Down to a Sunless Sea

5 The Strangers

All that morning they rode along the clifflike edge of the ancient continent, where the loose rocks and debris made their footing far easier than the talcum-fine sands of the dustland would have afforded them.

Brant was looking for a deep, capacious cave in the cliffwall, one that would give them the ultimate protection from beasts and inclement weather. And, preferably, a cave that was not already occupied by one of the dangerous predators that abound on Mars.

The three of them took turns riding in the saddle, and this time Zuarra did not yield her turn to Suoli, who was therefore made to plod wearily along on foot as often as her companions. The weak little woman whined and snuffled a little at this lack of preferential treatment, but to her protestations Zuarra paid no attention, her face set in grim mien.

The big Earthsider made no comment and ignored the rift between the two women. A lover’s spat, he thought to himself sardonically.

Along toward midday, with the sun a cold ball of pale flame at the meridian, Brant was jolted from his lethargy when the loper suddenly lifted its’ head and sniffed at the cold air with its scaly snout high. It then gave voice to a harsh cry, almost a challenge.

“What is it, O Brant?” asked Zuarra, scanning the vicinity with alert gaze. The Earthsider shrugged; but something had definitely aroused the loper’s vigilance and, from the direction in which it craned its long, snaky neck, the source of the reptile’s discomfiture seemed to be out in the midst of the dustlands.

Brant was an old Mars hand, and knew that the deadly sandcat makes it lair, tunneled beneath the fine dust of the deserts, lying in wait to trap the unwary, who tread upon the thin surface of its hiding place, break through, and provide the predator with fresh meat. But something in the behavior of the loper made him think it had detected some other form of life than a sandcat.

He wondered what it might be. Then he unlimbered his pair of binoculars from the saddlebags and began to search the dreary flatness of the dustland.

The powerful lenses had been adapted to the dimmer daylight of the Red Planet, and could be adjusted to various degrees of distance. By their aid he soon ascertained the cause of the loper’s fretfulness.

“What have you seen, O Brant?” demanded Zuarra breathlessly.

“Strangers,” he said briefly. “Two of them, at least. In trouble of some sort.”

“Let us go on,” suggested nervous little Suoli in a timid voice, “and leave them to their problem, which is not ours.”

Brant grunted, saying nothing, but Zuarra shot her “sister” a scathing glance of pure contempt. Survival is a deadly struggle in the great dustlands of Mars, and even clan-war and blood-feud are ignored when strangers meet.

“Wait here,” he said tersely, mounting the loper and turning its head out into the desert.

“We will go with you,” said Zuarra, “to share together what may chance to befall.” Behind her words was the obvious fact that, without Brant and the loper, they would have no chance to live very long in this desolate and hostile region.

“Suit yourself,” Brant said flatly. “But keep up!”

They made slow progress in the thick, soft sands, which sucked at their feet like quicksand and impeded every stride. However, Zuarra made no complaint and little Suoli dared not even whimper.

The loper, with its flat, splay-footed stride, moved more quickly and easily atop the superfine sands than did the two women; however, an extended journey across the dustland would soon exhaust it, as well.

Brant was not overly familiar with these Argyre dustlands, except that he was aware that they were vast in expanse and were cleft in twain by a very deep but very narrow canyon called the Erebus—one of those lesions in the rocky crust made eons ago when the planet dried and cracked and shrunk with the loss of its ancient oceans.

He hoped they would not have to travel as far as the canyon to reach the imperiled strangers, but doubted they could be that far off. Had they been, he did not think it possible for the loper to have scented them in the distance.

Fortunately, the newcomers were on this side of the Erebus, and not as far off as he had feared. Only a few minutes of hard riding brought Brant a closer view of them.

There were two men and two riding-beasts, and one of the lopers was clearly dead, the victim of a sandcat’s attack, from the clawed and torn condition of its carcass. Indeed, a moment later, Brant was able to observe the corpse of the predator, slain probably by the laser rifle the younger of the two strangers was holding. The sandcat was bigger than a Bengal tiger, and curiously catlike in appearance, for all that it was reptilian.

