Lilith, Chapter Three

The bleak star had become visible in Nottingham’s heavens. It filled the sky. Earthlings and Solidity were side-by-side, any fighting forgotten now as they gazed wordlessly to a man. Even the Vernderernders of Toothfire had no illusions about eliminating this threat through their usual means, so hunched on the summits of buildings like the vultures they resembled and merely watched. A hush fell across the land as preternatural night began.

Solar-systems away on Planet Eshcaton, four elderly sages witnessed the same scene via their mystic viewing-portal. The shrine in which they stood was holiest among all sacred places in the quadrant from which the Solidity hailed, but over the last fleeting minutes millions of that sector’s sons had joined the ranks of those who would never look on the temple again.

“I have lived too long,” murmured Albazorascabaranthi.

Overhead a colony made up of multitudes circled in Eshcaton’s ozone layer. These masses likewise looked on from the roofs of their starships as tele-transmissions and holo-projections relayed what were surely the dying moments of Planet Earth. As on that world, here too peace-loving protestors had attempted to oppose the war through passive resistance. Now their darkest dread was manifest before them. Here was the reason they had made their stand, and been called cowards and traitors for it. Yet all this community had seen, where so many others of their people could not, was that those who made deals with devils only ever received the rewards that were to be expected.

Thus the compassionate creatures of innumerable different zones huddled together in the awful light of their viewscreens, awaiting an atrocity they were powerless to avert. Speechless with foreboding as they were however, still nobody heard the footsteps of the one and only resident in motion.

That was because the feet were Flashshadow’s, and her physical presence was so slight that she made no noise when she walked. But walking she was, steadily along space-freighter fuselage. Earth was not the only spot at this stricken time that boasted a musical troupe with nothing to do. Cherry the singer, her female alien backing-vocalists, a six-armed insectile bassist and a robot drummer were staring wordlessly out upon growing darkness in identical fashion to the human band of Nottingham.

Flashshadow drew to a halt beside her friends, took out her lyre, and softly began to play.

Cherry knew the tune at once. It was a far cry from the pop music preferred by such members of the younger generation, but even so, this song no citizen of that galaxy could have failed to recognize. Within the bars and chords strumming from Flashshadow’s strings was power to stir hearts across the diverse spectrum of age, origin and species. It was a song that belonged to every childhood, every living memory, and every conception of every era farther back along the quadrant’s immeasurable chronological span.

When that most ancient of galaxies first discovered the secret of interplanetary flight, rudimentary trade-routes began to be forged between worlds that had hitherto been isolated and unreachable. Those earliest engines of space-travel, prehistoric fuel-cores housed in the hugest hulks of rust and iron and oil, ponderously chugged long lonely courses across expanses which today would be called infinitesimal. But back then the distances between the stars had been fenland lanes on a gloomy November morn, winding their way through barren fields swathed in fog, where dark hedgerows all a-glitter with dewdrops bulked silently and dropped away through the endless white. These empty rambling tracks, spanning still near-impossible distances between the paltriest clutch of inhabited planets, dotted here and there by a few scattered stations and outposts, were as yet all that was known of the universe. It was beyond the dreams of any life-form what these primitive beginnings would lead to. The whole of the adventure, all the infinite marvels that that galaxy would one day see and play host to, lay somewhere out there in the fog. And those first spacefarers had sung a song as they trawled, a pioneer psalm to keep spirits alive on interminable voyages along the great unknown, their upraised voices the first to be heard by eternity. This was the song Flashshadow was playing, and which Cherry, arising with microphone in hand, began to sing.

Behind us, home and moons and sun, and all those we hold dear;

By the next line, everyone within earshot had taken up the familiar old refrain. Accompanied by nothing more than Flashshadow’s gentle rhythms, one girl’s voice had become a choir:

The spaceway’s course is long to run, but we face it without fear;

And in no time at all, the length and breadth of the commune was belting it out as one. From the open-air convocation above, all the way to the quartet of wisemen below, Eshcaton and outer space resounded. It was understandable enough that now of all times, this sad murmurous melody from long ago should have jerked tears. But despite this the singers stayed strong. Here was their resistance. Here was the one defiant act within their power. These changing times with their ominous prophecies and war with Planet Earth had already made the olden days feel at a considerable remove, even before this impending evil which would shame the galaxy forever. Soon perhaps the song would be the last place in which survived all that this people stood for, and all of which they had been proud. If this then was the end, they would sing even unto the moment it came.

Destination-lights will blaze, through the dark in future days;

The Solidity soldiers stranded in Nottingham were of a like mind. At the moment of grimmest crisis they too had cast back along their heritage and concluded there was nothing left for them but to launch into that same song. Now the City Centre and Planet Eshcaton were truly united, one anthem rising from both. Earth’s troopers, who did not know the words but were mindful of the sentiment, had fallen respectfully silent to listen as their extraterrestrial counterparts carried it forth:

And then we’ll utter thankful praise, as journey’s end draws near.

Even in the dungeons beneath ruinous Nottingham Castle, the song was to be heard. Staffing shortages among that city’s defenders had necessitated moving three Solidity prisoners to a single cell, for safer observation by the teenage guards Lisa and Guy. Now behind those bars Lutts Form, a grown man, and the little girl who was his fellow inmate were sitting cross-legged on the stone-flagged floor, holding hands. Each was resting his or her other palm on one of the giant pincers of Mile Hunts, a lobsterlike cyborg monstrosity, and their three voices were rendering the hymn together.

