Shapeshifters, Chapter Four

Joe and Gala, having broken out of the cell, were proceeding through the dark tubes of the fungus-ship’s innards on their way back to the bridge. A smooth jolt ran through the organic walls and floor, followed by an unmistakable feeling of increased inertia.

“We’ve dropped out of hyperspeed,” Gala observed. “Wherever it is he’s taking us to, we’re there.”

“Then prepare yourself,” said Joe, who was taking the lead. “If we are to overcome this adversary, we must be ready for anything he might – ”

Draxu did not wait for the sentence to be completed before demonstrating to both humans just how vainly it was spoken, by assaulting them once more with thoughts purloined from secure archives then twisted and sharpened into tools of pain. This time it was Joe’s mind that supplied the torture-instrument, and he and Gala, taken by complete surprise again, had no choice but to stand and suffer.

It could not be called the sentimental or romantic feeling of missing Neetra, though her long absence had etched the torrent of images and sensations with a pining longing desire that was close to annihilation itself. All that Joe had loved in the little girl he first knew, the wide brown eyes, the trusting parted lips, and the soft curves of pale pink cheek that framed them, was here understood fully in terms of what was promised by the new, those robust swellings of chest and legs and hips that engendered his aching need to look upon her, to be near her, to breathe her in and be obliterated by his need. For this was the part of Joe he fought hardest and most tirelessly to master, knowing it represented everything he opposed. Here was only the interminable argument that Neetra was his and his alone. That which the familiar eyes and lips and cheeks now so ceaselessly and maddeningly invited belonged in its entirety to him. He had found her. He had seen her first. It was therefore his right to be her first.

As suddenly as it had begun the psionic ravishment ended, leaving Gala and Joe to the dank path before them and the danger that awaited.

“Wow,” Gala declared flatly. “Being inside your perspective really brings home to you just how much younger and perkier than me she is.”

Joe looked back. “It is hardly the same sort of secret as that which you kept from me,” he snarled, glaring at her.

The sarcasm in his voice, and the ugly flush on his face, made him as unlike himself as he had ever appeared. “I know it’s not,” Gala returned. “It’s just it throws a new light on what I was hearing earlier about the agonies you went through over me in the tower room. High praise, for the substitute you ran to the minute she went away.”

Joe let his breath out heavily.

“Draxu seeks to shame and humiliate us, and to turn us against each other,” he told her, in something at least a little closer to his usual tones. “If we play into his hands, Gala, we are already lost.”

“Forget it,” said she, without smiling. “The male mind seldom yields surprises. I don’t know why I used to think you’d be any different.”

She refrained from comment on the many areas of direct overlap between her companion’s preoccupations and those of the last male mind she had been in. Of that subject Gala had already heard enough today from both Joe and Draxu, and she was more than keen for it not to come up again until a time of her choosing.

The pair of humans set off on the remainder of their trek, each hating the other for reasons that boiled and churned over and over without dissipating. Reaching the bridge door they braced themselves, then with their powers caved it in at a single savage stroke.

Light, so intense it banished the last lowering shade from the starcraft’s murky hollows and overhangs, greeted them so fiercely that both had to shield their faces with their hands for a moment. As their eyes became accustomed to the brightness they perceived Draxu, standing high above on the control platform and outlined against the clear membranous viewscreen, whose entire span was filled with the white radiance of a gigantic burning sun.

“Welcome, puny Earthlings!” Draxu declaimed. “I do hope that even in the short time we’ve shared together I’ve caused you the greatest possible emotional trauma, and that the attendant physiological reactions in those revolting bodies have been equally as unpleasant. In just a short time from now our resplendent friend behind me will be called upon to reduce both the said carcasses to no more than worthless ash. First though, I’m sure you will indulge me as I play out my little game to its end!”

Joe and Gala, with flames and cutlass blazing, flew at him. Draxu however with the speed of thought plucked from each brain a specific source of turmoil, and honing these to a pair of vicious barbs let his enemies run onto the spears of their own paranoia and impale themselves. Gala, knowing she had failed as a leader and made the other members of the Next Four into mutineers, and Joe, reliving the moment he learned Neetra had not included him among the recipients of her long-range psychic message, crashed to their knees.

