Читать книгу The Amethyst City - John Russell Fearn - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

WRONG DECISION

An hour later the Ultra was on its way. The Amazon, clad in a close-fitting suit of black with a solid belt of gold about her waist, gazed intently through the port. Relka, taking on the job of navigator, and charting the fairly familiar course to Jupiter, stole a glance at her now and again. Her features were harshly set; a vindictive gleam lay in her violet eyes. He knew those signs. The fact that she had been nearly killed had resolved her to find Sefner Quorne this time, even if she travelled to the end of the universe to do it.

There was not room in the Solar System for both Sefner Quorne and the Golden Amazon. One or the other had to be obliterated.

“You could have reached Jupiter almost instantly by dissembly of atoms,” Relka pointed out. “We could have rebuilt ourselves upon reaching the planet.”

“Yes,” the Amazon said, “but l may need weapons, therefore I must use this Ultra of mine. Time is of no particular consequence, as long as I succeed.”

The Amazon was in a brittle mood. She left the control board once the course was determined, and fixed the automatic pilot in position. From here on it would be a matter of waiting and killing time until the asteroid region was reached: then would come the brief evading ceremony to avoid being smashed to pieces by hurtling cosmic rocks.

Ahead, Mars—outermost of the four inner planets—swelled until it filled all the void; then it was left behind and there remained the vast gap to Jupiter with the asteroid belt between.

Throughout most of the journey, since she slept but little at any time, the Amazon sat near the universal win­dow, which gave a view on all parts of the cosmos. Several times Relka saw her there, a superb figure in her black tights, her chin resting on her yellow hand, her golden hair drawn to the back of her perfectly shaped head by a jewelled clasp. She seemed back in those moods of abstract thought, her eyes gazing into distance, a solem­nity in her bearing that Relka, born of an alien world, found hard to under­stand.

Possibly no Earth being could have understood either. The Amazon was aware for the first time since the death of Abna that she really had no happiness in living without him.

When he had been alive she had scorned the thought of his being an essential part of her life. Now he was dead, she was ready to admit how mistaken she had been. But it had taken her a year of loneliness to discover it. She was a superwoman who had everything, and yet had nothing. Beauty, endless wealth, vast physical strength, scientific genius, the inhabitants of two worlds bowing down to her unobtrusive leadership—all these were hers, and yet were not enough. She could no longer find an interest in investigating and exploring for the sheer sake of it. Something had come into her life, and gone out again—and it had left an irreparable hurt.

Relka’s advice that the asteroids were not far away broke her almost con­tinuous mood of reminiscing. She moved from the universal window, guided the huge Ultra safely above the plane of the “minefield” of asteroids, and then retired again to brood. There was still a long distance to go before Jupiter became a compell­ing gravity field.

Now and again, she found herself wondering why no further hypnosis seemed to affect her; then she decided it must be because Quorne had fully believed his grim trick with the Jovian snake had succeeded. On the other hand, he had instruments capable of showing exactly where she was, so it was queer he did not renew his attack on her mental stronghold. Whatever the answer, she was left more or less free, until within 10,000,000 miles of Jupiter. Then, just as that colossal gravity field was making itself felt, she found herself in the grip of ideas and thoughts which she was profoundly convinced were not her own.

She struggled hard against them as she sat at the control-board, gazing out on to the mighty face of Jupiter, his cloud-wreaths girt about him and whirling under the stupendous force of the hurricanes lashing his surface.

“Relka,” she said at last, turning a strained face. “We are not going to Jupiter. We are going to Saturn.”

His thoughts expressed astonishment. “But why, Amazon? I thought you were thoroughly decided that—”

“I have changed my mind. You’d bet­ter reset the course.”

Relka did not argue, even though he did not understand. The Amazon passed a hand over her forehead, puzzled as to why it should ache so heavily. There was an oppression on her brain which she could not fathom, and the oppression seemed to take the form of an implacable command to go to Saturn and not Jupiter. She assumed it could only be Quorne at work with high-powered hypnotic amplifiers, against which she stood no chance.

