Attack ... of the Mind Worms!

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.

This was when the creature extended a pair of pseduopods. Acid dripped from them.

“An acid creature – a breather, spitter, drinker of acid!” Jasmine exclaimed. “Seeking to get at my innards. Absurd! I would provide no nutrients ... but such a thing must only see prey!” She flung herself to the side, scrambling up the side of the valley wall, the fingertips of her diamond gloves digging into the earth with crunching sounds. Only her enhanced strength and her own innate skill at rockclimbing allowed her to so speedily slip up the surface of the valley, coming to one of the cloud shrouded heights that she had been hoping to avoid. Here, the terrain was treachery itself – sharp, jagged dropoffs down to even steeper, deeper canyons.

Looking back, Jasmine saw that the creature could climb as easily as her, swarming up the side of the canyon wall, its body writhing and glittering with silvery viscosity.

“Acid...” Jasmine bit her lip, her mind whirling. Basic chemistry said that only a base could neutralize an acid ... but where could she find a base on the surface of Venus, the most acidic planet in the whole of the solar system?

A spray of orange-white light drew her attention. She saw, off to the east, a dome shaped hillock that revealed itself to be no simple hill. Magma flowed from a spouting crater in the center of it, like puss spurting from a pimple. Jasmine felt elation, a flash of excitement! She had a plan!

She just had to survive the next few seconds.

The acid beast had reached the top of the climb, and it reached for her. Jasmine flung herself off the side of the rise, then dug her toes against the far wall of the narrow canyon between her and the next rise. Diamond crunched and cracked worryingly, but she had no time to worry about it – even as her skin burst into sweat, tingling with the heat of her exertion ... or maybe the heat of Venus, seeping into her suit. She ignored that as she veered off, running with wild abandon along a narrow incline towards another one of the dome shaped hills ... but one that was not frothing with lava.

Behind her, the devilish acid beast rushed after her, getting faster and faster as it seemed to feel as if its prey was getting within easy grasp. Jasmine was slowed by her suit – but she managed to reach the hill she sought, skidding down an incline to the narrow dip in the landscape between her and the hill. Her gaze swept along the surface of the hill before herself...

“Aha!” she exclaimed.

There, she saw a long cooled flow of magma, pitted and scored by acid.

The acid beast, unwitting, screeched as it flowed down the hill towards her. Jasmine grabbed a rock from the ground and struck it against the magma, stooping so that acid rain fell onto her back and not onto the surface she struck at. A flash of yellow-white filled her eyes and she beamed. She smashed again with the rock, exposing more of the materiel. She heard the rushing sounds of the beast behind her ... faster and faster.

Jasmine risked one more strike.

The beast reared up!

Jasmine flung herself aside. She hit the ground on her shoulder and skidded, hearing crunches and cracks that alarmed her most considerably. She ignored it, turning to look upon the acid beast as it landed ... directly upon the thick vein of simple Trona ore that she had revealed with her strikes!

Trona ore was not well known by the citizens of the United States, despite the fact that nine out of ten homes purchased the byproduct of its processing every week in their trips to their favorite grocer and general good stores. They might have recognized it had she used the term ... baking soda. For Trona ore was refined into that very useful household product! Even in its unrefined state, Trona ore was a natural alkaline material – meaning...

“How do you like a taste of some base, you acidic annelid!?” Jasmine shouted, as the terrible Diamond Devil of Venus quivered and trembled within. It seemed unable to move as it digested more and more of the revealed Trona, its belly eating into it ... and its back expanding, moment by moment, until-

Jasmine flung up her arm as the Devil exploded from within. Chunks of viscous flesh splattered into the ground around her, and some even landed upon her Diamond Suit. She lowered her arm and laughed. “Never mess with a chemist in a geologically active planet! Might not be as catchy as ‘To German Command: Nuts’, but...” She stood, shaking her head. “It will have to do.”

She shook her head, then turned around – to find that the rise of the nearby hill was crowned with four curious individuals. They were clad in thick, heavy armor suits of rough looking material that was not diamond like her own, but looked proof against the pressure and heat of the world that they moved through. Their helmets were angular and dark, their face plates completely pitch black. They rode atop narrow, horse sized rockets that had reverse delta wings that thrust along the ground – sharp bladed and tough. The men were armed with long, narrow, crystalline lances and they were protected from the continual rain of acid from above by curved, swept back wings that spread above their rockets, giving them an almost biplane like apperance.

