Overture, Chapter One

Stars and planets wheeled overhead for a vertiginous instant before the combatants crashed through the bulkhead wall together and plunged into the cavernous square vault of the battle-cruiser’s cargo hold. Bret Stevens proceeded along the quickest route into the dark, punctuating this vertical course with rebounds and springs from the walls while striking brilliant sparks and clashing notes between his samurai sword and an alien bladed weapon that flashed with equal speed. Its owner, a lean and lithe and man dressed in form-fitting white and a round black helmet, had so far matched Bret in his aerial acrobatics and countered thrust for thrust and parry for parry.

“You’re good, Zeldich, but we’re kind of on a mission here so can we wrap this up?” Bret inquired.

The answer was apparently no, for the duel continued with fervour unabated while at an increasing distance above the cat-girl Amy slammed into an iron gantry and continued her own engagement on halfway steady ground. Her opponent, a tough-looking woman clad in boots and bandana, may have lacked Amy’s feline reflexes and speed but our heroine could vouch she more than made up for it. As their kicks, punches and blocks maintained a free trade back and forth along the balcony, Storm-Sky swept by using the power of flight that he alone among the party possessed. The solemn ebony warrior clad in cape and cowl was wrestling with three of a vermicular species, whose sinuous segmented bodies like those of giant worms were wrapped in writhing motion about Storm-Sky’s chiselled trunk. Struggling and striving, the dark man freed an arm and in a radiant blur of gold threw one of the snaky soldiers into space.

“Ho, Worthworms!” Storm-Sky hollered as he turned his attention to shaking off the other two. “It pains me to war against your gentle race, but you leave me no recourse!”

Huge Max Bohenien meanwhile was pitted against a pretty young girl, of which there seemed to be so many in this galaxy for all that they were a relatively recent addition. This one, named Psiona, had red hair and freckles and the ability to telepathically control a massive human hand made of luminous ephemeral matter. Posing atop a conjunction of high girders the girl sent this plunging and smashing after Max, scattering stacks of crates and drums with hammer-blows as her human target scrambled to stay ahead of the clutching fluorescent fingers.

A short distance below, Bret and Zeldich touched down on the cargo bay floor and with a spinning reverse-kick our hero disarmed the other. From his belt Zeldich whipped out a weapon like two sickles joined by a long chain and whirled it in an arc, while Bret swung his sword around and leapt back into the fray. He and his companions had encountered many dedicated warriors like Zeldich among the ranks of the Solidity, for the wandering martial artists of these distant worlds mostly subscribed to an ancient code of honour based in large part around the Prophecy. It troubled Bret that so many of his adversaries were not mercenaries or berserkers, but men of principles and beliefs so close to his own. Equally troubling was that the Solidity boasted a vast array of skilled and fearsome fighters when Bret and his friends numbered but four.

Psiona’s psychic hand found its mark at last, gripping Max bodily and starting to squeeze. With a rumbling growl the brawny man pushed back with sheer muscle and won free, throwing out his great chest and flinging his arms wide as the hand blew apart into pungent wafts of lingering phosphorescence, and Psiona shrieked aloud as the telepathic feedback fried her in her own juice. She fluttered to the deck and lay limp, steaming somewhat.

“That’s as well. Woulda hated havin’ ta have ta put the knuckles to ya,” Max remarked, then yelled up the cargo hold to Amy: “How was yours, kid?”

“Good left hook,” Amy called back in reply from the gantry, as she stood over the fallen body of her sparring partner and blew on her sore fist. “She fought Earth-style too, but I guess that’s no surprise. With a name like Louise-Claudia, and the fact she’s a grown woman, she can’t be from round here.”

“You’re starting to sound like an expert on this place,” Bret put in with a smile. He too had prevailed at last, and Zeldich was laid out before him. “How many patrols is that now?”

“Too many,” Amy responded grimly. “And they’re getting harder and harder to beat too, the closer we get to the Hub.”

“That’ll happen,” agreed Bret. “But we’re nearly onto the last round now, and the pair of you escaping the cell-block before ’Sky and I even made it you sure saved a lot of time!”

