Thundering Across the Stars, Chapter One

Blackly the fortress loomed before what looked at first glance like a full moon, until the seething agitations racing without cease round its white circumference betrayed it for a spatial disruption. All else was red sky falling away to surrounding scrubby jungle of the same garish shade, whose glistering fleshy sheen shaded to a night-dark interior. Though the planet was supposed to be devoid of fauna, something ominously large-sounding bawled from out of these depths.

On the courtyard a cobalt-coloured space-racer screeched to a halt. From its single seat first Flashthunder and then Contamination flung, to proceed at pace through an arched entryway overhung with ruddy creepers. Once within, the blue glow from Contamination’s bare breast and arms and pointy-eared head was the sum of internal illumination, while those parts of him cased in leather blended with the inkiness through which he and his small companion moved.

The twisting tunnels at length disclosed a lit flight of stairs. Flashthunder primly gripped the pleats of his tunic-skirt, perhaps fearing threats to his modesty over every other prospect his situation afforded, though on gaining the summit a second or two behind Contamination he was given reason enough to revise that view.

Five figures made up a welcoming-committee on the tiles of a kind of throne-room. Forcelife, hovering hooded and hunkered atop his bat-winged glider, would have been hard for Flashthunder to forget. The others he had never seen before, but they were more than familiar to Contamination. The pair side-by-side were huge and green, a hideous husband and bride. Another was a wolfman, and the fifth a dusty bandaged brute. All wore remnants of a black leather uniform, as Contamination did himself.

A secondary stretch of steps upraised behind this crew the seat of power, on which was arrayed a physique of bulging slick-skinned musculature ornamented in red vine. For all that the being beneath walked and talked like a man, he was the monstrous plant which had taken root on this world, and mercy was as remote from him as it was any strain of garden-choking weed.

“Antroar,” hissed Contamination.

“I’d quite like to go home now,” Flashthunder remarked.

Closing the distance between the spinning sky-disc and the hideout of Antroar, a Nottingham City transport-ship bellied low over the brushland having sighted an avenue unobstructed by tangled crimson. A ramp swung down from the undercarriage and four land-vehicles exited on the fly, hitting stony road one by one in swift succession with wheels moving and tank-treads clacking while the hauler set course for lofty climes again. It was fortunate Joe and his companions had already been enroute when they picked up Cherry’s distress-signal. Their destination was a business meeting at a toy factory, but in this galaxy you left nothing to chance.

On the transport-ship’s bridge were Croldon Thragg and his apprentice Thomthar. “The young lady was right not to take her tour-bus through there,” Thragg announced, assessing the shearing-forces with his Wonder-Tool. “It’s as I suspected. This singularly inhospitable planet sits within the bulb of a tiny pocket-dimension.”

Joe, from the cockpit of the speeding vehicle in the lead, acknowledged this. Like a glass bottle insect-trap back home on Earth, not that any of his companions would have had a clue what he was talking about. One way in and one way out. A battlefield of infinite appeal to the likes of Antroar. That one was wise to seek out every tactical advantage, albeit less so to threaten Contamination, Flashthunder and Cherry in the first place, especially when Joe owed a favour to all three of these friends.

The Valour skimmed along on its skis at the vanguard, rotor-blades folded to the rear. Flanking Joe was Flashtease in the Justice, a kind of domed bubble-car with iron tracks and a serrated claw jutting in front. The sleek pink-painted Courage was piloted by Joe’s newest female Mini-Flash recruit, Flashstanch, who was here because of Flashtease. Over in the Ingenuity, which was the Justice’s twin but for its colour-scheme and the substitution of a pair of articulated arms for the claw, was the portly and well-meaning Flashbuoy who’d decided to pledge his life to Joe’s interpretation of the cause at around the same time the latter showed The Flash Club Galactic Wildlife Revue at his film-festival. Meanwhile remote support continued from overhead courtesy of Croldon Thragg and Thomthar, both of whom seemed to view working with Joe as a kind of unpaid handyman job. Not for the first time our hero comforted himself with the thought of Flashtease. At least there was someone fighting for his cause who knew what his cause was.

