Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Three

Dylan and Phoenix ploughed a perpendicular line through the cloud-cover, their descent growing ever more rapid as their spluttering jet-pack steadily failed to bear the extra body for which it had never been designed. Using his powers Dylan was doing everything he could to compensate.

“Simple instruction, ‘Don’t try to come with me,’ the very last thing I said,” he grumbled, all the while endeavouring to enhance his engines and redistribute some highly limited mass. “Wouldn’t have thought it’d be too hard for someone with your brains to follow!”

“You are ze one whose intellect is deficient, Dylan Cook, at least when it comes to knowing what it takes to be in a relationship!” Phoenix flung back, gripping his body with both hands. “I need a boyfriend who will make room for me in ’is life, not one who acts ze big macho man and tries to leave me out!”

“Why is it always one rule for you and one for everyone else?” Dylan cried, as the last of the clouds blew away and they were plummeting down the shaft between two gigantic skyscrapers. “Oh sure, I’m not allowed to leave you out, while all the time you’re refusing to talk to your parents, or making Carmilla cry and leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces…”

“We do not all come from functional and supportive families, Dylan! Ferrous metals over zere,” returned Phoenix, and as Dylan pulled a jumble of ventilation shafts and junction-boxes from the upper wall of one of the buildings and commingled them with the jet-pack’s molecules, she went on: “I see what you ’ave and I envy you, truly I do, but not everyone can take for granted such a stable background!”

“Hey, don’t bring my parents into this!” objected Dylan. “I’ve been making an effort, Phoenix – move that bit over – but some might say you’ve not been the most understanding girlfriend just lately!”

She forcibly shoved the newly-assembled gyro-modulator into place. “Compared to Kumiko, I suppose!” came back the reply. “I might ’ave known it was only a mattair of time before you brought ’er up – ”

The navigational computer interrupted by breaking out into a warning wail. Dylan’s eyes flicked to its tiny screen.

“Babe, can we pick this up later?” he requested. “Because it looks like we’ve got company.”

Phoenix threw a glance over her shoulder. High above, between the oblong concrete monoliths that were the pair of tower-blocks, Steam was bearing down upon them. His stubbled chin was thrown out, his handsome face was set in a forbidding glare, and everything below his cogwheel-jointed arms was an inferno of broiling magma.

“Hang on tight!” shouted Dylan.

Gripping his control-stick he brought them out of their plunge and spearing across Nottingham skies. The city looked like another world after the all-pervading light and featureless blue of above, a maze of shadows and right-angles with leaden clouds overhead and wet streets beneath all edged in gold and amber from the setting sun. Hot on our heroes’ heels the hunter matched their course-correction, and rooftops melted into a blur as a deadly chase began.

Down into the crowded playground of a girls’ boarding-school Dylan and Phoenix swooped, hugging the asphalt then blasting off again, ruffling pigtails and petticoats throughout the stupefied student body. Steam stayed on them. Shielding their faces they tore through the canvas and plaster of an advertising billboard, and seconds later their adversary powered through the hole they had made, leaving fire round its rim. Dylan steered them into an umbrous labyrinth of housing developments where they hurtled left and right along straight-sided crevasses and barrel-rolled their way through alleys and gates, dauntlessly striving to throw Steam off. It was to no avail, for everywhere they went, the fuming flames of his exhaust glowered from the shade behind them.

“He is gaining!” Phoenix shrieked.

“One last burst with everything we’ve got!” Dylan returned through gritted teeth. “We’re nearly there!”

Phoenix’s tresses streamed back as the turbines gave up their all in a final explosion of heat and force, flinging our heroes up and out of the dark to where the gilded and grey City Centre wheeled before them. Near at hand was the Four Heroes statue with the Town Hall’s majestic dome soaring above, but Dylan muscled their out-of-control momentum away from the splendour and towards an unrestored zone that lay close by.

Into their path bulked a water-tower. Our hero swung out his arm and twin openings appeared at opposite points near its summit, causing a flash-flood in the ruins below. Without slowing he and Phoenix careened through the first aperture and out the other one, whereat Dylan sealed the tower and restored its massive surface to steely smoothness again. Steam, for the first time since sighting his quarry, was forced to break off. He pulled sharply up to avoid a collision and flew parallel to the tank until he had passed its peak, there to draw to a hover.

They were gone. Steam cast about with his eyes and his telepathic powers all at once, but there was neither an inkling nor a murmur. He knew The Four Heroes were formidable psychics and resourceful opponents, but he had never imagined they could accomplish this. Somehow, in the fleeting seconds bought by their stunt, Dylan and Phoenix had vanished without trace!

