The Trojan Horse, Chapter Two

Before the prow of the Henry Martin airspace parted like the deep, battering housefronts and roof-tiles with Aeolian spume as the skyborne galleon of timber and gold ploughed above the city’s square trenches. The robot hordes first sighted her as she rounded the headland of the Town Hall’s great dome, at which her fore-facing bores of brass cannon broke into far-off fiery winks all at once. A second later and the marauders were met full in the teeth by a bombardment in which each cannonball accounted for many, explosions of strategic targets striking chain-reactions throughout densely-packed metal bodies that cleared whole smoking blast-zones across the mechanical mass.

A counterattack was not slow in coming. The Dimension Borg robots raised fingertips, shoulder-pinnacles and glaring crimson eyes to ascendant angles and let fly at the Henry Martin with all the ordnance they still commanded. On her deck, where stood a thirteen-strong crew made up of the Collective’s entire compliment, Gala hollered the order:

“Shields!”

Degris, his single eye glowing gold, flung out his psionic powers as far as they would go in a translucent barrier that nullified the energy-onslaught of eyebeams and electrical arcs. Meanwhile the schoolgirl Lisa blew from her pouting lips an enormous circular projection of telekinetic bubblegum that she put between the robots’ micro-missiles and the hull, that the deadly projectiles thudded redundantly into the pink sticky ooze and detonated with harmless muffled splats.

The Chancellor was standing at the nucleus of a sprawling technological assembly that looked as if it was growing from his bandolier and the equipment-pouches on his grey uniform. Data-screens were orbiting his head on tracks and servo-arms, he was operating with both hands a great many more than two different keyboards at once, and his expression was grim.

“Though it is difficult to be certain of exact figures, preliminary analysis indicates our foe’s number is considerably below that catalogued in Military Control Centre One’s records,” he declared in tones of warning. “Where are the others, and why have they been held in reserve?”

“Is this really the time for a head-count?” Degris called back, still pouring his psychic might into keeping the ship safe.

“We must comprehend their stratagem!” The Chancellor barked impatiently at him. “This is not like the battles you have known, and these troops are a diversion only. You may hurl Four Heroes powers at them all you wish, but it will bring us no closer to their true objective!”

“That notwithstanding,” Joe retorted, a touch of irony about his voice as he leapt onto the carved railing and directed the flames from his hands at full burn upon the legions who had by now drawn directly underneath the ship. Assisted by the force-blasts of Lisa’s teenage classmate Guy and support from the Henry Martin’s artillery Joe proceeded to rain destruction on the Dimension Borg robots and lay their army to waste.

Guy and Lisa were side-by side as the former discharged his fireballs down the galleon’s lee and the latter maintained her gigantic gelatinous wall. “Keep that thing away from the jacket, it’s new,” Guy grumbled to her. “Your power is disgusting, Lisa, you do know that?”

Lisa, her cheeks full of bubblegum, could only make an indignant noise.

“Sorry,” Guy went on. “Actually, I like you best this way. It’s just these robots have got me on edge because they’re not bringing out the big guns. Remember, those massive gravity warps we saw them using in the invasion? If they’re meant to be stopping us getting to the Control Centre, pulling off one or two of those would do a great job. They should be letting them rip right now, and it’s freaking me out that they’re not.”

“They do not because they cannot,” The Chancellor put in from his station, where he was frowning severely at a list of figures scrolling down one of his screens. “Serial number cross-checking confirms your observation, boy. All the robots here deployed are those whose gravity-warp units are logged as damaged or disabled. The ones with still-functioning units are absent – evidently they did not leave the Control Centre. But what does all this mean?”

That same question was very much on the mind of Carmilla Neetkins, the one and only sentient being resident at our heroes’ destination. She had by now recovered the use of her faculties after the high-voltage assault that temporarily incapacitated her, but as she was chained to a wall this was of little help.

