Neetra and Dimension Borg

“You knew.”

Dimension Borg stirred in the cavernous dark of his throne room. There in the only doorway, outlined against the oblong of cold blue, was Neetra.

“You knew,” she said again. “Because you know us. Knew we’d come to you, and figured out that that was what was the Prophecy meant by the Host of War. That’s why you came to this sector and built the Solidity in the first place. Lightning and Space-Screamer were certain to respond without waiting for your permission, and take their army off to destroy the Earth. But you didn’t care. They were only doing what you’d always intended for them to do.”

“My role was not passive, flesh-sister. It is beyond your imagination how far I have gone to bend the fates to my will,” Dimension Borg replied. “But your accusation correct. It was I, and I alone, who set this in motion. I who ordered events even now on the brink of beginning that will decide the destiny of the universe.”

“Then don’t tell me you’ve changed! Don’t ever tell me you’ve changed!” Neetra flung back at him, tears glinting in her eyes. “It’s no different to what we’ve seen from you since the very start! Playing on the faith of others, throwing away innocent lives and the lives of your followers along with those of your enemies, without mercy or remorse...no matter what you say about your new purpose it’s still just death and destruction, that’s all you’ve ever been capable of!”

“If that is what you believe,” returned Dimension Borg, “why are you here?”

“It is what I believe,” Neetra said. She roughly dried her face with her forearm. “But I’ve told you what I want in coming here. I’ve sacrificed all and crossed the galaxies because you’re the only one who can give it to me.”

The great square body rose from the throne.

“Everything?” demanded Dimension Borg. “The Next Four’s plans? The rise of Harbin? All that is foretold in The Prophecy of the Flame?”

Neetra’s unwavering stare was confirmation enough. Dimension Borg said:

“Then come.”

Neetra and Dimension Borg made their way through the vast vaulted chambers of hollowed-out space-rock and echoing shafts of featureless steel that made up the interior of the latter’s remote and forbidding fortress. Our heroine could not but be reminded of another occasion she had walked through emptiness alongside that lumbering uncommunicative cube, when they crossed together the desolate red desert of Mars. This was similar in more ways than one. On that cold Martian night another betrayal of The Four Heroes, Neetra’s own, had hung heavy over her. This time it was her fear Joe had turned traitor that resounded silently through the solitude and the still, making her ache in a way mere loneliness could never hope to.

There were other differences, however. Back then Neetra had been a child, and she knew she wasn’t one now. She didn’t even need to look at how her borrowed Flash Club tunic stretched itself over new contours to be reminded of that. Around her heart orbited whole planetary rings of emotion that hadn’t been there in childhood, and nor was her heart the only region of her body where the changes were felt. But speaking of changing bodies, Dimension Borg’s was different too from how it had been the last time Neetra saw him. The battle-ready form he’d required for his altercation with The Four Heroes at World’s End Point he had apparently reverse-engineered into a design somewhat resembling the functional uncluttered right-angles Neetra’s parents had originally given him. It was as if he’d sought his way back to an earlier state of being, but had only succeeded in making it halfway there.

And Dimension Borg looked older, too. Of course, he was old. He had waited six hundred years for revenge, and traversed time and reality throughout a life that had gone further into the darkness than any sane or living thing dared venture. But for the first time, he looked to Neetra as if the centuries were finally starting to take their toll. She had been with him on the night he discovered the reason for his creation, and tried to destroy himself rather than face it. Denied that death, there had followed a string of new bodies and new directions – Tatsu Biogenetics and the Häst Patrol, then the Prophecy, then the first attempt to obliterate Planet Earth, then at last the Solidity and where he was now. Throughout it all though, or so it seemed to Neetra, Dimension Borg had found neither peace nor resolution. Only the same unrest and hate, only the same inevitable descent to devastation and chaos, as the long existence of a destroyer of worlds and universes wore neverendingly on. It was almost enough to make Neetra feel sympathy for him, had not his crimes forever banished her from that path.

Finally our heroine spoke. “I’d have taken the bus if I’d known it was going to be this far,” she grumbled. “Are you still planning to tell me anything about the Prophecy, or have you decided a cross-country hike would be more fun?”

“I will be nothing less than accommodating host,” Dimension Borg growled back. “How could I do otherwise, when you have observed human courtesy of dressing for the occasion?”

“Yeah, it’s been a real joy watching your sense of humour grow and develop over the years we’ve been fighting you,” Neetra replied, “but one more crack about how I look in this outfit and the truce is over!”

They had reached the end of the corridor. Dimension Borg’s viewing-gallery, the deepest and hugest chamber in the entire citadel, was before them. Together they stepped through.

Time-portals, each an elliptical doorway into a different epoch and numerous beyond human computation, moved through the black infinity in a slow solemn dance. Above and below, left and right, across every horizontal and vertical plane they filed and intersected, a billion lines of them carving space into rectangles and squares such that it resembled a three-dimensional road-map of some planet-sized city. For Neetra it was like standing at the bottom of an ocean whose boundaries were lost in darkness, throughout which the mind-boggling spectacle played in every direction further than the eye could see.

Our heroine could do nothing but gape. She knew that time-travel was no longer a scientific impossibility, for both Dimension Borg and The Chancellor had perfected it. That was how the former had been able to return to the present day from the year 2596, and also presumably the means by which he had located and read The Prophecy of the Flame at some point prior to its destruction. But here inside this gouged-out asteroidal mountain was time-travel technology deployed to its fullest and most awesome extent. If there was one room in the universe where Neetra could learn the truth, it was this one.

