Avalon

by Chris Dietzel

  A sensor display inside Traskk’s helmet showed there were only three other life forms on the ship other than himself and Talbot, which meant that neither the Hannibal nor their mechs could be detected. This contributed to his anxiety because he realized a horde of Hannibal could be approaching from any direction and he wouldn’t know it until he saw them. They could be amassing all around them for an ambush and he would walk right into it.

  He started another bout of hissing and Talbot said, “I know, I’m not enjoying this either.”

  As far as they could tell, they had two options: go in search of Lancelot and the others or else try to find some part of the Juggernaut that controlled the ship. Everything they had seen so far looked the same and they had no idea where the control room or command center might be so they began deeper into the vessel. Everyone once in a while Lancelot’s signal could be picked up inside their visors but more often it couldn’t be found.

  At the next turn, one of the glowing circles moved along the wall directly beside Traskk. He put a hand out to it, but when his glove touched the wall, the circle altered courses slightly so it curved around the area where he was touching. After it got past him, the circle of light continued further along the passageway until it disappeared down a side hallway.

  The entire thing unsettled the reptile, who was used to the exact opposite type of environment. He had been at ease among the din of fighting and threats that filled Eastcheap. Most of his time the past few years had been spent in the dark bar, where aliens of all sizes and colors drank, argued, and fought. Instead, he was in an enormous, well-lit, and empty series of hallways. His surroundings made him feel open and vulnerable.

  He growled and quickened his pace, eager to get to where the fighting would take place. Beside him, Talbot began to jog as well.

  120

  Two things crossed Lancelot’s mind as she raced toward the rust-colored mech. The first was that she wouldn’t have much time to fight the monster before the other three mechs converged on her location. She would have to strike fast. To her surprise, the other notion that entered her consciousness as she ran at full speed toward the reddish brown giant was that it was nice to have Swordnew fighting alongside her. It had been months since she had left the Carthagen asteroids and, with the exception of Traskk helping her briefly, she had fought by herself the entire time.

  The display in her helmet showed Swordnew was keeping pace with her. His four boots banged against the floor behind her as he joined in a charge across the cavernous hallway.

  Seeing that they had no intention of retreating, the mech stopped moving toward them and focused instead on readying his giant weapon. The ion sword was at least three times longer than she was tall, and she knew it would take all of her speed to dodge it. Lancelot guessed the mech also stopped in place to allow the other mechs additional time to approach from her sides and from behind.

  It took her less than five seconds to sprint the entire distance to the mech. During that time, she determined there was no use trying to fight it at what was usually a safe distance for her. Her lances normally allowed her to remain far from the striking range of her foes but the mech’s sword dwarfed her own blades. Instead, she didn’t slow at all. At top speed, she feinted to her right and saw the mech react by bringing its sword down in that direction. Instead, Lancelot went left and leapt ten feet in the air, where she landed on the mech’s hover platform. Without pause, she drove both vibro lances through the mech’s upper leg and both Meursaults through its knee.

  It responded by kicking in her direction. A heavy metal boot connected squarely against her torso, sending her flying across to the far side of the passageway. She hit the wall, bounced off it, and got back to her feet to see Swordnew attacking its other leg with his four swords.

  The mech reversed the grip on its sword and drove it down like a knife toward Swordnew, but he pivoted, evading the strike by inches, and then slashed one more time with his swords before the mech had a chance to attack a second time.

  Lancelot sprinted back to the fight. On top of the mech’s hover platform again, she drove both Meursaults through the mech’s wrist, then wrenched the blades so they tore through the inner workings of its hand. It ignored her long enough to drive a knee into Swordnew’s chest with a sickening crunch, sending him flying backward. When he landed, all four of his weapons scattered across the floor and he didn’t move to get back up.

  Lancelot dashed behind the mech. Each time it turned to face her she darted between or around its legs so she remained in its blind spot. And each time it tried to find her, she cut the back of its legs with her Meursaults until both trunks were shredded and the mech swayed back and forth.

  She glanced away from the enemy to see Swordnew collecting himself, slowly getting back up to his feet. He stumbled slightly, bent, picked up his weapons, then began back toward her.

  “Run!” Lancelot yelled.

  Swordnew paused for a moment, not understanding why he should run from the enemy they were defeating. Then he noticed she was looking slightly past him. He turned and saw the white mech racing down the corridor after them.

  Lancelot withdrew the pair of vibro lances that were still sticking through the rust-colored mech’s leg, then thrust both invisible swords through the same spot. The cuts were complete. She drove her shoulder into the mech as it tried one final time to spin and cut her down. Instead of turning, the mech had no base with which to remain standing and fell off its platform with a loud bang.

  Before Lancelot could finish the job, an ion arrow sailed just past her face and she turned to see the white mech was only a hundred feet away and closing the distance. It wouldn’t miss a second time. Taking her own advice, she ran.

  Swordnew was just ahead of her. As the two of them raced away to regroup, she wondered where everyone else was.

  121

  After trying to keep up with Lancelot and Swordnew through miles of the Juggernaut’s expansive corridors, Philo gave up running. Even at a sprint, he had been unable to match the Carthagens’ pace. Their long, galloping stride simply made them too fast. After ten minutes, they were nowhere in sight and he was out of breath so he slowed to a jog. There was no use in getting to the fight so exhausted that he couldn’t defend himself. Better to get his breath back and his mind ready.

  The longer he walked the more he began to question the Hannibal’s tactic. Surely the aliens, wherever they were in the Juggernaut, had a way of tracking Philo and the others. And yet the buzz of the mechs’ hover transports was always distant. The tactician in him began to suspect the Hannibal were herding him and his accomplices. He wasn’t sure where or for what purpose, only that they were being guided farther into the center of the ship. He suspected that once they were deep inside the Juggernaut with no chance of escaping through the hole Lancelot had cut into the vessel, the mechs would finally begin their assault.

  The strongest emotion running through him as he passed from one hallway to another wasn’t rage at the mechs or excitement at being aboard an enemy vessel, but disappointment in himself. He was fighting for a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the very people he had terrorized for years, and yet the enemy was nowhere to be found. The allies he had come with would have either defeated the mechs or else be dead themselves by the time he got to the battle. With no better plan, he continued through the labyrinth of wide open hallways.

  122

  The flight back through the layers of portals was almost enough to make Quickly question his career choice as a pilot. The roughly five hundred circles of energy arrayed all around the Juggernaut offered thousands of laser blasts that bounced from one portal to another. To add to the frenzy of ricocheting laser everywhere, the portals reset every couple of seconds so the pattern of laser streaks kept changing. Not only that, the portals themselves drifted and rotated slightly so streaks of laser continuously changed angles. Meanwhile, holograms of every size and design tried to trick the Juggernaut into thinking they were genuine threats
. Explosions and asteroids filled the space all around him.

  “Anyone else out there?” he asked in an open transmission.

  Only three fighter pilots reported in.

  “I’m making another run,” Quickly said. “Who’s with me?”

  He was greeted by silence. Someone else might have cursed the other pilots, but Quickly understood their reluctance. Each had someone they loved, someone they wanted to see again, just like he did. All of them knew if they re-entered past the walls of portals they most likely wouldn’t return home.

  “Fair enough,” Quickly said, bringing his modified Llyushin transport into a tight turn to avoid the middle of a portal, where lasers were appearing.

  He didn’t blame them. The lasers were flying too fast for anything but luck to save them. They all knew that. But he also knew that if he didn’t go, Lancelot and the others, the people who were depending on him, would die.

  “I love you, Enid,” he whispered, then set the transport’s engines to full speed.

  The Juggernaut had ceased its approach to EndoKroy and was instead in orbit around it. Where it had originally been on the exact opposite side of the planet from EndoKroy’s portals and the Excalibur vessel positioned there, it was now forty-five degrees closer to them and the two sides slowly drifted closer to each other.

  It was a matter of time until a laser blast hit Quickly’s ship. The first one ripped through the stern of his vessel. An alarm began to sound inside the cockpit. A second later, another blast incinerated the transport’s right wing. Critical alerts appeared in the cockpit. A laser blast passed so close to the front of the cockpit that Quickly would have been blinded by the light if the cockpit hadn’t already been set to cancel out the light of the portals in front of him. Another laser blast hit the communication transceivers located under his ship. The next one hit the sensors on top of the transport. Alarms were going off everywhere. Quickly knew he only had seconds until the main hull of the transport was hit and became engulfed in explosions.

  He made sure the ship was still heading in the right direction, then set the autopilot and scrambled out of the pilot’s seat. He ran to a storage locker in the next section of the ship and stepped into a soft version of space armor. Another blast rocked the ship, throwing him against the back wall. When he got his balance again, he smacked a button beside him and part of the floor began to slide away.

  That part of a Llyushin transport usually stored cargo or, if they were weaponized, held various types of bombs. In his modified ship, it was where he kept the one-man speeder. On Kerchin-Joshua, it had come in handy for short trips across the planet’s toxic surface. Here, it would be used to keep him alive a little longer.

  In addition to a single mid-class ion engine, he had equipped it with a pair of light cannons. They were smaller than the cannons used by Llyushin fighters and Thunderbolts but many times stronger than a handheld blaster.

  Yet another explosion rocked the transport. When he looked toward the cockpit, all he saw was the battlefield. The ship’s controls, the pilot’s seat, the viewport, were all gone. Another explosion jolted the ship and he reached out with both hands to keep himself from flying toward the rear of the craft. Without any grace and with a thud that almost dislocated his shoulder, he threw himself down into the bay and climbed aboard the speeder.

  The modified Llyushin transport began to explode all around him. He pressed a button and the bomb bay doors fell open, allowing the speeder to eject out of the remains of the ship, which was engulfed in fire and crumbling to pieces. He felt all the air in his lungs come up to his throat as the brief sensation of falling was replaced by the zero-gravity environment of space.

  Laser blasts were still zipping in every direction but now, without the help of the control center sending updates to his ship, he had no way of filtering out which parts of space were filled with holograms and which areas had real objects. He ignored everything except the center of the collection of portals, then sent full power to the speeder’s engine. Lying flat on his chest, he moved his hips to allow his legs to extend straight behind him.

  A holographic asteroid vanished into a real portal. A holographic Solar Carrier was peppered with hundreds of laser bursts. The Carthagen technology was so impressive that it enabled the fake flagship to erupt into explosions as if it were real so that the Hannibal would be further confused as to which ships were genuine.

  As he edged around the final layer of portals, the laser blasts died away and the massive ship came into view. Without slowing, he angled the speeder toward the hole Lancelot had cut into the behemoth. Only when he got to the open section of the ship did he cut back on the engines so he could judge whether the opening was large enough to fly through. He estimated it would be a tight fit but had no other alternative than to try. The bottom of the speeder, only a foot below where his stomach was resting, scratched against the Juggernaut’s frame as he entered the open corridors of the vessel.

  Inside, it took him a moment to understand his surroundings and to find Lancelot’s coordinates. As soon as he did, he sent another jolt of power to the thrusters and began soaring through the hallways fast enough that the lights embedded in the walls beside him became blurs.

  123

  Swordnew and Lancelot were off and running again. It would have been nice to finish the job with the rust-colored mech, but Swordnew understood Lancelot’s motivation for running. If they had remained there to cut it into pieces, both of them would have been struck down by the white mech’s ion arrows. If they were going to be victorious against the Hannibal, they would have to stay mobile. Strike when they could, run when forced to regroup.

  It was a version of the same tactic the Carthagen warriors had employed months earlier against the Round Table fleet inside the asteroid trap. Only now, Swordnew didn’t have the luxury of watching his adversary flounder from behind a two-way containment field. Now, he was racing for his life and hoping he didn’t turn a corner and run smack into a three-story tall mech.

  As they ran, the sound of the mechs’ hover transports was all around them. Occasionally, they would get a glimpse of one of the mechs. The next instant, he and Lancelot would turn a corner in the seemingly endless array of passageways inside the Juggernaut and they wouldn’t see a mech again for a while. They went wherever the revolving walls allowed. When they were blocked from turning right or left, they leapt and began running upward.

  He gave up on trying to keep a sense of perspective on which way they were going. Without gravity, up and down became forward and every hallway seemed to be the same as the last. Every once in a while, he glanced at the sensor inside his visor that indicated his position within the ship, but he gave up on trying to move in any specific direction.

  There were no Hannibal armies. There were no rooms of any kind. No command deck. The more he ran, the more he became concerned with what the Hannibal had in store for them. They were aboard a ship that had defeated every enemy it had faced and yet they couldn’t find anyone controlling the vessel.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Lancelot said, coming to a stop.

  Swordnew had to lurch to the side to keep himself from running into the back of her.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” he said.

  She looked around for a sign of the mechs. Their humming was still present but none of the four massive figures appeared in any direction.

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  Back in Orleans, when she had been the lead Carthagen warrior, she would have told Swordnew exactly what to do and when to do it. Now, instead of giving an order, she shook her head, said she didn’t know, and asked what he thought. He almost laughed, and it took him a moment to realize she wasn’t being facetious, that she was actually interested in his opinion.

  The humming grew louder and both of them turned to see if they could determine which direction it was coming from. In the oversized and empty corridors, every noise echoed off the walls, and it was impossible to tell which way
most sounds originated from.

  He turned back to her and said, “They either don’t know what to do with us now that we’ve gotten aboard their vessel, or they’re intentionally trying to tire us out.”

  Lancelot’s shoulders rose slightly and she drew her four weapons.

  “My spirit isn’t broken,” she said. “How about yours?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then. We should let them know that.”

  He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to that so he remained silent. Without asking for a response, Lancelot began to run again, only this time she raced in the direction she had just come. Once again, Swordnew followed.

  124

  Like Philo, it didn’t take long for Talbot and Traskk to give up on running through the Juggernaut. When it was able to find their location, the display in Talbot’s helmet indicated that Lancelot and Swordnew were moving faster than he and Traskk would have been able to anyway. He also knew Lancelot had an indicator in her helmet that would let her know where he and Traskk were. If it was her intention for the entire group to fight as one unit, she could turn around and start heading in his direction.

  “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” he said to the angry Basilisk beside him.

  Traskk let out a long string of hisses that were translated into Basic by a generic computer voice inside Talbot’s helmet.

  “Why don’t the Hannibal show themselves,” the translator said after Traskk hissed. “They’re just pissing me off by making me find them.”

  Talbot said nothing as they continued through the passageways. The translation program offered the reptile’s threats without emotion, as if reading poetry it didn’t quite understand. Talbot couldn’t help but smile at the absurd contrast between what was being said and how it was delivered.