The Girls From Space, Chapter Four

Dylan’s smart-missiles, configured exclusively for Harbin’s distinctive dark-light hide, bore down on their mark who withdrew the lethal spear intended for Auntie Green and vaulted heavenward instead. Jangling backwash from the sweep of his cape tipped Mini-Flash Meek in her impregnable sphere over onto her head again, though even from beneath her boots and knickers she kept up a persistent pattern of counterpoint to the other’s gloomy dissonance. Auntie Green, whose old bones were good for round two at the very least, thought once more how oddly garbled and oddly regular were the girl’s unremitting cries.

The star-fighter tracked its target. Telemetry was flowing cockpit-wards, and miniature Foretold Ones made from grids of electronic light bucked and contorted above every flatbed projector in Dylan and Phoenix’s view. Yet for all the data supplied by these animated armatures, one particularly pertinent question remained unaddressed.

“No way of knowing what sort of power-levels we’re up against,” declared Dylan, for on matters scientific he and Phoenix were always able to anticipate each other. “Harbin learns from his defeats, and he won’t have tackled even a lone member of the Special Program without charging himself to maximum capacity beforehand. Looks like Mini-Flash Meek on her own still put up enough of a fight to re-landscape the Patriotic Planet, bless her. But as for how much black hole potency that’s left our boy with…”

“Four ’Eroes and Next Four powairs,” Phoenix concurred. “Both impossible to scan via ze conventional means. And what else should be so of zeir unprecedented amalgamation?”

“Yep, thanks Joe,” remarked Dylan, as Harbin with breast thrown out turned to the torpedo on his tail. One axelike straight-fingered hand chopped down, and half the digital feed fell dead.

A related issue was whether there would be time to land the interceptor, lower its gantry and carry out an evacuation while The Foretold One was preoccupied. Banking low, Dylan consulted his monitors and reported:

“Mona’s down, and Auntie Green could probably use a hand. That won’t be any quick loading job – not without Bret,” he added with a chuckle. “Better play this one safe, babe. Keep Harbin in the air until we get a window.”

“I ’ave been fidgeting like 4-H-N for ze chance to give our new pincer manoeuvre a test-run,” admitted Phoenix. Dylan grinned back.

Their foe was a dusky whirlwind as he whipped about, kicked, and dispatched the second missile. Phoenix threw a lever and her seat straightened into recline position, as arm-rests and deck opened smoothly to swallow it up. Traversing head-first the launch-chute below Phoenix rendezvoused first with pneumatic arms which pushed gloves onto her hands then next a kind of press to clamp her backpack to her body, before a final hatch unlocked directly beneath and deposited her corkscrewing unto the star-fighter’s slipstream. Six wings of fiery fluorescence sprouted and she flew, while Dylan brought his prow to point. Silver drums on either side of him revolved, disclosing battery on battery of primed plasma-gatlings.

Harbin at that moment allowed gravity to take over. He dropped from flight, the ragged flag of his cloak describing a plumb-line behind him, and landed on a sole and a knee and a fist.

Phoenix, still spinning, lit the photon weapon on her gauntlet to wind a spiral over Limb’s black firmament even as Dylan cut his chugging bolts loose. Her helix and his staccato intersected in the sudden absence of any Foretold One to pin, leaving each strategist little option beyond soaring fruitlessly to their fallback co-ordinates.

“C’est impossible!” was Phoenix’s cry, crackling to Dylan on the cockpit’s communicator. “We ’ave nevair deployed zat operation before! We but conceived of it on our last date-night! ’Ow was ’e able to predict it?”

Only then did the mystery clarify itself for Dylan, and it imparted upon him a dawning sense of horror as it did so.

For what was the use of fighting The Foretold One across three dimensions, if Dylan was only going to go and forget the fourth?

It may have been the first time they’d attempted the manoeuvre.

There was however no guarantee Harbin hadn’t seen it a hundred times since.

That one hurled a vertical dart through Dylan’s fuel-tank, and the star-fighter vanished in a huge fireball.

TO BE CONTINUED