Doc Sherwood
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Disqualification Tablet, Chapter Three
Split-seconds of cannoning on at maximum burn carried our heroes round the Veirls along the wall of the tunnel and unto the night like a scarlet dart. Here the geography of Disqualification Tablet underwent a marked change, for on either side of the track as it wound its way close to the planetoid’s plane, the unmistakable traces of a lost city were rapidly starting to rise. Joe wondered whether it was mere manufactured scenery, or if there might once have been actual life on this outlandish world? Great nocturnal arachnoids perhaps, capable of clinging to their sheer-surfaced habitat and negotiating its perpetual dark, and true to this theory there was something of an insectile feel to the architecture itself, gargantuan hives with interconnecting spurs glooming black against the star-studded sky in Acheldama’s penumbra.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Disqualification Tablet, Chapter Two
“I’ll stop her, Joe!” shouted Flashtease, and before our hero could muster a word of caution the Mini-Flash bounded from his seat and gripped the top of the windshield in both hands, straightening his small body into a picture-perfect line and then flipping all the way over while curling up and continuing to spin. By the time he hit the racer’s scarlet apron he had become a whizzing sizzling ball of energy which bounced from that surface and soared to settle old scores, but the leering Solidity girl yanked back on her handbrake and unexpectedly curtailed the attack. Flashtease fell helpless through air she had never occupied, struggling out of his somersaults and resuming his tousle-haired tunic-flapping self, that he might clutch at the stern of the nearest hurtling craft and cling for dear life while his legs kicked frantically behind him.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Disqualification Tablet, Chapter One
A mighty chorus ranging from the bass baritone of moon-buster reactor-cores to the imminent whine of throttling nitro rose from the ranks arrayed in infinite diversity along the staggered start of Disqualification Tablet, each among them poised to raise its revving reverbs to blasts of acceleration. Some were vehicular robots whose mechanical minds required no interface with a living driver, others were beings of flesh and blood piloting craft which they personally owned, while others still were fusions of the technological and organic as bizarre in their realization as Mile Hunts or even stranger yet. Amidst this panoply sat Joe, ready at the gearstick with Flashtease beside him, while in nearby starting-positions doubtless waited the rivals and grudge-bearing aggressors and unlikely potential allies they had managed to make on their journey from the car park and back.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Joe and Flashtease
Flashtease ran beaming down the steps of the sports-complex and joined Joe, who was waiting for him outside. The friends set off together along the walkway, passing columns and domes on either side while overhead trawling starships dotted the space-conurbation’s artificial pink sky.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
The Old Flash Club Archive
The outing to the archive took place as soon as Flashtease next had a morning with no classes or sports lessons scheduled, which Joe supposed would have been the equivalent of a Sunday. Soon after breakfast they set off, the Mini-Flash driving their crimson-coloured interplanetary racer as it was he who knew the way. Flashtease explained that the building they were bound for was now disused, but had still been in service when he was a Flash Club neophyte. Hard as it was to imagine Flashtease looking any sweeter than he did today, his younger self in a beige entry-level tunic and knee-high boots might just have managed it.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Strays
“You left her behind?” Phoenix Prime’s question seemed to come as a surprise to Magnolia. The golden-haired girl, halfway through changing out of her damp swimming costume and putting her clothes back on, retorted: “We don’t need her anymore. And that whole hero-pretence thing was getting seriously old, am I right?”
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Shedding
The vaporous clouds of Nereynis suggested some celestial smithy where work was done for the day. It was as if the sun had downed his hammer, and the agitations he beat out relentlessly through the labouring hours were ceased. A soaring ephemeral skyscape which once undulated and fumed suddenly held at an all but total still, save for the gradual cooling by which its last tints of brilliant gold assumed those more substantial bronze and copper hues which had already taken possession of the depths. Even in a heavenly forge however, light and heat were visitors of markedly different conduct, one favouring the fast flit while the other made no hurry to depart. Long after colour had forsaken the firmament, Nereynis nights stayed sultry.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Pandemonium
“All ready?” Prof asked sotto voce with a smile. Dylan and Phoenix were. We’re just coming up on quarter-phase in the present solar cycle. This is the Interplanetary Broadcasting Service, handing you live to Grindotron for that mystery announcement the whole galaxy’s been waiting for...
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Undercurrent
“Grindostater units recommissioned for service on Nereynis,” were the words Psiona finally heaved out. “That’s the one.” As holographic newspaper-clippings went it was a perfunctory two-paragraph job at best, but of all Psiona’s numerous team-mates clustered round her control-desk in the asteroidal headquarters’s monitoring-cave, no humanoid or mini-jeep felt in much of a position to start second-guessing. Ever since their empty-handed return from the Rings of Xandreth, Psiona had applied herself to nothing short of unstinting toil over the galaxy’s media-streams. Carmilla, though she knew from experience how stubborn and determined girls that age could be, had more than once been on the brink of treating Psiona like one of her own little sisters and insisting she stopped taxing herself thus.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Engagement
Three interplanetary hot-rods, crimson, cobalt and black, were parked together at a rocky corner of the island’s coast. Flashtease, standing in his shoes, thrust arms and head into his short-sleeved tunic and finished with a purposeful two-handed tug on its hem, then turning to the first of his team-mates made a masterful gesture of leadership which immediately put his bright yellow underwear on display again.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Issues, Chapter Three
There was no beam, no line of colour nor electrical crackle bridging the short interplanetary gulf between Drenthis and her twin. Scientooth’s aesthetic had always tended more towards the Biblical. Sunshine and a lazy blue ocean fumed and plunged to purple-black sky-mountains illumining red, as torrential deluges drove down on the turbid waves and lashed Grindopolis’s skyscraper walls. In the promenades of the island city, colonials making purchases or sightseeing or merely talking to each other were drenched between breaths, and seaside recreation was supplanted by mass scrambles to seek shelter from the instantaneous tempest. Then out of the depths beneath Big Grin’s bullseye a body of mind-boggling broadness broke the roiling roof, distance and climatic conditions obscuring from shore any details besides its awesome span. Three more heartbeats of monsoon however and the thing surfaced again, leagues nearer, showing itself for some sort of armour-plated manta ray built like a good-sized sandbar. Atop harbour battlements or flood-defence banks those few Grindo observers who had not yet retreated from the heavens’ inundation stayed just long enough register as much, then fled hopping and wobbling the way of their frenzied fellows.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
