Captain Future 19 - Outlaw World (Winter 1946) (6 page)

“Look out — there’s a moon spider!” yelled the Uranian as he caught sight of the hairy monster in the web. “Kill the beast!”

His own gun flashed a streak of fire. But the huge spider, moving with incredible swiftness as the gun blasted, streaked back along its shining web and disappeared into its pit before the rest could fire.

“Here’s the jacket of one of them!” exclaimed Kra Kol, the Saturnian. Moving forward cautiously, he picked up the torn, bloody garment. “The moon spider must have got them when they blundered into its web.”

“So that’s why they shot and screamed.” Ru Ghur nodded. “The beast devoured them before they had a chance to escape.”

Captain Future, peering down from the big lily cup high above, saw the fat Uranian looking musingly at the ripped jacket.

“Well,” he heard Ru Ghur murmur, “this is a strange end for a long and brilliant career.”

“Let’s get out of here,” muttered Kra Kol. “I don’t like these cursed flower jungles.”

Ru Ghur shrugged, and led the way back in the direction from which they had come. In a few moments Curt and Bork King slid down to the ground.

“That was close, and it was cursed clever of you,” said Bork King to Curt. “What’s your name, Earthman?”

Captain Future knew better than to let his real identity be known now. Bork King was an outlaw, one of the Companions of Space. And all that pirate brotherhood hated Captain Future as their bitterest enemy.

Nor could he count on the Martian’s gratitude for having helped him escape from Ru Ghur. Hastily, he dissembled.

“I’m Jan Dark,” he said. “I was one of Zarastra’s crew.”

Zarastra had been a famous space pirate captain who had had been trapped and destroyed with most of his force by the Planet Patrol only a few weeks before.

“When the Patrol caught Zarastra’s ships off Titan, I escaped the wreckage in a space-suit,” Curt went on. “That devil Ru Ghur picked me up and was holding me prisoner. He thought Zarastra had buried radium treasure and was going to make me tell about it.”

Bork King extended a big hand. “You sure saved my neck, Jan Dark. And I’m not the man to forget a debt.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Curt denied. “All I want is to get my hands on that Uranian devil for what he did to me.”

Even as he spoke there came suddenly to their ears the distant sound of an explosion.

“What the devil?” exclaimed Bork King, his craggy face stiffening. “That came from the camp!”

ALMOST instantly, the explosion was followed by a distant roar of rocket-tubes. And they glimpsed four cruisers rising above the flower forest and darting up into the night sky.

“There go Ru Ghur and his raiders, curse him!” cried the Martian. “If they’ve taken my radium I’ll get them!”

He plunged back toward the camp. Captain Future followed him closely.

“Fiends of Mars!” swore Bork King as they burst into the planet-lit clearing of the flame rose glade. “Look at what they’ve done!”

The cruisers of the radium raiders were gone, Bork King’s men still lay unconscious around the ground beneath the giant flowers, as before. But an explosion had blown out the whole stern of the Martians’ cruiser, the
Red Hope
.

“Ru Ghur exploded your ship’s cycs so you and your men couldn’t get away!” Captain Future said quickly.

The big Martian was already hastening into the battered ship. He ran to the cabin in which his looted radium had been stored. It was gone.

Bork King’s broad shoulders seemed to sag, and a look of tragedy came upon his massive face. His eyes were dull with misery.

“Gone — every gram of it!” he muttered. “And we went through months of hardship and danger to gather that radium together.”

“It could have been worse,” Curt pointed out. “You might have lost your lives, as well as your loot.”

“That radium wasn’t mere loot!” snapped Bork King. “It’s true that we took it by force from its original owners, but it wasn’t because of greed.”

Captain Future looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t understand. I thought you were pirates, like myself.”

“We’re outlaws, not pirates,” retorted the Martian. “Oh, legally we’re guilty of piracy. But we had to have radium, and had to use force to get it, since for months Ru Ghur’s raiders have swept up the whole supply.”

“Are you after radium for the same reason as Ru Ghur?” Curt asked directly.

Bork King shook his head. “I don’t know what that Uranian’s motive is in gathering radium. Nobody does.”

