The Girls From Space, Chapter Seven

Storm-Sky proved the better man.

That was no small achievement for any warrior of any galaxy when their trial of skill and strength and speed involved Harbin, The Foretold One. Even three altercations down and a long way from maximum black-hole charge, he was a force to be reckoned with. The Flash Club commander however was more than his equal as he caught up Mini-Flash Meek’s rolling prison in both arms, ahead by at least a span of Harbin’s being able to do the same, and vaulted with her from the vertical racecourse.

Nor did The Foretold One trick or trap Storm-Sky. The latter had entered into this well aware of the way it must go.

So it was that as Storm-Sky began to clear the side of the crater, Harbin whipped by and clawed once. A grim impact reverberated dismally across the battlefield, and though Storm-Sky continued to soar with Mini-Flash Meek for the black starry arch of Limb Four, no longer did he do so straight and true. His trajectory bore him to where he had meant to be, at Auntie Green’s toecaps, but it was a crash-landing that saw Storm-Sky slumped and motionless upon the forcefield-ball.

He had sacrificed his own fighting-chance for the good of the game-plan. And perhaps the essence of The Foretold One’s evil was that he understood goodness.

Auntie Green and her present leader hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye. Now she stared on his fallen frame as if her eyes were new. At once she lowered Storm-Sky down that he might recover at ease, and grasped to her bosom Mini-Flash Meek. From within the sphere came no cessation in that one’s belting it out. Give it a rest, girl, thought Auntie Green wearily. Whatever it is you’re saying, you’ve already said it.

A pair of starship headlamps hove low over Limb as the great bulking back of an interplanetary transport cruiser appeared. Within its hulls, three slight and slender girls were locking themselves into launch-tubes. Neetra, beyond the glass in the cargo-bay, imparted to her friend Flashshadow the unspoken good-luck wishes of heartfelt faith, wished Mini-Flash Splitsville the same aloud, and lastly to Mini-Flash Juniper said: “You’ve done this before, Jen.”

It was intended to lend the other confidence, but also to remind her of the two Mini-Flashes who might have to look to her lead.

So if she could stay off the subject of their dishy moth-winged co-pilot for five or so minutes, that would be just great.

The tubes blew, propelling the prettiest pastel missiles that ever sailed patriotic airspace. Flashshadow, all shades of summer dusk, Mini-Flash Splitsville with silver-blue hair, and Mini-Flash Juniper at the arrowhead. Wearing her membrane, after all that.

They touched down surrounding Harbin, who by now was back on the plain to advance on Auntie Green.

And as soon as they did so, the universe became strange.

4-H-N and Mini-Flash Bobbypins had dried themselves off and tugged their tunics and boots and knickers back on. The former rewound her Mini-Flash Meek footage and started it up again.

They’d been going about this all wrong. 4-H-N saw that now. Even if she and Bobby had been able to break the language-barrier that apparently stood between them and their Special Program party-animals, the best they could have done was try and persuade them to help. She should have started with Mini-Flash Meek. The string of incomprehensible ululations she was emitting, over and over without the least variation or lapse, was surely where the answers lay.

“They all talk so funny, the Special Program,” declared Mini-Flash Bobbypins. “They’re just odd, the lot of them. Why doesn’t she just say ‘help,’ like anyone else would?”

“I told you,” 4-H-N began. “That’s not what she’s saying. Because ours already know she’s in trouble, and in this place – ”

She forced herself to rein in her temper. No use taking it out on Bobby. If she was part of the problem, it was only because she was what her galaxy had made her.

Few knew better than 4-H-N that Mini-Flash Bobbypins could be unfeeling, self-serving, even thuggish at times. Mini-Flash Meteor had always affirmed such girls were the quadrant’s future, not that 4-H-N cared to believe a single word Meteor ever spoke. Just now however were ominous intimations she might have been onto something. If the Special Program were indeed an emergent evolutionary stage for the second gender, as some believed they were, then true to form they’d taken clique mentality to another level. Once they’d chosen a faction, that was that. The life of one of their own might hang in the balance, but if that one had chosen otherwise, they’d still prefer to party hearty than do anything about it.

