Starr vs the Emperor of Space Pt. 03

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CHAPTER THREE

Haven of the Hawkmen

Disaster! The incomparable and intrepid JASMINE STARR and her longtime companion CLAUDETTE T.S GRANT have escaped from the imperial war rocket DOMINATION -- only to find their escape vehicle shot down by the terrible ROBOT ROCKETS of THE EMPIRE OF SPACE!

Worse, grizzled G.I MARK STYLES has found himself awakening from his ULTRA-SLEEP in the PLUTONIAN ICE CASTLE of AYTAN ZARDO -- but the evil emperor has given Mark to his daughter, STAR PRINCESS ZELLA, as a prize LOVE SLAVE. What will be his fate?

Meanwhile, JASMINE STARR tumbles towards the acid clouds of VENUS, trapped within a doomed rocket...

BEEP.

BEEP.

BEEP.

Jasmine Starr groaned, her eyes opening to cracks. Bleariness filled her -- a strange grogginess far, far, far worse than any sleep she had slept before. She shifted in her seat, feeling a deep and abiding chill sinking into her bones. She mumbled to herself. "Claudette, put some more Blue Coal on the fire..." She shifted, then blinked, awareness that she was strapped into a heavy chair crashing into her. She swept her gaze around the cockpit and memory returned in a flash.

She was in a winged rocket, the very one she had stolen from the Domination days before -- but something terrible had happened between her injecting herself with the ultra-sleep syringe and now.

For one thing...

The entire back half of the rocket was gone.

Jasmine gaped, momentarily dumbfounded, by the sight of her vehicle flying through space, without half its wings and without the main rocket engine on the back. There was just her sealed cockpit, the forward wings, the nose cone, the bristle of radar-scopes and communication ray emitters, and the vastness of space...nothing more remained.

"Racing rockets, what happened?" she asked, but there was no one to answer...she was alone...

Jasmine shook her head, clenching her jaw.

"There are two possibilities, Jas," she said, quietly. "Either the ship was sheered in half -- possibly by Vile and some of his weapons -- in which case Claudette has been flung into her own orbit...or..." She choked. The idea of her dear Claudette being blasted into atoms by the weaponry of the Empire of Space was too much, even for one as willful and ready to face danger as Jasmine Starr. And so, she choked back tears, forced herself to focus, and looked into the radio scope and the forward view panes.

Fortunately, whatever had struck the winged rocket had not imparted enough change in velocity to adjust her course towards Venus. And, in fact, her calculations had been dead on: The yellowish orb was already vast before her, growing larger every moment. Of course, she had been planning to decelerate using the atmosphere of the planet and her wings...as it was, she had no such control, no way to adjust her entry angle.

"It seems I'm in a bit of a pickle..." Jasmine whispered to herself -- but then her eyes fell upon the radar scope and realized the source of the beeping.

"I'm being radar scanned!" she exclaimed, adjusting the knobs and dials. Several radar beams were sweeping along her hull, as if distant vehicles were attempting to determine what and who she was. She adjusted her own radar scopes, following the beams back, and received the return signals of three rockets. Two were in formation with one another, in an equatorial orbit, and the other was by itself, and in a higher orbit -- meaning that every time it orbited Venus once, the lower ships would have orbited it twice.

Jasmine frowned. "Well, now, let us see if I can still bluff...just like back in Italy..." she picked up the communication wand that was attached to the forward control panel, then flicked it on. She put an imperious tone to her voice. "All ships, this is Jasmine Starr, consort-in-waiting to Emperor Aytan Zardo. I request immediate assistance -- any who allow me to come to harm shall face the wrath of Zardo. Over."

There was a short pause -- short enough she was sure she was terribly close to Venus indeed for there was no delay for light lag communication. Fear prickled at the back of her neck...was she too close to be intercepted and rescued? Then...

"This is Prince S'kye of the Hawkmen. Hold tight, Consort Starr. We are adjusting out orbit."

Then-

"Aha! Fool!" This was coming from one of the pair of ships, Jasmine saw. "We would not risk confronting any feathered fool in a patrol rocket...but the price upon your head, Prince Scoundrel, is worth our weight in Venusian diamonds!"

"Trust a faeman to look for profit at a time like this. Come at me, then!" Prince S'kye's voice, even over the communicator, was a bassy, confident, male one -- a deep contrast to the sneering whine of the 'faemen', whatever they were.

"Bold words for one about to become atomized vapor!"

The communicator cut off and Jasmine watched on the scopes as all three blips began to maneuver. At once, she saw that S'kye was a gallant fellow. He was angling his ship away from the two other bogies, despite the fact it was sure to make it harder for his weaponry to come to bear on them. The two faemen had just reached perigee -- where they were closest in their orbit to Venus. Perigee and apogee (the opposite position in an orbit) were the most energy efficient times to adjust an orbit. But rather than changing their orbits, the two bogies kept moving...but then...

Split.

Now there were five bogies.

"Racing rockets, they launched something..." Jasmine whispered.

On the communicator, she heard S'kye's chuckle.

"You think we can't knock those slow A-bomb rockets out of the sky with our heat rays, faemen?"

"Oh, you can knock down one or two of our A-bombs, yes..." the faeman captain chuckled. "But, my dear prince, can you also protect Zardo's pet whore at the same time? Heh...now you must choose. Let the woman die, or allow your ship to be A-bombed into glowing slag! Ahaha!"

"Bilewind!" S'kye snarled -- then a strange clack came over the communicator, as if he had gnashed his teeth. "You're mad! Zardo will destroy all of Venus if-"

"He can destroy your fragile floating cities, Hawkman! Our tunnel cities have survived five hundred years of Venus. They can survive Zardo! All hail the dark!"

The communication stopped as Jasmine frowned, then touched her communication ray device -- angling it so that the line of the ray would only land upon Prince S'kye's rocket. "Prince, how many of their A-bombs do you think are on my trajectory?"

"Only one...but one is more than enough. Your vessel is clearly disabled and unarmed."

"Oh, is it now?" Jasmine murmured, to herself, her communication wand turned off so as to not confuse Prince S'kye. She flicked it on again. "Ignore the rocket focused upon me. Turn your death rays on the rockets aimed at you -- I'll handle this A-bomb."

There was a long pause, then a low rumbling chuckle.

"I see, for all his personal faults, the Emperor has a fine taste in women!"

"Better than you can know, Prince of the Hawkmen." Jasmine turned off her wand. She had work to do. She looked and found a latch that would open her own personal canopy of glass. She quickly donned the emergency star suit that was loaded into the compartment beside her, wriggling and squirming to get it onto her body in the confined spaces. Once she had done so...she popped open the bubble. Air puffed out, rushing into space -- but far less than she had expected. Jasmine supposed that the winged rocket used less than a full atmosphere of pressure...reasonable, it would make it less likely to spring leaks and to be more easily filled with breathable air.

As it was, she was able to clamber out onto her remaining rocket. The boots of the star suit were automagnetic, allowing her to clamp onto the hull with ease, and that meant she could focus entirely upon what she wished to view most...the communication ray emitter!

Jasmine had studied a great many things, and one of them included the theories of death rays as advanced by the scientific community. The idea was simple -- somehow cause light itself to cohere and behave in a more rational, directed pattern than normal illumination would. This would create a beam of light, a ray of killing power that could be used to strike the enemies of whoever invented it first. Well, the Empire of Space had crafted these death rays...such weapons had been used on her Atomo when she had faced off against the Dominion.

But did a death ray have to be the only use for such coherent light?

No!

This communication ray was nothing more than a death ray that had been put to the purposes of communication -- like turning a machine gun into a semaphore station, but infinitely more elegant. Jasmine found a loose piece of metal at the edge of the tear between her cockpit and where the rest of the ship had been. Wrenching it free, she held it before the ray emitter, then activated it by the simple expedient of reaching back into the cockpit and flipping a toggle.

The metal flared and glowed at a single point and ripped from her hand. Jasmine yelped. "Racing Rockets! The beam melted the metal -- turning the hull material itself into a kind of rocket, yanking it right from my very hand!" She switched the ray off -- it was invisible in space, after all, and she didn't want to forget and get hit herself.

"At a close range, even a simple communication ray can kill!" she said, rubbing her own helmet in thought. "But I need more range -- an A-bomb, even in space, without atmosphere to transmit the blast wave, can kill, as easily with heat and radiation as it could with a blast and shrapnel. Think, Jasmine, think." She turned to the communication ray itself, examining it.

The device itself seemed quite simple -- once she had removed the cowling and looked at the pieces within...

The core contained a large glittering crystal tube that sat in the center of what appeared to be a collection of mirrors and lenses. But what was at the back was nothing more complex than a wire that led back into a heavy battery -- even Jasmine could recognize the shape and design of a power conduit. She chuckled. "Ahh, I see! This crystal must focus the light...transforming it from standard light into a ray!" She nodded. "I think I will only have but one shot for this."

On the radar scope, she saw that the three rockets that had been launched were now curving upwards as they swung around Venus at inedible speeds. Two were arcing towards Prince S'kye's rocket...and one was accelerating straight towards her!

She first tapped at the controls -- and the simple systems of the winged rocket responded.

COMMUNICATION ERROR! Flashed up on the screen as she attempted to tell the communication ray to send a message towards the A-bomb rocket that was racing towards her. Jasmine ignored it. She then started to rip apart the panel, assisted by the simple tool kit that was contained next to where the ultra-sleep injectors had been. She found every power cable she could, pulling them free, checking to ensure the magneto-calculator was still working...and then dragged them out, tugging them loose from their housings.

Soon, she had a whole mess of cables that she used a knife on -- parring their insulation down carefully, to expose the wires themselves. She got the wires very close to the communication ray...and she noticed the ray was actually shifting in its gimbal'd mount.

It was angling towards the A-bomb rocket!

"This might just work!" Jasmine whispered.

She looked up...

And she realized she could actually see the A-bomb rocket's fumes as it accelerated towards her. It was a cone of nearly invisible reddish mist, sweeping out in every direction away from the rocket's nozzle -- not the bright flare of a rocket on the planet Earth, but something considerably dimmer and more deadly.

Jasmine jammed her collected, frayed power cables into the power cable of the communication ray.

The ray exploded with a spray of sparks.

And in a distance, the A-bomb rocket's plume went dead.

Jasmine tensed...

The A-bomb rocket whipped past overhead, nearly invisible save for a bright glowing scar along the side, streaking by her head like a close passing comet!

Then it was gone.

Jasmine breathed a slow sigh of relief.

The distant star-battle was hard to watch, considering her console had been entirely burned out by the enlarged electrical load that her eager engineering had brought through the vacuum tubes and wires within -- several had melted, the cabling still glowing brightly through the dimmness of space. And so, Jasmine tried to judge what she could by watching the tiny flashes and streaks of light...until she realized that a disk of Venus' orange-yellow atmosphere was being occluded by a shape that was approaching her vehicle.

Lights sprang to life across it and Jasmine whistled to herself.

"Well, I'll be," she said, quietly.

If she had had any doubts about whether it was the Faemen or the Hawkmen who had come to her drifting rocket, the shape of the vessel before her was completely clear: It looked, for all the world, like two vast wings that spread away from a central spoke -- each wing was carved and shaped to look precisely like the feathered wings of a hawk, and each wing glowed brilliantly with ruby red light as waste heat from the reactor was pumped through them. The central spoke itself reached forward and split into a pair of bands, which locked down onto the 'hubs' of a turned wheel, so that it looked as if the wings fanned around a discus, like the tire flaps on a model-T, only far more elegant and beautiful than that made it sound.

The wheel itself seemed to be made of segmented sections -- eight sections, each one consuming forty five degrees of the three hundred and sixty degrees of disk shape. The sections themselves were all separated by a very thin gap, and each one was decorated with bird eye motiefs along the edges, so that it seemed as if a wheel of eyes, like an angel from the Good Book, was floating in space before her. The entire wheel spun at a steady rate...and Jasmine snapped her finger.

"Of course! Centrifugal force!" she exclaimed. "What other way could there be to provide gravity within a rocket -- other than acceleration...ah! This ship must be either short ranged, a patrol boat never meant to leave orbit, and thus not likely to accelerate...or it must be long ranged, designed to drift for many months between planets. Hah!"

Then she noticed the hubcaps of the wheel, both upper and lower, had turrets. Looking for all the world like the ball turrets on the super-fortresses that had leveled Hitler's and Hirohito's mad empires before they could complete their sinister schemes for total global domination, these turrets were different from the plucky American design in two ways: The first being the gold foil that was plated along the interior of the glass domes that served as viewing ports, likely to keep glare from the steely gaze of their astro-gunners...the second being that rather than the dependable M2 Browning .50 caliber machine guns, these turrets projected the narrow emitters of the dreaded death rays that seemed common among most space fairing species in the solar system.

