Daughters

Blaster-Track Commander wearily raised his head, not registering at first that what he had heard was the sound of the cell door opening. Suddenly several pairs of gentle hands were upon him, carefully helping his cramped strengthless body out of its miserable home these last months and onto the surface of what was no more than a remote asteroid with a hollow gored into it. The wonder of it all was compounded when Blaster-Track Commander, blinking in the starlight that had replaced the dark, saw who was in charge of the nine short-skirted Mini-Flashes surrounding him.

“Friend Neetra?” The Commander breathed in disbelief. “You...here?”

“Actually I’m going by Li these days,” Neetra informed him, her beauty illuminated by the purest happiness suffusing her features. “But I’m so glad you’re still alive. When we learned what Dimension Borg had done to you all that time ago, I hardly dared hope...”

“That vile doppelganger he replaced me with,” Blaster-Track Commander agreed grimly. “The one reason I was allowed to survive, should Dimension Borg require more of them. And what diabolical doings must that creature have carried out in my name by now, what deeds of twisted depravity to beggar the wildest imagination?”

“You’d have to ask my sister,” was Neetra’s response. “But for now, Commander, just try to rest, and – ”

“Boss,” a weak synthesized voice then said.

Trundling limply through the bare knee-booted legs was the miniature red jeep named Blaster-Track. He was still not fully recovered from the injuries dealt him by the Solidity, but had nevertheless quit the medical bay on the Mini-Flashes’ ship the moment he learned there was a chance of seeing his lifelong companion again.

That one rushed to Blaster-Track now, and went down on one knee before his fender. The jeep rose up on his rear wheels and touched his radiator to Blaster-Track Commander’s forehead, in which posture they remained without speaking for some time. Neetra and the Mini-Flashes, smiling, politely averted their eyes.

Then, as if they had never been separated at all, Blaster-Track jetted from the rocky floor and the other bounded into an upright stance atop him in one single fluid motion. Though the Commander’s green breeches were faded and his purple cloak hung in rags, there was no doubt in any of the nine who beheld them that the galaxy’s oldest and most dynamic duo was back with a vengeance. Looking down to Neetra, Blaster-Track Commander continued:

“How can we ever thank you?”

“By finding the rest of your team,” Neetra told him firmly. “The one who did this to you is gone, but your galaxy’s in turmoil because of it. You and the jeeps are going to be needed more than ever...especially if my Flash Club and I fail in what I’ve got planned.”

The Commander acknowledged this with a salute, at which he and his faithful Blaster-Track streaked away to the stars.

“Share happy time!” beamed Mini-Flash Luna, who was very much in her element on occasions like this. “Hope it will be better and better. Day day up!”

“Spoken just like a naïve neophyte,” declared Flashthunder, whose total scores at training were about a billion points below Mini-Flash Luna’s. “But Li, I think I speak for everyone else here when I say I’m absolutely terrified about the plan you mentioned just now.”

“I don’t blame you, Flashthunder,” Neetra replied seriously. “With Dimension Borg destroyed and the Solidity’s main fighting force a universe away at Planet Earth, the balance of power in this quadrant is shifting fast. The Flash Club – which is to say, our Flash Club – needs to emerge a major player in the outcome. That looks to me like the only chance we’ve got of using the secrets we’ve learned about the prophecy to somehow prove the thing wrong, and save this galaxy along with mine!”

Neetra’s twin sister, who went by the name of Phoenix Prime, was potentially seconds away from death. Pointing at her from the other side of the derelict hotel ballroom was a tachyon engine, capable of reducing her to a puddle of protoplasm with one squeeze of its trigger, and Phoenix Prime’s clone was the one taking aim. Neetra’s clone 4-H-N and the man who had made all four of these identical girls, Dr. James Neetkins, were looking on with expressions of frozen horror. The only one there who was loyal to Phoenix Prime, Kral-it-Gor, was likewise standing motionless like the stone man he was, knowing that for all his strength he had nothing like the speed to avert this disaster. In the corner of the room Dylan Cook of The Four Heroes, suspended upright but unconscious in the luminous fluid of a life-support tube, completed the tableau.

“Going to kill me, Phoenix?” inquired Phoenix Prime. Her voice was not panicked, but nor did she speak with any trace of irony or mockery. It was clear she quite accepted that the outcome to which she referred may come about.