“Hello there!” Jasmine shouted as hard as she could, hoping her voice would carry through the thick air.

“Hands up, Hawkman,” one of the men said, swinging off his rocket vehicle, his crystal lance glittering in his hands as he stepped into the acid rain – his armor growing slick and slippery instantly as fluid began to flow from his shoulder pads, neutralizing the acid before it could burrow into the leather.

“You’ve made some mistake, I’m no-” Jasmine said, starting to lift her arms.

The man stepped to her, then shoved his crystal lance against her back, so that she was forced forward.

“No, it is you who has made the mistake, Hawkman,” the man growled. “You are under arrest by the Rocket Rangers.”

Jasmine sighed, and, with little option, trudged towards what felt like the fifth cell in as many days...

Mark Styles, had he been attacked by bombs or bullets or even raygun blasts from a handheld death ray, might have known what to do. His experience and training had taught him to put cover between himself and an incoming projectile – or ray, in this case – and might have served him well.

Alas...

The attack that came was none that an Earthman could have predicted. As he and Robin Robinson, also known as the Cybrid by the people of Pluto, stepped into their prison cell, Mark did not know that at that moment, death itself lurked within the chambers for him – invisible, creeping, inevitable death!

“Zardo isn’t going to let that go lying down,” he said, shaking his head. “We have to find a way to get off this hell planet.”

“Jolly idea, Mark,” Robin said, grinning wryly as she stooped to keep from bumping her head against the ceiling. “But there is the problem that we’re in a cell – surrounded by the Emperor’s minions. The air we breathe is under his control, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe...” Mark said. He felt ... a strange spike of dizziness. His brow furrowed...

And then he was falling forward, collapsing to the ground, caught only at the last second by Robin, her lower arms snagging him. She wheezed, her eyes half closed. “The ... bastard!” she hissed out, the realizing striking home. “Nitrogen!” Her eyes flicked up to the corners of the cell – where the air filters were placed, bringing in the air from the rest of the vast circulatory system of Pluto’s internal, artificial atmosphere. Those filters had been altered some time between when she and Mark had left the arena and now ... and now, rather than pumping a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen into the chamber, they were instead filling it with nothing but nitrogen.

Without the ability to interact chemically with the human lung, nitrogen did not trigger the intense panic or headaches of carbon dioxide poisoning. There was no panic, to tell the would be victim that they were in danger. No sense of smell, warning of stale air that could spell doom. There was merely dizziness, then drowsiness ... then death!

Only Robin’s augmented body, twisted by Zardo’s mad science, kept her on her feet. While her brain starved for oxygen, reserves of super-oxygenated space blood were pumped from sacks contained around her heart, filling her blood stream with a rush of the vital chemical, allowing her to think, function, and act for the desperate moments she would need to save not only the life of her one true love ... but her own!

Robin knew she had but a moment to act. She thought through the security and safety concerns of the Ice Castle – the atmosphere systems were made to monitor, with intense fierceness and the mechanical precision that only the maniacal masterminds of Zardo’s domain could match. There was no room for error, when the killing vacuum of deepest space lurked beyond the corridors of their ice clad home! And so, every atmosphere filter was connected to a complex series of mechanical pressure sensors and chemical composition systems...

The chemical sniffers might have been disabled.

But no one in their right mind would tamper with the pressure systems – at least, Robin hoped not as she vaulted to the wall, grabbing onto the air filter seated in the corner of the room with her upper and lower hands alike, bracing her feet against the wall. She strained and muscles that had been reshaped by Zardo’s vile science trembled as she clenched her teeth, pulling more and more. In truth, had it merely been exo-hormones, Robin would have failed – not even when she had been brimming with testosterone would she have had the strength to pull the filter from the wall, securely mounted as it was by screws and bolts.

But Robin’s muscles had been enhanced with every concoction and chemical that Zardo had seen fit to test upon her unwilling body – and so, she was able to pull and pull and pull ... and feel the metal grinding, shifting, coming apart. Threading buckled and sparks flew as she slammed onto the floor, blackness surrounding her as the pressure alerts began to scream – without the mechanical inputs to the room, the pressure sensors had no method to check the chamber’s atmosphere and, thus, the other filters were thrown into emergency mode. Air began to flood into the room...

