The Girls From Space, Chapter Two

Considering The Foretold One had no face, it was remarkable how quickly Mona decided his nonexistent physiognomy was that of the inveterate fossil-crusher.

She went for him, head lowered, heels kicking up moon-dust. Harbin retaliated with his long-range weapon of choice, throwing shaft after shaft at the thundering shoulders, but there was little in The Foretold One’s philosophy to prepare him for such an opponent as Mona. She would barrel into the barbs and keep on going as long as their dispatcher threatened her lifeless rocky young. It was true Harbin himself didn’t realise he’d been doing that, but moreover he was ill-equipped to comprehend the kind of mother’s love that rampaged through scale-shredding razor shards with teeth gritted and horn down.

Auntie Green didn’t wait for the reds of his eyes. Riding high she hammered back on both bazookas and let him have it.

Swiftly switching the motion of his hands Harbin proceeded to palm each shell aside, these bumbling nose-over-tail like huge drunken bluebottles to blow with fiery bursts across the barren landscape and cold starry skies of Limb. Ballistic distances steadily closed until one missile caught the instant it was swatted, swallowing Harbin’s gaunt shape in the resultant conflagration.

A ragged grey cloak fanned this incandescent miasma as The Foretold One turned, smoothly following his own momentum to stride forward through burning roils, his other five fingertips already primed to administer unto the incoming a single killing strike.

Harbin however, as coldly intelligent as he was brutal, hadn’t reckoned on the momentum Mona herself was capable of building in a second or two of fire-blindness.

Her skull rammed him belly-on, and the two tonnes of hurtling muscle and bone behind it lifted his feet clear from the patriotic planet’s surface. Out of the residual bomb-burst the roaring saurian romped, Auntie Green aloft and The Foretold One impaled, trailing gaseous runnels of flame from her armoured flanks.

Below, Mini-Flash Meek in her orbicular prison was kicked like a football between Mona’s pummeling paws, back and forth, bunches downward and knickers uppermost then next breath skimming along on her shoulderblades with boots pointing at the reptilian undercarriage. Though her lips were out of the combatants’ sight, it was evident enough there was no cessation in their flying open and closed. Silly girl would do well to hold her noise, Auntie Green thought to herself, if she knew what was good for her.

Something funny about it though. Those distortions were more than acoustic. Nor would Auntie Green have expected Mini-Flash Meek’s commentary on being batted about by the insteps of a maternally berserk protoceratops to be anything so rhythmical. Whatever those sounds were she was making, the snatches Auntie Green could hear above the din of Mona’s stampede were almost certainly recurring and repeating themselves.

Something to think about. But maybe not just now.

For Auntie Green knew what poor Mona was a heartbeat away from doing. Such, sadly, were the drawbacks to having a hazelnut for a brain. Even so, Auntie Green would have taken her openness and honesty on the subject any day, over the myriad Mini-Flashes she’d had to teach who wrongly supposed they could claim otherwise.

Mona’s great horned head came up in a mighty lurch and propelled Harbin wheeling for patriotic firmament.

Instinct told Mona he’d crash to the ground, all ready to be trampled on.

Auntie Green however knew The Foretold One wasn’t so easily thrown. She could have kicked herself.

Only she knew likewise she wasn’t going to have to.

For an instant their adversary resembled his own power-source, a dark event-horizon as he tucked and tumble-turned over and over to correct himself, while the tatters of his cape were tongues of spatial tumult trailing in pinwheel fashion these black-hole revolutions. Then Harbin was upright, concavities of cloak-billows poised as to bear down and envelop his foes, toecaps anticipating Auntie Green’s chops.

Time enough to tell what he meant to do. But The Foretold One was fast. No time at all to do anything about it.

Those legs may have been skinny but Auntie Green could testify they had some strength to them. She was still registering his second hoof to the jowls as the whole of her considerable mass burgeoned backward through Mona’s slipstream, to grind to a grazing halt chin-first and prone upon the stony track.

Auntie Green didn’t see what Harbin did to Mona. Once her vision was back on-target her faithful steed was slumped, skyward side rising and falling to haul wheezing breaths, but conclusively out of the fight. The ball that held Mini-Flash Meek was trundling a last slow stretch to rest again in The Foretold One’s radius.

He, eyes blazing, drew back one open hand. His next javelin of dusky light was meant just for Auntie Green.

TO BE CONTINUED