Strays

“You left her behind?”

Phoenix Prime’s question seemed to come as a surprise to Magnolia. The golden-haired girl, halfway through changing out of her damp swimming costume and putting her clothes back on, retorted: “We don’t need her anymore. And that whole hero-pretence thing was getting seriously old, am I right?”

This last was addressed not to Phoenix Prime but their trio of male alien spectators. Magnolia’s modesty was on a par with her prudence, which was why the calm voice in which Phoenix Prime replied set not a single alarm-bell ringing when it would have terrified anybody else.

“You’re no method-actress, Magnolia, but your failure to grasp the psychology of heroics has never been more apparent than now. Yes, thanks to you Joe’s here, just where we want him to be. And when he recovers from his injuries, how do you propose I explain to him we abandoned his most ardent devotee to her fate on Planet Nereynis? Do you think he’ll be especially enthusiastic about lending us his support and assistance, after hearing as much?”

From Magnolia’s silence it was clear this hadn’t occurred to her. “Petunia’s probably going to be fine,” she said at length. “Her friends are planetside. They’ll find her.”

“So too might your sociopathic paramour,” Phoenix Prime pointed out, by now breathing audibly. “You and Schiss-Zazz were ever of one mind as regards Petunia. No sooner will his path cross hers than he’ll finish the job your incompetence started.”

Magnolia considered this while hiking up her panties. “Well, he’ll want to have a bit of fun first,” was her response.

Phoenix Prime’s fireball tore through the briefing-room and next second Magnolia was barrelling backward in flames. Moltron and Technus hastily retreated from her flight-path, while Big Grin could only gawk as burning girl collided with bulkhead and fell. Once the last of the fires had died Phoenix Prime was standing over her.

“Alright!” protested Magnolia. “Alright! If it means that much to you I’ll go back and sort it out! Jeez!”

This time the incendiary bolt smashed down from above, all but reducing its victim to a pressed Magnolia flat upon the deck.

“We scientists aren’t known for our sense of humour,” hissed Phoenix Prime. “So I’m afraid that little witticism was wasted on me. If however by some wild outside chance you were being serious, then you’re sorely in need of education on a little concept called trust.”

Big Grin had been trying to sidle his diminutive limbless self for the door. Without turning Phoenix Prime stooped, sank her fingers into his flabby flesh and slung him like a lump of kneaded dough across the concourse at his stolen exo-suit. The bulky bronze armour tipped on its heels to receive this hurtling load, then rocked forward again as if standing to attention. Phoenix Prime shot its pallid quivering occupant a look which advised him he’d be wise to do the same.

“You, Magnolia, I trust as far as guard-duty with the lunkhead twins here,” continued Phoenix Prime. “We’re all agreed we need Joe, which is my assurance he at least won’t come to any harm under your bungling ministrations. The task of rescuing Petunia meanwhile goes to the sole individual among my present acquaintance I trust enough to do it right. Me. Ferried to Nereynis by one who offers the next best thing, which is cowardly abject obedience.”

With a last boding glance in Big Grin’s direction, she finished: “Move, Grindo.”

With Big Grin clattering and clashing behind her Phoenix Prime made her way down the spiral staircase that wound about the dungeons’ vast central chimney. Each complete round on this brick pillar disclosed gaping black archways rimmed with heavy stone, dull iron chains strung from wall-spikes, and atop every gantry or scaffold a different dark engine muttering arcane portent. Some breathed from mouthlike orifices steady jets of fiendish flame, others disgorged smoke through what looked like organ-pipes, and to others still clung vaporous shapes whose dim luminescent billows restlessly circled, and which emitted a noise ominously like groaning. Phoenix Prime preferred not to pay any of this too much attention, though she had to admit her demonic wings of fire looked right at home here.

The floor at the foot of the steps was a maze of similar infernal machines. In the midst of connecting-tubes and monitoring-benches moved the like-minded duo who were masters here, skull-sized gravity-defying green robot Scientooth conversing intently at eye-level with Prince Agaric, a lean and elongated chalk-hued mushroom-man swathed in leather robes. Something else Phoenix Prime did her best not to notice was how far this pair’s work had advanced since the last time she was down here.

“Going out,” she shouted. “Try not to conquer the universe until I’m back.”

