On Intelligentsor Day, Chapter One

The distress-signal device had worked. 4-H-N was safely home, while Alliance salvage-teams remained busy shipping equipment from Phoenix Prime’s lab to that of Professor Grindo, in hopes of determining what the former had been working on at Nebula Seven. Her large and loyal and surprisingly mobile security-lodge had gone to Grindotron too, as had her robotic replica of Petunia to undergo recharge and repair.

4-H-N, proceeding down the corridors of Flash Club Headquarters on the morning of Intelligentsor Day, was glad the presentment of one old enemy was off her hands thus.

She was going to see enough enemies today as it was, old and new.

Striding into the entry-level canteen 4-H-N beheld the first of them. Alone at a table, remote from the other beige-clad girls and boys, sat Mini-Flash Meteor.

There’d been no specific deterioration in her prettiness, nothing you could put your finger on. The flaming curls still bounced, the long lashes topping the wide brown eyes still looked equal to a winning flick and flutter, whilst as for the figure there were no problems there as far as 4-H-N could see. Nevertheless, all the marks of a sudden fall from fortune were etched over those good looks. Since her ousting that fateful night Mini-Flash Meteor had been a loner, and it was rumoured she’d started hitting the tappy smell-bombs hard. Her glittering grades had steadily slipped, even while the gang began to make good under 4-H-N’s leadership. So it was that when graduation came around, two old foes had been handed a final twist of fate, and here they both were. The pair of them still stuffing out the beige. Fledgling usurper and ruler of the roost, now side-by-side on the stepladder’s bottom rung. 4-H-N reflected briefly on what a funny universe it was. Meteor kept back, and she herself turned down for advancement because she’d joined the Mini-Flashes mid-semester and hadn’t served a full neophyte term.

Or at any rate, 4-H-N liked to believe that was the reason. It had never been made absolutely clear to her.

She drew a deep breath, then marched to Mini-Flash Meteor’s table and clapped something down right under the astonished button-nose.

A tiny, empty, glass ink-bottle.

“Here,” was 4-H-N’s greeting. “I picked it up from the ledge afterwards, and it is yours. You might as well have it back. Sorry I wasted what was inside.”

True enough. 4-H-N’s recent history boasted no incident for which she was sorrier.

Meteor rose a little from her seat, and with a deft dainty elastic-pluck restored her possession to the proper Mini-Flash place. Long may it sit snugly there, thought 4-H-N. Never once had it done so shoved down the back of hers.

“And to what, my fluffy small gantrative, do I owe this most welcome if unexpected resumption of pleasantries?” the other then inquired.

4-H-N surveyed her in turn.

They weren’t friends. A cuter rattlesnake you couldn’t wish to see, but Meteor was coiled alright, pondering when to strike. 4-H-N knew she had something nastier than an ink-bottle tucked away where she kept her secrets, and it was going to be bad news for someone stuffy when she whipped it out. None of which changed the fact that today, 4-H-N needed her. Even if it would have been going too far to tell her why.

“Take a walk,” she replied shortly. “So shift those prissy pink ones if you’re coming.”

Intelligentsor presided over the auditorium. There were at least a dozen of him, giant cardboard cut-outs made specially for the occasion, while suspended on wires from the darkened vaults, motionless mock-up spacecraft soared. There was the ancient single-engine shuttle in which Intelligentsor had made his lonely long voyage, and there the flying command-centre he’d piloted later in life, at whose helm indeed he’d been the last time his galaxy beheld him. Tall and solemn towered the emancipator in the mid-contest spotlights, but benevolent, sealed within the full-body life-support suit which had been his everlasting ransom. Each two-dimensional titan had fixed a faceless gaze on some vanishing-point far above the heads of the populace, as had Intelligentsor himself on days preserved in living memory, those immediately prior to his never being seen again.

It was Mini-Flash Phytolith, taking his turn at the podium, who cast his eyes down. The multitude was beige, each breast bearing a yellow Flash Club insignia.

And Mini-Flash Phytolith had them.

He could see once-fidgety boys attending in wonder and thought, and girls who’d quit their whispering and giggling to listen with them in earnest.

Not every Mini-Flash. But some.

That was power, and power wasn’t something Mini-Flash Phytolith had been accustomed to wielding back at the compound. He made an end:

War is certain, now as then. Indeed, war has already begun. Our generation will see the galaxy laid waste, as did Intelligentsor. Much talk has there been in these our formative days, of factions, and causes, and interpretations thereof. Such division once led our esteemed Toothfire allies to war. Their Veranda cousins, happily now likewise at peace in this more hopeful era, responded then in kind.

And our galaxy reaped the inevitable harvest of faction, and causes, and interpretations thereof. He whose life and deeds we here commemorate was first to see that.

Another inevitable day is coming.

It is the day you will be asked to choose.

To stand.

So when that day dawns, remember Intelligentsor, as we have this day.

Remember he who chose to put causes aside.

Remember he who chose instead the path of peace. For peace is the only desired outcome of war.

And when there is peace, there will be no more need for causes.

The resultant hush was quite something. Eat your heart out, Mini-Flash Semiprecious.

Every word adapted or lifted wholesale from your old Intelligentsor essay.

The power really must have been going to Mini-Flash Phytolith’s head, because he couldn’t resist rounding off:

Go, and be strong.

Then applause. Phytolith closed his eyes, but not solely with a sense of accomplishment. Another state which he knew far better had taken hold of him, mere seconds subsequent to his rush of smugness, and now it raged. He’d needed Semiprecious’s text – being a defective dunce at writing himself, as he’d so often been laughingly told – but it had been a mistake to bring her hated superior pretty face into it. He could see her now, far away in Nottingham where she presumably still was, and this moment would have been a triumph for her. Hearing the adulation her eloquence had stolen, she’d have exulted yet again in Mini-Flash Phytolith’s slow stupidity. Those familiar cruel titters were making their way to him even over half the galaxy, even over the uproarious crowd.

Just you wait, Mini-Flash Semiprecious. Phytolith hadn’t forgotten the vow he’d made, on one of his own more formative days.

He would see her weep.

Curtseying extremely briefly to an audience which hadn’t even left off clapping yet, he exited fast and moments later gained the cooling dim dustiness of backstage. The noise from beyond dropped to a murmur and gradually died away.

Here a few unused Intelligentsors were leaning lopsidedly on stacks and palettes. Mini-Flash Phytolith stood small and short-skirted before his tremendous theme.

She’d weep alright. And here and now, she wasn’t going to snatch this away from him.

He’d had them.

That was the mission. It was war. Semiprecious should only hope to advance the standard as far as he’d done today. In fact, Mini-Flash Phytolith was through letting the second gender get the better of him. From now on he was going to –

A hand clutched his bare arm and whirled him roughly round.

Suddenly Phytolith’s heart was skipping beats, as the hot brown-eyed glare locked with his gaze. He saw the high ponytail, coppery in overhead halogens, saw the big beige bow holding it up, saw and smelled in a wild wheeling instant everything that went with pale pink roundedness whose divine disclosure you might drown in.

It was 4-H-N.

Plus a girl with red ringlets Mini-Flash Phytolith didn’t know, smiling silently by her side.

TO BE CONTINUED