Starr vs the Emperor of Space Pt. 13

This remarkable serial brought to you by Blue Coal, the cleanest burning coal on the east coast of the United States of America. Nine out of Ten housewives prefer Blue Coal to the next leading brand! Stock up on Blue Coal today and be warm tomorrow!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Might of Zardo

ESCAPE!!! CLAUDETTE T.S GRANT and her newly reunited lover, ALTAIR POLARIS, have escaped from the vicious clutches of the VAMPIRE QUEENS OF MARS. But will they survive to reach true safety? Hurtling from the dome cities of Mars aboard a stolen MARTIAN SPACE CAR, they are hounded by the ROCKET ATTACK SHUTTLES piloted by the vile DEATH COMMANDO along the infamous HIGHWAY OF DEATH.

Meanwhile, in the gorgeous cities of SATURN, MARK STYLES and the UNDERGROUND OF FREE PEOPLE find themselves caught between the pincers of a long planned trap as CAPTAIN SKAR and his CLONE LEGIONS strike from ambush towards their hidden base - directed hence by their malevolent master, EMPEROR ZARDO.

As these calamities unfold, JASMINE STARR - once more aboard her very own ATOMIC ROCKET - rushes towards Mars and her long estranged friend...

Claudette T.S Grant pulled back on the heavy lever that engaged the auto-loader and heard the rattling clunk as the heavy magneto-harnessed uranium rounds were slotted into place in her nuclear pellet gun, then gripped onto the double handled controls and glared out through the scopes on the space car as it roared down the highway - driven by her love and future wife, Altair Polaris. She frowned faintly, as she saw the glittering shapes of the attack shuttles sweeping down from the domes - their contrails cutting through the thin pinkish-red air like ruler lines cut by a manic architect, designing her own future tomb.

"All right, just like Petersberg," she whispered, then pulled back on the twin triggers.

The 37mm, six barreled Gatling gun whirred to life, the barrels spinning ferociously. Each time the barrel swept before the auto-loader, the coils mounted around the barrel in question pulsed with magnetic might, capturing magneto-harness and flinging the round that had been loaded and presented by the auto-loader. Within seconds, it had crossed many times the speed of sound within the thin Martian atmosphere, the harness bursting away from it with a spray of shredded metal, tracing a line of green through the air thanks to the hyper-advanced phosphorus coating slathered upon the round itself. The uranium - which had become spent utterly in the years of nuclear fission ti had been put through in various atomic reactors throughout the solar system - did not even need to be shaped to carve or cut through metal. It merely treated any flesh or machine between it and its distant parabolic end point in the distant fields of Mars as nothing more than a minor impediment!

Within the first few seconds of the first barrel releasing its first uranium slug, the attack shuttle that Claudette had sighted in on had flown through the streaming line of green fire and burst into a thousand pieces as it was shredded apart! The other two, though, banked around the explosion, then darted in as Claudette realized that the autoloader was preparing the next round of thick, heavy rounds. She swung the turret around and used the secondary trigger to bring on the coaxial deathray that was mounted alongside the weapon - but the shuttles broke off their attack before she could bore through their glittering space titanium armor! She saw why a second later as a trio of red dots appeared upon her scope and then drew into lines of white smoke as a trio of deadly missiles rocketed away from the shuttles and towards the space car in which she currently sat. Alarms blared and squealed and she sighted in on one incoming missile with her death ray already warmed and firing. The missile burst into a white puff of exploding material - and the second did as well, but the last streaked home before she could bring her weapon to bear!

However, it was then that Claudette realized that while Altair Polaris might have been a cosmic corsair first, that had not dulled her instincts or wits on Terrestrial - or, in this case, Martian - combat. The very last moment before the deadly missile struck the space car, Altair swung hard to the left, skidding the wheels out and launching the space car into a spin that caused the missile to whip past them, striking the road ahead of - now behind thanks to their spin - vehicle. Debris rained around them and some clattered and clunked off the roof of the vehicle as Altair laughed.

"Great shooting, my love! Now! Lets!" She threw the car into reverse and they shot over the crater, landed, then spun around again as she twisted on the wheel. "Keep going!"