They were, in reality, not very far off. No more than a few hundred feet of earth and stone separated the young couple from Steam’s position. There on dusty bedrock they lay face-down, Dylan with one arm around Phoenix. The subterranean gloom was partly dispelled by an eerie red glow, which seemed to buzz electronically from all around them. A short distance away sat the jet-pack, now just a mangled mass of half-slagged alloy, but its computer was still functioning. The screen showed Steam’s radar-blip as he finally gave up the chase, to ascend and head back to the Henry Martin. Dylan sat up.

“I knew that big hole the Nottingham Drill left in the ground would come in useful for something!” said he, grinning all over his grimy face. “Saved our skins today by getting us straight to where we needed to be!”

He rose to his feet and helped up Phoenix, who was all laddered stockings and cheeks as grubby as his. “It was a sound strategy, cheri,” she declared. “You reasoned rightly zat ze psychic interference radiating from zis place would mask our telepathic signatures from Monsieur Steam.”

“That’s not the only reason we’re here,” said Dylan. He turned, to survey the sprawling cliffside in the crimson half-light. Then, with the wordless satisfaction of one who drinks deeply at the end of a thirst, he drew in his breath long and slow.

“I’d have looked pretty silly if I’d been wrong, after all that,” he explained to Phoenix. “But I was right.”

“Right about what?” inquired Phoenix, who in all fairness had been wondering.

“Well, we both know Dimension Borg made the caves impenetrable from this rock-face onward, even to me and the gang, by hitting it with a giant drill that applied a similar principle to the one he came up with for his Energy Warp,” Dylan commenced. “He successfully prevented us from getting to the source of our cause, and Gala – at least, possibly – left it that way on purpose when she showed us how to save the world. After all, our cause could tell us the whole truth about the Prophecy and what she’s really up to, and it might just be she doesn’t want that.”

“’Owevair, we ’ave recently learned zat at some stage in ze future you will find a way to open up ze caves again,” Phoenix continued for him, already reasoning out the hypothesis by herself. “Incorporated into ze vehicle we saw operated by les enfants, zeir ’Ero Cart, was an instantaneous mattair transmutation formula clearly adapted from ze Energy Warp. You could only ’ave built such a thing aftair unlocking the secrets of ze Nottingham Drill.”

“That’s right, babe, and what’s more, Harbin came to our era in the first place to carry out a plan that hinged on our not having done that yet,” Dylan went on. “His choosing the date in his past he did, and not any later one, at least implies we’re already on the brink of getting there. And it looks like we are…but it’s not going to be as easy as it seemed.”

He pointed to a number of incisions and rents in the tainted stone.

“That big crack just by you…and that one…and that one…they weren’t there the last time I was down here,” he declared. “General Dartmoor and I were on-site just hours after the drill fell, which was when I learned these rocks had become impervious to our special abilities. Someone’s mined a whole load of boulders out of here since then.”

“But zat is impossible!” Phoenix exclaimed. “Ze strongest diamond-tipped drills we ’ave were reduced to so much scrap metal by Dimension Borg’s contaminations!”

“Impossible to us,” Dylan put in softly. “But what was done here must have worked in pretty much the same way as the Retrograde Bomb. I’d guess that for a people who’ve lately learned the hard way all about mutations on rock, and whose science is geology-based anyhow, it couldn’t have been too tough. Sound like any people you know? People who happen to be working for a certain enemy of ours now? An enemy we ran into just earlier today, whose new wardrobe caused a bit of a stir?”

Phoenix’s eyes, enlarged by her spectacles, grew enormous.

“Zen…’er armour!” she breathed. “Ze means by which it resisted ze Four ’Eroes’ powairs! She ’ad ’er soldiers make it for ’er…and zey made it of…!”

She threw out both her hands at the chasms in the rock. Dylan nodded once.

“Phoenix Prime,” he concluded. “Phoenix Prime has the secret of how we’re going to unseal the caves.”

Phoenix began to pace intently back and forth across the tunnel, her mind whirling from these revelations. “In zat case,” she went on, thinking aloud, “if we are to undo ze damage Dimension Borg did, learn ze truth about ze Next Four, and fulfill zat which we ’ave learned about our destiny, zen…zen all depends on our finding Phoenix Prime at once!”

Dylan looked back at her, not without a smile.

“That,” he said patiently, “is the reason I told you to stay behind. The one and only thing Phoenix Prime wants is to destroy you. If you’d been off in space while I was sorting this out, there’d have been no danger of that.”

Phoenix considered for a moment.

“My decision was ze right one, cheri,” she said at last. There was no smugness in her quiet voice. “For you are correct about Phoenix Prime’s agenda. Without me, you could ’ave offered ’er nothing in exchange for ze information we need. With me, you can bargain.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE