What Goes Around, Chapter Two

The little Solidity girl started and gawped. Her cell-door had just unlatched, softly and all by itself.

It could only be a trap. Not even Earthlings were stupid enough to make such a blunder. Besides, it was exactly the sort of thing she was always doing to boys back home.

On the other hand, it was a shot at escape.

That thought decided her. The next second Carmilla was bolt upright in her chair, the romantic novel spinning to the stone-flagged floor, as a bumping flurry of vivid yellow flounce streaked from the open cellmouth and vanished up the stairwell. “Get that tutu back here, Missy!” Carmilla spluttered, high-stepping it out of the dungeon in pursuit.

From the shadows of a concealed arch, Guy and Lisa watched in silence. They waited until Carmilla and the girl were out of sight. Then, still without speaking, they turned as one to the steps down.

Steam looked up, averting his gaze from Degris’s eye as they sat facing each other in the laboratory. The telepathic link between them was temporarily severed.

“Trouble,” Steam informed his companion.

“I don’t sense anything,” said Degris.

“And your psychic powers are well stronger than mine,” the mechanical man agreed. “But you’ll have to trust me about this one, mate.”

He stood, and turned back to Degris’s quizzical expression. In the darkest of tones Steam explained:

“You’re Four Heroes. It’s not summat you’ve ever felt.”

On which words, he exited.

The unblinking hooded eyes of Mile Hunts looked slowly up, as his cell door opened to admit Lisa and Guy.

“Come nearer, Earthlings,” said the beast, his voice as cold and forbidding as his crustacean appearance. “Know the wracking agony of death between my claws.”

“Sure you’re up to it?” inquired Lisa, with a gleam of something rather less than human in her eye too. “Because from where I’m standing, you don’t look like you can even lift your claws.”

On Guy’s face was a smile that spoke of neither mirth nor compassion.

“Climate-control, Hunts,” he declared. “All The Chancellor’s dungeons come with it. We’ve had yours attuned to keep your strength at a low ebb ever since you got here, but Lisa and I just ramped it all the way to maximum.”

“Fools, not to kill me that way,” was Mile Hunts’s response. “Now learn what comfort your trickery brings when you are but twin heaps of pulped flesh and shattered bone.”

The two teenagers advanced into the cell. Each was somewhat aware that this was new, and that at no point in life thus far had their respective superhuman command of telekinetic bubble-gum or energy-bolts ever been used to kill. The thought however worked no fluctuation on their resolve, as they mustered up those same powers with the sole object of slaying the weakened monster before them.

Suddenly Guy’s shoulderblades slammed against the stone wall. A pair of clenched metal hands had him fast by the lapels of his school blazer, and Steam’s furious face was mere inches from his own. With both arms the mechanical man flung Guy bodily at the open doorway, finishing off with a kick that propelled him flailing to the stone flags of the passage outside.

Steam hiked a thumb in the same direction. “Think I won’t?” he bellowed at Lisa. “Try me!”

It turned out Lisa was in no mood. White-faced she hastened through the door, which Steam slammed shut behind them.

Degris, who had followed him downstairs, witnessed the gist of the altercation. “Please tell me this wasn’t what it looks like,” said he.

“It was exactly what it looks like,” responded the grim voice of Carmilla, as she returned to the dungeons with the Solidity girl in tow. Bundling her into her cell and locking it again, Carmilla continued: “Miss Personality here could only have escaped like that if someone opened her door remotely, from the command-room. So after I’d caught her I went to take a look. Just like I guessed. What was more, the environmental settings for Mile Hunts’s cell had been tampered with to make him next to powerless.”

Degris put his upper pair of hands on top of his shiny orange head for a moment, and let out his breath.

“Guys,” he began at length to the pair of teens. “We all know you’re hurting over what happened to Jeffrey and Proteus. But we’re in a state of war, so we need you to be soldiers like the rest of us. That means finding a way to put your anger on one side, even when – ”

“We’re not kids!” Lisa burst out indignantly. “Don’t go talking to us as if we were – ”

“Yes you are!” Steam roared, cutting across her. “And that’s why I’m not having this! It’s why I’m not…”

He was aware everyone was looking at him by now. “We all understand why this matters so much to you, Steam,” Carmilla said in gentle tones.

The automated man turned his clear green eyes directly on his Collective comrades, for the first time he could remember. Not even the whirl and clash of emotions reigning within Steam could obscure the certain knowledge that came upon him in that moment. The time had arrived at last.

“No you don’t,” he informed the company. “Your lot don’t know the half of it, love.”

Steam gave over a second or two to try and compose himself.

“The lad,” he then resumed. “Flashtease. When he was here, like. Back when we thought it still mattered where Dimension Borg was. Had to find out, didn’t we? So one morning we got shot of Joe for the day. And Gala…”

But Steam was already shaking his head.

