"Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

"There's death here!" the mad Earthman was still
screaming. "I tell you, there's death on this ship!"
CHAPTER II
Attacked
THE Vulcan was no
more than a billion miles
from Neptune when the
real trouble came.
For many days, the
black ship had droned out
through the System on a
zig-zag course. At Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus
it had stopped, to pick up
more sentenced criminals.
Now, with more than two
hundred convicts aboard,
it headed for Neptune, the
last stop before reaching Pluto and the prison
moon.
Nothing untoward had yet occurred to justify
Captain Future's premonition. The convicts
imprisoned down in the cell-deck had growled and
grumbled, but seemed reconciled to their grim fate.
Yet Curt Newton had not been entirely reassured.
Upon the first day of the voyage, he had voiced his
doubts.
"They're too quiet," he declared. "They shut up
like magic when that fellow Kim Ivan ordered them
to."
"Well, that there big Martian swings a lot of
weight with them," drawled Ezra Gurney. "He was
one of the biggest pirate leaders before the Patrol
caught him."
"Even so, that bunch of tough criminals wouldn't
obey him now without a reason," Curt insisted.
"You think they've hatched up some scheme of
escape?" asked Captain Theron anxiously.
Captain Jhel Theron, who had command of the
navigational operation of the Vulcan, was a veteran
of the Patrol. He was a tall, grave-eyed Uranian,
bald like most of the men of that planet, his saffron
skin darkened by years of exposure to the
unsoftened radiation of space.
He and his next of rank, Lieutenant K'kan of
Mars, commanded an operational crew that
comprised three pilots, a chief engineer and two
assistants, three space-mechanics and four deck-
hands.
Distinct from these fifteen members of the