“Thanks for tying me right-way up this time,” she shouted pettishly at her captors. “I know, back at Du Bates you had to make it look good. Why bother with dramatic effect when there’s no need, right?”

The second-generation Dimension Borg robots Electromagnet, Technomancer, Breakpoint and Conduit ignored her to a man. They had borne Carmilla here, from the basement levels of Military Control Centre One all the way to the uppermost floor, together with the substantial volume of Dimension Borg robots they had not sent into battle. Then, having restrained our heroine and summarily bulldozed away all inner walls and office paraphernalia to transform the penthouse into one giant workshop, the cyborg quartet had set to their task at once.

As best Carmilla could gather, there were two stages to this. First, each and every member of the brigade was sawn open for some kind of readjustment or fine-tuning to be carried out within their torsos, after which there was no gesture towards resealing the resultant gaping breaches in the robots’ hides. Evidently the priority was to finish preparing them just as swiftly as possible, and whatever it was they were being prepared for, it was not to join their brothers in open conflict. The second part seemed to be to weld and fuse certain of the derelicts to each other as soon as remodulation was complete, the rationale for which eluded Carmilla until she noticed that all those selected for this grotesque conjoining process were deficient in the jet-engine department. Each Dimension Borg robot was supposed to boast such an appendage at the junction of its four spidery legs, and those whose engines were lost or damaged were being summarily grafted to the owners of functional ones. What all this meant was beyond our heroine, but she made so bold as to guess it was bad news.

“So any chance you’re going to let me in on your devious plan?” she went on hopefully. “You master used to love a good monologue at times like this.”

At last Electromagnet turned from his labours and pointed his featureless Dimension Borg mask at her. “Open-ended directive: facilitate Solidity’s destruction of Earth,” he droned. “Interpretation of directive based on available information: deactivate humans’ defensive shield currently denying Solidity access. Veiled threat: this done, we will have no further use for hostage.”

“Believe me when I say you can’t do anything worse to me than the last Dimension Borg robot did,” Carmilla returned.

“Electromagnet,” Technomancer called out, not faltering in his work for a microsecond but simultaneously processing continuous transmissions from the war-zone. “Diversionary forces depleted. Defeat inevitable.”

“Calculate time-interval,” Electromagnet responded.

“Seven point two chronal units,” Conduit burred in reply.

“Sufficient. Conclude task,” Electromagnet rapped back.

“Having said that, I could start to miss him all the same,” sighed Camilla. “If only for his way with words.”

“Ground and air teams!” yelled Joe. “You have your opening. Clear us a path!”

A gangplank on the Henry Martin’s underbelly swung streetward to form a ramp, and from out of the galleon’s cavernous hold thundered D’Carthage astride his gleaming white chromium steed. Leaping the several feet between runway’s lip and paving-stones he charged down the rabble, his lasso crackling with vibrant energies as he whirled it high. This found its target and whipped about one unlucky Dimension Borg robot’s steel trunk, at which D’Carthage heaved with both hands and both muscular arms, and assisted by his mechanical mount’s momentum lifted his victim’s four needle-point feet from the ground. A second later and that same robot was flying round and around D’Carthage in continuous circles as the steed galloped through the throngs, and Dimension Borg robots were smashed in scores by the bulk of their flailing brother. Bounding clear of the decimation he had wrought D’Carthage finally tightened the lariat, mangling his captive like a tin can and popping its head to the sky.

From the side of the ship Steam launched himself in a rushing cascade of fire, to strike like a bomb then blast off again leaving burning wrecks behind. Kumiko wasted not a moment in following him and made the heads and shoulders of Dimension Borg robots into a skate-park across whose ever-moving surfaces her nimble wheels skimmed, while her precision kicks and chops put enemies out of the fight as she passed. Meanwhile the shape-changing alien Proteus in one of his tried-and-tested alternate forms, that of a dragonish flying reptile he had encountered on his interstellar travels, was swooping down upon the ranks to rend and crunch their armoured bodies. The rotund schoolboy Jeffrey took an even blunter approach, hurling his rubbery bowling-ball of a physique into the heart of the masses and caving in exoskeletons with backspins and rebounds, whilst his classmate Carrie on her feathered wings drew the enemies’ fire and caused distractions. There was however one of the ground team who had not yet joined the fray, and this was so unexpected that Joe was several seconds in noticing as he looked on from the Henry Martin’s prow.

