"Are you ready for this?" Sanchez asked.
"I’m ready," the man said. "And my name is Tiler. My profession and my name."
"Well, Tiler, be careful not to threaten Private Parts here, or he’ll shoot you dead. Just distract him."
Tiler half-rose in his chains and the Morgh’s head snapped up from repose. Its eyes clicked open. Tiler looked at the people about him and began to shout. "Listen, people, I’m going to tell you how to lay tiles." He shook a finger in the face of the nearest person. "You’d better make sure your surface is flat. Use a straight plank as a level." He turned to someone else. "And make sure your grout isn’t too thin, damn it."
The Morgh raised its arm and the laser popped out. Its lenses were focused on Tiler, while it waited for evidence of threat.
"Wipe the grout from the surface of the tile before it dries. Do you understand that?"
Sanchez rose in her chains and grabbed the Morgh’s arm. Its head turned toward her, and its arm swung in her direction. Jason grabbed its shoulder and began to feel about the joints, looking for the access panel he knew was there.
"Jesus, Jason, hurry up." Sanchez was using all her strength to keep her grip on the arm and hold the laser above the heads of the prisoners. They screamed and crouched down, dropping to the floor with the rattle of chains. The Morgh threw Sanchez back and forth like a terrier at a bull’s throat. Jason popped open the access panel, reached inside, began to rip out wires. A laser-beam shot into the wall of the car just above Tiler’s head and the air rushed out with a shriek.
"Find a patch under your seat," Sanchez shouted. "There’s got to be some in there. Slap one on that hole or we’re all dead." A young girl leaped into action and followed her instructions. Sanchez was slammed against the wall and nearly lost her grip on the arm. Another laser beam sizzled into the ceiling overhead, and the girl was on it in a second with another patch, ignoring the danger. The smell of rotting flesh made Sanchez feel faint, but it would not do to pass out now; the Morgh would surely kill everyone in the car.
The forward hatch irised open and a human being stood for an instant in shock, then whipped out a laser pistol. Sanchez yanked down the Morgh’s arm, and a laser-beam flashed into the surprised guard’s chest. He collapsed and Tiler snatched his weapon from his falling hands.
"Not that way! Turn it around!" Sanchez was lifted off her feet and thrust into the ceiling as the Morgh rose to its full height. Jason hung on its back, still ripping wires from its arm. The Sand Rover squealed to a stop. The hatch of the driver-car irised open and the driver was framed in the opening. Tiler pointed the laser in his general direction and pressed every button he could find. The driver’s eyes went wide as he saw the struggle going on in the last car, then saw his companion lying dead. He ducked back and the iris began to close. A beam flashed through just as the iris was closing and the driver screamed.
"I’ve got it," Jason shouted. The Morgh’s arm went limp and fell. The Morgh thrashed wildly as Jason climbed over it, ripping out wires and breaking connections. It fell back into its seat and slumped there. The lights on its chest went dead and it lay still, only a few parts twitching occasionally.
"Good shooting, Tiler. Let me see that thing. I’ll bet they arm the guards with hand-guns just in case one of their cemetery pets goes berserk." Sanchez took the laser and sent several bolts into the immobile Morgh, just to make sure. Then she set about cutting her chains. Jason removed the laser from the Morgh’s useless arm and worked on his own restraints. In a few minutes everyone was being freed.
"Now, we don’t know if Satanic Headquarters has received any distress-calls from this vehicle," Sanchez said. "So we have to get under cover as soon as we can. Look through these bins and bring anything you find into the second car. This is a freight-car and there ought to be a lot of useful objects. There. Cargo netting. Good. Take that. Tools, anything you can find."
The second car was much more comfortable, as it was the living-quarters of the driver and guard, and fully stocked for a long trip across the desert. There were bunks and cooking facilities and even a shower.
"Drag those bodies into the last car with the Morgh," Sanchez ordered, as one by one the prisoners were freed and filed forward. "We can use the freight-car to cover our trail, I hope."
Finally, all the prisoners were freed. Sanchez shut the hatch and sealed the lock. She and Jason moved forward into the driving car. There was another bunk on top of the motor-housing, and a well-stocked weapons cabinet. She examined the weapons with grunts of approval, strapped on a laser, handed another to Jason, then slipped in behind the wheel as Jason sat beside her. She spun the wheel and the Rover turned in a half-circle as it headed back in an easterly direction. It bounced madly as she gunned the motor and it raced over the dusty plains on its huge balloon tires.
Tiler appeared at the hatch. "I don’t know how to thank you, Sanchez," he said, "but..."
"No need to thank me. It’s my butt on the line too. This thing was headed for the Tharsis and with every hour there would have been less and less chance of escaping. We may die yet, but we have a chance now. You did good work. You’ve got a head on your shoulders, and I need someone like you to keep the others focused. Try to make them comfortable back there. Work out a sleep schedule. Pick some people capable of carrying out your orders. Make sure everybody has a job to keep their minds occupied. Can you do that?"