No chance? A notion came to her. Getting up quickly, she moved to a panel and closed one of the switches. There was a brief grinding noise as radiation-proof plates rolled into position on the outside of the vessel, com­pletely sealing it off from all known forms of radiation, including cosmic waves. Thought waves, when sent through an amplifier, had a similar wavelength to cosmic waves, so the plates ought to block the hypnosis—yet they did not. The ache and the command in her brain remained undimmed.

“It’s a mystery,” she declared, switching the plates out of commission again. “What kind of power can Quorne be using to be able to subject me even through insulation?”

“Quorne’s science is known to be brilliant,” Relka responded, for the sake of a better comment.

Completely baffled, the Amazon returned to her control chair and remained in it until she had swung the vessel clear of Jove’s huge attraction. Fortunately, Saturn was on the same side of the sun as Jupiter at this time, so after a change of course, Saturn eventually came into view—its image greatly magnified on the viewing plate—a planet of incredible beauty, rings at an angle, shining with a deep yellow whiteness. The Amazon frowned to herself as she contemplated that beauteous world. She remembered the amethyst city and the mystery land of warm sunlight, dancing flowers and green fields; and she also remembered the real Saturn, with its deadly rocky landscape and poisonous atmosphere, comprised mainly of ammoniated hydro­gen, on the principle of Jupiter.

Suddenly Relka’s thoughts spoke with sudden urgency.

“Look, Amazon! A space machine!”

In surprise she turned from gazing at Saturn and looked back in the direction of distant Jupiter. A silver speck, becoming rapidly larger, was sweeping through space in fast pursuit of the Ultra.

“It looks like Quorne’s machine!” the Amazon said in amazement. “But why should his hypnosis drive me away from Jupiter when he obviously could do better if I went there? I can’t understand this situation at all—”

“He’s gaining,” Relka interrupted. “If you want to break free of him, you’d better put on speed.”

The Amazon’s mouth tightened. “All I wish to do is destroy him, Relka, not escape him—and this may be my chance. I wonder if he’ll answer a radio call? I have to be sure whom I’m attacking.”

She switched on the radio and spoke briefly into the microphone, identifying herself. She was interrupted in the middle of a sentence.

“I had hoped, Amazon, that you would come to Jupiter—but evidently you have not the courage. Which I find surprising! That being so, I intend to destroy you. Where you are heading I can only guess, but I assume it is Saturn. You are wasting your time. Saturn is a world of poison gas, hurricanes, and death. Or are you looking for that illusive amethyst city? I saw that delusion, as you must have, but I have never seen it since.”

The Amazon did not have the chance to say any more, for Quorne cut her off. But at least she knew she was dealing with him. There was no mistaking that smooth, cultured voice.

“Stand by to attack, Relka.” The Amazon glanced at the Jovian quickly. “I’ll pilot the Ultra and you do the firing. Quorne must be crazy if he thinks that small machine of his can stand up against my weapons.”

Knowing that Quorne was anything but crazy, however, the Amazon was prepared for any trick he might pull. She slowed the Ultra down, then swung it around to give Relka a better chance of using his weapons. He settled himself at the weapon control panel, fingers on the switches, his eyes fixed on the firing screen with its hair-thin demarcation lines.

Out of the gulf came Quorne, the size of his machine rapidly increasing. In the distance lay a scattering of Jupiter’s numerous moons. Then suddenly an orange ray flashed across the gulf and struck the Ultra amidships. The Amazon smiled coldly, satisfied that the insu­lated metal could withstand anything Quorne wished to hurl at her. She was right. The beam, in the order of a heat ray, reflected back into space harmlessly.

“Let him have it!” she ordered, and Relka closed the switches on the Ultra’s most deadly weapon—the protonic cannon.

