Geological Thinking, Chapter One

A million brilliant specks of mica began to gleam from the desert sands as the first rays of sun touched the Earth. Golden daylight stretched along the single road that ran through the town of Silence, brightening the facades of its six ramshackle wooden buildings and throwing their gable-ends and side-alleys into black shadow. A hundred miles from Nottingham and surrounded on every side by parched and dusty emptiness, Silence did not see many visitors. On this particular dawn the town barber and the owner of the general store were sitting together on the shop porch to smoke and watch the sun come up, in keeping with a custom they observed each and every morning.

Something was approaching from the mountains in the distant west, from the direction of Nottingham. It looked like a dust-cloud or a highly-localised sandstorm, travelling along the one road. The two old men turned wordlessly to look at it, and their gaze steadily rotated back to centre to follow the vast shining behemoth of a vehicle that thundered into view and tore along Silence’s main street without stopping, making the six buildings quiver and tremble. Its mighty hulls were silver, its rumbling caterpillar-treads churned up desert-dust in massive billows, its armour flashed with Four Heroes sigils in gold and scarlet, and from its nosecone protruded a drill the size of a small house. After an instant of engine roar and chaotic shudderings the speechless pair on the porch were staring eastward at the tailfins of the disappearing hulk. Within seconds it was gone into the wilderness far beyond Silence. The dust settled back upon the road, and the tiny desert town was just as it had been before the visitation. Once more, the barber and the shopkeeper might have been the only two people on the planet.

They sat there without speaking for quite some time.

“Yup,” the barber finally said.

Inside the newly-completed Four Heroes Drillmobile sat its creator, Dylan Cook, manning the pilot’s controls and keeping the vehicle on course as it ploughed through the desert. Behind Dylan in the seats on the port side of the passenger tube were his comrades Joe, Bret and Neetra, while beside them, seated along the starboard flank and separated from The Four Heroes by the aisle, were Steam, D’Carthage, The Chancellor and Gala of the Next Four.

“Remind me again,” Gala began to the company in general, “why we’re presently leagues away from Nottingham in this contraption when we should be tracking down those six villains, recovering the robot head they still have, and finding and defeating Dimension Borg?”

“For someone who still thinks she’s going to take over from us, there’s a whole load of things you don’t know about how this is done,” was Neetra’s reply. “There’s never just one mission, or just one thing we need to do. Nobody’s forgotten we have to get that head back from Solenoid and his gang, but so far we’ve not been able to discover where they’re hiding out, and just now it’s also important we go after The One Below.”

“Phoenix Prime’s still out there, plotting against us,” Dylan continued from the helm. “With her connections to The One Below it’s possible he’s still in contact with her, and knows where she is. If so, we have to find out, before she makes another move to harm Phoenix.”

“Your girlfriend. Her sister,” Gala remarked, briefly gesturing towards Neetra. “Dimension Borg is a threat to our entire planet as long as he’s free. Doesn’t that take precedence over family matters?”

“This has everything to do with protecting the planet, Gala,” Bret told her. “Phoenix Prime said The One Below only broke off his plans to invade Nottingham because of a war in his underground world. She helped him win that war, in exchange for an army to fight us. That means we could be looking at renewed hostilities from The One Below any time now, unless we confront him first and find out exactly what he’s up to.”

Dylan consulted the graph-plotter. “We’re directly above the co-ordinates of our last encounter with him,” he reported. “Seatbelts on, everybody. It’s time to give this new baby a whirl!”

With a grin, Dylan pulled back a prominent lever. The passenger tube began to tip forward at a steep angle, as telescopic struts built into the Drillmobile’s stern pushed the whole rear section to the sky. At the same time the immense drill-bit started to revolve, quickly picking up pace until its shining blades were a blur. It drove into the ground and bored deep, turning sand into a hurricane then cracking through the first layers of the upper mantle. Powerful jets kicked in, and the Four Heroes Drillmobile with its eight passengers followed the spinning shield into the dark.

After a long descent through the rocky tunnel of their own making, the Four Heroes and the Next Four detected open caverns waiting beyond the last stratum of bedrock. The drill brought them safely through, at which Dylan stilled its rotations and deployed folding wings from the Drillmobile’s chassis. With rocket boosters ablaze they began to cruise through the highest vaults of a vast catacomb, and took their first look at the subterranean realm.

When The Four Heroes had last been in this place, they had witnessed a proud, cruel and magnificent empire that The One Below ruled as sole warlord. It was unlike human civilization in many ways, based as it was around the strange silicate-based lifeforms of this underground land, but nevertheless all the trappings of culture, of academia and of technology had been apparent and recognizable. Everything of that was gone now. Before the eyes of our heroes as they gazed through the portholes sprawled an alien vista, a twisted terrain suffused with eerie light that seemed to shimmer from the rocks themselves. The stalagmites and stalactites were not shaped as they should have been, but were warped and pointing in crazy directions as if gravity itself were pulling them into unnatural attitudes. This discoloured and deformed geology rambled far away in every direction until the blackness of the depths swallowed it up, and there was no trace at all of any surviving cities or the millions of stony beings that had once populated them.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Steam declared grimly.

“It bears no resemblance to The One Below’s domain as we knew it!” Joe exclaimed. “What could have happened to cause this?”

“War,” The Chancellor replied. “It has a way of changing all our familiar landscapes beyond recognition. Believe me on this.”

Joe had recently learned that all the Next Four hailed from the darkest chapters of Nottingham’s history, so he had no difficulty believing these words and nor could he help wondering what the mysterious old soldier had seen in his native time to make him able to speak them with such conviction. Dylan, at the helm, gripped the controls tighter.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. “Something out there’s trying to throw us off-course and it feels almost like windshear or turbulence, but it can’t be that down here! Chancellor, what do you make of the readings?”

“Only that they are not right,” said The Chancellor, checking the monitors on his arm-rest. “Great currents and eddies of some force, possibly an unknown type of radiation, crowd the very air and buffet us as we pass. The same energy-signatures emanate from the molecular structure of the crust, perhaps explaining its luminescence and physical mutation, and output levels are off the scale. Clearly the war that was waged here wrought unbelievable damage upon the local ecosystem.”

“What did Phoenix Prime do to this place?” Neetra asked in a quiet voice, gazing out at the ruination below.

“It took more than fire, Neet,” Dylan said grimly. “In fact, nothing we know about her powers or any form of anti-matter mutation suggests she’d have been able to achieve this alone.”

“Which means the mystery is deepening by the minute,” said Joe, “and the more I see, the less I like it. My friends, we must double our efforts to locate The One Below, for only he – ”

The explosion came without warning. All of a sudden our heroes were flung hard against their seatbelts as the entire Drillmobile gave a stomach-churning lurch, shockwaves coursing through its fuselage and rattling every rivet and bolt. Outside the portholes great shapes were wheeling and flapping by, reptillian monsters that looked like pterodactyls beating leathery wings and calling out in harsh inhuman squawks. Each was ridden by a rock-man, their craggy grey bodies thinly clad in armour and loincloth, gripping their flying steeds between their calves as they swung heavy mallets and battleaxes in their hands.

“They’ve hit the secondary fuel tank!” Dylan yelled, frantically throwing switches all across his many control panels. “Get them off our back while I try to hold her steady!”

Throwing off his safety-harness, The Chancellor was first to fling open the ceiling-hatch and vault out into the slipstream. Joe followed, his soles touching the roof of the Drillmobile just as The Chancellor finished assembling and loading his sniper rifle. Roaring bursts of fire and precision beams of blue light flew from the pair as they stood back-to-back in the wind, scattering the flocks of barbarians at all quarters.

In a cascade of heat, light and noise Steam exited the vehicle via its hatch, leaving a column of flame behind him. Before the enemies knew what was happening he was in their midst, and his hurtling metal body knocked two warriors and their mounts spiralling towards the Drillmobile. Bret and Gala had arrived on the roof by the time they plummeted into close range, and between Gala’s shining cutlass and Bret’s fist they were swiftly dispatched.

With a grunt, one of the barbarians flung his axe from afar. The mighty weapon’s sharpened flint head embedded itself in the Drillmobile’s primary fuel tank, and struck sparks from the steel. Suddenly half the roof was gone in a gigantic fireball, and The Chancellor, who was standing nearest to it, was hurled into nothingness. Joe, Bret and Gala, as they struggled to keep their own footing, were afforded one tiny glimpse of his grey-clad figure flailing back into the distance before the catacomb swallowed him up.

Across Gala’s face flashed an expression of fearful concern that was most uncommon for her. “Chancellor – !” she breathed.

Neetra, in her seat below, witnessed the disaster through her porthole. “The Chancellor just bought it!” she cried to Dylan, who was wrestling with the controls.

“I suspect we may not be long about joining him, my dear girl!” D’Carthage opined, as their three remaining colleagues scrambled back into the passenger tube from the roof. The burning Drillmobile was entering a steady and inexorable descent, and the jagged rocks of the cavern floor loomed ahead. Dylan took a final grim glance at the flight computer, and looked over his shoulder to his comrades.

“Brace for impact!” he shouted.

Steam, looping round near the roof, drew in breath at the sight of his friends going down in flames. His moment of distraction was all it took for one opportunistic enemy to swoop in behind him and hit home with his massive stone hammer, propelling Steam helplessly down towards the plunging Drillmobile as his flames faltered and died on his mechanical form. He collided with the vehicle’s silver flank and tore half of it away in a shattering of chrome and glass before tumbling the remainder of the distance to the ground, depressurizing the cabin and dragging Neetra and Bret along with him in the vacuum.

The three of them bumped and rolled and skidded to a dust-choked landing, not severely hurt but unconscious from the crash. The Drillmobile, with Dylan, Joe, Gala and D’Carthage still in it, tore away ahead of them along the final stretch of its blazing death-dive and came to rest acres away, meeting the rock-face head-on and disappearing in a cataclysmic explosion.

Talons gripped the ground and batlike wings were folded as the stony warriors circled to land, surrounding the place where Bret, Neetra and Steam lay insensible. The chieftain jumped down from his mount and turned Neetra over with the butt of his spear. At the sight of her face the entire horde of barbarians drew back with a great marvelling gasp, and a dark expression of horror and righteous outrage dawned on the chief’s granite visage.

“The Ravager,” he growled.

END OF CHAPTER ONE