The high-school students watched. “We were wrong about them, Guy,” declared Lisa through her tears. “They’re no different to us. How could we have been so wrong?”

Then she broke down, and it was all Guy could do to take his classmate in his arms and hold her close to him. Looking helplessly up from Lisa’s lowered head to one of the narrow arched windows by the ceiling, the boy beheld a black sky outside and armageddon’s glow stretching from horizon to horizon. There was no hope as far as Guy was able to see. And yet the song went on, echoing from the city streets and all the way back to the heart of the galaxy its choristers called home, speaking perhaps of the one kind of hope that no-one was ever required or compelled to abandon.

Behind us, home and moons and sun, and all those we hold dear;

The spaceway’s course is long to run, but we face it without fear;

Destination-lights will blaze , through the dark in future days;

And then we’ll utter thankful praise, as journey’s end draws near.

In the caves under Nottingham’s mantle, Dylan Cook of The Four Heroes had risen from his coma in an all-knowing spectral form made up of sunset light. For some time now he had been staring in the direction of the sky, seeing it clearly through the rocky roof above and assessing the situation that his small group of companions as yet knew nothing of. Now he looked back to them.

“Get to the surface, guys,” Dylan instructed at last. “Kumiko, D’Carthage, I’m counting on you to use your fighting skills to keep the others safe. And take me with you – my physical body, I mean,” he went on, indicating the mobile life-support unit wherein his mortal iteration still slept. “After I’m gone from the caves, the version of me you’re talking to won’t last long. But I’ll have power enough to do what’s got to be done.”

“We’re on our way,” replied Kumiko, but her voice was quiet, and her large liquid eyes lingered on he to whom she spoke. That one did not need the sum total of knowledge to understand how she was feeling.

“You’ll see me again, Kumiko,” Dylan reassured the girl who loved him. “In fact, that’s part of it. When I fade away, so too will all the accumulated wisdom coming to me through the cause. So there’s one more thing I need to tell you while I still can.”

Though Dylan continued to include Kumiko and his other friends, he was now first and foremost addressing Dr. James Neetkins.

“There is a cure,” the golden one announced. “I don’t say that for my sake, but Phoenix Prime’s. I know everything, Doctor, so I know how bad your daughter feels about what she did to me. She’s desperate to make amends. And there’s a way for her to do that…not that it’ll be easy. I mean, when is it ever, with us?”

Dylan gave a good-natured laugh.

“It’s in the other galaxy,” he explained. “The one the Solidity and Flashtease and Blaster-Track and the Commander are from. Their advanced technology can save me. Tell Phoenix Prime. Now go.”

It was clear enough to all that the time had come for just that. As the friends fired up the life-support unit however and made all possible haste to hit the tunnels, 4-H-N could not help glancing back over her shoulder and adding: “Um, Dylan, you mentioned doing what’s got to be done…?”

He smiled.

“That old question, isn’t it?” our hero declared in the plainest of tones. “If we save Planet Earth, does that mean Harbin gets to use it as his intergalactic warship twenty years from now? Given everybody no end of trouble, that one. But now that it comes down to it, 4-H-N, it turns out there was nothing to agonize over at all. What’s got to be done is what The Four Heroes have always done. Protect innocent lives. Never give up on Nottingham and the world. And always fight for the chance of a brighter tomorrow.”

Those were the final words spoken in that cave, where Dylan presently was setting down to his task.

In the infinite knowledge which for this short time he still possessed, our hero pitied Empress Ungus. Although what she had done thus far was abominable, and although she intended to do worse, she nevertheless believed hers was the right way. Not that such plans could be allowed to reach fulfilment. Fortunately the caves were unsealed, and all the powers of The Four Heroes were at Dylan’s command, for never had there been such call for those powers as there was right now.

Even as the light of his sunset presence began to disappear, Dylan clenched both fists, tipped back his head, and closed his eyes.

Joe, alone on a forbidding far-off world. Bret, triumphantly entering the Martian Capital City alongside loved ones and those they had rescued. Dylan, rumbling through the caverns in his stasis-tank streetward-bound with his hurrying guardians. And Neetra, gradually recovering her strength while she cradled the infant Harbin in her arms.

Each of them stayed where they were, and in time would go back to how they were too. Such a feat as this could only be temporary. But the mysterious cause that had long guided and inspired that same quartet was such that when gravest need arose, miracles might happen. It was even possible that one hero, or for that matter four, should suddenly find it possible to be in two places at once.

Dylan, no longer composed of gilded luminescence, but a human being corporeal and conscious and combat-ready, stood atop the roof of Nottingham’s domed Town Hall.

Joe, Bret and Neetra were beside him. In their city’s darkest hour, The Four Heroes were reunited.

“Been a while,” observed Bret.

Neetra’s eyes flicked to the night-dark sky, where fumed the furnace of Empress Ungus’s orchestrations. “Not much has changed,” she remarked.

“Yep, looks like business as usual,” Dylan agreed.

Joe stepped to the edge of the roof. He ignited his fist in a burst of flame.

And in the square directly below, the human band struck up ‘Holding Out For A Hero.’

END OF CHAPTER THREE