The kinetic energy charge gauge dwindled, but not before Tracy and the hover steeder caught up with the cutthroat rustler's ship.

With the push of a button, the hovercycle converted into a galloping steeder beneath the marshal's legs.

The silhouette of the ship looked familiar to Tracy. It shared an awful lot of similarities with the illegally armed freighter that shot him out of the sky and left him for dead in a crater-grave.

In fact, it was the same exact ship.

And now they kidnapped a young woman.

On Earth, bodycams, laws, and the threat of prison kept Tracy's wrath in check. But on Mars, it was all fair game.

A large dock door lowered like a drawbridge. The door doubled as a loading ramp straight into the back of the ship. The rustlers apparently had caught up with the stampeding herd, guided them back to their ship which they'd parked in a secluded area, and were prodding the cattle, forcing them up the ramp door.

Tracy and Chasm galloped into the fray.

The rustlers didn't even bat an eye. As soon as they noticed him they started shooting.

Tracy palmed the hidden scabbard compartment. The Model X4 lever action carbine shot out as if from a cannon. He caught the weapon and spin-cocked the gun, whirling it around his cyborg hand. The HUD in his goggles defaulted to bipeds, so it only framed the rustlers for him and not the cattle, on top of providing holosights on the end of his carbine.

Pew. Pew. Pew. Pew. Pew.

Five shots fired. Five rustlers bit the dust.

Fear gripped the rest of the outlaws. They stormed up the ramp, leaving their dying buddies and any cattle not already in the ship behind. The ship lifted, hovering as she prepared to take off. Tracy fired shots at the cockpit, but couldn't pierce the thick exterior. Chasm raced alongside the fleeing ship, matching it speed for speed. Cows slipped and plummeted to their deaths as the pilot took off in a hurry, not waiting for the ramp door to close. He steered Chasm towards the open ramp door.

Tracy gathered up his long legs and lept from the steeder onto the ramp, then rolled out of the way as a cow slipped off the ramp where he'd just been. Slamming his borg hand into the ramp, Tracy gouged finger holds into the plating as the ship accelerated. He clawed his way up the ramp, then flipped around violently as they raised it. Jury fired, gunning down a suspicious rustler that spotted him, sending the outlaw overboard with a high pitched squeal, just as the ramp door closed.

The lawman righted himself and strode tall through the ship. Judge and Jury in hand, he blasted any resistance, downing rustler after rustler.

His ears throbbed, revolver blasts ringing in the close quarters of the metal ship. But his heart throbbed harder.

Where was the young woman? Had they dropped her in the frenzy? Had she fallen beneath the stampeding herd, trampled to death by the onslaught of endless hooves? He pushed away those dire assumptions. He had to hope.

As he neared the cockpit, he heard struggling and a female scream.

His heart beat fast as hope and dread grappled for control.

A rustler popped out of a hidden side compartment.

Pew. Pew. Pew.

Judge's electromagnetic shots tore through the man, pinging against the closed cockpit panel, as if death himself knocked on the door.

Tracy stepped over the dying rustler just as the panel whisked open. The lawman came face to face with a gauss barrel.

Pew.

The young woman shouldered the pilot, throwing his blast off. Tracy kept his surprise and joy that she lived in check as he returned fire at the pilot trying to kill him.

The last rustler ducked out of the way. Tracy's stray shot fried the control board. Sirens and alarms screeched and the ship lurched forward.

Forsaking all of their lives, the pilot raised his gun at Tracy again instead of regaining control of the ship.

Tracy anticipated the cold-blooded calculation, and sidestepped into the deck, cocked his smartarm and caught the rustler across the jaw with a metal wallop. The man slumped to sleep on the floor.

Tracy wanted to check on the girl, see if she was indeed okay. But they'd both be wrapped in an inferno of melting slag if he didn't take control of the ship. He leapt into the command chair and snatched the controls, pulling back hard. The ship leveled out, but just barely. A shriek pierced his ears as the bottom of the hull scraped along the rough Martian terrain.

The ship spun around, out of Tracy's control. A rock wall rushed towards them. A loud boom reverberated throughout the vessel and into Tracy's bones. The crash threw him up into the windshield, then smashed him into the dashboard. He slipped down to the floor in a heap.

Groans escaped his lips. He lay still for a few breaths, then helped himself to his feet.

The ship echoed with a chorus of frightened cattle moos and a few horse neighs.

