Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Two

The Henry Martin came about, beams and missiles zinging around her, while Steam took off in a fiery torrent to confront Neetra above the masthead. “Steam, you wouldn’t lie to me!” the girl cried. “Tell me Joe hasn’t really turned against us!”

“Too right I’m not going to lie!” Steam snarled. “You want to take a good long look at your boyfriend, love! He’s the one who came knocking on our door!

Steam knew that in this he was believing only what he wanted to believe, but he also knew he needed to yell his version of events into the face he loved, needed the pain it gave him. It helped his forget his heart was broken, now he must fight the only one who had brought him any tenderness. So he obeyed Gala and fought, pitting his strength and speed against Neetra’s teleportation and photon-rays in a perilous mid-air clash.

Below them Blaster-Track streaked at the Henry Martin’s deck in a strafing run and the flamboyant D’Carthage bounded into his path, apparently meaning to tackle him with just bare fists and a sparkling grin. Atop the scarlet jeep the Commander whipped out twin laser pistols and swiftly pinned his assailant, striking tactical explosions along the lee in the same fusillade. This was achieved without slowing and Blaster-Track and his two riders were the next instant receding into blue skies beyond the aft-deck, bowling D’Carthage over with the exhaust from their turbos.

“He is not for you,” The Chancellor told his team-mate contemptuously, having more wisely stayed back. “We face in this one a soldier of experience, one who knows the battlefield as I do. This should prove an interesting engagement.”

He set off aft at a run, returning fire over the side with his rifle. Meanwhile Bret and Max on the F.P. Lightspeed had discharged their ammunition against the enemy, and though they had done damage they had not put her out of action. Casting their spent rocket-launchers into the slipstream they steered the silver disc in a hurtling plunge deck-wards, aiming at where Gala stood with D’Carthage beside her. Dazzlingly fast as our heroes were though, it was Gala who was first to close. She held her ground to the very point before collision and when that split-second was past her cutlass moved as if it was made from light and not just radiant with it. The Flying Platform lurched over the deck-rail, severed cables trailing from the gash in its underside, and its pilots could only bail out to land aboard the Henry Martin while The Four Heroes’ oldest vehicle flipped and twisted into a death-dive and sank without trace beneath the sea of clouds. Bret and Max rose to face the two members of the Next Four.

“You and me, Stevens,” said Gala, raising her luminescent sword.

“Been wondering how this one would go,” Bret remarked. His katana sang from its sheath.

“Liberace is mine,” growled Max, and with muscle and sinew he and D’Carthage locked in brutal combat while Bret and Gala’s blades pierced the heavens with the keening note of their first consummation, to fly apart and fly together again in swoops and slashes too fast for the eye to follow.

The tenacious Chancellor, having fought for every foot of the way, gained the Henry Martin’s stern in defiance of the laser shots rained down on him by Blaster-Track, the Commander and Flashtease. He threw a switch, and an oak-panelled hatch above the rudder blew open in a cloud of smoke.

“Torpedo!” hollered Blaster-Track, and cut his engines just in time for a mighty cigar-shaped spectre to scream through the patch of sky they had vacated. Flashtease gulped, feeling as if several of his most important bits had been left twelve feet above him.

“Hold onto your pants, kid,” Blaster-Track advised. His rear-view sensors had already confirmed the torpedo was making a hairpin turn. “We’ve got us a heat-seeker, and this is gonna take some fancy flying!”

In a renewed flare of rockets they were off through the blue at breakneck pace, weaving and swerving in attempts to throw off their relentless pursuer. Back on deck the Chancellor slung his rifle, knelt, and produced a different gun from his bandolier. Into a socket on its stock he plugged his battle-data recorder, which held among thousands of other catalogued files a full analytical breakdown of Blaster-Track and his Commander’s actions documented during the rescue at the factory lair. The Chancellor then hooked the gun up to an eyepiece, fitted it in place, and took aim.

“I know your capacities, alien,” he said softly, using the sight’s digital augmentation to follow Blaster-Track’s high-octane evasive dance with his gun-barrel. “You do not know mine.”

“We’re not going to outrun it, boss!” that same jeep announced above the rushing of wind, while the torpedo inched nearer and nearer with every second that passed.

“Glacid-sprayers then, trusty Blaster-Track,” the Commander instructed. “Flashtease, duck.”

The boy threw himself onto his knees and Blaster-Track Commander turned, swinging his right arm over, as Blaster-Track himself vented from his rear chassis a twinkling pink mist that froze the heat-seeker into a crystal block. One precision beam from the Commander’s pistol detonated missile and glacid alike before they could drop to the surface of Nottingham…but that single instant, in which the vehicle and his rider were both distracted by what was happening behind them, was all The Chancellor had been waiting for.

An electrostatic dart embedded itself in Blaster-Track Commander’s back, and suddenly his slim physique was incandescent with blinding lances of blue-white. An agonized cry echoed across the clouds. Feet slipping from his faithful steed, our hero tipped over backwards and fell like a mannequin.

“Snare,” The Chancellor voice-commanded his gun. A serpentine phalanx of flexible cords whipped from its muzzle and intercepted the plummeting Commander as he neared, rattling and snapping around his powerless limbs to drag him bodily onto the Henry Martin and finally lash him against the mast. There he stayed, while The Chancellor wasted no time in fending off Blaster-Track and Flashtease with rifle-fire. Now that he was standing guard over a bound prisoner the tactical advantage was his, and the Commander’s heroic allies had no choice but to withdraw.

“You’re not the only one who has stood the test of time,” The Chancellor informed his captive.

“Darn it, they’re getting totalled!” Dylan cried, reading his monitors. “We’ve got to get in there and pull them out before we lose any more!”

“Easy, Dylan,” said Amy. Beyond the bridge was now a constant brilliant blue, and a resonant hum was swelling from the charging reactor-core. “We’ll be with them any minute for the evac, and then the Next Four’ll be eating our dust!”

“ETA in three hundred point seven eight seconds,” Phoenix added. “We must ’ave faith zat our friends last out until zen!”

“I sure hope they can, Phoenix,” said Dylan. “Because Gala and her gang are putting up a rock-solid performance, and we’re going to have to…”

Rock-solid.

Dylan blinked. He had spoken the two words almost without thinking, but when he did so, everything suddenly fell into place. The entire conundrum chose that moment to neatly and absolutely solve itself.

Phoenix Prime’s armour. Her armour which was made of rock, not metal.

By the time the blink was over, Dylan did see. He saw in every tiny facet of detail what had come to pass, what was yet to be, and what part was reserved for him to play. He also saw there was no time to lose. Without finishing his sentence he leapt from his chair, ran to the hatchway door and threw it open. Turbulence skirled across the bridge.

Dylan had just one instant to look back at the two huge-eyed and uncomprehending girls. As he did so he said:

“Phoenix, no matter what happens…don’t try to come with me.”

And he stepped out into nothingness.

Phoenix and Amy shrieked as one, but their horrified voices were swept away from Dylan’s hearing as the galactic cruiser spiralled to distant heights, leaving his free-falling frame alone with the wind. Accelerating from the spacecraft’s ponderous descent, Dylan perceived in mere seconds the long shape of the Henry Martin coming into view before his eyes, and heard the faint sounds of battle. He aimed himself at the fray.

Max, still duking it out with D’Carthage on deck, was the first to glimpse the human-shaped dot advancing from directly overhead. “What the…?” he began.

Dylan shot past Neetra and Steam, shot past Blaster-Track and Flashtease, and threw out his hand once the Henry Martin was his next port of call. Magenta-coloured lights cascaded from his palm, and deftly avoiding the wooden components of that vessel they tore away everything near in brass and bronze. The ship tipped and listed dangerously under this ransacking, and each individual struggle on board was interrupted as the combatants struggled instead to keep their footing. Dylan, continuing swiftly on his way, reconstituted the metallic fragments into a jet-pack that formed about him. Boosters flared, and our hero was gone from sight.

Back on the spacecraft Amy was frantically consulting her equipment. “His velocity’s evening-out, Phoenix, looks like he’s used his powers to control his fall,” she reported. “So that’s a plus, but darn it, Dylan, what were you thinking? He went straight by the others, must be on his way back to Nottingham, but as for why…”

All at once she noticed Phoenix was no longer in her seat. She tore her eyes from the screen and saw her friend standing by the open hatch, looking back at her.

“Phoenix, no,” Amy said in a toneless voice.

“Look aftair your child,” Phoenix told her firmly, then took a header through the doorway as Dylan had done.

The Henry Martin was righting herself, and each warrior was setting back to his or her task as the planks on which they stood drew level again. Suddenly Phoenix passed them like an air-to-surface missile, unprotected and unassisted, face-first with her arms and body held straight behind her. Many fathoms below, Dylan was approaching the cloud-layer when he registered her incoming figure on a navigational computer he had built into his jet-pack. His eyes widened, and he immediately switched his thrusters to retro and checked his course so as to negotiate himself into Phoenix’s flight-path. His positioning was on-target and he was waiting when she arrived, whereupon she wrapped her arms tightly around him and arrested her dive. There they clung together, high above the world, with a single set of rockets to support them.

Phoenix’s glasses had somehow stayed on throughout. Behind them, her eyes were like fire as they blazed into Dylan’s own.

“Hurl me into dangairs undreamt-of, drag me to ze very ends of time and space, but nevair ask zat I do it without you!” she raged at him over the fury of the elements. “Whatevair we face, it can mean nothing unless I am by your side!”

His own thoughts on the situation notwithstanding, Dylan saw clearly enough that there was little to be done. So he thumbed his communicator with a half-free hand, and transmitted to his friends the electronic and telepathic message: “Guys! We’re both safe, but we’re out of the mission! You’ll have to leave without us!”

Far above them, Gala pointed at the boards by her feet and spoke one word of command:

“Steam.”

Immediately he who was so named broke off his tussle with Neetra, while artillery fire from the Henry Martin drove the girl back. In a roaring trail of flame Steam exited the battlefield and was Earthward-bound.

“Talk about your promising beginnings,” muttered Max, as he and D’Carthage pitched back into fisticuffs. The Chancellor’s rifle sprang to life once more, Bret and Gala’s swords flashed anew, and battle was rejoined.

END OF CHAPTER TWO