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CHAPTER SIX
Attack Of The Mind Worms!
REBELLION ON PLUTO!!! The whole of Zardo's court is in an uproar -- for none other than the STAR PRINCESS ZELLA has interfered in the Emperor's villainy, saving the life of American hero, MARK STYLES, and his long separated friend and ally ROBIN ROBINSON. While Zardo claims that his daughter has nothing to fear, behind her back, he plots against all three.
Meanwhile, in the depths of the DEATH JUNGLE OF CERES, CLAUDETTE T.S GRANT and the PIRATE QUEEN ALTAIR POLARIS find themselves at a crossroads. Claudette wishes to go to Mars, to face down their enigmatic rulers, while Altair believes that the only thing she needs to do is flee to the depths of the solar system.
And, finally, JASMINE STARR plunges through the acidic clouds of Venus to her certain doom!
The winds of Venus whipped past Jasmine Starr's faceplate as she plunged, back first, towards the surface of that hellish world. She knew not what ancient catastrophe had soaked the world in acid clouds, but from Prince S'kye, she had learned what no Earth scientist had ever learned about the fell world into which she plummeted. She had learned that the pressure was intense enough to crush a Ford within seconds, with heat so high that it could cause lead itself to run as if it were warm water. Worse still was the acid -- thick, heavy rains of sizzling, boiling acid that sleeted down upon the rocky wasteland that was Venus perpetually.
Jasmine, though, was not without hope!
She, unlike many executed in this fashion by the Hawkmen of Venus, was not nude. Rather, she was clad in the fearsomely articulated Diamond Suit. The outer armor was solid diamond, placed above thick steel that, itself, contained hydraulic muscles and powered joints that could turn one man's strength into the strength of nearly ten dozen men.
With that mechanical might, Jasmine could move the arms, wiggle the fingers, even preform acrobatic feats as she tumbled through the air. But what was more, the suit contained coolant fluids that were piped along an arterial network that threaded within. This coolant fluid would not work forever to ward off the terrible heat of Venus...but it would keep her alive for a few hours.
Despite how marvelous the Diamond Suit seemed...it was, in fact, a poison chalice. A cruel jest of a device, constructed by the mad King C'arrion V'ulture. Anyone who landed upon the surface of Venus in this suit had not bought themselves a chance at life...no, they had merely found themselves trapped within an even more nightmarish future -- a short period of hope, followed by long, slow despair as even the durability of the suit faded before the continual onslaught of Venus.
Those who were doomed to die within the Suit would have time enough to know how painful it would be...
But Jasmine was no mere shrinking violet! No sir!
She had worked for none other than the Office of Strategic Services itself -- the classified crew of clever codebreakers and ciphermakers who, through cunning and even cruel methods, had bedeviled Hitler and Hirohito's heinous hegemonies! And in the OSS, she had learned many tricks that served her well, doubly so when layered upon her skills at fencing, her scientific acumen, and her deep understanding of the human mind. One such trick?
Always
memorize
a
map
.
For a short time while she had been on the
Bird of Prey
, she had seen the globe map of Venus, which showed the locations of not only the Hawkmen's Sky City, but also the Tunnel City of the Faemen. And so, she had asked to be executed at high noon -- the point in Sky City's steady equatorial drifting that it would be a few kilometers west of Tunnel City itself. As Venus rotated opposite to most other worlds in the solar system, this meant that the prevailing winds would blow her almost directly to the entrance of that subterranean safehouse!
"Now, old girl, you just have to survive the landing," Jasmine muttered to herself. She had not seen anything even close to a parachute...
And she would not find one.
The ground rushed forward, suddenly emerging from the clouds as if she had no time to think at all! Jasmine gritted her teeth...
And the world vanished in a spread of dull white. Her arms locked into place and her head snapped into position -- and then she felt a muffled impact, followed by a wild tumbling...followed by another impact, this on her shoulder. She tumbled once more, then impacted again. Her inner ear was whirling, her stomach tried to crawl out of her stomach. Each jarring impact, blunted as it was, felt as if it was driving spikes of pain into her joints and her shoulders. But each impact came just a bit softer than the prior -- until, at last, there was one impact that led to a slow roll, then a sudden stop...and then the air around her filled with hissing and burbling.
She was able to move her arms a moment later, and she felt as if she was completely surrounded by glop and goo. She shoved it away and stood, and saw that her diamond suit had become hideously streaked...by a slurry of melting white plastic, the plastic of the balloons that had deployed around her body, turning her lethal fall into a relatively painless tumble. Jasmine chuckled under her breath. "Well, there we go," she said, then started to take in the surroundings.
The surface of Venus, despite the desolation and the danger, retained some of the same beauty it had above the clouds. While the clouds had been spectacular, the rocks and slow, flowing rivers of molten rock and burbling liquid that made up the landscape about her possessed its own sepulcher grandiosity. The rocks scattered about the ground were slate-like and oddly smooth, worn away by the acid rain and the fearsome pressure.
The sky was close in. Dark. Gloomy.
"Well, then," Jasmine said. "If I were a tunnel city, I would build into something tough."
She started forward. Her boots scraped along the ground and she hopped over a slowly flowing line of lava, before coming to a narrow hillock. Walking up it, she looked about herself and saw, in the distance -- a distance that seemed oddly claustrophobic due to the close in nature of the cloudy sky -- she could see a dome like mountain, rising from the irregular ground. And carved into it, as if in pure defiance of natural law, was a statue of glittering glassy material -- diamond, she had no doubt -- that stood proudly before the mountain. It was of a nude woman, with an exotic, angular cast to her features and ears so long and proudly pointed that no one could mistake her as a native of the planet Earth.
"Tunnel City," Jasmine said, then began to pick her way forward...
Unaware she was being watched.
Using a hardened robot camera, built into a seemingly innocuous rock, a pair of Faemen guards watched the grainy, black and white footage of the Diamond Suit as it trudged towards the entrance of their capital. The subordinate looked at his superior, and whispered: "By the Dark! That is no Hawkman."
"No it definitely is not," his superior said. "I will inform the Princesses." He reached out -- then hesitated. "Wait...they are heading for the capital!"
"Should I alert the Rocket Rangers?" his subordinate asked, his communication wand already in his hand.
"No," his superior barked. His eyes gleamed with attentive focus -- brilliant red in the dim lights of their security bunker. His lips skinned back, white teeth flashing on a blacker than midnight face. "It seems that this fool is heading unwittingly to his death. Look. He has taken the Valley path."
"The Valley path?" The subordinate gasped. "Towards...the Venusian Diamond Devil?"
"The very same!" his superior said, leaning forward. "Whether this poor fool is friend or foe, we will never know. The Rocket Rangers cannot hope to reach them before the Devil has its due."
***
Jasmine did not know what it was, exactly, that clued her into the source of the danger. A tiny movement? A faint noise that stuck out against the natural whistling wind and drumming rain of Venus? Or maybe it was what some scientists referred to as a 'sixth sense', the innate human ability to become aware of danger when their life was on the line. For if there was any female on the Earth that could have been given the sense for danger, it would be Jasmine...and so, without thinking, she flung herself forward, rolled, and came to her feet as something swept through the air where she had been and smashed into the side of the narrow valley through which she walked. When she spun around, she found that the valley wall had crumpled inwards...and that the crater that had been left behind by the impact was filled with a kind of writhing mass of glittering liquid that had more in common with a mass of crystal than anything living...
And yet something living was indeed within that crater, and Jasmine watched as it flowed out of the crater and into the canyon floor, burbling and frothing. As it flowed along the ground, the bottom of it picked up a pattering of dust and dirt and earth, causing the base of the creature to solidify...transforming its movement from a smooth flowing to a kind of writhing, twitching, spasmodic leaping forward. Scrunch, expand, scrunch, expand it went like a living and malignant carpet. Jasmine backed away from the creature -- and then saw that a frothing acid had been left behind in the impact crater...
She knew, then, that this creature's very touch would be death itself.
