The Black Avengers

by John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Dayton Raslor, owner by inheritance of a successful spaceship corporation, is imprisoned in a penal colony on Jupiter for a crime he didn't commit. He had been framed by three ruthless industrialists on Earth who are plotting to take over his Spaceline. Raslor manages to escape from Jupiter with the aid of the son and daughter of his company's financial director, who had been driven to suicide after also being framed by the same industrialists. The trio plot their revenge by forming "The Black Avengers" and as interplanetary outlaws attack the spaceships of the stolen corporation...

Release date: March 31, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 99

Sample

The Interplanetary Court was in session, Judge Montrose presiding. The accused, twenty-five years of age, tall and weedy, with a slope-chin, listened without interest to the indictment read out by the Clerk to the Prosecution.

“Hear ye, hear ye, all men of Earth and the neighbour inner worlds! Know ye, men of Earth, Venus and Mars, that there stands before you one Dayton Ralsor, Earthman, accused in this year of Two Thousand and Seventeen of fraudulently converting the finances of the Pioneer Space Corporation to his own uses. Know ye that the learned Prosecutor will prove without malice or prejudice, that the accused has broken the law and must thereby incur the penalty … The court is now in session, Judge Montrose presiding …”

A gavel banged. The faint murmuring from the packed assembly in the giant courtroom—an assembly made up of inhabitants of the three inner worlds of the System, Earth, Venus and Mars—became muted. The Prosecutor began speaking, taking up point by point every article in the indictment.

Dayton Ralsor himself hardly listened. For one thing he was too weak in health to care particularly what happened; and for another he knew the whole business was a frame-up engineered by the three industrial giants who had long been attempting to oust him from his position as Governing Director of the Pioneer Space Corporation.

Raising his eyes for a moment Dayton Ralsor searched the faces of the watchers. One by one he picked out the men who were responsible for his now being at the mercy of the ruthless Prosecutor. There was Harving Lerab, big and bloated, the fabulously wealthy diamond king. He sat like Buddha, smiling inscrutably, content to watch the destruction of an innocent man.

Not far from him on an upper tier of spectators sat Emris Cafton, the precision instrument maker. Emaciated, never-smiling, fiendishly immovable and efficient, concerned only at the moment with seeing Dayton Ralsor legally eliminated from the scheme of things.

And lastly there was pink-faced, deceptive Valcent Drolag. He had a smile for everybody; he paid good wages; he was thought to be a genial money-maker and philanthropist. Yet he was an arms magnate on a colossal scale and interested only in the swelling of his coffers at the expense of innocent lives. Of the three men who had climbed to power by their ruthless cunning and callous disregard of all human rights, Valcent Drolag was by far the worst. Under the perpetual smile was the mind of a killer and the cruelty of a tiger …

“And it is submitted that the accused, inheritor of the Pioneer Space Corporation from his father, Ilan Ralsor, did variously and separately convert the finances of that organisation to his own uses, in proof of which I will submit to your Lordship signed evidence, provided by such respected men as Harving Lerab, Emris Cafton and Valcent Drolag. They, with their great business acumen, were aware of the double-dealing being indulged in by the accused and rightly brought the fact to the notice of the authorities …”

Dayton Ralsor smiled bitterly to himself and closed his eyes. One or two people nearest to him studied him. He had a characterless face, as far as the chin was concerned, but the forehead was high and the nose straight. But for an illness which no physician had been able to diagnose, and which made of his great frame a barely covered skeleton, he would have been a big man. The height and build were there, but not the flesh and muscle. Dayton Ralsor was obviously dying on his feet, and there was not a soul in the world who gave a damn about it …

“And I demand,” the Prosecutor continued, pointing an accusing finger, “that for such deliberate conversion of public funds the ultimate penalty be exacted!”

Ralsor still kept his eyes shut. There were murmurings in the court, the whirr of recording apparatus, and then the level tones of the Defence Counsel. But he was fighting a lost cause, a fact of which he had been painfully aware ever since preparing his brief. This plot against the ailing ruler of the only existing space line had been so thoroughly laid, every ramification of it so thoroughly checked, that it was impossible to prove it wrong in any particular.

In half-an-hour Dayton Ralsor heard himself pronounced guilty and opened his eyes to meet the hopeless glance of his counsel.

Then Judge Montrose spoke—impartially, his lemon of a face vignetted by the traditional wig still worn by the high legal authorities of the Interplanetary Court.

“You have heard the case against you, Dayton Ralsor,” he stated. “You have been accused and defended, and pronounced guilty by a sane and just quorum of your fellow Earthmen. It remains only for me to sentence you—to direct that you be removed to the penitentiary on the planet Jupiter, there to work out the remainder of your natural existence, banished from the society of those whom you sought to deceive. If you have anything to say, say it now. The law gives you twelve seconds in which to voice an utterance.”

Ralsor merely shrugged his bony shoulders—but his defence counsel rose up, his face grim.