Those turrets, fortunately, were not aimed at her. Jasmine breathed a sigh of relief as her star suit radio crackled and the warm, confident voice of Prince S'kye reached her.

"Need a lift, honored consort?"

Jasmine chuckled. "I hope you didn't have too hard a time of it, Prince of the Hawkmen..." She pursed her lips as the rotation of the wheel brought to bear a faintly glowing scar along the outer hull -- slashing one of the eyes in half.

"Just a few ray kisses," S'kye said, as casual as if he faced it every day. "Nothing we can't fix in astro."

An airlock, mounted just ahead of the upper turret opened and two figures emerged, giving her a sense of scale -- and Jasmine's eyes widened as she realized the wheel had to be at least five hundred meters wide along the diameter. The ship was almost the same size as the imperial war rocket that had plucked her from Earth orbit -- and the people who flew it were nearly her size. However, she had never seen star suits so obviously flamboyant. Like the winged hussars of Poland's imperial past, these Hawkmen took their hawk aesthetic to entirely new heights: Their suits had large articulated wings that swept from their backs, and...

"Ah, they have reaction control thrusters built onto those wings," Jasmine said, standing -- or at least, assuming the position of someone who was standing, considering there was no gravity for her to stand again -- and waving at the Hawkmen as their reaction jets hissed and puffed silently in the vacuum, using their spurts of cold gasses to accelerate them towards her. Both helmets had conical faceplates (an odd shape, but she put it from her mind) that were entirely opaque. However, brusque, authoritative voices she recognized from soldiers throughout Earth came onto her radio.

"Your arms, madame Consort, if you'd be so kind."

"Such gentlemen!" Jasmine said, lifting her arms.

The two Hawkmen took her arms and their wings hissed and spurted more of their cold gas -- and they were swept away into space, then down upon the central axis of the Hawkman ship. The airlock hatch was open wide and Jasmine swung herself in, feet first, the two men following afterwards. The hatch shut and the atmosphere within the airlock hissed inside. The instant the telltale above the door -- a bright red light -- flicked to green, Jasmine took hold of her helmet, twisted, then slid it off, sighing loudly.

"Ah it is a relief to be out of that space blasted helmet," she said as the airlock doors before her -- really, blow her, as she was currently angled with her feet towards them -- opened. "I...thank..." She trailed off, her eyes widening as she pushed against the ceiling to right herself.

Prince S'kye of Venus floated in the bubble-room that made up the central point of the Hawkman warship, the nexus that the whole wheel spun silently around.

He was...

Jasmine blinked a few times.

Beginning at the feet -- which were bright gold and scaled, with thick claws that tipped three flexible looking, gripping 'toes' that seemed more at home with a bird of pray than a humanoid male -- and sweeping up the muscular thighs -- furred and dark black-blue, with the glossy coloration of a raven or corvid -- up to the sleek white toga that was expertly swept around a chest so broad and muscular that she was sure she could have used his entire body as a bed, but while it was muscled, it was still furred and feathered, the tufted feathers at the shoulders giving him the build of someone in a cloak without needing to wear a cloak at all...and his fur and flesh were the same blue-black as his thighs. His arms, long and powerfully built, shifted smoothly from dark blue-black to bright gold scaling, to his fingers, which were all tipped with sharp claws. His neck was sleek and elegant and ended with the head of a bird of prey -- right down to the bright golden hued eyes, the wickedly curved beak, and the feathered hair that swept out and down along his back.

He clicked his beak and his eyes showed he was smiling better than lips ever could.

"Welcome aboard the Bird of Prey, honorable Consort," he said, then executed an elegant microgravity bow -- one that showed off the elegant grace of his powerful body, and the fact that the 'cloak' he wore was actually a pair of powerful wings. To her left and right, Jasmine heard hisses and clicks -- glancing, she saw the two astros who had emerged to escort her in were revealing that, beneath their star-suits, they were the same fusion of human and hawk, and that the decorative wings of their suits were actually pressurized protections of their very own wings.