Starr vs the Emperor of Space Pt. 06

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CHAPTER SIX

Attack Of The Mind Worms!

REBELLION ON PLUTO!!! The whole of Zardo's court is in an uproar -- for none other than the STAR PRINCESS ZELLA has interfered in the Emperor's villainy, saving the life of American hero, MARK STYLES, and his long separated friend and ally ROBIN ROBINSON. While Zardo claims that his daughter has nothing to fear, behind her back, he plots against all three.

Meanwhile, in the depths of the DEATH JUNGLE OF CERES, CLAUDETTE T.S GRANT and the PIRATE QUEEN ALTAIR POLARIS find themselves at a crossroads. Claudette wishes to go to Mars, to face down their enigmatic rulers, while Altair believes that the only thing she needs to do is flee to the depths of the solar system.

And, finally, JASMINE STARR plunges through the acidic clouds of Venus to her certain doom!

The winds of Venus whipped past Jasmine Starr's faceplate as she plunged, back first, towards the surface of that hellish world. She knew not what ancient catastrophe had soaked the world in acid clouds, but from Prince S'kye, she had learned what no Earth scientist had ever learned about the fell world into which she plummeted. She had learned that the pressure was intense enough to crush a Ford within seconds, with heat so high that it could cause lead itself to run as if it were warm water. Worse still was the acid -- thick, heavy rains of sizzling, boiling acid that sleeted down upon the rocky wasteland that was Venus perpetually.

Jasmine, though, was not without hope!

She, unlike many executed in this fashion by the Hawkmen of Venus, was not nude. Rather, she was clad in the fearsomely articulated Diamond Suit. The outer armor was solid diamond, placed above thick steel that, itself, contained hydraulic muscles and powered joints that could turn one man's strength into the strength of nearly ten dozen men.

With that mechanical might, Jasmine could move the arms, wiggle the fingers, even preform acrobatic feats as she tumbled through the air. But what was more, the suit contained coolant fluids that were piped along an arterial network that threaded within. This coolant fluid would not work forever to ward off the terrible heat of Venus...but it would keep her alive for a few hours.

Despite how marvelous the Diamond Suit seemed...it was, in fact, a poison chalice. A cruel jest of a device, constructed by the mad King C'arrion V'ulture. Anyone who landed upon the surface of Venus in this suit had not bought themselves a chance at life...no, they had merely found themselves trapped within an even more nightmarish future -- a short period of hope, followed by long, slow despair as even the durability of the suit faded before the continual onslaught of Venus.

Those who were doomed to die within the Suit would have time enough to know how painful it would be...

But Jasmine was no mere shrinking violet! No sir!

She had worked for none other than the Office of Strategic Services itself -- the classified crew of clever codebreakers and ciphermakers who, through cunning and even cruel methods, had bedeviled Hitler and Hirohito's heinous hegemonies! And in the OSS, she had learned many tricks that served her well, doubly so when layered upon her skills at fencing, her scientific acumen, and her deep understanding of the human mind. One such trick?

Always memorize a map.

For a short time while she had been on the Bird of Prey, she had seen the globe map of Venus, which showed the locations of not only the Hawkmen's Sky City, but also the Tunnel City of the Faemen. And so, she had asked to be executed at high noon -- the point in Sky City's steady equatorial drifting that it would be a few kilometers west of Tunnel City itself. As Venus rotated opposite to most other worlds in the solar system, this meant that the prevailing winds would blow her almost directly to the entrance of that subterranean safehouse!

"Now, old girl, you just have to survive the landing," Jasmine muttered to herself. She had not seen anything even close to a parachute...

And she would not find one.

The ground rushed forward, suddenly emerging from the clouds as if she had no time to think at all! Jasmine gritted her teeth...

And the world vanished in a spread of dull white. Her arms locked into place and her head snapped into position -- and then she felt a muffled impact, followed by a wild tumbling...followed by another impact, this on her shoulder. She tumbled once more, then impacted again. Her inner ear was whirling, her stomach tried to crawl out of her stomach. Each jarring impact, blunted as it was, felt as if it was driving spikes of pain into her joints and her shoulders. But each impact came just a bit softer than the prior -- until, at last, there was one impact that led to a slow roll, then a sudden stop...and then the air around her filled with hissing and burbling.