But was it oxygen?

Or yet more nitrogen?

Robin knew not as she slipped into unconsciousness – but she had a single hope: Please, let this save my Mark!

C’Law and W’ind, two of the hawkmen serviles who were part of the massive population of indentured and enslaved persons that Zardo’s vast palace required for its operations, strode together, side by side, through the corridors of the lower levels of the palace.

“I swear, she did smile at me,” C’law said, chuckling.

“Ah, but do you know which one smiled at you?” W’ind rumbled, his black feathered ear-tufts twitching up. “They’re twins. If you hit on the one you think smiled at you, but it’s actually her sister, then...”

“I’m fairly sure it was W’ing,” C’law said, rubbing his beak with one golden palm. He let loose a low, eager purring noise – more similar to a cat noise than a hawk noise, but considering his cock was knotted, any Earth born zoologist who might have witnessed him strutting about had other things to worry about. Assuming, of course, they had aroused him and he had taken off his loincloth – two things that many a beautiful Earth born zoologist would, considering C’law’s eager and bountiful lusts. And after that, said zoologist’s only notes would have been on the vigor and grace of Hawkman mating rituals...

“What makes you so sure?”

“W’ing is-” C’law started.

A sudden alert rang out, filling the corridor with the trilling alarm that meant only...

“A pressure loss!?” W’ind exclaimed.

“By the Feathers of our Forefathers – it sounds as if it is coming from two levels down! Quick, my bond-brother, to the dive shaft!”

The two hawkmen came to the dive shaft – in truth, they were not meant for such activities. They were something closer to internal structure areas that had simply yet to be filled with interstitial machinery, for even now, after centuries, the Ice Palace remained a work in progress. W’ind wrenched some hull paneling off the wall with a single shove of his arms, working his finger claws into the paneling, and C’law dove forward, gluing his wings to his back as he shot down through the shaft, narrowly missing half a dozen struts and bits of machinery, before he hit the open area two areas down. He flared his wings hard, feeling the pleasant burn against his powerful shoulder muscles. His wings cupped the air and he beat them once, skidding up before dropping further down the shaft towards an ignoble end, brought his legs up, then kicked out.

The wall panel two levels down bust open and he skidded into the corridor – and realized he and his bond-brother had been walking, unwittingly, above one of Zardo’s many prison levels. He found two clone guards standing before a doorway, glaring at it as if it owed them something. Their bolt-rocket rifles swung around to aim at C’law stood, and W’ind swept into the corridor behind him. C’law pointed at the door.

“Can’t you hear? There’s a pressure loss in that cell!”

“Quiet, servile!” one of the clones snapped. “We were ordered – no one enters of leaves the Earthman’s cell.”

C’law’s eyes widened. “Styles...” he whispered.

“Now, are you going to fix that wall panel?” the clone soldier growled. “You’re a technical servile ... by your collar, it looks like you’re earmarked for another two cycles – unless you want to be stuck here for another fifty cycles, then you’ll back away!”

C’law and W’ind exchanged a glance.

For many a space year, they had served Zardo, having no choice but the Deatomizer, should they rebel ... but ... within both their breasts beat an urge for freedom. And having seen on the video-screen the amazing display of gallantry and bravery from the captive Earth man, both Hawkmen were themselves feeling the self same urge for rebellion that blazed within every red blooded American man. For while they may have been born in the acid winds of Venus under the King F’eath Arr, the two of them knew now the bone deep truth of these immortal words: All you have to lose is your chains!

C’law half turned ... and then sprang forward. His legs, built for launching himself into the air and then soaring off under the power of his own wings, sent him up into the ceiling, where his clawed fingers pressed against the metal roof – and then he drove down with arm muscles strengthened by years of hard labor in Zardo’s service. His two heels drove together, smashing into the jaw of the first, stunned clone soldier’s jaw with the strength of a stooping bird of prey – a martial technique honed by Hawkmen since they first arrived in the solar system!

