Seven Against Mars. Martin Berman-Gorvine

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2013 by Martin Berman-Gorvine

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      This one’s for Daniel and Jonathan, my first readers this time. And in memory of Dr. Elsie Wiedner, who introduced me to the world of Mark Twain, and Ray Bradbury, magician of Mars.

      Book One: Morning Star

      Chapter 1

      Jack pushed his way cautiously through the grayish-green Venusian foliage. An Earthling would have found the day overcast and broiling hot, but to Jack it was on the cool side, with a tang in the air that hinted at the approach of the feared Venusian monsoon. However, the storm was at least an Earth-day away, and was the least of his concerns at the moment, for his beloved Anya, the girl with the flame-colored hair who had captured his heart, was trapped in the coils of the dreaded Greater Venusian Medusa, somewhere deep in this horrible wilderness.…

      Rachel Zilber paused with her fingers poised over the typewriter keys, staring at the half-filled page. Did that sound right? Despite years of relentless drilling from Dad and nightly exposure to the BBC on the forbidden, battery-powered wireless set, she still worried about her command of English. Those prim-and-proper British newsreaders were no help in learning the slang she needed to write for the American pulps. For that, she had only her precious collection of Astounding Science-Fiction, Amazing Stories and the rest that her cousin Abe had mailed her from New York the summer before the war began. Three years had passed. Was her slang out of date? And now that the Americans were in the war too, had they lost their appetite for science fiction and started thinking it was a worthless, juvenile waste of time?

      If so, they would have a strong ally in Mom. “What are you wasting your time on that rubbish for?” she would cry whenever she saw Rachel huddled over one of the dog-eared magazines with their garish covers. “You’ve got to stay up to date with your schoolwork! This war’s not going to last forever, you know, and when the Germans are beaten you’d better be prepared to finish high school and take your university entrance exams!” Rachel didn’t have the heart to share her growing fears that the Germans wouldn’t let them live to see the end of the war. Maybe if she didn’t say so aloud, it wouldn’t come true. So she studied her calculus and Polish literature textbooks and ventured out into the streets of the ghetto, where the sound of shooting was becoming more common every day, as little as possible. It was safer to stay in the smelly, crumbling little apartment, even though it was barely the size of her old room and she had to share it with her parents, bratty ten-year-old Sonya Goldberg and her even more obnoxious seven-year-old sister Shoshie, and their parents. And no one ever let her write in peace! Mrs. Goldberg always complained about “that clack, clack, clacking” while her horrible little girls always pestered her.

      Sure enough, Sonya leaned over her shoulder, whining, “Whatcha writing?”

      “None of your damn business!” Rachel leaned forward to cover the page.

      “Oo, you used a bad word! I’m gonna tell my mommy you used a bad word, and she’s gonna tell your daddy, and girl, you are gonna get a spaaan-king.…”

      “Don’t you ever call me ‘girl’ again, you little brat! You tell on me and see if your precious little dollies stay in one piece!”

      Sonya’s face worked as if she was about to cry, tainting Rachel’s satisfaction with guilt that bubbled from her gut like the sour aftertaste of Mrs. Goldberg’s horrible cooking. Not that anybody could do anything much with the moldy potato ration they were getting these days. She huddled deeper into her corner, trying to ignore Sonya’s nasty words to Shoshie and the hard little knot of hunger in the pit of her stomach—breakfast had been a half-slice of stale bread. At least she still had her precious though dwindling store of paper, mainly blank pages ripped out of old books that she’d been able to scrounge or barter for here and there. After a moment, she typed:

      Princess Anya was beautiful, with the delicate long-limbed loveliness of a native Martian raised in the Red Planet’s lesser gravity, and from the moment he first saw her looking lost and bewildered as she emerged from the immigrants’ quarantine at Aphrodite Port, Jack knew that they were meant for each other and that it was his duty to protect her. And that was before he even knew that she was a refugee from the evil Lord Ares II.

      Jack swore as he hacked his way through the thick undergrowth with his electric machete. It had been almost twenty-four hours since Anya had run away into the jungle after catching a glimpse of a tall, spindly man with the telltale chin-beard of the police caste serving the current Martian tyrant, whom she always referred to disdainfully as “the usurper.” Of course, she knew nothing of the Great Jungle that stretched for thousands of miles in all directions from Aphrodite Port, so she had stumbled straight into the Medusa’s nest, and there she would have been trapped and slowly eaten, one lovely inch of her at a time, if not for his faithful friend Karolla, who knew these lands like the backs of his giant seven-fingered hands.…

      ♂

      “Time to do your chores!” Ma called from downstairs.

      “In a minute!”

      “Right now, Katie!”

      Kaitlyn Webb sighed and shut the book she had been reading in the uncertain predawn light that filtered through the battered lace curtains over her bedroom window. She stroked the cover’s fancy embossed gold lettering for a moment with work-calloused fingers. Nobody makes books like that anymore, she thought. Leastaways, nobody in Texas. Lost Classics of Science Fiction was an anthology of short stories published in New York City, which told you right there that it had to be at least half a century old. She felt sort of wistful, and also sort of resentful, reading about the future those old writers thought was coming. All those flying cars and cheap space travel to the ends of the universe. What would the author of “Zap-Gun Jack Flash and the Dame-Eating Monsters of Venus” have thought if he’d known that hundreds of years after his time, folks would be getting around in horse-and-buggies if they were rich like the Montoyas down the road, or on a broken-down old mule if they were poor like her family?

      Katie tucked the book into a pocket of her overalls and made her way out to the well with two empty buckets. It was going to kill her to lug them back to the house. “Tough luck,” Ma would say if she complained. “You’re fifteen years old, almost a grown woman, and you’d better pull your weight around here!” Katie would’ve bet a whole lone­star that Zap-Gun Jack’s “unknown author” hadn’t had such problems. The brief blurb said the story was found in an old wooden trunk in an apartment in Warsaw, which had once been the capital of a European country called Poland, “in neatly typewritten manuscript form.” It was a romantic enough story, so Katie had invented a romantic figure to go with it. He was tall and dark and debonair (a word she’d learned from another book she’d found along with the anthology in the ruins of the library in the abandoned town of Jodie, on the road to Abilene). She pictured him in his early forties, with a distinguished touch of gray at his temples and a gently amused expression permanently etched into his face. Maybe he was a count! Didn’t they used to have counts in Europe? She’d bet anything that counts had exquisite manners, especially with girls like herself, and quite unlike the swaggering way Texas Rangers like that no-good Johnny Marshall had.

      When she staggered into the kitchen with the water buckets, Pa was just finishing his breakfast of salted grits. This morning there weren’t even any eggs, let alone bacon, so he was in a bad mood and Katie steered clear of him. He grunted as she walked past.

      “Now you hush and finish your breakfast so you can get along into town,” Ma said to him.

      “Not goin’ into town today,” Pa replied.

      “Why not? You know we need more kerosene for the lamps. Also soap, and twine, and—‍”

      “Fred told me he saw more Dixies out in his back forty,” Pa interrupted.

      “What?