Read Online In the Hall of the Martian King by John Barnes - Free Book Online Page B

moved rapidly down to a hypersonic glide at very high altitude. The relatively short distance around
     Mars—half that around Earth—the great velocity, the shallowness of the glide, and the great distance to be descended meant
     that they would glide right around the planet almost three times during their reentry.
    The captain announced, “All right, no more aerobraking, and we’re not in free fall: You two can get up.”
    Jak got off the acceleration couch. The grav was about a third of a g, downward, with a gentle noseward pull.
    Day and night flashed by at hour intervals, twice; three times they passed under Phobos. There was something ominous about
     the Jovian League’s major base hanging there, seemingly close enough to touch.
    Every few minutes the captain talked to his purse, and the variable geometry of the warshuttle varied further. Fins grew to
     wings, wings lengthened, then widened, then curved. After their third swift dawn, the warshuttle, still fifteen kilometers
     up, took up a twenty-kilometer-radius circle around Red Amber Magenta Green’s landing field. The fuselage, which had been
     nearly the whole ship on Deimos, was a small ellipsoid between vast wings.
    At last they coasted a dozen meters above the hard-packed red sand, toward the mad jumble of spires, towers, arches, and domes
     that was Magnificiti, the capital of Red Amber Magenta Green.
John Carter
dipped as if bowing to the towers, the linducer grapples coupled to the maglev rails, and they had grabbed the planet’s surface,
     like a perfect catch on the trapeze.
    Around them, the wings and fins rolled, folded, and collapsed back into the fuselage, until
John Carter
looked much as it had on Deimos, with only two meters of the boarding wing extended on the right side. The linducer track
     carried the warshuttle on across the desert, as if it were a big, slow-moving Pertrans car.
    There were five people waiting at the quai. Dujuv rocked back and forth like a small boy, and Shadow on the Frost stood with
     exceptional straightness, the floppy feather-covered scent organs standing so straight up that he really did look like a bunny—at
     least, like a very tall feather-covered bunny with a mouthful of saber-teeth. Erect posture was the equivalent of a broad
     human grin; the Rubahy have no facial muscles and hence no expressions.
    Sib and Gweshira stood by uncomfortably, too aware that Jak would rather they were not there.
    The fifth person was a tall young woman, very beautiful even in a century when genetic modification and routine body sculpting
     made everyone beautiful. Her gold-blonde hair and her all-but-jet skin were made more striking by her full, long white gown.
    Captain Adlongongu clasped forearms with Jak and Pikia again, gripping Jak’s muscles like a vise, but closing as lightly as
     a breath all the way round Pikia’s slender arm. “Well,” he said, “if (as you tell me) this mission is actually something that
     might someday make the history books, make sure my ship gets a footnote.”
    The boarding door dilated, and Jak walked out across the wing, onto the quai, and into a bear hug that could crush a pony.
     “I missed you too, Duj, you big goon,” Jak managed to gasp. The six hours down from Mars to Deimos, and the ten hours back
     up, and their tight schedules, had prevented their seeing each other since taking up their duty stations.
    Dujuv released him and stepped back. Jak’s oldest and best tove was a panth, a breed the genies of the Old Martian Empire
     had intended as bodyguards: mesomorphs with ultra-short reaction times, ultra-fast metabolisms, and far more fast-twitch muscle
     fiber than unmodified humans. Natural gymnasts, wrestlers, pilots, or commandos, they were also modified to bond deeply—once
     he was your tove, a panth could hardly help being anything else. They had a bit less verbap and mathap to make room for a
     great deal more spatiap, and their speed at sorting out a chaotic situation was