Presently Phoenix Prime and Big Grin had blasted from the subterranean launch-bay and put Planet Drenthis’s sand-dunes behind them, to make all haste on the short interplanetary hop for that arid world’s non-identical twin. She, wearing an oxygen-mask, perched on the brassy armour which her reluctant chauffeur was piloting in its star-shuttle mode, and orbital space flitted by unheeded for Phoenix Prime whose own troubled thoughts were more than enough to occupy her.

She had to hand it to Scientooth, or at least that would have been so under less disturbing circumstances. No sooner had she reactivated him after sinking their stolen Grindo spaceship on Nereynis than he’d steered Phoenix Prime’s rag-tag assemblage at the sister-planet’s deserts, beneath which happened to be a dozen antiquated Toothfire munitions laboratories and tactical staging-posts Scientooth somehow knew all about. What long-ago conflict these belonged to was information he had not thus far shared with Phoenix Prime, but it meant easier living conditions and a greater guarantee of going undetected than she could ever have anticipated on selecting this remote corner of the galaxy for their hideout. Nor had there been any shortage of equipment for Scientooth and Agaric to immediately start busying themselves with, though for Phoenix Prime that was where good fortune started to shade into more ambiguous territory.

Her selection had been based on a chance discovery that the Vernderender High Command, from whom Scientooth was fugitive, were for some mysterious reason unable to broach Drenthis and Nereynis’s desolate solar-system. She was by now sure the explanation for this enigma was likewise locked in Scientooth’s databanks. His self-congratulatory confidence he was beyond his enemies’ reach exceeded even his customary pomposity. That there were ancient relics of a Toothfire war lying under Drenthis’s sandy surface could not be unrelated, but if Scientooth had revealed any of these secrets it was only to his partner in crime.

Hauling a long intake through her breathing-apparatus Phoenix Prime retreated more deeply still into her own hunched shoulders, and rested her forehead on her clenched hands.

It wasn’t working. Time to confront that, because the very errand she was now embarked on was sufficient evidence she wasn’t exactly making inroads into teaching Magnolia and the others the ways of The Four Heroes’ cause. They were as hungry as ever for the protection and respect Joe’s powers would command were he won to their side, but cared no more for his principles than they had on the day Phoenix Prime commenced her project. Masquerading as heartfelt followers of Joe’s philosophy had been just that to them, a masquerade, a necessary ploy to dupe Petunia into acquiring their target. Which was how Phoenix Prime had dressed it up in the first place, of course, but she’d bargained on the idealistic girl’s presence among this pack of mercenaries and reprobates bearing some reciprocal moral influence in turn. Now Petunia was paying the price for Phoenix Prime’s folly.

Already the latter’s anger against Magnolia had subsided, for even throughout their altercation Phoenix Prime had been able to see she genuinely didn’t understand what the problem was. Blame for that had to go to the one who’d thrown her into a world of ethics she’d never so much as thought of before and expected her to keep up. If Phoenix Prime was going to deceive people, what could she hope for but confusion? Something she remembered Petunia saying was that Joe didn’t make anybody join his circle of supporters. Indeed, now Phoenix Prime thought, Phoenix too had always spoken in terms of choosing to adhere to the cause. That choice was precisely what Phoenix Prime had robbed these many disparate individuals of, when she involved them in her experiment without their permission.

Phoenix Prime understood experiments. She’d grown up and educated herself reading all about her parents’ best ones, and they still made sense to her in a way people didn’t. Why was it that the scientific laws which so adequately governed molecules and chemical reactions always went awry when you added human life to the equation? Disasters like this seemed to be the only results you could count on when you tried experimenting with people.

She should have just stayed away from them, as she’d done most of her life. They were always getting hurt around her. Petunia. Dylan. All very well attempting to justify her recent deeds by arguing her first teacher in the ways of The Four Heroes’ cause had failed her. It was the other way round. Phoenix betrayed her beliefs only to heal the loved one Phoenix Prime had harmed. Never even mind that the galaxy might have been a good deal better off had Scientooth stayed a prisoner of his people, regardless of the ideological implications, given how he’d apparently been employing his time since she freed him. Everything was spiralling to catastrophe and it was mostly Phoenix Prime’s fault.

She forcibly banished these thoughts. They weren’t something she was able to deal with now. First she had to save Petunia. Recriminations and restitution could wait until after that.

