When Flashes Clash, Chapter Two

If there was anywhere in The Flash Club and Space-Screamer’s galaxy more widely dreaded than the Seegs, it was The Back Garden.

This place, as its name suggested, was an overgrown plot of land laid out on the interplanetary scale. Across its black cosmic vista no stars glittered, for their celestial glow was obscured by the entangled hollows and criss-crossing webs made of fungal tendrils whose size all but defied human imagining. Only shadows and perpetual night reigned here, for it was thus the organic white-green masses thrived. Whole worlds were wrapped up in the mesh, wrested from their orbits into an unnatural nearness by plantlife whose awesome strength and insistence was not to be fought. Now the huge dull spheres hung motionless, stripped of all living things save those which swelled silently in the dark. These had made the dead globes very much their own, and the dots of unblinking blue bioluminescence that shone coldly along each distant colourless curvature might almost have suggested cities to the newly-arrived observer. They were no welcoming home-fires however, but the glinting eyes of one single alien intelligence that recognised outside matter only in terms of nourishment, and knew nothing but its own pitiless unstinting growth.

This was the view that stretched before Joe and Gala as they stepped out of their fungus- cap starship and gazed around them. Though they were standing on a vast highway of a mushroom-stalk that spanned outer space between two planets, the air was breathable and suggested that of a dank cellar at midnight. Optimal conditions for sustaining The Back Garden’s denizens prevailed there at every point and at every time.

Ahead, the tendril-road twisted away into murkiness and finally vanished amid the jumbled nightmare horizon confronting the two humans. They were standing apart, neither touching nor looking at each other.

In a thin quiet voice most unlike his own, and addressing more himself than Gala, Joe remarked:

“I knew the world would be forever different to me the next time I looked upon it. But not even I could have imagined this.”

Field-dressings of a kind had been applied to the burns on Gala’s left leg, which was bare to the thigh where her leather breeches had been torched away, and also to the cutlass-wound beneath the slashed clothing on Joe’s chest. What he and Gala had done, they had done as if the world was about to come to an end, or rather as if they no longer cared whether or not it did. When it was over however, and the world turned out to still be there, it had felt the decent thing to tend to the injuries they had inflicted on each other. So they sought out the fungus-ship’s medical supplies and did so, saying little.

Then their expectations had been proved wrong a second time, for another factor in Gala and Joe’s decision had been a shared belief they were doomed no matter what, their vessel being adrift and fated sooner or later to run aground. However, this living craft was apparently endowed with some homing-instinct that had dutifully carried it and its two Earthling passengers through the empty gulfs and back to the realm where first it had germinated. Now Gala, not answering to Joe’s previous comment, but surveying instead the ship where it sat having moored itself, made the observation:

“You see those nodes all along the sides of the vine, like the one our craft latched itself onto? They must be for others like it, though of course no-one’s here – they’re all still fighting on Earth. We’re in a shipyard, and an important one too, if it’s meant for the royal fleet.”

“Still convincing yourself all will be well, as long as you continue to speak of business,” was Joe’s response. “I suspect we have reached the time when that can no longer help.”

“True, that was just like me,” Gala admitted plainly. “Quitting, meanwhile, is absolutely nothing like you.”

But she was already shaking her head.

“How else could you feel, though?” she then went on. “To have waited too long as it was, and then for that to have been your first experience?”

This time there was sympathy in her voice. Joe turned to her at last, and tried to tell her with a smile that it was alright, that he understood, and above all else that he had not forgotten it was something they entered into together. For there had indeed been mutual consent, at least of a sort. As smiles went it was a weak one, but in such a setting as this it could not but bring a glimmer of comfort to the pair of them.

“If we’ve reached the Empress’s private docks then her palace can’t be far off, and she told us herself what’s there,” Gala continued softly. “I know it feels hopeless now, Joe. But one way or another we’ve made it within reach of everything we’ve been searching for since we began the Collective, and what kept us going all through that time was our faith that the Prophecy will save Nottingham. We can still make that happen. Nothing to do with our cause has to change because of what went on between us.”

It did not feel at all that way to Joe, and nor was he able to convince himself the regret and foreboding he knew would have been that of any other sixteen-year-old in the same situation. Hesitantly though he held out a hand to Gala, and in the eerie hush of The Back Garden she took it in hers. Then they turned as one, to take a look at the path that awaited them now the gates of Paradise were closing at their backs.

During the most frightening and desperate military standoffs of Pre-Nottingham Earth, when whole trembling populations deemed it inevitable the superweapon brinkmanship of mighty power-blocs would escalate into Armageddon itself, old religion and new fears had combined to suggest a second Adam and Eve. These, it was anticipated, would rise from among the corrupted mutated remnants of man and in sad parody of their general ancestors intertwine their misshapen digits to stare out on a barren radioactive wasteland, legacy of the last original sin. If Gala and Joe in that moment felt they resembled any iteration of their Biblical progenitors, it was this comparatively recent one. Nevertheless, they tightened their grip on each other’s hands, and through The Back Garden took their solitary way.

