The Eighth Excalibur

by Luke Mitchell

  He hadn’t meant to yell.

  It didn’t matter. It hadn’t worked.

  Why hadn’t it worked?

  “Nate,” Marty repeated, trying to get his attention. “Dude, are you—”

  “I’m fine,” Nate muttered, slumping back against his chain post, eyes front, away from his friends and Gwen and everyone else.

  He wasn’t fine. None of them were fine. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. How he’d actually deluded himself into thinking he might just casually rip heavy chains apart… Well, whatever the Merlin and Lady had thought him capable of, they’d probably realize their mistake once the troglodans were flying around with his Excalibur. Or with the eighth Excalibur, at least. Because if that little display had proved anything, it was that the Excalibur was most certainly not his.

  “Nate…” Gwen whispered,

  He wanted to look at her, wanted to take some small comfort from the fact that she was still there, but he couldn’t bring himself to take her hand or turn his head. Couldn’t handle the thought of the disappointment he imagined he’d see in her eyes. Disappointment that he’d lost his shit, or that it hadn’t worked. Disappointment that he wasn’t worthy. For any of it.

  So instead, he sat there, eyes pointedly forward, stewing in his own silent despair while, at the front of the room, Todd and a few vocal others made solemn promises that if those things came looking for torture victims here, they’d fuck them up real good. Somehow.

  Then something made a firm thud-thud on the brig door, and half the room cried out in startled terror. The rest, Nate had a feeling, simply soiled themselves in silence.

  A metallic groan poured from the door’s latching mechanism, casting a heavy hush over the room. A dark-armored troglodan stepped into the brig, drawing the door shut behind it. Nate couldn’t tell if it was one of the same ones from earlier, but the heavy-looking pulse cannon it held casually over one broad shoulder looked familiar enough.

  It took a few swaggering steps toward the center of the front aisle, seeming to enjoy the way those nearest to it flinched with its every move.

  “Hey, asshole!” someone called—Todd, Nate realized with a small ripple of shock.

  He craned his neck to see Todd leaning forward against his restraints, sitting tall and proud, muscular chest puffed in challenge right up until the troglodan turned his way and took a step closer.

  It started with a sinking of the shoulders, like a slowly deflating balloon. Todd’s mouth tightened, his eyes darting across the creature’s massive frame. The troglodan stepped closer still, and Todd rocked back against the wall. It sank to one thick knee, leaning in with its jutting jaw until Todd bowed his head, visibly shaking with the threat of the thing’s closeness. Then it grabbed Todd by the shoulder, one huge hand covering half his body, and clamped its other hand over his face.

  As many times as Nate had dreamed of seeing Todd Mackleroy knocked from his godly war horse and dragged into the mud with the rest of them, there was something profoundly terrifying about seeing the unshakeable Greek god lose his shit. And lose his shit, he did.

  No sooner had the troglodan clamped its hand to Todd’s face than a pulse of light flashed from beneath its huge palm, and Todd began kicking and screamed like a madman.

  The terror was contagious.

  The room exploded with screams and cries and utterly futile scrambles to either help Todd, or get the hell away from whatever was happening to him. Nate could only stare numbly at Todd’s flailing legs, sure that each moment would be the one that the troglodan incinerated his head, or simply closed its beastly fist and smashed it like an overripe pumpkin.

  He watched, sickened, helpless.

  Then the troglodan promptly released Todd and stood back to its full height, casual as ever, leaving Todd trembling on the deck in a pitiful heap, Emily Atherton reaching for him with shaking hands. In that moment, Nate felt nothing but empathy for the man. But empathy was quickly swallowed by dread as the troglodan turned to face the rest of the room. Turned with purpose. Something was blinking red on its thick wrist, like Todd’s face had failed the test.

  Something clicked, deep in Nate’s brain.

  He watched the troglodan, not breathing.

  “Are-toor-ee,” it rumbled in a deep voice.

  Nate’s head buzzed with the word. Positively spun with it.

  The room went fuzzy around him, dimming whatever Gwen was whispering next to him.

