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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Might of Zardo
ESCAPE!!! CLAUDETTE T.S GRANT and her newly reunited lover, ALTAIR POLARIS, have escaped from the vicious clutches of the VAMPIRE QUEENS OF MARS. But will they survive to reach true safety? Hurtling from the dome cities of Mars aboard a stolen MARTIAN SPACE CAR, they are hounded by the ROCKET ATTACK SHUTTLES piloted by the vile DEATH COMMANDO along the infamous HIGHWAY OF DEATH.
Meanwhile, in the gorgeous cities of SATURN, MARK STYLES and the UNDERGROUND OF FREE PEOPLE find themselves caught between the pincers of a long planned trap as CAPTAIN SKAR and his CLONE LEGIONS strike from ambush towards their hidden base - directed hence by their malevolent master, EMPEROR ZARDO.
As these calamities unfold, JASMINE STARR - once more aboard her very own ATOMIC ROCKET - rushes towards Mars and her long estranged friend...
Claudette T.S Grant pulled back on the heavy lever that engaged the auto-loader and heard the rattling
clunk
as the heavy magneto-harnessed uranium rounds were slotted into place in her nuclear pellet gun, then gripped onto the double handled controls and glared out through the scopes on the space car as it roared down the highway - driven by her love and future wife, Altair Polaris. She frowned faintly, as she saw the glittering shapes of the attack shuttles sweeping down from the domes - their contrails cutting through the thin pinkish-red air like ruler lines cut by a manic architect, designing her own future tomb.
"All right, just like Petersberg," she whispered, then pulled back on the twin triggers.
The 37mm, six barreled Gatling gun whirred to life, the barrels spinning ferociously. Each time the barrel swept before the auto-loader, the coils mounted around the barrel in question pulsed with magnetic might, capturing magneto-harness and flinging the round that had been loaded and presented by the auto-loader. Within seconds, it had crossed many times the speed of sound within the thin Martian atmosphere, the harness bursting away from it with a spray of shredded metal, tracing a line of green through the air thanks to the hyper-advanced phosphorus coating slathered upon the round itself. The uranium - which had become spent utterly in the years of nuclear fission ti had been put through in various atomic reactors throughout the solar system - did not even need to be shaped to carve or cut through metal. It merely treated any flesh or machine between it and its distant parabolic end point in the distant fields of Mars as nothing more than a minor impediment!
Within the first few seconds of the first barrel releasing its first uranium slug, the attack shuttle that Claudette had sighted in on had flown through the streaming line of green fire and burst into a thousand pieces as it was shredded apart! The other two, though, banked around the explosion, then darted in as Claudette realized that the autoloader was preparing the next round of thick, heavy rounds. She swung the turret around and used the secondary trigger to bring on the coaxial deathray that was mounted alongside the weapon - but the shuttles broke off their attack before she could bore through their glittering space titanium armor! She saw why a second later as a trio of red dots appeared upon her scope and then drew into lines of white smoke as a trio of deadly missiles rocketed away from the shuttles and towards the space car in which she currently sat. Alarms blared and squealed and she sighted in on one incoming missile with her death ray already warmed and firing. The missile burst into a white puff of exploding material - and the second did as well, but the last streaked home before she could bring her weapon to bear!
However, it was then that Claudette realized that while Altair Polaris might have been a cosmic corsair first, that had not dulled her instincts or wits on Terrestrial - or, in this case, Martian - combat. The very last moment before the deadly missile struck the space car, Altair swung hard to the left, skidding the wheels out and launching the space car into a spin that caused the missile to whip past them, striking the road ahead of - now behind thanks to their spin - vehicle. Debris rained around them and some clattered and clunked off the roof of the vehicle as Altair laughed.
"Great shooting, my love! Now! Lets!" She threw the car into reverse and they shot over the crater, landed, then spun around again as she twisted on the wheel. "Keep going!"
The shuttles split up, coming at them from three directions at once now. Claudette fired a short burst at one - the green streaks clipping through the air to the left of one wing, but the attack shuttle jinked and dove away from her unerring uranium pellets! Then the shuttles were sweeping in...but this time, rather than using their deadly radar guided explosive ripped missiles, they activated their nose mounted forward facing death rays! Invisible beams of killing, ultraviolet heat carved lines of rust red dust along the road, arcing towards the space car, even as Altair jinked furiously, trying to throw off the dire pilot's deadly intent! Claudette yelped as she watched the road just behind them explode apart into a spray of molten asphalt, ripped to pieces by the thermal pressures of the evil energy weapons!
