Noisy Running, Chapter Three

As the luminous boxlike forcefield-cage blinked out of existence, Phoenix was given reason to doubt everything the galaxy said about Moltron’s quickness. His slopping transformation to an innocuous slick made lightning-bolts look ponderous. It seemed however to be Phoenix’s day for brief impressions, because no sooner had she taken note of this than twisted nature white in tooth and claw was scrabbling at her throat.

It was the mutant Mini-Flash, bent on a rematch.

Together they tumbled into the elevator, writhing and entangling, Phoenix fending off the fangs. She backed into machinery and felt it give, then as promptly knew the stomach-jolt of a rapid vertical ascent. The body of the ship whizzed by, then the bridge, and Phoenix could barely wrest a hand free to affix her breathing-mask before the floor on which she strove juddered to a standstill, throwing herself and the ravening animal clear of each other and onto the Star-Fighter’s fuselage. A prairie of chrome, its hillocks bumps and ducts, rolled beneath the arching black heaven.

Something was wrong with space. Phoenix felt it at once.

Space shouldn’t drag like this.

A capsule boomed from the aft section and twinkled to far-off cosmos. There went Moltron. So Phoenix did all that was left for her to do and addressed her remaining dance-partner.

“I do not wish to ’arm you!” she yelled, but even her words were warped and distorted by that inexplicable pull.

What was causing it? Where had Moltron deposited them?

And then, out of the corner of her spectacles, Phoenix saw.

A horizontal pencil-line, etched with a ruler across the vacuum, such that its length from tip to tip might barely be estimated. Only no, it was in fact the rim of a gigantic coin. Now Phoenix perceived its circumference swelling on either side of the straight, her perspective dictated by the Star-Fighter’s steady list in that direction. For the thing wasn’t flat like a penny after all. Not when you looked it dead-on. True, from any other angle it was as good as two-dimensional, so you didn’t see it until long after it had started sucking you in. That process however was well-commenced, so that Phoenix and the creature and the hull where they warred were tiny silhouettes before a celestial funnel of storms, a swirling roiling vortex that fell forever tier by tier, a bottomless fusion-reactor choked with sulphurous-yellow fire-gas.

A blight star.

Phoenix gaped, as did her companion, which came as no surprise. Given what she’d deduced by now about that one’s origins, the experience must have been akin to gazing on the heart of its creator.

Perhaps that explained the change that came over it, for even with her attention divided between two different perils, Phoenix beheld what dawned upon the colourless maw and chops. Obfuscatory madness was washed whirling out of sight by the blight star, and ruby oculars bulged anew with what rationality their bearer had ever been able to claim.

Function brought purpose. Completion was expected. There had been comfort in that.

Somehow it been forgotten, out here amid this vast other compound beyond the ring of stones. Now it was back, and it was not too late.

Four feet scrambled on steel. Phoenix had time to throw out an arm after the ranging headlong one, as it slavered for that turbid tunnel in whose bottomless depths lay release. A helpless cry died on our heroine’s lips, for by then it would already have been futile. Smaller and smaller before her eyes span the lean white form, its consummation down the racing clouds already begun. One final glimpse of those rapt misshapen features, which a kinder universe would have crafted in the lines of any merry girl or boy, and Phoenix was alone on the edge of the prow.

Not that it booted her to stay there long. The blight star was tweaking the very tears from her cheeks, to draw them glittering after her friend. Phoenix decided it might be time she herself was making a move.

Even turning back towards the elevator took effort, and the skintight bodysuit she was wearing wouldn’t turn all the way with her. It was like wearing stockings that had snagged. Setting her teeth Phoenix made to walk, then swiftly discovered hands were going to be needed too. Dropping to her knees she proceeded to forge, mounting the rounded rise that was the starcraft’s canopy, arm over arm and toecaps dug in. All the while the merciless blight star pulled at those parts of Phoenix nearest it, craving a hold on her, but so far securing only space-age fabric which lacked the wearer’s resistance and strength. From Phoenix’s soles to the backs of her upper arms streamed the galaxy’s slowest contrail, scarlet fibres lifting and disintegrating from the pale contours beneath.

Phoenix guessed she wouldn’t be playing netball after all. Not looking like that. She’d be barred from the courts.

The elevator floor was a long-sought sanctuary and the sliding shut of the doors above it brought blessed respite, but Phoenix wasn’t yet in any position to relax. By the time she reached the cockpit she was on her feet again, though these were now bare as she threw off her breathing-apparatus and the last ragged shreds of red webbing. Gauntlets and harness and nothing else but glasses was an interesting look for her, not that Phoenix’s thoughts ran greatly on appearances as she threw herself into the pilot’s chair and gave the engines everything they had.

No good. Full burn was barely keeping the ship steady where it was. That would last as long as the fuel-supply, and then the unrelenting enemy would win.

Which left only one option.

Phoenix’s fingers closed about the hyperdrive handle.

This was probably going to be suicide, but probable suicide beat certain death, if only by a slender margin.

She threw the lever.

The interceptor jumped, its breast and nosecone scaling for constellations light-years distant. This they achieved, but the blight star held on, boasting its own pattern of force which ran in the opposite direction to that of this upstart new variable. So it was that even while the Star-Fighter’s power-core whirled and whirled, everything outside of it strained in stasis and tingled under tensions for which nothing physical was ever meant, a spaceship whose frontal half broached a solar system far from sight of that in which languished its boosters and body.

Phoenix all at once was longer than she’d been in her life. Not taller, because she was sitting down, but longer from front to back. Suddenly sandwiched between those opposing planes was a new extended remix of Phoenix Neetkins whose scope was best comprehended on cosmic terms. Yet to compare with the closest Earth-correlative, it was as if she’d boarded a Tokyo to Los Angeles long-haul which had somehow travelled so speedily as to gain the West Coast while Phoenix was still resting on the runway. She could feel the press of the leather seat-cushion, sticky from her perspiring flesh, and that was within the mouth of the blight star. Meanwhile the westernmost extremities of Phoenix, namely the twin outthrust tips of her torso, were pointing into the populous galaxy. Her shoulders were a pair of mountainous plateaux, rising in California just below Phoenix’s eyes, then level over continents and seas to finally drop away in Japan where the back of her head resided.

And it wasn’t…

…pleasant…

…but Phoenix gripped the controls and set to weathering it out, telling herself it would be over soon, one way or another, that it couldn’t last, that it must not last.

Could it last?

There was just enough time for Phoenix to conclude that given the nature of this experiment, given its grounding in factors unknown, one possibility was that it could last.

Forever, even.

It was a moment she never forgot.

Nor however did she forget the next, when the ship’s hindquarters and her own popped free of the blight star and galloped the intervening leagues to catch up with their precedents.

Reunification threw Phoenix face-first upon the console as her hips and thighs catapulted to where they were supposed to be, but our heroine was happy merely that momentum didn’t carry them further than that. Indeed, since permanently walking around back-to-front had seemed for a short time Phoenix’s prospect, happy may have been too mild a word. Ecstasy or bliss drew closer to describing what it was to be alive, sprawled on a flight-panel with the bruises to show for it, and each of these beautifying a limb which was its proper dimensions again. Friendly planets were gleaming all about, while the Star-Fighter Mark II boomed out the last of its protests and fell still.

Phoenix’s goal for some years now had been to expand her mind.

In future she’d be careful what she wished for, now that that organ had been shaped like a shoehorn spanning half the galaxy.

THE END