There had been girls on Earth at least a little like Mini-Flash Meteor, but the Special Program were light-years from 4-H-N’s values. If they were the way the second gender was going, then that was bad news for the galaxy. No wonder people feared an alliance between them and The Foretold One. 4-H-N was reminded of the many times on this mission she’d had to warn herself not to search too hard for humanity in beings that looked human but weren’t. She was given to believe that seldom ended well.

Yet she wanted to believe in Bobby. 4-H-N remembered the vote of confidence she’d received from her in the alleyway, and how she’d halted and faltered over every word as if it was the first time she’d ever had to say such things. You didn’t snap at someone who was trying their hardest. She took Mini-Flash Bobbypins’s hand in hers.

“That’s not the way she talks,” 4-H-N explained kindly. “It’s that thing Harbin’s sealed her in, disrupting her speech somehow. Even as it is, can you tell that she’s saying something a lot more complicated than ‘help, help?’ Harbin knows she’s connected to the rest of the Special Program, and they have the power to save her. He’s put her in that bubble to keep her words from getting through.”

“Then it’s a message?” breathed Mini-Flash Bobbypins.

“More like a bargain,” the other declared.

For as different as the Special Program were from 4-H-N, there were certain concepts familiar to her which they too seemed to hold in the highest esteem. Sue had come into her life in the first place while attempting to do her a good turn, in exchange for the part it was imagined she’d played in the Special Program’s escape from Flash Club Headquarters. Clearly repaying a favour mattered to these girls, and so did freedom.

“It’s got to be information,” 4-H-N went on. “Something Mini-Flash Meek knows which the rest of the Special Program don’t. She’s sharing a secret so they’ll be obligated to rescue her.”

All but the three who were loyal to Joe, that was. They alone among their ilk had rushed to Mini-Flash Meek without requiring any kind of incentive. 4-H-N hadn’t wanted to dwell on that. Inculcating and encouraging such principles among his Special Program charges was like something the old Joe would have done. The one she’d lived with in Nottingham, even saved at the Floating City. And, yes, who’d later saved her from his own runaway clone. None of which made up for all that the new Joe had done. Hastily 4-H-N reminded herself of the list which included Neetra, The Foretold One and Prince Agaric. These she put ahead of the item at the top of the list because everyone else was angry about them and it wasn’t just her. Even so, 4-H-N couldn’t hate the new Joe absolutely when his Mini-Flashes at that very moment were being the model for what she needed hers to be.

And that made a total of four Special Program girls who weren’t getting any safer. 4-H-N banged her antiquated equipment into operation, first calling up the entire recorded soundtrack to the battle on Limb and isolating from all the other graphical soundwaves Mini-Flash Meek’s contribution. As had already been established, it was one sequence recurring. A single instance of this 4-H-N chopped from the long rote and enlarged onscreen. There before her in pictorial form were the mangled magic words on which everything depended.

The diagram resembled the outline of a mountain range in which there were six peaks. That their slopes were jagged and uneven was doubtless The Foretold One’s doing, but each in altitude and steepness was the same. Mini-Flash Bobbypins shook her pretty head.

“If you ask me,” she pronounced, “that isn’t speech. Not to begin with, I mean. There are all sorts of ways to encrypt an audio signal, but it never ends up looking – or sounding – like that.”

4-H-N knew she was right. A terrible helplessness overcame her, for she also knew that that meant her entire thesis hinged on a supposition dangerously close to being disproved.

“We can’t let that stop us, Bobby,” said 4-H-N at last. “One way or another we have to crack Harbin’s code. Nothing else can save those Mini-Flashes now.”

TO BE CONTINUED