Doc Sherwood
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Unto the Breach, Chapter Three
Hangonel too broke into a sprint. Two pairs of bare feet pounded the plain, throwing up twin crimson dust-bowls steadily closing to collide as the counterparts made ready to settle through combat the tie-breaker over which of them was wearing the least. Bendigo discovered the proper parlance was something you could fall back into as if you’d never been away, for without so much as a hesitation he hollered out as he hurtled: “Then learn, impetuous Hangonel Mangonel, that it was none other than my venerable father who first sought to set down the Prophecy you speak of! So perhaps it is indeed meet we are thus enjoined on this battlefield, for only the benign spirits and ancient gods might have ordained a reckoning between two such!”
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Incoming, Chapter Three
All night long the Henry Martin spearheaded Planet Earth’s advance, blazing a trail for helicopters and fighter-jets as together they poured their payloads down upon the twisted tendrils burrowing into Nottingham’s heart. Now with ammunition finally exhausted the great galleon had tacked back from the City Centre to let fresher vessels finish the fight, and was sailing daylight skies at the war-zone’s outskirts in search of survivors to airlift to safety.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Incoming, Chapter Two
Harbin seized the advantage. Thrusting out an arm he turned Gala’s trick against our heroes, with a clench of one fist which telekinetically crunched a wall of hard tangled stalks behind where Joe was standing. The rubble crumbled down and crushed him helpless to the ground, while Harbin whirled back about and fixed his smouldering red eyes on Gala. In an instant the battlefield fell still, almost as if the stare from those dual embers was holding her in place.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
- Top Story - July 2021
Incoming, Chapter OneTop Story - July 2021
Less than an hour had elapsed for Joe and Gala since receiving the horrendous news that they were already parents-to-be of Harbin, The Foretold One, whose adult life would be distinguished by a universe-wide reign of terror. Now amidst the grotesque greenery of The Back Garden, where living fungi of monstrous size snared whole planets in their twining grip, the first of The Four Heroes and the first of the Next Four braced for battle as that same son barrelled down upon them. Harbin, a grown man on his second time-travelling trip to the present day, was a gaunt blur of twilight wrapped in a ragged cloak as he alighted on the tangled stalks and stems that made up the flooring where his parents stood. Those two at once bore the piercing white light from Gala’s cutlass and the fiery blaze of Joe’s fists directly to the heart of Harbin’s preternatural dusk, as the family reunion made its less-than-promising start.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Incoming, Chapter Four
It began with a spatial misalignment crackling its disturbances across the empty cosmos. Some deployment undreamt of by man was making it possible for one object to simultaneously exist on opposite sides of the universe. The thing itself was a flat oblong of metal too vast to have been constructed on-planet, suspended vertically amid the stars, and perforated once with a circular hole. From out of this aperture shapes began to fly like missiles. They were Vernderernders, robots of the same breed as Neetra’s travelling-companion Vern, each identical individual riding the fiery exhaust of his twin throbbing tailpipes with gears and radials locked for flight. Glinting talons were upraised, rodlike necks extended the die-straight line of the body, and orbicular beaked heads thrust themselves horizontally onward. These, half-vulture and half-motorcycle, were the Lords of Toothfire. And their numbers were legion.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Under Starter's Orders, Chapter One
It was easy enough to mishear Flashshadow, since she never raised her voice above the softest of timid murmurs, and that was why Joe had assumed the name of their destination must be something other than what it sounded like when she said it. Our hero didn’t see how there could be a place called “disqualification tablet,” even in this galaxy. He should probably have kept in mind he was still a comparative newcomer here, and that the literal appellations towards which local cultures so tended nearly always made sense after you’d been to take a look firsthand.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Unto the Breach, Chapter One
A vast luminous sphere of temporo-psionic flux had blinked into existence above Nottingham City Centre. Deep in that enemy-overrun war-zone, three crusaders named Phoenix, Kumiko and Phoenix Prime looked from where they were holed-up to gaze at the spectacle in awe. The winged schoolgirl Carrie, darting over battle-ravaged rooftops halfway to her destination, halted at a hover and gawped likewise. Every Solidity soldier stationed at ground-level was occupied the same way, for as far as these extraterrestrials were concerned, the unthinkable had happened. This swirling swelling ball of supernal energies had eaten a hole in their encirclement of giant robotic Future Fighters. A defensive barrier that the ageless wisdom of the Purplecoats themselves had pronounced impregnable now stood breached.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Unto the Breach, Chapter Two
Erupting from the turbid vapours of an interplanetary heat-field was a very different Flash Club to Lightning’s, this one led by Neetra Neetkins of The Four Heroes. She was making a stand all her own in the battle to save Planet Earth, not from the streets of home where her family and friends waged the war on several fronts, but rather in the distant galaxy whence their enemies hailed. Neetra and the eight faithful Mini-Flashes under her had seconds ago completed a series of gruelling challenges flung at them by Toothfire, a machine-empire dreaded throughout the quadrant but which opposed the Solidity as vehemently as Neetra did, and with whom our heroine in her last hopes of turning the tide sought to forge an alliance.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Unto the Breach, Chapter Four
Back on Mars, the Solidity patrolmen were safely tied-up beside the wreck of their ship while Bret and Max searched through the scrap for the distress-beacon. Meanwhile Amy was sitting on the sand with the Professors and Bendigo, rounding off the long story of how she and her friends came to be there.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
The Foretold One
In Nottingham’s war-torn City Centre, Solidity forces were being unilaterally redeployed to the very heart of town. Over the stone steps and paving-slabs of that ornate square hung Empress Ungus’s giant saucer-shaped mothership, from which huge green world-rending tendrils spanned the gap between sky and earth. These were suddenly pulsating and germinating with a vengeance, perhaps making up for a stretch of lost time when it had seemed to some their maker was keeping them on hold, but Earthling tanks and planes were ever muscling their way through the widening breach in the Future Fighters and ultimate success for the Solidity’s superweapon now rested on a last concerted stratagem of defence.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
The Trojan Horse, Chapter Two
Before the prow of the Henry Martin airspace parted like the deep, battering housefronts and roof-tiles with Aeolian spume as the skyborne galleon of timber and gold ploughed above the city’s square trenches. The robot hordes first sighted her as she rounded the headland of the Town Hall’s great dome, at which her fore-facing bores of brass cannon broke into far-off fiery winks all at once. A second later and the marauders were met full in the teeth by a bombardment in which each cannonball accounted for many, explosions of strategic targets striking chain-reactions throughout densely-packed metal bodies that cleared whole smoking blast-zones across the mechanical mass.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction