Opening his door, he jogged down the street, turned a corner, jogged another three blocks, turned another corner, then came upon what would be one of the busier districts when the fighting broke out. The few people who weren’t already hidden in their assigned bunkers turned and looked at him. The blaster in a woman’s hand twitched and Philo thought she might raise it and shoot him right there in the street for everything he and the other Fianna had done.
He saw a man in the light armor of the Purple Berets and knew it was the same individual he had choked unconscious during the training session. Philo couldn’t see the man’s face through the tinted lens of the special unit helmet, but he could guess that the fighter now understood why Philo had been reluctant to explain his credentials. Seeing the Fianna armor, the man was now most likely considering himself lucky to be alive. Philo nodded to the man, then turned and walked toward the spot where he would hunker down and wait for the mechs.
The reinforced ditch, dug into a spot surrounded by pavement, had another occupant. A middle-aged woman, dressed in the gear of a Vonnegan ground soldier, turned and stared at him and his goblin-faced helmet. She looked at him, then back out to the street, and then to the sky where the mechs would appear.
“How can you live with yourself after everything you did?” she said.
Back in the days when the Fianna protected Mowbray and served as the face of the Vonnegan Empire, he would have killed her just for that comment. Now, the two of them awaiting a common enemy, he gave the question some thought as he also looked up at the sky. With the hundred-story buildings all around them, neither of them could see very much of the purple clouds and definitely nothing of the Juggernaut.
Not intending the comment to be cynical or to alleviate the tension, he looked up and down the street for any sign of the mechs, then said, “I won’t have to live with myself for much longer, I guess.”
“If we do get through this, I’ll kill you myself,” the woman said.
“If I were you, I would want the same.”
All around him on the street, in their various hiding spots, everyone went silent. A humming noise began to fill the air. The mechs were approaching.
40
Quickly’s Llyushin transport touched down at the mouth of the same asteroid cave where Round Tables forces had fought and died after making made their emergency landing months earlier.
“You’ll want to stay here,” Lancelot said in her normal voice. Then, after her helmet was on, she added in the monotone and unemotional speech of the voice modifier, “You shouldn’t have any problems, but if you do, take off and follow the same course we followed to get here. Do not deviate from that course, no matter what you see in front of you.”
“Understood,” Quickly said. “And you? If there’s trouble, I mean.”
Lancelot had been heading toward the back of the ship. She turned and gave a slight shake of the head.
“If there’s trouble, I’ll kill everyone on this rock and meet you outside the asteroid field.”
“Fair enough.”
When she first left Orleans she didn’t think she would ever return. Instead, she was now visiting them a second time in a matter of weeks. After muttering a string of curses under her breath, she paused and realized how irritable she had become. Before continuing down the asteroid tunnel to where the Carthagens would be, she forced herself to identify the reason for her annoyance.
It didn’t take much effort to realize it was because both times she had returned to the Orleans asteroid field it was to ask for help. She prided herself on being able to defeat everyone she faced, and it went against who she wanted to be to ask for help from anyone, especially those who had deceived her, as the Dauphin had.
It hadn’t been much of a blow to her ego when she had recruited Quickly. She had never claimed to be an expert pilot and it was his speciality. And he knew Vere, so they had a common ally. Lancelot could trick herself into believing Quickly was doing Vere a favor rather than herself. That was how she rationalized it.
But here, among her former people, she was forced to admit she was the one who needed assistance. No one else. For the first time, instead of taking pride at having dispatched all of the other Carthagen warriors with ease, she felt the shame they must have felt after being beaten both mentally and physically.
The sympathy made her growl and remember why she was there. While Vere and Mortimous would no doubt appreciate that she was able to have empathy for her vanquished foes, those same people had only accepted her because she could kill better than anyone else. If they had known who she really was—not a Carthagen at all but a human—they would have killed her. Even after the Dauphin appointed her as the leader of their warriors, they had allowed her to believe a lie—that she was protecting a colony of Carthagen women and children, not just three old members of a dying race. She owed them nothing, especially not her sympathy.
The sensors in her helmet detected noise from farther in the tunnel, much too far for ordinary ears to hear. After turning the corner and continuing into the darkness, the display in her visor switched settings and she saw a grayscale image of exactly what was hidden in the darkness.
“Hello, Swordnew,” she said. “Nice to see you again.”
“Lancelot,” the other Carthagen warrior said.
The two of them stared at each other from opposite ends of the tunnel before Lancelot started ahead again. Her focus, as she walked, was not on Swordnew but on the walls, floor, and ceiling. If the Carthagens weren’t happy to see her they easily could have installed new defenses since the last time she was there. Her helmet detected nothing, however, and she continued ahead without interruption.
When she was still ten paces away, Swordnew turned and began to walk back in the direction he had come. Without speaking, Lancelot followed. The tunnel connected to another and then to a third. After walking for another minute they were at the door to the Dauphin’s chamber.
Swordnew stood in front of the stone slab, waiting for it to slide open. When it did, he proceeded into the room where the elders resided. Lancelot entered after him. But instead of Swordnew continuing to the back wall, where warriors stood, he remained in the middle of the room. For a moment, Lancelot thought he was challenging her to another duel. Maybe he had been practicing and thought he could finally get the best of her.
Her attention shifted, though, and she realized what was different. It wasn’t that Swordnew was standing where he didn’t belong. It was that there were no elders. The last time she had visited, only two of the Dauphin had been there. Now, there were none.
“Where are the Dauphin?” she asked.
“They are dead,” Swordnew said. “It’s just me now.”
41
As the Llyushin cruiser readied for launch, Talbot remained at the bottom of its ramp. His feet were still planted on Edsall Dark but his mind was already deciding what he would do once he and the others in the first wave of ships reached their next destination.
Rather than think of his mother and about leaving her on the planet with no one else she cared about, he tried to focus on Lancelot. She offered hope for a fulfilling future instead of reminding of an unfulfilling present.
“You ready?” a member of the Round Table forces said as he and another soldier made their way up the ramp.
All the engineers were aboard. The pilot was ready. Another set of ships would be leaving from CamaLon as soon as the next assortment of moveable containment field generators was finished. The only thing left to do was walk up the ramp and say goodbye to the place where his father had hoped to achieve his greatest ambitions and where his mother had watched her life dissolve into something she could never have predicted.
He would leave and travel across the galaxy and the next time he walked down the ramp he would be two sectors away, carrying out his part of Lancelot’s mission in an attempt to save the very place he was looking at now.
“You ready?” the other soldier said, the two members of the Round Tab
le forces looking at him from the top of the ramp.
Both of them had clear expressions of doubt. Maybe they knew he was Julian’s son and they had been supporters of Hector. Or maybe they knew his father and had hoped General Reiser’s son would be just as charismatic. It was also possible they knew exactly who Talbot was and cared only about how he had quit the military following the Cartha campaign.
Talbot looked around one last time. He wished his view was of the market and the children playing everywhere or of the fields outside the capital wall and the herds of animals roaming freely. Instead, he saw various vessels he didn’t recognize and which meant nothing to him. His surroundings reminded him of the last time he had set off for a quest across the galaxy. Then, too, he had boarded a vessel he didn’t care about. The only difference was that his father had been in charge of that campaign. This time, those around him perceived him to be the mission leader even though he was only following Lancelot.
His father had been a leader. Yes, Julian had certainly had his share of faults, but he had also inspired confidence in those around him and had led by example. Talbot also had his share of faults. The difference was that he didn’t lead by example or by any other means. He barely led at all.
“Sir?” one of the soldiers said from the top of the ramp.
“Yes, I’m ready,” Talbot said as he jogged up the walkway. “Let’s go.”
42
In their discussions, Philo, Thidian, and Pompey had agreed to organize Greater Mazuma’s resistance into quadrants. The northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest sections of the metropolitan planet were divided by two main thoroughfares that crisscrossed to transport millions of people via hover trains and ion transports. Philo stationed himself in the middle of that intersection, in the heart of what had been the busiest part of the busiest planet in the sector.
Beneath him, millions of people were hiding. Some were two stories directly below him in an abandoned and lead-coated storage facility. Others were two blocks away, four stories underground, in part of an ancient and unused waterway system. All of them were defenseless. If Philo and the fighters on the ground level failed to repel the mechs, if the traps Thidian had designed didn’t work, everyone hiding in those shelters was as good as dead.
Philo had been alerted to the mechs’ arrival by the humming of their transports. A second confirmation came via a short message, received inside the visor of his helmet.
“The mechs are in the northwest quadrant,” Philo said to Dindraine, the woman beside him who constantly glanced at his Fianna armor with disgust.
It felt odd to speak while wearing his Fianna helmet. Part of his seemingly endless training had entailed absolute silence while serving as Mowbray’s protector. All communication had been carried out silently via a combination of eye signals that were processed by the Fianna helmet and by the body language of every other member. They had trained with each other for thousands of hours so each Fianna would know what every other member was going to do without saying a word. In the six years Philo had served as a Fianna, he had only spoken while off-duty, when he wasn’t wearing his armor. Even then, the members of his detail tended not to say very much.
“Are they coming this way?” Dindraine said.
“Not yet,” he said, barely paying her any attention.
He was preoccupied with the idea of climbing out from his hiding spot and joining the fight. Across the street, he was sure the Purple Beret was entertaining the same notion. Instead, Philo stayed exactly where he was.