“Forgive me for not elucidating,” gloated the prince, as he descended upon them down the platform steps. “Only one of you will still be living when you burn. That is a privilege reserved for the winner of my game. For it pleases me that the honour shall not be granted until that said one has finished off the other.”

He stood over Gala’s fallen form.

“Do you know the two things he wonders about you the most?” Draxu asked her. “What you’d look like naked. And this.”

Joe, slumping powerless on the other side of Draxu’s shins, saw in that instant every brutal detail of the tortures Gala had inflicted on Flashtease. Telepathic violations, physical beatings, and finally the ravages of a tailor-made device called the striation needle that had made the dying boy thrash and plead and crawl.

“You scum, you filthy unnatural little vermin!” Gala screamed at Flashtease in this abominable vision. “Tell me which set of co-ordinates it was, or...!”

Even before the psychic episode had run its course, Joe on the bridge floor had slowly turned his head to fix his gaze on the Gala beside him.

“And now, where’s that last one?” Draxu leered. “Ah, yes!”

Gala was before Joe again. This time she was standing beneath a garish stormy sunset on the roof of some grim building our hero had never visited, but which was evidently in Nottingham during the Third Dark Advent. Three others were with her, two he recognized as Next Four operatives and one he did not, but these details hardly registered with him. The words Gala was speaking to her companions could not but command the sum total of Joe’s attention.

The Next Four’s cause was to raise into the mortal realm the master of the darkest alternate dimension of them all. Gala had planned from the very outset to undermine and destroy The Four Heroes, as the only ones capable of standing in her way. Joe himself, as the founder of that valiant quartet, was to be singled out for special attention by Gala herself. She knew of boys and men, she announced to the trio amid contemptuous laughter, and with temptations and seductions would force him to doubt his beliefs, lure him away from Neetra, and ultimately tear the team apart. It had happened just as Joe witnessed it now. Everything had been decided at this, the inaugural conference of the Next Four.

Gala in the here and now, still kneeling on the fungus-ship’s deck, threw up her head. Her dark eyes were livid.

“No! Joe, don’t listen to him!” she implored hoarsely, then to Draxu: “You! If you chose that memory out of all the others, then you must also know...!”

“I do listen to everything Mother tells me,” Draxu affirmed, his red eyes glowing confidentially down at Gala while his mocking voice made it clear he wholly comprehended what had passed between them. “I’m a very good son in that way.”

Joe was rising shakily to his feet. Every muscle seemed to be shuddering. The prince with an elegant bow stepped aside for him.

“Do it, male,” Draxu hissed, in tones of the most exquisite pleasure. “Mete out final justice upon your female. Obey that precious cause. What does it dictate, now you know at last who and what she is?”

Both Joe’s hands erupted into roaring flame. His head still hung and most of his countenance was under the shadow of his hat, but as he stared down at Gala those features illumined by the fuming inferno indicated he wore a face of fire too.

“You know what must be done,” Draxu whispered.

The response came back: “Indeed.”

And then with the accumulated force of everything that was left in him, Joe thrust into Draxu’s mind what he had seen when he opened the living-room door.

A psychic blow of such unmitigated weight, delivered without the least of warnings, could only entangle itself inseparably with the victim’s own memories and perceptions as it drilled unstopping through every resistance to punch through to the core. So it was that Draxu beheld in that moment not Joe’s mother but his own, his beloved Empress Ungus, outstretched upon the carpet of a Terran house one wintry afternoon. There the massive heap of roots and tendrils lay, motionless, lifeless, the minuscule eyes on the budlike head pointing forever at the ceiling. She had died in the same unspeakable way that Joe’s parents did, and when the prince stared as Joe had done on the indelible proof of this, he felt what Joe had felt too.

Draxu staggered back. “No!” he began to howl. “Mother! No...!”

