Incoming, Chapter Two

Harbin seized the advantage. Thrusting out an arm he turned Gala’s trick against our heroes, with a clench of one fist which telekinetically crunched a wall of hard tangled stalks behind where Joe was standing. The rubble crumbled down and crushed him helpless to the ground, while Harbin whirled back about and fixed his smouldering red eyes on Gala. In an instant the battlefield fell still, almost as if the stare from those dual embers was holding her in place.

On their last meeting, Harbin had exercised his sinister powers in such as way as to painfully wrest Gala’s Time-Shifting Device free of the body-molecules to which it had then been fused. For the first few seconds of this present attack it felt as if he might be trying the same again, searching for the technology which was no longer there. Next instant however Gala’s eyes widened with the dread certainty this was something far more. Her mouth dropped open and she collapsed, as strange emanations of darkness and noise swallowed the stage.

Joe struggled in vain to drag himself from the ruins, gazing horrified as an unholy spectacle commenced before him. Blackly radiant shafts of shadow stretched and spanned from the epicentre where Gala presumably was, though her visible shape had been consumed by stormfronts swarming at the eye of this vortex. The half-light’s demonic dance kept time to heavy rhythmic chords, such as might have pulsed from the pipes of some bloated infernal organ, reverberating upon the solid surroundings in an oppressive otherworldly dirge. Amid this diabolic orchestration Harbin hunched over the coruscating nexus, his clutching hands and flexing fingers in ceaseless motion, every energy apparently bent on shaping intangible luminescence and disharmony to his design. Joe could not say whether he more closely resembled a mad scientist or a crazed conductor.

On learning the truth about The Foretold One’s origins, Gala had proposed she and Joe immediately sacrifice their own lives and thereby end all potential for Harbin’s existence in the present or future. Joe for his part had argued that knowing what their son was fated to be provided an opportunity for them as parents to guide him onto a better path, one that did not lead to the prophesized disaster. It seemed however Harbin himself was unwilling to accept the outcome of either of these two choices. For that reason he had journeyed again into his own past, even knowing he could not ensure his return, to deploy his capacities as never before in a deed now thrashing out its monstrous crescendo and culminating with a last dispersal of umbrageous after-flux.

The procedure had been bloodless. Joe supposed it was achieved through some unprecedented feat of genetic acceleration and matter-transposition, though the abhorrent experience of witnessing its vile violations had left him well beyond such objective analysis. Gala lay, physically intact but white and weakened to near-lifelessness, the lean figure of Harbin looming above her.

And by Gala’s side on the Back Garden floor slept the full-grown newborn baby which was Harbin’s infant self.

“See you, Vern!” Neetra Neetkins called to the receding afterburners of he who had ferried her to within a mile of Gala and Joe’s location. Vern however had already kicked off a complaining monologue which would sustain him all the way back to Toothfire boundaries, so ignored the cheery farewell.

As Neetra undertook her first proper inspection of The Back Garden’s environs, her own feelings became far more serious. For one thing it wasn’t exactly as if the dead starless skies, galactic-scale fungi and fusty spore-stifled atmosphere made her regret not bringing her bikini. But the task that lay ahead of her, Neetra then reminded herself with a sigh, was such that even the time for making jokes to herself would soon be over.

Confronting Joe and Gala, at long last, and finding out what had really happened between the one she loved and the one who hated her.

The only part that wasn’t going to be a problem was tracking them down. To say Neetra could detect her quarry would have been an understatement. Her psychic powers were picking up not only the pair she sought, but also presences which by rights shouldn’t even have been there and energy-signatures whose nature our heroine couldn’t so much as guess at. That being the case, Neetra suspected it would be somewhat wiser to take a look for herself at what was going on instead of teleporting headlong into it. She drew a last deep breath, and set off on foot.

The baby was as pink and healthy as any other human child, displaying none of the adult Harbin’s strange physical traits. Perhaps he took after his father in that his powers were not evident at birth, or it might even have been that the twilight silhouette and glowing red eyes were aspects of Harbin’s appearance he elected later in life to adopt. If the latter instance were so, then he might be said to be the antithesis of his mother. She too had entered the world a rosy-cheeked infant, but at a time when all humanity about her was disfigured and odd, and Gala had striven to restore to her people their lost countenance. Had Harbin distorted himself in some kind of statement on the values wholly unlike hers which he had chosen?

That one in his cloaked luminous majority advanced on his helpless younger state. But then he halted, as with a rumbling from behind him Joe threw off the heap of rubble and arose, both his fists alight.

“You will harm your mother no more,” said he.

Harbin turned.

To an outside observer, at least, there might have been something ridiculous in the spectacle of a boy assuming parental authority over one whose manifest temporal self was older than he. Harbin however was too much the scholar of The Prophecy of the Flame to take this situation in anything but deadly earnest. By this stage in his life-span he had already watched from the roof of Nottingham’s Town Hall, a black hole wheeling above him, as The Four Heroes’ first successors fell by his hand on the day of triumph. Yet Harbin knew the Prophecy spoke of those children’s mighty progenitors rising one last time to face him in final conflict, and the book made no answer as to whether it would be he or The Four Heroes who survived. Thus there was no contemporary Harbin more feared than the man he knew to be his father.

Moreover, it did not take an academic of Harbin’s credentials to know the boy had made momentous contributions to Nottingham’s destiny even in his years so far. When he was younger than he was today he had founded The Four Heroes, so that under his guidance they might bring the city into existence in the first place. Harbin’s own self-appointed destiny, that of vanquishing forever The Four Heroes’ cause, had been determined long before this date by the boy now fixing his fiery glare upon him. Here stood not only the originator of Harbin himself, but also of everything he opposed, and everything that opposed him still.

So it was that when The Foretold One advanced on Joe, there was neither arrogance nor swagger about him. All that the motion of his sinuous frame imparted was purpose.

A split-second before the outbreak however, father and son froze. Two telepathic awarenesses were suddenly blaring out priority warnings as one. On a day for unexpected visitors to The Back Garden, it seemed the last on the guest-list had picked this moment to arrive.

Lights like eyes gleamed at the vanishing-point in distant black space. Another split-second elapsed and then Joe and Harbin could see the object from which these stared, hurtling down upon them in a whirlwind of turbines and a sonic bawl. Its needle-sharp nosecone pierced the sluggish sky like a dart, its hulls were made of the same slick skin that coated The Back Garden’s monstrous foliage, and bulgy nodes for weapons and engines jutted from this living starcraft’s length.

Standing on its roof, one foot resting on the single-seat cockpit, was a solitary figure clad in billowing black overcoat. His stern moustachioed face and soldierly bearing were those of a man familiar to Joe, but his inhuman grey-green flesh was new, and for our hero his matching pair of arms also came as rather a surprise.

It was The Chancellor, rifle at his hip, taking aim.

END OF CHAPTER TWO