Titans of Chaos

I looked up. Before me, where the lander had been, on a throne made of crudely hewn slabs of therust-streaked black rock, was a soldier in the panoply of a Greek hoplite. His breastplate andhelm were coppery bronze, and his cloak was bloodred, as was the horsehair plume noddingabove. A round shield painted with a gorgon face rested against his knee, and a slender lance wasin his hand. Anachronistically, his arms and legs were covered in fatigues of red and brown andblack camouflage patterns. Both katana and Mauser broom-handle pistol dangled from hisweb-belt in holster and sheath.

Beaten again. Oh, I did not mind being a prisoner-- heck, I was used to that by now. I had lostanother race. Someone got to Mars before me.

"You will plant no flags on the soil of my world," Lord Mavors said. Behind him was a bannerstanding: a black field with a red circle, from which a single arrow pointed to the upper right.

Behind and above Mavors, I could see a flickering discontinuity, like the ripples on the surface ofa lake. On this side was breathable earthlike air; on the other side, the thin subarctic atmosphereof Mars. I guessed I was seeing the refraction from the change in density of the medium: theboundary between two sets of natural law. The film was stretched like a drumhead over thehalf-mile-wide crater valley.

Before I could get up, Mavors tipped his lance, and the blade touched me lightly on the shoulder,not two inches from my naked cheek.

He said, "It takes about four pounds per inch of pressure for a blade to penetrate the skin. Oncethe skin is broken, no other internal organs-all of which are necessary for life, or useful-offer anyreal resistance. Only bone. A man skilled with a spear, of course, knows to avoid bone."

So there I knelt before his crude throne on all fours, looking up at him. The Union Jack had spunfrom my hand as I collapsed, and I could see it, an impromptu parachute, unrolled in midair overMavors' head.

He moved his eyes, but no other part of him, and glanced up. The rippling fabric of red, white,and blue, bold with the cross of Saint Andrew and Saint George, seemed to be caught orsuspended in the surface tension of the air boundary separating the crater bowl from the thinMartian air above. Now it began to sink in the slight Martian gravity, and started to fall, pulleddown by the weight of its pikeshaft.

Mavors said, "Boreas, don't let her banner touch the soil."