Avalon, Chapter Three

The party was still only just getting started when sandstorms whipped all at once round bare ankles and legs, searchlights swept the clearing, and live music was summarily supplanted by burgeoning engine-din. Girls and boys and other creatures ceased their spirited wriggles to gape skyward at the looming pig-backed crowd-control cruiser which had elbowed itself into the airspace above them.

Mini-Flash Splitsville breathed: “The man.”

“Attention!” keened a twelvefold-amplified electronic voice encoded into the unmanned ship’s loudhailers. “You are trespassing on planetary property now paid for in full by the Grindo people! Please disperse peaceably and leave this world at once. Notice is hereby served that if you do not, this vessel under the rights of private ownership is empowered and indemnified to – ”

Contamination threw from one hand a spiralling pillar of blue-white nucleonic force and silenced this pre-taped message. Listing to the treetops, superheated armour-plates belching steam, the automaton cruiser opted instead for a demonstration of just what it was empowered and indemnified to do. Its bulkheads broke and scattered apart into little angular bits, which promptly flipped nosecones-forward and ignited blazing afterburners to show themselves for Micro-Mallet robots, each the size of a pentagonal manhole-cover and daubed black for jungle stealth. Equipped with prazon weapons they potholed the sand and quick to follow was swimwear-clad chaos, Contamination and the two Mini-Flash girls bolting for their respective racers that they might lead these robot riot-police away from the panicking partygoers.

From out of the woods on the other side hastened Magnolia, accompanied by another figure which crashed hungrily through the shadows behind her.

“Inconvenient,” she hissed in annoyance to this one. “But it’ll take more than a handful of grabby sponges to stop us now we’re so close. We’ve endured this charade too long to miss out on securing Four Heroes powers for Scientooth’s service. The civilized invitation Phoenix Prime had in mind is just going to have to wait.”

With a sardonic laugh Magnolia continued: “I’ll go and arrange us a little insurance. You deal with Joe. He doesn’t leave this misbegotten wet globe unless it’s with us.”

Her challenge was greeted with a gleeful glint of teeth, and the dragon sprang. Of sinuous shape it lurched low along the beach, streaking through the hail of prazon-fire, lean and lustful and sporting the skimpiest pair of swimming-trunks seen in this or any star-system. Sniggering and snipping it tore into the greensward, its claws steel shears worn on either wrist before which bracken and brambles bowed.

Unto the reigning carnage Schiss-Zazz screeched: “Nobody can stop me, nobody!”

Joe had made landfall and was on the move, hot-footing it for the embattled heart of the forest while cursing himself for a fool. Send three young people on reconnaissance to a big beach-party, with Contamination their chaperone, and expect strict radio-contact to be maintained. Moreover, while Joe hadn’t anticipated the Grindo intervention, he could hazard a wild guess that the new landlords weren’t the ones who’d fired first. If our hero was setting his sights on a hat-trick of disastrous missions, he was more than halfway there. Joe would have asked himself what it was that kept throwing off his judgement lately, what unrest or absence or yearning unfulfilled, except that he knew very well.

His headlong charge was curtailed when he collided with Dean, who like most of Petunia’s circle had fled the glade for safer territory. “Whoa!” was the nigh-on euphoric reaction. “Oh, wow, this is like…! I mean…! Face-to-face with…! Whoa, can I just have a second here to get my head around – ”

Such latitude however would have been well outside the pursuers’ programming. A rattle of prazon discharge through the greenery overhead and Joe threw himself forward onto his new friend, hitting the deck as three Micro-Mallets sliced by. This grounding in the literal sense seemed also to restore Dean to what little grounding in practical reality he had ever been able to claim.

“My board, bro!” he implored his saviour. “It’s over that way at the cove! Lead them out to open water where you’ll stand a chance!”

It was true that in these tangled confines the small nimble robots held every advantage. Thanking Dean and advising him to seek refuge our hero struck off in the direction indicated, as the formation trio banked for another pass and gave chase. Nights were short this distance from Nereynis’s meridian, and already thunderous grey was flitting through slits in the tree-cover. There was the cove, a hollow of dim dawn limpid at the end of this overgrown black tunnel. Feeling like Jan our hero seized Dean’s boogie-board from where it was embedded point-down in the sand, then took the plunge into coldness and spray to catch the stormy morning’s first turbulent tube.

Flashtease had become separated from Petunia during the initial strike. Having climbed to a high clifftop in hopes of espying the lost girl, he could not have missed Joe speeding out to sea nor the triplet fighters which tore after him. No sooner had Flashtease resolved to go help however than a rope snaked about his person, and weighted by the grappling-hook at its tip lashed three times about and bound him fast against a tree.

Magnolia strode flauntingly forth. “Hold that thought, brat,” she sneered. “You make such a sweet hostage, and I’ll have use for one in the unlikely event of Schiss-Zazz failing to reel in our trophy.”

He of whom she spoke chose that moment to put in an appearance below, flinging his own surfboard onto the riptide and mounting it in one well-oiled movement to surge slashing down the track Joe had taken. Magnolia affected a pretentious sigh, and for the benefit of her captive audience cogitated aloud: “Why do I only ever fall for the bad ones?”

“Er, because you’re bad?” suggested Flashtease.

Asking Magnolia not to tell him to wait right there would have been asking her to be someone she wasn’t, especially in the light of impertinence like that. So she did, then set off at once for where her motor-boat was moored. Joe meanwhile had made short work of the Micro-Mallets, picking them off one by one with firebolts from his hand, and was ready to beat a path back when he saw the sinister shape of Schiss-Zazz was all but upon him.

