Lilith, Chapter One

Some musicians sat on their stage at the foot of Nottingham’s domed Town Hall and stared up together at a sky which was darker than it should have been in the middle of the day. To her backing group the golden-haired female lead-singer remarked:

“Pretty sure this is the end, guys.”

Her combo had been performing at a protest rally when the first shots were fired in the interplanetary war they were protesting about, and the concert ended abruptly in a full-scale evacuation. The band members obediently returned to their homes in the City Centre, but by eleven o’clock next morning that entire territory was in enemy hands, and life over the subsequent weeks for those unlucky humans trapped therein had consisted of nothing but struggle to stay hidden and alive.

All that, however, was now done. The wide pavements stretching before the band were eerily devoid of clashing soldiers, and the mass of giant fungal tendrils which had towered above the rooftops while growing to proportions capable of destroying the planet was reduced to a paltry few stumps of desiccated brown jutting at broken angles out of the concrete. The battlefields stood abandoned and empty, but strangely enough, not silent.

For the very streets were sounding with song. A solemn unaccompanied chorus of massed voices beyond number was rendering a sad refrain into the hush of doomsday.

“If you ask me they’ve got the right idea,” commented the singer, standing. Her group in concurrence did the same, to sling guitar-straps over shoulders or take up position behind keyboards or switch amplifiers back on for the benefit of the non-existent audience. Gripping her microphone-stand, the golden-haired girl added:

“Might as well go out the way we lived. And I think I know just the one…”

A little earlier, and a considerable distance away.

Gala stood, to face Neetra across stony barrens in this lifeless stretch of The Back Garden. Above was black galactic space, and at the females’ feet lay a helpless newborn baby. Over this infant’s head Gala had been holding a jagged rock, which now she tossed aside. Her hand did not yet move towards the cutlass at her thigh, but Neetra knew better than to take her eyes from it.

“You know Shakespeare,” Gala observed by way of greeting. “I don’t mind admitting I’m surprised.”

“Brief but distinguished high school career, between the Martian occupation and Dimension Borg’s second attack,” Neetra informed her. “Did you research the other three heroes, or just my boyfriend?”

“Don’t interfere with this, girl,” warned Gala. “You don’t know what that baby is.”

“I know exactly what he is,” came back the quiet reply.

Everything that that knowledge entailed for Neetra, every emotion attendant on apprehending the baby’s identity, was heavy in her voice. Likewise it was etched across her features, for although the prettiness of the little girl who looked on Nottingham’s creation still intermingled faultlessly with the ever-blossoming beauty she had inherited from her mother, something new had come. Never before had this young and exceptional face borne the marks of so much pain.

Gala saw.

“You do know, don’t you?” she remarked softly.

Now her scarlet lips were pursing into the coldest of smiles. Her dark eyes glinted.

“Funny you should have mentioned my research into your boyfriend,” Gala declared, a cackle of mocking laughter in the back of her throat. “Yes, lately that’s become quite hands-on. In fact, I’ve reached my conclusion. Apparently the first of The Four Heroes is defined above all by a talent for improvising his way out of difficulty. Whether that takes the form of defeating evil threats to Nottingham, or just getting over a tiresome early fetish.”

These well-aimed barbs did not miss. Her target said nothing, but Gala was more than equal to recognizing hurt in another’s eyes.

“There you were, thinking you’d found in him another Steam, another Flashtease,” Gala resumed, luxuriantly, in her triumph. “Only this one wasn’t content to sit and fidget while you primly tidied your underwear drawer in front of him. He can’t really be blamed. Might be a fun game on both sides at first, but I guess your mistake was putting him through years of it.”

She had spoken such words to Neetra before. Unlike the last time, however, her vile accusations prompted no verbal response. Gala pressed on:

“Seems there’s truth in the old cliché that love’s sweet wine turns sour if you leave it too long. On which note, I feel obligated to put in a good word for Flashtease here, since you’ll probably agree it’s past time you rounded off the Little Miss Innocent performance. Having dipped into his and Joe’s fantasies about you, I’m hard-pressed to recall which was which. Suffice to say both these fine upstanding boys respected your sweet and compassionate personality in roughly equal measure.”

Still, and though every attack hit home, no retort was forthcoming. Almost wildly Gala launched into invective anew, escalating from subjectivity and bias to outright lies, aware that by now she and not Neetra was the one putting in a performance:

“Respect, indeed. That was something he and I always laughed about – how you’d believed him when he told you that you had his. He mentioned he was going to keep stringing you along, just to see if it would have been worth the wait. Though he already admitted he couldn’t imagine you’d be any comparison to a real woman…”

Finally, Neetra spoke.

