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.

Of the three-strong crew, only Degris possessed psychic power enough to qualify as captain so he was at the helm. Lookout duty thereby fell to Carmilla Neetkins and Flashtease, the latter of whom was leaning forward on the carved oaken rail to stare thoughtfully out.

It did Carmilla good to see him thus. The way he was letting the mild air-currents play over his bare arms and legs and tousle lightly through his fair hair spoke of a boy no longer in distress or pain. That state was somewhat mirrored by the expression on his freckly face, which for the first time in quite a stretch no longer wore the signs of immediate wracking fears. Panic and anxiety were gone from his large blue eyes, but their pondering gaze on the middle distance nevertheless suggested Flashtease had much on his mind for one so young. This, Carmilla already knew well. She also knew he still had no idea what to do with that tunic when a breeze was blowing, which was why she greeted him by catching the back of his hemline and tugging it down in a futile gesture towards his modesty.

“I swear you’re as bad as me,” she smiled. “This cheerleader skirt’s about as suitable for open-air transport as that Mini-Flash uniform of yours.”

“We are in the same boat,” Flashtease agreed solemnly.

“And I’m not surprised you’ve more to think about than whether your underwear’s showing,” Carmilla went on, putting her arm around him. “That’s something else we’ve got in common, Flashtease. You’ve started me thinking too. As it happens, mostly about Joe.”

“He didn’t know anything about what the Next Four did to me,” Flashtease told her at once. “They made sure he was away, so he wouldn’t find out.”

Carmilla gave his shoulder a quick squeeze. “Steam told us the same,” said she. “But Joe really did do a load of other things I’d never have believed of him, Flashtease. So the last time we were together, I treated him to a few choice words. In fact, I was pretty brutal.”

She sighed, and joined her small friend in stooping over to rest her elbows on the rail.

“Way back in the beginning, you see, I used to be one of The Four Heroes’ worst enemies,” she explained. “We battled each other four times, and whenever I saw Joe he was this sweet, brave little boy, completely devoted to the forces of good. Once I’d become myself again, it was Joe who inspired me to join The Four Heroes’ cause. So maybe the reason I was so angry with him when we said goodbye is that lately he’s not been the Joe I thought he was anymore.”

Something came over Carmilla’s features as she spoke these words, so that for a moment she looked as lost in her own thoughts as Flashtease had done.

“Which makes me think of Gala, for some reason,” she continued vaguely, then added for Flashtease’s benefit: “I’m a tiny bit psychic. Something left over from the old days. Nowhere near the same league as my little sister in The Four Heroes, of course, but every so often I pick the odd thing up. Right now I’m getting the feeling that where Joe’s concerned, Gala’s been through kind of the same. Even though she and I should both have known that when you put all your hopes in someone staying what you’ve always wanted them to be, you’re only ever going to be riding for a fall.”

She turned to look at Flashtease beside her, and her eyes were warm.

“Because not so long ago, I saw another brave sweet little boy do what had to be done when it came to life or death,” Carmilla declared. “There was nothing sweet about the situation, but that wasn’t the boy’s fault. His whole world had changed around him, and doing the right thing no longer meant what it used to mean. Which makes me wonder, Flashtease, that with everything we go through in this life, it might just be we can’t expect the brave and sweet little heroes to keep that way.”

“Joe wouldn’t have hurt me,” was Flashtease’s reply. “And if he’d known what the Next Four were planning, he’d have stopped them. They saw that. It’s why they hid it from him. Because they could see he’s still the hero you remember.”

Carmilla touched his hand, and looked outward again without further words. She recalled mentioning to Joe during that same painful parting that creatures of evil such as she once was tended to see good as an unambiguous absolute. It was only out here in the light you could appreciate how heroism was much more complicated than that. Maybe the true measure of a hero lay not in maintaining the principles and beliefs you were resolved to uphold, but rather in how you fared when you ended up in circumstances where these could not possibly apply, and all you could do was cope the best way you knew how.

Artillery fire flew from the barrel of The Chancellor’s gun, strafing Harbin’s bare torso and forcing him to raise his arms in defence as he retreated from Joe. Several of the front-facing apertures on the speeding spacecraft’s fleshy fuselage followed up by spitting out missiles in the target’s direction, but that one was faster and took to the skies, leaving the projectiles to explode on the floor where he had stood. Joe threw himself aside to dodge first this blast and seconds later the rushing body of the ship itself, which bellied low to the ground for its pilot to leap from the roof then jetted independently on, the spiralling flagella that trailed from its turbine whipping its wake to a cyclone. The Chancellor voice-commanded his weapon to switch batteries and dispatched a volley of heat-seeking rockets after Harbin’s heels.

Joe scrambled upright. “Help from an unexpected quarter indeed!” our hero exclaimed.

“He is standing in the way of my objective,” was The Chancellor’s reply. “Or to put it another way, he is one of my objectives, though he appears in a form I did not anticipate.”

“I however suspect I can anticipate the identities of your other objectives,” Joe said dryly, as Harbin, having swatted the heat-seekers, plunged back upon the pair flinging furious thunderbolts from his hands. “Perhaps ‘help’ was not the best term I might have used.”

“You have my word I’ll forego your assassination if neither of us survives this,” returned The Chancellor, at which the unlikely comrades-in-arms scattered across the battlefield as Harbin’s bombardment blasted home. “Witticisms from him now,” muttered Joe, coming about. “We’ve worked our way through the Next Four.”

Launching himself at the airborne adversary he struck home with fist ablaze, and once Harbin was thus lowered into range for surface-to-surface combat Joe’s new ally followed up the action with the butt of his rifle. Blows were dealt out and received on all three fronts while The Chancellor, thrusting and parrying with the firearm, strove to turn it about that its muzzle faced forward. This achieved, he let rip, but the burst of gunsmoke merely added to the holes in Harbin’s cape as supernal reflexes carried him safely aloft again.

The Chancellor’s craft, operating either on autopilot or through some telepathic convergence with its master, arced dutifully into view at once still riding the column of turbulence its motor generated. In a smooth pulsation the membranous windshield slid open and closed, admitting The Chancellor to the cockpit, then a second later Joe landed above him poised atop the vessel’s fuselage. His hands etched twin parallel flame-trails on either side of the air-helix as Harbin’s hunters began to climb.

Battle was rejoined high in The Back Garden’s verdant vaults to swoop down to the plateau and ascend once more, Harbin pitting agility and force against flying firepower. In and out of the forest of tendrils they wove, now pursued, now pursuing, now clashing head-on, negotiating outcrops or levelling them wholesale. This was the spectacle that greeted Gala’s eyes, as groggily she raised her head from the floor and made every effort to haul herself back to consciousness.

Nearby lay The Prophecy of the Flame, and not far from it the baby was stirring from sleep and starting to kick and whimper. Together they looked oddly like two scraps of detritus from what was raging overhead. Gala was aware of them as she dragged her body onto hands and knees, but maintained a steady gaze on the altercation all the while.

What was in that wordless stare, and which of the toiling trio it lingered on the most, would have been unfathomable questions to an outside observer of Gala’s face. But between her son, her one-time lover and the first of The Four Heroes, perhaps only the last-named would have been able to read the intent those near-inscrutable features registered. It was even possible Joe might also have divined such regret and sorrow as was likewise written thereon. Gala’s was the look of one acknowledging what this moment was. Her gaze did not neglect the man with whom she had shared the beginning of her great adventure, but it rested in its largest part on the boy whose significance to her life could scarcely be described in such ready terminology. For Gala knew that in a moment from now, after she acted on the decision she had already made, never would she look thus on Joe or The Chancellor again.

She clutched for the book and returned it to her inside coat pocket. Then she rose, scooped up the baby in her arms, and fled.

END OF CHAPTER THREE