"They're coming around for another pass, Claudette!" Altair hissed. "I can't keep dodging them forever!"
"I got this, Polaris," Claudette said, bringing her turrets nose to bear. One attack shuttle got too confident and paid for it: A stream of uranium ripped it from nose to rocket cone, and the twin wings of it flapped off into two opposite directions, flung away with great force from the exploding fuel tanks. The other two, though, dove down, clearly intent to bracket them within their intersecting death rays. Claudette, though, had spared ammo - not enough to get a kill she was sure...but enough for
this
!
She swung the turret around and fired the last dregs of her currently loaded belt of ammunition into the very Martian soil that whipped past them! The slugs tore into the surface of the world, sending up gouting sprays of thick, reddish dust! Through that dust carved the beams of the death rays - and while one fell upon the hull of the space car, they did not burst or slow. Instead, the armor that cladded the four wheeled vehicle bubbled and hissed...and then the shuttles were banking away for another pass, frustrated by the occlusion that Claudette had cast up!
"HAH!" Altair laughed.
"Trust a maid to know how troublesome dust can be!" Claudette said, grinning.
"Quite! But keep sharp! We have some attack cars coming from the west!" Altair said. "...hell! They have a space tank!"
Claudette blinked as she craned her head around - and saw the attack cars. Three of them were just like the vehicle they even now drove in, save that their back mounted turrets had a pair of unguided rocket racks, like the deadly and much feared Katyusha used by the stalwart Soviets during their war of defense against unchecked Nazi aggression. As if to demonstrate both their puissance and their mechanical might, the Death Commandos driving those rocket cars immediately began to loose their salvos of arcing death. Roaring explosions - muffled only slightly by the thin Martian air - flashed and burst ahead of, behind, and side to side of Altair's space car. She drove forward, swerving wildly to avoid the aimed shots...but there was enough spread from the hissing, arcing rockets that they might hit from a miss as easily from the most deadly, aimed shot.
The fourth vehicle though was the space tank that Altair had spotted, and it was a dreadful beast indeed. Massive and rectangular, with a pair of canted turrets that thrust from the sides of the twin treads that flanked the sides of the vehicle, it was covered in ball turrets that themselves were already flickering with reflected ray-light as they shot their hull mounted Death Rays against them. Here, the enemy's sheer exuberance in the art of murder smashed headlong into one another: The rockets bursting around them kicked up so much dust that not only could the death rays be seen...they barely did any damage when they did smite against the side of the rocket car!
Claudette fired - but to her shock and horror, the green fire of her nuclear pellet gun struck the space tank and seemed to sink harmlessly into it, flashing with blue-white glittering glows.
"It has a force field!" Claudette exclaimed. "D-Do those exist?"
"Not quite, my love," Altair said, her voice tight. "It's covered with a vacuum-jacketed armor shell!"
"Ah, how different!" Claudette said, her voice thickly sarcastic - and unaware of how very wrong she was! The tank, like space vehicles, was jacketed in a set of layered armor, the outermost layer being thin and separated from the rest by a bubble of vacuum. When the high velocity rounds struck and pierced through, the friction of the impact flashed the hyper-dense shots into a haze of glittering plasma, which them struck hardened space composite armor that could easily resist the impacts! Thus, the space tank was able to stand in the face of the killing force of Claudette's weapon...long enough to bring its mighty main gun to bear and fire!
The main gun was similar to hers - save that rather than many barrels, it had but one...but it needed only one, for the shell it launched was nearly the size of the space car's entire engine block! The shell itself was a fiendishly designed weapon, with a sensor-ray emitter that gauged the distance between the tip of the shell and its target...and once it reached that distnace, the secondary explosives within detonated, transforming the shell from a large singular mass to a spreading cone of metallic death, spraying forth like a vast, godlike shotgun. It was made to butcher infantry and light vehicles, and had Altair been anything but Altair Polaris, the Pirate Queen of Ceres, she might have been yet another reduced to mangled meat by the space tanks of Mars!
