Read Under the Moons of Mars for Free Online

satisfaction of seeing it go deep into his shoulder. His gun hand wavered.
    Leaping again, I drove both my feet in front of me. I hit Odar Rukk in the chest with tremendous impact. The blow knocked him and his attached machine chair backward, tipping it over. Odar Rukk skidded across the floor. The part of him that was machine threw up sparks. Hoses came unclamped, spewed gold fluid. Wires came loose and popped with electric current. Odar Rukk screamed.
    I hustled to my feet and sprang toward him to administer a death blow, but it was unnecessary. The hoses and wires had been his arteries, his life force, and now they were undone. Odar Rukk’s body came free of the chair connection with a snick, and he slipped from it, revealing the bottom of his torso, a scarred and cauterized mess with wire and hose connections, now severed. The fat belly burst open and revealed not only blood and organs, but gears and wheels and tangles of wires and hoses. His flesh went dark and fell from his skull and his eyes sank in his head like fishing sinkers. A moment later, he was nothing more than a piece of fragmented machine and rotten flesh and yellow bones.
    I recovered his firearm, cut some of the wire from the machine-man loose with my sword, used it to make a belt, and stuck the pistol between it and my flesh. I recovered my sword.
    Outside of the locked dome, I could hear the clatter of battle. Farr Tharvis had been more successful than I expected. But even if he had put together an army, the metal men would soon make short work of them.
I looked up at the pulsing globe that rose through the top of the dome. I jumped and grabbed the side of the dome, in a place where my hands could best take purchase, and clambered up rapidly to the globe, my sword in my teeth.
    Finally I came to the rim below the globe. There was a metal rim there, and it was wide enough for me to stand on it. I took hold of my sword, and with all my strength, I struck.
    The blow was hard, but the structure, which I was now certain was some form of transparent stone, withstood it. I withdrew the pistol and fired. The blast needled a hole in the dome and a spurt of gold liquid nearly hit me in the face. I moved to the side and it gushed out at a tremendous rate. I fired again. Another hole appeared and more of the gold goo leapt free. The globe cracked slightly, then terrifically, generating a web of cracks throughout. Then it exploded and the fluid blew out of it like a massive ocean wave. It washed me away, slamming me into the far wall. I went under, losing the pistol and sword. I tried my best to swim. Something, perhaps a fragment of the globe, struck my head and I went out.
    When I awoke, I was outside the dome, which had collapsed like wet paper. I was lying on my back, my head being lifted up by a smiling Farr Larvis.
    “When you broke the globe, it caused the gold men to collapse. It was their life source.”
    “And Odar Rukk’s,” I said.
    “It was a good thing,” Farr Larvis said. “The revolt I led was not doing too well. It was exactly at the right moment, John Carter. Though we were nearly all washed away. Including you.”
I grinned at him. “We still live.”
    There isn’t much left to tell.
    Simply put, all of us who had survived gathered up weapons and started out as the machinery that Odar Rukk had invented gradually ceased to work. The drawbridge was down. All the gates throughout the underground city had sprung open, and had hissed out the last of their steam. The gold ones were lying about like uneven pavement stones.
    We found water containers and filled them. We tore moss from the walls and used it for light, made our way up the long path out. After much time, we came to the surface. We gathered up fruit and such things as we thought we could eat on our journey, and then we climbed higher out of the green valley until we stood happily on the warm desert sand.
    It was a long trip home, and there were minor adventures, but nothing worth