1899- Journey to Mars Page 5

  Ian Mackenzie was a tall, rawboned clansman from the stony mountains above Loch Maree, who John rescued from a rock precipice as the Scotsman waited for the last of a group of lowland bandits who had finally cornered him. Ian sat on a rock, his huge, two-handed claymore with the strange rose-colored blade across his knees, a six-foot longbow and quiver with three arrows remaining at his feet. He held a bagpipe and played “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” as he waited for the remaining dozen of his wary enemies to climb the final twenty feet to the crest.

  John slowed the airship so it was within inches of the man and looked him over. Ian was bleeding from a long cut on his forearm and had a red stain low on the side of his white shirt and another one on his torn kilt. John said, “Would you care for a lift?”

  Ian stopped playing, squeezed the air out of his pipes, grasped his claymore and said, “I might be, but tis a fair breeze up here, and I have me playmates coming, so it must be a grand temptin’ to sway me.”

  Carter said, “You’ve got three arrows left. You could put them to good use while those boys are climbing.”

  “Aye, but I sent their bowmen to meet Charon the Ferryman, and now they’re lowlanders armed with poor quality steel. Wouldn’t be sportin’ to fletch three of them.”

  “I can see how it wouldn’t. But it’s a long walk from here to anywhere, and I have a ride if you want it.”

  Ian grinned at Carter, bright blue eyes sparkling, and said, “Would ye be havin’ a dram or two of skull thump with ye? That would tip the scales, I’m thinkin’.”

  “There’s a bottle of Kentucky anti-fogmatic in the galley.”

  Ian pursed his lips, “Bourbon? Pity, I think I’ll be stayin’.”

  The lines at the corners of John’s eyes crinkled, “I do happen to have a full cask of The Glenlivet I picked up yesterday from their distillery in Speyside.”

  “Yer a bonny prince, Captain! Permission to come aboard!” John motioned with his arm. Ian sheathed his claymore, grabbed his bagpipe, longbow and quiver, and vaulted onto the deck as light and agile as a red-haired catamount.

  They had been as close as brothers ever since.

  Ian said, “We should be approachin’ Adam Peak in a wee bit. Do ye ken to pass the sacred mountain on the east or west?”

  John pulled his yellow-lens goggles down so they hung around his neck and said, “On the east, and low, as deep into the greenery as we can. There are too many eyes on Adam Peak.”

  “Aye, John. We’ll nudge the monkeys so gentle from their perches we won’t wake a single ape.”

  The Wraith approached the tall, reddish mountain called “Sri Prada” by the Ceylonese and Adam Peak by the British. Buddhists knew it as the most holy place in Ceylon. The gray frigate swung to the east side and submerged into the green-tinged darkness of a forest that spread like an emerald skirt down the slopes of the mountain. The Wraith sailed in silence though the vegetation, its hull bruising the leaves and petals, releasing oils into the air so the night filled their nostrils with a sweet perfume of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, jasmine, orchids, and countless other fragrant flowers. Here and there, the frigate disturbed large clusters of multi-colored butterflies that fluttered so thickly around the ship that John felt it was like looking through a kaleidoscope. The colors were vibrant, even in the moonlight.

  When Mount Adam was behind them, John walked to Ian and said, “Where is the rest of the crew?”

  Ian said, “They’re a wee bit skittish of the ballast there.” He indicated the woven baskets.

  “We will be rid of them soon. Tell the boys to stop being so girlish about it.”

  “Aye.”

  “And tell them to remember that sound carries in the mountain valleys, and we won’t be out of them until the first gray light.”

  “They’re good lads, John. It will be fine sailin’. Dinnae be gettin’ yerself a case of the flopsies, it’s not like ye.”

  John squinted one eye and looked at the Scotsman. “The flopsies?”

  “I believe I’ll check on the sails,” Ian said as he walked away, humming a highland tune.

  The Wraith cut through the night like a sleek predator as it followed the rivers and canyons through the mountains to pass beneath the massive bulk of Piduruthalagala and on to the lower reaches, finally emerging on the flat plains with the coastal city of Colombo straight east. The faintest sliver of lighter color showed on the horizon. John let the wind tousle his hair and felt the old tingle of coming battle in his body, like a warm liquid coursing through his veins and charging him with power and strength.

