Mars Rising, Chapter Three

Hand by hand, aching all over, Neetra made her weary way back up the tow-chain. The pilot’s chair awaited her at the end of her painful clamber and she started the Ultimate Cycle’s engines again, though they sounded in worse shape than she was and overexerting the forcefields for such a desperate gambit had sapped the batteries almost to deadness. Nevertheless our heroine set course to return to the citadel, with nothing to go on but hope she had power enough to make it there.

Dimension Borg could not be far behind. She knew of his capacity for survival. It was greater than hers.

The castle was a distant dot at the end of the inky funnel down which Neetra was flying. It looked like the eye of a hurricane, or the bottom of the world. With trembling hands Neetra grasped the control stick and held on, as the empty cold pressed in around her.

Why hadn’t she joined Dimension Borg like he’d wanted her to, instead of throwing herself into this eternity of hurt? He’d been right, after all. Joe didn’t love her any more. He’d chosen Gala in her place. The Four Heroes were gone and the Next Four had taken over. What they’d fought for was already lost, but she’d tried to fight regardless, even though Dimension Borg’s offer had truly been the only choice left for her. Now it was too late.

She was going to die here, out in the dark void. For all her brave talk, she couldn’t defeat this killing machine. Nobody and nothing in six hundred years ever had. This was the end. She was never going to have another happy day. Nothing would ever be lovely again.

Neetra couldn’t stop the tears that were breaking. She’d not been tucked up in her own bed for so long. She’d not felt her mother’s arms around her for even longer. She wanted her parents, her sisters, anyone who cared. Why weren’t they here when she needed them the most?

Anyone. Anyone at all. Anyone who’d be sad, and would want to protect her and love her if they knew she was unhappy. Steam. Crosius. Flashthunder...

Joe...

Her small hands gripped the controls until the knuckles showed white.

The citadel. It was closer now.

She clenched her teeth and drew in breath through them. This wasn’t over yet, and it only would be when she started giving in and letting it beat her. That would be no sort of way to round off such an enmity as she’d endured with Dimension Borg, and if there was still something Neetra was certain of, it was that one way or another she was going to give him a finish he deserved.

Now her eyes were fixed ahead as she urged the Ultimate Cycle on to the last lap. Dimension Borg’s fortress, poised on its black rock, outspread itself to let her in.

The citadel had been first to bear the brunt of the supernova. It was not long for this universe, and as the planetoid that made up its moorings will have looked at its beginning, so it looked now at its end. The rocky face was cracking apart to reveal a filigree of fire below, whilst whole acres had already sunk into lava-pits and the distant peaks were volcanoes howling out their last. A mighty dust-bowl beaten out of the stones by the solar emanation had resettled in the atmosphere and become apocalyptic clouds of black and lurid green, through which rays of lingering light from the doomed sun filtered like slanting columns holding up a sky that was about to fall.

Neetra rode one of these diagonal paths down, though her steed by now had nothing left and gravity was doing most of the work. The best she could hope for was to run aground, bruised and scraped in a bone-numbing impact from which the Ultimate Cycle emerged as nothing but mangled and twisted scrap.

“Sorry, Dylan,” Neetra murmured as she hauled herself out of the wreckage. “I know you loved that old thing...”

Dimension Borg was descending. An angry red meteor tore through the lowering firmament and struck not far from Neetra’s position. Following her through space without a ship and then making planetfall without one had taken its toll on his exoskeleton, and the battle on the sun had been as draining for him as it had been for Neetra. But still he came, wading through the magma and eruptions of the dying world, his red eyes burning at her.

Neetra rose from all fours as he advanced. No words passed between them. Both saw where they were. They had tried everything else, and they knew what remained.

They flew at each other, and amid the din of doomsday rang out clunks and clanks of metal hitting flesh and flesh hitting metal as they went at it. It was blow for blow, she hammering his blistered breastplate with her fists, ripping at the damaged patches with her fingernails, clutching exposed wires through the smelted holes and tearing them out, while his heavy pincers rounded her face, drove into her body, bludgeoned her arms and legs. The ground below opened in a gaping chasm but even this could not stop them as they plummeted into the abyss, still thrashing and beating and kicking. It could only end when there was nowhere further to fall to, and they slammed upon the deck of the citadel’s lowermost subterranean chamber amidst a hail of plunging rocks. There they were still, Neetra sprawling strengthless on her back, Dimension Borg hunkered at an angle on his war-torn trunk.

“It is over, flesh-sister,” he declared at last, in grinding tones that suggested even his voice-circuits were all but stripped away. “You are mortal. I am not. I was ever destined to outlast you, for I am eternal.”

Slowly, Neetra sat up.

“I’ll show you eternal,” said she.

All of a sudden there was something in the room with them which hadn’t been there before. Neetra, though battered and worn with her locks of hair tumbling, stood as if lifted by this mysterious new force. One hand shot out to touch Dimension Borg, and then in something more than a teleport, with a light that was somehow more than her usual gold, she and her enemy were gone.

They reappeared in a realm of infinite white, without horizons, without boundaries, without anything but the pair of them. Neither one needed telling what kind of place this was.

