When Flashes Clash, Chapter Four

Six of Flashtease’s fellow Mini-Flashes were waiting together on an Arcology launch-pad, together with the Vernderernder squadron assigned to them.

From pole to pole across the sky overhead, other formations of these skeletal vulturelike war-machines were eagerly making their way on throbbing engine-cylinders to amass in the stratosphere. There a slab of equipment hung hugely behind the ever-growing swarms, simple and functional in its design, merely a giant sheet of smooth steel with a circular hole in the middle. It was an intergalactic warp-gate, through which this army would presently be effecting instantaneous travel from their own sector to Earth. No sooner had Neetra informed the Vernderernders as to the coordinates of that said planet than they arranged for the gate to be ferried from their dominions with the utmost in mechanized swiftness and efficiency.

Many of the races inhabiting this corner of the universe would have been downright amazed at how smoothly Neetra’s negotiations with the dreaded instrumentality known as Toothfire had run. Our heroine however, when researching its long and oil-soaked history in advance, had deduced soon enough there was nothing to suggest its lords the Vernderernders were any less open to diplomacy than other empire-builders of a similar ilk. Their home quadrant’s only mistake was in forgetting the nature of those they so feared. Toothfire’s interminable series of wars over the strategically significant planet Grindotron was as good an illustration as any. The native Grindoes, small spongy creatures of no combat potential but immense intellect, had responded to the Vernderernders’ territorial advances by constructing ever more powerful battle-robots to meet this threat in kind. But as the Vernderernders were themselves powerful battle-robots, their first recourse was to fight hostile hardware just as long as the Grindoes continued to throw it at them. Dimension Borg, knowingly in his case, had used an identical strategy to contain Toothfire while he went about his own plans for the peoples of this sector. The unfortunate Grindoes however could have been enjoying a ceasefire for generations if they’d only once thought to sit down with the Vernderernders and talk to them instead.

Neetra, indeed, had found Toothfire nothing short of agreeable at the conference table. The terms she insisted on for safeguarding neutral worlds belonging to her proposed alliance were readily accepted, and nor did the Vernderernders rank among those who allowed bureaucratic considerations to hold up a good old-fashioned final onslaught. Everything had proceeded at such a pace, indeed, that even now the warp-gate was beginning to charge its power-reservoirs for the mass galactic jump by leeching away what remained in the Arcology’s fuel-core. The lurid gaseous red clouds that had prevailed throughout Solidity occupancy were fast fading to feeble wisps, through which the blue sky of an early autumn evening had begun to appear above the six Mini-Flashes.

And yet the pretty peacemaker herself, the sweet signatory to the all-important treaty and leader of this small Flash Club, was one of the three yet to arrive. So the other members of her team patiently waited, beneath the first silver stars and planets that twinkled in the deepening firmament. It could not have felt more like the time for departures that it indubitably was, but there was one such in store at which none of these Mini-Flashes so much as guessed.

Flashthunder, the only male of the absent trio, was sitting on a seat in an out-of-the-way and still half-intact Arcology building. From the closed door behind him the voice of Neetra spoke:

“You’ll have to tell the others. Not just about me, but Shadow too.”

The misty and ephemeral girl named Flashshadow was with Neetra in the room on the other side of the door, helping her. At these words she looked as if she was about to say something in her meek murmurous way, but Neetra firmly held up one hand.

“And you can give that a rest, because I know what you’re like when you get going,” she warned Flashshadow. “You’re not even supposed to be a combat operative, but I’ve dragged you into every battle we’ve fought and nearly got you killed twice. This one you’re sitting out, Shadow. Just for once I want you to stay safe – or at least, as safe as anyone can be right now.”

When Neetra was done, Flashthunder finally replied. He was slightly muffled by the door, but our heroine heard nevertheless the pleading or even reproachful note in his weak little voice as he said to her: “It won’t be what they’re expecting.”

Neetra closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the door-frame. She doubted whether Flashthunder would ever know just how far his innocent charms had wrapped her around his little finger, and he still held power to persuade her even now. But not this time. Here, he was asking too much. He alone was going to be painful enough for her.

How could she go through the same with dear reliable Flashlight, who bumbled his way through every possible social awkwardness but who she could count on to stay strong and steady and cheerful no matter what they were up against? Or her friends Mini-Flash Bloomer and Mini-Flash Frill, both reminiscent of popular girls back home on Earth, fun to be around and infinitely good-hearted? Then there was Mini-Flash Socket, who had a besotted smile for her every time her eyes fell on him and who clearly thought the universe of her. Neetra suspected even his fellow neophyte Mini-Flash Brace would be a wrenching experience, and he wasn’t the sort of boy you could easily warm to. But above all else, what about Mini-Flash Luna? Her Titch, the most special one of all? How could she stand before that diminutive devoted girl, who had followed her and learned from her and drawn inspiration from her every step of the journey, and break the news that would start tears welling up in those wide trusting eyes? How could she do that to them all?