Raising his head just slightly above ground level, he scanned the little bit of sky he could see between the giant towers all around him. The only visible indication of the mechs’ arrival was a cloud of black energy that was drifting across the tops of the buildings a few miles away.
Behind him, he heard a click, and Dindraine rustling as she changed positions. There were a million different things that could have caused a click, but not that distinct metallic sound. She had disengaged the safety on her blaster.
“The Fianna killed my parents and brother,” she said.
Philo thought about reaching over his shoulder to grab his vibro halberd. However, if her blaster was pointed at him there was little chance he would have enough time to defend himself. He also thought about turning and smacking the weapon out of her hands. It was a maneuver every kid grew up seeing in galactic adventure movies but it was nothing like what would actually happen, which was that she would get a shot off before he managed to turn even halfway around.
Understanding his situation, he remained motionless, his back to her. It was probably better that way, he thought. If he turned and she saw his demon mask, she would be reminded again of the atrocities the Fianna had committed.
“I’m truly sorry for that,” he said.
His helmet was nudged forward, and he knew she had the barrel of her blaster pressed against him.
Then she fired and there was nothing.
43
“Where are the Dauphin?”
“They are dead,” Swordnew said. “It’s just me now.”
Lancelot looked around at the empty chamber that had once held a dozen warriors and the three elders, the pretense being that they were all there to protect countless other Carthagens located somewhere else in the Orleans asteroid field. The truth had been that the entire Carthagen race had been in that one cave chamber. Now, the room contained only two warriors.
“How long ago?”
Swordnew looked back at where the Dauphin had always stood, at the control panel that monitored everything going on inside their own hunk of rock and also everything in the asteroid field. He turned back to face her.
“The second elder, a week after you last left. The final elder, only two days later.”
Something about the way he said it made her take note. While Bookknow had designed her voice modulator to mimic the delivery of other Carthagens—monotone, the words all slightly blending into one another—it also tended to hide any emotion. A real Carthagen tended to more easily let on how they felt. Being able to tell when they were frustrated or scared was one of the ways Lancelot had a natural advantage when she had faced them in the duels.
“You blame me,” she said.
“One died a week after you were here.”
“You think I brought some kind of germ back with me? And the others that died before that? Was I somehow responsible for them dying as well?”
Growing up, she had always been told by the elders that the Carthagens were susceptible to sickness. But after hearing there were no other Carthagens in the sector, she guessed their fears had created that very reality. By blocking themselves away from the rest of the galaxy they had also weakened their immune system to any naturally occurring germs outside Orleans. Rather than work with scientists to figure out how the Carthagen race might be kept alive, the Dauphin had created their own prison inside the asteroid field and tricked Lancelot and the other warriors as well.
When Swordnew didn’t say anything, she told him the Dauphin were always going to die sometime, it was just a matter of when. No amount of hiding from other people or creating a technologically advanced home could change that.
When he still didn’t speak, she asked why he was still there. His attention had drifted away from her. Upon hearing her latest question it returned.
“You know why. I have to protect the others.”
She closed her eyes and groaned. The elders, the cowards, hadn’t had the courage to tell their last remaining warrior that they had lied to him all of his life.
“There is no one else,” she said softly, wishing the words could be tempered.
“Of course there are. They wouldn’t die just because the Dauphin are gone.”
“Oh, Swordnew,” she said, taking a step toward him and extending a hand to place on his shoulder.
Seeing her movement, he stepped back. Rather than take offense, Lancelot nodded and lowered her hand. Swordnew had it instilled in him that the room they w
ere in was for combat, and it had been in this very chamber that Lancelot had defeated Swordnew countless times.
“Where are the other Carthagens then?”
Swordnew looked at her, then at the control panel that showed everything going on inside the Orleans asteroid field, then back at her again.
“Where are they?” she asked again.
“I don’t know. But I need to protect them.”
“How are you going to do that if you don’t know where they are?”
“It’s very simple. I’ll keep all outsiders away.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd that we’ve never seen or heard from any of the other Carthagens? If there are others, why haven’t we seen any signs of them? Why don’t we detect a power source where they’re living? The control panel the Dauphin used can detect any life inside the asteroid field but I guarantee it doesn’t show any signs of civilization other than you and me and the pilot I arrived with.”
Swordnew shook his head. “The Dauphin had to hide them to keep them safe. The elders were wise.”
Lancelot sighed and waved her arms at the empty room. “Come on, Swordnew. Look around. You’re alone. The Dauphin lied to us. All these years, they lied to us. That was part of the reason I left.”
She knew he was rational enough to know that what she was saying made sense. Rather than answer, however, he remained silent. A moment later, he walked to the controls the Dauphin had used and began entering commands into them. Various holograms appeared, each showing heat signatures of various asteroids in the sector. However, the only one with any sign of life was the one they were on, and Lancelot wondered how many times Swordnew had performed this same exercise over the past weeks.
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