worked for me at the trading post.”

“Why is he walking naked in this cold?”

“Magic?” Bowles rubbed snow out of his beard. “Maybe the Cabal has some kind of spell on him. If they do, and I can get him to recognize me, it could be the break we’re looking for.”

The six of them thought for a minute. Yarnall looked doubtful. “On the other hand, it could get you very killed.”

“If I don’t go down there and try to save him, I’m betraying our friendship.” He hefted his whale rib. “I have this. Sedna wouldn’t have given ‘em to us if they wouldn’t do the job.”

“Then we all go,” Yarnall said.

Eviane would meet nobody’s eyes. She shuddered.

Bowles shook his head. “No. No need to risk everyone. The rest of the team is moving around from the other side. Someone has to be here to tell them what happened, just in case.”

“Well, then, what about two of us?” Max asked. “Me and Yarnall.”

Bowles considered it for a moment, then nodded. “All right.”

Yarnall turned to Ollie. “Trade you.” He exchanged his war club for Ollie’s rifle. He hefted it lovingly, sighted along the barrel. “That will give us one modern weapon and two traditional ones. That’s a decent spread.”

Eviane clung to Max’s arm. “Max-”

“Have you had another premonition?” He was only half-kidding.

She closed her eyes, and he saw her eyes moving under the closed lids, searching for visions. “No. No, but it comes and goes, Max. I don’t know-”

If she could play for the hidden cameras, so could he. “Listen, Eviane,” he said. Damn, he could almost hear the music swelling in the background. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s-”

His miserable attempt at humor was wasted on her. Her eyes overflowed with genuine tears, and she pulled herself against his chest and sobbed. He looked beyond her to brother Orson, who shrugged.

Max pushed her out to arm’s length. “Now hear this. You knew that all of us might die on this trip. We all understood that. I’m just playing out the hand as dealt.”

She nodded dully.

Max shucked his pack. He peeked over the wall.

The wind had died down a bit. The line of naked brown bodies was still trudging along, overseen by the one headless creature. Its long arms lashed at them, urged them one at a time into a low stone-slab building on the far side of the clearing. From that building, flush against the jagged rise of cliff, there issued forth irregular, horrifying screams.

The line moved forward again. Mik-luk was third in line at the door.

Carefully, cautiously, Yarnall, Robin Bowles, and Max moved out from their hiding places, covering each other as best they could.

(How exactly do you “cover” someone with a walrus prick? The usik wasn’t a ray gun! Max’s rising sense of the absurd would drown him if he wasn’t careful.)

Max ran a modified zig-zag pattern through the ruins. He stopped, heaving for breath. Max turned and ran his fingers over one of the blocks. Hard, cold, carved. The layers of ice prevented his fingers from actually touching the carving. He saw glyphs and pictographs portraying strangely shaped creatures, some of which looked like the result of an obscene, and surely fatal, mating of human and pachyderm.