As Powerprobe locked on to Firestar, the Lords of the North felt themselves weaken and, eyeing one another apprehensively, grasped their firestones with trembling fingers. Lord Rothlan held Lady Ellan close and put his other arm protectively round Amgarad while Prince Casimir, sitting alone on his silver throne, gripped his hands together tightly and thought of his son.
Deep inside Morven, the hobgoblins froze as they felt the first slight tremor run through the machine. It had done it before and they knew what it signified. Another attack! Such was their fear that their tendrils positively blasted their way out of their heads and swirled round them. Rumbletop and Rumblegudgeon looked at one another in horror and made a concerted rush for the machine.
It was then that Rumblegudgeon tripped over his writhing tendrils and, with a yell of alarm, skated wildly across the marble floor to cannon violently into the control panel.
When word got round NASA that Powerprobe was due to lock on to Morven for a second time, an interested group of spectators gathered round Patrick Venner to watch the fun. Talk of the goat-faced alien had, of course, got round and, indeed, had generated much amusement. Most of the scientists regarded it as freak interference from a TV channel and poor Venner had been teased unmercifully about it ever since. After a while, he more than half-believed them himself and, being a good natured chap, took their teasing with as much good humour as he could muster.
Nevertheless, as he adjusted his monitor to receive the expected stream of data, he felt a sudden nervousness and, calling himself every sort of a fool under the sun, steadied a trembling hand and steeled himself for whatever might happen when Powerprobe locked, once more, on to Morven.
His fears, as it happened, were justified for the first thing the Americans saw on the monitor was Rumblegudgeon streaking towards them, his face displaying a variety of emotions. Alarm, fear and horror all registered as the little hobgoblin shot, shrieking, across the marble with the grace and speed of a twenty ton elephant slipping on a banana skin and as he’d no control over his flight whatsoever, it was hardly his fault that he landed up smack against the machine.
Venner’s monitor picked the whole thing up. Hitherto sceptical NASA scientists grabbed at one another in panic as they saw Rumblegudgeon careering towards them, screaming fearsomely and as he grew ever larger, they ducked, as though expecting him to shoot straight through the screen and land in their midst. As it was, the final picture on the monitor gave them a pretty good view of his tonsils.
Predictably, chaos reigned supreme as everyone in the control room totally lost the plot.
Then Powerprobe’s monitor went blank.
That shut everybody up.
As the babble of alarmed voices quietened abruptly, the horrified silence deepened, all eyes focusing on Pat Venner as he bent over his keyboard and tapped at it frantically. Apart from a single, dancing point of light, the monitor remained blank. He tried again and again to raise some kind of response from Powerprobe — any kind of response — but to no avail. He sat back in his chair with a sigh and, in a voice shaking with nerves, told everyone what they had already gathered.
“Sorry, guys,” he said as a frisson of alarm rippled through the crowd, “but I reckon that Powerprobe’s been zapped!”
Powerprobe had, indeed, been zapped.
Ever since the first attack, Firestar had been ripe for retaliation. As it had been in existence since more or less the beginning of time, it had a pretty fair working knowledge of the universe and although the original attack had taken it by surprise, causing it to miss the arrival of Malfior, the constituents of the lasers had by no means escaped its understanding.
So, as it happened, Firestar hadn’t been at all disappointed when it felt the first tentative probing of the lasers. Indeed, it embraced them in much the same way as a spider welcomes a fly to its web; gladly and with a certain mouth-watering sense of anticipation. Once caught in its clutches, poor Powerprobe had as much chance of survival as a snowflake in hell.
With painstaking care, Firestar gathered together every ounce of power it possessed and with a massive surge of blistering energy, shot a beam of light back through the lasers to Powerprobe and quite successfully zapped all of its computers.
The force of Firestar’s assault not only shook Morven but rocked the entire glen. For an instant, the mountain became as clear as crystal with a bluish-white, vibrant core that shot in a stream of blazing light from the top of the mountain, through the sky and into the furthest reaches of the heavens. And, as the beam hung, suspended in the air, the wind picked it up in its arms so that its magic drifted over the land, houses and farms of Glenmorven and into the screes and corries of the surrounding glens.
Deep in the heart of the mountain, Firestar relaxed and breathed in its power once more. Scores had been settled and its charges, the Lords of the North and the peoples of the world of magic, could now live their lives in peace and safety to the days at the end of the world.
However, while Firestar swelled comfortably in satisfaction at a job well done, Malfior, curled in its depths, smiled nastily. It knew Firestar’s mind and, indeed, it suited it that the connection to Powerprobe had been cut. Hidden and unsuspected, it could now grow unseen and unchecked.