Unto the Breach, Chapter Three

Hangonel too broke into a sprint. Two pairs of bare feet pounded the plain, throwing up twin crimson dust-bowls steadily closing to collide as the counterparts made ready to settle through combat the tie-breaker over which of them was wearing the least. Bendigo discovered the proper parlance was something you could fall back into as if you’d never been away, for without so much as a hesitation he hollered out as he hurtled: “Then learn, impetuous Hangonel Mangonel, that it was none other than my venerable father who first sought to set down the Prophecy you speak of! So perhaps it is indeed meet we are thus enjoined on this battlefield, for only the benign spirits and ancient gods might have ordained a reckoning between two such!”

Fortunately the space between the foot of the ridge and the mill’s entrance was quite broad, allowing Hangonel time enough to bellow his clarion reply: “Well did I observe, scion of the Prophecy-maker, that our warlike hearts were akin and our fateful course the same! And as we are in the hands of powers greater than ourselves, it is as you say meet that we obey their magisterial authority until one of us stands no more!”

With knees and elbows pumping industriously throughout all of this, the loquacious duo had finally drawn within a sword’s-length of each other. As if in slow-motion their soles cleared the sand, each of them hauling back a limb mid-flight preparatory to lashing it out in a thunderous first blow the moment their bodies converged…

Just ahead of which, a subterranean pocket of natural gas directly beneath them decided now was the time to explode.

Hangonel had in fact been lucky to make it this far, because the sad truth about him was that things tended to blow up when he was around. There were those in his home galaxy who attributed this to some sort of curse, and others to a latent paranormal ability, but for fellow warriors such as Zeldich it was more a matter of only mentioning the problem when they had to and being as supportive as they could. Indeed, Hangonel’s brothers-in-arms sympathized to the utmost, for his affliction really was just about the most unfortunate one you could ask for in a line of work where maintaining your dignity was so important.

He and Bendigo sailed head-over heels through the night and splatted as one against the mill’s stone exterior, leaving large matching dents. They peeled off together like rain-lashed leaves to tumble past the quarry’s lip, where the ancient rusting frameworks of jagged mining machinery threatened to make for a combat environment which only the nimblest could negotiate. Luckily however, there was also a great open vat of stagnant fifty-year-old oil in which Hangonel and Bendigo squarely achieved splashdown. Under the impact it tipped obligingly on its hinge, discharging the duo amid a waterfall of gunk, whereat two industrial steel springs jutting from a broken rail managed to hook their pointed tips neatly inside the waistbands of the plummeting pair’s pants. A moment later the duellists were safely bungeeing up and down, their titanic confrontation somewhat on hold due to their being several feet out of arm’s reach of each other, but both flailing and kicking at the empty air with such vigour as to all but make up for this. The battle-cries and shouts of defiance were fearsome indeed, if a little drowned out by the loud boinging noises.

“Bendigo’s met his match,” Iskira breathed.

Dr. Mendelssohn turned from the quarry to the ridge, even as further blasts and blams triggered by Hangonel’s mysterious properties sounded from below. The remainder of the Solidity platoon was on the move, surging down upon the Professors in an avalanche. At the scarlet stormfront glinted the lethal blades of Zeldich, while behind him through the billows and whirlwinds were sights equally ominous – a man with huge moth-wings, another firing energy-beams from a handheld device, a ginger-bearded giant hurling what looked like lumps of tree-trunk, a gargantuan ravening rat that scurried on all fours, and a brooding masked figure wielding a murderous-looking blowtorch, while over this outlandish collection’s heads soared numerous caped musclemen of The Flash Club wearing yellow lightning-bolts on their brawny breasts. Iskira and Mendelssohn did not require their impressive scientific credentials to conclude that things were looking bleak.

Bendigo, daubed in oil and sand, hauled himself out of the ravine and slung onto the desert at his feet the unconscious form of Hangonel Mangonel. “I know my charge,” he informed his two friends. “Go! I shall occupy them!”

On that pronouncement he was off again, plunging headlong at the onslaught he could not hope to survive. “Bendigo, no!” Iskira screamed in vain.

“We must help him, my dear – the ATV, quick!” cried Dr. Mendelssohn, grabbing her by the hand and hastening to where their all-terrain vehicle was parked beside the mill. Unarmed and outnumbered thus, both Professors were grimly aware their one chance lay in ploughing straight at the foe to somehow pluck Bendigo out before Solidity weapons and powers shredded their transportation and them with it. Swiftly affixing their seatbelts the couple steeled themselves for this last-ditch gambit…but as the ATV came back about to bring their destination before them, they could only sit and stare.

The desert plain had been swallowed up by a melee that churned its sandy surface from one border to the other. Within the swirling gritty chaos such moving silhouettes as could be glimpsed, far from making short work of a lone individual against impossible odds as the Professors had anticipated, were instead busily engaged one and all in the arts of war. From what little visibility was afforded, it seemed everyone was fighting for their lives. In addition, though Hangonel Mangonel remained slumped where Bendigo had dropped him, explosions within the tumultuous cloud were adding their violence to the uproar.

“What’s happening? Is Bendigo doing that?” Iskira exclaimed.

