Joe and Gala, Chapter One

Light-years distant from anywhere else, in the cold vacant gloom of a galactic backwater, a starcraft hung. It was not of metal but flesh, a giant fungus-cap listing somewhat to its anterior cusp, and the tempest it knew was not external but raging within its twisted guts. Had any observers been by in this dim starlit no-man’s-land, they would have witnessed a periodic trembling of this patch or that patch on the thing’s dull surface, and heard a muffled din of explosions and blows carrying across the silent void. Then all at once these spectators would have been astonished, as the saucer’s horny husk tore open in a brilliant jet of flame.

Gala, riding the fires and staying ahead of their deadly epicentre, doubled-up her slim physique and dove back on herself. She hit the ship hands-first, using her powers to open up a pothole on its rough pitted crust, while behind her Joe ascended wrathfully into the vacuum amid the venting inferno he had struck. The tunnel sealed the instant Gala rolled inside, but Joe with his telekinesis grasped that same mound of obstinate hull and hauled himself bodily upon it, punching through with a burning barrage.

First she, then he hot on her heels, touched down atop a rigid tendril-bridge beneath which seethed some kind of plasm-lake deep in the ship’s cavernous belly. Gala whirled about to face Joe, her cutlass of white light flying from its sheath. A vast lunglike shape overhead, presumably the vessel’s power-core, was giving out bass throbs in time to which the duellists engaged, Joe’s fiery fists beating away at the flat of Gala’s darting sword. At the first opportunity the tempo would permit she lashed out in a swooping figure-of-eight, and both combatants leapt apart as their walkway split in two and sank. Joe and Gala poising on its opposite stumps glared at each other across the blistering pit.

“You,” intoned Joe, the conflagration from his hands roaring alight. “Most treacherous of threats to Nottingham, Earth, the future and The Four Heroes…all that I ever made, and all that I believe in and stand for! Gala, prepare to meet your doom!”

The wheeling dance of death broached what appeared to be a cargo-hold. Into the vast hollow plant-cell burst Joe’s bolts of flame and Gala’s slashes of white, their combined illumination banishing shadow from the murkiest corners. Sword parried fire and fire pummelled sword for several more moments, before the opponents separated and held off from each other with their respective light-sources standing steady.

Communication through neither words nor telepathy was one of the many skills this pair always seemed born for, and they had perfected it in their time together. Such a message passed between them now, and was acknowledged in mutual agreement and understanding.

Joe extinguished his flames, fell backward and hit the fleshy wall, letting his shoulders and head come to rest there as he slumped with arms hanging. Gala meanwhile sheathed her cutlass and threw herself down on the nearest benchlike hummock, where she proceeded immediately to light up a cigar. These were two evenly-matched opponents, and half their battle had taken place in the airless vacuum outside, and moreover both had already been on the point of physical and emotional collapse when they began fighting.

“Five minutes,” Joe told his counterpart between heavy intakes of breath. “No longer than that.”

Gala stubbed out the last of her cigar on the crusty bench. “Ready, if you still think there’s any point,” said she.

When Joe’s silent glare demanded elucidation, she went on:

“Draxu was the only one who knew how to fly this thing. And I’ve been around ships, even if it’s my first time on one of these. We’re adrift, Joe. It’s just a matter of time before we run aground on some black hole or another sun, and then it’s straight to the bottom for the pair of us.”

No change of expression crossed her opponent’s fixed look. “You will have met your end long before then,” were his only words.

With a sigh Gala rose, drawing her cutlass once more.

Through a wall into some gigantic atrium at the operational heart of the fungus-ship she and Joe presently plunged, carrying their deadly duel to the internal organs of this otherworldly vessel. From floor to distant ceiling the arena was alive with moving plantlike limbs that lurched and revolved and elevated and dropped as if in an intricately choreographed sequence, sweeping by each other and circling their partners before plunging apart, never jarring together, but always returning to the starting-point to launch again into the solemn silent rises and falls that fed kinetic life to each function or faculty throughout the photosynthesizing starcraft.

Gala leapt onto one of these ledges as it began to climb. “You do remember what I mentioned before?” she called down to Joe as the altitude between them increased. “About how we’re dead already, and this melodrama’s only wasting what little time we have left?”

