Target Harbour

Target Harbour was a known jumping-off point for several different solar systems where Alliance extradition-orders were not yet all they might have been. A crescent-shaped hunk of a far larger moon which exploded eons ago, its curved outer ridge was encrusted with low-rent temporary residences whose neon stained space. The towers of the taller hotels were interlinked by a monorail network, while within the great hollow of this rocky arc had collected purplish fluorescent gases which lay like the waters of a bay. Reflected upside-down in these seething depths, the gaudiness of advertisments and train-tracks and a million window-lights shone a longstanding invitation to the weary traveller whose recent deeds might preclude him from more reputable places to stay.

Croldon Thragg and Sludge-Man strode into the cubby-hole office of Administrator Tren Varg, a vagabondish man with uncut hair and a large cold smile. His secretary was at that moment fleeing the room in tears.

“She seems petrified of you, Varg,” remarked Croldon Thragg.

“Then she wants to remember my persecution-complex and violent hair-trigger tendencies before she goes making harmless innocent remarks around me,” sighed the long-suffering one. “Now, are you two going to tell me why you’re taking up my valuable time or do I have to start doing things to you with this anglepoise lamp?”

“On the trail of a runaway Grindo,” Croldon Thragg replied. “And as our regular Target Harbour contact we suspected you might be able to help us with a small inconsistency we’ve discovered. Young lady who’s usually correct about such matters informs us our Grindo is here. However, we took the liberty of checking your records in advance – ” he projected a screen of recent bookings onto the far wall using his Wonder-Tool “ – and the official manifest says nothing about him.”

“It wouldn’t,” Tren Varg explained patiently. “Because he came through me. My standard no-questions-asked package, paid for in full. Wealthy lot, the Grindoes, it’s a pleasure doing business with them.”

“For the same sum again, will you tell us where he’s staying?” Croldon Thragg asked.

“Naturally,” said Tren Varg. “I’ll need something to amuse me tonight when I’m lying under the old sack which for me serves as bedsheets, and picturing the look on that puny sponge’s pitiful squashy features when he finds out I’ve double-crossed him more than fits the bill.”

“Not a very nice thing to say,” Sludge-Man observed.

“No, well I’m not a very nice person,” admitted Tren Varg.

Blaster-Track banked low to avoid the hotel-block’s lines of windows and bore his Commander into the gloomy storage-area at the building’s base, Carmilla atop green-painted Runalong alighting beside them. “This is a rough neighbourhood for functionally defenceless life-forms,” Blaster-Track Commander explained to her. “Our Grindo friend won’t leave without the armour. It’s just unfortunate that as yet we know nothing about its capacities.”

Croldon Thragg’s voice crackled insistently from the two jeeps’ speakers: “That’s the very reason I recommended rendezvous with myself and the lad before engaging, Sir.”

“Negative on that,” Blaster-Track Commander responded. “Tren Varg never settles for two pay-packets when there’s a chance of a third. Our quarry will have already received a chargeable tip-off that we’re on our way, and if we waited for you to join us he’d be long gone. Hopefully Carmilla and I have arrived in time to intercept him before he has the opportunity to collect his stolen goods.”

No sooner was the Commander finished than from out of the shadows a new voice crooned:

“Ah, but time, and hope, are two things you just ran a little short of.”

The lights of the loading-bay boomed to full beam. From its maze of packing-crates and pulleys stalked a figure twice the size of a man, its molded musculature cast in brilliant bronze. Chunky segmented cables which looped from its power-core to junctions at the hip and elbow-joints hinted at veritable gushers of thermodynamic juice keeping this oiled behemoth limber.

Blaster-Track Commander reopened the communication-channel. “All deliberate speed, friend Thragg,” he added.

Set into the armour’s cone-shaped head where the face should have been was a transparent panel through which the pilot, himself nothing but face, might be glimpsed. Unusually toothy for a Grindo, he was showing off this questionable advantage with a hideous simper directed at the humanoids and jeeps below.

“On Grindotron we have no use for individual names,” he declared. “But out here in the great wide universe, just call me…Big Grin.”