“Your powers can affirm I will not attempt deception with holograms or simulations?” Dimension Borg inquired.

“I know which way round to put my knickers on too,” Neetra snapped back. “And you can save questions like that for someone who’s not The Four Heroes’ strongest psychic.”

The sharpness of her tone was promoted by a growing feeling of unease. Neetra realised that until now she had enjoyed the comfort of telling herself that no matter how bad the news from Dimension Borg might be, it was more than likely her oldest and most treacherous enemy would lie. That reassuring thought had suddenly ceased to be an option, for Dimension Borg was correct that her telepathic abilities were more than equal to identifying the difference between a time-portal and an illusion. Everything Neetra saw in this gallery would be real. Attempting to convince herself the images were false would be as futile as a non-psychic trying to make himself believe a lamppost was a tree.

“In that case,” Dimension Borg intoned, “behold the answer to the first of your questions.”

He raised a pincer aloft, and moved his metal arm to the side. One of the time-portals far up above followed the minute motion and sped downward to Neetra, as if the whole cavern were some vast point-and-drag computer with Dimension Borg its core. In an instant the oval window to another era was in front of her staring pretty face, and everything it disclosed bombarding her shocked senses.

It was Nottingham, on a day somewhere in the future, and this last detail was clear to Neetra because the city was in the throes of an apocalypse that had not happened yet. The towers were falling, last survivors joining companions already crushed to rubble, and the sky teemed with nightmare lightning and fires as if there were brewing a storm that the world itself might not survive.

This cataclysm looked to be nearing its crescendo as the portal’s perspective steadily scrolled toward the City Centre, where some bitter struggle was taking place. Harbin, tall and gaunt, swathed in twilight and a ragged grey cloak, was etched against the coruscating firmament as he stood atop the Town Hall and rained his fearsome powers down upon four Neetra also knew. It was The Four Heroes’ heirs and successors, Tidshaw, Autumn, Thassal and Ned. Clad in black uniforms with the crimson and gold emblem of their parents on the breast, they were fighting hard but evidently at a disadvantage. However much they piled their own force upon Harbin they remained ever on the defensive, sheltering and regrouping with growing desperation as the sky above began to fall. Neetra’s attention was most of all on Tidshaw and Autumn, the twin teenage brother and sister who made up one half of the outmatched band.

“This is after they came back to our time,” our heroine murmured. “They’re a bit older. A mother knows.”

“Indeed,” Dimension Borg responded heavily. “It is the day of Harbin’s triumph.”

A rupture fit to shake star-systems swallowed the heavens of Nottingham, its impact smashing through the world below and seeming even to breach the time-portal’s ambit and make tremble the stones beneath Neetra’s feet. Stormclouds and lightning were gone in a heartbeat. Now above the future Nottingham, now above the whole future Earth, the all-consuming gravity and nothingness of an event-horizon spiralled like the yawning maw of death. Harbin atop the Town Hall roof threw open both arms as if in worship of this end of all things, and bathed in the dark radiations flooding from the void.

“A black hole?” gasped Neetra, who in her previous encounter with the foretold one had witnessed the terrifying effect such astral phenomena had upon him. “Harbin opens up a black hole, so close to the Earth? But with his powers boosted to maximum, right there in Nottingham, he’d be...”

She could not bring herself to finish the sentence. Dimension Borg did so, mercilessly.

“Unstoppable,” he boomed. “And if you acknowledge as much, you have seen all you need to see.”

With a gesture of his forearm he consigned the time-portal back to the distance whence it had come. Neetra’s head was lowered, her eyes on the ground.

“What happens to my children, Dimension Borg?” she asked in a tiny voice. “And Bret’s son? And Felicity’s?”

“Your line survives,” was all the other would say. “You have not forgotten that we met in future far beyond this date, and witnessed Four Heroes’ ultimate legacy? But it would have been better had what we witnessed never come to pass. Using power of black hole Harbin turns the Earth itself into his dreadnought, and roams very universe spreading his carnage wherever he goes. Thus does he come to this galaxy and wreaks the bloodshed that has long been prophesied here, as he will a thousand other sectors and worlds.”

Neetra finally raised her head. Tears were wet on her cheeks. Everything she had learned on that faraway day in the library and everything she had discussed then with the two professors was falling into place, even as the finality with which it did so broke her heart.

“So it will be us,” said she. “Good and evil will be thrown into final conflict. Those are the exact words of the Prophecy. The Four Heroes themselves are going to have to make a stand, or face the end of everything our cause embodies. We already knew that’s exactly what Harbin will take as his mission in life. So our children fall, and ending this age of darkness all comes down to us again. It’s been ordained that way since the dawn of Nottingham.”

Dimension Borg’s eyes were alive with raging electrical fire.

“And perhaps you still believe my present calling is no different to mere destructive folly I pursued in early days?” He proclaimed, his tone savagely victorious. “Learn at last, flesh-sister, reason I sought termination of Earth. Learn why I seek it still. Loss of one planet means death of some, it is true...but a small price to pay indeed, when this prevents loss of countless lives and planets and galaxies throughout entire cosmos! For now you know as I do that such will be fate of universe, should your world be allowed to survive!”