“Queen of the Martian Catacombs,” a 1949 novella by Leigh Brackett

Thanks to the continued efforts of the Internet Archive, you can read or download “Queen of the Martian Catacombs,” a wonderful novella written by perhaps my favorite science fiction author, Leigh Brackett. Originally published in the Summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories magazine, the story features the exotic Martian adventures of Brackett’s interplanetary character, Eric John Stark. Here are the opening lines:

FOR hours the hard-pressed beast had fled across the Martian desert with its dark rider. Now it was spent. It faltered and broke stride, and when the rider cursed and dug his heels into the scaly sides, the brute only turned its head and hissed at him. It stumbled on a few more paces into the lee of a sandhill, and there it stopped, crouching down in the dust...

“Queen of the Martian Catacombs” was later expanded into a novel, The Secret of Sinharat (1964).

[via Blue Tyson of Free SF Reader]