“The last time we were face-to-face you had me believing you, Gala,” she said calmly. “But to put it in language you’d understand, that ship’s sailed. So let’s stick to the truth.”

Gala’s expression became ugly.

“Fine,” she spat. “Then since you evidently don’t need me to explain our situation, you’ll step aside and let me do what must be done.”

Neetra forced herself to suppress a sigh. She’d had it up to here with Next Four thinking. But her gaze was firm as she looked directly into the other’s eyes, and made her the rejoinder:

“He’s your son not mine, Gala. And yes, one possibility among many is that he’ll grow up to be Harbin someday. But none of the above gives you the right to kill that baby here and now.”

In temperament Gala had never been especially patient, but this she responded to in the tones of one for whom long patience was at last exhausted.

“Always, criticism of my values! But what about the dangers of Four Heroes thinking? How much suffering has Nottingham known since you brought it into being, how many wars and invasions and conquests? Dimension Borg, General Banthal, The Grand Master Robot, Clayton and Brentwood Hawkman, The One Below, not to mention your own sister…! And now the very worst of them lies ahead, the deadliest enemy of all, yet still you refuse to take action!”

Neetra did not waver. “Four Heroes thinking tells me that if you carry on the way you’re going, my next action has to be to stop you,” was her reply. “And you don’t look in any condition for that.”

It was no taunt, and Neetra spoke with some genuine concern. Gala had indeed been weakened by the preternatural assault upon her body which dragged young Harbin fully-formed into the mortal realm, but all she said was: “I’ll be more than a match for you, girl.”

Though Neetra saw it was in many ways a separate issue, this was what sent her own patience the way of Gala’s.

“You’ve never once called me by my name!”

Our heroine bellowed it at the top of her voice, thrusting both hands heavenwards in disbelief. “Even though you know perfectly well what it is! So what am I supposed to think, Gala? That your whole so-called cause had anything to do with the Prophecy at all? Or that it was only ever about how you felt for Joe?”

In the aftermath a ringing hush prevailed throughout the vista, as if its very crags were stunned to meekness by the voluble pronouncement echoing out its last among them. There were truths in raw unchecked emotion which brinkmanship debates and premeditated insults could not supply. Both females now felt the subsequent change in the tenor of their very confrontation. It was Gala who, after a silence of many long seconds, acknowledged this. She drew in breath, then spoke the one and only word that could do justice.

“Neetra.”

Then at great length Gala went on:

“I won’t deny, it wasn’t without personal feeling. And as a member of The Four Heroes, you saved Nottingham many times. It’s only right I should tell you that too.”

Our heroine was thereby left with no illusions as to what time they had arrived at. These were to be not only the first courteous sentences she ever heard from her counterpart, but also the last. Neetra wracked her brains for some quality she admired in Gala, anything, with which she might repay the compliment.

“You’ve got nice boobs,” was what she finally came up with. “Now, if you’re determined this is the way it’s got to be – ”

“I’m not standing here listening while you say ‘let’s do it,’” Gala interjected, and all at once the wasteland was awash with white as her cutlass slashed from its sheath. Neetra didn’t care to find out whether its blinding blade was meant for her or the baby. She hurled herself headlong, soaring over the latter’s small form and under the sword-swing to plough bodily into Gala amidships, whereat the sheer force of Neetra’s drive tipped both combatants backward. A low gravelly cliff dropped away in their path and with arms and legs entangling the pair scraped and grazed down this rough incline, each hissing out several things through gritted teeth while striving vigorously against the other with knees and elbows. The infant originator of their struggle, uncomprehending and defenceless on the summit, was presently hundreds of feet above them.

Nearby, in the region of The Back Garden dominated by Empress Ungus’s gargantuan palace where the space-rocks were densely foliated with towering tangles of galactic fungus, Joe and The Chancellor battled on against Harbin’s time-travelling adult self. That one’s immense power had threatened to overcome Gala and Joe when they faced him together, but now the tide was turning. In the interval since Joe’s prior encounter with The Chancellor, the latter had undergone gruesome bio-engineering into a state akin to one of Ungus’s creatures, which meant that here in The Back Garden he was in his element. Injuries inflicted on this strange new Chancellor healed almost instantaneously, his greenish-grey plant-flesh speedily re-knit by the very particles and nutrients thickly crowding the rank airspace, and the same was so of his living starcraft which under The Chancellor’s telepathic commands was as good as a third warrior pitted against The Foretold One. Still Harbin fought furiously, flinging shafts of his own twilight hue and levelling the landscape through telekinesis, but he was pressed close on all sides by the flames flying from Joe’s hands, The Chancellor’s prodigious arsenal, and rockets of explosive spore fired forth by the hurtling hunter.