Tracy moved over to the girl. She looked to be in her late teens or early twenties. The crash had knocked her unconscious. A line of blood trickled down her head leaking from a small cut. No way to tell if she had a concussion, but if he was a betting man, Tracy could guarantee she'd have a headache and some bruises to go along with it. Her arms were tied together at the wrists, but she breathed. And she was safe now. He let out a short sigh of relief.

He passed through the ship, searching for a medic kit. Along the way he found some of his belongings on the bunk of one of the rustlers. It was the stuff they'd made off with after shooting him out of the sky, before his ship had gone up in a blaze. They'd obviously mistaken him for a dead man. Left him to shrivel up in the sand.

He found another couple of IV packs, and swapped his on the spot. A deepfake hologram mask they'd issued him lay among the booty too. He pocketed it with a chuckle. That would come in handy later. He also found his government issued comm. Busted. He had no way of knowing if they did it out of spite, or if the crash broke it. Of course his smartarm had a comm function built into it, but it wasn't designed for interplanetary communication. Hence the government one. It had been his direct connection to his support team back home, his superiors, and if need be, his link to his wife. And now he knew it was for sure severed.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

But the cover was intact and in one piece. With care, he slipped the cover off and found what he wanted to still be tucked inside. A printed photograph of his wife, Hina. She'd razzed him about it. Called him old fashioned. He could easily store a gif of her and pull up a holograph on his smartarm. But there was something romantic about old photography. The trial and error of waiting to capture the perfect moment. Smart tech had all but made true photography a lost artform. But in the moment of her chiding him, laughing at him, he'd caught her smile, captured her warmth, her scent, the luster in her hair. No looping gif could ever capture that.

In the face of his predicament, he smiled, then tucked the picture away in his breast pocket inside his duster, over his heart.

A medic kit hung on the wall. He opened it. Everything inside was sealed. Untampered and sanitized. He ripped the entire kit off the wall and got back to the cockpit to check on the girl.

The cow calls grew frantic behind him as the ramp door sounded again. Someone was still alive and trying to lower the ramp to make a getaway. Tracy's eyes scanned the control room.

The girl was there. The pilot was gone.

***

They raced down the jagged channel, the rustler on his horse of flesh, Tracy on his horse of machine. The rustler had a head start on him. But the organic horse was no match for Chasm. The channel grew narrower by the moment, until the immanence of a dead-end looming around the corner became obvious. Still the rustler fled, and Tracy lost sight of him.

He rounded the channel bend and found the rustler yanking his reins so tight his horse nearly bucked him off. The horse pranced in a circle, an extension of the man's dithering dread.

Backed into a corner, the man sent two wild shots at the marshal. Tracy had no time to react. Luckily they hit Chasm, ricocheting off of his chrome exterior. Tracy gaped at the metal horse. For a split second, Trace expected his steeder to be hurt, but wouldn't you know they built him like a tank. The Mustang pawed the ground, reassuring Tracy he was ready for action.

Tracy's hardened voice echoed off the channel walls. "There's no way out. Drop your weapons, dismount, and walk over to me, slow like."

Chasm rooted himself in the dead center of the pathway, blocking the only way out. Tracy's rifle ensured the man wasn't getting past them. The man yelled incoherent words as he leapt down from his horse and rushed behind a boulder.

Tracy dismounted and levered his .30-30 Model X4. Sparks spewed from the railgun as he hammered the boulder's edge with a hailstorm of gauss blasts. The rustler tried to return fire, but the lawman's lever arm and trigger finger were too quick.

The rustler clutched his shooting arm and cried out. He fell, rolling in the dirt, then attempted to crawl away. Tracy's boots crunched over gravel. Quiet clicks ticked away, sounding the outlaw's remaining time on Mars while Tracy reloaded the carbine.

The rustler groaned and swore a string of profanity so vile it could have stripped the lacquer finish off of Judge and Jury's walnut grips. He dragged himself away, looking like a marionette whose strings had all been cut, save for one. But for all his clamoring, he never apologized, never begged for mercy. He was pitiful, but not sorry. Not an ounce of remorse in his bones. Only fiery scorn for getting caught.

Tracy's boots filled the outlaw's vision. He levered the action one last time, putting a round in the chamber. The defenseless rustler craned his neck, looking up to the lawman, but only saw the black silhouette of the lawman framed by blazing sunlight.