Apparently the sovereign spirits of Nereynis’s archipelagos didn’t limit themselves to such benign affairs as festival and song. Joe reignited both fists. This visitation was born of jumping lava which bubbled and boiled from the ocean’s rocky crust, and its music was war-cries and the dry rattle of bones. Swerving down the steep flank of his breaker to meet the threat in the gulley between, Joe sparked a dazzling rain which vaporized on the seething surface as his backhand deflected Schiss-Zazz’s shark-snapping steel. Then the duellists parted, heeling their boards to the uppermost lip of each moving mountain they rode, until these crested and began their catastrophic collapse to bring Schiss-Zazz and Joe cleaving into close-quarters again.

Contamination at the wheel of his midnight-blue single-seater was finishing off the Grindo hulk, which lay belly-up amid the acre of woodland it had crushed, while Mini-Flash Splitsville and Flashshadow coasted hostile skies tackling those Micro-Mallets which were still in the fight. One of these scored a lucky hit to starboard, wreaking such turbulence that Flashshadow’s minimal mass was sucked from the bucking black space-racer’s passenger-side to spin helpless into the slipstream.

Joe and Schiss-Zazz, hammered by the motion an increasingly furious deep was forcing them to emulate, rose again and again with the unforgiving flow and again and again descended for the savage stab and scorch. Both warriors were weary, while their battlefield demanded ever more. Well was it written on Joe’s world that civilisation ends at the waterline. He himself was by now sure of Schiss-Zazz, and saw he could finish it next time they locked, but there was no neglecting the sharp serpentine strokes which had shredded his clothing to gash him each bout. So it was that when Joe with lowered prow had snarled one last time down the half-pipe’s current and from out-thrust palms shot a fireball that bowled his opponent straight to the bottom, our hero’s own knees were next to buckle. That was the law of these parts. The cruel sea always prevailed. With one cheek flat where his foot had lately been Joe lay prone and adrift, a leaden heaven closing round tempest-tossed wastes.

The last visitors Flashtease had expected in his embarrassment were some very familiar rubber pants, but there they were, accompanied by the boy who wore them. “Regret our having made such a bad beginning,” issued from this unexpected quarter as its occupant bumbled about the business of untying Magnolia’s knots. “But I guess you and I are on the same side after all, so this seems our best bet if we’re to save Petunia and clean up this mess!”

“Thanks, kid!” said Flashtease gratefully, shaking free the loosened rope.

“Plunder Dacks,” the boy introduced himself, so as was only proper they took a minute out of their busy schedules to shake hands. Just then Flashshadow fell head-first past them with a thin little cry and vanished from view beneath the cliff’s edge.

“There goes your friend,” Plunder Dacks pointed out.

“Come on!” yelled Flashtease, snatching up the grappling-hook, and together the boys beat bare feet down the rockside for the cove.

No-one could have accused Magnolia of being the clingy suffocating kind of girlfriend. Over the spot where Schiss-Zazz and his surfboard sank she buzzed her boat without stopping, though she smiled affectionately when she thought about how good he was at getting himself out of such scrapes. Only on reaching Joe face-down atop his floating shield did Magnolia quell her outboard motor, to snare the exhausted hero by the scruff of his neck and bundle him bodily between the bows.

“Here’s where I bring this little story to its tragic conclusion,” crooned she.

“Knew it already,” retorted Joe, delirious. “Story was based on me. Just ask...Empress Ungus...”

Starting up her engine again Magnolia came about. The hills in the distance burned from the battle, forest fires pluming smoke into the sky. Several spaceships had already started to trace the course of these dark ascensions, as Petunia’s party-guests fled Nereynis before Grindo reinforcements could arrive. Time for a girl to do the same, decided Magnolia. Thus bearing the wounded Joe she crossed by boat to the island, he slumped and insensible against her lee.

A slender lissome hand emerged from below the surface, slim fingers reaching to receive, the pale palm open. Flashtease by the water’s edge hurled Magnolia’s metal hook spinning out from shore, and the hand closed about it to hold the straight shaft aloft.

Thus did Flashtease and Plunder Dacks, working together on the rope at the other end, haul the rest of Flashshadow up from where she’d made her splash-landing and pull her onto terra firma again. It was hardly a job for two, Flashshadow’s weight being what it was, though to look at it another way that meant the task couldn’t have been better-suited for Dacks’s physical strength. While the boys were still helping her get dry they were joined first by Contamination, then Mini-Flash Splitsville who managed to park her damaged vehicle alongside his.

Together Joe’s followers looked out on a desolate scene. Somewhere amid that exodus departing the island’s ruination was sure to be Magnolia, with Joe and presumably Petunia too in her custody. “Never thought I’d say it about that real-gone little booper,” Mini-Flash Splitsville vowed, “but the only time I’m gonna stop is to juice up my rod between now and when she’s safe and sound back on Planet Square.”

“Petunia and Joe,” concurred Flashtease. “He’s got to come again. In our galaxy’s darkest hour, we know we’re going to need him. But it’s up to us! We’re the only ones who can rescue him now!”

Flashtease stood, a small determined figure in his yellow underpants, while all about him the last vestiges of a dream cracked and crumbled away.

“We have to remember everything he taught us,” the Mini-Flash declared. “He’d never have entrusted us with his teachings about the cause if he hadn’t meant for it to live on after he wasn’t here. He put his trust in us. We can’t let him down. Joe said himself that if everything we believe in was going to survive, it’d be in the hands of our generation. The universe can’t afford for us to prove him wrong! Let’s go!”

Thus turning Flashtease led the way, kicking sand behind his heels. Never once did he hesitate or falter, nor avert his freckled features from the challenge ahead. Through wreckage and despair the youthful form sprinted steady, a boy alone but bound to pit his dauntless spirit and devotion of heart against such odds as might await him, on and on until the day he was able to strive no more.

“Run, Flashtease,” said Contamination. “Run.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE