series 01 05 A Prince of Mars Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  A Prince of Mars by Frank Chadwick

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One - "The Deadly Sand"

  Chapter Two - "Sickness in Paradise"

  Chapter Three - "A Hidden Friend?"

  Chapter Four - "A Perilous Road"

  Chapter Five - "Martian Crossroads"

  Chapter Six - "On Silken Wing"

  Chapter Seven - "Death Above the Clouds"

  Chapter Eight - "A Dolorous Duty"

  Acknowledgements

  Space: 1889 & Beyond—A Prince of Mars

  By Frank Chadwick

  Copyright 2012 by Frank Chadwick

  Space: 1889™ & © Frank Chadwick 1988, 2012

  Cover & Logo Design © Steve Upham and

  Untreed Reads Publishing, 2011, 2012

  Cover Art © David Burson and Untreed Reads Publishing, 2012

  Space: 1889 & Beyond developed by Andy-Frankham-Allen

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Other Titles in the Space: 1889 & Beyond Series

  Journey to the Heart of Luna

  Vandals on Venus

  The Ghosts of Mercury

  Abattoir in the Aether

  Dark Side of Luna

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  “A PRINCE OF MARS”

  By Frank Chadwick

  For Diana,

  once she’s old enough to read it.

  Prologue

  1.

  “My prince,” Shistomo said as he entered the small sitting room, and he bowed to the room’s sole occupant. His companion smiled in appreciation, leaf-like ears twitching with pleasure, but he waved away the title with a hand heavy with gold and silver rings.

  “Not a prince yet, my friend, but soon, ah? Soon the usurpers will be overthrown and the Old Order restored.” He held up a paper bearing the remains of a red clay seal disk, the mark of official correspondence. “I have just received the final assent. All four of the Charoni princes have agreed to support our plan—unofficially, of course.”

  “Of course,” Shistomo said. “Although you have the letters, My Prince, which might embarrass them should the plan…enjoy less success than we hope.”

  “Oh, they were careful enough about that. All are from minor functionaries in their administrations and all are in code, with separate ciphers. I suppose if they want to distance themselves, they can claim I invented the ciphers to make innocent communications appear sinister. It does not matter. What matters is their assent. They will place no obstacle in our path.”

  “Nor will they assist us in any meaningful way,” Shistomo said.

  “It is as it should be,” his companion answered with a graceful gesture. “Our destiny is now in our own hands.”

  In my hands, you mean, Shistomo thought to himself, but he smiled and nodded. Shistomo would gladly make a hundred new princes, let them all rule by murderous whim and live in shocking opulence, and never himself take so much as a copper ring in repayment, all provided it would speed the day when Stafraana—Syrtis Major, as the British devils called it—was reduced to a smoking ruin, stained red with Earthman blood.

  2.

  EXCERPT 44.

  “Beyond the Inner Worlds: The Journal of Professor Nathanial Stone” (Published July 2011, by Chadwick Press).

  Monday, September 16th, 1889.

  It has been six days since the destruction of Peregrine Station, six days filled with anxiety and boredom in equal measure, a combination I never before contemplated, let alone experienced.

  My anxiety is both particular and general. That swine Le Boeuf made a proper job of poor Annabelle’s leg and she suffers most grievously. The aether cutter, which I appropriated for our escape, was stocked with some basic medical supplies—alcohol, carbolic acid, fresh dressings, that sort of thing, along with a very useful copy of Blackwood’s Pocket Physician. I was able to clean her wound and bandage it, so I hope to avoid infection. Since removing the bullet, I also extracted bone fragments from the wound. Le Boeuf’s revolver bullet clearly broke one of the two bones of her lower leg, the tibia I believe if I have read Blackwood correctly, and so I made an effort to set and splint it as well. She does not have a fever—and thank God for that!—but her behaviour has become erratic, her mind confused, and her sleep troubled by violent dreams. I have read this result often accompanies the escape of bone marrow into the bloodstream following a severe fracture. Laudanum eases her physical pain and dulls her mind—both outcomes welcome under the circumstances.

  Cleaning and dressing her wound was one of the most distressing things I have ever done—as well as quite embarrassing to see her unclothed limbs, at least at first. If she had been wearing a dress it would have been easier, as it was the coverall she appropriated from Peregrine makes things somewhat more difficult. It mattered very little after a moment, however, in the face of her injuries. I don’t find that I am particularly squeamish about my own hurts, nor have I ever found the sight of my blood upsetting in the least. Seeing the damage wrought to dear Annabelle’s leg by that single revolver bullet, however, made me light in the head and weak in the stomach, and it was only with considerable difficulty that I did that which needed doing.

  Were it within in my power, I think I should require all would-be generals and admirals to work in a field hospital for a month or so. Let them peer into pulped flesh and shattered bones, let them hold down a man (or woman) screaming in pain, and see how many are still anxious to send soldiers into that butcher’s arena afterwards.

  Of course, the ones still willing to do it would be the first ones I’d strike off the list. But as the others would have surrendered their candidacy, there would then be no generals or admirals at all, and I suppose we need some.