They wouldn’t understand her reasons. In this galaxy everyone was still learning what love was. But they’d care, and they’d want to do something to make it better, even though they couldn’t. Putting them through that was what Neetra couldn’t face. She had destroyed Dimension Borg, brokered a truce for an entire sector, and saved Nottingham again and again ever since she was a tiny child. But it seemed Neetra had at long last found something she just wasn’t strong enough to do.

“You’ll have to tell them,” she repeated to Flashthunder, in hollow tones.

Looking down at herself Neetra saw Flashshadow had completed her work. Softly she touched the Mini-Flash on her strange insubstantial hand, asking her wordlessly if she’d mind waiting in here a minute. Then she opened the door and stepped out.

Flashthunder stood up at once as Neetra emerged into the corridor. She was wearing some unfamiliar clothes, which Flashshadow had found for her in one of the Arcology’s less ravaged districts.

In Neetra’s hand was a bag, containing a folded brown lightning-bolt tunic and a matching pair of knee-length boots. She handed it to Flashthunder, who took it.

This much was done without a word. As Flashthunder looked upon our heroine however he saw he must speak. It was not the circumstances he already knew of, though certainly he felt her pain over the farewells she was unable to offer, and more than shared her apprehension for what was to come. Rather, it was what Flashthunder read at that one moment in the sadness upon Neetra’s beautiful features that prompted him to say to her aloud:

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I’ve told you everything,” Neetra returned. “He’s here, Flashthunder. Joe and Gala have both come to this galaxy. I’ve been able to sense them ever since we left the heat-field. You know how things are for me – you’re the only one I told. And that’s why I need you to try and understand, and explain to the others, that that’s why I have to…”

But her insistent words tailed off into a sigh. It was no use her trying to keep secrets from Flashthunder.

“You’re right,” she finally admitted in a tiny voice. “There is more. What I’m picking up from them so far, especially about the things they’ve been getting up to while we were apart…it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be good news for me.”

“Then how about we forget what we agreed on back in my room?” Flashthunder begged her. “Do you really think I’m going to force you to go through with it now?”

“You won’t have to,” Neetra replied, looking at him through clear brown eyes. “Because we both know it’s still right. So you’d better just make sure you keep your side of the bargain too,” she added with a little brave smile.

“Oddly enough I don’t have a massive problem with finding out whether the hottest girl in the solar system’s got a crush on me!” he burst out, flustered. “It’s you throwing yourself into danger yet again that I don’t want! Confronting what could hurt you the most…you’re always doing it! Why do you have to be so…well…heroic, all the time?”

Flashthunder heaved a huge sigh of his own.

“Loving you would terrify anyone,” he concluded. “So just imagine what it’s been like for me.”

Neetra laid her head against his shoulder one last time, as if to remind him of the things that simply had to be. Then she looked up into his eyes.

This was why she’d had Flashshadow stay inside. Flashthunder, who might have been the one, and who so nearly was, only to turn out not to be after all…there was only one kind of goodbye you gave a boy like that. And it wasn’t the kind you let your friends see.

Then it was over, and Neetra was in the corridor alone.

Timid Flashshadow tiptoed daintily to join her, slipping through the door without opening it, and Neetra had never imagined that a friend who barely existed physically and who was only visible under certain lights could bring her so much solid comfort. She smiled gratefully at the gentle glimmer of girl, and side-by-side they set off.

On a small remote ledge at the Arcology’s rim sat the Vernderernder Neetra had requisitioned for her personal use. Each girl threw a leg astride his back and straddled him like the motorcycle he somewhat resembled. Red miasmas and even blue dusk had already receded from this lonely spot, leaving only the black of space and an occasional star. A long night-journey stretched ahead.

“Can I call you Vern?” Neetra said to the Vernderernder. “Planet Eshcaton first please, to drop off my friend. Then on to where I’ve got to be.”

For a resident of The Back Garden, darkness and silence were the preferred natural habitat. One of the vilest creatures ever to crawl from those dank demesnes was at that moment skulking through the caves beneath Nottingham, making himself a murderous menace to every other being both mechanical and organic likewise at large in the catacombs. It was Mucidor, the Empress’s three-headed arch-potentate, attended on by a hideous horde of mushroom-monstrosities like him.

Mucidor’s senses, which were not those of an entity that lived its life in daylight, glanced at and immediately passed over the eight robots still thrashing out their feud in the subterranean realm. Automatons. Some were loyal and some were traitors, but none engendered in Mucidor anything but contempt. He had not ventured to this weak world to rend unfeeling metal. If that was what he wanted, he might just as well have stayed at home. The galaxy these days was fairly crammed with foolish technology and foolish little life- forms that depended on it. Mucidor had not come to this place for robots. He had come here for his next kill.

An instant later, he had them. There were the ones he sought. They were moving towards him along the tunnels, only a short trek from his position. Phoenix, Phoenix Prime, Kral-it-Gor and the injured Carrie…not that their names would have interested Mucidor in the slightest. Everything he wished to know had already been transmitted to him by their spoor.

There was fleshiness. All but one of them were pulpy and moist, after the fashion of this pitiful planet.

They would do nicely.

Six scarlet eyes blazed with bloodlust, and each of Mucidor’s mouths bid the huntsmen follow.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR