Cycles, Chapter One

They hit the road as one, churning stone-strewn flatland to a dust-storm behind them as the Grindotron freighter which had dropped them there climbed back for the stratosphere. Dylan, letting his massive rig’s six-wheel suspension take the strain of landing with barely a check in its stride, powered on to assume the head of the convoy with unspoken determination and purpose. Flanking him on either side his company skimmed above the dusty disordered planet-crust, Phoenix in her streamlined star-fighter, the two Mini-Flashes astride their rocket-bikes, and 4-H-N surfing upright on her robot companion Micro-Mallet.

The skies were crowded with asteroids and moons. It was a dense lightless region of space, heavy on fundamental force, and as Dylan’s team hit a sheer-sided ridge and struck out for jagged peaks the reason for this waxed steadily into view. A gargantuan black hole, its declination forever out of sight beneath the planetoid’s horizon, and its upper elliptic the sum of heaven’s span. Some barbarian race which dwelled here eons ago had named this phenomenon the Arch of Titus.

Dylan and his motorcade drew to a halt atop the summit. Flashlight and Mini-Flash Bloomer, staying in the saddle, each rested with one foot on the rocky ground while 4-H-N prettily shook silicates from her long ponytail. Scattered over the mountain-ringed plain were numerous relics of the bygone tribe – smithies, slave-pens, gladiatorial arenas – and amid it all a conspicuous something far too recent to belong. It was difficult to make out from so far off but appeared to be a dome, lit from within, and possibly moving. Phoenix looked to the Arch.

“Let us not be ’ere when Monsieur returns from zere,” she proposed into her intercom.

“We’ve got time, babe,” Dylan replied, transmitting the words from the rig’s control-cabin to the other members of his command. “Telepathically I’m still reading Harbin enroute and the farns down below in whatever that thing is he’s built. It makes sense. Neetra said in her message he wants them alive, which means he’d have to leave a safe distance between their prison and his power-source. But you’re right. Phoenix, we can’t wait any longer. Especially as it looks like it’s going to be just the six of us.”

This last hung heavy over the assembled, including Dylan. Neetra in her message had also promised to be here, and if Dylan was equal to psychically locating the adventure’s main players at the Arch of Titus then so too surely was she. Each of the command had been looking forward to a reunion, but Neetra’s unexpected absence was considerably more than disappointing. It was downright ominous in any number of ways, perhaps most pressingly because of what the team was now bound to face without her.

“Something tells me the answers to wherever Neet’s got to are waiting for us where we’re going, guys,” Dylan reassured his friends. “And Alliance ships are on their way to back us up. We’ve got a head-start though, and we can’t waste it. Not while a certain somebody else has the same idea,” he added darkly.

No sooner were the words out than those of another, the renegade robot Scientooth, leaked unbidden and unwelcome into Dylan’s mind:

“The boy will recover, but everything you once fought for will have changed.”

Dylan sighed. Although he had not been present to hear Scientooth’s prediction, it was bearing more weight by the time-interval. Battles in this galaxy did indeed feel nothing akin to those he had shared with The Four Heroes back home on Earth. What was this one even about? Dylan surveyed his attending teammates on the rig’s dashboard comm-screens. First was Phoenix, her features set in the steely resolution Dylan admired still, but which lately had become a secret concern for him too. Yet if his loved one was troubling in her shows of unflinching conviction that she was right and others were not, her fellow clone 4-H-H had made herself a comparable liability in her desperation to atone for perceived misdeeds and prove her worth. As for the pair of Mini-Flashes gazing back at Dylan wide-eyed, their belief in him was absolute. It was however based around a hope that accomplishing this mission would guide certain of their peers from Joe’s damaging influence and to that interpretation of The Four Heroes’ cause represented by Dylan which had proved far more compatible with the native establishment. Dylan himself was aware that that sort of thinking could only widen a divide he was anxious to heal.

