Captain Future 19 - Outlaw World (Winter 1946) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

outlaw Martians showed that their trust in their leader was absolute.
    Bork King and his second in command, a lanky, solemn Martian named Qi Thir, inspected the wrecked cyclotrons of the Red Hope .
    “They did a good job, blast them,” growled the leader. “Every one of the eight cycs is blown.”
    “Number Three and Four cycs only have their heads blown off,” spoke up Captain Future, beside them. “They’d be the easiest to repair, and would give us enough power to get the ship off this low-gravity moon.”
    Qi Thir looked at him with respect. “You know ships. Were you a cyc man with Zarastra?”
     
    CURT NEWTON nodded hastily, seizing on that explanation.
    “That’s right. Let’s look at the hull now. It didn’t seem to be ripped, though it’s pretty badly bulged.”
    The explosion had bulged out the heavy triple wall of the Red Hope like tin. Girders had snapped, but the plates had held. Also, the telaudio transmitter had been wrecked. That quenched a hope Curt had had of sending a surreptitious message to the Futuremen of his whereabouts.
    “The hull’s strained but it ought to hold together for a while,” he declared. “How far is it to Iskar?”
    “Why, you ought to know where the pirate asteroid is,” Bork King said, surprised. “Only twenty degrees Sunwise from here in the inner belt of the asteroid zone.”
    They began work almost at once upon the wrecked cycs, concentrating their efforts on the two least damaged ones. The solemn Qi Thir and Curt Newton superintended the repairs.
    Bork King’s Martians worked without pausing for rest, jumping at the slightest command of their big roaring leader, with a sort of fanaticism. Curt sensed a mystery about this outlaw band from Mars.
    “That’s all we can do here,” panted Qi Thir, hours later. “If the gods of Mars are good, we can limp to Iskar on these two cycs.”
    The day of Leda was dying, the Sun sinking into the faery flower forest and Jupiter rising in huge majesty into the dusking sky.
    “Get aboard,” Bork King ordered his tired men. “We take off at once.”
    Captain Future stood beside the big Martian in the pilot-room as the two repaired cyclotrons began a ragged, irregular droning that shook the weakened ship. With infinite care, Bork King eased the cyc pedal down until the cycs seemed about to tear themselves apart.
    Then he jerked the space-stick back. The Red Hope lurched clumsily up through the giant tree flowers, unsteadily riding the jets of its keel tubes. The ship shivered as Bork King fed power to the stern tubes and sent it limping shakily out into space.
    “We got off, at any rate,” muttered the big outlaw. “Now for Iskar, then we take Ru Ghur’s trail.”
    The asteroid zone stretched across the firmament ahead of them, a great band of shining specks that in reality was a cosmic jungle of whirling planetoids and spinning meteor swarms.
    The Red Hope staggered toward it, and toward the secret pirate asteroid that was the rendezvous of the Solar System’s lawless underworld.
    Captain Future, looking ahead, realized grimly that he was taking his life into his hands by going into this lair of the men who of all men in the System hated and feared him most.
     

     
Chapter 7: On the Pirate Asteroid
     
    THROUGH the whirling wilderness of the asteroid zone limped a battered outlaw ship, For hours, the Red Hope had threaded a precarious course deeper and deeper into the great band of rushing planetoids and spinning swarms of meteor drift.
    At spasmodic intervals, its rocket-tubes fired weakly, as it clumsily changed course to avoid a dangerous mass of drift. Sometimes the ship, barely managed to avoid disaster, for of its two working cyclotrons only one was now functioning with any degree of efficiency.
    Captain Future, standing beside Bork King in the pilot-room listened with an intent expression on his brown face to the throbbing of the cyclotrons.
    “Number Three is about gone, but Number Four may hold out a little