Ahead gaped a vast canyon on top of which was heaped an interwoven labyrinth of vermilion vegetation. The bridge-struts for this twisted mass-transit system were flat-headed stalagmites stretching from the bottom of the ravine. Without hesitation, though guessing what was next, Joe proceeded to take his convoy across.

They were halfway to the other side when the scarlet skin on which they drove began to inflame. Within seconds every spare stretch bulged with boils and buboes. Swelling like hillocks from the road ahead these necessitated sudden swerves, or in pendulous clusters pulled whole heavy boughs of the interlaced ceiling so low as to close tunnels off. When they ruptured, what surged in steams from the shredded red flesh was more than a static obstacle. The Thorn Legion, Antroar’s living hordes, slipped speedily over the knobby hide on trails of lubricant goo which their undersides ever exuded, and each of the sliding shapes bristled from rim to epidermis-ridge with deadly barbs and burrs.

Joe and the Mini-Flashes broke their tight formation and met the Thorn Legion head-on. Bumping down a vine-bank on the Valour’s shock-absorbers our hero tore through the swarms with his flamethrower, incinerating them even as they negotiated the steep descent that they reached the gulley-floor only as charred bits. Flashstanch meanwhile adopted the opposite approach, retracting her pink rubber tyres and rising in the direction of the roofing ribs while swinging her electric blaster into position on the Courage’s crest. Lightning struck, and the oncoming Thorn Legions were flash-fried in their own sap.

Flashbuoy made a fumbling attempt to fend off a fleet raiding-party with his robotic arms, but succeeded only in tying these appendages in knots. Gleefully the ghouls glided by, their vicious spines scraping the Ingenuity’s armour and knocking the circular craft for a spin all ready for the minstrations of a second and yet more malevolent wave.

“Oh!” wailed the hapless pilot. “I don’t know how to operate it correctly! I’m not even sure why I was chosen for this mission!”

“Old Flashbuoy’s flying by the seat of his pants!” chuckled Flashtease, setting course to come to the rescue at once.

“You know some weird Earth-expressions,” Flashstanch giggled into her communicator. “What else would we Mini-Flashes do?”

Rounding the arch in a gravity-defying loop-the-loop Flashtease interposed his own pants between friend and foe and threw his pincers wide to welcome the advancing marauders. When they locked, he closed his grip to squeeze the leaders and dug in. With the strength as well as the horns and shell of some rampaging Hercules beetle the lone Justice turned the tide, shovelling masses back the way they came in a multiple Thorn Legion pile-up, tank-treads churning through the slime left behind that the worst Flashbuoy faced was severe windshield-splatter. When the mountain of squirming and secreting spikes had become too tall to stand, it tipped over and tumbled apart into its component car-sized chunks which crashed into the crevasse hitting every trunk and tendril on the way down.

Neither Flashtease nor Joe had been in a position to study the Thorn Legion’s strategies that day the Solidity took the City Centre. If they had, they might have realised in time their opponents were keeping them occupied instead of going in for the kill. All the while the site of this demolition derby was clenching like a fist, uprooting itself from the canyon’s lips and slithering over its flat-topped props in a steady contraction from rambling network to crimson clump. Already the interstices had become too narrow for our heroes to exit that way. Thragg and Thomthar observing from above had no choice but to hold their fire, fearing injury to friends should they intervene.

Once the shrunk and shrivelled cage of creepers was resting atop a single teetering monolith, horrid hallucinogenic eddies began to whirl about its environs. It was within the unholy power of Antroar’s fortress to teleport, and now those forbidding façades usurped what had hitherto been empty sky and swallowed into dark innards the branchy ball which bound three Mini-Flashes and Joe. Precariously the dread edifice perched on its slender new foundation far above the gulf, and aboard the circling transport-ship Croldon Thragg looked grimmer than ever as he consulted his Wonder-Tool.

“Electronically and telepathically shielded,” he announced. “Can’t risk a warning-shot until we know how that thing’s laid out. Better put the kettle on, Thomthar lad.”

END OF CHAPTER ONE