  He turned from the bow and saw Ian and his men on the deck, armed with pistols, rifles, knives, swords, and axes. They stood beside the baskets and their eyes were bright with the promise of battle. “We’re dead on course and steppin’ lively to the time, Captain.” Ian said.

  [ 13 ]

  Avi groaned as the two guards jerked him from the stone floor and forced him to stand as they manacled his hands and feet. The Chief Guard said, “It is being your time of dying, Avinash Rathmandu Joseph, and I shall sing for your death to be long and painful.”

  “Why do you hate me so?”

  “You chose not to be revealing your knowledge to our British masters, and they took their displeasure on me for failing them. For this, I hate you and am joyous at your suffering.”

  They pushed him out of his cell and he saw the manacled black woman leaning against the far wall. She had been beaten, and probably worse. Her clothing, what was left of it, was only pieces. Her skirt hung in shreds, showing the full length of her bare legs. The remnants of her blouse covered some of her breasts, but not her stomach or arms. Her smile was crooked because of the swollen corner of her lip, but she said in that familiar, lilting voice, “Soon, Avi, death be freein’ us.”

  The guards shoved both of them down the hallway and out of the building, where they crossed the grounds through a throng of unsmiling guards. Avi and Bixie stopped at the bottom of a tall, white-painted wooden structure with the gallows ropes at the very top. The stairs went up at a steep angle, twenty-four feet. The Guard pointed up the stairs, and to add emphasis, slapped Avi across the shoulders with the flat of a ceremonial saber. Avi fell hard, but was immediately jerked to his feet. “Get up the stairs,” the Chief Guard said. Avi and Bixie started the slow climb to the gallows.

  [ 14 ]

  John Carter studied the massive, rectangular wall of stone and mortar a short distance ahead. Inside the huge enclosure was the dreaded Ceylonese maximum security prison the natives feared so much they averted their eyes rather than look at it.

  Welikada Prison, where the hangmen were so busy they worked in shifts, and guards doled out beatings and torture by the hour. One executioner had worked at the prison for eleven years, and averaged hanging ten men per week for that time. Everyone called him The Black Hood, and he was said to relish his job. The prison’s capacity was thirteen-hundred inmates, but had two thousand prisoners living in squalid, overcrowded conditions. The inmates were in constant agony from beatings, malnutrition and illness. The unsanitary conditions left a fetid smell that never left the air. A tangible sense of misery and despair hung over the prison like an invisible fog.

  Carter checked his brace of pistols, the new ones the Maharaja had given him for saving the Princess from four Thuggees attempting to murder her. Their shape was somewhat like the customized Winchester pistols that Western men called Mayor’s Legs, with a brass Winchester-type cocking lever under an egg-shaped black steel receiver inlayed with beautiful gold and onyx charging tigers.

  But where the barrel of a Mayor’s Leg was merely a cut down Winchester rifle barrel, the Maharaja’s barrels were made of three slender, separate tubes that spiraled around a center barrel and, two inches from the end, fused into a single barrel. The effect was not for beauty, but for function, for the Tiger Pistols, as the Maharaja called them, shot pulses of energy rather than bullets. They were accurate and deadly, and the only two of their kind in the world
.

  The New Delhi gunsmiths and scientists that worked five years in absolute secrecy to develop them were dead in the explosion that demolished the lab and left nothing of substance behind.

  He slid the weapons back in their holsters, then checked his cavalry saber. He looked at his crew and said, “My spies say that the executioner will hang our quarry on the high gallows this morning. I think we will deprive them of that task today.” The men murmured their assent. The prison wall was mere yards ahead. John looked at the crew, “I’m glad to be with you men. Now let us cry ‘Havoc!’ and let loose the dogs of war!”

  The Wraith floated low over the wall and sailed thirty feet above the crowd of guards and viewers gathered at the foot of the high gallows platform. John saw The Black Hood, the executioner, standing beside a small young woman and a slender young man. A Westinghouse robot stood beside him, holding on to the steam-operated lever that dropped the gallows floor.

