Mars Rising, Chapter One

The crimson whiplashes of Dimension Borg’s eyebeams tore into the world.

Neetra threw herself aside, teleporting as she rolled to finish up a clear six feet from the deadly path of the rays. Dimension Borg, his great cuboid body still motionless but his computer-brain working and compensating at terrifying speed, swivelled his head. More flashes and sparks followed suit, scarlet from him and golden from her, such that for minutes on end a frenetic dance of light played across the viewing-gallery’s sandy floor while the ranks of unheeding time-portals continued to file in sedate sequence overhead. The girl was all reflexes and speed, the robot all merciless exacting precision. She scampered and skipped from spot to spot, refusing to let herself be targeted, and he was an entrenched battalion to which she could not draw near. Such a standoff had to end, and it did when Neetra, flitting unhurt out of the latest fusillade’s trajectory, was tagged through the flapping pleats of her short brown tunic. Skirt smoking from three round holes she skidded to a halt amid a small dust-cloud and threw both hands above her head.

“Hey!” Neetra yelled indignantly. “This isn’t even mine!”

He fired again and she dematerialized once more, this time in an upward direction, scaling into the cavern vaults through which the slow oval portals scrolled. Neetra knew Dimension Borg wouldn’t risk damaging his own paraphernalia. Perching herself high on the rocky wall, our heroine gripped telekinetically a window to some primordial planet and flung it with all her might at the robot below. He gave the incoming time-portal a single look, and it blinked out of existence before it was halfway there.

Neetra should have known better than to try and panic an emotionless mind into forgetting it had the power to close the portals at will. Then Dimension Borg turned her own trick against her by raising both pairs of pincers and bringing them together, to send a dozen portals bearing down upon her from every direction. It took all the psychic force Neetra could muster to meet them head-on, and her chest heaved with the concerted effort of pushing them back. The luminous ellipses flipped away, but the space thus disclosed was suddenly full of Dimension Borg’s razor-grille mouth and blazing red eyes.

He’s still got his short-range boot-jets, was Neetra’s one thought as she felt the steel pincers clamping down.

Then she was on her way to the gallery floor at a brutal rate, leaving her stomach where Dimension Borg was. Fighting the dizziness she forced herself to teleport and thereby nullify some of her momentum, so that the impact with which she hit the ground was not a fatal one. Our heroine bounced to her feet again and made for the cliff-face, taking a moment to smooth her tunic back down as she ran. Another burst of gold and she was out of sight, whilst Dimension Borg, single-minded and far quicker than might be expected for one of his bulk, landed and ploughed straight through the solid space-rock in pursuit.

Staying ahead, using her powers to flicker across the echoing expanses of steel and stone that made up this gigantic fortress, Neetra seemed to be looking for something. There was however no throwing Dimension Borg off her tail. Nothing but she in this whole citadel had body-warmth or a scent or a pounding heartbeat, and this meant she could not hope to stay hidden from the hunter’s sensor-suite. He tracked her every jump as she wafted from chamber to chamber and amended his course accordingly, making short work of any physical obstacle that happened to stand in his way. An ominous advancing chorus of crashes and booms was never far from Neetra’s hearing no matter what wing of Dimension Borg’s castle she was fluttering through, as if her host’s mechanical mind was bent only on ensuring she came to her end here.

They had both begun in a castle too. Neetra, like a lost princess in some fairytale, had been spirited away from its ramparts and raised an orphan on the streets of a faraway land, innocent as to her heritage but growing up beautiful and kind and good. Her parents meanwhile had played the lonely king and queen who, desperate to right the wrong they had done, turned to forces outside their world. They had not hesitated to make a pact with the wicked spirit, to release the genii from its bottle.

James and Iskira Neetkins could not have known, in the solitude of their empty castle, that they were setting in motion another convergence of the twain. For as their daughter at the distant orphanage grew, becoming sweeter and lovelier with each passing day, in the shadowy silence of their laboratory grew the other too.

Alien indeed, Neetra and Dimension Borg had seemed – seldom had two creatures been less alike. But the intimate welding of their later history could not be denied. Many times had their dissociate paths brought them together, often in battle, once in peace, and all of it leading to now. This was the august event of which they were twin halves. From this, only one of them would walk away.

For both came of the same mother, and she came of the Planet of War. It was as if war were the destiny Neetra and Dimension Borg had inherited from her, and which had united them since the very beginning.

This is their story.

Neetra appeared at last in the room she’d sought. It was Dimension Borg’s communications centre, lined from wall to wall with transmittor-terminals. Our heroine ran at the nearest one that boasted a chair and in a great bloom of skirt threw herself into it, sitting down with a bump. While the equipment was loading she took a quick survey of the damage to her borrowed tunic and pouted at what she saw.

