Issues, Chapter Three

There was no beam, no line of colour nor electrical crackle bridging the short interplanetary gulf between Drenthis and her twin. Scientooth’s aesthetic had always tended more towards the Biblical. Sunshine and a lazy blue ocean fumed and plunged to purple-black sky-mountains illumining red, as torrential deluges drove down on the turbid waves and lashed Grindopolis’s skyscraper walls. In the promenades of the island city, colonials making purchases or sightseeing or merely talking to each other were drenched between breaths, and seaside recreation was supplanted by mass scrambles to seek shelter from the instantaneous tempest. Then out of the depths beneath Big Grin’s bullseye a body of mind-boggling broadness broke the roiling roof, distance and climatic conditions obscuring from shore any details besides its awesome span. Three more heartbeats of monsoon however and the thing surfaced again, leagues nearer, showing itself for some sort of armour-plated manta ray built like a good-sized sandbar. Atop harbour battlements or flood-defence banks those few Grindo observers who had not yet retreated from the heavens’ inundation stayed just long enough register as much, then fled hopping and wobbling the way of their frenzied fellows.

They were halfway to cover when Grindopolis shook, scattering its citizenry across the open street like so many stray mercury-droplets. The leviathan had leapt and flung itself against the foundations. Lightning hollowed out the churning clouds, and when it did, the mighty creature’s overlapping shell-segments fluctuated from chitonous opacity to the same celestial shade. It was only half-there, a prehistoric energy-phantom raised from long slumbers under the seabed. No true ghost however could have packed such a wallop. Diving so its wingtips clove the dark fathoms-deep it came about, spectral echoes of eons-gone instincts urging it to a second and yet more devastating strike.

As the swift hunter closed the gap between itself and its powerless prey, others unbeknownst to it were racing against that same deadly consummation. “I’ll admit we wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you,” said Flashtease to Phoenix Prime, who was flying abreast of his hurtling hot-rod with her fire-wings hissing in the rain. “Not that I’m absolutely convinced this team-up’s a good idea, you having kidnapped Joe and tricked Petunia and all,” he added, with a protective glance at the girl beside him sitting on the knee of a boy in rubber pants. “But showing us to that old Toothfire engine-pool so we could patch up our vehicles is just the sort of thing that might win me round.”

“Wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on saving a people from whom we recently escaped arrest,” Phoenix Prime replied, a wry smile on her face. The Four Heroes’ cause and her own sense of humour were two fields in which she was still finding her feet, but she was determined that if she failed at either, it wasn’t going to be for want of trying.

The sea-beast’s jump this time carried it past the pilings, that its whipping tail and bony shoulder cracked building-facades into plummeting rubble. Within the same engine-throb however Mini-Flash Splitsville broached Grindopolitan airspace, her souped-up space-rod’s triple carburettor roaring out high-octane song. Standing in her seat the silver-haired girl threw both arms wide, and over her head as she barrelled by reality itself unzipped. Into this rift the first payload of boulders plunged and disappeared, to fly out again from another fissure far-off and administer a rattling retaliation on the monster’s carapace before descending with their target into the deep.

Numerous Grindoes were in free-fall as the truncated towers continued their collapse. Flashshadow slipped sliently from Splitsville’s passenger-side, not needing to open the car door, and joined the wailing ones while her friend with a series of nifty handbrake turns caught as many as she could on her seat-cushions. Those she missed, Flashshadow plucked up handfuls of as she glided groundwards, and when her dainty fingers were stretched to their limits from rolls of Grindo-fat she scissored the last survivors between her silken thighs and squeezed them there safe. Though gravity acted on the misty Mini-Flash as it did everything else, physical contact with her was somehow a passport to landing unhurt. When her toes touched pavement it was far more lightly than those of a girl playing hopscotch would have done. The last of the landslide was seconds away from an impact destined to sustain no such comparison, but Flashshadow knelt at once with her charges while sweeping up in the same embrace any other stragglers on the street. It was easy enough for her to make sure even such a huge huddle was properly packed together as one, since everybody in it but she was a sponge. When the rocks slammed and hammered to rest Flashshadow and her quivering clutch vanished from view, but no sooner than that did the Mini-Flash stride intangibly out of the deadfall, a bulging burden of grateful Grindoes borne before her. These she set down and they scattered to the corners of the windswept square as an armful of party-balloons might have done.

