Free Flash Gordon 5 - The Witch Queen of Mongo by Alex Raymond Page B

and he could go no further.
    “Get them off me,” he pleaded with Azura.
    The queen laughed.
    “I’m afraid. I’m afraid.”
    Through the haze of terror, he saw her look down at him.
    “Silly man,” she snarled. “Silly, foolish man. You could have been my king, but you chose instead to reject me. To fight me. You’ll find out what it is to make an enemy of Queen Azura.”
    “No, no,” Flash howled, pushing himself back against the wall. “Go away.”
    Azura laughed again, an evil, sinister laugh that made Flash’s body quake with fear.

CHAPTER 10
    Q ueen Azura was elated. Here, within her power through a combination of paralysis NG and pacifist mist, was the catalyst she needed for her final act.
    She had been silly to be so worried about how to achieve her ends. Didn’t something always happen at the last minute to put the whole scheme into focus?
    Phase one of her plan had long been in the works, including the development of weaponry and military machinery—“hardware” as her minister of war called it—and also including a great deal of mass propaganda administered to her people through the controlled media under the administration of her ministry of communications.
    And phase two was also very much in the works, although it was so deeply secret and so very much controlled by total security that no one in the realm really knew the truth about it. No one but Qilp. Of course, there were rumors, and the rumors kept bringing up the dreaded name of Ming the Merciless, although he had been dead for six years.
    Queen Azura smiled at the thought of phase two.
    And now, suddenly, here was phase three, ready to go. The sudden and unexpected arrival of Flash Gordon on the planet Mongo, and the almost unbelievable good fortune of having him drop into her hands, had caused her to think seriously of implementing phase three immediately.
    And phase three would bring on phase four—all-out war.
    Thoughts of phase two were a bit unnerving to Azura, but she knew she must face all the rather unpleasant possibilities involved in working with the principal factor of that action. Qilp would be back soon. She erased all thought of that from her mind.
    Yes, Queen Azura was elated.
    And she was also amused.
    Paralysis NG, the nerve gas her experts in the council of scientific advisors had devised for her, was one thing, but this new formulation—pacifist mist—was something else again.
    Originally, as part of her overall plan to dominate the planet of Mongo both politically and scientifically, she had moved her entire ministry of science into military experiments. The genius and ingenuity of the Azurian scientists had, however, come up with more and more types of vapors and formulations that had nothing to do with military aggression.
    Pacifist mist was a strange offshoot from the labs that Azura had never tried to use before. Now, as she studied Flash Gordon cowering in the corner of her chamber, she realized that some of these military developments could be used for her own personal pleasure as well as for intra-planetary conquest.
    Naturally, none of this would ever interfere with her ultimate goal—to become the Witch Queen of Mongo.
    Meanwhile, she could afford to indulge herself with Flash Gordon, to whom she had once made a long-standing promise: to make him pay for spurning her advances years before when he had first landed on Mongo.
    She knew his strength and his will and his pride. And now she had bested him by the very simple means of forcing pacifist mist on him. He had turned into a man without courage, a mouse, a cipher motivated totally by fear and terror.
    Pacifist mist alone could make the average man into a cowering wretch, just as her lab technicians had promised. Yet it had not been powerful enough to defeat Flash Gordon completely. Her scientists had developed another vapor, pacifist mist plus, to be used in conjunction with pacifist mist if it proved not effective enough.
    Plus was a vapor that