Mars Rising, Chapter Two

She was not far into the asteroid belt when behind her the Flying Destroyer rose. Dimension Borg’s spaceship, a long sleek vessel of intimidating vastness that resembled a great metal shark, it hung before the black neutron star that the citadel orbited and pinned the taillights of Neetra’s craft with a glowering predatory stare.

Our heroine brought the Ultimate Cycle banking around, even as the first torpedoes screamed past her head. She wove in and out of them and opened fire, throwing the Ultimate Cycle for a corkscrew spin that plaited its triple-barrelled cannon-discharge into a devastating spiral. Thus twisting and wrenching her way through the Flying Destroyer’s armour she gained the black avenue of its hull and levelled-out, to run the gauntlet at breakneck speed dodging the flak from artillery-domes while perforating every radio-antenna and scanner-dish that whizzed into her sights. Wheels hit the bottom of the trench as she cut turbos to complete her dash with tyres squealing, and when the stern loomed before her she hit its fins like a ramp. Jets roared anew and Neetra was back in the asteroid belt, threading her way deeper and deeper as the hanging space-rocks took the missiles that followed.

Her targeting-computer was pinging insistently at her even as she looped-the-loop to come back around. Neetra threw her hair out of her face and did her best to read its screen upside-down. Apparently an intake port on the massive ship’s throax was the Achilles’ heel she needed. Dutifully our heroine gave it all three barrels on her next pass, but to no avail. Of course it was too heavily shielded for that. Neetra saw well enough, as she climbed vertically to outstrip the death-rays Dimension Borg returned, that a personal touch was needed.

At the rate both vessels were moving teleports were out, unless she wanted to mince herself to matted clumps of hair and knicker-elastic. Hitting instead the button for the tow-chain, Neetra threw the clattering links spooling behind her and felt a soft thump reverberate through her seat as the magnetic clamp found purchase on the Flying Destroyer’s hull. With her photon-emitter and backpack still in place she leapt and flung her arms around the chain, gripping it as she did so with thighs and ankles too, then slid down through the streaking stars with her inside-out skirt flapping at her armpits. The soles of her boots were first to take a touchdown that all but squeezed the breath from her, but recovering fast Neetra disentangled herself and set off at a run along the space-shark’s back.

The intake port was a mere letterbox surrounded by clustering cities of angular armour. Our heroine pointed at it with her muzzle, and emptied every last erg in her flight-pack’s batteries into the narrow black oblong.

No sooner had she stripped the now-useless apparatus free of her arm and shoulders and cast it away into space than she felt the first tremors under her feet. It had begun. Neetra set off at a sprint for the tow-chain, knowing she was going to need the Ultimate Cycle’s forcefields to survive what was coming and that a hand-over-hand rope-climb had just become the only way to get to them in time. Our heroine threw herself upon the taut ladder of clanking steel, stuffed her toes and fingers into the small holes between the links, and began to scale even as the first fiery blossoms bloomed beneath her.

A perspex elevator-bubble spilt open to disclose Dimension Borg on a pneumatic platform. His head revolved lightning-fast to Neetra and he launched into a determined march along the hull, his crashing metallic footfalls rapid and dauntless despite the explosions on either side. It was a grim and desperate race between robot and girl in the last few seconds before any remaining solid footing vanished into spinning fragments and flame.

Neetra reached the Cycle. Her solar plexus hit the pilot’s seat’s arm-rest, folding her over double with legs kicking in nothingness and one hand flailing at the dashboard. There was the forcefield-switch, but even as her fingers clawed at it she felt a savage lurching drag on the turbines that made her heart sink as she slammed the lever down. Dimension Borg’s vicelike pincer had closed around the chain at the last possible moment. So it was that the shields encircled him too as he clung to the end of the towline like a great square anchor, and when the Flying Destroyer went up the next second in a cataclysmic detonation the pair of combatants were safe in their luminous sphere together. Even still, when the resultant plasmodic tide from the engine-core’s meltdown washed into the forcefield’s wall it was sufficient to carry the counterparts across the cosmos, Neetra and the Cycle like a helpless broken kite with Dimension Borg its tail.

A sun lay in their path. It had already caught them in its gravitational pull. With both hands on her control-board Neetra pushed the forcefield to maximum overdrive, such that the quivering atoms of each physical body thus surrounded began to break down and blend with the protective energy barrier. It was risky, but our heroine knew that only by practically fusing herself with the shields would she stand any chance of having oxygen and resilience enough to withstand this imminent ordeal. Even as it was, some of the sun’s unrelenting exhalation was making it through. Her torso was suffocating under the bodice of her tunic, and even her bare skin was bathed in unimaginable heat.

Dimension Borg let go the chain and Neetra likewise quit the pilot’s chair. Staying within the forcefield’s ambit they descended to the mighty star’s corona, facing each other over a short distance, two black specks of slightly different sizes but both minuscule before the rolling incandescent convexity of amber and gold. Neetra could always tell when her enemy was up to something, and already she was mustering every power at her command to meet whatever it was he had in store.

And then, impossibly, incomprehensibly, there was music.

Even at such a place and time, our heroine could not mistake the first twanging lilting chords of a melodious tune. But how could this be? Where was it coming from? Neetra was dumbfounded, but only for a moment.

