Resolutions

Empress Ungus had recalled her own offspring to the mothership for this final crucial thrust of the long drawn-out battle. Now several hundred feet above Nottingham’s Town Hall they stood assembled, a panoply of hideous spawn half-fungus and half-demon but none so vast and vile as the towering parent. She remained rooted to the floor and therefrom to the bulging living tentacles spanning craft and ground beneath, and thus with her foul family clustered about her she stared out through the clear membranous view screen that encircled half the bridge. Outside were the blasts and bursts of endgame dancing their luminous dance ever on, and the din of continuing carnage was muffled background-noise echoing through the fleshy walls and upon this grim audience while they watched as one.

“Grow, my youngsters,” Empress Ungus murmured, addressing not the children beside her but those to which she and the ship were organically fused. “It’s going to be a close contest now. This enemy is making us pay for every minute I held you in stasis. Not that I had any choice. Lightning was onto me, as he made a point of letting me know every five minutes, but at least he never learned my reasons. That would have added greater consequences still to my error.”

Immediately the Empress’s sixteenth-born son chimed in: “Not you, Mother! Surely you are above erring in the manner of mere – ”

“No, Stinkhorn,” Ungus silenced him, ignoring the sycophancy with neither false modesty nor rancour. “Your Mother made a terrible mistake. I was certain Gala would accept my proposal and return to her own time with her lost love. I couldn’t see any reason she’d turn down that offer in favour of what she chose instead. Nor can I still.”

The budlike head shook slowly from side to side on its long stringy stem.

“These humans,” sighed Empress Ungus. “They’re so unlike us. They don’t take the path of least resistance as we do.”

She looked up again, back to the battle.

“My poor dear Draxu,” the Empress went on. “He’ll have fought them with every power at his command. But I know the way that Prophecy works. From the moment Gala and Joe escaped me, anything Draxu did would only have sped them to what they were destined to do. That was why I needed time. Simply destroying this world won’t be enough now that Gala’s already bearing The Foretold One. I couldn’t have revealed my knowledge of who he truly was to Lightning or Space-Screamer. Either would have seen too much opportunity in it. I’ve never claimed to lead a life simpatico with the forces of good, children, but I will tell you this much. Among the Solidity triumvirate, I was alone in seeking nothing more or less than the preservation of life in our galaxy.”

Her minuscule face was resolute.

“But I bought us the time we needed,” she resumed. “Time to revise our plans, prepare an emergency measure and dispatch him on his way. While we’re tying up loose ends here, the last act in accomplishing our mission will fall to him. And in his aptitude for that, I’d place my every confidence…”

The Chancellor, with one arm made of mushroom-matter and all his skin grey-green, checked his instruments. He was not the man he was, having been genetically engineered by Empress Ungus’s occult mechanics into the ultimate hunter-seeker, and he rode a sleek deadly one-man spacecraft whose turbo-injected spore-jets and cracking flagella looked like they meant business. Now it and he were hanging briefly at rest in a nexus high among the stars, while The Chancellor waited for the orifices on his dashboard to display a bio-luminescent readout.

There. In the very region his employer called home, known locally as The Back Garden. His unborn target, and into the bargain the father as well.

Empress Ungus’s orders were clear. Terminate all three with extreme prejudice.

Although, considering their history, the last part was pretty much a given.

The Chancellor brought his warship about and set course.

Down in the caves beneath Nottingham Dylan and his friends heard the rumbling only a short distance from the rock-walls around them, as Empress Ungus’s vines steadily secured their hold in readiness for the planet-cracking wrench.

“We can’t stay here much longer,” said Dylan. “In the next few hours everything’s going to be decided. But just ahead of that…D’Carthage. There’s an explanation I still owe you.”

“In that case, dear boy, you must suffer me to repeat myself,” that one replied. “Gala chose wrongly. A mere wanderer and gadabout was I. Yes, a few gypsy charms and tricks I acquired on my ramblings, which perchance suggests I was indeed born with what you would call Next Four powers. But I did not liberate the Second Dark Advent. No-one to my knowledge ever did lift the clouds that lowered over those troubled times.”

D’Carthage looked on the other four with nothing but sincerity in his clear blue eyes.

“Besides,” he went on, open and unabashed. “A blunderer on the battlefield, upbraided for his dangerous vainglory by Master Stevens on his very first foray, and who later through the same failing incurred so costly a defeat for the Next Four? Think for a moment how it would have been, had we brought back that knavish robot’s head from our first contretemps in your age. And only that night, as I have related to you ere now, did I truly learn of The Four Heroes’ cause. No better precept might I have craved, sithens it spared me a dismal fate. But to enlist such a one as I, only then beginning to discover what the world was, for a mission transcending time and creation whose other recruits had proved themselves all?”

“Discovering the world’s what you do when you’re young, D’Carthage,” was Dylan’s response. “And that’s the whole point. You are the saviour of the Second Dark Advent. You just haven’t saved it yet.”