“Do we absolutely have to?” asked Carmilla.

High-powered gatlings unlatched themselves from hatches in the brazen armour’s wrists, and Blaster-Track and Runalong summarily swept their riders off the ground to safer altitudes while Big Grin with gusto turned both barrels to the task of wracking and cracking every wooden crate in his sightline. The jeeps circled their gun-toting opponent and returned fire, staying ahead of the rattling barrage, until Big Grin with a snarl retracted his firearms and hefted a jangling iron jumble of chains directly at his adversaries’ heads. Blaster-Track swooped across the cumbersome projectile’s flight-path and laid down a glittering pink glacid-mist from twin sprayers in his tailpipes, such that the severed hunk of power-crane crystallized to the brittleness of thinnest ice as it burgeoned through the cloud. Carmilla’s fist alone was then sufficient to shatter the once-murderous mass.

In the time it took our heroes to pull off this manoeuvre however, Big Grin did not stand idle. Lurching through the last of the pink-glinting shard-shower at a turn of speed that belied his armour’s bulk, he swatted Carmilla and Runalong with one brutish blow and she crashed into a rank of winches with her green-hued steed capsized on top of her. The same oversized brassy gauntlet then thrust out to pluck the Commander from Blaster-Track’s back, while Big Grin’s other claw made short work of wresting that scarlet jeep out of his jetstream and gripped him pinned and powerless alongside his partner.

“The pair of you ought to take this creaky double-act on the road,” Big Grin told them. “Might get a few laughs out of the old-age pensioners. Because here in our modern ever-changing galaxy, you fit in about as well as your girlfriend over there.”

So saying he hurled Blaster-Track and the Commander at one of the few packing-cases still intact, reducing it to splinters. Next second Big Grin’s transforming armour was shifting shape for a quick getaway, because he had overheard every word on the subject of reinforcements and fighting to the finish out of honour alone did not feature heavily in his psychological make-up. Reconfigured to interplanetary shuttle-mode the armour roared clear of the loading-bay doors in a trail of rocket-exhaust, while Carmilla and Blaster-Track Commander scrambled out of their respective heaps of detritus, leapt onto their jeeps and gave chase.

The landscape of Target Harbour did not offer sightseers much in the way of open skies. Big Grin’s bid for the wide black yonder was so thwarted by crisscrossing monorails and clusters of overhead cables that it took the Commander and Carmilla no time at all to catch up with him. With his jets at a furious burn he set to weaving in and out of train-track struts and caroming along oblong alleyways formed by parallel thirtieth-storey facades, craving escape in every neon-stained corner from his twin pairs of pursuers. They however were not so easily deterred, Blaster-Track Commander with purple cape blown back and Carmilla’s billowing brown locks and beige tunic-skirt riding out the rushing currents likewise, while the dauntless vehicles on which they surfed this aerial maze of blocky obelisks were blurs of crimson and green beneath their feet.

Big Grin made a break for the bay but our heroes harried him back, driving him low over the sizzling sea that the agitated gases flared in their wake. Reentering Target Harbour’s lurid jungle they rapidly found themselves in environs so densely forested with pylons that only the flat tops of the monorail-tracks afforded Big Grin elbow-room to continue his flight. His armour underwent another quick-change and thudded onto the sleepers in four-wheeled mode, squealing off for the borders of town as a kind of spread-eagled tank whose glass-fronted headpiece now formed a turret rising from the central chassis. Blaster-Track Commander and Carmilla stayed hot on his heels, swiftly assuming the single-file that that confined causeway demanded, he leading and she backing him up. Tyres screeched on steel as Big Grin ahead vanished into the darkness of a tunnel-mouth and the heroes tearing up the tracks plunged in after him.

They burst out upon a cityscape where garish towers swished by on either side, and far fewer obstructions than before ran along the embankment. Big Grin was not slow to seize upon this advantage and immediately uncoupled his machine-guns from the fuselage of his present form, but Blaster-Track Commander was faster in whipping out his photon pistols and putting precision-shots across the interstitial distance to disable both targeting-motors before these weapons had time to swivel rearwards. With ordnance thereby stuck pointing uselessly in the wrong direction, there might have been no choice for Big Grin but to accept arrest at pistol-point…had not the thunderous din of an oncoming train suddenly changed everyone’s plans.

