The Trojan Horse, Chapter One

A tide of devastation was washing through the city. Where just twenty minutes previously the public had been assembled in an open-air show of togetherness and resistance, now were police and army hastily dispersing the crowd and evacuating the square as fire and tumult drew ever nearer. The advancing ones were without finesse, without strategy more complex than the marauding charge, and indeed each and every member of their horde was without some limb or component or other. But with crushing metal fists and spasmodic blurts of high-powered weaponry these semi-functional Dimension Borg robots, lurching onward on their remaining legs, were making carnage of the night.

This was clear enough to the three who watched the proceedings via a live feed on their viewscreen at Nottingham Castle.

“Our old friend the head,” Gala declared grimly. “It has to be. There were no other agents loyal to Dimension Borg down here in Nottingham when the Feeder Ray was deployed.”

“And these legions can only be made up of the derelicts hitherto stored at Military Control Centre One,” continued Joe. “Somehow the head has found a means of reactivating them and turning them loose.”

“Which would explain why their pattern of dispersal triangulates the Control Centre at point of origin,” The Chancellor responded. He spoke with excessive curtness, as if the fact he referred to should have been apparent to Joe from the outset. “But an army in such a condition cannot hope to be more than a delaying tactic against the combined force of our Collective. The head knows this. That is why it is putting them between us and its present location.”

Gala nodded her agreement. “Military Control Centre One just became a Trojan Horse,” she mused. “And the head is in there right now, figuring out some way to open the gates of Troy from the inside.”

“Need we fear that?” Joe put in. “I have faced the Feeder Ray before. No power on Earth seemed capable of overthrowing it in that way.”

“Certainly, your efforts failed,” returned The Chancellor. “But has it occurred to you there might have been others better suited to the task? Dimension Borg’s troops are derived from the same technology as the Feeder Ray, and that means the head may possess insights into its workings that The Four Heroes did not. All of which you would have already considered by now, had you any semblance of sound military training.”

In the aftermath of this outburst the meeting room was uncomfortable for reasons that had nothing to do with the growing crisis. Gala rose to her feet.

“We need to move on this,” she announced, but her eyes had met Joe’s, and her voice made clear the hint she was dropping.

“I shall alert the others,” Joe replied, courteously enough, though it was evident from his tone that he in turn had taken the hint. With one last look at The Chancellor, he departed.

Gala faced her one-time confidant across the empty hall.

“Here was I thinking you couldn’t even bear to think of me anymore,” she began dryly. “Do I still have reason to be thankful for my charms, even now?”

The Chancellor did not return her gaze, nor participate in her weak attempt at humour.

“I cannot forgive you,” he said at last. “What you had us do to the boy...you have changed. I loved the one you were before, not the one you are now. It is only that...”

His words tailed off into silence.

“Only that times like this have a way of putting us back in touch with the long-ago?” Gala finished for him gently. “Believe me, Chancellor, I know. Don’t think I don’t feel it too.”

He did not reply with words. They were not needed, after so long together, for the pair to understand each other.

“We both knew I’d have to become closer to Joe,” she went on. “That was the mission. That was why we accepted the things that couldn’t be. But Chancellor…”

Gala sighed.

“Georg,” she corrected herself. “You know better than I do what we’re about to set off for. You know this is the one we might not come back from. Be the soldier you’ve always been, and show me the united front we’re going to need to survive. Because I don’t want us to end like this.”

What it still signified to The Chancellor, that he was one of the select few to whom Gala had ever been known to speak so softly and coaxingly, was not revealed in its entirety by the short reply he gave:

“Nor do I.”

And Gala saw that with this much revelation of his feelings for her as they stood now, and no more, she would have to be content. Few of her questions had been answered, and fewer of her doubts assuaged. Indeed, all that Gala was left certain of was that the quest she spoke of, though it had led her and The Chancellor through a veritable winding maze of time and reality and fate, could never match for peril and complexity the painful interactions of their entwined hearts.

Joe quickly put the word out among the other Collective members and the castle was roused at once. It was Degris who tracked down Kumiko, last to respond to the summons, who he located in the small gloomy archive-room where security camera footage was stored.