D’Carthage and the others remained baffled, so Dylan continued patiently:

“When Gala and The Chancellor brought their respective Dark Advents to an end, it just so happened to be one of the first things either of them did with their lives. In fact, they hadn’t even heard of the Dark Advents or the Prophecy when they did it – saving their worlds was how each of them found out about all that. But we’ve already seen with Jiang Jiang it was the other way round. Ending the Third Dark Advent was the very last thing she ever did. That’s how it’ll be with you and the Second, D’Carthage. There wouldn’t have been time for you to join the Next Four afterwards. Gala saw that the only stage on the chronological scale when you were free, so to speak, was right at the very beginning.”

“Then…I am to return?” D’Carthage breathed. “On some day of what I should call my future, shall I find my way back to what you might term the past?”

In his voice was some rising hope his companions had not hitherto detected. “You will, D’Carthage,” Dylan declared. “Always assuming any of us survive what’s happening now, that is,” he then added as another rumble reverberated near.

“Always loved your way of looking on the bright side, sweetie!” burst out Kumiko. “Only this time it’s the honest-to-goodness darkest hour, isn’t it? Joe and Gala did the dirty and Harbin is their son gone bad. So all the Solidity wants to do is save their galaxy from the powers of The Four Heroes and the Next Four mashed up together and turned to evil, which when you think about it you can’t exactly blame them for! But sparing them that means letting them destroy the Earth!”

Kumiko threw both hands above her pretty head.

“You talked about surviving, Dylan?” she cried. “How are we going to do that? I’ve been a Four Heroes fan-girl since 2596 and not even I can see any way out of this one!”

For all the ferocity of this tirade, her addressee’s golden features were twinkling at last into a smile.

“I can answer that, Kumiko,” said he. “D’Carthage, I think our friends need to see the reason you’re sure to fight your way back to the Second Dark Advent one of these days, and why you’ll go on fighting to make it a better place once you’re there. What’s more, it might even do you good to be reminded of it too.”

One last psychic scene was flickering into being. Its soft rapid flits of light and colour were not solely due to its ephemeral transitory nature, for in the image it displayed a warm wind was blowing in from the beach and stirring the lush vegetation that overhung the seashore. On the edge of this tropical jungle, immersed in its dancing shades where moving specks of sunlight constantly played, stood a solitary lodge. Unpretentious in design, but homely and strong, it bore the look of having been built by somebody’s own two hands. A wooden porch ran around the outside, and from the appearance of the windows short equatorial dusk was drawing on, for the blinds were drawn and the oil-lamps lit. Their comforting radiance within the lodge cast upon the nearest window-screen two silhouettes, of a woman and a boy, who sat there quietly at rest.

And Kumiko, 4-H-N and James knew as soon as they saw them that they were looking at D’Carthage’s wife and son.

This telepathic transmission, like the predecessors summoned by Dylan, imparted far more to its spectators than was conveyed by superficial sound and picture. Thereby each of D’Carthage’s companions in that moment also became aware that the persona he worked so carefully to maintain, the excessive cavalier charm and the suavity of a philandering bounder, had merely been yet more theatrics. These however were not ordained by Gala but D’Carthage himself, to protect those he cared about from the dangerous world of time-travel and fearsome otherworldly powers in which he had found himself. Only then did it occur to his comrades they should have noticed that for all D’Carthage’s affectations and mannerisms, he had made not so much as a gesture towards finding a lover in all the time they had known him. But they had never suspected. He must indeed have been a wonderful actor in his college days. And yet not even D’Carthage’s finest stage performance could have bestowed greater joy on its audience than that of James, Kumiko, 4-H-N and Dylan too, as they shared in what D’Carthage felt on seeing his loved ones again.

“They wait for me,” he whispered. That quality of hope about his voice now sounded in it like a song.

“And they will,” Dylan assured him gently, “until you come home.”

James, looking on, could only think of his wife Iskira from whom he had long been parted, and wonder if it was truly too late? 4-H-N, who knew how he was feeling, took her creator’s hand and clasped it tight. Kumiko maybe even was allowing her memories to linger for a few uncommon moments on the tribal king and queen who had had in mind a wholly different destiny to the one which had called her instead, while for Dylan, even the sum of all knowledge was taking second place in his mind to thoughts of his mother and father.

He spread his hands, and sunset in that underground cave blazed to final glory.

“That’s how we’ll make it out of this,” Dylan declared in conclusion. “In a way, through that same aspect of ourselves that’s responsible for the suffering. Because humanity is also what you’re seeing in front of you now. It’s what there is about us that makes us wait. It’s why we care, why we love, and why we choose to as the better option. Any sorrow that that part of us works can be healed by it too. That’s really what The Four Heroes’ powers were all along. Those who don’t feel it will never understand. But just as long as we remember, throughout whatever’s to come, we will prevail.”