The Eighth Excalibur

by Luke Mitchell

  Are they alive out there?

  I don’t know, Ex said, not needing to ask to whom Nate was referring. Then, after several seconds of hesitation: It seems… unlikely.

  Sometimes, it turned out, words alone could do just fine.

  “Okay,” Nate whispered, nodding to himself, reaching to knock on the cell wall without really thinking about it, his movements numb and dreamlike, brain checked out, watching from a distance.

  “Hey!” he called. “Hey, I know you can hear me out there. I’m ready. If you won’t let me try to help out there, then you’d better come take this thing and give it to someone who can.”

  That’s it? For some reason, Ex actually sounded surprised. One planetary invasion, a pair of abductions, and you’re giving up, just like that?

  “Are you…” Nate muttered. Are you fucking kidding me? Why shouldn’t I give up? You clearly have.

  But you broke the chains. You kissed the girl. Blackened hands, I thought you were finding your way.

  My way? Nate paused mid-wall-pound, frowning at the empty air. My way to what? To your bullshit worthiness?

  To the truth.

  Slowly, uncertainly, Nate lowered his hand from the cell wall. What truth?

  Ex hesitated. Nate couldn’t have said what it was about the silence, but something gave him the unmistakable impression they’d arrived right back at the deep, dark secret he was sure his companion had been holding back since Day One. The secret to their bonding. To his ascension. To everything.

  What truth, Ex?

  It is… difficult for me to say.

  Nate’s knuckles cracked, his jaw painfully tight. Part of him wanted to scream at the Excalibur that he didn’t give a damn if it was difficult—that people were dying out there, for the unmerciful love of Christ, and that it was pretty clearly now or never. The rest of him couldn’t seem to find the energy to believe that anything Ex could say would actually matter at this point. Because if this was the new truth of the universe—if the entire damn Earth could simply fall prey to devastating alien invasion at the drop of a hat, and if it was truly up to a paltry eight Excalibur Knights to stop such atrocities across the galaxy… Well then who the hell was he to take up one of those precious few slots?

  He raised a fist to resume his pounding. It was the only decent thing left to do. Cough up the Excalibur. Hope it would be enough to help the gorgon smite off the troglodan armada and get the Beacon out of here. Even if that meant laying down his life.

  Fine. Give up, then. Blame it on fate, and the Lady, and everything but our own failure.

  Nate was halfway into telling Ex to shove it ad infinitum when he registered that one little word. Our failure. Not his. Not alone.

  It was the closest thing to humility he’d ever seen from Ex. Certainly the closest he’d come to an apology. It was enough to give pause to the growing storm of Nate’s self-righteousness, and leave him swaying for balance with his suddenly shaky resolve.

  “What have you been holding back all this time?”

  I… don’t know.

  On paper, the words might’ve sounded like another deflection, but it was Ex’s tone that caught Nate dead in his tracks. Bitter. Hopelessly frustrated. Like it killed his companion to say even those three words.

  Nate waited, sensing they were on the precipice of something important.

  You want to know why we have struggled to complete our bond—why I cannot simply give you the answers.

  Nate stared through silent space, suddenly afraid to even breathe.

  This was it.

  The truth… is that I do not have them. The truth is that I have no more answers than you do, Nathaniel. I never have.

  But… Nate blinked like a malfunctioning robot. It didn’t make any sense. But you know all about the Knights, and the Alliance, and—

  And everything else which one could glean from a thousand year old browse through the Alliance databanks, yes. But I do not remember my time with Arthur Pendragon. I cannot tell you how we bonded. How we served.

  Ex’s voice was surprisingly fragile.

  I can scarcely remember him at all. Nor his predecessor. No more than what one might find in public record.

  But why? Nate wondered hesitantly, when it seemed Ex would say no more. How is that possible?

  Perhaps… Ex seemed to shake some rogue thought off. I only know what my instinctual conditioning tells me: an Excalibur is not meant to remember how it felt to be wielded by the mind and body of any but the Knight with whom they serve. He was silent for a long moment. Though I would be lying if I pretended that that explanation felt… satisfactory.

  Nate couldn’t say he blamed his companion for that.

  And here he’d been thinking he was the only one without choices.

  Perhaps I am damaged, Ex added, thinking out loud. Perhaps I, too, am faulty. I cannot help but think I might have been better suited to this task if only…

  If only you hadn’t been dished here to figure it all out with a sniveling college kid? Nate wondered, surprised to find the faint hint of a grin tugging at his lips.

  Ex rippled at that. If the Merlin had possessed the time to more thoroughly orient us, I am certain he would have done so. Doggedly loyal as the words were, though, they came out only half-hearted.

  It was certainly a far cry from the shouts of insolent cur and sniveling fool Nate had incurred anytime he’d thought to question the Merlin in the past weeks. Positively friendly and courteous by comparison.

  Maybe we’re supposed to find our own way, he thought idly.

  It was an empty platitude. Something to fill the silence. Yet the words rang with a surprising warmth as he thought them, lingering in his chest like the welcome breaking of sunlight through the clouds on a cold, wet day.