He volunteered no further information as they emerged from the cruiser and began examining the unconscious men, all Martians like their leader. The men lay in drugged coma from the effects of the sleep-gas.

They worked for some time to revive the sleepers, and finally the score of men had all been roused.

Cries of rage broke from them when they learned of the theft of the radium. “We’ll follow that Uranian, blast his whole band, and get the stuff back!” cried a furious young Martian.

Captain Future spoke up quickly. “And I’m with you in that, if you’ll have me. I’ve got my own score to settle with that fat devil.”

“We’ll be glad to have you with us. Jan,” said Bork King promptly. “But it’s not going to be easy to follow Ru Ghur. He sabotaged the
Red Hope
pretty thoroughly. And even if we can get it repaired, we don’t know where the raiders’ secret base is.” He looked at Curt keenly. “Ru Ghur didn’t give you any hint of where his Outlaw World is when you were his prisoner, did he?” he asked.

Curt shook his head. “No. All he said was that it is a world of whose existence the System peoples don’t dream.”

A brooding look crossed Bork King’s massive face. “That fits the rumors you hear — that their mysterious Outlaw World lies far outside the Solar System. Yet I can’t believe that.”

He raised his voice, addressing his men, “We can’t make major repairs to the
Red Hope
here. The best we can do is to patch it up enough to get us to Iskar, the pirate asteroid. We can complete repairs there, then take Ku Ghur’s trail!”

The chorus of agreement from the 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.

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 longer,” he declared.

The big, bristling-haired Martian outlaw uttered a blistering oath.

“Curse that devil Ru Ghur for his sabotaging tricks! It’s hard enough to navigate this blasted jungle of swarms with full power, let alone with a half-dead space-stick.”

The
Red Hope
had entered one of the densest and most perilous sections of the zone. Curt Newton looked out into a black void crowded with moving crumbs of light. Those innocent sparks were rushing meteors or planetoids whose orbits were unbelievably complicated. Any one of those hurtling masses of stone could instantly destroy the ship.

“I don’t see how you can navigate in here at all,” Curt admitted. “Meteor meters would be useless in such crowded stuff as this.”

Bork King looked at him in surprise. “You surely must know the secret of navigating the zone if you were one of Zarastra’s pirate crew.”

Captain Future hastily covered his slip. “I was a cyc man — not a pilot. That’s why I don’t know anything about the piloting end of it.”

“Of course.” The big Martian nodded, satisfied by the explanation. “Well, Jan, any pirate can navigate the zone, but nobody else can do so safely. Listen to that buzzer.”

Curt Newton became aware that from the buzzer in question was coming a constant succession of sharp notes, in distinctly different groups of long and short buzzes.

“Long ago, pirates planted wave-projectors on the ‘toids and swarms here in the zone,” the Martian outlaw explained. “Each gives off a distinctive individual signal in that specially tuned buzzer. If you know the code of those signals, as all the pilots of the Companions of Space do, you can navigate the zone safely.”

“So that’s why the asteroid Iskar is such a safe rendezvous for space pirates?” Curt exclaimed, and Bork King nodded.

“Iskar is at the center of a region just choked with swarms, nobody but pirates ever try to reach it,” Bork said, and added thoughtfully, “Of course, some day the Patrol will find it and clean it up, just as they did Pallas and the other pirate asteroids in past times. But until then, it’s a safe base for all the Companions of Space.”

“I thought you said you weren’t a space pirate, Bork,” reminded Captain Future, looking at him curiously.

Bork King’s massive face darkened. “I’m not, though the Planet Patrol wouldn’t agree. Radium is the only thing my boys and I take. We wouldn’t have to take that by force, if it weren’t for Ru Ghur and his cursed band.”

Captain Future did not press his questions further, for he had already learned that Bork King was intensely reserved upon the motives for his activities.

They went deeper into the wilderness of spinning swarms and meteor drift, limping on precariously. Then at last the big Martian pointed to a small reddish speck of light not far ahead in the zone.

“That’s Iskar,” he said.

Blood-red as a glittering ruby, the almost inaccessible pirate asteroid beckoned like an ominous crimson beacon.

“Small, isn’t it?” said Bork King. “But not a world in System is as deep with blood and treasure as wild Iskar when the pirate fleets are in.”