"Of course, Sanchez. Leave it to me."
"The girl who did the patch-work. What’s your name?"
"Ko-Ree."
"Well, Ko-Ree, you’re Tiler’s lieutenant."
"Yes, Ma’am."
In an hour, the Rover squealed to a halt at the top of a steep bluff. Sanchez backed the vehicle to the edge of the bluff until the last car hung over the edge. There was a banging from inside.
"One of those men is still alive," Tiler shouted.
"Too bad for him. He shouldn’t be selling his fellow human beings to the monsters." She flipped a lever on the panel and the last car uncoupled with a hiss. She threw the Rover into reverse for just a second and bumped the last car over the edge. Through the port they could see it picking up speed as it rolled down the steep embankment, then shot out into space over the kilometre-high cliffs. Even in the thin air of the Martian heights they could hear the crash.
"They should be able to find that right away," she said, "And if they start searching the Echus Chasma region first, it ought to give us some valuable time." The great tires squealed in the dust as the Rover roared off, continuing in an easterly direction. "We’re sitting ducks out here for an aerial search. These Rovers are painted to stand out against the Martian surface, just to make them easier to find. But I think I can fix that if we can get under cover before they spot us."
***
A few hours later, the Rover headed down the slopes of Hebe Chasma into the driving snow. The sky turned ice blue as they descended the glacial slopes, and the snowstorm pelted the forward port with tiny crystals of ice. Sanchez pumped the brakes and continually spun the wheel to keep the vehicle from sliding sideways on the icy slopes, as she peered through the port into the white haze outside. They could hear the howl of the wind and feel the Rover shake as the constantly changing gusts buffeted the vehicle this way and that. Finally, she saw what she was looking for and steered into a dark cave. They could still hear the wind shrieking at the cave’s mouth, but they were out of the storm. Sanchez checked her instruments once again, then rose and went aft.
"The air is very thin outside and extremely cold, but it’s breathable for a few minutes at a time. I need some help for a few hours and then we can sleep till daylight."
There were plenty of volunteers--willing to do anything to stop thinking about the fate they had narrowly avoided and might yet face again. There were free-fall suits to protect their viscera in the thin air, and fur parkas to protect them from the cold. There was breathing apparatus they had to learn how to use, but the atmosphere was thick enough to prevent rapid decompression, and Tiler kept watch to make sure no one stayed out too long. They wrapped the Rover in cargo netting, dug down into the snow until they found red Martian soil, then melted enough ice to create a thick mud paste that they plastered all over the vehicle. By the time the daylight from the cave-mouth had disappeared, they were finished.
"I think this is a pretty good camouflage job, People," Sanchez said. "We have to make a good seventy kilometres overland tomorrow before we can get down into cover again. Good work. Get some sleep."
Their spirits lifted for no good reason other than the fact that they needed to be, the escapees retired to the cab to sleep, some on the bunks, others curled up on the padded floor.
Jason stripped off his clothes and crawled into the bunk in the driver car. Sanchez sat for a moment, studying the readouts on the dash. "We should be able to re-charge the solar panels on the road tomorrow," she said. "And the air-tanks are being replenished now."
"Maria..."
"Wait." There was a muted roar from the mouth of the cave--subtly different from the howl of the wind. A searchlight flicked on and flashed by as a flyer sped the length of Hebe Chasma, shining its light into the dark corners of the valley.
"Routine search," she said. "They don’t really think we’re in this area."
"Maria, you need to get some sleep."
Sanchez stood by the bunk and stripped off her clothes. In the pale light of the instrument panel, Jason studied the writhing landscape of her illustrated body.
"You’re so beautiful," he said. "I never get tired of looking at you."
Sanchez sniggered. "No one else ever called me beautiful."
"Davis has. And he should know an excellent design when he sees one. In my home torus, there was a family of cats, like the jaguars you mention, but smaller. They were beautiful like you--sleek and graceful and strong, and covered with complex patterns. I loved to watch the mother teaching the kittens how to hunt. In fact, I learned how to hunt from watching them."
"Go to sleep, Jason." Sanchez peeled off her panty and slid under the sheet. She curled up inside the arc of his body, her head resting on his arm. He kissed the nape of her neck and heard her breathing increase in rhythm. His hand slid down between her breasts until his palm was flat on the hard muscle of her belly, now rising and falling rapidly as she began to pant. She felt him growing hard behind her, and she lifted one leg so he could slip inside. The panting sound of her breathing rose to a low growl; the sound was tremendously exciting to him. He flipped her on her stomach and leaned over her, pinning her hands to the bunk. She could have thrown him off in an instant, but she didn’t. Her head thrashed on the pillow and her hips rose to meet him at every thrust, and it wasn’t until he let go of one wrist and slapped her hard on the buttocks that she surrendered to orgasm. He collapsed on top of her and bit her on the back of the neck, like a cat, and her screams subsided into laughter.
In the next car, Tiler chuckled to himself and laid his head back down on his pillow. "Thank the gods for that," he mumbled. "Maybe she won’t kill anybody for a while."