Mini-Flash Splitsville swooped to reunite the Special Program sorority of two, while Flashtease in his own space-racer set sights on the swirling stretch beyond land. “Now, Dacks,” he said extremely warily, turning to the boy by his side. “You’re going to need those driving-lessons I gave you. I’m not asking for Disqualification Tablet, just a slight improvement on last time. Think you can manage that?”

Dacks yooped out some kind of half-hysterical confirmation, so Flashtease duly vacated his seat via a handstand atop the windshield and flipped over to finish crouching on the hood. The younger boy shuffled his rubber pants behind the wheel and gulping took a grip, while Petunia with an expression of great seriousness planted both hands and a cheek upon those parts of her disciple where she felt they would bring the most encouragement. Out amid the downpour, Phoenix Prime and Flashtease looked to each other.

“Let’s do it!” he cried.

The antediluvian avenger burst forth again. Flashtease, taking a run-up along the racer’s apron, hurled himself past its radiator and next second had become an incandescent pinwheel from whose scintillating circumference the storm was sent spinning. This shooting-star collided with an incoming world and rebounded like a ball from its crust, which in the aftershock spluttered to and fro between grainy substance and ectoplasmic luminosity. Then as Flashtease unfolded and came to rest feet-first on the prow of his hot-rod again, Phoenix Prime followed suit. So methodical and precise were her flame-bolts that they seemed to dart obliquely in and out of the slanting torrents, until rapid successive nudges achieved what a head-on barrage would have failed to do. Buckling from its skyward sortie the gargantuan bellied into the brine, that the only ill-effect meted out on Grindopolis was a soaking afresh from a tremendous tide of spray.

“I said nothing so melodramatic,” Scientooth told Big Grin scornfully. “You watch too many movies.”

That notwithstanding, the struggles of Joe’s associates nevertheless looked for all the world like a watchable supporting feature, arrayed as they were on monitor-screens which glowed around and above the reprobate Grindo’s standpoint. “What the heck kind of weapon is that?” Carmilla cried.

“It is an etherium actualizor,” explained Scientooth. “And you witness but a fraction of its potential.”

Without warning, eldritch conjurations blasted Big Grin clear of his operations platform. The blackness of an adjoining tunnel-mouth parted as Prince Agaric rematerialised. He was not alone.

“I am as good as my word when lackeys are to be dealt with,” commented the fungal heir.

“OK, guys, as we say on my planet, time out!” declared Carmilla. “I’m all for keeping the galaxy alive. But even if your machine’s the only thing that can do that, you’re still talking about The Back Garden coming out on top of everyone who’s left! My family and friends are Alliance. You can’t expect me to write them off as acceptable losses! And you can’t expect me to join you when all you’re really after is conquest and revenge. Not while there’s one interpretation of The Four Heroes’ cause still doing the rounds of your whole demented quadrant!”

Prince Agaric was smiling again.

“In that, female, I fear,” proceeded his most musical utterance yet, “you speak but for yourself.”

“You must listen to him, Carmilla,” a far more familiar voice then said.

From out of the shadows stepped Joe. With him was Neetra. For the first time in what felt an age Carmilla stared on the little sister she loved, brought before her under the very last circumstances our heroine could possibly have reckoned on.

“He’s right,” Neetra said to Camilla gently. “This is the only way.”

So held the tortured tableau, and unto its deathly and absolute hush, Prince Agaric began to laugh.

“Is it not exquisite?” he pronounced, addressing Blaster-Track Commander who like Carmilla gazed aghast at his one-time friends. “In opportunistically granting me mercy you sought to preserve a love between siblings, only for your deed to sunder that same love forevermore!”

“And that is but the beginning of what you wrought,” concluded Scientooth. “My weapon, Commander, and the powers of not one but two of The Four Heroes at our disposal? We shall be unstoppable. Behold, then, the final downfall of the Alliance, and the commencement of our thousand-year dominion over the galaxy!”

END OF CHAPTER THREE