The Incursion, Chapter Three

Joe strode down the Stronghold’s cold corridor, thankful Mini-Flash Splitsville had given him something to smile about. Her regular warnings that theirs was to be a strictly casual affiliation had commenced the very day they met, as if she herself had yet to notice she’d become a key member of Joe’s most trusted inner circle from effectively that moment on. Indeed, our hero wondered whether the moody loner of her own self-perception would recognise the Mini-Flash Splitsville he knew, that small silver-blue-haired permanent presence asking him endless questions about Rebel Without a Cause. Joe wished there were more like her. No Mini-Flash besides Flashtease gave him greater reason to suppose his theories on this galaxy were valid.

The interview immediately ahead was not going to make Joe smile. That much he was resigned to as he entered the command centre.

“And you thought this day would never come,” a sardonic synthesized voice greeted him. “That your old friend had forgiven you.”

The speaker, immersed in a column of sterile light at the heart of the darkened room, was a green mechanical skull with one telescopic optic sensor.

“You speak of an earlier Nottingham, Scientooth,” observed Joe. “Dylan destroyed your crowning technological achievement and thwarted your schemes for revenge on Toothfire. Moreover, in so doing he brought the galaxy to the brink of another First and Final War. Only through some miracle not of our making was this disaster averted. Surely we are far past any era in which Dylan’s forgiveness is something I should seek.”

“So you assure me,” Scientooth replied dryly. “I myself maintain a more realistic perspective on my old friends. The good Professor, for example, will claim he has committed no act of war. This incursion shall be deemed regrettable, but needed in the name of peace.”

“Still determined to perceive your enemies only through a single lens,” Joe declared, though he saw this was an unfortunate choice of words. “Tell me now who is being deceptive? Or do you ask me to believe such an intellect as yours refuses to entertain the possibility Professor Grindo speaks the truth?”

“I merely illustrate that my doddering saggy counterpart, in the parlance of your homeworld, plays his cards close,” said Scientooth. “Perhaps this is conduct to which all you organic life-forms are occasionally prone. Yes, Dylan Cook of The Four Heroes put paid to the etherium actualizor and our faction’s plans of conquest. But not before you and your female had successfully deployed my machine in the fulfillment of your own designs.”

“I have yet to hear you complain of the accommodations,” Joe returned levelly. “In the parlance of my homeworld, I would bottle and sell that quality if I could.”

The monocle held its hard focus on Joe, and Scientooth’s unspoken accusation hung heavy. This was an old argument, and they both knew it.

“I but refer to Storm-Sky,” Scientooth finally continued, in unconvincing pretence of having changed the subject. “Do not count on his opposition to this violation of our borders. He cannot afford to appear so weak with the eyes of the galaxy upon him. True, The Flash Club is not indentured slavery and his Mini-Flashes are free to leave. By now however he has allowed so many to defect to us that there is talk as to where his sympathies lie.”

Joe received this particular item of news with a thoughtful expression. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d never had the very same thought about Storm-Sky.

“As time is of the essence, Scientooth, let us confine ourselves to the matter at hand,” our hero said at length, and turned to set off for the launch-chute on the wall.

“Oh, I am not so unwise as to try and divert you from your purpose, my human friend,” the sing-song tones of Scientooth rang out in response. “I of all beings in the galaxy know what you are capable of when roused. Poor Prince Agaric.”

These closing syllables fairly groaned under the weight of mocking irony. Joe halted, still with his back to Scientooth. After a second of silence he resumed walking.

The launch-chute swept Joe down a vertical shaft through which the lighted strata of successive floors flickered by in the space of heartbeats. Halfway to the bottom storey he was joined by Flashtease, and after travelling parallel for a breath or two they ejected together into nothingness. The Mini-Flash’s tunic-skirt obligingly blew clear of his bright yellow underpants that these along with Joe’s jeans might come to rest on seat-cushions, whereat in a flaming flare and a surge of motion our heroes exited still side-by side via a hatch in the Stronghold wall. Joe and Flashtease had a new space-car, of the same crimson paint-job as their old one though somewhat chunkier than the last, and with a curious circular contrivance like a sideways-on fan-engine protruding from the rear. City rooftops melted into luminescent streamers as the speeding duo swiftly homed in on Mini-Flash Splitsville’s trajectory.

They sighted her leading the Boosters and Micro-Mallets through a series of chicanes along the Nottingham freeway, though about half the Grindo drones had already been run off the road or steered into the sides of buildings by Splitsville’s maverick racetrack tactics. Flashtease drove while Joe picked off the remainder with fireballs from his fist. Then banking low the red racer rendezvoused with the black, keeping pace as the beach-road hit its steady curve and proceeded to slope downhill.

Our heroes leaned on their steering-wheels to one side, and the tower-blocks directly ahead rolled in parallax to the other. Stepping slowly through the moving interstices was something that matched the summits for height. Scrolling screens of skyscraper façades disclosed the soaring translucent ball-head, the weird tubular-fingered hands that coasted flat like flying saucers palms-down to the ground, and the tapering stick-figure torso of terrifying tallness which together were the shape Joe and his Mini-Flash friends must confront now the preliminaries were done.

It was a Grindostater unit.

Joe said: “We need the Silver Cat Lord.”

Above the otherwise homely Nottingham skyline Scientooth’s Stronghold was a forbidding and incongruous elevation piercing the night’s firmament, each of its four fearsome faces an upright slab of smooth steel. Whole sections of this sheer exterior might therefore suddenly swing downwards on invisible hinges and crash their uppermost lip at street-level to form a ramp, which was what one did the instant Joe lent his requirement voice. What thundered forth from the iron indoors was akin to a stronghold itself, only one which moved like a runaway steamroller and whose bulkheads and turrets were amassed within the trappings of a giant cat’s extremities sculpted in silver. Aft-decks and a blue hemispherical canopy clustered between huge gleaming haunches and were intersected by the titanic tail, while the streamlined prow with its twin giant bores of heavy-duty cosmic cannons ended in vast horizontal forelegs outspread as if in crouch, and the noble feline features themselves rode proudly as figurehead to this Jovian juggernaut. It roared down the exit-ramp and lurched onto the freeway, whose ten-lane width it fully occupied, then with caterpillar-tracks clattering in a mighty uproar started at once for its summoners.

Joe and Flashtease in their racer began to climb. For Mini-Flash Splitsville it was like a hillside was gaining on her, as first the tail-tip then the silver ears then the hackles and all that bulked between steadily rose in her rear-view mirror. She however merely changed gears as the obedient Silver Cat Lord lowered a ramp of its own, that Splitsville might reverse safely into its docking-bay.

From the seats of their scarlet-hued space-rod Flashtease and Joe leapt high. That vehicle began to undergo a transformation, its wings folding in from the fuselage to lock in place. Then operating on autopilot it drew abreast of the Silver Cat Lord’s hurtling hull, which was already extending a special runner for the smaller vessel to slide itself onto. There the red racer in altered state slotted like a strange sidecar for the feline fortress, an appendage not seen on Joe’s prior iteration of the Silver Cat Lord.

Mini-Flash Splitsville had taken the express elevator, which sounded like something she’d have said but was in fact quite true literally, and arrived on the bridge just as Joe and Flashtease joined her from a more roofward direction. By the concave wall ahead sat three swivel-chairs and the long curving instrument-panel, beneath a panoramic picture-window with one central stanchion which was the inside of the gigantic cat-head’s visor-like eyes. Joe assumed command position while the Mini-Flashes under-tucked their skirts neatly into the side-seats.

“Let’s do it,” said Joe.

END OF CHAPTER THREE