Phoenix and Phoenix Prime, one on wings of flame and the other wings of light, swooped into the Nottingham shaft each with an arm hooked under one of Kumiko’s. The sight that greeted this trio on landing chilled their hearts at a single stroke.

“Carrie!” Kumiko gasped, skating to the feathered schoolgirl the minute she was set down. Phoenix hurried after her. It took them no time at all to assess the bad news.

“Without medical attention she cannot last long,” whispered Phoenix.

Carrie stirred, and her lips parted though her eyes remained closed. “Unseal…caves,” she managed to murmur. “More important…than me…”

“She’s right, Phoenix,” said Phoenix Prime, but these words were not spoken with the indifferent scientific detachment that would have been heard in the days before she fell in with her clone and her fellow crusaders. Indeed, for Phoenix it was the greatest testament yet to how much progress she and Phoenix Prime had made in their adventures together. The empathy and resolve that burned in the latter’s eyes as they looked into hers, and the firm hand that had settled on Phoenix’s shoulder, assured her they would help Carrie, that they would do everything in their power to see she survived, just as soon as they completed the duty on which millions of lives besides hers depended.

Phoenix nodded once, and broke open the carrying-case in her hand. While Kumiko stood guard over Carrie the twin scientists set down to work, affixing their equipment via small suction-cups to the rock-face Dimension Borg had changed, stringing cables all along its perpendicular topography, and connecting the entire matrix of modulators and wires to a pair of microprocessors on which the solution to this evil puzzle was encoded. Both Phoenix and Phoenix Prime knew their task and had been eager to go about it, so in short order all preparations were put in place.

There was no time for ceremoniousness. A glance flitted between the eyes of originator and clone to confirm they were ready. Then identical fingers stabbed down on identical “proceed” keys, and it began.

Despite the urgency and the peril however, three girls’ hearts could not but soar, and nor could three breathless smiles fail to illuminate each face as the happy culmination of their quest commenced before their eyes. Even Phoenix Prime knew something of the powers that created Nottingham, and Phoenix and Kumiko had loved and shared and battled beside The Four Heroes for much of their youth. As Dimension Borg’s geologic tampering was purged in an instant like the malicious computer-virus it was, and the molecules of the cave-entrance threw off their long misalignment and settled gratefully back into what they should be, that which rushed forth and washed over the girls like a summer zephyr was everything they remembered of their cause. It was like the sunlight that had fallen over the garden at The Four Heroes’ house on dusks of long ago, an almost solid presence of gold, opaque in the deepening afternoon shades, softly sparkling with warm pollen that lifted from the grass to dance in its glory. So it was still there, after all. Phoenix and Kumiko knew then that even now they had not strayed as far from it as they had come to assume, that it still meant something, and that it was possible to find it again.

Space-Screamer’s clamps, meanwhile, had never been designed for this. They blew one after the other and crashed and clattered in pieces to the rocky floor, becoming visible again as they turned to scrap and the hoses attached to them did likewise. In a series of explosions scaling the vertical heights the supernatural energy turned loose by the rock-face’s restoration travelled along these tubes, destroying them segment by segment and bringing each mangled cylinder back before the naked eye as it went.

“What’s all this optical-camouflaged junk stuck to the cave entrance?” Phoenix Prime muttered distractedly.

“You mean, what was it,” came back Phoenix’s succinct reply.

Out of the Nottingham shaft surged The Four Heroes’ cause, and began streaking along the streets directly at one who was in his last seconds of believing he still wanted it. Space- Screamer whipped around from his final checks on the trans-mat unit to behold that which was tearing apocalyptically towards him.

“What in the name of Plomonoog…?” he hissed.

As had been seen once already that day, Space-Screamer was a quick thinker when it came to saving his hide. This time though not even his self-preservation reflex was quite speedy enough, for the moment he clutched at the activation lever to make good his escape was the same moment the tide came in, and all that it imparted coursed into Space-Screamer’s galactic trans-mat unit and via it, into him.

As far as Earthly science knew, there may have been machines invented that would prove compatible with whatever The Four Heroes’ cause truly was. However, the cybernetic implants with which Space-Screamer had empowered his carbon-based frame to maximize its potential for tyranny and despotism turned out not to be machines of that hypothetical kind. His shrilling terminal screech rang for long seconds throughout the dilapidated neighbourhood, accompanied by a dissonant chorus made up of his every capacitor and interlink and printed circuit-board noisily erupting from the nervous-system with which they had hitherto been fused. The trans-mat unit, its cloaking device overloaded, blinked back into view as Space-Screamer crumbled lifeless to the asphalt beneath it, pluming smoke and the acrid stench of sizzled silicon chips from what had been the sockets of his eyes.

Lightning, standing off for a second or two above the warehouse roofs to muster another attack, glimpsed the trans-mat unit’s reappearance. His gaze shot groundward to make certain he was indeed looking at a house-sized hunk of equipment whose origins conspicuously lay in the sector he called home.

Space-Screamer’s technology? Here? Lightning thought to himself. Why...?

Then Storm-Sky ploughed into him again and this mystery was put on one side, as the two Flashes resumed their pummelling with fists and feet and plunged thus occupied to other quarters of the city.

END OF CHAPTER TWO