  My thoughts wander. That is the boredom at work. As perilous as is our situation, and as worrisome as is Annabelle’s condition, there are only so many things which can be done to deal with them, and those I have done, and done again, and done once more for good measure. Dealing with Annabelle’s injury has allowed me the distraction to take my mind off those lost on Peregrine. So many people…friends among them. No, I must not think of them, for there is naught I can do at this time.

  I have also been reading up on Mars, from Conklin’s Atlas of the Worlds. I have, of course, read the entire section several times now, first from a sensible desire to prepare myself, and then from simple boredom. Now I wait.

  My general anxiety is for the condition of the flyer. Our craft was struck by debris from the destruction of Peregrine. The hull leaks were comparatively easy to repair and I did so before we lost much of our oxygen. The aether propeller was damaged as well, but fortunately its external components were unharmed; the concussion of the explosion misaligned the internal armatures, but this I was able to correct, so we now are able to make a very good turn of speed. I expect to make Mars-fall within two days. I have no means to i
nspect the exterior of the craft, however, and so cannot observe whether the airscrew and lifting vanes are intact.

  I suppose I shall determine that empirically in forty-eight hours.

  Chapter One

  “The Deadly Sand”

  1.

  The Two sat in the shade of the skrill’s enormous outstretched wing, watching the shadows creep across the bare rock and red sand, waiting for the mid-afternoon heat to pass. For a long time neither of them spoke.

  The two were as different from each other as memory from anticipation. The younger of the two, the woman, was shorter, broad in the shoulders, and her skin, unlike her companion’s, was the swarthy ochre of the Martian hill people. She wore the leather harness and spurs of a skrill rider, the harness strapped over dirty blue robe and leggings, and her face bore the distinctive swirling red and black tattoos of a high hunter of the Numaka clan of the iTaka-Queln. Her thick red hair hung in a wild tangle almost to her waist, but twin braids to either side framed her face. Entwined in the braids were the yellow teeth of the Barrovaangian warrior she had slain as a young girl, nine seasons past. That act, one of simple self-preservation, had changed her life path and led her clan to make her the only female high hunter of the iTaka-Queln. She was a handsome woman, in her narrow-eyed and tight-lipped way.

  No one would ever describe the older man’s ruined face as handsome in any way. Tall and slender, pale skin an odd contrast to his greying but still dark hair, he sat cross-legged on a flat rock. He carefully carved a long straight skrill horn, wearing away the bone with the point and dull trailing edge of his knife blade. A wonderfully intricate, twisting pattern already covered most of the length of the horn. The design reflected the shape of the woman’s tattoos, or perhaps of clouds torn to ragged streamers by a dust devil. He paused and flexed his cramping hand, then scanned the horizon and twitched his large, pointed ears, alert to any hint of wind. Nothing.

  The woman stirred. “Reconsider,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No,” he answered, and smiled. “You see? I can be as taciturn as you, my ferocious huntress.”

  “Voicing the claim puts lie to it,” she answered.

  The man shrugged. He set aside his horn and went back to studying the desert. “Look at the horizon,” he said, and pointed. “Straight and sharp as a blade’s edge. No wind out there to raise the dust, and cool enough that there’s no shimmer. Your ride home will be smooth.”

  “Why do you do this?” she asked.

  “This is where the Queln come to face the long sleep…or to find it. You know that.”

  “But you are not Queln.”

  “Cruel Gillsa, would you deny me even that?” He touched his abdomen. “In here I am Queln. That has been enough for me.”

  She turned and looked at him, studied him before speaking, and her hard eyes softened. “Kak’hamish Bent-Face, Far-Wandering Speaker of Tongues, Bright-Voiced Night Singer, ride with me back to the high aerie.”

  “No,” he said. He touched her hand but his eyes remained on the horizon. “I have sung all my songs, Gillsa Brave-Flyer. Fair Gillsa. I have done everything in this world my hand is fit for, everything except finish this one last carving. There will be time enough for that before I sleep.”

  They sat together in silence for a while longer, then the woman named Gillsa rose, touched the hair of the man named Kak’hamish, and turned away. She mounted the skrill, secured her riding harness, and leaned forward to whisper the words of command. The beast stretched its long, sinewy form, spread its lifting membranes, and rose silently from the desert floor. It circled twice and then, its wings rippling like waves on the deep canals, the skrill carried its rider south. Within moments they shrank to a speck in the sky, and then they were gone.

  For a long time Kak’hamish watched the place in the sky where they had disappeared.

  2.

  THEY LIVED. So as crashes went, this one could have been worse.

  Nathanial rubbed his bruised left shoulder as he surveyed the damage. Too many lift vanes carried away by Peregrine Station’s explosion, and an auxiliary boiler which gave up the ghost seventy miles above the surface of Mars, had combined to nearly put paid to them. A miracle he’d even been able to sit the cutter down in one piece—one big piece, in any case. Small bits of hull and external fittings decorated the quarter-mile-long trench his landing had ploughed in the reddish rock and sand. Most of the remaining lift vanes, for what good they’d done them so far, were gone, stripped away in the crash and now floating somewhere in the lower Martian atmosphere, carried heaven knew where by the wind.

  He scanned the horizon in each direction. Nothing. Flat sand, rock, and a few rust-coloured thorn bushes stretched as far as his eyes could see, and his eyes were very good. Only the wreck of the aether cutter, and its quarter-mile debris field, defaced this enormous blank canvas.

  Inside the cabin Annabelle moaned. Nathanial scrambled through the open hatch into the gloom of the interior. She stirred on the leather couch. He sat beside her and took her hand, and her eyes fluttered open.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She looked around the cabin, confused. “I had a dream. There was a little girl…she had dark hair.”

  “Most little girls do, in my experience, except for the blonde ones. And there’s the occasional red-head, of course. Let’s have a look at that leg of yours.”

  Nathanial first felt her forehead—warm. A bad sign. He gently peeled back the linen bandage on her lower leg, sodden with blood. The wound had opened again and the flesh around it seemed to glow with inflammation, as if in indignation over this gross violation.

  “No, her hair was not just dark, it was black,” Annabelle said, her voice fainter, less certain. “So black it seemed to…to glow. Black as raven feathers. So black it shone blue in the light…so black…”

  Her voice trailed off. He thought she had dozed, but she turned to face him and her eyes cleared.

  “We crashed, didn’t we?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so. We both seem to have come through reasonably intact, but the cutter will never fly again, that’s certain.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I rather had my hands full coming down, I’m afraid, but I made a few observations before we hit. Given our angle of approach, I imagine we are somewhere northeast of the crown colony at Syrtis Major. I saw a city to our west, but quite far away. We seem to be well off of any regular trade route, so I don’t imagine we are likely to see any travellers.”

  “And no one knows we were headed for Mars. We weren’t due, so we cannot be overdue, can we?” Annabelle laughed, and the momentary wildness in her eyes frightened Nathanial.

  “Ah…precisely. I don’t see much alternative to a very long walk.”

  She passed her hands over her face and gathered herself. “Yes. Well, you walk to that city and bring back help.”

  She said it seriously, bravely, but Nathanial could see in her eyes that she knew it meant a death sentence for her. He would not come back in time. He probably wouldn’t live to come back at all.

  Or was there a chance? It was certainly his best hope of survival: travel light and fast due west until he found either the city or a canal. All Martian cities were on canals, or the ruins of old canals.

  Yes, strike the canal and then what? Should he head north of south? Of course, he didn’t know a single word of any Martian languages. How long would it take to make himself understood? How long to persuade someone to mount a rescue expedition?

  How would he even find the cutter again in this featureless waste? Leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind him? And all that time, Annabelle would suffer alone, dying by inches, not knowing what had happened to him even if he reached civilisation, which as he thought about it, he realised was itself a rather dodgy proposition. The desert was probably overrun with all sorts of predators which would find him delicious.

  No. He had promised her uncle he would see to Anna
belle’s safety. He would not, could not, leave her here to perish alone. On the other hand, simply sitting down to die with her seemed a rather…Lilliputian final act for his life.

  The truth was, aside from a few aches and bruises, he felt quite good physically. He expected that was due to the lower gravity—about eight or nine tenths of Earth’s as he recalled. He couldn’t just carry Annabelle, or not very far, but there was an abundance of now-useless steam and water piping lying about, and electrical wires to lash it together.

  “You lived in the west,” he said. “What is that Red Indian contraption I’ve seen in photographs? The one they drag behind ponies?”

  “A travois?” she answered.

  “Yes, that’s it. I’ll wager I can do better than that.”

  3.

  NATHANIAL WALKED for two hours that first afternoon before learning the wisdom of resting during the heat of the day and walking at night. He and Annabelle sheltered under a simple lean-to tent formed from a canvas ceiling cover salvaged from the cutter. They talked a little, but Annabelle’s mind, clouded alternately by pain and laudanum, wandered too much for serious conversation. The air became very hot and close at sundown, but then cooled almost immediately.

  He walked again after nightfall, his satchel slung over his shoulder, dragging his improvised travois upon which Annabelle rested with their provisions. They had plenty of provisions on the cutter, including water. The issue was weight, and he had largely solved that with several lifting vanes recovered from the wreck of the cutter. That was tricky work, and making a stable floating travois even more so, but the actual construction was the difficult bit. The engineering was trivial.

  He had mounted the salvaged vanes under the four corners of the travois platform for stability, then settled Annabelle in the centre, as he knew she would shift position from time to time, and would cause the least disruption to trim of his “aero-travois,” as he thought of it. He’d mounted one adjustable lifter in the centre of the raft, which he could manually turn through ninety degrees and so adjust its lift from maximum to nil, letting him drop the sled when he was not hauling it. As it was, the raft did not completely negate the weight of its cargo, and for further stability rested on two long runners.