Flashtease was atop the rail on all fours, poised to spring into action but motionless as if frozen, the fluttering hem of his short grey tunic agitated by the slipstream. His eyes however were not on Joe, but had darted fitfully to hold on Gala who only at that moment saw him too.

“Go!” she cried out to him in disbelief. “What are you waiting for?”

Then Flashtease was off at once, curling up into a sizzling spiral of power as he descended to join the robot rout. Joe witnessed it all and was baffled, but only for an instant. The boy had been waiting for a direct order from Gala. Apparently that was how frightened Flashtease had become of the consequences of acting without one.

Joe could contain himself no more. He rounded on his fellow Collective leader.

“Gala, tell me the truth!” he flung at her. “Something has happened to Flashtease, something you know of and are keeping from me! Our union was founded on mutual trust, and I warn you, if I should discover – ”

He broke off. What was in the air, the swelling disturbance of the atmospheric molecules and the low rumbling noise it brought with it, could be ignored no longer. The Chancellor, whose instruments were spiking off the scale, was seconds ahead of Joe and Gala so it was he who shouted: “Look!”

On the horizon beyond, at the distant point that was our heroes’ destination, the roof of Military Control Centre One erupted. While the Collective’s ground and air teams strove on in pitched combat, the six on the Henry Martin’s bridge could only stare as a multitude of thin white vertical lines ascended from the breach and began to track steadily to the roof of the sky. At that range they looked like ballistic missiles rising from underground silos, miniscule from where the flying galleon was standing off, but the launch numbered so many that the thought of what would follow this portentous silence filled every heart with dread.

“There go the thousand ships,” murmured The Chancellor.

Each Dimension Borg robot – for that of course was what they were – rode its jet engine to the heavens carrying in most cases at least one or two of its fellows welded to its infrastructure. The barrier neared, its ruby curvature masked by night, but the robots’ still-functioning sensors did not lie. Razor-grille faces revolved upward as one to glare down the incoming wall, narrow red eyes crackled and sizzled a vengeful final blaze, and from deep in the robots’ throats surged a death-howl so demoniacal that for an instant the celestial vaults roared with a tumult that had no place there. Then the robots triggered their gravity-warps, and were swallowed up one by one in ever-expanding voids of apocalyptic nothingness.

These decrepit soldiers had never been meant to return from the front line. With each gravity-unit pushed far beyond tolerance their physical forms simply disintegrated in the stratosphere, leaving nothing behind but a monstrous disc of searing light whose circumference seemed to push back reality itself, and which in tandem with a myriad others bursting into being across the skyscape bombarded the Feeder Ray’s inner concavity again and again and again. The sheer force of these unrelenting impacts swept clear the dark firmament, blotching it with huge islands of trembling exposed red. From planetside, to the Collective and the whole fearful populace of Nottingham that watched via windows and television screens, the overhead phantasmagoria of crimson and black swirled and teemed out a never-ending maelstrom while before it hung the dazzling white circles in their awful silent stillness. They were like gigantic alien flowers whose beauty was terrible and cold.

For what The Chancellor had feared had come to pass. The next-generation Dimension Borg robots, born of a technology that stemmed from the same source as the Feeder Ray, had been familiar enough with the latter’s nature to adapt their brothers’ most powerful weapons into bombs tailor-made for its unique modulations and frequencies. Under their onslaught, which was as delicately and precisely attuned as it was savage and merciless, the Feeder Ray was weakening.

END OF CHAPTER TWO