“That’s just great,” Neetra grumbled. “Now after I’m done with this I’ll have Flashthunder to deal with!”

The communicator was active. Right away Neetra set her small fingers tapping and rattling across the keys, knowing she had very little time. While she typed she also accessed the viewing-gallery, patching the communicators though to its unique apparatus that allowed the chronal and reality barriers to be breached. This done, she summoned up her psychic powers and suffused them into the buzzing circuitry of the terminal, bestowing upon digital encryptions a potential to travel beyond the commonplace boundaries of wavelength and wire. It was no ordinary message Neetra beamed forth with a triumphant stabbing of her thumb at the send-button, and where it was bound, only she knew.

Our heroine reflected that this sort of thing was getting to be a habit, but Dimension Borg’s computer was telling her the transmission had been sent, and that was a plus. Now at least she had a slender chance of making it out of this alive.

The wall behind her cracked into flying boulders as her host arrived. Neetra barely had time to scramble out of her seat and untuck her underwear before a volley of eyebeams smashed into the communicator and it vanished in a ball of flame. The explosion ruffled the pleats of Neetra’s tunic and set her tresses billowing, but she held upright.

“A futile attempt, flesh-sister,” Dimension Borg declared. “Nobody can come to your aid in time.”

“If that’s so, then I’ll finish this alone,” was Neetra’s reply. “You’ve gone on long enough. No more last-minute escapes, no more brilliant contingency plans, no more returns from the dead. This is where you finally get what you deserve.”

“You crave human concept of justice,” said Dimension Borg, “but will achieve only your doom.”

“You still don’t understand!” Neetra shouted back. “The one thing that kept you functioning was what you knew about the Prophecy. Now you’ve told me it all. I’ll never think that much of the Next Four, but I was right with them when it came to wanting you gone long before now. All the lives you’ve taken, everything you’ve destroyed...and you exist because of me. I’m not having you on my conscience any more!”

“Words cannot prevail,” Dimension Borg growled, “and nor have you power enough.”

Neetra looked at him out of large eyes unblinking in the glow of the fire, as black shreds of chair and terminal drifted on vapour through the distance between them. “We’ll see,” was all she said.

Twin arcs of crimson radiated from Dimension Borg’s optics. In a twinkling Neetra disappeared, as the eyebeams flew again and pulverized the burning wreckage that remained.

A relentless gale began to whip through Neetra’s clothing and chill her bare skin as she reappeared outside the citadel. Far above to an incalculable height the megalithic construction towered, a dark vertical highway of rock and iron etched against endless blackness beyond. This fortress’s foundation was a craggy asteroid and it was here Neetra stood, not far from where she had parked the Four Heroes Ultimate Cycle. She ran to it, and turning her back on the citadel bent over and busied herself with one of the passenger compartments.

The double-doors of the castle entryway swished open. Dimension Borg was approaching fast along the windswept ledge.

“You delay the inevitable,” he thundered. “Run where you will, you cannot...”

Neetra whirled back around, and her right arm was agleam with the polished pink ceramic of her photon-emitter. A pluming crater punched into Dimension Borg’s chestplate and he retraced several steps at a stumble.

Our heroine threw her arms into the shoulder-straps that fastened her weapon’s power-source to her shoulders and hurtled at Dimension Borg on foot, raining photon down on him again and again. Her spears of light dealt glancing blows to his bodywork, chipping away fragments of armour, and as she closed with him she raised the emitter and leapt into a kick. The full weight of her body scored a huge dent across Dimension Borg’s fissured façade.

Not even this however could faze her foe long enough. His thrusting talon found its mark even as Neetra sailed by, and mid-flight she gasped aloud. Our heroine touched down in a low kneel, clutching her injured flank. Dimension Borg’s eyebeams summarily smashed the stones beneath her and she tumbled with the landslide, to hit the ravine bottom grazed and hurt.

It was no use. She wasn’t Bret, and at any event, tackling Dimension Borg on these terms had only ever been a job for all Four Heroes working together. If her ploy in the communications array was to save her, she needed to buy some time. Neetra saw clearly enough that it wasn’t to be bought this way.

Her adversary was on top of the ridge. Telekinetically she threw much of the surrounding rockpile skywards to block the crimson rays he fired down, then teleported in a single hop over Dimension Borg’s head to materialize behind him. Bundling herself and her weaponry into the Ultimate Cycle, Neetra fired up the engine and made a break for it.

END OF CHAPTER ONE