Flight of the Girl, Chapter One

Maureen had just finished dyeing a streak of electric blue into Mini-Flash Juniper’s long fair hair. Now Juniper was wide-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror, still lost for words.

“My old classmates aren’t going to know me, Maureen!” she managed at last.

“Didn’t think we were doing it for a bunch of prissy grammar girls,” Maureen replied.

She was grinning, and Mini-Flash Juniper’s subsequent blushes might have made her do so all the more, except that now wasn’t the time.

Maureen knew best the one for whom this operation had actually been carried out.

She’d known him longest, after all. But she also knew herself. That included knowing all the different kinds of moments when she made jokes, and why.

Sure enough, a sort of silence had already fallen.

Mini-Flash Juniper felt it too. Maybe she was thinking of the first time she saw Maureen, streetlamp-shadowed in the summer dusk and glaring out at her from under the five red and green lights on her forehead, more than ready for this first encounter to turn into a fight. That had been a fortnight ago, and apparently much could change in that span. Juniper opened her lips to speak, but something blurted from Maureen before she could.

“Look,” was how it commenced. “I’m no good at this sort of stuff. But if it’s the end of the holiday and we’re all supposed to be going home tomorrow, then…well, every other one of these I’ve been on, you make friends and then you say goodbye and that’s that. Never see them again. Bit younger when I first came here though, and obviously, so was Pat. If you ask me, this is the first time he’s wanted it to be more of a staying-in-touch sort of deal.”

The full-body redness was kindling anew, but Maureen couldn’t let even that stop her now.

“Don’t start up about future sisters-in-law,” she therefore continued, with a note of warning. “But Jen, you’ve talked, and I’ve listened. Even tried to stay off the candy-sticks in the end. And that’s just me. I’m not asking for me. But, that’s not to say I don’t want us to…”

Mini-Flash Juniper waited for these falterings to finally dwindle away.

“I’ve only been on holiday around here once before,” she told Maureen, when they had. “And I never expected to be back. Now here we are. One of the things I’ve learned is that no-one knows what the future’s going to bring, not even me. So, I hope we’ll meet again, Maureen. And I’m not only saying it because of Pat.”

Speaking of whom. It seemed the moment of destiny was at hand.

“Hug me now and I’ll give you a right going-over,” Maureen advised. “Just go get him, Jen. Like the pair of you haven’t wasted enough time.”

All in a flurry Juniper rose, and underwent such contortions before the mirror while holding her new vivid strands to examine them from every possible angle that a friend less staunch than Maureen might have written off the project there and then.

“He’ll love it,” she insisted instead. “Shows your wild side.”

True, Maureen had to fight with every fibre of her non-existent being to keep a straight face, but that wasn’t to say she was insincere.

Mini-Flash Juniper knew as much when she stopped at the door and turned once to look back.

For underneath the headband, Maureen’s eyes were twinkling too.

Juniper wasn’t wrong that she’d have flabbergasted her erstwhile schoolfellows that morning, but she wouldn’t have needed a blue stripe in her hair to do it.

It wasn’t that they hadn’t seen her several times in the state she was in as she exited Maureen’s chalet and sought the bus stop by the camp gates, pensive with her lower lip between her teeth, her fingers endlessly restless about the hemline and underwear. That much would have been the same old Mini-Flash Juniper as far as the Special Program were concerned. Most of that number however had had next to nothing to do with her since the Headquarters breakout, and it would have been quite something to tell them her fidgets were because of a boy.

Yes. Mini-Flash Juniper. Anxious over what she was going to say to a boy.

That alone might have done it, but it wasn’t even all. It was what her apprehensiveness was making her miss, everywhere around her as she proceeded.

The expressions of dread on holidaymakers’ faces.

The chill whispers and murmurs that kept passing from one to the next.

The palpable ripples of shock which were growing in intensity by the second.

A clear and apparent crisis was telegraphing itself from every corner, and Mini-Flash Juniper moved through it oblivious.

This, from the only one among the Special Program who was good at sports.

If any of them had ever been able to size up a situation and act, it was she.

The remainder of that sorority would have blanched to their knicker-elastic. It would have ungirled them. If they’d been Earthlings, they’d have sworn doomsday was near.

And by a funny coincidence, half the camp was already doing the same.

The local news had never broadcast such an emergency bulletin before. It didn’t even matter which channel you tuned in to. Both were showing it.

In the early hours of that morning, something had shattered a section of seawall at the small coastal town near the camp. The pattern of damage did not correspond to either a freak tidal surge or a naval mine. Rather, it was apparent the something had hit from above, cracking the promenade to a craggy cliff then gouging a furrow a hundred feet deep along first the beach and then the ocean bed. It seemed the meteor, or whatever it was, had finally come to rest about a mile or so from shore.

These preliminaries were grimly reported amid footage of the broken seafront cordoned off by emergency services, and the canyon fast filling with incoming tide.

Grimly, because it had since transpired another something was on the way.

Local air-bases confirmed as much through long-range radar. It was still outside Earth-orbit for now but it was following the track of the first arrival, and it was bigger.

Comet-sized.

Flashsatsumas and Miss Ugly burst from the camp’s largest store.

They were laden down with loot, not money but toys, all still packaged in boxes or on cards of identical colours and one insignia. Miss Ugly was carrying an assorted heap of these atop the stiff net skirts of her tutu, which she was holding out before her in both hands, whilst under her arms and spilling from Flashsatsumas’s were yet more of the same. Nor did the pair of friends hesitate to throw themselves pantswise on the pavement and set about the goods now scattered around, ripping action figures free of transparent bubbles and clipping on fiddly backpacks and rifles, or tearing open the larger boxed vehicles to carry out assembly where required then peeling paper decals from small sheets and smoothing them down onto armour and hulls. The pair of them must have presented a quaint sight, to say the least, he in his orange inflatable containment-suit and she her Victorian ballet clothes, sitting at work on these objects of play while public disorder spread throughout the plaza.

Soon a fair-sized tiny strike-force was assembled in its ranks, motionless soldiers with elbows akimbo, and bulking behind them diminutive plastic war-machines. Flashsatsumas jumped up.

“Go get Mini-Flash Juniper,” he instructed Miss Ugly as he helped her to her feet. “Time’s short, so I’ll have to start now. That means when you find her, she’ll be as she was the day you met, without her memories and thinking she’s someone else. So, make sure she eats this,” and he handed over a wrapped-up slice of chocolate cake from his satchel, which as usual was crammed with them. “Then both of you head back here to revive me.”

“I still don’t like it,” Miss Ugly declared. “You’re right that we don’t have a choice, but even so. Deliberately bringing to life anything that’ll be on those creatures’ side…!”

Flashsatsumas’s expression told her eloquently all her misgivings were his.

Then he and Miss Ugly turned to their respective tasks, one commencing a characteristically ponderous fade-out while the other unscrewed the pneumatic capsules on the forearms of his suit. True, this place had its own strange way of doing things, but even neophyte Mini-Flash training pointed to a textbook instance of alien invasion. What had been sent on ahead was surely a radio-beacon, and the impending visitor no comet, but a landing-craft for interplanetary parasites. Some sort of army to respond to that threat was all too patently indicated, even it it meant throwing in with the very unlikeliest of allies.

Upon the miniature militia at his feet Flashsatsumas poured his powers, then fell prone to the ground as deep unconsciousness claimed him.

END OF CHAPTER ONE