Anger burned in Tracy, almost giving him the shakes. But he maintained an outward calm. He should cuff this man and drag him all the way to New Oklahoma and deposit him to the local authorities. But that would be another burden Tracy had to bear. Plus, who's to say Martian law understood Earthen justice? No, this man was a rustling thief, a complicit murderer, and would have preyed on that young woman had Tracy not intervened. They were in the wild, on the fringes of society. The only law was man versus man, right versus wrong. Justice would prevail.

Yet Tracy hesitated. A small voice inside, underneath the grey storm clouds of rage whispered that this was no longer self-defense, rescuing a damsel, or seeking justice. This was punishment. As a U.S. Marshal, Tracy wasn't to mete out judgement. He could defend himself and others, using force if need be, but he could not take matters into his own hands. He had sworn an oath. If he broke it, even when no one was around, he would be putting himself above the very law he enforced. Wouldn't that make him just like these rustlers, taking advantage of an opportunity? The bonfire inside subsided, the flame of wrath diminishing.

The rustler broke his train of thought. A mask of confused recognition warped his Rubrun face.

"Hey, you're that Terran we shot down."

Tracy already knew that, from the specific ship they piloted, not to mention finding his belongings onboard. But hearing the confession roused his emotions again. These were the guys that marooned him on Mars and left him for dead. Just like they done Jorah's dad. His lips curled back exposing his gnashed teeth. Tracy pummeled that tiny voice inside, drowning it with self-righteous anger, the blazing fire renewed. His finger tightened on the trigger.

"Yep. And now I'm returning the favor, buddy boy."

An unearthly roar broke his spell of rage.

A large shape camouflaged with the rock walls emerged, crawling out of a wide cleft into the channel with Tracy and the rustler, a racing blur, almost too fast for Tracy to register.

The rustler's horse neighed and bolted while Chasm bucked but stayed put. The thing prowled on six muscular feline legs towards the wounded rustler, drawn to the open wound. The man screamed in horror as whipping tendrils lashed around him, hoisting him into the air to meet the monster face to face. Scythe-like forelimbs hacked the man, silencing him. It's hammerhead split sideways revealing rows of spiked teeth that caught the former outlaw like a fluffy rabbit barbed in a thistle thorn briar.

Tracy stumbled backwards with a yell. He tripped and squeezed the trigger. A coil shot went wild, but the thing knew to fear the shot and backpedaled on muscular, feline-like legs. It regained its composure, sizing up the lawman. After the shock of the blast waned, it no longer felt threatened by Tracy and swooped in close for another kill.

Shock and confusion froze Tracy.

But he had one trick up his sleeve. Literally. A weapon he reserved for the direst of situations. A mini pulse-cannon. But several uses of the pulse blast would render his smartarm useless. He'd only have time for one shot to take the alien beast down.

He raised his cyborg arm, thumb up, pointer finger out, his metal hand making the shape of a finger gun. Panels opened, his finger elongated, forming into a glowing pulse barrel.

But he wasn't quick enough.

Tendrils lashed towards him, seeking to envelope his whole body. They latched onto his transforming smartarm, crushing it like a boa constrictor. Sparks sizzled under the outer layer of the prosthetic. Tracy reeled back, but the suction cups on the underbelly of each tendril held his smartarm fast. Tracy tugged away, but pain laced up his shoulder stump into his mind. The thing's grip would tear his prosthetic clean off.

Chasm charged the thing, rearing up, and bucked the tendrils with his hooves. The interruption to his demise snapped Tracy out of his stupor. Muscle memory kicked in, levered the action, and returned revolver fire at the foreign beast. Gauss shots scored the thing's hide. It hissed and recoiled.

Tracy fired until his carbine ran dry. Instead of reloading, he pulled out Judge and Jury in fluid reverse draws. The cylinders spun, sparks erupting from the barrels. The beast, though not mortally wounded, retreated up the channel wall, knocking large and small rocks loose in its wake.

Tracy locked on the edge it disappeared over, lingered with his revolvers aimed. His heart thundered in his chest, matching his breathing. Then his smartarm spewed sparks and collapsed against his side, a cold, deadweight. Luckily his borg hand latched onto Jury in a vice grip. He'd have to pry it out later. Time to get gone.

With intuitive understanding, Chasm knelt so that Tracy could mount him and together they hightailed it out of the channel.