“I take leave to protest against the sentence, Your Lordship! My client has been found guilty, and against that I have no redress, but I am allowed to lodge protest against the form of penalty. It would be plain murder to send him to the penitentiary on Jupiter! He is obviously ill, and under the appalling conditions reigning on that planet he would be dead within a week.”

“The physical condition of the prisoner is not my concern,” the Judge answered briefly. “You will kindly remember, Mr. Baratok, that I have to be impartial. All convicted persons are banished to Jupiter—which, I would remark, is a great improvement over the old days when each world had its own jails! A faraway world containing all the prisoners and outcasts of society is a sure means of keeping our social order free from defilement.”

The Defence Counsel opened his mouth to speak again, but the thump of the Judge’s gavel intercepted him. Ralsor gave a grim smile and a tired shake of his head to the counsel, then he turned away in company with the warders …

Three men in particular watched him go, and the same three men met half-an-hour later in an exclusive uptown restaurant and discussed the matter over rich wines and softly fragrant cigars.

“Nicely handled, my friend,” observed the emaciated Emris Cafton, and Drolag’s perpetual moonlike smile widened a little.

“All a matter of organisation, eh, Harving?”

Harving Lerab drank his wine and then nodded. “As you say, organisation. We cannot afford to have an ailing fool like that at the head of the biggest money-making concern in the System. Isn’t to be thought of! He hardly knew what he was doing, anyway. Inherited the damned thing from his father and automatically became Governing Director. I started the whole campaign against him, chiefly because with that space line in my hands—or partly, sharing with you boys—I can vastly increase my diamond concern. Venus crawls with diamonds, and without owning a part of the space line my transactions have been limited. Now it will be different.”

“And different for me,” mused the emaciated Cafton. “I must keep up my supplies of rubies, emeralds, and so forth for use in my precision instruments.”

“And I must continue to have uranium,” added Drolag, all smiles and pink cheeks. “Altogether, gentlemen, we have accomplished a masterpiece. With Ralsor out of the way our claim to taking over the space line can very easily be substantiated. Certainly we have money enough to buy it, and there will be no serious opposition.”

“Unless it’s from Razlon Sneed,” Lerab pointed out. “He is a powerful man in the Space Corporation, and probably did most of the controlling with Ralsor as the figurehead—”

“Soon be rid of him,” Drolag interrupted, and the venom in the man leapt into his voice even though he smiled. “Sneed is a financial director outside of his connection with the Space Corporation. A little judicious pressure in the right places can—and will—bankrupt him. Then he’ll be in no position to talk. We’ve come this far—and we’ll finish the course.”

The arms king raised his glass slightly and grinned as the two other glasses clinked against his own … And, on the reverse side of the picture, the law was taking its pontifical course and Dayton Ralsor was languishing in his cell.

That same evening, however, six hours after the trial, he was removed from his cell and taken to the chamber wherein he was legally divested of all civil rights, even to his name, and given a number instead. Henceforth he would be DR/7654, life-worker in the Jovian penitentiary. He took it all without comment, the fire dulled out of his eyes and his weak shoulders drooping.

Once this legal banishment was completed it was merely a matter of awaiting transport—and it came a week later. With three other unfortunates he was thrust into the stinking bowels of a prison spaceship and carried in darkness and the smell of rocket exhaust through the great deeps of space. Neither he nor his fellow prisoners were allowed to see anything except their cell. They were given just enough food to keep them alive and slept as best they could on hard bunks—until there came a day when they felt the crushing pressures of the giant planet beginning to embrace them, and from this point onwards their miseries really started.

The Jovian penitentiary lay under a dome of metal, deep in the bowels of the mighty planet. The metal of the dome was specially tested to stand the strain of the huge gravity, and was absolutely sealed against the atmosphere, composed of ammoniated hydrogen at a temperature of – 120° Centigrade. Jove was a frigid, poisonous hell. The penitentiary was controlled by a Governor, himself an outcast of society, doomed like the rest to rot his life away in the deep underground. The only advantage he had was that every comfort science could devise was his. For the luckless prisoners there was nothing but work, the appalling strain, fitful sleep, and work once more. Until death came. The nature of the work was simple but exacting. Every prisoner spent his time inspecting and repairing the walls of the great underground settlement since the poison in the Jovian atmosphere and the effect of perpetual acid hurricanes raging outside, gradually ate through the proofed metal.

A grim irony, to be forever sealing up the walls that held them in thrall! Those who had tried to let the poison through had died instantly from the very attempt, and others had been rushed to stem the breach. Death, when it came, must be from exhaustion, not from the hell that raged outside.

Into this lighted wilderness of iron-faced men, ruled over by the embittered Governor, Dayton Ralsor presently arrived, the prison ship entering through a vacuum trap which was sealed immediately afterwards. The officials looked at the worn-faced Earthman as they checked his papers and decided he might last a few hours and no more. For here he was carrying a bodily weight three times heavier than it had been on Earth, owing to the gravity, and added to it was the strain of breathing vitiated atmosph. . .