  Awkward pronunciation, some helpful part of his brain pointed out. Awkward, but still unmistakably a name. His name, he registered numbly, even as the troglodan raised a small cube between enormous thumb and forefinger, and a flat hologram flickered into life for all the brig to see, sputtering and tinged red, but unmistakably a human face. His face.

  “Vorshna et,” the troglodan rumbled, “Nah-tan-yell Are-toor-ee?”

  24

  Chain of Command

  He was dead.

  That was the first of the two revelations that ripped through Nate’s brain like a bolt of lightning.

  Somehow, the troglodans had found his face and his name. And now he was dead—messy pulse cannon decapitation pending.

  “What’s happening, Nate?” Gwen was whispering beside him.

  He genuinely did not know how to answer that question, or why his first instinct was to look to Marty. Maybe he just wanted to say farewell to his best friend. Because he had no choice now, did he?

  “Vorshna et Nah-tan-yell Are-toor-ee!” the troglodan roared.

  No choice.

  Maybe these big bastards couldn’t distinguish one human from another on sight—maybe that’s why Todd had just gotten the full troglodan facial—but Nate couldn’t just sit here while that thing scanned its way through the room looking for him. Eyes were already flicking to him, back to the troglodan’s hologram, back to him.

  He had to turn himself in. There was nothing for it.

  He opened his mouth and—

  “It’s me,” someone croaked, in a voice that wasn’t his.

  Nate followed the voice in disbelief, and found his best friend staring back at him, eyes wide with some mixture of shock and sudden clarity.

  “Marty,” Nate hissed, “don’t you fucking d—”

  “It’s me!” Marty shouted. He lurched forward, rattling his chains.

  “No!” Nate yelled.

  “My name is Nathaniel Arturi!” Marty cried, even louder. “Take me and let these people go!”

  Around them, the brig fell silent. Ahead, the troglodan leaned its hilltop head toward Marty, studying him with its dark beady eyes. Then it bared its dirty yellow teeth and started tromping their way.

  “No!” Nate cried, bucking against his chains.

  “It’s me!” Marty yelled.

  “Stop it!” Nate screamed at him.

  Marty wasn’t listening.

  “I’m Nathaniel Arturi!” he cried over and over again. “Let them go, goddammit!”

  “Vorshna et Excalibur, Nah-tan-yell Are-toor-ee,” the troglodan growled, stomping closer, swinging its huge cannon down from its shoulder.

  “Stop it!” Nate bellowed.

  The troglodan drew up to a halt a few feet from Marty and leveled the cannon straight at Nate’s face in silent warning, not even bothering to look at him. Nate froze, deathly aware of the building thrum in the weapon’s depths, and of how casually the first prisoner had been shot. After a few seconds of breathless silence, the cannon swiveled away from him and around to Marty.

  “Vorshna et Excalibur?”

  “I…” Marty was shaking now. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Just—Just take me. Just take me and let them—”

  The troglodan cut him off with an enraged roar. “Vorshna!” it boomed, dropping to a knee beside Marty and taking the chain that bound his wrist shackles to the wall loop in one massive hand. With a hard yank and sharp crack, the beast tore the chain clean in two.

  Nate was hyperventilating, wild desperate panic reach
ing its electric tendrils through every inch of him, building, screaming, threatening to stop his heart as the troglodan yanked Marty closer, thrusting its humming cannon to his head.

  “Vorshna et—”

  Something broke inside Nate.

  The world went hazy, blurred shades of red, like a sea of burst blood vessels. There was pain and sound and movement, and suddenly, inexplicably, he was on his feet, staring at the back of the troglodan’s head and realizing that it wasn’t something within him that had broken.

  It was his chains.

  He felt the heavy links swinging from his wrist manacles even as he noted dimly that, at his full height, he barely stood level with the shoulders of the massive beast crouched in front of him.

  And that beast was turning toward him.