The shuttles split up, coming at them from three directions at once now. Claudette fired a short burst at one - the green streaks clipping through the air to the left of one wing, but the attack shuttle jinked and dove away from her unerring uranium pellets! Then the shuttles were sweeping in...but this time, rather than using their deadly radar guided explosive ripped missiles, they activated their nose mounted forward facing death rays! Invisible beams of killing, ultraviolet heat carved lines of rust red dust along the road, arcing towards the space car, even as Altair jinked furiously, trying to throw off the dire pilot's deadly intent! Claudette yelped as she watched the road just behind them explode apart into a spray of molten asphalt, ripped to pieces by the thermal pressures of the evil energy weapons!

"They're coming around for another pass, Claudette!" Altair hissed. "I can't keep dodging them forever!"

"I got this, Polaris," Claudette said, bringing her turrets nose to bear. One attack shuttle got too confident and paid for it: A stream of uranium ripped it from nose to rocket cone, and the twin wings of it flapped off into two opposite directions, flung away with great force from the exploding fuel tanks. The other two, though, dove down, clearly intent to bracket them within their intersecting death rays. Claudette, though, had spared ammo - not enough to get a kill she was sure...but enough for this!

She swung the turret around and fired the last dregs of her currently loaded belt of ammunition into the very Martian soil that whipped past them! The slugs tore into the surface of the world, sending up gouting sprays of thick, reddish dust! Through that dust carved the beams of the death rays - and while one fell upon the hull of the space car, they did not burst or slow. Instead, the armor that cladded the four wheeled vehicle bubbled and hissed...and then the shuttles were banking away for another pass, frustrated by the occlusion that Claudette had cast up!

"HAH!" Altair laughed.

"Trust a maid to know how troublesome dust can be!" Claudette said, grinning.

"Quite! But keep sharp! We have some attack cars coming from the west!" Altair said. "...hell! They have a space tank!"

Claudette blinked as she craned her head around - and saw the attack cars. Three of them were just like the vehicle they even now drove in, save that their back mounted turrets had a pair of unguided rocket racks, like the deadly and much feared Katyusha used by the stalwart Soviets during their war of defense against unchecked Nazi aggression. As if to demonstrate both their puissance and their mechanical might, the Death Commandos driving those rocket cars immediately began to loose their salvos of arcing death. Roaring explosions - muffled only slightly by the thin Martian air - flashed and burst ahead of, behind, and side to side of Altair's space car. She drove forward, swerving wildly to avoid the aimed shots...but there was enough spread from the hissing, arcing rockets that they might hit from a miss as easily from the most deadly, aimed shot.

The fourth vehicle though was the space tank that Altair had spotted, and it was a dreadful beast indeed. Massive and rectangular, with a pair of canted turrets that thrust from the sides of the twin treads that flanked the sides of the vehicle, it was covered in ball turrets that themselves were already flickering with reflected ray-light as they shot their hull mounted Death Rays against them. Here, the enemy's sheer exuberance in the art of murder smashed headlong into one another: The rockets bursting around them kicked up so much dust that not only could the death rays be seen...they barely did any damage when they did smite against the side of the rocket car!

Claudette fired - but to her shock and horror, the green fire of her nuclear pellet gun struck the space tank and seemed to sink harmlessly into it, flashing with blue-white glittering glows.

"It has a force field!" Claudette exclaimed. "D-Do those exist?"

"Not quite, my love," Altair said, her voice tight. "It's covered with a vacuum-jacketed armor shell!"

"Ah, how different!" Claudette said, her voice thickly sarcastic - and unaware of how very wrong she was! The tank, like space vehicles, was jacketed in a set of layered armor, the outermost layer being thin and separated from the rest by a bubble of vacuum. When the high velocity rounds struck and pierced through, the friction of the impact flashed the hyper-dense shots into a haze of glittering plasma, which them struck hardened space composite armor that could easily resist the impacts! Thus, the space tank was able to stand in the face of the killing force of Claudette's weapon...long enough to bring its mighty main gun to bear and fire!

The main gun was similar to hers - save that rather than many barrels, it had but one...but it needed only one, for the shell it launched was nearly the size of the space car's entire engine block! The shell itself was a fiendishly designed weapon, with a sensor-ray emitter that gauged the distance between the tip of the shell and its target...and once it reached that distnace, the secondary explosives within detonated, transforming the shell from a large singular mass to a spreading cone of metallic death, spraying forth like a vast, godlike shotgun. It was made to butcher infantry and light vehicles, and had Altair been anything but Altair Polaris, the Pirate Queen of Ceres, she might have been yet another reduced to mangled meat by the space tanks of Mars!

Instead, she slammed down upon the brakes, moments before the gun fired - and so, the shell burst ahead of the space car, and the howling storm of metal bearings turned the road ahead of them into a haze of shattered infrastructure! The space car, too, screamed out and spun hard, wheeling almost onto its side as Claudette screamed and clutched to the insides of the turret she was perched within. When the wheel had settled, the air felt silent and still - save for ragged panting and a faint squealing alert from the other chamber of the two chambered car.

"Alta?" Claudette called out. "Alta, are you okay?"

"Just...fine..." Altair's voice was ragged and wheezy - and Claudette swung down the window partition between the chambers, and saw that one of those terrible metal fragments had struck the side door of the vehicle, pierced through, and tore into Altair Polaris' side. Black blood flowed around the metal fingers she had to keep her side from falling to pieces. Her eye was half closed, while her head lolled back against her seat. "Just fine..."

"No!" Claudette cried out.

Altair licked her lips. "Y-You must...there's so much dust. You get out. You run. I'll...buy you time..."

Claudette tensed, then found the emergency space helmet in the inside of the turret. She slammed it onto her head, worked the seal, then forced open the back hatch against the squealing alarms of the computer-machines. The biting cold, thin air of Mars clawed at what she had not taken the time to cover, but Claduette did not care. She slid from the back of the space car, and waved her arms desperately as the smoke cleared - and the attacking forces of the Vampire Queens slowly cruised in, slowing as they reached her.

Her helmet crackled, the radio buzzing with the gloating voice of Queen Vorella. "Ah there you are, my little morsel..."

"Please! We surrender," Claudette said, her voice desperate. "My love is wounded, I-"

"Good!" Vorella laughed, and to Claudette's shock, the coupula turret on the space tank opened and the squid-faced vampire queen thrust her upper torso out into the Martian air, her face covered only by a light mask that kept her breathing oxygen. She cackled at Claudette's expression. "Did you think we'd let that pirate bitch make fools of us and live?" she asked, her tentacles drawing back within her mask, to bare her maw and her fierce teeth. "We're going to skull fuck the pretty brain from your little stupid Earthwoman head, and then we're going to puppet your body with one of our larvae-young, until you become a replacement Queen for my dear departed sister! How do you like that, you blond bitch!?"

Claudette's eyes flashed. "Oh, I don't know..." she said, her eyes fixed on the glittering star behind Queen Vorella's head. "I'd put it a touch below my preferred ending to this little afternoon's adventure. I'd kill for a sauna."

"A s...a sa-uuuna?" Vorella asked. "What is this trifling Earthling invention? Some kind of primitive orgyarium?"

"No, it's just a steam room. It gets quite hot," Claudette said. "And I think you will enjoy it! And Hell with it!" She flung herself flat...moments before the star swelled into the unmistakable cone of an atomic rocket, decelerating down towards the Martian surface. Vorella turned her head back and threw up her arms as she screamed in fury and fear - for before she could even swing the hatch shut, the rocket's nose-cone seemed to fill the sky and proceeding it came a superheated jet of steam, hot enough to melt steel twice over, moving swiftly enough to outpace sound itself! The jet struck the back of the space tank and, as Claudette dug herself into one of the many cratered holes in the tamarack, melted the space tank, Queen Vorella, and twenty six of her Death Commandos into bubbling slag in the space of a few short, sizzling hot seconds!

The rocket settled down with a hiss, click, and pop that was audible even from a distance. When Claudette peeked out...she refused to believe it!

It was impossible!

It could not be!

And yet...it was...

It was the Atomo, streaked straight from her memories and dreams to reality - and from it came the gangplank and, striding forth in a skintight red spacesuit, a ray gun in her hand and a rapier on her hip was...

Was...

"JASMINE!" Claudette screamed, springing to her feet, then rushing forward, and the two struck one another, and embraced, helmet clacking against helmet! She clung to her - then sprang away as if Jasmine was red hot. "My wife is dying!"

"I-" Jasmine blinked, then chuckled. "Well, we can't allow that, my dear."

Claudette practically swooned as her mistress sprang down the gangplank, straight to the wrecked space car. When Jasmine returned, she had already slung a makeshift bandage about Altair and carried her aboard. The gangplank swept up and Claudette allowed herself, at last, nearly a year's worth of pent up swooning as she dripped to the deck and ducked her head forward, while her mistress called out, her voice firm: "Lancer! A syrette of space morphine and an ultra-sleep injector!"

"Aye, Captain Starr!"

The 'Lancer' in question swung down the ladder a moment later, revealing himself to a be a stocky, well built Faeman, and the syrette plunged into Altair's neck, allowing her to sigh softly. The ultra-sleep injector followed, and her eyes closed and she lapsed away. Claudette whispered; "Will she live?"

"Ultra-Sleep means that her heart will beat once every minute, and her lungs will need a thimble of air every day," Jasmine said, then flashed Claudette her most confident smile. "More than enough to get her to her surgeon - they'll patch her up in a thrice!"

"Problem, Captain Starr!" The voice that came from the bridge was feminine, fierce, and faintly afraid. "We have several tracking targets on the radar locator - attack shuttles on the approach! We're a sitting cloud duck here!"

"Claudette, my dear, you will have to tend to your wife," Jasmine said. "Strap her down there, see to it that she does not get flung about - and strap yourself down as well!" Jasmine flashed her a smile. "We have to go a raiding!"

"Yar har, mistress!" Claudette said, showing her Jasmine a little smile - and Jasmine laughed, cupping her cheek with her palm.

"Oh how I missed you my dearest!" Jasmine kissed her forehead, then scrambled up the ladder in a trice! Caludette took the metal hand of her prostrate lover, looking down at her, at her sleeping face. She leaned forward, then placed a gentle kiss on her brow, and whispered, softly.

"Don't you worry...those Martians never knew what was coming." She squeezed. "Jasmine Starr is here!"

***

Jasmine Starr strapped herself into the pilot's chair, while S'hira counted off: "One hundred space kilometers," she said. "Ninety. Eighteen. We have been radar locked!"

"Lancer?" Jasmine asked.

"The death rays are ready, ma'am, but our range is a reduced by a third - this damn atmosphere!" He chuckled. "Could be worse - we could be on Venus. Or Earth!"

Jasmine nodded. "Remass?"

"We have only six kilometers per second of delta-V left," S'hira said. "Fifty kilometers!"

"Have to spare the countdown then!" Jasmine threw the throttle back. "Blastoff!"

The Atomo lifted to the heavens on a graceful pillar of luminous steam, streaking upwards, while Lancer pulled back on the triggers for the newly mounted turrted death-ray. The beam seared through the thin atmosphere of Mars, slicing two of the attack shuttles clear in half with a darting thrust and thrust. The third dropped their missiles, but the two heat guided rockets streaked towards the Atomo, locked onto her brilliant thrust plume, and burned themselves to cinders - the fools! Jasmine cut the rocket off, and S'hira cried out.

"We're not out of the atmosphere yet, Starr!"

"We're not making it to Earth on six kps of delta-V! Not in any time scale I wish! S'hira, give me the location of the nearest spaceport, Lancer, give me cover!"

"Aye, aye, Captain!" Lancer said as the rocket's nose fell forward - and then the engine streaked on again, slamming them back into their seats as S'hira called out the bearings. Jasmine swung the gimbled rocket around, angling them as they sliced through the air, the whole rocket rumbling and rattling around them. The Atomo soared through the air as if she had been born to cut the heavens with her beauty, and a dome city flashed by under them, then another - and then, looming before them came a pimple on the horizon that began to swell and swell and swell, until Jasmine realized...they were flying towards some nearby hillock, but rather, towards a massive, distant mountain - a mountain to rival the mightiest of mountains on Earth, a towering space born Olympus!

"Racing Rockets" Jasmine whispered - witnessing a splendorous sight that no Earthman or Earthwoman could have ever dreamed of seeing, the titan of the terrible red world...the Magnificent Mountain of Mars! So titanic that the entire solar system swore by it - and resting before its majesty was a sprawling military spaceport, sporting the malefic might of the Martian Astro Navy! But, as even the farsighted and strategically minded men of the United States Navy had learned to their woe...a navy at port was a fearsomly vulnerable thing!

Bat-Men in the bright red and white uniform of the Martian Astro Navy sprinted across the tarmac, towards their waiting battle-rockets, their helmets gleaming with reflective light. Others drove lorries full of the explosive hydrogen used to fuel the fast attack shuttles. Yet more operated the snub barreled nuclear pellet guns that aimed to try and bring down the attacking Atomo. Yet none were quite as prepared as they might have been - too sure that a single rocket would never dare to attack them at the heart of their malevolent empire!