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 FOUR
The Corsairs of Ceres
CERES! The pirate haven of the solar system, home to the many clans of BELTER SCOUNDRELS, dwelling in and among the dreaded DEATH JUNGLE. It is here that the dread PIRATE QUEEN ALTAIR POLARIS has taken the plucky CLAUDETTE T.S GRANT -- but will she serve as a prize, a prisoner or plaything?
Meanwhile, within the depths of EMPEROR ZARDO'S Plutonian Ice Castle, MARK STYLES has found himself entangled in the deadly games of politics with the STAR PRINCESS ZELLA -- can our strapping hero navigate the intricate imperial intrigues imparted upon this icy planetoid?
And the final, most vexing question...
Whatever will become of JASMINE STARR as she is taken before KING F'EATH ARR of the HAWKMEN?
Claudette gasped as she stepped from the airlock of the dread pirate rocketship
Salty Sirius
and looked out, for the first time, upon Ceres. The asteroid itself, discovered one hundred and fifty years ago, had long been known to be among the largest in the entire asteroid belt. But what the famed astronomer and mathematician, Giuseppe Piazzi, could never have imagined that balmy evening when he first spied the glint of light that was Ceres was that, by then, Ceres had been lived in for eight centuries -- and in those centuries, it had been hollowed out...and set to spinning!
And so, Claudette found herself gaping upwards...not at sky, but at a distant, glittering green expanse of lakes and forests, sprawling outwards in every direction. The sun that sat in the center of Ceres was, itself, a mimicry created by angled mirrors that were situated at the polar regions of world, where gravity itself seemed to be nearly nothing at all. Those vast mirrors gathered sunlight from beyond the curve of the world, then angled it inwards and struck a large reflector, which shone it out against the rest of Ceres -- illuminating the world within. Currently, the hue of the sun was a dull red, casting the sunlight colors of late afternoon about.
The area around Claudette herself was almost not worth noticing -- being that it was nothing more than a sprawling collection of wooden shacks and metal lean-tos. The tallest building was three stories, and around the buildings were dirt tracks and muddy alleyways. People shambled too and fro between the buildings -- not in despair...but in revelry. Claudette's eyes widened as she saw a pair of bearded men of unknown species, swaggering together as they sang, arm in arm. She saw a man teetering on a barrel as he drank from a bottle, and a woman with her breasts out for the whole world to see, leaning from the second story window of one of the larger buildings, waving her handkerchief down to astros striding past with their suits on and their helmets tucked under their arms.
"Well!" Claudette whispered. "I never. This is almost as bad as New Orleans!"
An arm snaked around her -- steel strong and steel in truth -- and the dreaded Pirate Queen Altair Polaris drew her in close, her breath warm against her ear. "Oh, you haven't seen the worst of Ceres yet!" She laughed, as Claudette pushed weakly at her, trying to get free -- but Alta took that as an excuse to swing Claudette up onto her shoulders with a braying laugh -- her crew laughing as well. Claudette kicked her legs.
"Put me down you! You! You! Heathen! You cad! God bless your heart!"
Alta ignored her, instead breezing straight into one of the taverns, throwing the door open.
"Alta, you old space dog!" A cheerful looking be-tusked, green skinned man with a huge scraggly beard spread his arms as he stood from his table, his crew lifting their mugs. "Why I heard you got atomized out by Venus just a few months ago!"
"Nah, that was some poor fool's attempt at escaping Old Zee," Alta said, cheerfully. "Anyone got eaten while I was out?"
"Some drunkards by the spinward edge of camp. Nothing to be done about it," the bearded man said, shaking his head as Alta came to the stairs that led up to the second level of the rickety bar. Claudette blushed, her hand reaching back to try and keep her skirts from flaring up around her hips -- of course the pirates had forced her out of her star suit and into the maid outfit she had kept beneath it, meaning that now, her nethers were on full display to anyone sitting in the right place in the bar -- but then her head snapped up.
"Did he say
eaten
?" she asked, shocked -- while Alta came to the second story.
"Price of living free, girlie," Alta said, cheerfully. She opened a door, then swung Claudette around. Claudette squeaked as she hit the bed -- the springs complaining underneath her. She panted, sitting up, glaring at the Pirate Queen through her bedraggled blond hair, which hung down her face in a cascading tangle.
"Living free!? Then what am I, you...you...you
pirate
?"
Alta grinned, her eyepatch gleaming as she slid her jacket off her shoulders, revealing that her arm that remained faithful flesh had been festooned with fierce tattoos, winding and curling along the curves of her muscles, muscles that were repeated in synthetic steel and bulging cables that corded along her metallic arm. She held the jacket between silvery fingers and rotated her hand a hundred and eighty degrees to flip said jacket over her shoulder as she looked Claudette over -- her tricorn hat cocked at an equally arrogant angle.
"I said it's the price of us living free, not you. You don't want to risk your pretty little neck out in the wilderness," she said, casually striding around the bed, to a small rectangle that looked for all the world like a refrigerator -- but rather than opening to reveal bottles of beer, Alta instead simply began to punch in commands on the small keyboard mounted on the top. As the box hummed quietly, she continued: "Ceres used to be the jewel of the Devilmen Kingdom. But...Zardo..." She shook her head, and for a moment, her jocular grin faded. "The wrath of Zardo turned the paradise out there...into the Death Jungle of Ceres. Now, the only folk that live here are too stubborn to know any better."
"Like you,
hmm
?" Claudette asked.
The box chimed and Alta laughed. "I don't
live