Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Four

High above the clouds the clear light of day was still set to reign for at least another hour, but over the Henry Martin there now fell a shadow that was not nature’s doing. The galactic cruiser had arrived, and was hulking abreast of the Next Four’s ship. On her bridge Amy switched manoeuvring jets to hold steady, and the discharge from their vents blew into the combatants like a north-wester. Bret and Gala locked blades in the squall, drawing face-to-face.

“You’re going nowhere,” she hissed to him, then shouted: “Mooring-chains! Scupper that vessel!”

The Henry Martin responded at once, requiring no more than this verbal command from Gala so presumably acting under the psychic confluence she had spoken of. Its starboard hull, that which was facing the spacecraft, opened at four points from bow to stern and from each of these hatches flew a flat-headed magnetic clamp the size of a truck-wheel, with a fearsomely hefty iron chain clanking and clanging behind it. Four resounding hollow booms of metal on metal rang through the battlefield as the clamps hit home, making fast to the cruiser’s flank. Then the Henry Martin began to reel in her chains, and with a terrible creaking squealing groan a deathly grapple began.

Amy’s thrusters were going full-out, but the inexorable tug of the mooring-chains was fighting their force to gain inch after inch. Slowly the spaceship was being wrenched in two directions at once. Bolts sheared, girders twisted, the fuselage shrilled under the torque. This structural stress however was a minor worry, compared to the one that had Amy throwing levers and switches the length of the control-panel in a frenzy to break free. The power-core’s hum was rising in pitch as the moment of critical mass approached. Our heroes did not have long to get on board and get underway, but if the cruiser should still be unable to move at the time the jump into hyperdrive must be made, it would be the end of them.

“Guys!” Amy yelled into her communicator. “Get those things off me or it’ll be a really short trip!”

The Chancellor, by the Henry Martin’s mast, knew the same. “Jettison your power-core into space, Four Heroes!” he hollered. “It is the one chance of saving those on your ship!”

“We’re not sacrificing our mission just because your leader’s nuts!” Bret snarled back. He sheathed his sword, turned from his duel with Gala and leapt overboard in a single motion, to land upright on one of the mooring-chains and set off again like a sprinting tightrope-walker. With faultless balance Bret tore along the precarious high-wire and crossed the gap from Gala’s craft to his, unmindful of the terrifying drop spinning beneath his feet, and on reaching the cruiser launched himself into a blue-glowing vertical bound. He came down knees and fist-first directly on top of the magnetic clamp, and that single punch detonated it in a fiery blast that sent the truncated chain swinging back to the Henry Martin.

Max and D’Carthage’s drag-out slugfest had proceeded to one of the gantries low-down on the galleon’s port side. The two men had been comrades-in-arms while saving the world from Dimension Borg and had even briefly talked together at that time, but nobody would have thought it to see them today. Max was the stronger and heavier while D’Carthage held the advantage in speed and flair, so they were evenly-matched. Their brawl might well have gone on for hours yet, but when the severed mooring-chain swung heavily past them they paused, both knowing what it meant.

“My good fellow!” D’Carthage protested, his gleaming white smile like that of a hearty host begging a dinner-guest not to leave. “After so fine a contest you surely cannot mean to deny me satisfaction now!”

“Biggest satisfaction for me’d be gettin’ away from your yap, buddy,” Max replied, and as the chain rushed by on its return-swoop he grabbed it in both hands and was borne swiftly away from his opponent.

The massy metal proceeded on its upswing like a pendulum, the Henry Martin’s starboard its pivot, and holding on tight Max travelled with it. At the apex of his rise he let go and the momentum carried him the rest of the way, bringing him bodily against the hull of the galactic cruiser, whereat he found footholds and handholds and began to climb. It wasn’t long before he had reached one of the three remaining magnetic clamps, and hauling himself above it Max stamped down again and again with his great boot. The second clamp went the way of the first.

Klaxons were blaring a multiple red-alert as Bret clambered onto the bridge through the open hatchway. Every control-board was demanding a hundred course-corrections at once, for the cruiser had been pulled so far off her original trajectory by the Henry Martin’s chains that all the computations our heroes had entered for the intergalactic jump were irretrievably scrambled. Bret and Amy were but two, and the power-core’s dirge was mounting to a crescendo.

“It’s no use!” Amy cried. “Only Dylan’s powers could make all these recalculations in time for critical mass!”

“Dylan’s powers or someone with an electronic brain that can link with the main computer,” said Bret, running to the communications array.

Blaster-Track banked around and faced the Henry Martin once more, Flashtease still perching ready on his back. Ahead and below lay Blaster-Track Commander, bound to the mast, and beside him The Chancellor with rifle in hands. “I’m coming for you, boss!” the devoted jeep declared. “One more pass and I can get you out of there!”

Suddenly Bret’s voice burst out over his receivers: “Blaster-Track! Our navigation’s gone haywire! We need you on the bridge!”

Blaster-Track knew at once his human ally was correct, and only he could save them now. He turned his optical scanners one last time on the Commander, slumped and unmoving with his blond hair hanging in his eyes. They had never so much as been apart. Now Blaster-Track had no choice but to leave him helpless in the hands of an enemy, and put a distance of galaxies between them. Feeling as if his central processing unit had been ripped in two, he turned and fled for the cruiser.

As they neared, Flashtease jumped from the jeep’s back and curled himself up, transforming into a spinning sizzling star. In this scintillating state he made a pinpoint strike on one of the two remaining mooring-chains, snapping it across the middle and bouncing up from it. With a final few sparkling somersaults Flashtease reverted to his familiar boy-self, and made a one-footed landing on the spacecraft’s very summit.

Blaster-Track roared in through the hatchway and screeched across the bridge floor on his wheels, skidding to a halt at the mainframe terminal. “I’m here! Everybody hang tough!” he shouted, extending his interface hoses and plugging them in. The sirens fell quiet at once, to be replaced by a massed chorus of computers whirring their way through a million adjustments at lightning speed.

Neetra flitted to the cruiser on her flight-pack and sliced away the last of the mooring-chains with a photon-beam, before ducking in through the hatch to join her friends. Our heroes’ transportation was free of let or hindrance, and the open skies of hyperspace were before them.

Gala, on the Henry Martin, saw this. She raised her hand. The four portholes that had discharged the clamps slid closed, and then the whole of the starboard hull opened up again. A cannon to end all cannons, its mouth a gaping pit of darkness, shouldered itself into the light of day.

“The death-shot,” said Gala. “Put a hole through their power-core!”

“Gala! That explosion will destroy us all!” The Chancellor bellowed.

“They won’t escape us!” came back Gala’s reply like an Atlantic gale.

The cannon fired. Flashtease, on all fours atop the galactic cruiser, watched it happen as if in slow-motion. He saw the blossoming of ruddy smoke, saw the flame-streaks that dawdled across its gradually-widening span, and saw the black sphere of doom as it hulked out of the peripheral gunpowder cloud and embarked upon its journey. As far as Flashtease was concerned, he was no longer in a strange galaxy light-years from home, crouching on a spacecraft far above a distant planet. He was back at the Grindotron Classic, in the final minute of play. Twenty towering androids had stood between his small self and the single point needed to clinch the match, but he’d made it past them, and the Flash Club had brought home the trophy for the sport they invented. Because Flashtease was good at his game.

It’s just a Flashball, he told himself. Just a really fast, really hard Flashball.

And he was gone from the roof of the starship, hurtling to meet the onrushing projectile. Flashtease knew that a head-on collision would do nothing but wipe him out, but if he aimed himself high so he skimmed the thing’s uppermost crown, he could get in a hundred hand-strikes across it as he approached and then a hundred more hits from the soles of his feet as he passed. That should be enough to push the cannonball downward to such a degree that it missed the reactor-core…and, just as long as Flashtease made each and every one of the two hundred the fastest he was capable of, he’d come out of the experience with all his limbs too.

Nobody saw it. Though there was not one eye on the Henry Martin or the galactic cruiser that dared so much as blink, all that the spectators saw was a blur of grey and a blur of black passing each other and shooting away in opposite directions. They did not know Flashtease had indeed made it until the next split-second, when the cannonball, drooping out of its arrow-straight line, crunched into a deltoid fin on the spaceship’s underbelly and left her bulkheads untouched. The power-core remained whole. Flashtease crashed onto the planks of the Henry Martin’s deck, crying and contorting, his hands obscured by plumes of white smoke issuing from his palms and the soles of his footwear melted to slurry.

“FLASHTEASE!” Neetra shrieked.

Max swung onto the bridge and slammed the hatchway shut. The reactor was by now howling out the apocalypse, and even before our heroes’ gaze the seats and equipment around them began to warp into light and colour, as the very molecules of their vessel loosed their hold on three-dimensional space and screamed for release to the great interstellar tide.

“Course-corrections complete!” yelled Blaster-Track. Amy responded:

“HIT IT!”

The engines erupted into life, and it began. Nottingham’s airways for leagues around thrashed in the clutches of chaos, and at the epicentre the three members of the Next Four and their two prisoners felt as if all existence had blinked to nothing. Bret, Neetra, Amy, Max, Blaster-Track and their ship were enfolded by the universe’s primal force, and swept away to nebulas and quasars far beyond human ken. Immediately after their departure came the shockwave, as the world rushed back in to fill the space the cruiser had vacated. The Henry Martin tipped and tossed as quake after quake bombarded her hull, and it took everything those on board had just to stay there. At long last though, it subsided. Blue firmament and grey-white clouds swam back into being. The skies of Planet Earth were still.

Gala put one foot on Flashtease’s prostrate body, and stood looking out upon the emptiness without a word. The Chancellor and D’Carthage did the same, and Steam, rejoining them off the bow, held steady on his contrail. Together the Next Four surveyed the rolling realms in a newfound and all-enveloping silence.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR