The Foretold One

In Nottingham’s war-torn City Centre, Solidity forces were being unilaterally redeployed to the very heart of town. Over the stone steps and paving-slabs of that ornate square hung Empress Ungus’s giant saucer-shaped mothership, from which huge green world-rending tendrils spanned the gap between sky and earth. These were suddenly pulsating and germinating with a vengeance, perhaps making up for a stretch of lost time when it had seemed to some their maker was keeping them on hold, but Earthling tanks and planes were ever muscling their way through the widening breach in the Future Fighters and ultimate success for the Solidity’s superweapon now rested on a last concerted stratagem of defence.

Four of the many soldiers redirected thus were tearing together along a street that led to the Town Hall. There were two men, a woman and a pretty girl, all of whom had at some prior point in this protracted conflict suffered defeat at the hands of The Four Heroes or their associates. One of the men, who carried a pair of imposing edged weapons like ornamental halberds, glanced back over his shoulder and called to the woman: “Keep pace, Louise-Claudia! We shall surely need your combat skills in the final battle that even now is upon us!”

“I’m allowed to have second thoughts, Bygrune,” she retorted as they ran. “This planet was my home. Now I’m helping destroy it, to save the galaxy that’s become my new one.”

“Quite, female, it almost makes one wonder if this will happen every time you move house,” sneered the second man, who went by the name Contamination and was composed entirely of carcinogenic blue-white plasma. “Maybe I should incinerate your Earthling body to a crisp here and now, thereby sparing countless thankful generations that worry!”

Just then the fourth Solidity warrior skidded to a sudden stop – and not because of Contamination’s threats, for these were the sum of his conversation and those who knew him had long ceased to listen. The others halted too and turned at once to the youngest and sweetest member of their unit. She was raising a quivering hand to her forehead, her long-lashed eyes tightly shut.

“What are you picking up, Psiona?” Louise-Claudia asked.

“A mind…like none I’ve ever detected before,” the girl breathed back. “And a disturbance, drawing nearer each moment…no! It’s not telepathic – it’s temporal!”

Psiona’s final frantic words shrilled into a scream, as that which her sixth sense had already registered made itself known to those boasting just five. Reality ripped apart, and the Solidity quartet threw up their hands to shield their vision from the rays of interstitial unrest glaring out through the rift. In the midst of the passageway through chaos thus rent open, movement stirred, heralding the imminent arrival of a sole someone.

“There’s nothing about this in the Prophecy,” Bygrune declared.

The arrival of Harbin on the streets of present-day Nottingham was less a lone figure passing through a temporal rift, and more the onset of an electric storm.

He was a presence swelling into the angular canyon of asphalt and office-block, a manifestation that far exceeded the boundaries of his own gaunt physique. As the rip between epochs sealed shut behind him, the surrounding quartet of Solidity troops not only saw this newcomer but heard and felt. An elemental overture like the clash of illumining thunderclouds reverberated from within Harbin’s bare twilight-shrouded breast, sounding a note of imminent outbreak far more ominous than any nearby din of war, whilst unholy rays coursing blackly from his silhouette shaded even the night-time tableau to lurid cosmic darkness.

Of the soldiers it was Bygrune, lifelong warrior, who read at once the intent etched in the lean poised musculature and smouldering red eyes. Twin halberds whirled to silver circles as their valiant wielder leapt, plunging for attack-priority on Harbin’s shadowy frame.

Fast as Bygrune was, his target was faster. Harbin swooped and dodged the deadly steel arcs, his ragged grey cloak an afterimage trailing each lightning circumnavigation. Then a staccato rhythm struck up along the street as Harbin’s swift brutal retaliations drummed his dissonance into Bygrune’s armour and the limber frame of Louise-Claudia, who pitched bravely in to assist her comrade armed with nothing but her fists and feet. It was a deadly dance whose steps were knee-thrusts and elbow-checks, until the third Solidity soldier screeching characteristic sarcasm on disco-neon for these terpsichorean efforts cut loose his carcinogenic critical mass and sent a nuclear river deluging down in indiscriminate spate.

The combatants scattered before this singeing blue-hot torrent, while simultaneously the other side of the battlefield came alive with garish pink. Pretty teenage Psiona, taking her cue from Contamination, had raised dainty fingertips to her forehead and unleashed her telekinetic hand, which was ten times the size of a man’s and made of fluorescent flux. Now holding itself perpendicular and rigid it was powering at The Foretold One in a karate-chop.

