What Goes Around, Chapter One

Carmilla Neetkins stepped from the stairs into the flickering torchlight and grim stone-walled confines of Nottingham Castle’s dungeon.

Taking prisoners was in the first place a practical necessity of war, which Carmilla accepted but knew she would never like. It made the problem rather worse having nowhere to keep them except these dungeons that came so emphatically out of medieval times. The enemy had however left little choice for Carmilla and the Collective to which she belonged, after reducing to so many piles of smoking rubble those more modernized sections of the castle that had stood above ground.

“Thus begins another thrilling day of guard-duty,” Carmilla muttered, talking to herself as she crossed to the first of three formidable iron-studded oak doors. “So who’ve we got? First up, one little chubby Solidity girl whose name I can’t pronounce, in her tutu with somewhat knocked-about mechanical butterfly-wings. And which will it be today?” she continued, sliding back the small viewing-panel in the door. “Practicing her dance-steps or picking at her underwear? Oh right, no surprises there then.”

Carmilla slid the panel shut and proceeded to the second door. “Next let’s look in on the Solidity’s very own aeronautical ace, Lutts Form, resplendent in his golden shorts,” she went on. “This girl’s guess? Meditating in his favourite spot, upside-down on the right- hand corner of the ceiling.” She briefly checked. “And that’s two for two.”

Closing Lutts Form’s peephole again Carmilla completed her rounds, declaring: “Then last of all, and most definitely least when it comes to good looks, here’s scary giant cyborg lobster Mile Hunts. And is he hunkering motionless staring menacingly back at me?” Her finger flicked the panel. “Got to say it, guys, everyone’s showing a real weakness for the classics this morning.”

Restoring Mile Hunts’s privacy Carmilla went to her chair, took up the romantic novel that was on the seat, then sat down and found her page.

“For this I gave up an evil vampire rock-star lifestyle,” she grumbled. “Being a good guy sucks.”

The other members of the Collective were occupied elsewhere about the castle’s subterranean remnants. In what had been The Chancellor’s laboratory sat Steam and Degris, the latter continuing a long programme of telepathic work on the former. Among the detritus stacked about them in the ruined workroom were a select few chemicals and compounds which when bonded together would yield our heroes the one last weapon still theirs to call upon. Only with this might they breach the encircling wall of colossal Solidity robots, or Future Fighters as they were known, through which the enemy was holding Nottingham City Centre in an impenetrable defensive ring. Steam’s residual memories of exactly which materials the Collective needed were there in his subconscious, but clouded by the unstable mental state he had been under when he saw them deployed. Therefore Degris laboured away patiently with his considerable psychic powers, completing the slow and intricate process of liberating these fragments of precious knowledge from his comrade’s embattled mind.

Meanwhile, in the small control-room that governed the dungeons were to be found two high school students named Guy and Lisa. Despite its centuries-old appearance, Nottingham Castle’s detention block had been brought as up-to-date as the rest of the Next Four’s once headquarters during The Chancellor’s residence there. From a trio of monitors on the instrument panel opposite the teens glowed live footage of each prisoner, beamed directly from concealed security-cameras in their cells. Aside from the eerie monochrome illumination cast by these screens, all else surrounding Lisa and Guy was darkness.

“Next time it was Carmilla’s turn on guard was what we agreed,” said Lisa.

The reminder was hardly necessary, as a reminder. Their plans for today weren’t the kind it was easy to forget. From Lisa’s pointed tone, however, it was clear her concern wasn’t that Guy might have accidentally made other arrangements.

“I’m not going to back out of this,” he assured his companion.

Reaching for one of the camera-control joysticks, Lisa zoomed in on the Solidity girl. Silently she began to study the luminous black-and-white close-up of the younger female.

“There’s our diversion,” said Guy, and this time he was the one making a stern and weighted reminder.

His classmate continued to say nothing. Her eyes remained on the small oblivious captive, or more specifically the side of her face that Lisa hadn’t hit yet.

“I’ve told you already,” Guy went on firmly. “Not the little girl.”

“Yeah, we don’t want to get a detention,” Lisa spat back. “Pretty sure the Solidity aren’t playing this by the school rules, Guy. If they were, Proteus would still be walking round all alive and that.”

“It’s got nothing to do with school,” retorted Guy. “They killed one of our team and put our best friend on the critical-list. This is where we show the Solidity we can hurt them just as bad, and we do that by sending them the shell of one of their hard-hitters. Not by letting you give their fat little fairy another smackdown while her hands are tied.”

Lisa looked away, flushed. She had seen Guy angry before, but never had he spoken such words to her so coldly. That one took a different joystick in his hand and filled the third monitor with the shell to which he referred.