“Well, ya were takin’ so long about it...!” Max chuckled.

Storm-Sky did not participate in the humour. He was busy carefully setting the three fallen Worthworms down to rest beside each other on the deck-plates.

“The gentlest of races,” he repeated, and his deep voice was grave. “Like the Grindoes. Like the Dexonians. Like the Purplecoats. But to all of them now, the genocide Lightning calls inevitable appears the only means of ensuring these myriad noble civilizations will survive.”

His words were sombre ones indeed for the remainder of the company. Each of the three Earthlings was only too aware that if prophecies were anything to go by, they were fighting to protect a world whose continued existence would be responsible for untold suffering in this quadrant just two decades from now. Small wonder then so many of its inherently benevolent peoples had come to see the destruction of that planet as a necessary last resort, and small wonder too our heroes had come to know such doubt and uncertainly as to whether they had chosen the right path this time.

“We can still catch the big event,” Amy said, as one who wanted to change the subject, though her tones were no lighter than before.

“Might as well see what we’re up against,” said Bret. The quartet came together, and throwing a lever on the nearest control panel our hero triggered the pneumatic struts of the platform on which they stood, whilst with a creaking clanking groan the cargo bay began to open. Protective forcefields blinked into being as stars glinted beyond the great hatches’ widening maw.

Steadily the four friends elevated side-by-side. Each was wearing on his or her torso the yellow lightning-bolt insignia of a faction that only Storm-Sky had ever belonged to, and which had since pledged its services to the enemy. Nevertheless that body still existed in a different form, founded anew and led by Bret’s old colleague Neetra. What however had become of the body Bret and Neetra had once belonged to with such pride, a thing from long ago called The Four Heroes, Bret was not able to say. Indeed, with so much shifting of allegiances and so many options all of a sudden for two different galaxies to choose a side, our hero barely knew what he and his allies were any more...aside from a handful of souls hoping to save their home.

The loading-platform juddered to a halt. There before the humanoids was outspread in panorama everything they faced.

From the burning dome of the red giant sun Acheldama coruscated a fiery light that tinted hulls and prows and artillery orbiting that stellar body as a thousand constellations of steel. Armadas that had trawled to this place from every planet and system in the sector were combined into a fleet of configurations so diverse that not even Storm-Sky could identify them all. The nearest battleships were sleek undulating highways of armour from which jutting rows of cannon gleamed with solar flame, whilst those cruisers further off were distinguishable in formation as they tracked across the seething curve in twenties and fifties. As our heroes looked on, a battalion buzzed past the cargo bay like mosquitoes and wove its way deeper and deeper into the mesh of slowly-revolving war machines, finally turning to dots and disappearing against the sun’s relentless glare.

Acheldama was this galaxy’s boundary-post on the border that abutted stars familiar to Bret, Amy and Max. Beyond its lonely light was an interstellar gulf that even now these unimaginable legions were readying themselves to broach, and whose opposite shore they intended to gain with all guns blazing.

Max pointed ahead. “Here they come,” said he.

Space was starting to ripple under the hyperdrive effect. Then with alarming suddenness the fluctuating patches resolved themselves into flat circular forms of awesome size, shooting into visibility here, and here, and here, such that within seconds the orbital periphery of Acheldama was choked with ominous dark discs. At first they appeared to our heroes to be saucer-shaped starcraft, but there was something wrong about the circumferences, something too bumpy and uneven to suggest even from so far away things technology had wrought.

Another moment, and all was clear. The circles were alive. They were like the caps of mushrooms, or round funguses that grow on the sides of trees, swelled here to proportions fit for travel between stars. The upper cusps were islands of thick horny skin across which pockmarks of bioluminescence glowed coldly, and what had looked like a giant turbine making up the underside of each was in fact the fleshy flaps of spore-gills fanning from the central node.

Neither the Solidity nor its uninvited guests required any herald to announce to them that the contingent from The Back Garden had arrived.

Throwing their round black shadows over the smaller ships beneath them the fungizoid gargantua began to descend, moving with slow inevitability towards what also happened to be our heroes’ destination.

END OF CHAPTER ONE