Harbin scarcely paused for breath as the blue glow faded and the pink encroached. He rolled upright in a heartbeat and was on the move again before the next, that the psychic hand sliced through nothingness and slammed Contamination backward against a wall. Completing his evasive movement with one of his own hands open and pointing at Psiona, Harbin threw from his forearm a shaft of dusky light that impacted bodily upon the girl. Her round thighs and the hem of her miniskirt quivered, and an instant later Psiona’s clean white panties were smacking concrete.

Louise-Claudia, glimpsing what she took to be her long-awaited shot, jumped, turned and kicked. It seemed however that no matter where she was, Harbin was there split-seconds ahead. A hand interspersed itself between his face and her boot to clap tight about the latter, and then Louise-Claudia was wheeling helpless to the heavens unaccompanied by any backward glance from he who had flung her. That one instead merely dealt out a second spear, felling Bygrune and consigning to the highway the last of the opposition.

In a flap of his tattered cloak Harbin scaled for starlight, the aftermath of his ascension a jarring note rebounding upon the silent stage and lapping the prone bodies of his adversaries. For all that he might have appeared an unthinking vessel of violence, Harbin had shown himself before now to also be a scholar of Nottingham’s intricate history. On his previous trip to his own past he had known the most strategically advantageous location afforded by that time-zone to make his entrance, and this night in comparable fashion he was evidently aware of the one and only exit. Like a streak of purple-grey he was tracking across the war-torn rooftops for the Future Fighter breach.

Earthling militia in tanks and planes striving to gain the City Centre through this widening gap in the encirclement of vast multicoloured mechanoids, and Solidity toiling with equal tenacity against their advance, gaped to a man as Harbin shot by unheeding over their heads. With cape outspread like crow’s wings he began to coast the circumference of the chrono-telepathic ball that hung over Nottingham like some light-planet, its steady unabated growth swallowing Future Fighters one by one. Harbin cleared the luminous equator to slingshot himself at the stratosphere, and with green-blue Earth spinning at his heels he swerved and chicaned to negotiate the Solidity armada that crowded orbital space and dodge the hostile barrages fired his way. Within half a minute these enemy ships were behind Harbin too and onward he forged, a sole speck of twilight in the empty deepening void.

His destination, like his starting-point, was somewhere to which he had paid a visit on his prior voyage. At the black hole opened long ago during The Four Heroes’ battle with the Grand Master Robot Harbin slewed to a halt, staring into the belt of rocks and wreckage that ringed its incalculable span of nothingness. Amid a howling interstellar wind and the rush of gravitational currents as matter and energy alike were pulled to their doom, Harbin clenched both fists and willed the tide to turn. Such fundamental forces by which the event-horizon had drawn all into itself were suddenly cascading outward, straight to the waiting molecules of The Foretold One.

Last time, Harbin had been suffusing this potency into a sophisticated item of technological equipment, and the going had necessarily been careful and slow. This time he swallowed the celestial cataract in one monstrous glutting gulp, collapsing the black hole out of existence. Not even a body as powerful as Harbin’s could long hope to contain what it had thus absorbed. His shoulders were hunched, his thunderous storm-light had flared to cataclysmic keenness, and rhythmic radiations of overspill were urgent shrill scrapes from the strings-section heralding the inevitable onset of meltdown. But nor did Harbin mean to keep that which he had taken. Like Atlas hefting the world he wrestled the monumental burden within his grasp, and expended it to the last vestige in a single devastating deployment.

Never before had creation witnessed a solo unassisted flight from one galaxy to another. That however was the astro-navigation feat Harbin achieved, riding the wave of an exploding black hole to bestow upon his very frame such speed and endurance as to chart the gulfs alone. Like any hyperdrive starcraft he was light-years distant the moment he was underway, while a crescendo of sound and fury crashed out its closing chords on the meteors and hulks littering that dark corner of the universe.

Gala had sought out what was apparently the communications suite of Empress Ungus’s palace. Although the wide wall-monitors were framed by slick green creepers instead of metal or plastic, and the picture-quality they displayed suggested that of a vision in a witch’s cauldron, it had nevertheless proved possible to access a signal straight from Earth. Joe was beside Gala, and together they watched the faraway images of war in the night skies and city streets of their home. Aircraft were falling and land vehicles foundering on both sides of the conflict, while companies of soldiers endlessly locked and disengaged. It was a panorama of devastation pivoting about the great fungal column and mothership that loomed from its core.

“Why have you led us here, Gala?” Joe asked.

“It only made sense that the Solidity would have had arranged some means of staying in contact with their own galaxy while they were away,” was her reply. “Transmitter-buoys would be my guess, deposited while their ships were navigating space between this sector and ours. We can reach Empress Ungus from here, Joe. Let her know we’re willing to do what must be done.”

