Incoming, Chapter Four

It began with a spatial misalignment crackling its disturbances across the empty cosmos. Some deployment undreamt of by man was making it possible for one object to simultaneously exist on opposite sides of the universe. The thing itself was a flat oblong of metal too vast to have been constructed on-planet, suspended vertically amid the stars, and perforated once with a circular hole. From out of this aperture shapes began to fly like missiles. They were Vernderernders, robots of the same breed as Neetra’s travelling-companion Vern, each identical individual riding the fiery exhaust of his twin throbbing tailpipes with gears and radials locked for flight. Glinting talons were upraised, rodlike necks extended the die-straight line of the body, and orbicular beaked heads thrust themselves horizontally onward. These, half-vulture and half-motorcycle, were the Lords of Toothfire. And their numbers were legion.

On the nearest planet, which was Mars, six humans stood atop the last of a range of high crimson dunes beside an exhausted all-terrain vehicle. Outspread below them were the spires and domes of the Martian Capital City. Iskira, Dr. Mendelssohn, Bret, Amy, Max and Bendigo had made it through the desert, just around the time strange lights began to flicker and flare in the starry heavens above their heads.

Half of the party had previously witnessed the Solidity armada’s appearance in similar fashion, so were apprehensive. Bret Stevens however was smiling.

“You should be very proud of your little girl right now, Professor,” he told Iskira.

All at once the scientist-mother was more beautiful than she had ever been, hope and wonder shining from her face. “My small Neetra?” she cried. “The author of this was she?”

“I wouldn’t even have needed my psychic powers,” chuckled Bret. “Her trademark’s all over it. I was The Four Heroes’ keen-edged sword, and she was the sledgehammer!”

Down upon Earth’s blue-green disc streamed the Vernderernders in a single flock. The Solidity ships, parked in orbit with weapons pointing planetward for the purposes of their strategy, had not been anticipating attack from behind. Before there was time to adjust targeting-scopes the hordes had already sped by and were screaming into the stratosphere. As galactic void thickened to slipstream and clouds and sunlight the dreadful din of Toothfire’s advance began to swell, a million engine-cylinders roaring out Wagnerian song.

Both home and visiting factions heard before they saw. At the Future Fighter breach, not far from the army camp, heads turned skyward for a moment and then differences were swiftly put aside, as Earthlings and Solidity scattered to a man.

Heedless of their consternation the Vernderernder column swerved smoothly underneath the temporo-psionic flux-ball and ploughed through Nottingham City Centre’s airspace. The dust of war was a sandstorm beneath those closest to the pavement, as bladed claws tore paths through the ether and scraped whirling trails behind. Hundreds of feet above, seven Mini-Flashes wearing lightning-bolt tunics like Flashtease’s each clung with thighs and fingertips to his or her steed while the square summits of skyscrapers rushed by in breathtaking rote. There were five neophytes and two senior boys, and the youngest of all, tiny Mini-Flash Luna on point with eyes alive, screeched to this brave new world:

“Steel in the hour of chaos!”

The destination loomed. A gargantuan perpendicular pillar of monster-plants, it was Back Garden vegetation usurping Earth-soil on a potentially apocalyptic scale. Inside the hovering mothership from which this nightmare agglomeration grew, hideous Empress Ungus whipped her stringy neck to see.

“Vernderernders?” she flung out, while her many assembled children glowered in fungal foreboding likewise. “Toothfire is here?”

Then the first of the Valkyries struck, and Ungus’s next vocalization shrilled and wracked its way up from the blackest depths of her being. Organically fused to the spacecraft and the giant tendrils depending from it, this mistress of all she surveyed was consequently subject to every physical sensation attendant on razor appendages carving through vine-flesh at a ballistic pace. In an instant the Empress’s tangled heap of a body was prone on the floor to which it was rooted, her twenty-fingered fists thrashing and pounding in helpless throes, while the wide-gaping cavernous mouth vented ghastlier ululations still.

