Doc Sherwood
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Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Three
Dylan and Phoenix ploughed a perpendicular line through the cloud-cover, their descent growing ever more rapid as their spluttering jet-pack steadily failed to bear the extra body for which it had never been designed. Using his powers Dylan was doing everything he could to compensate.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Joe and Gala, Chapter One
Light-years distant from anywhere else, in the cold vacant gloom of a galactic backwater, a starcraft hung. It was not of metal but flesh, a giant fungus-cap listing somewhat to its anterior cusp, and the tempest it knew was not external but raging within its twisted guts. Had any observers been by in this dim starlit no-man’s-land, they would have witnessed a periodic trembling of this patch or that patch on the thing’s dull surface, and heard a muffled din of explosions and blows carrying across the silent void. Then all at once these spectators would have been astonished, as the saucer’s horny husk tore open in a brilliant jet of flame.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Joe and Gala, Chapter Two
With battle-wearied bodies nearing their last vestiges of strength, Gala and Joe were swinging and slugging at less than half the speed of before. There was something however keeping them going, something each had found within one of the darker and less-travelled recesses of themselves, as slowly parrying they stumbled into some boiler-room deep in the fungus-ship’s bowels. Here the environment more than suited the combatants’ mood. Shapes that did not bear close inspection hulked in the murk, and the walls and floor were awash with horrid slime secreted by these giant glands to lubricate the constant peristalsis of this living craft.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Broadside for Broadside, Chapter One
Pavements soaked with standing rain stretched beneath a hard grey-black sky seared through with red. The city drew in breath. Something was moving through the clouds, something huge, something fast. Doors and windows rattled in its unseen overhead wake, and lakes and canals parted into deltas as if cloven by an invisible prow. Those citizens who turned their eyes fearfully upward saw only an immense indistinct shape, darker than the heavens it was forging through, throwing even gloom into shadow for a moment then just as swiftly gone.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Overture, Chapter One
Stars and planets wheeled overhead for a vertiginous instant before the combatants crashed through the bulkhead wall together and plunged into the cavernous square vault of the battle-cruiser’s cargo hold. Bret Stevens proceeded along the quickest route into the dark, punctuating this vertical course with rebounds and springs from the walls while striking brilliant sparks and clashing notes between his samurai sword and an alien bladed weapon that flashed with equal speed. Its owner, a lean and lithe and man dressed in form-fitting white and a round black helmet, had so far matched Bret in his aerial acrobatics and countered thrust for thrust and parry for parry.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Please be Waiting, Chapter Two
Soon a pair of sisters were in each other’s arms. Carmilla had once decried Phoenix as a traitor to The Four Heroes’ cause, and although this was not wholly unreasonable since Phoenix engineered that deception herself, there had been prior harshness and accusation too for which reconciliation never came. Now however, as Carmilla and Phoenix held one another close, their peace was finally made.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
At the Drive-In, Chapter One
Two glaring eyes on a monstrous faceless visage burst upon the horizon without any warning at all, as heavy beats of warlike music began to pound. Flashthunder, beholding in the dark, trembled. He had dreaded this moment. The tiny comfort that usually accompanied it, which was in knowing that for once in a way he wasn’t the only one terrified, scarcely applied tonight. For this evening it was very important he somehow find it in himself to not to show his fear.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
At the Drive-In, Chapter Two
The evening’s film, as Flashtease had hinted, was not proving a hit with the audience. These days any seasoned director was in the unenviable position of having to pitch his works at a younger generation which bore no resemblance to that of his own Arcadian days, and most efforts to do so misfired disastrously. Even Joe, a stranger to the region, could tell after the first ten minutes that an intricate and involved war-drama following the progress of an ever-growing number of splinter-groups, and paying pedantic attention to which particular faction owned which particular weapons at any given point in the struggle, was not exactly going to grip girls and boys of Flashtease’s age. It occurred to our hero that this sector’s film studios were leagues behind the local music industry, for example, or indeed leagues behind he himself, in keeping up with contemporary tastes. Sure enough, early signs of unrest were beginning to appear on the canyon floor below. Through the deep blue night Joe could perceive tiny figures in tunics and bouncy underskirts exiting their starships, and there was a busy bustling motion about them suggestive not of ennui but purpose.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Flashthunder
Flashthunder had stayed behind after the game to gather up the spare Flashballs, principally because he was terrified of going into the changing-room where the other Mini-Flashes were. Not that he knew for absolute certain that they knew about the plans for tonight that only he and Cherry were supposed to know about, but Mini-Flash Frill had raised her little eyebrows in a most decided way while observing aloud he had his lucky red pants on. That incident alone was more than enough to fill Flashthunder with dread at the prospect of well-intentioned but horrid ribaldry in the sonic showers followed by weeks of attendant emotional anguish. Volunteering for Flashball collection duty seemed mild by comparison, even though being the only Mini-Flash in a deserted gymnasium frightened Flashthunder quite badly too.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Please be Waiting, Chapter Three
Sunset had arrived on that early autumn day in Nottingham. Long black shadows by now claimed the alleyways and yards, while the western sky blazed a magnificent orange-red that lit the world but from which the last of the daytime warmth was all but gone. The stars tonight would glint brighter and sharper than they had done all year, and maybe a wind would start to blow, rustling leaves that had clustered silently on their branches since spring. These first gusts of the season, presaging winter frosts to come, might even steal through ventilators into bedrooms and rattle a waste-bin liner or a sheet of paper on a dressing-table. Then sleepers would stir at the unexpected noise in the night and ponder once again all that had come to pass that day, not only its joyful celebrations but also the future that herewith began, in which The Four Heroes and the city they created would seem to have parted company at last and forevermore. For some time it had not been as it was, but henceforth no member of the quartet remained on Planet Earth, and the chill wind of tomorrow even now striking up needs must be faced without them.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
The Four Heroes, Chapter Three
The fluxball’s southern hemisphere rolled slowly before Neetra’s upturned eyes, as might that of some moon of light bellying into the atmosphere to orbit a mere hundred or so feet above the Earth’s mantle. Our heroine had pretended to Bret far more confidence than she felt about her chances of ever coming back out of this leviathan’s guts once she was in. But there was no point getting her knickers in a twist. Duly Neetra cast out her astral form, which looked exactly like her and was wearing the same clothes, and thus entered the sphere while her physical body slumped to sleep on the pavement.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Lilith, Chapter One
Some musicians sat on their stage at the foot of Nottingham’s domed Town Hall and stared up together at a sky which was darker than it should have been in the middle of the day. To her backing group the golden-haired female lead-singer remarked:
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