  John studied the female prisoner. Hair the color of cocoa hung to her shoulders in finger-thick braids. Her skin, of which so much was visible, was the color of fresh cinnamon. Her exposed legs were lean, but muscular, as were her arms. She was short, but well-formed, he thought, and maybe twenty years at most. The Black Hood placed a noose around her neck, then stepped behind Avi and slipped the second noose around the slender young man’s neck, but he didn’t place the knot at the side of Avi’s neck to give him a quick end. The hangman purposely placed the knot at the back of Avi’s neck so that death would be slow and painful by strangulation. John knew that it could take half an hour to die that way. At that moment, the first rays of light bathed the frigate with a yellow fire. A few guards looked up.

  John looked at his men and said, “Toss them, boys!”

  [ 15 ]

  The people looking up were at first confused when eight large baskets tilted over the sides of the shark-gray frigate above them, but the confusion turned to screams of terror as an avalanche of scaled, writhing, hissing death fell upon them.

  Eight-hundred king cobras fell through the air and upon the tightly-packed throng. The large snakes flared their hoods as they hissed and struck at everyone around them over and over, lightning fast, while their coils wrapped around the necks and heads of screaming men and held them at face level for the strikes

  John and his men dropped their lines overboard and slid down to the melee, with John and Ian swinging to land on the gallows. The Black Hood pulled two wicked, curve-bladed khukuri, the knives favored by Gurkhas, and wove them in a practiced martial arts movement. John raised his pistol to shoot the hangman, but Ian placed his hand on his friend’s forearm, “Nay, brother, I’ll take out the trash, but ye can have the iron one.”

  John shot the robot and the bright green pulse flashed into its chest, knocking it far off the platform to the ground below. He holstered his pistol and went to Avi and the woman as Ian unsheathed his long, two-handed claymore.

  The Black Hood stepped toward Ian and said in a muffled voice, “I will feed your pieces to the dogs, Scottish scum.” Ian moved very fast, dropping to one knee when he was close. He swung the blade sideways so it chopped off both legs above The Black Hood’s knees.

  The executioner screamed and collapsed to the wooden platform. Ian stood and kicked the khukuri off the platform. He took an empty noose and placed it around the screaming man’s neck. The Highlander said, “Dinnae be hangin’ aboot, ye dobber,” and shoved the man onto the trapdoor, then pulled the lever to drop him into space.

  The rope snapped taut and swung slowly, creaking with every pendulum movement. The Black Hood was silent, the knot at the side of his neck.

  Bixie picked up the executioner’s legs and dropped them through the trap door, dusting off her hands as she walked to Avi’s side. She looked off the platform as chaos reigned below. The men of the Wraith cut down the prison guards like scythes cutting ripe wheat, and the snakes struck poison into those the crewmen missed. It was over in minutes. She smiled at Avi, “I told you.” She had dimples, Avi saw, and her eyes were an imperial jade so deep it was striking.

  John said to them, “Ian will stay with you until I climb on board the Wraith and lower her so you can board.

  Bixie said, “We can climb.” She and Avi grabbed the ropes and went up them to the frigate. Bixie went very fast, then helped Avi onto the deck.

  Ian said, “Age before beauty,” and offered the rope to John. Carter looked at the heavens and shook his head, then took the rope and started to the ship with Ian beside him on the other rope.

  As the two men pulled themselves on the deck, John saw a massive presence lifting from a smoky area in the slums. It rose quickly into the air and sailed toward them. Two huge freighters with dirigibles of black and red above them sailed in tandem with an enormous burden tethered between them that was cloaked in black canvas.

  “Trouble,” Ian said. He moved to the stern and the air anchor as John hurried to the wheel.

  The freighters were two hundred feet higher in altitude than the Wraith, and only fifty yards from the prison walls. Bixie yelled, “It be dah sea monster!”

  The air began to hum with a low sound so deep and powerful it seemed to fuzz the air. Birds near the frigates fell from the sky and John’s heart vibrated in his chest. The canvas between the two freighters dropped away and the two huge ships untethered the lines and veered sharply away left and right.

