Mars is a lonely world after dark. The wind moves across endless red plains, strange migrations thunder through the night, and every traveler knows the stories about the towering beings called the Nobles.
No one has ever captured one alive. The few men who have encountered them were found horribly altered—or never found at all. Prospectors working the remote deserts speak of them in cautious voices, describing creatures fifteen feet tall who move with unsettling grace and vanish before anyone can understand what they are.
Ross, an archaeologist stranded far from Marsport, is simply trying to survive the long walk back to civilization when night forces him to take shelter in a cave. Instead of solitude, he finds another man already inside: a nervous prospector named J. J. Abrogado who claims to have been isolated in the desert for months.
At first the conversation is harmless—small talk about Marsport, new construction, and the long-awaited interstellar ship under assembly. But the prospector cannot stop talking about the Nobles. His descriptions grow vivid and strangely intimate, filled with details few people should know.
Outside, the desert erupts as hundreds of thousands of nightrunners stampede past the cave in a deafening migration. Inside, Ross begins to wonder if he has made a terrible mistake by entering the shelter at all.
Because when a man speaks about monsters with that much certainty, one question becomes impossible to ignore. How does he know so much?
Arthur Jean Cox’s “The Nobles Are Coming” is a tense Martian encounter story where isolation breeds suspicion and every shadow may conceal something waiting above you.
Arthur Jean Cox wrote science fiction during the early magazine era of the genre. His work appeared in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, where writers explored strange worlds, alien civilizations, and the uneasy frontier of interplanetary travel.