“Kumiko?” Degris began, speaking to the girl’s back, for she was seated and hunched over the glow of a tiny playback monitor. “Kumiko?” Degris began, speaking to the girl’s back, for she was seated and hunched over the glow of a tiny playback monitor. “Trouble. We’re moving out – ”

Only then, as he walked over to her, did Degris see what it was she was wordlessly watching. The footage was from a battle that had lately raged outside in the grounds, and Kumiko was focusing on just one brief snippet – that in which Dylan was struck a crippling blow by Phoenix Prime. Degris had already watched the sequence himself when he was reviewing recent events, but he had not pored over it again and again in silence as Kumiko was doing now.

“Whoa,” Degris breathed. He put one of his many hands on the girl’s shoulder.

“Listen, Kumiko, Phoenix Prime’s got a lot to answer for,” he told her firmly. “No-one here disagrees with that. But fighting Dimension Borg robots and saving the world’s got to stay our priority. You turning this into some samurai revenge-drama isn’t going to help.”

“I’m not Japanese,” came back Kumiko’s reply. “Ryo-Hashiro Island’s a sovereign nation off the coast of Japan. That’s how come I’m the princess.”

Her eyes never left the screen. “So why do I get the feeling you’re about to tell me your people invented that brutal revenge stuff and exported it to the mainland?” Degris pressed on.

“Because we did,” Kumiko declared darkly. “Roller-skates and brutal revenge. The two great Ryo-Hashiro contributions to world culture.”

Then she was on her feet and skating for the door in brisk fashion. “If we’ve got robots to bust, let’s go,” she called back to him.

“I’m there,” said Degris, joining her. “But I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

From space, the Feeder Ray looked like a hairline of brilliant red spanning the black distance between Mars and Earth in order to maintain a steady supply of energy for the protective ruby sphere surrounding the latter. At its opposite end, a needle-shaped beaming-station amidst empty vastnesses of Martian desert, the ray was as wide as a highway as it roared to the cosmos in a vertical torrent of power and sound. Inside the facility the only colour that prevailed was red, this monochrome illumination thrown primarily by the furnace that was raging at full output and also a myriad scarlet-hued scanner-screens which a trio of operators was anxiously observing.

Several of these monitors depicted a vector graphic showing the twin planets, and between them multiple dart-like blips fast closing the distance from one to the other. At this image Professor Iskira Neetkins was casting continuous grave glances.

“Solidity interceptors are still on course,” she informed her pair of companions. “But they won’t get past Admiral Kasei’s orbital defences without a fight. We have time...some at least. Just as long as there are no surprises. Bendigo, any word on that?”

“No further dispatch-riders from the warlord called Chancellor,” reported that huge man clad in chauffeur’s livery, who had been given the task of standing by the communicator and telling the other two whenever it made a noise. “But fair Professor, these dastardly assassins that have skulked dishonourably into the kingdom we fight to protect...what can their plans be, and what can they do from there to strike at us?”

“I don’t know,” Iskira said grimly. “I built their creator too well for that. Irwin, the Feeder Ray’s functional parameters?”

“Within acceptable limits,” responded Dr. Mendelssohn, not turning from his workstation. “But we must be ready for all eventualities. This is war, Iskira.”

These words, in and of themselves, were beyond question. Nevertheless, nothing could prevent Iskira from leaving her troubled gaze on the back of the man she had once loved, for long seconds after he had fallen quiet and returned to his dials and gages with a steely and determined intentness.

Had she imagined that quality of Mendelssohn’s tone lurking on the periphery of the voice she knew, and which chilled her blood with foreboding even now? Chilled it not because it was unfamiliar, but rather because she knew it too, and remembered enough of the earlier time to which it belonged to recognise what would be signified by her hearing it now?

At last Iskira tore her eyes away, all too aware that the task at hand demanded her undivided attention. She told herself she must have misheard. The machine-noise in this busy chamber distorted every act of speech, after all, and these scarlet shadows played tricks on the mind. There were problems enough to occupy her and her two companions as it was, so with a sigh Iskira bore down again and amid the hectic ongoing din attended to her duties in uneasy silence.

END OF CHAPTER ONE