The Girls From Space, Chapter Six

Mini-Flash Meek reached the end and began again, though all that reached her scattered saviours through the transparent wall encasing her was as weird and unintelligible as before. Harbin advanced, but halted as rich purple robes and a fleeting crop-circle mandala of moon-dust interposed themselves between.

It was Storm-Sky, leader of The Flash Club.

“Well, Foretold One,” he declared, deep and calm. “Shall we see whether all the Prophecy claims of you is true?”

Something about Harbin’s featureless visage seemed to suggest he’d like that. With one gaunt shadowy arm he threw back his cloak.

They went at it, forearms locking and hands and fists plunging low to be deflected, capes whirling to the horizontal as they rode out the motion of roundhouses and leg-sweeps. Storm-Sky’s kick swung at Harbin’s head and he dodged, then thrust his foot facewards that Storm-Sky tipped back out of range. They proceeded to the heavens, rising higher with every lunge and knee and heel, each scaling the other’s parries until strike abutted strike and propelled the pair apart and down. Friction-trails scorched behind soles as Harbin and Storm-Sky skidded to rest face-to-face on the patriotic plain.

One threw his wasted arms aloft. One thrust forth his steady open palm. Twilight barrage hurled itself on a shield of gold.

Harbin’s power was dark disharmony jarring and jamming over the rocks of Limb, breaking them like a tide. Storm-Sky’s was song, galactic balance mustering magisterial bells out of stone and ore and confluence, bright resplendent bars chiming. It was he, not The Foretold One, who ultimately weathered this trial of endurance, and having subsumed foul cacophony unto his celestial chorus flung the coda from him with all his remaining might.

Only not in Harbin’s direction. Straight at Mini-Flash Meek.

An Earth-man, bound by native notions of proper conduct towards the fairer sex, would have been shocked by the speed and readiness with which Storm-Sky whipped out this move. Sons of the surrounding stars however started from the opposite point. Storm-Sky would surely have balked at involving Mini-Flashes of the fragile first gender in such a rambunctious play, but he knew the second could take it. The only question hung over the sturdiness of the sphere Harbin had sealed her in, but that unstinting pragmatist wouldn’t have done so in the first place if he hadn’t needed her intact, and nor did The Foretold One believe in half-measures.

Sure enough, when Storm-Sky’s yin-yang projectile of intermingled light and shade exploded, the single curving surface held firm. Over and over through spinning skies Mini-Flash Meek flew – and still, even now, the same strange sequential sounds spurted from her, uninterrupted but for a little forgivable exaggeration.

Whatever else The Foretold One may have been, he wasn’t Flash Club. Storm-Sky vaulted into a reverse-somersault and booted the opalescent orb shrieking at Auntie Green.

Sound sports-field tactics. Unfortunately though, the deciding factor wouldn’t be so much possession as ball-control.

One twilight hand scraped a harsh chord and Mini-Flash Meek changed direction again, warbling. Her own head-to-head with Harbin had ripped a chunk of Limb Four out into space, leaving their battlefield a sheer-sided crater. This perpendicular boundary she hit, and under The Foretold One’s cruel compulsion began to circle at a dizzying rate, each round whisking her breathless past the multifarious combatants her orbit enclosed.

Harbin looked to Storm-Sky. So, the red eyes seemed to say. You like games.

He launched himself at the brutal bagatelle he had wrought. At once Storm-Sky did the same, only his heading was counter to Harbin’s. The Flash Club commander knew that in this twisted roulette it would be futile for him to pursue, and that his only route to reaching poor Mini-Flash Meek first lay along the opposing arc.

Two pairs of toecaps coasted onto the vertical cliff as one. Each holding himself level to the ground the gladiators hurtled at each other, capes standing straight from their shoulders like sheets. Pinball was now a motorbike wall of death. Grimly Storm-Sky and The Foretold One closed second by second their distance along the same sheer slope.

A blur of dusk, moving to intercept a rolling marble, and another blur of purple and gold chasing after this same.

An impending collision-course, Mini-Flash Meek in the middle.

TO BE CONTINUED