“Flashshadow,” she groaned softly. “Your demo tape...!”

For sure enough, hundreds of feet above, the gradual shifting of molecules from one plane to the next had apparently been what was finally needed for the pyramid-shaped recording device given to Neetra by her Mini-Flash friend to jolt itself into compatibility with Dylan’s universal adaptor on the Ultimate Cycle’s stereo. It had slipped from its jammed position to the correct one, and had started to play. Now the jangling strains of what Neetra took to be the stringed instrument Flashshadow herself played were dancing in and out the swirling scene, carried on warm solar winds to reverberate through the melding half-discorporated subatomic particles of herself, Dimension Borg, the Cycle and the sun itself like the ultimate in wraparound audio. The music was all the noise there was, and it was not heard but felt and lived and breathed, suffused into the very essence of that which it swallowed. Dimension Borg meanwhile seemed to be marshalling his force, as a booming baritone kicked in:

Bom-bom, bom-bom,

Barom bom-bom, bom-bom...

Neetra had briefly met the band at the asteroid youth-club where they performed, and that deep vocal could only belong to the six-armed beetle-like bass-player. But if his physical appearance would have been outlandish on Planet Earth, his lyrical arrangements would not, for even this early in the measure it struck Neetra how astonishingly familiar and even nostalgic it was. For all its otherworldly cadences, it did not suggest the music of another galaxy as strongly as it did certain ancient pop hits of which Neetra was only dimly aware, but which she immediately associated with lonely girls in bouffant petticoats pining over college boys. Love-songs that had somehow been oldies ever since the moment they were made, dating to a point in Pre-Nottingham Earth before even her parents’ time...but then Neetra realised that that made perfect sense. Girls had only recently been invented here. The culture of the young, and its language for talking about what it was to fall in love, was still in that first flush of dawn.

Amid the steady slow rhythm, Dimension Borg threw both arms heavenward. The surface of the sun erupted as three female backing-singers took up the refrain:

La la-la, sharing in my starburst,

La la-la, sharing in my starburst,

La la-la, sharing in my starburst of love…

The tongues of fire loosed by Dimension Borg were like dragons writhing and twining higher and higher in the endless night. Neetra stood firm and watched them ascend, as the first verse also began to rise. The lead singer would have been hard for anyone to forget, a girl named Cherry who was Neetra’s own age and had long waves of hair as dark as the universe that sparkled with constellations of their own. Beautiful, haughty and strange, the quintessential teenager from outer space, it was Cherry now whose upraised voice as sweet as starlight cut across the battlefield, at once so joyful and yet so yearning it was nigh-on impossible to bear:

Where photons glint and glitter,

In the the limpid quasars nigh,

We’ll ride a crystal comet,

And be there by and by…

Dimension Borg thrust both pincers in Neetra’s direction and reined his wheeling dragons back about, tearing down a sky made of fire and sending it roaring upon her. Our heroine raised one hand.

Soaring high together,

To nebulae above,

Sharing in my starburst of love.

The deluge hit. On doing so it parted around Neetra’s palm into serpents of flame that cascaded past her and on into infinity. Her hair streamed back and her tunic whipped amid the conflagration, yet she held her ground and faced down the cataract heart of this blazing sun.

Bom-bom, bom-bom,

Barom bom-bom, bom-bom...

La la-la, sharing in my starburst,

La la-la, sharing in my starburst...

Three bodies, locked and pitted against each other. The star’s seething elemental magnitude was the weapon Dimension Borg piled on and Neetra resisted, in a cosmic trial of endurance that could only end when one of the trio finally succumbed to inevitable oblivion. Neetra’s teeth were by now gritted as the instrumental pounded on, and she was drenched in sweat. Dimension Borg’s steely hide was showing stress-fractures, and expanses of his cuboid torso had become sloshing liquid where he had begun to melt. It could not last much longer. It must not. As the duellists recognized as one they had reached their last reserves of strength, and the ensuing seconds would decide their bout at last, Cherry belted back into soaring high notes which were all but sufficient to rend everything that ever was:

I’d rewrite the laws of physics if you asked me to,

Science fiction would be science fact if you were loving me true...

As a dying fall from Flashshadow’s alien lyre followed Cherry’s voice down, Neetra and Dimension Borg felt the sun give way. From then on all seemed to happen in a heartbeat, floods of fire and golden-glowing plains dissipating away as the drained stellar body collapsed into its spiralling core, only to burst out again a last gleaming wave that swept by the survivors in an awesome arc and fanned to every corner of space. The radiant tones of Cherry as she rounded off the closing verse sparkled from the cusp of this afterglow, lighting up the galaxy and echoing in worlds and lives throughout the great unknown.

And though quadrants stretched before us,

I’m the only girl you’d see,

When you’re sharing in that starburst with me.

For the two that remained it was a matter of watching all that had been light and warmth and music recede to dark and cold and silence. The ruddy edges to Dimension Borg’s overheated plating faded with the last of the supernova, until nothing was left but the glare from his crimson eyes.

“You are done, flesh-sister?” he inquired out of the black.

“I’m only just getting started,” was Neetra’s reply.

END OF CHAPTER TWO