He shot off a volley after her, the first blazing bolts of which she deflected with her cutlass before Joe’s direct line of sight was obscured by one fleshly barrier after another hulking in their heavy revolutions across the widening gap. Our hero left off firing and plunged into the labyrinth, jumping from one escalating island to the next as he tracked Gala’s progress and threw a well-aimed fireball whenever their ceaselessly-changing terrain allowed. The two agile humans appeared minuscule traversing this mighty room, and the fireballs that flew and the cutlass that repulsed them mere flickering specks, when all was dwarfed by the mind-boggling machinery in and out of whose mysterious meshing gears the altercation progressed.

“I have heard enough of your equivocations and excuses!” Joe declared as he continued to scale the vaults. “They can mask your intentions no longer! There is but one truth that remains for us, Gala. The time has come for you to pay for your crimes!”

“Absolutes again!” she returned. “Can’t you see we’ve reached a place where they can’t serve you anymore? Yes, everything you learned about me from Draxu was true. Yes, there’s much I have to answer for. But if you stop, and consider – ”

Joe saw his chance while she was talking. The swiftest platform by far, at which he hurled himself and rolled into a kneeling position as it bore him aloft in a rushing of wind. One fist came alight and trailed flame behind him for the last seconds of the journey before Joe struck home, and fuming fire met glaring white as Gala with less than a breath to spare interposed her sword between herself and the blow. Even then it so winged her she fell, whilst its recoil tipped Joe in turn from his precarious perch such that the next moment both combatants were separating in open airspace.

The soles of Joe’s boots touched solid footing. “What can there be to consider?” he cried, propelling himself back into the fray. “My cause alone directs me now, and in its name I shall not rest until your menace is ended for good!”

“In other words you won’t listen to reason?” snarled Gala, as she likewise rebounded from the wall and hurtled at him. “Then you leave me little choice!”

They passed and repassed again and again, striking sparks each time the horizontals and obliques of their arrowing courses intersected, while at the borders of the battlefield the giant inscrutable cogs continued to turn. At length two such appendages scooped Gala and Joe from either side of the heights, switching once for a final explosive conjunction of cutlass and flame before depositing the duo on a floor which for the moment at least seemed stable.

Nestled in the very spaceship’s uppermost convexity, this mezzanine was roofed by huge bulging buboes of transparent membrane through whose domes were perceivable stars and planets glinting in black infinity overhead. Joe held up one hand to indicate the vista as he proclaimed to his opponent: “Behold what it is I fight for, Gala! Our universe itself! That which you and your Foretold One would condemn to an eternal era of carnage!”

“Don’t you see it’s you who’s setting it in motion?’” she cried. “Empress Ungus warned that in defying her we’d bring the Prophecy down upon us. Step back from the brink of this, Joe, or the fires that rage across all reality will be your own!”

“I see no abstractions, Gala, nor threats to which I must bow!” was his response. “All I see are the lives I am sworn to protect, by ensuring your dark designs never come to pass!”

They locked again. Maybe it was as Joe said, that creation abounded with unique souls each of whom had some destined and deserved role to play. However, here in the uncharted gulf between the worlds, it was easier to believe the only lives that mattered were those of two human beings battling it out on a narrow balcony beneath far-off stars. In that remote place, worlds were colliding. The comets of Joe’s fireballs and fists rained incandescent showers from each apocalyptic impact against the searing white arcs and moebius-strips of Gala’s blade, one warlike aurora intermingling with the other to cast planes of garish light and jagged blocks of shadow as their wielders variously gained or gave ground along the stage. Above them ranged the cold indifferent constellations, moving only into such alignments as the gladiators’ back-and-forth seemed to shift them. Those tiny stellar dots were etching out the shape of a hand, fingers outspread in the heavens and palm pointing downward at Gala and Joe, poising to close.

It was Gala who at length retreated through the single doorway, which let onto a flight of stairs, and with Joe in pursuit they set off downward continuing their conflict all the while. Behind them the ship’s intestines cycled into a new phase and sealed the passage tightly shut. There could be no turning back now.

END OF CHAPTER ONE