1899- Journey to Mars

“What’s dat you be sayin’, Mistah tin man?”

“I was stating a reverential supplication for guidance from above,” Guthrie intoned. His head swiveled on his neck and he smiled at Bixie Cottontree, then winked before turning back to the console.

“Brace!” Ekka shouted.

The Argent shook from stem to stern. The rear window was blackened for a moment from the hull of the dark ship, but then the window slid along a row of rivets until the interior of the other ship was in sight. A pair of the orange-haired, fanged creatures regarded them.

There arose a loud clatter all around them.

“Dem droopy arms from dat t’ing, dey sure be holdin’ us tight,” Bixie said. “Maybe they be tryin’ ta come inside wit us!”

The teeth-rattling clatter of the mechanical arms running over the outside of the ship was enough to make clear thought improbable at best.

“Not for long,” Guthrie said. He looked over at Billy, who nodded back to him.

Ekka’s eyes grew wide.

Billy reached back behind him with his left arm and touched her knee.

A nearly blinding sheet of bluish white light filled the windows. The clatter on the outside diminished and was quickly gone.

“What the hell was that?” John Carter asked.

The black ship dropped from view. John Carter stepped to the glass and peered downward.

“Tesla’s Faraday Cage idea,” Billy said. “It’s what saved the Arcadia on the way back home. It’s a design feature we put into the construction of this big bucket of bolts. We turned the hull of the Argent into a Faraday Cage and hit that thing out there with about fifty million volts. Alright, everyone hold on to your suspenders. We’re gettin’ out of here!”

The Argent lurched forward as if a hand had swatted it, but inside, the effect was no more than a mild shudder. As the ship shot upward and into the clear blue sky, there was one last loud clang, as if some part of the attacking black ship had harpooned them, or perhaps a piece of the other ship had collided with them as a result of some explosion.

“When next we meet with that ship,” Guthrie said, “I have my doubts that it will attempt to grapple. I assess from the multiple ports

along its side and top that it has far more arms and armaments of which we know little.”

“It’s my intention,” Billy told the robot, “to never see the thing again.”

[ 23 ]

As the Kraken fell away from the Argent following the electrical discharge, the repairedTitan turned its head to regard the ship’s captain. The captain nodded, “Sic ‘em.”

Titan launched upward and away from the Kraken toward the Argent, trailing fire and black smoke. Titan fired a dorsal thruster and pitched forward, slamming into the aft section of the Argent in a shower of metal-on-metal sparks. It activated its magnetic coil and merged with the craft as if welded into place.

[ 24 ]

Aboard the Kraken, Solomon Grundy removed his goggles and leapt from the Captain’s chair to the pilot’s station and took emergency measures to stabilize his ship before it crashed into the jungle below.

“Cort!” he shouted.

One of the singleton orange-haired albinos raised its head from off the deck. It was nearly impossible to kill the damned things. The cort had been leaning against the bulkhead when the Argent hit them with the electrical discharge, and while it was happening Grundy watched from the corner of his eye as the singleton shook violently. When the discharged faded, the creature fell to the deck, its clothing and its orange hair smoking.

As it climbed slowly to its feet, its clothes still smoking, the cort turned to Grundy.

“Yeah?” it said, and grinned. Solomon regarded the creature, now almost back to normal and thought about how it was next to impossible to kill a cort. Only separating the head from the body, and then making sure the two parts were a long distance apart would work. Let the parts lie close and the body would crawl to the head and hold it in place until the parts regrew together. He had seen it with his own eyes. Then the other thought came, as it invariably did, on the heels of that: but you can kill a mort. The life cycle of a mort was about three weeks. If you were unable to kill it, all you had to do was wait.

“Get down to the engines,” Grundy snapped. “I need full power. We will pursue. Once we clear the atmosphere, send a message to our ally to send singleships. We will herd our prey to him.”

Cort nodded and shuffled to the doorway behind the Captain’s chair. Grundy wondered if it was hurting, but was unsure if corts actually felt pain.

Grundy waited for five minutes while two more corts arrived on the bridge of the Kraken and took up duty stations. They grinned at him and he nodded.