Shapeshifters, Chapter Two

Interplanetary space had been struck alight. Energy-emissions, the kind that looked like highways made of pulsating death, were roaring from the vanishing-point and cascading into the black yonder while deadly missiles and rockets buzzed endlessly by like outriders in their slipstream. In and out of this chaos the Flash Club ship swerved and rolled as it made its dauntless way ever onward. Neetra, who had done her homework on this galaxy’s weapons before embarking, gripped the twin handles of her steering-stick yet tighter and hollered aloud:

“Still reading mostly prazons and lethalities, so girls, keep those engines at full, we need to bob and weave! I sound like my old netball teacher,” she added in a mutter, then continued: “Boys, stay on the glacid depth-charges – use the blubulous-bombs if you have to. The last thing we need is to freeze up in the middle of this!”

“Will do!” Flashlight acknowledged, and there was a huge grin on his face even as the cockpit lurched and dipped like some nightmare roller-coaster. “Wow, this is great!”

“You mean because they’re trying to kill us?” wailed Flashthunder, who was terrified of roller-coasters and almost everything else.

“No,” replied Flashlight, “I mean because they haven’t done already.”

“I still don’t see how that’s great!” poor Flashthunder squealed.

But Neetra was wearing a look of grim satisfaction, for she understood. “Creatures like these Vernderernders are all alike, Flashthunder,” our heroine explained above the tumult. “They measure the worth of others only in terms of their strength. This is a test, which proves we were right – they know who we are, and they’re willing to negotiate. Just as long as we survive to make it to them.”

“Oi!” Mini-Flash Bloomer then shouted. “Got a bit of aggravation moving in from the fourth quadrant! Looks like section two of the test’s coming right up our knickers!”

The monitors were indeed showing new blips, neither vessels nor projectiles but animalistic things that moved independently through space. “Are those Vernderernders?” Neetra asked.

“Fringers,” Mini-Flash Socket corrected. “Mutant machines of practically no intellect, far less technologically sophisticated than Vernderernders. Toothfire guard-dogs.”

“Then let’s teach them some obedience,” declared Neetra, grabbing a breathing-mask as she rose to her feet. “To the roof!”

Draxu’s thin body of slick grey-brown epidermis and many-gilled spore-slits still hunched unmoving on the detention-cell bench. The slender roots of his feet were twining on the floor, and his hands, disproportionately long and whiplike, rested on either side of the narrow hips. The slight shoulders were raised, and his mouth was hanging half-open to show needle-point teeth. His unblinking eyes burned with a low crimson light directly at Joe and Gala as they observed him from the corridor outside.

“My guess?” said Gala. “Someone who has to make that much effort to look menacing can’t be any threat.”

“I sense no psychic anomalies from him,” Joe admitted. “But, even so...”

“You’re basing all your suspicions on one conversation we may or may not have had,” Gala reminded him. “And isn’t it much more likely you told me one time what happened to your parents, then forgot you did? There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of the rest of it, Joe, believe me. You’re just not used to being with somebody else that way.”

As she spoke, a painful memory was beginning to surface. It was the day of her mother’s funeral, when as a small child in a simple white dress Gala had stood on the ramshackle deck of the plague-ship she called home, by far the youngest and healthiest among otherwise ragged and diseased mourners all gathered to pay their last respects to she who rested before them in a bare coffin of planks. The recollection brought its familiar sting of sorrow and bitterness, as Gala knew it always would, but she supposed it was natural enough for it to come back to her now. She had, after all, just been talking to Joe about the visit they made to that day together.

“Come on,” Gala said to him, trying to brush it off. “Let’s go back upstairs, and see if we can’t get you a little more used to...”

No. Something was wrong. The memory was affecting her more than it should. This quickening of anger, helplessness and fear within Gala’s breast had not been felt so intensely for what might have been a lifetime, maybe not even since the bleak day itself when she had trembled beside the casket, vainly fighting back tears she could no longer suppress. It wasn’t fair. She was lost now. The only one who loved and protected her was gone. And without her mother, how was she ever to fulfill her destiny? How could she possibly save her people and lead them to freedom, when she had to face it all alone?

Draxu’s red eyes glowed.

“A little more used to...used to...stop,” Gala faltered, raising a hand to her forehead. “Stop that...”

Then Draxu spoke. “She likes doing to to others, but she doesn’t like it when it’s done to her,” he sang softly. “How human.”

Gala’s fist whacked the jutting node on the wall that opened the transparent barrier. “Get out of my mind!” she hollered, her voice raw. “Get out...!”

“Gala, wait!” cried Joe, but already she was striding into the cell, her cutlass flying from its scabbard. The prisoner sprang up and nimbly evaded her wrathful charge. Joe, seizing the advantage of seconds, ignited his fist to block Draxu’s escape...

When without any presentiment at all Joe was plunged deep into a telepathic flashback – and it was no fantasy or illusion, for his own psychic powers were equal to telling the difference. This came straight from the lived experience of the only other human being present. It was Gala, aged sixteen, and the fat man wearing singed and tattered robes Joe knew to be the Burghermeister, self-styled emperor of Nottingham in the First Dark Advent. This could only be the day Gala ended his tyranny and discovered The Prophecy of the Flame, for her younger self and the Burghermeister were facing each other in the high belfry at Nottingham Castle where that latter momentous happenstance had occurred, and close at hand on its stone lectern rested the august tome.

Joe had thought himself fully acquainted with this chapter from Gala’s past, but here was a paragraph she omitted from her retelling. So it was that with mounting horror our hero watched for the first time as the cracked and jagged stump of Gala’s original cutlass left its sheath, and brought the Burghermeister’s evil life to its blood-sodden end.

This dark deed was over and done long before Gala and Joe ever met. And in all the time since, Joe knew nothing of it. Until now.

Something collided with his body even as he reeled under the impact of what he had witnessed, and Joe went down. He was not slow to recover, and nor was Gala, but by the time they were both on their feet again the membranous wall was back in place, and Draxu was on the other side.

His fangs gleamed a triumphant red in the light of his eyes. Then he was gone.

The Flash Club hurried together onto the roof of their speeding spacecraft, Neetra wearing her oxygen-mask and the other eight youngsters breathing freely in the vacuum. Overhead amid star-studded gulfs the Fringers were circling, but on first sight of movement below they broke formation and began to descend. Each was a wiry beast of twisted steel with leaf-spring tendons and serrated razor claws, from which a pair of round headlamp eyes glared ever ahead above a toothy mouth like a radiator grille. Their growls were the sound of a hundred rusty revving motors as they drew near.

Mini-Flash Bloomer leapt, twirling so her skirt kicked up to show lacy elastic, and on completing her spin threw out one arm to meet the lead Fringer full in the snout with an eruption of shocking pink. As her target veered off-course and took two of the other Fringers with it, the remainder gained the ship’s bulkheads and a demolition derby began.

Neetra, between teleporting out of the paths of furious marauders and warring on with all her psychic strength, was able to snatch glimpses of what her fellow lightning-bolt tunics were getting up to. Mini-Flash Frill was in flight, staying abreast of their hurtling battlefield while beaming out lethal pristine scintillations in her effortlessly pretty way. Tiny Mini-Flash Luna was fighting-mad, and flinging spark after spark from her outstretched hands had already junked a total of Fringers far greater than her share. Female Mini-Flashes such as these were by nature more powerful than the males, but Mini-Flash Socket nevertheless made a valiant enough sight as he tried hard to pick off the foes with his photon pistol. Mini-Flash Brace was bowled over by a Fringer rushing by and fetched up at Neetra’s toecaps with his tunic inside-out, but somewhat pink in the cheeks he scrambled to his feet again and pitched back in. Meanwhile Flashlight, oldest and strongest of the boys, had transformed himself into the dazzling silhouette from which he took his name and about him blinded Fringers were lurching crazily away and running aground.

All along the bumpy metal plain the melee continued as the stars shot by. Even Flashshadow, who boasted no aggressive capabilities, was lending veracity to Mini-Flash Socket’s earlier comment on their enemies’ intelligence, for time and again a Fringer would pounce at her glimmering shape only to slide straight through her and dash itself to pieces against the hull. Even after numerous repetitions of such incidents it did not seem to have dawned on the Fringers that neither Flashshadow nor anything she was making contact with could be touched.

Turning from her intangible friend Neetra spied Flashthunder, tackling Fringers with the strange spluttering energy-projections he had only become able to emit since meeting her. This was not the only change Neetra had worked in the beautiful but rather hapless Mini-Flash. When they met, Flashthunder would have been the first to admit that encounters such as this one terrified him into utter stasis as a matter of course. Now though, whenever Neetra was around he positively threw himself into violent confrontations with a kind of fitful panicking haste that sat awkwardly alongside his fear. This newfound pluckiness, however, had made him careless. Neetra caught her breath as she noticed Flashthunder was standing on top of a fuel-pod to face down two advancing Fringers, and that his “special thunder to make fire,” as he called it, had chosen that particular moment to fizzle out.

Our heroine saw she had less than a second to act. She teleported, straight into the incipient warmth and shockwaves of the explosion’s birth-pangs, and threw her arms around the slim body that was already going limp. Around them the heat was rising to an unbearable pitch, tearing wickedly at their bare skin, but with an almighty effort Neetra mustered up her powers once more and they were gone into the cosmic cool while the cataclysm boomed and roared to its monstrous majority and swallowed fuel-pod and Fringers alike.

Neetra rematerialized in the shelter of one of the spacecraft’s tall deltoid fins and immediately laid Flashthunder down. Not daring to breathe she gazed on his pale delicate features, all smeared with soot and not moving. Then Flashthunder stirred weakly, his eyelids starting to flutter, and Neetra could not suppress her choking sobs of thankfulness and joy. Again she gripped him tight and pressed him against her.

She had taken this too far. Everything she had done was in the name of saving the Earth, a cause in which she still devoutly believed, but she had involved others in her desperate bid and now one of them had been hurt. What was more, he was somebody she cared about – indeed, it was possible she was only now coming to realise just how deeply she cared. Her guilt and self-reproach at this alone were devastating to her, but worse still was her knowledge that the danger into which she had willingly flung herself and her companions was not over, and far more terrible consequences than these were surely yet to come...

END OF CHAPTER TWO