Mile Hunts, a bionic beast in whom gargantuan crustacean claws and spiny segmented carapace meshed hideously with gleaming machine-tooled steel and arching tailpipes, was at rest on four tyres of fearsome wheelbase whose stony serrated rims were made for crunching concrete. The Solidity girl, her onscreen behaviour uncharacteristically devoid of anything flaunting or petulant, had betrayed utter unawareness of surveillance on the part of her captors. Hunts on the other hand gave the impression he knew full well you were watching him. Guy set his jaw.

“There’s our boy,” he declared. “Solidity monsters know how to dish it out. Now we’ll see if Solidity monsters can take it.”

The Chancellor was a changed man. It would have been immediately apparent to any who knew him, had they been on board the fungal flagship to see.

Strangely, what might perhaps have been most striking was the absence of his dark grey military uniform, for he had seldom appeared in public wearing anything else. The Chancellor’s new suit of clothes was very much in the style of the Solidity’s home sector, and as men’s fashions there typically covered less skin than those of Earth, a second and far more sinister change was revealed through the stretches of chest and throat left exposed. All The Chancellor’s flesh had taken on the inhuman greenish cast of a toadstool.

There was one more aspect to this disturbingly different former member of the Next Four which would also have astonished just two of his erstwhile comrades, had they been able to look on him. When Gala and Joe were last in The Chancellor’s presence, he had possessed only one arm. Now he was the proud owner of a pair again, both naked to the shoulders and green.

Shuffling alongside him through the tunnels of the living spacecraft was Stinkhorn, one of the younger sons of Solidity chief Empress Ungus. A vile specimen consisting mainly of twisted white roots and staring yellow eyes, Stinkhorn was a disagreeable enough sight in and of himself. More troubling still however was the progress The Chancellor seemed to be making in becoming like him.

“Understand, human, that while the limb-graft is a reliable medical procedure for my kind, it has never been attempted on one of yours before,” Stinkhorn stated passively as they walked. “Your body may yet reject it, necessitating other alternatives. In addition, the long-term side-effects on your metabolism and psychological state remain unknown.”

The Chancellor’s response was merely to flex the strong tendons and sinews of his new arm. “I am touched by the concern for me your mother shows,” he added dryly, looking her sixteenth-born up and down.

“We have suffered a family bereavement, Earthling,” retorted Stinkhorn. “Mother sensed his death, as she would that of any who are her own, and is distraught. So am I, as it happens. I’d already planned the perfect assassination for Draxu, and now it’ll have to go on one of my lesser brothers instead. It’s endlessly stressful working your way to the top.”

They had reached the shuttle-bay, where Stinkhorn’s underlings were loading the last of The Chancellor’s equipment and guns onto a small hyperdrive spacecraft that sat there. Unlike the discoid ships of Empress Ungus’s main fleet, this one was shaped like a long narrow mushroom-cap lying on one side so the needle-tip was its nosecone. A single panel of transparent membrane disclosed a one-man cockpit, and bulges on the sleek skin of the fuselage gave way to supplementary sets of gill-slits facing aft like turbo boosters. Long white flagella trailed from the hub of its primary turbine. This vehicle was no star-cruiser or transport. It was a hunter.

The Chancellor was donning his black overcoat. Before he had the chance to embark, Stinkhorn slipped in: “Have I mentioned how glad I am to see you wearing something decent for a change?”

“I fight on the side of your sector now,” The Chancellor reminded him levelly.

“Yes,” Stinkhorn went on with a leer, “and you wore the old uniform all through your Next Four days, as a gesture of your continuing loyalty to Gala. As I say, I’m glad it’s finally dawned on you that that time is behind you now. I mean, it took her chopping off a part of your body then fleeing in the embrace of another male, but at least you got there in the end.”

“You forget that long before that, I wore the uniform as a soldier defending my country and my people,” The Chancellor pointed out. “Including, and perhaps especially, our helpless infants. I hardly need tell you that the mission on which you dispatch me now has little in common with that.”

Stinkhorn’s glaring yellow eyes narrowed. “Which is not to say you’re having second thoughts…?” he prompted in a hiss.

From the look The Chancellor returned, it was clear enough he was not.

“My target is otherwise destined to conquer this world, destroy your galaxy and lay waste to the universe,” he declared slowly.

“Ah, such noble motives – gets me right in the mesophyll,” said Stinkhorn, giving him another deeply repulsive smile. “And I’m sure the manner in which that same target came into the universe isn’t any sort of secondary incentive. Mother’s had you figured out since the Fourth Dark Advent.”

A white tendril-digit stabbed in the direction of the hunter.

“You’re supposed to be the best there is at this sort of thing,” Stinkhorn concluded. “So go, exterminator. Do your job.”

Summarily The Chancellor boarded, and in a smooth deployment of supernal star-drive was gone from the flagship and the Earth.

END OF CHAPTER ONE