Vernderernders, methodical machines all, were no uncoordinated plague of locusts but a veritable tribute to automated efficiency. Starting at the foot of the tower they proceeded in file to ascend in a spiral, slicing and slashing and winnowing its height with the speed and savagery on which Toothfire’s reputation was built. It was as if a sudden freak storm had broken in Nottingham’s town square and over a radius of a mile or two around it, its gale-force gusts the dispersing turbulence of a Vernderernder whirlwind and its hailstones enormous shreds of hard dark-green mushroom-bark smashing through office windows and accosting the street like boulders, or, if they impacted on the side that had previously faced inward, adhering gooily to facades and road. Then, once the ever-rising onslaught had stripped away skin and tendons to dig down to the veins beneath, flash-floods of opaque yellow sap spurted in diagonal geysers and daubed the landscape, plastering the fan-patterns of their trajectory over a dozen buildings at once or hammering down into the canyons, where cars and other debris were washed away as by a tide. The Vernderernders were like a circular saw with the edge facing inward, and Solidity soldiers all along the battlefield or watching from orbit via electronic monitors stared on desperate defeat as the very lynchpin of their campaign turned to shavings and mulch before their eyes. Earth-troops for their part were no more inclined than the invaders to continue fighting on the same terms as before, now that this fearsome visitation of unknown mechanical marauders had made its presence felt. Thus erstwhile enemies were suddenly united in seeking escape by the quickest achievable route, and allowing the awesome devastation wrought by Toothfire to play itself out how it may.

The Mini-Flashes had leapt from their mounts for a convenient rooftop just ahead of the operation getting underway in earnest, and made touchdown in a succession of somersaults and a minor kaleidoscope of underwear. Now the seven of them were looking out together on their allies’ work.

“Good old Neetra, doesn’t mess around when it comes to planning an attack,” commented Mini-Flash Socket, his voice an even mixture of admiration and horror. “She’s some girl!”

“Terrifying,” Flashthunder agreed seriously. “No matter what situation you found her in.”

“Yeah, how you made it out of that bedroom in one piece I’ll never know,” remarked Mini-Flash Bloomer, not unkindly.

Flashlight seemed barely able to contain his enthusiasm. In a characteristic gesture he plonked his hands on his short-skirted hips.

“Here we are at last,” declared the Mini-Flash. “Neetra’s homeworld, and the very city where I’ve every confidence we’ll find old Flashtease safe and sound, if I know him as well as I think I do. After hearing so much about it, we’re finally there. Earth!”

So saying Flashlight drank in his surroundings, from the intergalactic war concluding amid the city streets, to the encirclement of multicoloured robots ringing the horizon, to the whirling Vernderernders vivisecting what remained of Empress Ungus’s colossal concoction.

“Quite a lot like home, isn’t it?” he observed.

Gala, having reached an expanse of craggy waste some distance remote from the three combatants, stumbled and sank to her knees. She was still drained after her ordeal, and could go no further. Onto the gravel directly ahead she set the baby on his back.

Joe had cited precedent, drawn from one of his many Four Heroes adventures, of a son whose despotic course through life had changed when his mother resolved to show the love she had denied him in the unaltered timeline. On this Joe based his argument that he and Gala, through rearing their own son correctly, might yet avert the fate which more than one prophecy had assigned to him.

It was not that Gala disbelieved Joe’s story. It was merely that she had already made her choice.

With one hand she picked up a rock, and raised it above the baby’s head.

When Gala’s poor parents had looked on her at no greater an age than her child was now, they did so in the blind trusting belief of the oppressed that this extraordinary birth would lead to extraordinary deeds, and that the world they lived in would be unrecognizably different when the baby before them was grown. Gala’s not wholly dissimilar beliefs regarding their grandson bore the authority of pen and ink, rather than that of folk religion. How far there were other differences she was unable to say. Many were the examples Gala had personally witnessed of The Prophecy of the Flame’s power to accurately predict future events, but her faith in it was not absolute. Indeed, she and Joe were in agreement insofar as both saw direct parental action as a means of putting the lie to what was anticipated. Only in the question of what form the action should take did their opinions diverge.

The baby, seeming to know the face in view as that of his mother, bared his boneless gums and smiled at her. Restful and contented the infant Harbin lay, little guessing the one he so implicitly trusted was seconds from dashing out his brains.

“Not so fast, Lady Macbeth,” said a voice.

Gala looked up. Neetra stood before her.

NEXT: 'LILITH'