She was able to move her arms a moment later, and she felt as if she was completely surrounded by glop and goo. She shoved it away and stood, and saw that her diamond suit had become hideously streaked...by a slurry of melting white plastic, the plastic of the balloons that had deployed around her body, turning her lethal fall into a relatively painless tumble. Jasmine chuckled under her breath. "Well, there we go," she said, then started to take in the surroundings.

The surface of Venus, despite the desolation and the danger, retained some of the same beauty it had above the clouds. While the clouds had been spectacular, the rocks and slow, flowing rivers of molten rock and burbling liquid that made up the landscape about her possessed its own sepulcher grandiosity. The rocks scattered about the ground were slate-like and oddly smooth, worn away by the acid rain and the fearsome pressure.

The sky was close in. Dark. Gloomy.

"Well, then," Jasmine said. "If I were a tunnel city, I would build into something tough."

She started forward. Her boots scraped along the ground and she hopped over a slowly flowing line of lava, before coming to a narrow hillock. Walking up it, she looked about herself and saw, in the distance -- a distance that seemed oddly claustrophobic due to the close in nature of the cloudy sky -- she could see a dome like mountain, rising from the irregular ground. And carved into it, as if in pure defiance of natural law, was a statue of glittering glassy material -- diamond, she had no doubt -- that stood proudly before the mountain. It was of a nude woman, with an exotic, angular cast to her features and ears so long and proudly pointed that no one could mistake her as a native of the planet Earth.

"Tunnel City," Jasmine said, then began to pick her way forward...

Unaware she was being watched.

Using a hardened robot camera, built into a seemingly innocuous rock, a pair of Faemen guards watched the grainy, black and white footage of the Diamond Suit as it trudged towards the entrance of their capital. The subordinate looked at his superior, and whispered: "By the Dark! That is no Hawkman."

"No it definitely is not," his superior said. "I will inform the Princesses." He reached out -- then hesitated. "Wait...they are heading for the capital!"

"Should I alert the Rocket Rangers?" his subordinate asked, his communication wand already in his hand.

"No," his superior barked. His eyes gleamed with attentive focus -- brilliant red in the dim lights of their security bunker. His lips skinned back, white teeth flashing on a blacker than midnight face. "It seems that this fool is heading unwittingly to his death. Look. He has taken the Valley path."

"The Valley path?" The subordinate gasped. "Towards...the Venusian Diamond Devil?"

"The very same!" his superior said, leaning forward. "Whether this poor fool is friend or foe, we will never know. The Rocket Rangers cannot hope to reach them before the Devil has its due."

***

Jasmine did not know what it was, exactly, that clued her into the source of the danger. A tiny movement? A faint noise that stuck out against the natural whistling wind and drumming rain of Venus? Or maybe it was what some scientists referred to as a 'sixth sense', the innate human ability to become aware of danger when their life was on the line. For if there was any female on the Earth that could have been given the sense for danger, it would be Jasmine...and so, without thinking, she flung herself forward, rolled, and came to her feet as something swept through the air where she had been and smashed into the side of the narrow valley through which she walked. When she spun around, she found that the valley wall had crumpled inwards...and that the crater that had been left behind by the impact was filled with a kind of writhing mass of glittering liquid that had more in common with a mass of crystal than anything living...

And yet something living was indeed within that crater, and Jasmine watched as it flowed out of the crater and into the canyon floor, burbling and frothing. As it flowed along the ground, the bottom of it picked up a pattering of dust and dirt and earth, causing the base of the creature to solidify...transforming its movement from a smooth flowing to a kind of writhing, twitching, spasmodic leaping forward. Scrunch, expand, scrunch, expand it went like a living and malignant carpet. Jasmine backed away from the creature -- and then saw that a frothing acid had been left behind in the impact crater...

She knew, then, that this creature's very touch would be death itself.

This was when the creature extended a pair of pseduopods. Acid dripped from them.