Joe would be able to help. He knew his cause, and this kind of situation, in ways Phoenix Prime did not. He’d show her how to straighten out the bigger picture, because to give Magnolia her due, they did have him now and that was one plus at least. However, this rescue-mission was far more than mere mercy for an imperilled innocent. Phoenix Prime in her own personal pursuit of the cause had come to need Petunia easily as much as Joe’s guidance and direction were needed for their group as a whole. This was not because of the depth or insight of Petunia’s thinking on the subject, which to be absolutely truthful didn’t quite compare with that of Phoenix, but rather the girl’s sheer unquestioning faith. There had Phoenix Prime found meaning and inspiration as she struggled on a path which so often presented her endless stretches of thorns. Petunia in fact was well on her way to becoming the second friend Phoenix Prime had ever had, even though besides this she didn’t have much in common with the first. Losing her the way she had him did not rank among the outcomes Phoenix Prime was prepared to accept.

Big Grin, sealed inside the conical canopy she was sitting on whence he peered out through the perspex from between her shins, had probably been talking over their comm-link for some time. “It’s really altogether too bad of you, Phoenix Prime!” were the petulant words that gradually swelled to her conscious hearing. “Grindo reinforcements must be heading here by now after the ruckus Magnolia reported, and you know full well I’m at the top of their most-wanted list as a rogue spy and dangerous renegade. Let’s hope your favourite strange-smelling second gender specimen carries a convenient short-range shuttle shoved down her knickers, or you’ll both be a bit stuck for a return journey in the likely event of my having to sacrifice my freedom for her!”

“The marine biologist who named the boring sponge can’t have ever met you, Big Grin, or he’d have realised there was a more apt candidate,” said Phoenix Prime. They had by now reached the boundary of Nereynis’s atmosphere. “Just maintain a geosynchronous position and look sharp for my signal.”

Standing, Phoenix Prime spread her fiery wings to the void and took a header over Big Grin’s hull. Like a scarlet dart she quit black space lit by the water-world’s limpidity for a realm of sunlight and azure sky, leaving hazy white clouds whirlpooling in her wake. Sea was the sum of Nereynis’s surface all along the cusp of its visible curvature, save for some dark dots scattered amidst the sparkle. At the one which was giving off plumes of smoke Phoenix Prime locked trajectory, as her stratospheric dive with all possible expedience brought her bearing down on that island destination.

Roaming the coastline a lone girl watched wanly as the remnants of an overcast dawn bowed before brilliant morning rays and were fast reshaped by keen gusts portending greater turbulence yet. Not that there hadn’t been a fair bit of that already, reflected Petunia with a glance in the other direction at forest-fires still raging and space-vessels hastening to depart. The whipping wind which whistled in and out of her petticoats and lifted her flip-up violet locks might as well have been working its agitations likewise on her fluttering heart. Where did Magnolia and Schiss-Zazz go when the Grindo robots arrived? Had her two chaperones abandoned her? Was she stranded? If only she could find her way back to sweet Flashtease and her other, older friends, who she knew had also been here. Even Dean or Plunder Dacks would have made for a welcome sight right now.

Beside her the blazing jungle cracked like a gunshot. Waves were parting in a manner which had nothing to do with the breeze, but rather was herald to a moving body rapidly bound inland. Petunia turned, frightened at first, but then her tight sweater heaved a thankful sigh.

“Schiss-Zazz!” she exclaimed. “I was so afraid!”

Kicking beach from her flat-soled sensible shoes she ran over at once, beaming, as he dragged his lean frame out of the deep and proceeded to wade silently towards her.

“Where did you get to, Schiss-Zazz?” cried Petunia. “Is Magnolia with you? Did you find Joe? Oh, I’m ever so glad to see...”

It wasn’t the near-nakedness, or even the deadly shears on either wrist. Petunia knew Schiss-Zazz and was used to these traits. What checked her joyous words mid-spill was the expression he wore, for although he’d evidently received a soaking and what looked a scorching too, it nevertheless seemed to Petunia that quite such a dark look shouldn’t rightly have been.

She skidded to a halt by the surf, skirts and sweater and flippy tips bumping, cautious suddenly. In a quizzical voice she ventured again: “Schiss-Zazz?”

That one was well aware the little peachy hadn’t seen his game-face before. He’d made a point of keeping it from her, all this long unendurable stretch he’d waited.

Now the mad features at which Petunia gazed were fast breaking into a sea-serpent’s smile.

NEXT: 'ENGAGEMENT'