More from 1899: Journey to Mars: ---------------------- 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 albinos raised its head from off the deck and shuddered as its bones began popping back into place. It was nearly impossible to kill the damned things. Grundy believed that he had seen this particular cort stabbed, shot, amputated, burned, and now electrocuted. 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. A lightning bolt had emerged from one of its flailing legs and arced across the cabin into the far wall, vaporizing the bottom of its boot. When the discharged faded, the creature fell to the deck, its clothing and its orange hair smoking. It appeared that every bone in the thing’s body had separated, and if measured where it lay it likely would have been a foot taller than normal. Now Grundy shuddered as he witnessed a rare event: a cort re-integrating itself with a hundred small pops and clicks. Possibly they were actual vampires. As it climbed slowly to its feet, its clothes still smoking, the cort turned to Grundy. The last bone to pop back into place was its jaw. “Yeah?” it enquired, and grinned. As it did, its fangs fell out. New ones would begin re-growing and become fully formed within hours. No. There was no killing a cort. 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 heliograph message to the Manchurian to send singleships. We will herd our prey to him.” Cort nodded and shuffled to the doorway behind the Captain’s chair. It limped not from pain but from the having no sole on one booted foot. Grundy was unsure if corts actually felt pain to begin with. 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. “Full power restored,” one of the corts said. “Follow that ship, seventy degrees ascension, ten degrees larboad. And punch it!” The cort nodded and pulled back on a lever with a loud clank. The Kraken shot upward. Solomon Grundy put his goggles back on, then his helmet. Since the forward window was gone, he would be going into space without any atmosphere aboard the bridge. To both sides of the window the great tentacles retracted. “Are you boys all right without air? Also, space can be mighty cold.” A cort turned to regard him, shrugged and smiled. Grundy shivered, yet again.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 03:27:34 +0000
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