A livid pencil of disintegrative fire blasted straight at Quorne’s machine. On the nose of it the plate buckled and began to roll up like charred paper, but by a masterful piece of space navigation he hurled the vessel to one side and dodged the frightful stream of energy. The Amazon scowled and began to manoeuvre the Ultra once again.

Quorne replied with lavender and green beams this time, one disintegra­tive and the other a freezing ray. Neither of them made any impression. Then came something else, stabbing up from Jupiter itself, through the cloud­banks. It was a beam that had the Amazon baffled. It was black, the most extraordinary thing she had ever seen. Too late she tried to swing the Ultra away. The segment of black whirled around, struck the Ultra, and sent it spinning madly like a top.

The effect in the control room was chaotic. Relka was hurled backward from the weapon range, and the Amazon was pitched out of her chair and flung against the farther wall. Com­pletely out of control, the Ultra began to fall back into the gravity of Jupiter.

The Amazon forced herself up from the floor and kept a hold of the wall struts to prevent herself from being flung over.

“That is negative force he’s using,” she panted. “That’s why it’s black. It doesn’t disintegrate matter—it batters. He can fling the Ultra where he wants. Evidently his Jovian laboratory is work­ing at full pressure again.”

Clinging to the wall, she inched her­self back to the control board. Outside, space seemed to be turning somersaults while the Ultra apparently remained still. Far below, Jupiter was gyrating and whirling crazily. Once down there in that vast gravity, surrounded by ammoniated hydrogen atmosphere, the Amazon knew she would be finished. Quorne would see to that. So she closed the switches and gave the rockets facing Jupiter all the power they possessed.

The effect slewed the Ultra away from the giant planet, but it immedi­ately fell into an opposite attraction, this time from Ganymede, one of the larger moons. Too late, the Amazon saw her mistake and all her frantic efforts to pull free were useless. She was only 1,000 miles from the satellite and plunging at terrific speed.

Breathlessly she watched that crazy little landscape flying out of space to meet her. She gave the forward rockets full power to check her fall, but there was little they could do at such short notice. Within a few minutes, so fast was the Ultra dropping, the brief air depth of Ganymede screamed around the ship—then it crashed.

The Amazon was pitched helplessly across the control room by the impact. There was a twanging of shock-absorbing springs, a rending of metal projec­tions, the explosion of disrupted plates, the hiss of shattered rocket tubes—then a dead quiet. The power plant had stopped.

Slowly the Amazon got to her feet and looked about her. The first thing she noticed was the lightness of the gravity. Relka also struggled up. Neither he nor the Amazon were hurt, thanks to the powerful shock absorbers.

Her face grim, the Amazon moved across to the control board and made a test of the power unit. It wheezed in a very odd fashion, its copper bar atom provider out of alignment. Outside the machine, clouds of smoke rose as vegetation was briefly incinerated by the smashed rocket tubes.

“Ditched!” the Amazon declared bitterly. “I don’t think the Ultra has ever taken such a beating before— Just let me get my hands on Quorne!”

She clenched her fists and glared through the observation window upon Ganymede’s landscape.

The vessel had landed in the midst of a riotous jungle of weird, genetically engineered plants, over which shone the varied lights of Jupiter, the sister moons and—infinitely far away—the sun.

“Did you say Ganymede?” Relka asked, joining the Amazon in her scrutiny.

“Yes. One of the larger moons which the Cosmic Engineers from Earth have started to modify at my instructions, so as to make it a possible future mining colony. Slight gravity, oxygen-hydrogen air up to two miles, lush vegetation specially created to help generate oxygen. On the same lines as Io—where I once ditched Abna. Maybe this is just retaliation. It’s certainly not going to be a simple job to repair the Ultra. We’d better get outside and see what the damage is. We don’t need space suits, because as well as created air there’s a controlled release of heat from underground.”