This provided at best only half an answer to Joe’s question. Gala, seeing it was so, turned to to meet his eyes with hers.

“We can offer her our lives,” Gala explained. “In return for sparing the Earth. When I die, this abomination incubating inside me dies too. I couldn’t say where in all this the genetics ends and the supernatural begins, but without us there’s surely no longer any potential for Harbin to exist. Empress Ungus couldn’t disagree with that. It must have been the real reason she tried to convince me to return to the past with The Chancellor. Well, now we can promise her the same outcome through a different method. It’s the only way, Joe.”

That one had drawn in breath at these words, and now let it out very slowly. “Gala…” he began.

“Let this be my one heroic act,” she insisted. Her voice was low, but each sentence was cast in steel. “Let me find my atonement here for all the wrong I’ve done. We won’t just be saving Planet Earth and all the lives that are being lost at this moment. We’ll also be preventing The Foretold One’s reign of terror, keeping this galaxy and all the others safe from him in a way that allows our world to continue. What else is there for us, Joe? You always used to understand sacrifice. There were so many instances when The Four Heroes were willing to accept it. So you tell me what this is, if it’s not the time come at last when sacrifice is truly all that’s left?”

When Joe’s reply finally came back, it took the form of a single word.

“Thassal.”

Of all Joe might have said, the given name of Thassal Son of Banthal, child to one of The Four Heroes’ archenemies and their friend Felicity Skay, had not ranked highly among Gala’s expectations. She could but stare at him uncomprehending.

“You cannot have known this,” Joe went on, “but The Four Heroes met Thassal once before you did. He was different then, Gala, a bloodthirsty despot to rival his father. His mother, transferring her hate for Banthal upon the boy he had left her with, did more to shape him thus than she knew. That iteration of Thassal died, warning the younger Felicity he awaited her if she repeated her mistakes. She vowed she would not, and on the day we encountered our children they were accompanied by another Thassal, one who observed our cause and battled to uphold justice.”

Joe’s gaze upon Gala by now was intense.

“There, the course of history was changed through a mother’s conscious acts,” he informed her slowly. “Felicity Skay glimpsed a dark future and made choices that built a bright one in its stead. Such a thing is possible. We have seen the proof. It can be so for us.”

“What are you saying?” Gala cried incredulously. “That the secret to bringing peace to the entire universe lies in…parenting?”

Joe had brought The Prophecy of the Flame with him to the communications suite. Now he threw the book open to its first page, where on the day he was first shown that parchment recto he had scorched into it the palm-print of his own burning hand.

“Why do you imagine I made this the preface to the tome that has so long occupied us, Gala?” he inquired. “Was it not that I wished the story of Nottingham’s past, present and future to be one determined by those principles The Four Heroes ever defended? You spoke of heroics, and responsibilities. What of preserving life instead of taking it? What of allowing others the freedom to choose good instead of evil? What of setting examples that will inspire others to follow? You have suggested one solution we might take. My proposal, I grant you, cannot be achieved with comparable swiftness or ease, but regardless of that it can be done!”

“I think you’ve done enough,” said Gala, though still in a low voice, and she was no longer looking directly at him.

Joe put down the Prophecy and seized her in his arms, as he had done that sunset evening in the tower room.

“What was it you saw in me, Gala?” he demanded, into the face now returning an awed stare to his. “Was it not the promise of a better world? One of more hopeful tomorrows than you had known? I still offer that, in spite of all! Find the courage that I know is within you, and say you will commit to it beside me!”

What commitment Gala would have made in response to this, was never known. Suddenly the spot where she and Joe stood entwined was surrounded by pulsing bio-luminescence and wailing alien noise, and though the arcane symbols screaming from the scanner-screens were a far cry from any radar either of the humans had ever witnessed, both were equal to knowing a proximity-alarm for what it was. Loosing each other at once they raced together up staircases and along hollow echoing tunnels, Gala’s flashing cutlass of white light flying from its scabbard and Joe’s hands igniting to blazing flame as the consorts burst out of the palace gates and into The Back Garden’s dank outdoors.

Awesome redwood fungi and vines sprawled across the black vista of the universe, where far off in the distance whole globes and planetoids hung suspended forever in these tendrils’ grasping embrace. At dead centre of this space-scape a man was making meteoric fall upon Joe and Gala, riding out the last of a trans-galactic propulsive wave. His thunderous twilight tint and the tattered rags of grey that flapped about his body were known to both parents only too well.

So it was that the first of The Four Heroes and the first of the Next Four came face-to-face once more with their wayward scion.

Harbin was descending, the apocalypse in his eyes.

NEXT: 'INCOMING'