***
The Rover sped across the plains, its great wheels kicking up dust-clouds that billowed skyward and tiny dust-devils that spun in its wake. The heading was due south, toward Ophir Chasma.
"There’s a ship," Jason said, his eyes glued to the screen. "Coming from the northwest."
"Damn! We’re still thirty klicks away from any decent cover. Unless..." She spun the wheel and the Rover roared off in another direction. The walls of a crater rushed toward them. Her eyes searched for a gentle slope in the rim until they found a collapsed section, and the Rover nosed in and up and down the slope. It screeched to a halt in the shadow of the rim and backed in behind a rock-fall. Sanchez shut off the motor.
A ship descended into the crater and hovered, studying the dust-clouds. There was nothing strange about dust-devils in the lee of a Martian crater, and the drifting dust had obscured the Rover’s tire-tracks--or so Sanchez hoped. The ship hovered, moved their way. They could see the death’s head of the pilot, strapped into the controls--indeed, part of the controls of the ship. For a moment, it studied the jagged patterns of black and red on the crater’s slopes, and then the ship rose and sped off to the southwest. In a few minutes, Sanchez started the motor. The vehicle spun about, climbed the crater wall, and roared off to the south again.
Ahead, the rim of the world seemed to rush toward them. They dropped over the edge of the plains into Ophir Chasma and sped down the slopes. Frost appeared on the rocky soil, and soon there was snow, and they found themselves descending the icy slopes in the shadow of towering glaciers. Sanchez concentrated on keeping the vehicle upright as its great tires bounced through gullies and snowdrifts and open streams, and finally there were huge open vistas of tundra, dotted with wildflowers. The land sloped away to the forest far below, and they could see the expanse of a mountain lake. In the end, the vehicle slipped into the trees and came to a stop at the edge of the lake.
The atmosphere was festive as the vehicle’s occupants washed the red mud from the Rover and filled the cargo-netting with tree-branches and great armloads of moss. They had dinner beside the lake, afraid to build a fire but happy to be outside in the cool, refreshing air.
"What now?" Jason asked.
"From here, straight down into Candor Chasma, and then across the Melas Plain to the River Coprates. Hassan will have to sail up the river, and if we can find a narrow spot, we can hail him from the shore."
"If he hasn’t passed by already."
"I don’t think so. He has to depend on the wind, which has always been variable in the Mariner Valley, and we’ve been moving pretty steadily."
"What about the passengers? Tiler can drive the Rover now. Can we turn it over to them when we find the Argo?"
"That’s one option. They could drive down the Coprates and over the Aurorae Planum to Gangis Chasma, then overland across the Xanthe Terra and down the Shalbatana River Valley to the coast. It’s a long trip, and they’d be in danger from pirates again, once they got there. But there’s really not much choice. By that time, either we would have the Aries and be able to pick them up, or we wouldn’t, in which case pretty much everybody’s screwed, anyway.
"Or we could give them the Argo and they could try to sail home. We’ll need to travel overland once we get to the Labyrinth of Night, anyway, and there’s certainly no guarantee we’ll be able to find another Sand Rover in working condition. This baby may be a godsend." And she patted the side of the vehicle with affection.
The Rover made its way slowly down the slopes of Candor Chasma, following animal trails through the forest, carefully crossing meadows and open plains, splashing across or down shallow creeks. Sometimes they had to make long detours around canyons or build rafts to pole the vehicle across broad rivers, but always they made their way south toward the greatest river valley on Mars.
Supplies ran out and Jason taught the passengers how to make weapons and traps from materials found in the woods, and how to kill or trap their own food. They saved the lasers, not only to conserve power, but to cook without open fire--a plume of smoke in the forest could easily be spotted from the air. Also, they might need the lasers for battle at any time; by now everyone was trained in their use, and Sanchez praised her little army openly. The general consensus of opinion was that she had mellowed a great deal, though no one said so, and the majority thought it was because she was getting laid on a regular basis, though no one said that either.
Finally, they emerged into Melas Chasma, a 200-kilometer-wide stretch of prairie flatland in the Mariner Valley. The passengers admired the landscape as they rolled through the long grass; most of them were from farming communities and they knew good land when they saw it. If not for the Shadow of the Sorcerer, some said, Black Canyon could be a land of good black earth instead of black death and horror.
Sanchez stopped the vehicle in a patch of trees on a bluff and climbed out.
"Wait here," she told the others. "Jason, bring the binoculars."
"What is it?"
"Aircraft, I think."
They crept to the edge of the bluff and peered over the rise. Sanchez snatched the binoculars and scanned the valley below. Jason could see a broad river snaking through the valley. There were things buzzing in the air, like insects, and a black mass of movement, like an ant-colony.
"What the hell is that?"
"It’s the Army of Darkness, that’s what it is."
"What do you mean?"
"Morgh. A Morgh encampment."
"How many?"
Sanchez swept the binoculars across the valley. "I’d say...oh...about three thousand. Give or take."