Pursuit

Auntie Green shrugged off the hunk of roof that had fallen on her. There were times she was almost willing to swear that one of these days she was going to get too old for this. Not today though. Nor had Auntie Green reached the age she was now by being unprepared. She hastened through the ruination to the discreet private exit she’d insisted on having installed immediately after the first Special Program incident, and flinging aside with her bare hands the rubble in front of it finished her swing by caving in the closed hatchway with the sole of one boot. Possibly the manual release still worked, but why waste precious seconds finding out?

Into darkness she leapt. Perhaps Auntie Green was past the time in her life when she could have competed with her charges for mid-air gracefulness, but at sheer economy of movement she was still the master. With speed and neatness unsurpassed, not to mention gravity on her side, she dropped onto the seat-cushions that awaited her below in the gloom.

Then all Auntie Green had to say was: “Yah.”

A section of Flash Club Headquarters’ façade exploded across the roadway and flattened itself against the side of the building opposite. Mini-Flashes and other hapless pedestrians fled screaming as out upon the evening afterglow erupted Auntie Green, riding triumphant in a saddle that looked like the top half of a tank. Beneath were the bulging saurian muscles and four flat thunderous feet of something roughly akin to an Earth protoceratops, massive shoulders forward, bony dome lowered, snout-horn truculently out-thrust.

This was Mona, who led her life in a perpetual state of berserk maternal protectiveness. That the clutch of eggs whose security she valued some way above her own existence had fossilized eons ago would have been professorial palaeontology to Mona’s hazelnut-sized brain, so woe betide the living thing that as much as glanced at her dull ovoid rocks. Auntie Green wasn’t much of a pet-person in the ordinary way, but she and Mona had hit it off right from the start, and now they were soulmates.

Mooing Cretaceous indignation Mona stampeded down the highway leaving a pattern of cracks in the pavement, while space-racers and other occupied vehicles swerved or scrambled heavenward lest they go the way of parked brethren upended by tosses of the furious head. Round a corner the rampaging one romped, Auntie Green more than maintaining balance and poise though this tipped her to a steep incline, while Mona with a single cosh of her tail annihilated an empty cruiser in whose motionlessness she had evidently read some threat to her petrified pretties. Over the boulevard’s geodesic boundary in a sky shading to cerise, little fireflies with lacy underthings on were behaving as if someone had just unscrewed their jar. Calmly Auntie Green primed her twin bazookas.

The weapons, mounted like titanium tree-trunks along either side of Mona’s saddle, were meant for surface-to-surface deployment and it took time for them to elevate on their old-style winching mechanism. Reliable though. Auntie Green didn’t set much store by flimsy modern rubbish. She was content to wait as Mona’s ever-pounding paws kept pace with the truants overhead, while architecture whizzed by on the sidelines and between it and her the giant cannons steadily raised their bores to the level of her steely spectacles.

Auntie Green felt the jolt through her seat as both barrels locked. Gripping each of her arm-rest joysticks she let the Special Program have it. Bursts of smoke and fire riddled the firmament.

Zero acquisition though. Now they remembered their close-combat aerial drills. Auntie Green supposed it would have been asking too much for them to do so in the practice-room. Still, at least she’d taught them something.

Doughtily she persevered, but it was a foregone conclusion. When her equipment was new there hadn’t been any call to use it on Mini-Flashes. She’d seen Mona bring down a Stumgaur, but drawing a bead on those flittering knickers was an eventuality The Flash Club’s munitions engineers hadn’t considered. Lately the galaxy had been turning up rather too many of those.

A vast plasma-reservoir supplying power for that whole space-conurbation stretched in Mona’s path. Auntie Green at last commanded her trusty steed to halt on the very promontory of this shimmering sea, not without reluctance, though also with a huntress’s respect for her quarry and a certain touch of pride. The redoubtable duo of matron and monoclonius stared out wave-wards and watched until the Special Program runaways had dwindled to dots and disappeared, Mona’s heavy back hauling up and down while her nostrils flapped open and shut to bellow out torrents of steam.

The other took a moment to compose herself, and checked her foot-tall iron-grey bouffant was still in place. Then she activated the video comm-link on her arm-rest instrument panel.

“Great Storm-Sky,” commenced Auntie Green. “I daresay you’re going to want to know about this.”