Please be Waiting, Chapter One

The numerous conquests and invasions of Nottingham had impressed upon its people the importance of a good Treaty Day. Indeed, citizens often cheerfully remarked that ceasefire celebrations were worth looking forward to the whole year round. Faith in the safe-haven city for all mankind could never be shaken, only reaffirmed, as long as there were such days. For it had been learned before now that hostilities, in both their outbreak and cessation, were necessary parts of the process whereby Nottingham survived, its children grew, its adults became wiser, and friendship and love endured. This particular Treaty Day was one of brilliant sun in early autumn, when the leaves on the trees were just starting to turn. Without the swelter or the hazes of summer, shadows stood out sharp and black while a cloudless blue sky deepened into afternoon. The day The Four Heroes created Nottingham had been much like this, and now as then, a palpable feeling hung in the air of something new beginning.

Angel-schoolgirl Carrie uprose on joyous outspread wings from the army camp, recovered in full from her injuries and eagerly scanning the sun-soaked streets. She did not have far to look. Atop the cliff close at hand, teenage prison-guards Guy and Lisa were waving-off the freed Solidity captives Lutts Form, Mile Hunts and a little nameless girl, who had spent most of the war incarcerated under the ruins of Nottingham Castle. No sooner had the alien trio flown, trundled or trotted away downhill than Carrie collided with her friends like a small feathered cannonball, and for a long time there was laughter and hugging and tears. Then at length, a voice they all knew spoke out:

“So has it been oft throughout these our salad-days, and so it is once again, that we empowered individual junior academics bear out the popular aphorism. It seems we do indeed come bouncing back for more!”

The classmates turned, and there, still with a slight limp as he exited the castle remains but back in every other respect to his hale and hearty old self, was the round rubber schoolboy Jeffrey. And his fellow-scholars jubilantly threw their arms about his globose mass, drawing the quartet together again and completing the high school reunion.

The crowd was moving downhill at a leisurely pace, humans and extraterrestrials alike passing through the deep shadows and planes of sun to an open expanse where populaces had begun to assemble in their thousands. Alongside the people of Nottingham ranged men and boys and girls of far distant planets, each of them clad in outlandish garb to match, and intermingled with the bipedal species were wildly different races including the vermicular Worthworms, the towering mechanical Stumgaurs piloted by tiny organic blobs, and creatures unique unto themselves such as the wheeled bionic giant lobster Mile Hunts. Weaving in and out of the throng were foot-long transports housing hundreds apiece of the minuscule Stealthonian folk, while prisoners taken on Mars had by now been dispatched to Earth and reunited with their countrymen, such that the whole warrior-brotherhood of Zeldich, Bygrune, Cruiser and Hangonel Mangonel stood tall and proud again. Elsewhere were Louise-Claudia, Psiona, Contamination, Lutts Form, Antroar, and muscular adults of The Flash Club with their short-skirted junior Mini-Flashes dotted about in numbers beyond estimation, and a myriad other diverse individuals besides. Even the skulking sons of Empress Ungus, who shared no complicity in their mother’s last demented deed, were a passive presence on the borders of this huge happy gathering.

Atop beaten-down buildings and other vantage-points meanwhile perched the robotic vulturelike Vernderernders of Toothfire. This dread empire had once struck fear throughout an entire space-sector, but today they joined the rest of their quadrant under the banner of peace. Though the Solidity armada was lost, Toothfire had agreed to make their still-functional intergalactic warp-gate available to all, and even now enormous star-freighters were touching down on Earth to ferry the survivors home.

Over the centre of the multitude rose the mountainous square hulk of a fallen Future Fighter. Assuming its slouching shoulders to address a capacity crowd was Storm-Sky, mighty Flash Club founder who like Carrie and Jeffrey was over the worst of his war-wounds. Silence fell, and Storm-Sky’s deep powerful voice resounded through the square:

“We were wrong. Our galaxy should not have trusted Dimension Borg. Though he did not live to see the outcome of his design, it far too closely resembled that which he intended. We will engrave on our hearts the names of all those millions who fell on this battlefield, and their sacrifice will never be forgotten.

“But now, the old despots and tyrants are gone. Dimension Borg, Empress Ungus, Space-Screamer, Lightning…all those who previously divided the solar-systems in their endless thirst for power. The alliance between Toothfire and The Flash Club, forged in the fires of this late war, is as strong as case-hardened dullivian in its aftermath. A potential golden age stretches before us, one of greater harmony and accord than any in our quadrant’s eons-long history.

“Herewith I don the mantle of Flash Club leader, an honour bequeathed to me by Neetra Neetkins. As our Earthling friends would put it, she is a hard act to follow. But I will strive to continue the noble work she began, and so shall we all, on either side of this great stellar sea, face the future as The Four Heroes have taught us – with courage, and respect for life, and always the belief that tomorrow can be a brighter day!”

Uproarious cheering and applause shook the city to its very foundations, and overhead a flight of Vernderernders roared in formation though the limitless blue. It was a happy occasion shared across two galaxies and innumerable worlds, but there was one reason why that happiness could not be quite complete.

For although The Four Heroes had saved the Earth as they had done so many other times, it was known by all that they were not truly back in Nottingham as they would have been then. What exactly this meant was not widely understood, but a mutual acknowledgement existed that The Four Heroes had in fact never really been here at all, or at least were somewhere else too, and it was there they would presently return for who knew how long. There was in addition a rumour that some strange and mysterious sadness had been upon the group ever since their return from orbital space, as if victory had come at the cost of portentous revelations thus far known only to Nottingham’s creators. Whatever truth there may have been in this, it was evident to all that The Four Heroes had barely been seen since the armistice, and had played no part in the festivities as they surely would have done in the past, and that even their whereabouts over these their last hours at home remained uncertain. All this tinged the prevailing mood with an unnameable melancholy as goodbyes and good wishes were imparted, and some journeys ended, while others began…

On a rooftop in a quiet corner of the city, a strange shipwreck was surveyed by her crew of three. Half ancient galleon of planks and tar, though also boasting a solar fin and other futuristic technology besides, she sprawled in splinters spread out over the tower-block’s summit. Here the Henry Martin had unexpectedly run aground, and here she rested, never to sail the skies again.

Degris, one of his four orange hands outstretched, finished his telepathic scan. “Nothing but dead wood and brass now,” he reported. “Psychic propulsion and motive force are gone to the last trace.”

Carmilla Neetkins’s voice was soft and subdued as she added: “Given what Gala told us about her bond with that ship, I guess there’s only one conclusion on what’s become of her.”

Flashtease walked to the broken Henry Martin and gently laid his hand upon her hull.

“I forgive you, Gala,” he whispered.

Then, as a curious feeling of anticipation fell over the little Mini-Flash boy, he slowly turned around to look in the other direction.

They were running towards him through the slanting rays of sun. His dearest friends from home, Flashlight and Flashthunder and the five neophyte Mini-Flashes Bloomer, Brace, Socket, Frill, and Luna the smallest and most special of all. They were safe and well and looking exactly as they’d always done in lightning-bolt tunics like his, and they were beaming all over their faces with arms thrown wide.

If Flashtease hesitated, just for the briefest of seconds, it was because when last he saw these seven it was in a scarring psionic delusion which had done its worst to make him believe he deserved their disgust and hate. For a time, the prospect of meeting them again had been mortifying to Flashtease. Stains of shaming residue from the torture so persisted that he had come to dread it might yet be true.

But when he saw their smiles, all that was at long last over.

Flashtease ran to them and the next instant was at the heart of an eightfold Mini-Flash caress, no longer far from home, aware as his peers were that they had grown much in the course of these recent events, but loving nonetheless with all the strength and constancy of the young. Degris and Carmilla watched smiling, and three eyes were wet.

She, at length, touched the palm of her hand to one of his bare orange arms. There was a farewell between friends in it. Carmilla knew a reunion of her own, and the start of a new adventure, were ahead of her.

END OF CHAPTER ONE