"An acid creature -- a breather, spitter, drinker of acid!" Jasmine exclaimed. "Seeking to get at my innards. Absurd! I would provide no nutrients...but such a thing must only see prey!" She flung herself to the side, scrambling up the side of the valley wall, the fingertips of her diamond gloves digging into the earth with crunching sounds. Only her enhanced strength and her own innate skill at rockclimbing allowed her to so speedily slip up the surface of the valley, coming to one of the cloud shrouded heights that she had been hoping to avoid. Here, the terrain was treachery itself -- sharp, jagged dropoffs down to even steeper, deeper canyons.

Looking back, Jasmine saw that the creature could climb as easily as her, swarming up the side of the canyon wall, its body writhing and glittering with silvery viscosity.

"Acid..." Jasmine bit her lip, her mind whirling. Basic chemistry said that only a base could neutralize an acid...but where could she find a base on the surface of Venus, the most acidic planet in the whole of the solar system?

A spray of orange-white light drew her attention. She saw, off to the east, a dome shaped hillock that revealed itself to be no simple hill. Magma flowed from a spouting crater in the center of it, like puss spurting from a pimple. Jasmine felt elation, a flash of excitement! She had a plan!

She just had to survive the next few seconds.

The acid beast had reached the top of the climb, and it reached for her. Jasmine flung herself off the side of the rise, then dug her toes against the far wall of the narrow canyon between her and the next rise. Diamond crunched and cracked worryingly, but she had no time to worry about it -- even as her skin burst into sweat, tingling with the heat of her exertion...or maybe the heat of Venus, seeping into her suit. She ignored that as she veered off, running with wild abandon along a narrow incline towards another one of the dome shaped hills...but one that was not frothing with lava.

Behind her, the devilish acid beast rushed after her, getting faster and faster as it seemed to feel as if its prey was getting within easy grasp. Jasmine was slowed by her suit -- but she managed to reach the hill she sought, skidding down an incline to the narrow dip in the landscape between her and the hill. Her gaze swept along the surface of the hill before herself...

"Aha!" she exclaimed.

There, she saw a long cooled flow of magma, pitted and scored by acid.

The acid beast, unwitting, screeched as it flowed down the hill towards her. Jasmine grabbed a rock from the ground and struck it against the magma, stooping so that acid rain fell onto her back and not onto the surface she struck at. A flash of yellow-white filled her eyes and she beamed. She smashed again with the rock, exposing more of the materiel. She heard the rushing sounds of the beast behind her...faster and faster.

Jasmine risked one more strike.

The beast reared up!

Jasmine flung herself aside. She hit the ground on her shoulder and skidded, hearing crunches and cracks that alarmed her most considerably. She ignored it, turning to look upon the acid beast as it landed...directly upon the thick vein of simple Trona ore that she had revealed with her strikes!

Trona ore was not well known by the citizens of the United States, despite the fact that nine out of ten homes purchased the byproduct of its processing every week in their trips to their favorite grocer and general good stores. They might have recognized it had she used the term...baking soda. For Trona ore was refined into that very useful household product! Even in its unrefined state, Trona ore was a natural alkaline material -- meaning...

"How do you like a taste of some base, you acidic annelid!?" Jasmine shouted, as the terrible Diamond Devil of Venus quivered and trembled within. It seemed unable to move as it digested more and more of the revealed Trona, its belly eating into it...and its back expanding, moment by moment, until-

Jasmine flung up her arm as the Devil exploded from within. Chunks of viscous flesh splattered into the ground around her, and some even landed upon her Diamond Suit. She lowered her arm and laughed. "Never mess with a chemist in a geologically active planet! Might not be as catchy as 'To German Command: Nuts', but..." She stood, shaking her head. "It will have to do."

She shook her head, then turned around -- to find that the rise of the nearby hill was crowned with four curious individuals. They were clad in thick, heavy armor suits of rough looking material that was not diamond like her own, but looked proof against the pressure and heat of the world that they moved through. Their helmets were angular and dark, their face plates completely pitch black. They rode atop narrow, horse sized rockets that had reverse delta wings that thrust along the ground -- sharp bladed and tough. The men were armed with long, narrow, crystalline lances and they were protected from the continual rain of acid from above by curved, swept back wings that spread above their rockets, giving them an almost biplane like apperance.

"Hello there!" Jasmine shouted as hard as she could, hoping her voice would carry through the thick air.

"Hands up, Hawkman," one of the men said, swinging off his rocket vehicle, his crystal lance glittering in his hands as he stepped into the acid rain -- his armor growing slick and slippery instantly as fluid began to flow from his shoulder pads, neutralizing the acid before it could burrow into the leather.

"You've made some mistake, I'm no-" Jasmine said, starting to lift her arms.

The man stepped to her, then shoved his crystal lance against her back, so that she was forced forward.

"No, it is you who has made the mistake, Hawkman," the man growled. "You are under arrest by the Rocket Rangers."

Jasmine sighed, and, with little option, trudged towards what felt like the fifth cell in as many days...

***

Mark Styles, had he been attacked by bombs or bullets or even raygun blasts from a handheld death ray, might have known what to do. His experience and training had taught him to put cover between himself and an incoming projectile -- or ray, in this case -- and might have served him well.

Alas...

The attack that came was none that an Earthman could have predicted. As he and Robin Robinson, also known as the Cybrid by the people of Pluto, stepped into their prison cell, Mark did not know that at that moment, death itself lurked within the chambers for him -- invisible, creeping, inevitable death!

"Zardo isn't going to let that go lying down," he said, shaking his head. "We have to find a way to get off this hell planet."

"Jolly idea, Mark," Robin said, grinning wryly as she stooped to keep from bumping her head against the ceiling. "But there is the problem that we're in a cell -- surrounded by the Emperor's minions. The air we breathe is under his control, for God's sake."

"Maybe..." Mark said. He felt...a strange spike of dizziness. His brow furrowed...

And then he was falling forward, collapsing to the ground, caught only at the last second by Robin, her lower arms snagging him. She wheezed, her eyes half closed. "The...bastard!" she hissed out, the realizing striking home. "Nitrogen!" Her eyes flicked up to the corners of the cell -- where the air filters were placed, bringing in the air from the rest of the vast circulatory system of Pluto's internal, artificial atmosphere. Those filters had been altered some time between when she and Mark had left the arena and now...and now, rather than pumping a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen into the chamber, they were instead filling it with nothing but nitrogen.

Without the ability to interact chemically with the human lung, nitrogen did not trigger the intense panic or headaches of carbon dioxide poisoning. There was no panic, to tell the would be victim that they were in danger. No sense of smell, warning of stale air that could spell doom. There was merely dizziness, then drowsiness...then death!

Only Robin's augmented body, twisted by Zardo's mad science, kept her on her feet. While her brain starved for oxygen, reserves of super-oxygenated space blood were pumped from sacks contained around her heart, filling her blood stream with a rush of the vital chemical, allowing her to think, function, and act for the desperate moments she would need to save not only the life of her one true love...but her own!

Robin knew she had but a moment to act. She thought through the security and safety concerns of the Ice Castle -- the atmosphere systems were made to monitor, with intense fierceness and the mechanical precision that only the maniacal masterminds of Zardo's domain could match. There was no room for error, when the killing vacuum of deepest space lurked beyond the corridors of their ice clad home! And so, every atmosphere filter was connected to a complex series of mechanical pressure sensors and chemical composition systems...

The chemical sniffers might have been disabled.

But no one in their right mind would tamper with the pressure systems -- at least, Robin hoped not as she vaulted to the wall, grabbing onto the air filter seated in the corner of the room with her upper and lower hands alike, bracing her feet against the wall. She strained and muscles that had been reshaped by Zardo's vile science trembled as she clenched her teeth, pulling more and more. In truth, had it merely been exo-hormones, Robin would have failed -- not even when she had been brimming with testosterone would she have had the strength to pull the filter from the wall, securely mounted as it was by screws and bolts.

But Robin's muscles had been enhanced with every concoction and chemical that Zardo had seen fit to test upon her unwilling body -- and so, she was able to pull and pull and pull...and feel the metal grinding, shifting, coming apart. Threading buckled and sparks flew as she slammed onto the floor, blackness surrounding her as the pressure alerts began to scream -- without the mechanical inputs to the room, the pressure sensors had no method to check the chamber's atmosphere and, thus, the other filters were thrown into emergency mode. Air began to flood into the room...