“A psychic void? Who has established it, and why?” Dimension Borg demanded.

Neetra had only to wait. It quickly became apparent they were not alone after all.

Figures were moving in the nothingness, becoming more distinct as they drew closer. Though Neetra had been in psychic voids before, this was the first time she truly appreciated what a space without limits really meant. This crowd of people went on forever. Saying there were too many of them to count would not have done justice. Though they had gathered in a land without vanishing-points, and were marching across on a surface without planetary curvature, nevertheless they filled it. There were too many of them to comprehend. They came in all shapes and sizes, some humanoid, some not, but there was one resemblance that neither Neetra nor Dimension Borg could overlook. They were all coming nearer to them, as if of a single mind.

“What is this?” he growled to her.

“I told you I’ve been planning today for a long time,” was Neetra’s response. “But on Christmas Eve last year I learned a thing or two about how it could be done. Things about the way our universe works, about other worlds besides our own. You know about them yourself...not that you’ve ever been able to really see the things you know. But I saw. I saw that if I used my powers in conjunction with your communicators and your time-portal technology, I might just be able to get through to them. So that I could let them know what was going on, and extend an invitation to anyone out there who wanted to be a part of it too.”

Dimension Borg still didn’t understand. The innumerable masses were closing in, their misty eyes set. When Neetra next spoke, there was something like gentleness in her voice.

“They’re your victims, Dimension Borg,” she explained. “Every life you’ve ever taken. All those attacks on Nottingham and the Earth, all those realities you swallowed up. You’re looking at the inhabitants of every last world and universe you ever destroyed. They heard my message, and they set up this void and helped me get us into it, because they’ve all agreed to unite here and now.”

Still Dimension Borg’s processors were telling him to stand by, as they strove to tally the total number he faced. Not even his artificial intelligence could compute how many of them there were.

“They’ve come to settle their account with you,” Neetra told him.

With that she ascended lightly from the featureless surface, as if standing back, or making ready to leave.

“Goodbye, Dimension Borg,” said she.

He who was addressed rotated his dome to face the legions head-on. If there had ever been a time his merciless machine-heart knew fear, it was surely now, but nobody would have imagined it from the way he let fly with his eyebeams and decimated the front lines. What became of them, dying for a second time in such a place as this, is more than anyone knows. Their sacrifice availed Dimension Borg nothing however, for it was not armies he faced now but populations, and soon enough they overran him. Hands closed around his metal frame, even as the eyebeams still darted and his pincers swept, crushing and slicing at the ever-clustering forms. Then with a concerted heave from several avengers at once, his breastplate came clean away to expose pipes and cables beneath.

The crumpled sheet of steel clattered upon the white floor, whereat a contingent of the spectral victims detached from the vanguard and went to work on it. Stamping and trampling, pummelling and pulling, the team steadily amassed through their angelic powers some supernal heat that was building through their host. What was left of the chest-shield was starting to liquefy, and the same mystical warmth suffused the hands of other warriors that were steadily disembowelling their prey. Wires and components dragged by the fistful from Dimension Borg’s square husk they rolled and rubbed between their palms until they became gelatinous, then like mercury, then in a final rush of heat evaporated to an acrid tang on the psychic void’s atmosphere.

On the spectres went, some individuals still falling before Dimension Borg’s relentless resistance, but with whole planets of sentient beings there to take each one’s place. The pincers they wrenched away one after the other, whereat dual companies dismantled them to outer plates and panels that were dropped into the ever-widening molten lake at their feet, and inner gears and rods that revolved between their fingertips until their molecules hissed apart.

Dimension Borg was sinking into the pool made up of his own mass. His leg units were gone and his ravaged torso half-immersed, but still he fought and roared and bellowed even as his dome was torn free, clanking to the ground like a broken metal bowl, leaving just a razor-grille mouth, two burning optic eye-bulbs and the networked circuitry of a robot brain.

This the avenging ones turned their especial attention to. Microchips and memory banks were devoured by dedicated sifting assemblies that ensured each tiny piece of plastic and copper went up in invisible dispersing atoms, so that nothing would remain of the most evil intelligence that had ever spawned conscious thought.

The noise from the mouth-grating and the glow of the eye-lights had ceased by the time these, and what was left of the skull, were consumed last of all by the lake that had started to bubble. Growing hotter and hotter it was within moments a froth, and then a triumphal roiling miasma as the living liquid gave up the ghost and all the whiteness in this world-without-end was seared with smoke and air.

At length the sky cleared. When it did, the domain it belonged to began to dim, receding as the metallic fumes had done. The spectres, all the countless universes of them, set off walking in silence. The deepening gulfs folded them up as they embarked on their journeys back to wherever it was they had come from.

And Neetra, gazing from above on the end of one who had been a part of her life for so long, and whose deeds had given purpose and direction to The Four Heroes since the very beginning of their great adventure, shed the few tears that were only to be expected. But knowing it had always had to be so, she turned to look onward, while behind her the disappearing psychic void bore the last vaporous traces of Dimension Borg away.

END OF CHAPTER THREE