With the full weight of his body and the strength of his downward momentum combined in that singular point, the clone soldier’s head was snapped to the side and around with a crunch not unlike that of a man biting into a fresh piece of celery and, stricken dead before he had a chance to realize it, the clone soldier fell bonelessly to the deck floor. His fellow, well trained in the inadequacies of bolt-rocket rifles at close range, dropped his useless weapon and drew his sword from his sheath. He swept it towards C’law, who dodged back and away, hissing as blood spread across his chest.

“Step away from my bond-brother, you son of a tank!” W’ind snarled, slamming shoulder first into the clone soldier. But the soldier easily twisted and flung W’ind down – then ... drove his sword through the black feathered hawkman’s chest!

“No!” C’law cried out. The clone soldier drew his blade free – only to find himself facing the feral rage of a hawkman! C’law’s hand lashed out, grabbing onto the clone soldier by his collar, then drove him against the wall. In an instant, the sharpened claws of his thumbs were at the clone soldier’s eyes, then driving in. The clone shrieked but once ... and then shuddered ... and then fell, his face mercifully turned towards the ground, to conceal what horrors had been done upon him in C’law’s wrath.

The red feathered hawkman knelt beside his brother, putting his hand to his chest – blood flowed between his gold scaled fingers.

“It’s ... all right, my bond-brother...” W’ind whispered, blood dripping around his beak. “Save ... the Earthman ... end ... Zardo...” He slowly went slack, his head twisting to the side.

C’law ducked his head low, then let his bond-brother slip from his blood soaked hands. “By V’ultar’s hammer, by the many moons of Homesystem ... by the lost temples of Hawk Prime...” He lifted his head to the ceiling, glaring up at where Zardo surely sat, decks above him. He clenched his fist, blood dripping down his wrist. “I will avenge you!”

Then, snatching up the bolt rocket rifle, C’law stepped as far back from the door, leveled the barrel ... and fired!

Given time enough to accelerate, the bolt-rockets and the needle like tips drove through the thin metal of the door as if it was nothing better than Earth tissue paper. In a few seconds the door had been shredded and the rifle clicked loudly as it tried to fire bolt-rockets from its magazine that were simply not there. C’law stepped forward and saw two prone bodies within. His head swam ... and he gasped in shock, blackness sweeping around his eyes. “Nitrogen!” He reached in, dragging Mark, then Robin from the chamber of death.

Both the Earthman and the Cybird groaned, then, their eyes beginning to open. “I ... feel like I went ... three rounds with Rocky Marciano ... and he had ... a baseball bat!” Mark groaned, rolling onto his hands and knees. He lifted his head, seeing the carnage before him, then saw C’law. “Oh my god, W’ind-”

“He’s dead,” C’law said, his voice tight. “But let us see that he did not die for nothing! We have to get out of here.”

Mark nodded as Robin coughed.

“I have a plan,” he said, then snatched the other bolt rocket rifle from the grasp of the dead clone beside him. He looked it over, then nodded. “It’s no M1 ... but it’ll do!”

The Star Princess Zella awoke with a feeling of dislocation and confusion. One moment, she had been sleeping comfortably in her plush bed, still tingling with nerves and excitement at her defiance of her own father, the Emperor Aytan Zardo himself ... the next? She was awakening kneeling in the center of a room, her body clad only in her sheer nightie, her arms chained behind her back, a gag wrapped around her mouth, and a shadowy darkness all about her! Her eyes widened as she tried to look around herself, but she saw nothing but more darkness ... split only by the light shining down upon her from directly above, trapping her in a cone of brilliant white light.

“Are they ready?”

The sneering, aristocratic voice...

It was her father!

Peering into the darkness, Zella saw the faint shape of her father standing in the darkness, his bald head just barely gleaming in the reflected light from the center of the room. Beside him was the hunched, robed figure that could only be his damned aide, Kryton the Cruel! Zella squirmed and struggled within her restraints, trying to speak – but her mouth was gagged by cold, hard metal.

“Ah, my daughter wakens,” Zardo said, then stepped forward into the light. “My dear, it hurts me ever so much to have to subject you to this. But it seems I have not raised you as properly as I had hoped.” He shook his head. “You show mercy to my enemies. Mercy? A weakness. A delusion, clung to by those who are weaker than the mighty Zardo.” He shook his head. “It has no place within the mind of the Star Princess, my dearest Zella.”