This was all the opportunity Gala needed to drive forward. Her cutlass came up and down again, slashing Draxu open from one shoulder to the opposite hip. So unchecked was the force of Gala’s swing that it whirled her fully around, but she rode it out and ended with a kick that propelled Draxu at the viewing-membrane. He burst straight through, and all sound vanished from the bridge at once.

Writhing and flailing Draxu shrieked out his silent death-cries to the uncaring void, while its airless demesnes rushed into those cells of his body that remained intact and swelled them to grotesque balloons. These were not long about rupturing, and the explosions that coursed across a thousand different parts of Draxu all at once left nothing of him but a limp deteriorating shred of vegetable matter. It drifted into the sun and charred away.

Joe and Gala were clinging to the bridge’s fungal furniture in the awful echoing noiselessness, turning their powers to a final desperate deployment as they strove against the vacuum’s counterforce to seal the viewscreen breach. From every quarter pressed upon them the empty cold of space, their own exhaustion and the pitiless pull that would drag them ever to their doom, but together they battled on, and together, with one last concerted telekinetic heave, they prevailed. The membrane gleamed one whole sleek surface again, and as air and gravity reasserted themselves the two humans could only thud to the deck, haul great gasps into oxygen-starved lungs, and glory at the hammering of hearts against ribs that informed them they must be still alive.

At great length, Joe began to pick himself up. “Reasoned that...since he handled emotions of others without ill-effects...his own psyche must be somehow insulated,” he explained between long intakes of breath. “Direct telepathic assault...penetrated those defences.”

The Flash Club proceeded down the steps and back into their ship, having locked and barred each exterior door against the peril without. “Take good care of her,” Neetra instructed the small group of Mini-Flashes charged with bearing Flashshadow to her quarters, then with her arm around the still-weakened Flashthunder set off helping him on his road herself.

“Your gamble paid off,” Gala said approvingly to Joe. “Glad we’re both still here. I’m grateful for the chance to start putting all that behind us.”

Joe, by now fully upright, looked long at her.

“A humorist to the very last, it seems,” were his grave words.

Iskira had found one of the mineral processing mill’s old furnaces, and been able to stoke it up again. It served now as a fireplace for herself and Dr. Mendelssohn, the one source of illumination and heat in the cavernous workroom this black Martian night. Two seats wheeled over from dust-covered monitoring benches did the duty of armchairs.

Opposite Iskira beside the flickering flames, Mendelssohn raised his head. She returned his gaze, seeing in the half-light not the old man, any more than she still saw herself as professor, wife and mother. Once, as teacher and student, they had shared the dawning of those lives. Now on this, perhaps the last night of the same, Iskira almost could believe they had found their way back to what they had once been.

“The murder of the Burghermeister,” Joe continued to Gala. “The torture of Flashtease. And the truth my friends laboured to make me see, and which I ever denied – that all along, you and the Next Four were no more or less than treacherous enemies to Nottingham and The Four Heroes. Draxu was not wrong on every point, Gala. There is indeed but one course left to us now.”

“Something tells me it’s too late for that explanation we talked about?” Gala ventured.

Joe’s only answer was to reignite both fists.

Leading Flashthunder into his chamber, Neetra saw they had entered the danger zone. Through the square window was only roiling incandescent fog, and already sweat was starting to prickle her from the heat in the compact room.

She gently steered the boy to his bed, then sat down beside him. Even that felt to Neetra like more than a mere action. Even then she apprehended in some measure how different a place her world might be when the time came for her to stand up again.

Flashthunder turned huge eyes and a pallid face on her. For once, his fear was shared by everyone on board. Neetra noticed she was holding her lower lip between her teeth.

“Li, are we going to survive this?” Flashthunder asked her tremulously.

Quietly and with emphasis, Neetra replied: “We might not, Flashthunder.”

This may be our last chance, her mother thought.

Gala, with resignation, unsheathed her sword.

“To the death,” Joe declared.

“To the death, then,” Gala said to him.

So it came to pass that couples three described a triangle whose points spanned the universe. Each female looked on each male, knowing their destiny was at hand, knowing that when they commenced with that on which they now stood poised, everything would change forevermore.

And when Neetra’s lips touched Flashthunder’s, it began.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR