Noisy Running, Chapter One

Dylan wasn’t one to sit around. A sweep of his arm and the Junkyard-Belts of Nebula Seven came alive, magenta-coloured swirls and streamers throwing the surrounding escarpments of scrap into the air and at each other. 4-H-N stumbled back agape as a boxlike distress-signal device clunked complete at her feet, by which time the corroded old chasses of two space-cars were kitted out with replacement parts and idling above the ground.

Phoenix and Dylan each picked one, and next second 4-H-N received a good airing as boosters kicked in. Then twin pairs of taillights were dots in the distance, dwindling as fast as the smaller duo they pursued.

It seemed to 4-H-N that the dust had long resettled before her ponytail and skirts got around to flopping down again.

“So I think I’ll stay here, because it’s too dangerous,” announced the girl unto silence.

The hijacker held every advantage in speed, but that would only count for something once he’d cleared Nebula Seven. Earlier on, Phoenix had had to steer the Star-Fighter Mark II at a crawl to negotiate this densely-crowded region, where hung reddish space-rocks and derelict starcraft interlocked in rings like giant wreaths. Since the stolen ship was far larger than a galactic hot-rod, Dylan and Phoenix were still in the chase. That said, the latter’s scruples about the former’s paint-job were not shared by the thief, which meant a chase was very much what it was. In and out of asteroids our heroes wove, carburetors roaring, flinging staccato sparks at the silver shape ahead each time their windscreens looked out upon a clear line of sight.

“Getting nothing telepathically from laughing-boy in front,” reported Dylan. “Must have some effective psychic shielding, or not enough brains for me to scan.”

“In a moment you may ask ’im which,” crackled back Phoenix’s voice over the antiquated radio-communicator.

She stepped on the gas, clearing a rocky obstacle though she pranged herself in so doing, that a dislodged fender span away into infinity behind. With her hood-mounted cannon Phoenix harried the fugitive from above, while Dylan swept smoothly round underneath and completed their pincer-movement. Accosted by streams of fire from both sides, the Star-Fighter was forced to change course and seek cover.

“This from the girl who lectured me on risky plays,” was Dylan’s comment.

“Mes soeurs may keep zeir netball,” responded Phoenix, pressing home the pursuit. “I prefer to run and pass.”

“You missed out on a lot,” Dylan concluded. “Gym lessons, school dinners…”

They were looping round the lumps their own vessel had bashed through. Its furnaces by now were burning near, even as green-glowing clouds began to lift.

“Discos…”

“Early ’eroics to ze strains of techno-rave,” anticipated Phoenix.

Engines at full-throttle, the two small space-cars were keeping pace with a comparatively vast wingspan outspread beneath them. There were no more clustered hulks to contend with, only tiny meteor-fragments which cracked hazardously from headlamp-glass as the duo battled to decrease altitude. Dylan opined that the artistic and cultural significance of No Limits would only ever be lost on those who hadn’t lived through that time, at which Phoenix commended him for identifying one of the few plus-points to being a fiery winged baby pinging round a castle instead, and all Dylan had to say about that was that if they’d had the option of playing a little road-music just now his first choice wouldn’t have been Oxygene. Nebula-ephemera was wisping fast before unobstructed star-studded black, and the rogue hull shimmered as it made a shift to jump.

Twin dashboard target-scopes finally fell into range. Phoenix and Dylan hit their winches. Rattling chains shot the interstice and magnetic clamps boomed.

“Now before you bring Enigma into it,” Dylan went on, “just bear in mind that – ”

The Star-Fighter lurched into hyperdrive, stretching the universe and warping all to wild light and colour. Latched to its back, the space-rods were jerked along on this career, where noise held its breath and the beat of life itself seemed momentarily to slow.

“…spoke to us all about that return to innocence which was Nottingham’s creation, so whichever way you look at it, the year of that single’s release was to their…”

And they were back. Reality snapped to and the interceptor was droning through atmosphere on a bulldozer descent, rooftops spinning with alarming nearness face-first. Target Harbour. Our heroes knew it at once, for all the bumping and windshear which threatened to tip them from their perpendicular car-seats. Short daytime only rolled round every handful of solar cycles here, but you didn’t miss much. Bespotted and mottled exterior walls in every stage of grubbiness made for a labyrinth of urban decay, at least in the poorer quarters that clustered about the rim of this wretched rock, and it was at these the ship was nose-diving. On the far-off horizon stood megalithic hotels, whilst nearer at hand seethed the gaseous ocean which had long ago collected in Target Harbour’s cusp, by night luminescent but now bleakly colourless under a white diurnal welkin.

These various blots on the distant landscape Dylan and Phoenix could afford to register but fleetingly at best. Their attention was required for more immediate concerns. A large starcraft might shoulder its way through those obstacles whose concentration thickened the closer to a bustling port town’s pavement it drew, but this was never going to spell happy landings for two space-racers trailing like fragile kites in its wake.

“Disengage!” yelled Dylan, wrestling with his controls as half a billboard crashed plywood and canvas inches from his brow.

Neither of the tow-hooks seemed in the mood to disengage, which was probably what came of working with junk. The Star-Fighter mangled its path through an electrical pylon, whose severed cables snapped like whips and entangled themselves in the overstraining chains.

“Can’t – ” began Phoenix, teeth gritted, at arms’ length gripping her wheel.

The squat square tower of a refuelling-port was rising into view above the city-banks. There could be no doubt that this was the larcenist’s destination, but interposing overpasses and elevator-trains lent our heroes little hope of reaching it with him. Their cars were coming apart. When the connecting-lines finally gave, most of the bodywork to which these were attached had long since done so. Phoenix and Dylan in free-fall traversed the last stretch between sky and concrete, disintegrating as they sailed by fifth-floor apartment windows, then fourth, then third, and so to alight amid catastrophic clangour as their steeds scraped out the last of their momentum along a Target-Harbour side-street.

TO BE CONTINUED