She turned to the airlock and unscrewed it. Pulling it open, she jumped lightly down into the undergrowth and began wandering around the huge bulk of the almost upended vessel. Every­where she and Relka looked they saw damage. The rocket tubes were com­pletely shattered, several plates were no longer of use, and there were fissures in the outer casting.

“This job is going to take us several weeks,” the Amazon decided finally, coming to a stop when the examination was complete. “But it’s got to be done.”

She paused and looked upward toward Ganymede’s grey sky, her eyes narrow­ing. Against the backdrop of stars and attendant satellites an S of sparks was curving as a space flyer came swiftly down from the void.

“Quorne!” Relka said.

The Amazon said nothing, but her hand removed her ray gun and she stood waiting. The space machine swept over the area where the Ultra lay, then it came back and settled nearby. The airlock opened and a slim, dark-headed man in the lilac-coloured clothing of a Jovian dignitary appeared. With his gun in his hand, he came through the undergrowth, followed by four other men. The Amazon waited, making no move.

When the Jovian scientist was close, his eyes, the colour of heliotrope, glanced over the battered Ultra.

“Rare for you to make a crash landing, Miss Brant,” he commented.

“We can dispense with the fancy speeches, Quorne,” she retorted, then she fired her ray gun.

Quorne remained as he was, grinning a little as the chest of his garment smoked into rags. Beneath it, a dully gleaming metal plate became visible.

“Precaution,” he explained, and with a lightning movement he snatched the Amazon’s gun from her. “Naturally, I would not have walked so boldly toward you had I not been protected.”

“Negative energy and a chest shield,” the Amazon snapped. “Both neat tricks, which upset my calculations. As a scien­tist, I congratulate you.”

“Praise indeed,” Quorne murmured, smiling acidly. “You will appreciate the fact, of course, that you cannot continue to upset my plans—”

“I was not aware you had any. For all I have known to the contrary—until now—you were dead.”

“I gather my present of a Jovian reptile was something you did not feel able to accept?”

“Only as a challenge,” the Amazon retorted. “Which I assume it was intended to be. I did not know even then that you were the sender, but it seemed a logical assumption. Like your hypnosis upon me for the past year.”

A change of expression came to Quorne’s thin, intellectual features.

“Hypnotism? I don’t quite understand, Miss Brant.”

She did not gratify him by explaining any further. A thought was turning over in her mind. She felt pretty sure from the Jovian scientist’s manner that he was genuinely surprised; and if that were so, then who had created hypnotism?

“Naturally, I escaped Saturn,” Quorne continued. “The dense cloud coverings helped me. After that I returned to my own planet—Jupiter. Then,” Quorne nodded towards the four men with him, “I released the last remaining Atlantean men from the penal colony.” He smiled faintly. “You did not quite succeed in your attempt to wipe out my race when you smashed the protective dome over our main city.”

The Amazon frowned. She had completely forgotten about the small separate settlement, which Abna’s father had created for banished criminals.

“Naturally they were grateful, and are loyal to me,” Quorne continued. “Together we revived the science of Atlantis, and got the city to work again under its protective dome. Then I set out to accomplish the pur­pose for which I have so long striven—to break you, Miss Brant. The snake was a bait, yes, but I gather you lost your nerve at the last moment, since you turned away from Jupiter and headed for Saturn.”

“I changed my plans.”

“Change or otherwise, the answer is the same,” Quorne commented. “First I am going to destroy this vessel of yours, then I am going to kill you and this Jovian who seems to have become so attached to you.”

Quorne had forgotten for the moment that the Jovian had the power to read thoughts—hence Relka was warned in advance of what was intended.

Regardless of consequences, Relka dived forward, lashing up his scaled fist as he moved. It struck Quorne a glancing blow as he jerked his head sideways, but the next moment the scaly, vastly strong body had crashed into him and knocked him spinning. Immediately the four other men whipped around their ray guns. Two of them jabbed livid flame at the Jovian’s scaly hide, but it had little effect: the other two found themselves grappling with the Golden Amazon, and being quite ordinary men, they felt as if they were fighting a tigress.

The Amazon’s first dive in the light gravity brought her hands around the necks of the nearer two men. She smashed both men’s heads together. They fell apart, half-senseless. Down came a yellow hand on the arm of the nearest man and a wrench snapped the bone viciously. He screamed, and it died in his throat as he was hurled a dozen yards and crashed unconscious into a rock.

Relka swung around, picked up the dazed Quorne in one hand, and then dashed him down to the ground again. Quorne gave a cry of anguish and grabbed at a gun within a foot of him. He fired blindly, the ray carving across the Amazon’s left leg. She staggered, gritting her teeth with the pain as flesh charred to the bone, and the bone broke. Then she fell to the ground.

Relka’s mailed fist crashed down on the head of the second man and flattened him to the ground. The third and fourth men swung their weapons around, but before they could fire them, that packed mass of supermuscle was plowing amidst them, battering at them with such force that bones broke under the blows.

Quorne, by no means unconscious, saw his chance. He fired, and the flame bit into the Jovian at the one vulner­able point—the unscaled portion across his midriff. He writhed desperately, then became still.

The Amazon lay as she had fallen, her face masked with pain.

Quorne got up and said: “I am wondering whether to fire a beam straight through your heart, Miss Brant, and finish you—or whether I should let you pass from the scheme of things more slowly. If I destroy your Ultra, you are powerless. You can lie here and die slowly in this lonely outpost of the spaceways.”

“Do as you like,” the Amazon whispered. “But if I die, Quorne, I’ll come back from the farthest star to get you. If I live, I’ll still get you.”

“Perhaps we had better see which promise you can fulfil,” Quorne suggested.

He went to his machine and from it there presently projected a disinte­grator beam. It flashed to all parts of the already damaged Ultra, driving huge fissures in the massive plates, snapping off the remains of the rocket tubes, splintering the conning tower—and finally an extra savage burst sliced the nose of the vessel clean off and left half-molten, crumbled metalwork. The Amazon could not see the control ­room from her position, but she judged that it must be completely shattered, with the many connections essential to navigation melted into one common mass.

Satisfied, Quorne ceased his wrecking activities. He returned and, one by one, picked up his guards and carried them to his ship. Then he contemplated the Amazon from a distance.

“I am not leaving any men in case they happen to have some life in them,” he said. “They might become sentimental enough to help you. As for Relka, your Jovian servant there, I fancy he will never return to life.”

The Amazon was in too much pain to answer. She was doing her best to stem the flow of blood from the wound the ray had inflicted. When she heard the sound of rocket exhaust, she looked up. Quorne’s machine was hurtling upward on its way back to Jupiter.

The Amazon passed her dry tongue over lips that were salty, and tried to think straight in the blur clouding her body and mind.

If she could reach the vessel, and the first aid equipment was still in existence, she had materials that could help her injury, if not cure it. So, set­ting her teeth, she forced herself up and stood on one leg. Then she began a series of hops—but within a few seconds, strong though she was, dizziness brought her down. She had lost so much blood she was rapidly weakening.

She wormed her body along until she gained the side of Relka. She caught at his outflung scaly paw and pulled at it.

“Relka!” she panted hoarsely. “Relka, help me—if you can!”

The fallen Jovian was silent. Reaching his shoulders, she pushed them up, the light gravity helping her. He tum­bled over on his back, his torn body revealed, and it told the Amazon that Relka would never be her companion again.

“If I ever live through this, Quorne, I’ll spend the rest of my life paying you back,” the Amazon whispered, her pain-deadened eyes staring up at mighty Jove.

She relaxed, struggling for breath, her whole body feeling as if it were alternately bathed in fire and water. The sweat of pain had soddened her close-fitting suit; it trickled down her drawn face. Then lights began exploding behind her eyes, and her last effort to fight off unconsciousness was unavailing.

The Amazon went down into a blackness where pain and awareness no longer existed.