The two men he observed narrowly as he rode up to where they stood. One was a native, lean and wolfish, holding a bright new laser rifle at high port, not exactly pointing the weapon at the mounted man, but having it ready for action at need. He had hard, cold eyes and a cruel, thin-lipped mouth, and Brant noticed that his garment bore no clan markings, which suggested that he was aoudh-—an outlaw, exiled from his nation.

The other man, rather surprisingly, was an Earthsider, older than Brant by a couple of decades, probably, wearing a fresh nioflex suit but without a respirator, which meant his body chemistry and lungs had been surgically modified to endure Martian conditions. Brant himself had undergone these modifications years before, and knew that few colonists save for the Colonial Administration police can afford to have their bodies adjusted to life in the open on the desert world.

However, the older man did not look like a cop to Brant, and he would have been extremely surprised to have discovered that the police were looking for him this far from Sun Lake City. Nevertheless, Brant had not kept alive this long on Mars without learning how to take precautions.

He reined in the loper a little distance from where the two men and the dead beasts were stationed, and slid down from the saddle. He held one of his power guns in his left hand, the barrel pointing down, but ready for use if necessary.

The older man stepped forward, raising one hand in salute.

“Good day, citizen! I am Dr. Will Harbin, an Aresologist, and this is my guide, Agila. We are fortunate that you came along.”

“Jim Brant,” said the newcomer, with a curt nod to the native guide. “Prospecting. These two women are under my protection,” he added, as the two plodded up to where the loper stood.

He looked the scene over, noticing a second loper, seemingly unharmed, which knelt exhaustedly on the sand.

“Looks like you had a run-in with a sandcat,” he observed. “Lucky it didn’t get all of your beasts.”

Will Harbin smiled wearily. “That we did, Cn. Brant. My man, Agila, brought it down just as it went after our pack-beast.”

Brant was a trifle puzzled. “Why are you just sitting here, instead of piling everything on the lopers? The cliffwall isn’t very far away—”

Harbin shrugged. “We’ve been riding across the dustland for days now, trying to make for the Regio before our mounts foundered. The beasts are too exhausted to travel farther, and we sure weren’t looking forward to spending another night out here—not with the chance of more sandcats on the prowl!”

“Right,” grunted Brant. “The scent of the slain beasts will bring them around by nightfall. Better chance it afoot and lead your beasts at any easy pace. We’ll accompany you, of course. No sandcat is going to be crazy enough to risk attacking three men and two women. The quicker we get started, the better.”

Harbin followed Brant’s advice, and, while Agila and the women loaded the saddlebags on the weary beast, the two Karthsiders drew aside for a brief conversation.

“Are you looking for anything in particular on the Regio, or just making a survey?” inquired Brant.

Will Harbin smiled: “Actually, I’m fossil-hunting, Martian paleontology being one of my fields. But as far as the Administration knows, I’m making a photo-survey of this part of the south.” He grinned. “What they don’t know, won’t hurt them, I figure!”

Brant chuckled. “Money’s scarce for fossil-hunting, I guess?” The older man soberly agreed.

“Mind telling me where you picked up this guide of yours?”

“In Dakhshan, the trade city,” he said. Brant nodded. Few and very far between were the permanent settlements of the People, but Dakhshan was the nearest—a sheltered spot where many merchant routes met.

“What do you know about him? Looks aoudh, to me. …”

“Yes, Agila was driven into exile by a powerful native chieftain who envied him his prowess and his wealth,” said Harbin. “Or so he says, anyway.”

Brant said nothing, chewing it over. Most outlaws profess innocence of any wrongdoing as a matter of course, whether they were actually innocent or not. He didn’t much like the looks of this Agila: the man had the hard, wolfish way of a bandit, to his observance.

All bandits are outlaws, of course. So … if he was right about this Agila, what possible crime could he have committed that was deemed so horrendous that even the bandits would force him into flight?

It was an interesting question.

And, as it had weight to bear on their immediate future, he decided to find the answer to it as soon as possible.