Girls in Gear, Chapter Two

Splitsville hit a straight and pinned the pursuers in her rear-view. These cats weren’t flying Alliance colours. Some were daubed, others painted black, and there were wilder custom-jobs besides. Maybe she’d been hanging too long at the Heart-Throb’s Film Club, because it looked to her like all they needed was a foxtail or two.

Had Scientooth known? Way the cueball rapped, it had sounded like he was hip to what went on. Bringing it up may have been one of his real original games.

Back to the present, and buddy-boy there was fixing to shed oil. Mini-Flash Splitsville eyed the hawk-billed one steadily closing the distance to her fender.

She hit the brakes as only she knew how, that the initial jolt hurled her swan-diving to the heavens as her chariot lurched front-end first to teeter on its headlights. Then momentum and the weight of the tail tipped the onyx space-rod aft over prow beneath its pilot’s sailing shape, while the leader of the pack compensated for this anomaly and switched course to lacerate Mini-Flash flesh instead. The wearer of same tucked into a succinct seat-drop, tunic-skirts parachuting, and whipped both palms beneath her panties. She plunged into the portal thus opened and was gone from her own path of descent, that the Vernderernder’s razor beak found no purchase until it ploughed into the road below. Mini-Flash Splitsville’s portal reopened directly above her leather upholstery, upon which she landed with a bump, as the space-car righted itself and drove straight over the mangled spare parts which were all that remained of one rebel.

Sonica too had noticed the Vernderernders were parading their status as a rogue enclave. That meant the Toothfire High Command would enjoy deniability, which the rest of the quadrant was welcome to take more seriously than Sonica did. For it had reached her even in hospital that there was restlessness among the erstwhile empire. Alliance newscasts had done their best to suppress rumours of some mutant Mini-Flash, impervious to even the most sophisticated sensory apparatus, which had lately attacked and was said to have been sent by The Foretold One. If that were so, the Vernderernders might not necessarily be here for Scientooth. Mini-Flash Splitsville was one of three girls Nottingham harboured who many feared might figure in The Foretold One’s designs, although these airborne assemblages of scrap metal were going to have to look sharp if they planned to threaten Sonica’s friends. It was even conceivable Joe was their target, which wouldn’t have come as any great surprise. That Earthling acted like gravitation on whatever trouble was out.

A clutter of the beastly things was all but at her tail-pipes. They’d picked the wrong pink paint-job to peck. Sonica spied what she was after and threw her steering-wheel hand over hand.

Not that you ever had to look far for a roadside ditch in Joe’s subconsciousness. For some reason the place abounded with them. Sonica’s speaker-car swung sideways over the edge and described a full barrel-roll on its way down, to splash upright again in the standing water at the foot of the lower level. The pursuers roared by above, overshooting, and Sonica didn’t so much as stop to untuck her Fridays after their slippery ride. Instead she thrust both hands into apertures under the wheel, and her transmitter-panels at ninety-degree elevation jammed a jarring chord whose radiant concentric circles blew the Vernderernders from the verge.

Sonica started up her motor and hydroplaned to regain altitude, spraying ditchwater for a leg or two but steadily climbing the steep grassy bank until she was coasting over asphalt again, in pole-position alongside Mini-Flash Splitsville. “Double-team, kid!” that one hailed her.

Throwing her arms wide, Splitsville put a portal directly in their path. Sonica blasted a second volley of harmonics straight ahead. Vernderernders were demons of the freeway no matter what world they were on, but unlike those they hounded they were wont to neglect the wing-mirror. Splitsville’s portal reopened behind them and Sonica’s sound-burst met their exhausts, to fly by between the speeding females seconds later carrying with it a clatter of what wreckage was left.

Too many of that rabble were still in the chase though, gaining with terrible mechanistic inevitability while our heroines were all but out of tricks. Above the brushwood both glimpsed ramshackle girders, a framework stark against the dimming sky. It was the bridge that led out of this deathly arena and back to those lanes that might be designated Nottingham.

“Getting a handle on how Ichabod felt,” affirmed Mini-Flash Splitsville, “so long as Bing was down with it when he said the spell breaks here.”

“Can you quit making allusions to the Earth-culture you’re so fond of and just flipping drive?” Sonica screeched.

Together they wound about the final chicanes and rattled over rickety planks, to blast from the flatlands of Pre-Nottingham Earth and broach new ground which rose steadily through rocksides. The din of the Vernderernders was never far behind, but over this and the roaring of their own carburettors, Mini-Flash Splitsville and Sonica suddenly heard something else.

A fast incessant flittering of bare feet traversing the terrain, at such a rate as to bring their owner abreast of two space-racers going all-out.

It was Fleetrope, his ceremonial robes dancing in the current of his slipstream, and he carried his lasso coiled. This he unfurled in wide arcing loops which rolled back upon the veering Vernderernders then tightened taut at a tug from the bearer, so those enemies which had not kept outside the ensnaring rings were crunched to bundles by the bonds. Then came Sludge-Man, on the girls’ other flank, presiding over a slime-slide which traced the route of this final stretch, new goo ever exuding from fingers pointed at his toes. Thus surfing on his own ooze Sludge-Man freed a hand to send some the Vernderernders’ way, clogging gears, plugging fuel-lines, splattering the steely ones to a squealing stop on the stones.

An off-road vehicle rumbled dauntlessly over the rough landscape to complete the convoy, each of its six segmented tyres bouncing out a passage on sturdy-shock absorbers, its mudflaps mottled by delineations of dirt. Thomthar the young moth-winged apprentice worked the steering-stick, while at the rollbar stood Croldon Thragg, middle-aged man of action in skintight lycra from toecaps to chin. He had no need of a cannon, for from his handheld Wonder-Tool lanced precision crimson light-rays to fuse the Vernderernders.

“You ladies looked like you were in need of a little automotive assistance,” chuckled Thragg.

“Courtesy of funky fine Nottingham’s raddest road-crew!” added the gliding Sludge-Man with his most companionable leer.

Down below, the wind boomed over a barren plain dipped in red from the dying embers of the day. Scattered about every stage of the slalom, greyish smoking Vernderernder-cairns testified that in certain quarters, to menace some was to reckon with all. Beyond the bridge the relics of those who had not been mindful of this were at their densest concentration, while slopped over the boulders a thick brown-green band marked where Sludge-Man’s slide had dripped and sagged. Besides the odd pop of a bubble from this, and the pyres’ steady pluming, the route of road-battle stretched resonant and still.

It was as Mini-Flash Splitsville and Sonica had known since well before the start-line.

Mess with Joe’s Faction and you better have the cast-iron components to back it up.

THE END