“It is ‘Phoenix’ now? Not ‘clone?’” the other threw back in an iron voice. “Is zis improved etiquette a part of your miraculous conversion to ze side of good? Or is it merely because our roles ’ave been reversed, and now I am ze one who means to take your life?”

The nozzle of the tachyon engine jerked as if Phoenix were tightening her grip on the handpiece. 4-H-N and James hardly dared breathe.

For the latter, even the desperate urgency of this situation could not prevent his thoughts from flying to the grander scheme of things. James had known his daughter Phoenix Prime only for a matter of months, during which she had operated as a dangerous enemy to his family and The Four Heroes. Meanwhile he had enjoyed years of loving parental relations towards that daughter’s clone, Phoenix, who he had come to regard as his child even knowing in truth she was not. Now however, all James could do was remember that long-ago autumn of Iskira’s second pregnancy, and the pride and excitement they had shared, and his unutterable joy on that golden morning in the castle bedroom when he saw his newborn twin girls before him. And a life-form who had not existed then, an artificial being James and Iskira had subsequently created through science, here stood on the verge of taking away from him forever one of the children around whom these happy memories constellated.

It was all his doing. James knew it was. Though his feet remained rooted to the spot, his lips had started to move and were whispering a prayer that only he could hear:

“No’ like this. Please, no’ like this. It’s my fault, so make it my life, do whate’er ye like tae me...but please, please, dinnae punish me through them!”

Phoenix gritted her teeth.

“Do you think I care what you wished to do to me?” she snarled at Phoenix Prime. “But for destroying Dylan’s life, what othair fate could you deserve? You shattered our ’appiness, ruined our chance of a future togethair...!”

It was 4-H-N who spoke in response to this.

“Yes, she did, Phoenix,” she softly told her fellow clone. “And ask yourself what Dylan would do right now. What would he want you to do?”

The question hung in silence for another endless second. Then, with a sob, Phoenix lowered her weapon and began to cry.

James and 4-H-N gave vent to their relief in heavy sighs, and perhaps Kral-it-Gor felt as they did behind his unchanging rocky visage. Their reactions, however, could not compare with Phoenix Prime’s. She looked utterly bewildered, as if she lacked the faculties to make sense of what had transpired before her eyes.

James strode to her and gripped her forcibly by the arms.

“Surprised, are ye?” he cried, not in anger but in the most heightened emotion. “Aye, maybe because ye’ve made yuirself believe all these years in what ye’ve been spouting, that ye and yuir clanes are no’ alike! Didn’t think she’d be capable o’ compassion, did ye? Ye’ve convinced yuirself ye’re better than them. Ye think yuir the ainly one wha can feel!”

He turned his daughter roughly about, so her gaze was on the tears of her clone.

“Look at her!” James commanded. “Look at her humanity! Look at what ye’ve refused tae see! And let that be yuir first lesson!”

Phoenix, bringing her weeping under control, unstrapped the tachyon engine from her back and kicked it aside. “If we are to work as a team, zen no single one of us is to ’old ze threat of death ovair anothair,” she declared, pinning Phoenix Prime with her stare. “I make ze first gesture towards zat.”

Phoenix Prime closed her eyes and nodded. “Understood,” she said in a quiet voice.

“Then if we’re decided, let’s get going – we dinnae ken how long we’ve got,” announced James, crossing to Dylan. With the pull of a lever the glass tank descended pneumatically into an horizontal position, while caterpillar-treads deployed from the lower fuselage to facilitate all-terrain travel.

“We cannae leave him here, no’ wi’ the Solidity’s invasion due any minute,” James explained. “What’s more, something tells me that even wi’ oor formula fuir unsealing the caves, we willane get far wi’oot the laddie. The Four Heroes were the ainly ones ever able tae communicate directly wi’ their cause. My guess would be that despite his condition, we’re still going tae need Dylan tae get where we’ve got tae be.”

“Makes sense,” said 4-H-N, as she and the obedient Kral-it-Gor busily started loading up their equipment into the life-support apparatus’s storage compartments. “But the sooner we get to the caves the better, because – ”

Suddenly an explosion rocked the night, trembling the hotel’s frail foundations. The party hastened to the window.

As they beheld together what was out there, 4-H-N began tonelessly to James:

“You know what you were just saying, Dad, about not knowing how long we’ve got...?”

NEXT: 'THE TROJAN HORSE'