  He didn’t think. Just kicked wildly at the troglodan’s big pulse cannon. His foot connected, hard. Pain shot through his leg. Whether by sheer surprise or dumb luck, the troglodan lost its grip and gaped stupidly as the cannon went bouncing and skidding across the brig deck. Then it turned its beady eyes back to Nate, not seeming to understand.

  Nate was already swinging for the troglodan’s head with the chain hanging from his right wrist, operating on blind Michael Bay instinct. He swung with everything he had, and watched in disbelief as the blow landed, and the gray-hided behemoth toppled over toward the grimy deck with a strangled grunt.

  There was a moment of sharp panic as the troglodan fell toward the guy beside Marty on an imminent crushing path. Then the troglodan caught itself on the deck with one thick arm, and drove an even thicker boot into Nate’s chest, mule-kick style.

  It was like he was watching from third person. The impact was so stunning—so world-shaking—Nate didn’t even register the pain. There was only the up-down nauseating blur of a world gone sideways, then the second impact, hard and utterly unforgiving. The rear bulkhead, some dutiful corner of his mind informed him, right as the pain caught up to his speeding corpse, blossoming through his chest and back and every inch of him like a screaming wave of—

  “Get up, Arturi!” someone growled.

  Nate blinked his eyes open to the face of a crying girl that couldn’t have been the owner of that voice.

  “It’s coming, man!” someone else cried. “It’s coming!”

  “Please get up,” sobbed the crying girl right above him. “Please.”

  Nate got up. He didn’t understand how. Especially not as his insides filled with fire, and he coughed up what felt like more than a little blood. But that hardly mattered when he saw the troglodan picking itself up thirty feet away, next to Marty.

  Jesus Christ, had it kicked him that far?

  That hardly mattered either as the troglodan turned his way, oozing dark blood from the angry-looking gash where Nate’s chain had struck. One of its eyes was gone. And it looked pissed.

  “The gun!” snapped a voice somewhere behind him. “On your right, two o’clock!”

  He spotted the big cannon not far away and scrambled forward. No time to wonder how the hell he was alive, or how he’d apparently kicked the bulky gun almost as far as the troglodan had kicked him. Especially not as that troglodan roared a guttural challenge and charged forward.

  Nate practically fell over in his rush to scoop the cannon from the deck, praying he was holding the correct end. The thing must’ve weighed forty pounds, but Nate was much more concerned with the trigger. Or the lack thereof.

  It was every nightmare he’d ever had, times a thousand. Fumbling desperately for the trigger of the forty pound club in his hands. The troglodan thundering toward him, shaking the deck with its monstrous bulk. No time. No—

  Thumb trigger.

  Never in his life had Nate been so happy to hear another voice in his head. He spotted the protruding stud on the weapon’s grip and jammed his thumb down. The cannon hummed in his hands, building, building. The troglodan closing. Building. Not firing. Screams all around him. The roaring troglodan lunging forward to smash him to a pulp.

  Let go.

  With a wordless cry and a blind prayer, Nate released the trigger stud. The cannon gave a thrumming pulse in his hands, and the troglodan stumbled backward, its massive hand dropping to its abdomen, where its dark armor had crumpled in like it’d taken an invisible cannon ball. It gave a labored grunt, baring its teeth at Nate, taking a heavy step forward.

  Nate raised the cannon higher, thumbed the trigger, and watched in morbid horror as the troglodan’s head caved in with another invisible blast. The beast thudded limply to its knees, then smashed face-first to the deck, shaking the floor beneath Nate’s unsteady feet.

  The room was dead silent.

  For a long moment, it was all Nate could do to stare down at the huge body, and the black blood slowly pooling out from its crushed head.

  “YES!” Kyle shouted down the aisle, breaking the thick silence so suddenly that Nate almost dropped the cannon.

  “I fucking knew you were a superhero, dude!”

  Ahead, Marty joined Nate in shooting Kyle an incredulous look, then he collapsed back against the wall and sighed, just loud enough for Nate to hear, “Thank fucking god.”

  25

  You Always Turn Left

  Nate felt more than heard the cannon thud to the deck beside him.

  “Easy, buddy,” Kyle called across the brig. “Keep it together. Keep it—Uh-oh...”

  Nate was already staggering back, knees buckling without permission. He joined the cannon on the deck, just shy of the dark pool of troglodan blood that had set his legs shaking in the first place. His limbs felt like gelatin, and his stomach...

  “Are you okay, dude?” Zach called somewhere ahead.

  “Your knee,” added a quiet voice to the right.

  Nate looked down and saw that the pooling blood had reached his right leg, viscous inky crimson seeping eagerly into the khaki cotton blend.

  Somehow, that was the detail that did it. Or maybe it had been the alien chest kick, and the thirty foot flight and abrupt wall impact. Either way, that was when Nate puked—one great heaving purge of creamsicle IPA, stomach acid, and blood. More blood than seemed safe for his immediate survival.

  “That’s it, buddy,” Kyle called weakly. “Out with the bad spirits.”

  Out with the fucking spleen, Nate wanted to reply, but then he thought about what else that kick had probably done to his insides, and he nearly puked again.

  You will survive, came the Excalibur’s disgusted voice.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Nate whispered.

  The Excalibur didn’t answer.

  Of course not.

  Nate hauled himself to his feet with a groan, looking down at the giant alien corpse, lost for what to do next. Now’s not the time to clam up, Ex.

  He felt his companion there at the edge of his mind, bristling with… what?

  What do you want, another apology?

  The whispers were starting to spread.

  “Nate?” came Marty’s cautious voice.

  He looked up and saw pretty much everyone in the room watching him. Watching like they were all waiting for something, but too terrified to actually speak to him.

  “They might’ve heard all that noise,” was all Marty said.

  It was enough.

  Nate scooped the cannon up and rose back to his shaky feet. Everything hurt, and he wasn’t sure how the hell they were possibly going to escape this ship—especially if they were still in flight or, gods forbid, in orbit. He wasn’t even sure he was going to make it as far as Marty before passing out or dying from internal injuries, regardless of what the Excalibur said. But escape was most definitely a problem for Future Nate to solve, after they’d dealt with everyone’s restraints.

  He stopped at the troglodan’s body, thinking to search for a key, or anything else of use, but there were no pockets or handy key rings in sight, and Nate was pretty sure he didn’t have it in him to lug the beast over onto its back.

  The beast, h
is mind echoed.

  Somehow, that beast looked a whole lot less beastly now that it was a cooling corpse on the deck. Somehow, it looked a lot more like a dead citizen of the troglodan empire the Excalibur had told him about—a brutal, war-happy people, maybe, but also undeniably sentient. Sophisticated enough to achieve interstellar travel. And he’d just shot one of them in the goddamn—

  “Nate?”

  Gwen’s voice this time. He latched onto it, following it away from the unexpected wall of guilt threatening to fold in around him. She was twisted around as far as her post allowed, just far enough to see him.

  “Got it,” he whispered, stooping to grab onto the protruding edge of what looked to be another gun tucked down the troglodan’s front. With a heave that left his head spinning and his beaten body screaming, Nate shifted the troglodan’s leg enough to yank the thing free. He came away with a bulky pistol that would’ve made Hellboy proud. The grip was probably too large to be held practically in a human hand. But it was something.

  Nate gathered the weapons and headed up the aisle. It was hard not to be aware of every eye in the room following him, no doubt wondering what he was thinking. Joke was on them if they really thought he knew. If anyone had a problem with him helping Marty first, though, they didn’t say anything. Just murmured quietly amongst themselves.

  “What are you?” asked the wide-eyed guy next to Marty as Nate drew up to them.

  “Just your friendly neighborhood IT Guy,” Nate croaked, offering Marty the oversized “pistol,” throat burning with the minor effort of speaking.

  Marty looked at the weapon with wide eyes. Nate didn’t really blame him, given that the thing looked like it might break both of his wrists with a single shot, but Marty sobered quickly enough, and took the weapon with a shaky nod.

  “Why’s he get the gun?” someone whispered behind Nate.

  “Just shut up!” someone else answered.