Then the source of the detonations became at least slightly clearer. From behind the high sand-dune the Solidity’s spacecraft was rising, its turbines whipping the cyclone into yet greater agitation while its plasma cannons pounded down upon the prairie. However, a response from the patrol to this hostile deployment of their own hardware was not slow in coming. Surface-to-air emissions of Flash Club energy in tandem with deadly rays from the man with the handheld device scored a critical hit on the ascending interceptor, which listed and began to nosedive.

Dr. Mendelssohn threw the ATV into reverse. Sand-spray fanned behind its grinding wheels as the fender came about from the impact-zone. Through their rear-view mirrors the scientists were granted one last glimpse of a confusion of leaping forms before the ship crashed catastrophically against the side of the mill, demolishing its ancient stone upright and throwing into the black night sky a wall of crimson detritus that dwarfed the battle-tumult. Stamping down on the accelerator Mendelssohn raced ahead of the escalation, tearing across the flats until finally all had run its course, the doomed space-vessel had embedded itself in Mars, and the flying acre of desert was gradually settling into a quiet rosy mist.

In the newfound still Dr. Mendelssohn calmed the engines. Whatever in the universe had just transpired was evidently over, and it would have been futile to run from something he and Iskira so little understood. So instead they stepped out of the ATV and merely waited.

Someone was approaching from the fog. Though neither of the Professors could believe it, they recognized at once the muscular outline even before it had clarified into battle-grimed bare skin and a pair of gaudy underpants. It was Bendigo, alone.

There could be no doubting he was back to his old self. Iskira well knew the smile he was wearing, which was the one reserved for great victories. In their many years’ acquaintance she had yet to see him achieve one of these, but she had seen the smile often enough. Even by Bendigo’s standards, however, it had never followed widespread destruction on quite this scale.

“My learned friends,” he intoned, “the battle is won. I have prevailed. The enemy is defeated, and more, our captured allies are free.”

Dr. Mendelssohn and Iskira gazed at him, speechless.

“I go now to meditate,” Bendigo concluded splendidly, and swaggered off.

Iskira, feeling that this day had by now brought just about as much as she was prepared to take, weakly raised a hand to her forehead. “What captured allies…?” she managed to ask the planet in general.

More shapes were moving through the mist. On sight of them the Professors drew warily together, for the first detail apparent about these three powerful forms was a yellow lightning-bolt shining from each trunk. Was Bendigo wrong, and the foe not completely overcome? Or had Solidity members turned on each other, thereby orchestrating this otherwise inexplicable rout?

“Well, could be we gave him a little help,” said one of the trio, and the voice was familiar. “Don’t tell him that, though. It’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time!”

With that, they stepped fully into the Professors’ view. It was Bret Stevens of The Four Heroes, and with him Amy and Max.

Deep beneath Nottingham’s contested City Centre, where even the din of raging battle was a faint murmur overhead, Space-Screamer’s robot guard of four laboured at the foot of a giant drill-shaft. To human eyes, had any been present, their toils would have appeared some mere elaborate mime, as steel pincers busily closing and unclosing traversed empty air before the sheer rock-face. However, the automatons’ technologically-enhanced optic sensors and those of their watching master saw the visibility-shielded apparatus that this treacherous workforce was rigging to the upper mantle. In actuality two great iron clamps gripped fast, and from each stretched a mighty hose that spanned the vertical distance to topside hundreds of feet above.

The crew completed their task and stood to attention. Space-Screamer’s sneer of triumph widened.

“It is done,” he commenced. “The Four Heroes’ cause and its myriad mysterious powers will soon be mine. Come! The surface awaits! My laboratory-moon stands ready to receive the heart of this mudball world, but all depends on our deploying the galactic trans-mat unit before our prying friends in the Solidity discover us. I shall not forsake my precious plunder now we are so close to – ”

Suddenly a small pretty figure with white wings and a navy-blue school uniform dropped in from above and joined Space-Screamer’s audience.

The evildoers stared, and Carrie stared back with sinking heart. She had expected her destination to be deserted, or as a best-case scenario to already contain Phoenix, Kumiko and Phoenix Prime. This was conspicuously not the rendezvous she had looked for, or indeed one that any Earthling would.

“Fear not, omnipotent creator, for she is of this world,” the robot Steelstreak reassured Space-Screamer. “The Solidity has not learned of your august enterprise.”

“Yes, and of course the humans won’t have the slightest objection to what we’re doing down here!” shrieked his sarcastic master. “Slay her, you fools!”

“Like I say to the boys in PE – take a great look, jerks!” Carrie retorted, and in a determined flutter of her feathers was soaring back the way she had come. Even Cyclotor, swiftest of the automated quartet, reacted only in time to slice his cruel air-blades through ozone that the girl had long vacated. For a second or two Space-Screamer and his lackeys gained nothing but the promised view of Carrie’s petticoat and polka-dots ascending to daylight high above them…until she collided face-first with one of the invisible hoses, whose existence had hitherto been unknown to her.

Stunned and wheeling, Carrie rebounded her way down again and was back on the drill-hole’s rocky floor a crumpled heap the next instant, several of her white pinions following her at a slower rate. The leering robots at whose foot-units she now lay helpless looked more lustfully malevolent than unfeeling machines had any right to.

They lunged at her as one.

END OF CHAPTER THREE