Two other monorail-tracks ran adjacent to the perilous path, one on a higher horizontal level and the other lower down. Our heroes therefore chose the only course left to them, and separated before Big Grin made his move. Blaster-Track rocketed skyward that he and his Commander might cover one potential escape-route while Runalong accordingly bore our heroine to the gully, such that all were ready to resume the engagement when its armour-clad objective lurched and clattered to Carmilla’s track and let the monorail carriages rip by overhead like a force of nature.

Big Grin took a glance behind him and spied his female pursuer. “You again,” hissed the Grindo, large teeth flashing. “One-quarter of the reason for all my troubles…!”

Runalong let fly with energy-beams from his headlamps, industriously carving away slices of the brassy armour’s mudflaps and running-board. In mere moments he would be through to Big Grin’s wheels, bringing that one’s vaunting ambition to a conclusive halt, but just then Target Harbour’s overhanging aluminium boughs parted for the fugitive to glimpse Blaster-Track’s crimson undercarriage and the inlay of his Commander’s cloak keeping pace far above. Having quit the upper monorail-track the duo was scouting for some trace of their friends and foe, but all three of these were shielded from view by girder-mesh and telegraph-wires. Big Grin’s guns no longer traversed, but they could still elevate. Without a second thought he put his unsuspecting prey squarely between his crosshairs and took careful aim for the dastardly kill-shot.

“By all means keep whittling away at me with those pea-shooters,” Big Grin sneered to Carmilla via the armour’s megaphone. “It’s that or hurry to the rescue of lover-boy. But something tells me you’d sooner choose option two!”

Hesitating even for the instant it would have taken Carmilla to contemplate her next move would surely have spelled calamity. So skipping the hesitation our heroine flung herself face-first past Runalong’s fender to alight with bone-jarring impact on the speeding armour’s roof, whereat she wrapped arms and legs about Big Grin’s canopy and leaned to one side with all her might. This added weight and momentum acting on the vehicle’s tallest extreme tipped it wholesale from the precarious runway for which it had never been intended, and amid a spray of misdirected bullets Grindo and girl plummeted together into the gulf.

Big Grin, uttering several of his planet’s foulest curses and threats, struggled through a free-fall reversion to robot-mode in attempts at shaking Carmilla off. She however clung fast, and though her thighs slipped as metal plates between them parted and interlocked, her fingers never lost their stranglehold on Big Grin’s helmet. This remained so even when the combatants crashed to rest with a colossal jolt, earlier than expected, the armour beneath and Carmilla splayed on top of its brazen body.

They were outstretched thus on a crumbly concrete pillar, presumably relict of some long-abandoned monorail-line. Certainly it had shuddered ominously on their arrival and was continuing to do so, but in spite of this Carmilla willed her weary hands not to leave go the armour’s throat. For while she and her enemy maintained this dangerous embrace she was too close for the latter’s gatlings or fists to be of any use to him, which meant the advantage was hers, at least until the teetering strut beneath them succumbed to inevitable collapse.

Calling on all the strength left in her aching arms, Carmilla hauled herself up into a kneel on the prone armour’s die-cast chest. Through main force she cracked the helmet open and thrust it back on its hinges, such that Big Grin tumbled shrieking and gibbering into the upper recess of that conical cabin to hang helpless over the remainder of the drop.

“Long way down, Big Grin!” commented Carmilla. “So either you start talking, or I find out whether this thing flips all the way over. Something tells me you’d sooner choose option one,” she added with a dangerous smile.

“Talk?” Big Grin fired back at her from the bottom of the upended receptacle. “Why on Grindotron would you want to talk? Let me get this straight, first you take away my every happiness and turn me into a wretched runaway, and now you want my thoughts and feelings on what a good job you’ve done of it?”

