Supply and Demand, Chapter Four

Neetra waited at her hotel room window in her pink party-dress and high heels. Outside was a darkened Flaban street, and the night was still.

Where was he?

It was well past the hour he was wont to put in an appearance. This evening his war-world had stubbornly refused to materialize, and that made Neetra uneasy. She’d been sure the first item on his agenda was going to be a discussion of payment terms.

There seemed little point in sitting up any longer. Neetra undressed and slid beneath sheets of the finest homespun Flaban silk, but found she still wasn’t able to relax.

Something wasn’t right.

Her telepathic senses weren’t detecting anything out of the ordinary. That in and of itself was reason enough to keep her guard up.

Because there had to be a reason her new friend hadn’t shown, and this suspicious psychic silence more than met Neetra’s definition of a little too quiet.

She closed her eyes and scanned the hotel. Neetra had always been good at this sort of thing. It was probably a bit like teachers, not that she’d ever been at school long enough to know. Those fresh out of college saw a class studying in absolute hush and were merely pleased by the peace. It took experience to detect at once the practical joke which was surely on the way, and sidestep it in time.

Only this wasn’t any schoolroom, and our heroine guessed her source wasn’t joking around. There. In a heartbeat she teleported, letting nothing but instinct guide her.

Mini-Flash Robin’s room next door. Neetra was lucky it was long after his bedtime and her burst of yellow light hadn’t woken him, seeing as she had nothing on. In fact, what with that and the day she’d rescued Mini-Flash Juniper from the Fringers, the other male Mini-Flashes must have been wondering what Robin’s secret was.

There were other secrets here besides. Why hadn’t her teleport woken him?

The curtains were open, and a square patch of grey summery night fell on the fidgeting murmurous sleeper. He was wearing pyjama-tunic and pants. His Mini-Flash Juniper action figure, which Neetra knew he took to bed with him, lay face-down on the carpet. Atop his tangled sheets rather than under them Robin tossed and turned, restless bare feet further crumpling the silk.

And from the looks of things, he was having quite a dream. Jeez. Neetra switched her eyes straight back to his feet.

Only, he didn’t seem to be enjoying it very much.

Mini-Flash Robin himself might have said he totes couldn’t make that out, and nor could Neetra. Stirring and fretting in obvious distress didn’t go with what else she could see. She’d not had a lot to do with boys Robin’s age, but she knew that much. There was the two and two that made five which she’d been looking for.

Neetra had a feeling though.

Slowly she walked over to the chair, sat down in it, and summoned her astral form.

So a corporeal body gave up its own gold-glowing unclothed likeness, whose tiny toes trod air. This new Neetra gazed wondering on a bedroom all at once athrong with comparable limpid phantoms. They came in every size, and she herself was there more than once, as was Mini-Flash Robin’s Flaban girlfriend. Most however were Mini-Flash Juniper. Each was of misty gilded luminescence a little fainter than that of Neetra’s own projection, and in a steady spiral they whirled ascending, looking no happier about it than the slumberous fitful boy who dreamed them.

There were two robots in the room. Both looked like Neetra’s new friend, only they were small enough to fit indoors. One, humanoid and not much taller than Neetra herself, stood like a sentry at the foot of Robin’s bed. The other, winged like a pterodactyl, was hovering directly above the Mini-Flash by the ceiling lampshade. A feature of its underbelly were twin circular apertures which resembled spools. These were going like an electric cake-mixer on maximum, sucking the spectres into their spin whereat wailing and whirlpooling they shrank as one at the apex of the vortex and vanished behind the body of the beast.

It was violently recording Robin’s nocturnal visions. Recording, or stealing them.

All this, Neetra’s psychic persona was granted no more than a split-second to take in. For upon the next, the guard-robot in a frenzy sprang at her.

Guns which it brandished were fast converting to their aggressive application. “If I see one more clip-on accessory today,” muttered Neetra, thrusting forth an open palm to check the automaton’s advance. Her telekinetic shunt propelled its torso back the way it had come and spread it across the far wall, while the limbs and head clanging and banging went their separate ways.

Mini-Flash Robin slept on. All this was happening on a parallel at one remove from him.

The birdlike robot broke off what it was doing and began to spit eyebeams down on Neetra’s golden doppelganger. She took to her toes again, racing the deadly rays which sank without impression in the wallpaper to her right and raked her own unconscious physical form as she hurtled past the chair. That Neetra merely pouted and scratched herself sleepily. The other was starting to feel like Peter Pan’s shadow.

She skidded to a halt in the corner and the kestrel came about, ready to pick her off.

Good. It didn’t know that in this state, Neetra could also fly.

Sprinting headlong she ducked under the lasers and was off from the floor like a guided missile, clasping outstretched hands around her target’s steely neck. In an ugly airborne tussle of squawks and beating wings Neetra drove the enemy grimly to the bed, one knee pressed against its beryllium breastbone. Mini-Flash Robin was thrown from the mattress when they landed and hit it again with a thump, but still he slept, though the combatants rolled and writhed in and out of him. Neither the naked girl of his fantasies nor the mechanical nightmare with which she strove on his behalf were in truth anywhere near.

Neetra and her foe tipped at last over the side of the bed, she on top. From the carpet she mustered all her strength of mind, and with telepathic teeth gritted wrenched the thing’s head clear of its body and flung it over her shoulder. It bounced once from Mini-Flash Robin’s covers and crashed to the floor on the opposite side.

The ghosts of his desire were descending now, no longer like a whirlwind, more akin to autumn leaves. Gently they circled back to the body where they began, their light merging once more with Mini-Flash Robin. He too seemed to be settling, in every sense, to the far deeper untroubled slumbers of one well and truly exhausted.

Neetra was exhausted too, but not from the battle.

It was more the effort of kicking herself over and over again in the knickers, not that she was even wearing any.

How could she have been so stupid?

Knowing from the start there’d be a price to pay, and immediately assuming it was going to be something within her power and her right to give.

Seriously? She’d been fighting the forces of evil how long?

Her new friend wanted Mini-Flash Robin.

That was his price.

NEXT: "LOOK OUT, MINI-FLASH ROBIN!"