It seemed the days were long gone when a task such as rescuing kidnapped wisemen held meaning in and of itself. Since when was there any need for two feuding heroes to race? Why did public approval and media ratings have to come into it? Already a bitter clash against Joe on one of the neighbouring planets had taken its place in Dylan’s irretrievable and unamendable past. Now here he was, speaking as if content to let himself be swept up in it all. Sadly Dylan shook his head.

“Joe’s not on our side anymore, guys,” said he, his tones a little less harsh than they had been. “I don’t understand why, but he’s not the person we knew. All his talk about how we’re in the wrong, and yet he’s the one doing things that don’t add up, telling us we’re not allowed to hear what Neetra had to say without giving any explanation. What he did to the message in the end was proof enough.”

“You can all take a quick look at my knickers if you want another reminder,” muttered 4-H-N.

“But it was only because you listened to the thing before he destroyed it, 4-H-N, that we’re in with a chance of saving the farns now,” Dylan went on. “Which, I’m afraid, might suggest to some that Joe’s latest plan is to stop us from doing good. If so, he’s had his shot.”

Turning to the all-but empty city Dylan restarted his rig. A chorus of revs from other engines took up the tune.

“Let’s not lose sight of pragmatics, people,” instructed Dylan. “We all know the stats. It takes Four Heroes powers approximately eight times over to tackle Harbin when he’s fully-charged. Whether there were three of us, or two, or just the one, this’d still be an extraction not a fight. We find Neetra, assuming she needs to be found, and we save the farns. If The Four Heroes can’t stand together for this, then that’s the way it has to be. These days upholding the cause is down to us alone.”

From the giant-size telemonitor shone twin worlds rendered in vector graphic form, replete with readout-boxes listing data from the subatomic to the astrophysical. “You’d never know if you hadn’t been told exactly what to look for,” hinted Professor Grindo to his fellow scientists, both of whom had come to know him affectionately as Prof. “But you see it, don’t you?”

Of the guests, human and Martian, it was the latter who completed her calculations first.

“Those are not naturally-occurring orbits,” asserted Iskira Neetkins. “No law of the universe produces twin planets thus. Only an external factor could have been responsible.”

“A weapon, my dear,” Prof concurred. “Some hideous and long-forgotten doomsday machine deployed either by Toothfire or their like-minded cousins the Verandas. The chaos it wrought slowly tipped Drenthis and Nereynis into each other’s gravitational embrace, where they remain to this day. That’s why history makes no record of twin planets in that solar-system. It’s also why Drenthis is a desert whereas Nereynis consists mostly of water. They were identical ice-worlds once, but when their respective axes tilted to new interdependent inclines, one dried up while the other melted. You’re certain Joe isn’t a genius? Nothing about the hairstyle, hat or general conduct suggests it, but I just thought I’d ask.”

“Joe didnae figure this oot the same way ye did, Professor,” James Neetkins told him in no uncertain terms. “Much as it’s beyond me how he and oor Neetra did. She’s nae chip off the auld block either, scientifically at least.”

“No grandchildren following in our footsteps from that side of the family,” Iskira murmured absent-mindedly in agreement.

James looked at her. “So Neetra told me,” she added at once. “After she met Tidshaw and Autumn when they travelled through time. Nothing more than that was implied, my husband.”

“I should say not,” grumbled James, switching back to the screen. “Still a wee lassie, oor Neetra. Nae need tae be worrying aboot that kind o’ thing juist yet.”

Prof resumed smoothly: “We’ll let posterity make its own assessment of Joe, since the rest of the quadrant seems to be doing the same. Your other future son-in-law, however, is indubitably a marvel. I needed to know the reason for some very strange behaviour on the part of my people’s deadliest one-time enemies, and what the implications of this might be for the whole Grindo race. Dylan obligingly radioed me the most comprehensive and convincing answer I could have hoped for as to why Toothfire refuses to go anywhere near that nondescript little corner of the galaxy.”

“So much for the first part, then, Professor,” James pointed out. “How aboot the second?”

Like all Grindoes, Prof was nothing but face. Now in response to James’s query his entire being began to smile.

END OF CHAPTER ONE