Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep (Winter 1943) Read Online Free PDF

answered, his moon-like yellow face muddy with fear. “Moremos killed Captain Theron with his own gun! He and the others have gone back for the Futuremen!”
    “I might have known that murderous Venusian couldn’t hold his trigger!” roared Kim Ivan. “Come on!”
    They burst into the top-deck longitudinal corridor, stumbling over the slain bodies of Captain Theron, a Patrol guard and a deck-hand.
     

     
Chapter 4: Trapped
     
    A TENSE tableau met their eyes. Ahead of them, Moremos and a half-dozen other mutineers were charging the stern corridor. Captain Future’s tall figure had just burst out of his cabin, and the Venusian murderer was raising his gun to fire at the hated planeteer.
    Curt Newton’s draw was the swiftest in the Solar System. His proton-pistol came out of his holster with the speed of light. Yet he could not fire, for Joan at this moment emerged into the corridor. She was between him and the Venusian.
    “Joan, get back!” he yelled to her. She hesitated dazedly. Curt couldn’t fire at the Venusian while she stood between them. But Moremos, who had no interest in the girl’s safety, was going to shoot!
    Curt’s desperate expedient came with such lightning speed that it seemed an instinctive reaction rather than a deliberate decision.
    He fired the blazing white bolt of his weapon, aiming at the metal wall of the corridor beside Joan. Most of the energy of the oblique blast burned into the wall. But a part of that blazing blast of force was reflected and deflected on along the corridor toward the mutineers.
    The deflected blast was not strong enough to be fatal. But it was enough to scorch and daze Moremos and the others. They recoiled.
    Captain Future lunged forward, swept Joan behind him, and triggered swiftly.
    His blasts cut down two of the men beside Moremos. The Venusian and the others hastily darted back out of the corridor.
    “Holy space-imps, what’s going on?” It was Otho, his green eyes blazing and his proton-gun in his hand, who had emerged with Grag from the cabin they shared. Ezra Gurney, too, was scrambling startledly out.
    “Mutiny!” Curt Newton cried. His voice was bitter with self-reproach. “Just what I feared, and yet I let it happen.”
     
    YOUNG Rih Quili, the Mercurian lieutenant, and another Patrol officer had wakened and come out to join them.
    A stentorian voice echoed back to their little group from the fore part of the top-deck. It reverberated along the corridors.
    “Future, will you and the others surrender? You haven’t got a chance. We hold the bridge and control the ship.”
    “That’s Kim Ivan,” gritted Ezra. His thin hand clenched upon his atom-gun and he started forward. “I’ll show that cursed Martian!”
    Grag and Otho started forward with him, but Curt Newton held them back. “Don’t be foolish! There’re scores of convicts up there and they’ve got all the guns in the arsenal by now. They’d get us no matter how many of them we got first.”
    He glanced swiftly around, his gray eyes snapping. “We can’t stay here. They’ll come up the aft companionway, and then they’ll have us caught between them. We’d better retreat down the aft stair to the cyc-room. If we can hold the cyc-room against them, we’ll get the upper hand over them yet.”
    “I get it!” exclaimed Otho. “If we hold the cyc-room, we can keep the cycs shut off and prevent them from taking the ship anywhere save Neptune.”
    Hastily, the little party entered the aft companionway and went down its short, zigzag stair to the lowest deck of the Vulcan.
    The big cyc-room took up the whole rear half of this deck. It was crowded with machinery — the huge, massive, cylindrical cyclotrons, the tangle of fuel pipes and power-leads, the squat generators of the auxiliary drive whose vibration-thrust was used only in emergencies.
    George McClinton ran bewilderedly toward them. The lanky young chief engineer had apparently just been aroused from his nearby bunk by the