Flight of the Girl, Chapter Three

Flashsatsumas’s twin ghastly guards led him and his model army to the beach, where congregated on the damp sand below, the other twenty-two creatures were waiting.

It had up to now been Flashsatsumas’s very great privilege to have had little to do with that collection, and he only wished it could have lasted. Beneath the black threatening sky their lurid bodies worked an ever-changing eerie luminescence, whose blue-green and amber and diabolic red lent a sickly disorienting quality to a sight which scarcely needed it. All were hunched and horrendous, their heads vastly out of proportion to the rest, though there was otherwise great variety as to which had huge fleshy lips and which fangs and fins. Flashsatsumas was pleased to say he only recognised Gachna, master of chains, more repulsive rather than less so for the gilded finery with which he adorned himself. Mini-Flash Juniper wouldn’t have struggled to pick Lasser out of the crowd, and from her descriptions it was possible for Flashsatsumas to identify Yon, even though Juniper was never anything but Special Program vague when it came to recounting facts. She’d nonetheless communicated clearly that the leader of these fiends was a gigantic eyeball who went around in a sedan chair carried by four subservients, and Flashsatsumas certainly hoped there couldn’t be two such.

Xameer and Xuna, as the emissaries were named, proceeded to rejoin their loathsome like and Flashsatsumas followed, soldiers tramping after him. Overhead hummed the several skycraft which various airmen had adopted, while cognate corps from the motor-pool drove land vehicles down the ramp which adjoined the concrete steps. The noise these made was not that of tank-treads, but skittering plastic wheels fitted beneath motionless mock-ups of the same. Faintly Flashsatsumas recalled seeing Earth-children taking their toys to the beach to play with.

Copters hovered, engines idled, and the skeletal squad stood to attention.

“On the march,” issued from Yon, who ignored Flashsatsumas. “There is a township beyond the pier. Occupy, and hold. When the hostile arrives, you will fight to the last man.”

A great bass voice rapped out unexpectedly at this:

“Begging the General’s permission.”

It came from a sergeant, bearded like the pard, which was to say the lower half of his staring slab face was painted dark.

“The recruits may be the roughest pack of rawhides yet to defend the peace,” this one continued in a sort of rhythmical bellow. “But they respectfully remind the General he has not detailed his own regiment’s place in the battle-lines.”

“Yours is the only regiment, dolt,” came back coldly from Yon. “The enemy will betray their weaknesses in the process of dispatching you, and that is what I wish to study. Do not confuse your miserable existences with those that are of consequence.”

Strange to say, this wasn’t well-received.

A rumble from the ranks was echoed by an imminent peal of thunder, as the tempest over the sea made set to break.

Flashsatsumas wasn’t arrogant as the creatures were, which was another way of saying he had sense. Sense enough to speedily find out a well-removed bit of beach, which boasted the added advantage of shelter.

“Didn’t sign up for no suicide charge,” a soldier spoke up amid the rising dissent.

“I’m in it for my medal and my pension,” growled another.

“Ours but to do and die?” was the booming pronouncement that carried above all. “Not this time, maggot. We’re reasoning why.”

Within an instant it had begun. The stretch of shoreline was all at once a circling dance of devastation, flyers spiralling aloft and armed armatures breaking from file to sprint in formation with plastic machine-guns ablaze, their heavier gear commencing salvos from the outermost periphery. Rockets that were overgrown toys nevertheless wrought real explosions, and for the first few seconds of the fray their targets writhed amid fiery clouds. Yon however was not slow to rally, and with words alone whipped his bearers to a defensive ring about his chair, while the remaining nineteen held an encirclement to push their attackers back. Rain lashed the battlefield, and barely had Flashsatsumas drawn another breath than it was a driving slanting deluge, the first weather-pattern forced on ahead by an interstellar threat which one male Mini-Flash had naively envisaged the participants in this death-struggle uniting to fight.

For Flashsatsumas, although not an Earthling, carried within him what that race referred to as humanity. He ought to have known better than to evaluate by his standards things which walked and talked, but shared not a shred of humanity between them.

The beach was beginning to ooze underfoot. Those combatants that had quit the conveyor-belts believing themselves men of war fought on, as men of war did.

Theirs was the advantage in discipline, strategy, tactics.

Now they were learning what good those did them when pitted against monsters.

True, the steady streams of bullets cracked and pinged, but this to Yon’s legion was little more than an annoyance that might be shrugged off. Their retaliations meanwhile were brutal, shattering in the literal sense, for Gachna’s chains of lead which flew in die-straight obliques and horizontals smashed limbs from their joints or splintered them to fragments. Spears and spinning hand-axes hurled from foul misshapen claws downed choppers and lamed tanks, such that soon burning hulks were sinking in the mire. Strewn likewise, an ever-increasing number of legs and arms, or mannequin torsos bereft of these, made their grotesquely bloodless exit as bubbling mud claimed them.

Such was the fate of those dealt with from a distance. When Flashsatsumas dared a look at the commandos and martial artists who brought their edged weapons in attempts to close, he could but conclude their fallen brothers had been the fortunate ones.

Not that Flashsatsumas saw much of this, for he could only squeeze his eyes shut at what was being done with hologrammatic daggers and clubs.

He fled, all but splashing through the slop, his rubber containment-suit slick with rain. Yet on gaining the summit of the steps again Flashsatsumas couldn’t but turn for one last look, before seeking what refuge the camp might still temporarily provide. Anywhere just then would have been safer than the appalling panorama outspread, where the creatures in their killing-frenzy were by now seeing off such stragglers as remained.

So this was war.

This was the fate which Flashsatsumas and all his generation had been schooled to anticipate.

Was this what it would amount to? Broken bits of bodies stamped down into dirt?

And it came of Joe. As The Foretold One did. Whatever this time and this place might have been, every atrocity playing itself out there was somehow intrinsic to The Four Heroes’ founder.

For what it was worth, Flashsatsumas hadn’t joined him.

Mini-Flash Juniper had, and more than once she’d mentioned her second thoughts.

Flashsatsumas didn’t feel he could blame her for these, as he gazed out on what seemed to him a microcosm of what Joe was in the process of visiting upon their quadrant.

And Flashsatsumas, as it happened, liked Dylan. That brilliant, easygoing Earthling who helped him with his power-harness was both a friend and someone to look up to. Personal preference had been, at the very least, as much a factor as politics in determining which interpretation of the cause Flashsatsumas chose to stand by.

No doubt the same had been so for most Mini-Flashes.

Including those who’d chosen the other way.

Which was probably how a galaxy ended up facing such prospects as theirs now did.

Juniper also liked to tell tales of her adventures, usually at bedtime after Flashsatsumas was clamped. Between the narrative style and the content he found them rather difficult to follow, but there was one to which he suddenly couldn’t but revert.

He who it treated of was at that moment alongside his accustomed hanger-on Gorm, taking it in turns to stake what was left of the bearded sergeant with trident and sword.

What Lasser had said to Mini-Flash Juniper on the night in question, Flashsatsumas was no longer in any position to doubt.

A creature which barely knew what truth was had spoken truly indeed.

It was all Joe.

END OF CHAPTER THREE