Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

roaring shock sent the men in the crowded bridge caroming into the walls.
    Captain Future clutched a stanchion. He heard the scream of tortured metal coincident with the reverberations of the explosion.
    He dragged himself erect. A dead silence reigned, then was broken by oaths and cries of pain from the other parts of the ship.
    Kim Ivan, bleeding from a gash on his forehead, dragged himself indomitably to his feet. “What’s happened?” he husked dazedly.
    “The bow rocket-tubes have back-blasted!” Curt cried. “You can’t use full brake-blasts at the speed we had — inertia forces the blast back up the tubes. I think the laterals let go, too.”
    “Look at that!” shouted Boraboll. The Uranian’s fat moon-face was a muddy yellow as he pointed shakily ahead. “We’re going to crash!”
    A cold hand seemed to close around Curt Newton’s heart as he caught a glimpse through the broad window. The tremendous force of the disastrous brake-blast had sharply checked the Vulcan’s headlong rush toward the planetoid ahead. But the crippled ship was still falling onward.
    The uncharted little world already filled half the starry heavens before them. The thin, feeble light from the distant Sun vaguely illumined it. Dark, dense forests were visible upon it. And at one point on its surface, a great bed of smoldering volcanoes flung a lurid red glow.
    “This is your fault!” roared Kim Ivan to the terrified old Saturnian.
    “I lost my head!” shrilled Tuhlus Thuun. “I jammed the brake-blast pedal before I realized.”
    Captain Future jumped to the interphone. He called the cyc-room: “What happened down there? Did the tail-tubes go, too?”
    The scared, hoarse voice of the mutineer in charge of the cyc-room answered him. “We got a dozen dead men down here — half the cycs blew up when the bow and lateral tubes back-blasted! The tail-tubes didn’t give way, though they seem to be badly strained.”
    “Switch the power of the remaining cycs into the tail rocket-tubes!” ordered Curt. “Then get out of the cyc-room!”
    He turned and hauled the stunned old Saturnian out of the pilot-chair. “Give me those controls.”
     
    MOREMOS leaped forward, deadly suspicion on his face. “Wait a minute, Future! You’re not pulling any of your tricks!”
    “Tricks, the devil!” flamed Curt. “We’re falling toward that planetoid, and in ten minutes we’ll crash. We can’t get away, for the bow and lateral tubes are blown, and the tail-tubes are strained and can’t be used for more than a few minutes of firing.”
    He was seating himself in the pilotchair and grabbing the space-stick as he talked. “If we crash on that planetoid, everybody in the ship dies. I don’t care a curse about you pirates. But I’ve got friends aboard. There’s a chance I can make a safe landing.”
    “Go ahead and try, then!” exclaimed Kim Ivan. “Get back and give him room, the rest of you!”
    The Vulcan was turning slowly over and over in space as it fell at appallingly increasing speed toward the mystery planetoid. Captain Future’s eyes tensely estimated the distance of the little world, by the graduated scale etched in the glassite window. The hundred-mile sphere now filled most of the firmament. The edges of its dark green mass were rimmed by a haze that told of a thin atmosphere.
    Superhuman tension gripped the watching criminals as the ship fell on toward doom. Curt’s brown face was like rock, his hands holding the space-stick in the rigidly upright position that would fire the tail rocket-tubes when he depressed the cyc-pedal.
    “We’re going to hit in a minute!” quavered fat Boraboll.
    A wild scream came to their ears from the lower part of the ship. The mad shriek of John Rollinger.
    “Are you going to let us crash without even trying?” roared Grabo to Captain Future.
    The falling Vulcan was only miles above the surface of the uncharted planetoid. They were rushing down toward a convexity of green jungle in