The Mongo Machine - Chapter 1

John Carter. Buck Rogers. Crash Corrigan. Three Warriors. Out of Time.

May 03, 2026

This short story officially launched my House of Entropy and put sci-fi pulp front and center in the Public Domain Super Heroes universe. From this story, the novels The Metropolis of Mongo, The Marine Moon of Mongo and the forthcoming The Martian Monsters of Mongo were born.

A new chapter will go live every Sunday at 12:00 AM EST. I will update the links on each chapter at that time to point to the next installment in the story.

There is also an index page if you lose track.

I hope you enjoy it!

CHAPTER 01

Live-fire exercises.

Bloody Bill and Wally ran the damned things every other day, and John Carter was beginning to think that it was their way of getting back at the three of them for getting the assignment that might have gone to the two senior trainers. Nothing in the brief required a three-man team, and Bill and Wally certainly had all the requisite skills.

Another shot cracked off the facing of the boulder he was hunkered down behind. This sort of exercise usually involved a trench and a bunch of muddy soldiers pissing themselves in the mud as they desperately tried to keep from getting shot in the ass crawling through it. There was almost no real danger in a standard live fire trial so long as nobody lost their head. Bill and Wally didn’t do anything standard.

Crash had already taken a shard of stone shrapnel in the cheek, the blood streaming down his face like crimson tears. Against all sense, he was grinning as he ducked back under cover, ten feet from Carter’s boulder. Rogers was nowhere in sight, but Carter knew where he should be.

The pinning fire came from two directions; Bill and Wally having taken to the trees somewhere out there in the dense forest. There wasn’t a trench to crawl through and they weren’t aiming at anyone’s ass. John Carter didn’t imagine that either of them would intentionally do the other any serious injury, but a low-caliber bullet grazing your thigh or ribcage was no joke. He would rather not test their marksmanship today.

His team was armed with special pellet guns that used compressed gas to silently fire 22-calibre glass balls filled with ink. Camp X had developed the special guns to give trainees something better than blanks to return fire with during this kind of exercise. Since the whole point was to take down snipers firing from cover, they couldn’t very well be issued real guns and ammunition, not even low caliber weapons. It’s too easy to injure or kill a man in cover with a careless shot.

The gas guns, as they were known, could fire other ammunition as well and had utility in covert operations, so it was good practice. Sadly, the ink pellets were ballistically little better than old fashioned lead shot, so the trainees had neither the range nor accuracy of conventional weapons.

That was just fine with John Carter. Close in fighting was more in keeping with his style. All three men in the squad had been chosen for just such proficiency, and three months of intensive training at Camp X, a secret facility in a nondescript rural area of Ontario, Canada had honed those skills to a razor’s edge. Bill and Wally were about to learn the meaning of the old saw, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ Rogers should be bringing their little surprise into play right about...

Now.

With a nod, Crash Corrigan ran from cover, drawing fire. A centre fielder on his college baseball squad, Corrigan was as nimble as he was fast. He jinked and leapt, not giving Bill or Wally a straight line to draw a bead on. Shots came from cover and missed him by a margin that would have the two trainers buying the drinks at the PX tonight. Laughter followed him into cover.

The stunt had given Carter the locations of both shooters and he fired two shots into each bolt hole in rapid succession. The gas guns might not be powerful or accurate, but they had the virtue of being semi-automatic and for his purpose that was more important than scoring a hit. He just needed to keep their head down. He could hear Rogers’ little surprise, coming fast.

The mad bastard had strapped rockets to his glider and was careening through the forest at a speed Carter could hardly believe. And...dear lord. The man was doing a Tarzan yell as he weaved his way through the trunks. Buck Rogers was the only man John Carter had ever met who might actually be crazier than Crash Corrigan.

The wingtips of Rogers’ glider clipped leaves from branches at every turn, but he somehow, impossibly managed to navigate a path that took him in the perfect arc to drop two canvas sacks, one on each position Carter had marked with his shots.

Each bag had held fifty of the little ink filled glass nodules, pilfered last night from the camp armoury. Both improvised bombs found their mark, raising cries of alarm and anger from the men hidden in the brush. Rogers pulled up sharply, yanked a release and dropped lightly to the ground, rolling to bleed off the last of his momentum. The wings and the rockets he had strapped to them fell to the wet ground, a couple of pops signaled the end of the fuel in the tubes. The whole contraption caught and burned merrily, lighting up the forest and wafting an oddly pleasant aroma of woodsmoke and burning fuel to their nostrils.

Jogging through the trees, Carter reached Buck Rogers’ landing spot and offered the younger man a hand up. “You gonna put that out?” he asked, nodding to the little blaze.

“It rained last night, remember?” said Crash Corrigan, trotting up to join them. “Buck’s not gonna burn the place down.”

Carter looked at the blaze and could see it was already dying, having consumed the wood and canvas that made up most of the glider’s body. A few spars of aluminum were blackening, but the fire wasn’t spreading on the damp ground. They might be nuts, but his team was the kind of crazy that thought three steps ahead, qualities that made them perfect for the mission.

“You three are on REPORT!” called Bill, standing and wiping a giant splatter of red ink from his face. The canvas sack had dropped in front of him, blasting open and drenching him from forehead to chest. He was furious. And red.

The three trainees looked at each other, swallowing their laughter.

From the other side of the glade, Wally’s voice chimed in. “And you owe me a new hat!”

The man stood, a vision in crimson. Where Bill had taken a near miss and a splatter of ink to the face, Wally had been directly in the line of fire, the sack dropping directly on his head and spilling its entire contents over him. He looked like a man who had upturned a bucket of blood on his head.

Half a mile away, the rest of Camp X was puzzled by the sound of wild, abandoned laughter from the forest.

Chapter 02 will go live on May 10 at 12:00AM EST