Dark Matter Date

Cherry saw the evening might yet be salvaged, but only if they made their move now. She signed to the pink-haired girl with the lyre, who stepped up keenly. Flashshadow always did this one well, and here was a break straight out of every understudy’s dreams. Her time to shine.

She raised her hand and dashed it down to the strings. One strum, waking the languid girls and besotted boys in an instant.

Grindotron.

A pause, then another strum, then a lead-in. And on the wealthiest world in the galaxy, intruder-alert sirens struck up a counterpoint to the jangling jaunting beat churned forth with spirit by Cherry’s pink-haired guitarist, while her two singing sisters from the vocal trio launched into the swing of things and started to chant in time:

La-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la, la, la-la, la-la,

A skipping trill from the green-skinned girl with gills and the other who was orange with bobbing antennae, keeping pace with the twin pairs of pounding feet upon the Grindotron corridor’s tile.

La-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la, la, la-la, la-la,

Schiss-Zazz, his lean physique bare but for the deadly shears on his wrists, and Magnolia, a sleek smirking blur of shimmery stockings and golden curls, pelted down the hangar to the alarm’s hectic tempo.

Take me, baby, on a dark-matter date…

Cherry broke in, her perfectly modulated pitch reigning over the rattling lyre while Professor Iskira Neetkins and her husband James burst through a door at the end of the expressway and grabbed ray-pistols from an adjacent security-case. Eager youngsters swarmed the dancefloor, skirts swished, feet switched, and opening shots from the scientists’ gun-barrels flew clean and fast and level like the words Cherry fired forth. The two alien girls merrily struck up their vocalizations again, and as wholesome young couples twirled and laughed a somewhat less respectable duo cartwheeled clear of the ray-beams and maintained their fearsome head-on advance, James and Iskira backing off still shooting, and Cherry relenting no less. The music cut to a breakdown. With the heel of her hand the pink-haired girl vigorously chorded the lyre, and as both her friends clapped along in time Schiss-Zazz closed the distance between himself and James and drove the latter into the wall behind. Clutching the Doctor’s throat leering Schiss-Zazz drew back his other fist and the lethal blades that glinted thereon.

La-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la, la, la-la, la-la,

Iskira ducked under Magnolia’s razor-sharp hook, then dropped her pistol to grasp the girl’s rope and with all the strength in her arms heave her bodily into her reprobate beau seconds before he could deliver the murderous plunge. Schiss-Zazz and Magnolia tumbled crashing together to the corridor floor a great jumble of naked or nylon legs.

Take me, baby, on a dark-matter date…

Cherry span out the question, the interlopers scrambled back to their feet, the pink-haired girl hit the turnaround and musicians and dancers and combatants alike surged for the big finish. Magnolia and Schiss-Zazz, now on the opposite side of Iskira and James, hurtled on at their original objective while hunkering low to evade renewed volleys zinging in pursuit. Gaining the gantry’s rail they bounded over it as one, somersaulted to the launch-pad below, scattered a last few spongy technicians and next second were aboard the nearest unoccupied battle-cruiser, revving its engines to an imminent crescendo.

La-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la, la, la-la, la-la,

Take me, baby, on a dark-matter date!

Amid closing melodious clangs from the lyre James and Iskira skidded to rest too late at the launch-pad’s edge, witnesses to a stolen ship’s rowdy afterburners roaring off into star-splashed void. Then the girl behind the guitar beamed out her triumph with cheeks as pink as her locks, and the only noise remaining was the dancefloor’s applause.

As soon as the misappropriated cruiser was safely outside Grindotron’s radar it opened its pod-bay doors for a tiny shuttlecraft piloted by the third member of Magnolia and Schiss-Zazz’s subdivision. This one soon had the humanoids hard at work, disabling homing-devices and relooping surveillance monitors all throughout the servo-systems of which he, as a Grindo, possessed a passable working knowledge.

“Those wires need to be severed there, don’t forget,” fussed Big Grin, his small squashy self wobbling bossily between the two open maintenance-panels. “And Schiss-Zazz, bio-scan recorder there to your right if you please, unless of course you’d like the fleet to be onto us the very minute we join their formation.”

Schiss-Zazz smashed his steel points into the recorder in a manner that suggested he could just as easily have done the same to Big Grin’s toothy face.

“Ah, mindless aggression,” the Grindo pronounced, striving for loftiness though his hue had dropped several shades. “It doesn’t surprise me, Schiss-Zazz, from one whose reason for existence seems to amount to little more than slashing and kicking. I will admit I’m somewhat saddened by the bigotry your kind ever displays towards functionally defenceless races such as mine, but not surprised.”

“We’ve met brave and capable Grindoes,” Magnolia commented archly. “Don’t misinterpret it as racial prejudice.”

Big Grin wished his armoured suit wasn’t still recharging after his overzealous deployment of its power-cells at Target Harbour, so he could show the pair of them functionally defenceless. “I’ve proved my worth,” he spat back at Magnolia. “As my species was doing long before the likes of you showed up. Were it not for me Phoenix Prime wouldn’t even have a plan, let alone one that’s going ahead tonight.”

“Yes, you’re the pride of your people,” Magnolia sneered. “A first-rate traitor and an adequate pen-pal.”

There was some substance to each verbal duellist’s partiality, for the tumult rife this evening on Xandreth Rings and Grindotron owed itself in large part to Big Grin’s having kept in touch with other members of Scientooth’s Grindo spy network who unlike himself had not thus far panicked and broken cover. It was one of these fellow turncoats who intercepted and shared with Big Grin a top-secret memorandum transmitted from laboratory to war office, which ran:

Can confirm zero Toothfire involvement re: farn rescue. From information received have determined beyond doubt Vernderernders physically unable to broach binary planet star-system at destination. Cannot elaborate on reason for this as all related data strictly classified, but rest assured. Prof.

Strictly classified and irrelevant too, as far as one faction was concerned. All Phoenix Prime had needed to know was that there were twin worlds where Vernderernders feared to tread. Her scheme to spring Scientooth hinged on locating just such a refuge from the latter’s Toothfire captors, and here was one that seemed tailor-made, provided she and the rag-tag assemblage that rallied round her acted now.

“Just do your jobs,” Big Grin commanded Magnolia and Schiss-Zazz, in what was supposed to be a clipped authoritative tone. “We want the Alliance battleships to detect nothing untoward about this vessel while we’re hiding in plain sight among them to get to our new staging-ground. That depends on you disabling these instruments before the others arrive, which should be soon enough, always assuming there’ve been no hitches at Phoenix Prime’s end…”

NEXT: 'CENTRE OF MY COSMOS'