These words did not spill forth from cowardice alone, for Carmilla could hear well enough the healthy measure of indignation thrown in too. Bewildered, she listened on:

“Was a quiet life too much to ask? Serve Scientooth from the comfort of my own home, until his eventual conquest of Grindotron when I’d reap the rewards he promised me. Power and status in his new world order, and the chance to lord it over Professor Grindo at last! Well, Scientooth’s not going to worm his way out of that! Not even with your help, you and those other three overgrown second-gender outsiders! You may have landed me in this ludicrous family squabble of yours, but I’ll pick a side if that’s what it takes! I’ll do anything I have to do, just as long as I get what’s coming to me!”

“You’re going to get what’s coming to you in two seconds flat if you don’t start giving me some answers,” snarled Carmilla. “Now for the last time, what’s all this about? What did you flee Grindotron looking to do?”

“Join Phoenix Prime, of course!” Big Grin screamed. “Join your sister and her other supporters in her plan to spring Scientooth!”

Carmilla, who had acted so fearlessly and unfalteringly when Blaster-Track Commander’s life was in danger, now did far more than hesitate. Colour seemed to drain from her world, and did so in actuality from her face. Suddenly there were no more witticisms on hand, no more savvy rejoinders, indeed nothing at all that it was within her power to say.

It made little difference anyhow, because at that moment the column cracked in half.

As the skyscraper-summits of Target Harbour wheeled crazily heavenwards for Carmilla, she caught a brass-tinted glimpse of Big Grin’s armour mutating back into its spaceship semblance to blast away for the boundless cosmos so long sought. It didn’t seem to matter though, because surely nothing did, in the light of such news as Carmilla had lately received. It had left her no better than dimly aware of her present plunge to certain doom, but there was nevertheless a split-second when she felt about ready to resign herself to that fate, knowing all this could never come to any good.

It was not however the hard pavements of Target Harbour that proved to be Carmilla’s next stop. A far softer landing awaited her in Blaster-Track Commander’s strong arms, as he stood ready on his scarlet steed to expertly intercept her vertical trajectory. As Carmilla came to and looked blinking around her she saw they shared their middle-height hover with the riderless Runalong, and also Croldon Thragg atop his purple-painted jeep Computero and that one’s diminutive yellow-hued brother Little-Track who bore a jubilant Sludge-Man.

“Kick back and relax, chick, the raddest dudes in seven solar-systems have got your righteous butt!” rapped out the last named. Just as soon as she found her voice again Carmilla breathed gratitude to the whole team, even Sludge-Man, for all that he was hanging around her feet-end taking frequent looks at that of which he spoke.

“We should thank you,” replied Croldon Thragg, who appeared to be calculating a performance-analysis on his Wonder-Tool. “It was very soundly executed. In next to no time we’d heard everything we needed to hear, and then we couldn’t have asked for a better window of opportunity to close the operation and pull you out.”

Carmilla needed a minute for this to sink in.

“You mean you were monitoring us the whole time?” she spluttered. “And it was you who broke the pillar?”

Blaster-Track chortled. “Four jeeps, eight glacid-sprayers, no waiting!” he confirmed.

“Then you let Big Grin get away?” Carmilla exclaimed to the world in general. “Why?”

In search of elucidation she gazed up into Blaster-Track Commander’s face. He was smiling.

“Our Grindo friend no doubt possesses many fine if well-hidden qualities,” that one affirmed, “but at going it alone in a harsh and duplicitous universe, he is a novice. It was information we sought, not his capture. Big Grin now believes he has outsmarted us, and in his egotism and overconfidence will lead us directly to Phoenix Prime’s whereabouts, which it was by no means certain he would have disclosed were he in our custody.”

If there was a touch of self-congratulation, or possibly even swagger, about Blaster-Track Commander was he uttered this last, it was surely excusable. Carmilla however was still looking up at him without words, and her expression he could not fathom. Therefore quickly resuming his accustomed courteous demeanour, the Commander commenced: “But fair one, you have my most profuse apologies for any undue distress our surreptitious ploy might have – ”

“Oh, knock that off,” Carmilla told him at once, for the curious look on her face had in fact been a smile of her own. “Just for a moment there you were starting to remind me of someone…!”

NEXT: 'THE BACK GARDEN'