At last a decision seemed to register across the featureless visage and baleful red eyes. Harbin vaulted from where he was hunkering and took flight into the heavens, his ragged cloak streaming straight behind him. “He seeks to recover his advantage!” cried Joe. “And his powers are such that should he be allowed to reach a black hole in this region of space – ”

“You know, I am capable of comprehending our situation without the services of a narrator,” The Chancellor put in, summoning his ship. A second later they were giving chase, Joe poised atop the starcraft’s roof and his unlikely partner manning the cockpit controls, while The Back Garden’s tangled terrain fast receded into darkness behind them.

Still Harbin hurled his bombardment back along the line of his cape and down on the pursuers, and still they returned fire in a lethal exchange across that stretch of empty void. As the distance between Joe and his quarry steadily closed, the oxygen-enriched atmosphere of their prior battlefield begin to thin likewise into the airless vacuum of the free galaxy, and our hero recognized that without breathing-apparatus he could not hope to survive for many minutes more. It lent an additional urgency to Joe’s situation that he knew The Chancellor was well aware of this. For more reasons than one it was time to bring this hunt to an end.

The great black orb of some primordial planet’s night-side loomed like a boundary-buoy on The Back Garden’s asphyxiating shallows. Harbin was a tiny grey streak skimming the lightless plains of this sphere, but with each heartbeat his shape enlarged as The Chancellor’s ship gained another league upon him, and Joe was all but in position to bear down. Hauling the last of the vanishing slipstream into his lungs he set one fist alight, and leapt into space.

Harbin turned, dealing out a last volley as he did so. The javelin whipped by Joe without stopping and clove cleanly through The Chancellor’s hull, at the very instant our hero’s blazing blow struck home.

Caught in the planet’s gravitational field the two combatants began to descend, at which Joe was granted one farewell glimpse of the hunter looping to The Back Garden again while fan-sprays of crystallizing sap arced from its wound. It was true that The Chancellor would not have hesitated to end Joe’s existence had the circumstances allowed for it, but fate instead made them brothers-in-arms for this final foray, and they had stood side-by-side on earlier adventures too. Joe suspected that all things considered, they could never have been friends. Yet despite the embattled nature of their acquaintanceship, and for what little his wishes could possibly be worth now, our hero hoped The Chancellor would live to fight another day.

Down into the atmosphere of that remote inhospitable world warred Harbin and Joe, passing the apogee, trading black muggy night for opaque ochre and sulphide skies cast by a raging proximitous sun. Joe’s fists however were like twin suns themselves as they pounded and parried, the light of The Four Heroes’ cause locking with the shadow that sprang from the moment it faltered. Thus this astral body of golden glow and sinuous shade, this yin and yang in endless intertwining motion, charted a die-straight course down the alien skies trailing meteor-sparks of planetfall. An ocean of turbid magma boiled below, heaving as if in lusty readiness to swallow up both fighting frames, but the first of The Four Heroes and The Foretold One shared a power that was equal to steering them instead at the strips of black basalt jutting like islands from this surging sea.

They touched down on one of these ridges the moment a lava-wave crashed against its rim. Silhouetted before the monsoon heart of this supernova tsunami Joe and Harbin closed for the last time, fists of flame and twilight flying and swinging and driving even as incandescent spray flung by the breaker etched its volcanic gouts a mile above. Thus an erupting planet roared out its primal fury, and when it was over, Joe stood. Worn and weary and battle-scarred, but unbowed with fires still bright, and his prodigal son writhing on the rock-face at his feet.

“The future is not yet written,” said Joe. “Harbin, begone.”

This time the child obeyed the parent. In an instant Harbin had clawed himself skyward and was a tattered crow wheeling away across the brimstone clouds. Joe watched him until he was out of sight, deducing that he had travelled to this time without the means of returning to his own as before, and that their paths were thereby destined to cross again. But that, of course, had been determined long before now. It was more than Joe could say how many other different temporal iterations of himself and Harbin would coincide and clash before the final reckoning delineated in the Prophecy, but this much our hero knew. The boy he was now, in his weakness and unpreparedness, had brought about the menace of Harbin in the first place. On the day Joe atoned for this, he would achieve something undreamt-of in all the power-crazed ambitions of the man his son had chosen to be.

END OF CHAPTER ONE