  Hovering in the air where the canvas had been was an enormous, torpedo-shaped airship that had no sails and no dirigibles to keep it aloft. An ugly snake-green light throbbed audibly at the ship’s stern. Its surface was as black as obsidian, and colors undulated along its sides like those on oily water. Deep red lines traced patterns along the flanks and bottom and they seemed to glow, as if made of colored glass. The stern rudders were like flukes on a great squid, and glowed with the green light. Two large glass observation windows resembling great eyes were high on the bow. As those on the Wraith watched, the rounded nose of the bow opened like the petals of a black flower.

  Out of the dark opening a dozen writhing metal tentacles crawled and waved in the air like blind things searching for prey. Two of them, much larger than the others, were flattened like paddles on the end, and John saw spinning silver suckers on them as large as dinner plates.

  From the initial sighting to the present took only seconds, and now the black ship was high above the wall. Colors of red and pink and green pulsed along the ship from stern to bow, and the red lines brightened. Then side panels rolled up, and weapons appeared, pointing down at the prison grounds.

  John and Ian yelled down at their men simultaneously, “Climb!”

  The crew started immediately for the ropes.

  The air was torn by the roar of a dozen multi-barreled Velociter-Magnus Machine Guns spewing one hundred-twenty bullets per minute into the men. Others turned theirs on the Wraith and lead projectiles chewed the deck and gunwales into splinters as the rounds traced lines from one side to the other.

  John spun the wheel and yelled at Ian, “Cut the anchor!” In an instant the Highlander slipped the claymore from its sheath and slashed the rope, freeing the Wraith. The frigate veered sharply left, flinging Avi and Bixie across the deck as John maneuvered the ship out of the hail of bullets.

  John started to circle back for his men when Ian said, “Nae, John. They’re all dead. We have Avi, we need to flee.”

  John steered the frigate in an S maneuver, “I’m going to sting them some before we go.”

  Ian nodded and went below deck for a moment, returning with the tall longbow and a quiver full of long arrows. He stood at the gunwale and notched one to the string. The distance was constantly varying from one-hundred to one-hundred-thirty yards, with both the black ship and the frigate flying in angled crossing patterns.

  Bixie touched Ian’s arm and said, “Bend yer beautiful head down tah me hands, Scotsman.” Ian hesitated a second, then did as she asked. Bixie placed her small hands on the side of his face and touched the li
ds of his closed eyes with her thumbs. She whispered a soft prayer in some language Ian had never heard. Then she kissed his forehead and said, “Dese brave eyes be tellin’ yer arrows where tah go, now.”

  Ian smiled down at the little woman. “What a bright, bonny lass ye are!”

  John said, “If you can stop sparking the girl and let fly an arrow, it might be a good thing. They’re turning into us.”

  Ian winked at Bixie, then raised the longbow, felt when it was right, and let the barbed missile fly. The arrow crossed the space between the two ships in an arc and went into the open hold a foot above one of the machine guns. It hit an orange-haired man high in the chest and penetrated all the way to the feathers.

  Ian shot three more arrows in the next five seconds and three more shooters fell. The others ducked behind cover and stopped firing.

  John pushed the Wraith to top speed and it seemed to fly through the sky. He spun the wheel hard left, then right as he worked the air rudders to drop the ship below the tree canopy, where he had to slow. “Can you see it?” He asked the others.

  Avi said, “It is coming, but does not see us, I am believing.”

  “Go back,” Bixie said, “Toward dah prison. The black ship, she don’t be lookin’ behind.”

  John realized she was right. He spun the wheel and worked through the trees, watching the black ship pass overhead, going in the opposite direction. The air vibrated so strongly that leaves and small limbs shook loose from trees, and monkeys and birds ran panicked in every direction, or fell to the jungle floor like stones. The buzzing vibrations made everyone on the Wraith nauseous and caused Avi to vomit.

  Bixie shuddered and moved close to him. Avi wiped his mouth with his wrist and asked, “What is the matter?”