Unto the Breach, Chapter Two

Erupting from the turbid vapours of an interplanetary heat-field was a very different Flash Club to Lightning’s, this one led by Neetra Neetkins of The Four Heroes. She was making a stand all her own in the battle to save Planet Earth, not from the streets of home where her family and friends waged the war on several fronts, but rather in the distant galaxy whence their enemies hailed. Neetra and the eight faithful Mini-Flashes under her had seconds ago completed a series of gruelling challenges flung at them by Toothfire, a machine-empire dreaded throughout the quadrant but which opposed the Solidity as vehemently as Neetra did, and with whom our heroine in her last hopes of turning the tide sought to forge an alliance.

Below Neetra’s combat-worn and half-slagged Flash Club starship stretched the Arcology, a dizzying panorama of diverse interconnected alien architecture moored between abutting planetoids, and steeped in a sluggishly swirling artificial atmosphere that left a gaseous scarlet smudge upon the cosmos. Rising from the nucleus of this nightmarish sprawl was a central tower, one slim perpendicular upright of altitude unattainable within conventional gravity, onto which Toothfire had apparently grafted their heavy ordnance after conquering the Solidity stronghold. As the spacecraft barrelled near, these cannon began to blast, accosting the intruder’s bulkheads with what might have felt a less than promising welcome.

Neetra and the Mini-Flashes gripped their arm-rests or clung to their terminals as the flight-deck lurched and juddered violently around them. “We can’t stand up to this!” cried Flashlight, gaping into the viewscreen at the oncoming firestorm. “We sustained too much damage in the heat-field. Neetra, the ship’s coming apart!”

The girl so addressed tossed back her long hair, and swivelled her seat to face the two neophyte boys behind her at the engine controls.

“Ramming speed,” Neetra commanded.

Armour-plates and fuselage were by now spinning from the hulls in fragments as a death-dive neared its climax, but mere moments before what was left of the burning wreck collided with the tower it loosed six escape-pods that jetted on streamers of compressed air high above the Toothfire barrage. For the Mini-Flashes inside, squeezed two or three bodies per pod, outside noise was muffled but they witnessed through the convex plexiglass windows a mighty blooming of flame and debris that heralded the end of their trusty vessel and split the control tower in two. As the latter’s upper hundred or so floors toppled in spectacular slowness and impacted shatteringly on the ruins below, Neetra and her team amid the silencing of Toothfire’s artillery blew the lids on their escape-pods and streaked the last stretch to the ground without them. The girls who could fly did so, the boys who could not free-fell, and the ephemeral Flashshadow merely drifted gently downward. Sixteen small feet hit solid floor and eight parachuting tunics dropped neatly back into place. In a burst of yellow light Neetra teleported to the lead, and The Flash Club was assembled on Toothfire terrain.

They set off walking. Once the Arcology had been the crowning technological achievement in all this ancient sector’s untold ages, a geometric infinity of colourless pristine parades from which glittering chrome summits soared to impossible heights overhead. Now all was torched and ravaged and charred, the skyscrapers reduced to heaps of dirty white rubble strewn across the cracked and blackened palisades. Everywhere were littered robotic carcasses, among them Nemsinod Robigs with their gowns in tatters and their spherical heads like blown light-bulbs, and also fallen infantry from Dimension Borg’s battlefield hordes. These looked like abstract sculptures, their remaining spidery legs frozen forever at angles above their rusting husks.

The Flash Club proceeded into an open terrace as vast as a national park, whose tiers and stairways and collonades must have been awe-inspiring before Toothfire laid all to waste. A Dimension Borg robot was prone on half its torso and still semi-functional, its mouth-grille sizzling out static-wracked gibberish. Neetra drove her heel through the curvature of its skull and silenced these splutters. Then with hands on hips she held still, her army beside her, waiting for their hosts.

And their hosts came.

The Lords of Toothfire were a race called Vernderernders, and the first impression our heroine received of them was of vultures starting to circle overhead. The appearance of these gaunt black shapes against the red sky, however, was accompanied by the roar of powerful motors. As the skeletal forms began to swoop purposefully streetward Neetra saw she had not been wholly wrong on their resemblance to scavenging birds – about the hunching shoulders and hooked talons and long thin necks ending in beaked heads was much of the buzzard or crow. It was just that their bodies were made of motorcycle components. What Neetra took to be the heart of each one was a set of throbbing high-powered engine cylinders, and the bare grey metal of their frames gleamed in the sleek streamlined undulations of some vintage Harley-Davidson. They had fuel-pipes, hinged articulations at the leg and neck, and huge twin exhausts that bellowed out in massed chorus the din of a dreaded chopper-gang tearing up the coast. Now that she had seen them, Neetra could understand how these Vernderernders earned their dread reputation in this galaxy. It was obvious they were built only for chaos, ransacking and devastation.

They darkened the ruined Arcology with their number. Within moments there were thousands of them, settling hunched on every crumbling tower-block and overhanging ledge. Level after level, line after line of Vernderernders, scaling into the discoloured heavens, and each and every one of the eyeless heads was pointed at the nine young people below. What was apparently a leader had perched on a truncated pedestal directly ahead of The Flash Club, and was surveying them in the same manner from there. The engine-noise gradually subsided to a steady low growl and the flock was still, but for the occasional shift and shuffle from one glinting steel claw to another.

Even the bravest Mini-Flash had cause for a swift underwear-untuck by this time. Flashthunder was visibly palpitating and looked about ready to leap into Neetra’s arms.

“Not in front of the Vernderernders,” she hissed to him sidelong.

At last the leader spoke, a cold metallic voice ringing out in the deathly hush.

“You have taken our interest,” he informed Neetra. “You destroyed the founder of those who resisted us. Resistance is something we know of. The Solidity. Those presumptuous Grindoes. Our archenemies the Verandas, traitors to the life-oil that spawned both our breeds. But few have ever sought an audience with Toothfire. Fewer still have survived the trials through which that honour is granted. You are the first. Such an achievement is scarcely to be imagined.”

“We are a very energy team,” Mini-Flash Luna put in truculently. “We have many imagine.”

“Nor can we conceive of a reason you would seek the privilege,” the head Vernderernder went on. “To waste the time of Toothfire is to invite immediate visceral dismemberment. What can you possibly say to us now, that you might stand any chance of averting this fate?”

Neetra replied in a clear voice:

“I can help you defeat the Solidity. Before they defeat you.”

This pronouncement was followed by a marked rise in angry revving from the roost. “Have a care, fleshly one,” said the lead Vernderernder, in colder tones than ever. “You stand amid all that remains of the Solidity’s accomplishments. Look on our works.”

“They kept you occupied with their disposable robots all the while they had more important things to do,” corrected Neetra. “And you only took this place when their entire fighting-force went away. What do you think would happen, if the Solidity came back here in triumph after destroying my world? All the great powers of this quadrant united as a single body, and you alone standing against them. They’d wipe you out. You know they could do it.”

This time the massed snarling objections were fearsome indeed. Flashthunder by now was having quiet hysterics, but Neetra took the head Vernderernder’s motionless silence to be an encouraging sign. At any rate she deeply hoped it was, as she pressed on:

“But enter an alliance with us – accept the few terms we’ll require of you – and the first offensive is all yours. You can strike at the Solidity before they’re ready.”

At long last, the head Vernderernder inquired of Neetra:

“How?”

“Because I can tell you where they’ve gone,” said she. “I’ll show you the way to Earth.”

Bendigo’s booming cries of alarum had awakened Neetra’s mother Iskira Neetkins and Dr. Irwin Mendelssohn as they lay in each other’s arms. Together they hastened out of the mill to join their agitated comrade at the entryway, both of them buttoning up the last of their clothing. It had been a big night, and the morning was shaping up to be bigger still.

“Behold!” hollered Bendigo the moment he saw them, apparently not noticing their state of partial undress. “One comes! The long-awaited hour of final conflict is upon us!”

Descending the ridge opposite the mill was the imposing scantily-clad figure of Hangonel. He began walking across the desert plain towards the trio.

“The Solidity,” said Dr. Mendelssohn in a hush. “They’ve found us.”

“Ho!” proclaimed Hangonel, his voice carrying to them across the divide. “You who would deny and subvert the Prophecy, bear witness! For what force in the universe but that which has charted the very paths of all our destines could lead us to this confrontation? Know that I am the mighty Hangonel Mangonel, and far have I travelled in sure and certain faith of finding the worthy opponent I look upon now!”

Something had for a while been stirring within Bendigo’s breast. It may have begun when he was enlisted by his two learned friends on their desperate mission to defend Planet Earth from the Solidity armada, and certainly the feeling had surged anew after the failure of that enterprise, when standing outside the mill Iskira had informed him that her life and Mendelssohn’s now depended on his protection alone. All of this had begun to call him back, to a time before the humiliating defeat whose details were long forgotten, but the shame and ignominy of which he had carried ever since like a prize in some bitterness contest. For Bendigo had once known exactly what he was meant to be. There had been no hiding then, no fooling himself that a string of alternative professions might yield one that would suit him just as well – lab assistant, butler, driver, security chief, drunken vagrant. This situation, this moment and this place, bore testament enough to his folly. The words of the young stranger rang true. Bendigo knew it in his blood and his very being. Slowly, he began to clench a fist.

What was rising up from deep inside could no longer be confined to the trappings of his body. Thus our hero planted his feet wide apart on the dusty floor, gripped the high collar of his chauffeur’s livery with his other hand, and in a voice that shook the very desert roared aloud:

“No more weakness! No more pretence! I am Bendigo, and I am what I have always been…a warrior!”

With a single sweeping gesture of his arm he obliterated his uniform and cast it to the Martian winds. Then he was away, charging masterfully to face down the advancing youth, resplendent in his favourite red-and-white spotted boxer-shorts.

END OF CHAPTER TWO