“No,” he corrected himself in a broken voice. “It weren’t Gala. Because I had a choice. Even when she got to me, I could still have said no. But I didn’t. Joined right in with the rest of them. There’s more than one reason I know about The Chancellor’s reconstruction lab.”

His four companions were by now looking at him as if seeing him for the first time. It was all Steam could do to keep meeting that awful gaze and hold his voice steady. From an unknown place deep inside he somehow mustered the power to do so, as he continued:

“I know I’ve done for myself. I know I’ve no business fighting alongside you.” He found out Carmilla. “I know I’ve no right to ever go near your sister again.”

“Steam,” Carmilla began, though she had to confess she had no idea how to complete the sentence.

“But you pair,” Steam finished, addressing Lisa and Guy. “While you’re still kids. You don’t go down that road. Not none of us. Ever. No more.”

The silence that fell upon the dungeon after this seemed very long and very loud.

“Degris, mate,” Steam then went on. “How we doing?”

Finding his voice, Degris replied: “We’ve learned everything we can from the psychic exploration. Nothing left to do now except put it to the test.”

Steam nodded. “Right,” he declared. “Time we were getting down to it.”

The five Collective members in the free city had wheeled out to the blasted remains of their castle courtyard an antiquated wooden catapult from the subterranean vaults. In its great studded bowl of lead sat a jury-rigged bomb containing the final preparation of ingredients that Degris and Steam had at length selected from The Chancellor’s laboratory. As the Future Fighters had never seen a weapon of that kind before, it would be good for one shot before they had a chance to adapt to it…and one way or the other, one shot was all the Collective was going to need. The question of whether they had succeeded or failed would come down to that and nothing more.

There loomed the wall of towering robots far off at the foot of the hill. There were no spoken words that could do justice to the feelings of Carmilla, Degris, Lisa, Guy or Steam. So it was that with a wholly silent prayer from each of them they gripped the wooden lever hand-over-hand together, and as one threw it down.

Across the Nottingham sky sailed the bomb, dwindling to a speck as the seconds ticked away, vanishing at last somewhere high over the Future Fighters’ heads…before a flash that raced back to the Collective fractionally ahead of its cataclysmic din unleashed upon the city humanity’s last hope.

The robots were reacting, and certainly the vast flickering ball of whitish luminescence shouldering into their midst seemed to be giving them cause for concern. Something, however, was clearly very wrong. The chrono-telepathic anomaly was neither as large nor as single-mindedly expansive as the other of its like our heroes had seen, which that previous Christmas had wasted no time swallowing anything and everything within reach of its curvature. For this new one it seemed a struggle merely to establish a hold, and even while it faltered the Future Fighters were countering, with the customary zeal of their purpose-built breed. Already quintets had started locking together to assume Power Plus mode, and the Collective saw in all the starkness of bleakest despair that once this was achieved, their creation’s existence would be measurable in picoseconds.

“This can’t be!” yelled Degris. “All the materials were correct! We identified every compound that was there before! Why isn’t it doing what the last one did?”

“Because it’s not all there yet,” came the voice of Steam. “Last time there was one other thing.”

Carmilla, alone among the Collective members, heard the tone of his voice for everything it was. It was this that allowed her heart time enough to rise into her throat as she tore her eyes away from the pyrotechnics and rounded on Steam, heedless of her long hair whipping her face or the pleats of her skirt completing the counterspin, knowing only the sound of herself screaming out: “Steam, no! It doesn’t matter what you’ve done! You don’t have to – !”

But the flames by now had already roared to life.

Then Steam’s four companions were united in gazing powerlessly after him as he burned and broiled his skyborne path down through the last divide, friends fading behind his contrail and the glow from his target shining ever brighter as he drew near. He was like some rocket blazing out the glorious final moments of its flight, and on his handsome face was a smile of more happiness and peace than he had ever worn.

“Sound as a pound,” Steam whispered.

Then he plunged headlong into the brilliance, and was seen no more.

It began. All at once the anomaly was everything its brother had been, purest white-blue and too radiant for human eyes, its primordial presence mantling and widening indiscriminately into corporeal matter that yielded without resistance. There was neither hurry nor tardiness about it now, merely an unstoppable terrible swell. The Future Fighters, mid-combination, were swept up like toys in a whirlpool. Their multicoloured blocky bodies melted plane by plane into the endless dazzling nothing until all that was left were a few disjointed panels of black, which soon enough were gone likewise.

The Solidity’s defensive circle was breached. Nottingham City Centre was impenetrable no longer. And a giant sphere of temporo-psionic flux was growing as if to consume the world.

NEXT: 'UNTO THE BREACH'