  That’s what she wants, isn’t it? He felt the first audacious hint of excitement flickering in. It should’ve been demoralizing, he thought: the realization that his judgmental, holier-than-thou guide had in fact been flying blind all this time—that they’d both been lost. Somehow, it was the most hopeful thing he’d heard since any of this had started. Because if the one calling him unworthy didn’t even know what worthy looked like…

  Maybe it wasn’t just that Nate was a helpless dud.

  Maybe, on some level, it was also that, despite the long days and nights spent discussing the Beacon, and alien threats, and everything else, they’d somehow managed to avoid ever actually opening up to one another, right up until the world had caught fire around them.

  Maybe this was how it started.

  Maybe this was why he’d been chosen.

  Would that it were so simple.

  Nate slowed from the nervous pacing he hadn’t even noticed he’d begun, the Excalibur’s defeated tone giving his burgeoning hope pause.

  Would that the Lady had chosen you at all.

  He came to a full stop.

  But… What are you talking about? The sword and the stone. She—

  No, Nathaniel. If we are to be honest moving forward, you must know that this is where the Arthurian mythos has been warped most of all. The infernal crutch of divine providence. The desperate belief in the myth of the Chosen One. The truth, Nathaniel—one of the few certainties written at the core of my instinctual conditioning—is that the Lady has never once turned down any vessel who has willingly sought to take up an Excalibur. The truth is that I cannot say how many like you have tried and failed to complete the bond in the fifteen-hundred years since Arthur Pendragon was destroyed. I have forgotten their faces.

  Nate stared dumbly at nothing, feeling himself sinking down to the hard deck like an inanimate raft losing air.

  The truth, Nathaniel, is that you are not special. You are nothing more than a random chance, a shiny bauble idly prodded by a power beyond your reckoning, and the only reason you are here is because you chose to prod back rather than to return safely through the gateway when it was offered.

  “Oh,” he heard someone whisper on a flutter of hopeful
air deflating from defeated lungs. His body shriveled right along with those lungs, and before he knew it, he was huddled back in the corner of the cell, arms wrapped absentmindedly around his knees, as if they might somehow keep some of the fleeing hope in, or the cold emptiness out.

  His fists throbbed from pounding the wall. His insides ached. He looked around the cell and, for the life of him, had no idea what the hell he’d even been thinking it would’ve changed, coming to some breakthrough while he was stuck here in this anti-Excalibur prison.

  “Oh.”

  I am sorry, Nathaniel.

  “No, it’s…” Nate searched for words, distantly aware of the lilting beneath him. “It’s good.”

  And somehow, he actually meant it. He felt strangely at peace in that moment, with the ugly truth airing out before him, and the ship banking gently beneath, turning through some course adjustment. Maybe that meant the gorgon Knight would be back soon.

  What was it she’d said, about his fight coming to an end?

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  Nathaniel.

  It’s okay, Ex, he thought, surprised to find how readily his newfound calm absorbed the edge of his companion’s tense voice. Right up until the Excalibur said his next four words.

  I’ve located the node.

  It was like an electric shock jolting through him, tugging his shoulders upright, filling his head with a thousand cluttered thoughts of his friends and jamming his tongue before he could even get the first question out.

  It’s… Blackened hands, it’s headed straight for us.

  “What? But how’s that—”

  Before he could finish being incredulous, the ship’s steady banking turned to a hard lurch, and the deck dropped out from beneath him. He hit the opposite wall close to the ceiling, and scrambled fruitlessly for footing in the sudden weightlessness. Free fall, he registered, right as it also occurred to him that maybe—just maybe—Tessa Kalders had actually gotten her aerial support, and that his friends might’ve somehow used the node to track him down.

  He had all of an instant to indulge in the farfetched hope before a violent maneuver threw him back across the cell and thudded him flat against the deck. Evasive maneuvers, he had to guess, by their sheer ferocity.

  I don’t think it’s humans out there, Ex offered.

  Nate might’ve been inclined to agree, had he not been too pancaked by upward acceleration to even think to answer. He cried out in relief as the thrust eased off. Then the room detonated with a deafening clap of impact and wrenching metal, and all hell broke loose.

  Sound came back to his ringing head like a gale of rushing wind. No, that was actual rushing wind, howling in through the gaping gash that’d just been blown in the loading bay deck. Wind, and daylight, and—

  The next missile struck. Except it wasn’t a missile, Nate’s concussed brain insisted, as the thing tore through the jagged hole in the deck and straight on up through the ceiling. It was a troglodan. A crimson monstrosity unlike any he’d seen before.

  The massive figure was already gone, crashing through the decks somewhere above. Before Nate could blink, three more dark-armored trogs punched through the now-gaping hole on roaring thrusters and followed, boarding the ship like a stream of honest-to-Christ sky pirates.

  For a breathless moment, Nate lay there gaping at the impossible destruction, too shocked to even think to move. Then it dawned on him that he wasn’t just seeing the destruction. He felt the whipping wind on his face. Felt it, he realized, shifting his numb gaze, because the far corner of the cell had been torn clear open in the mad breach.

  He was free?

  What are you going to do about it?

  Nate clambered to his feet, pitching unsteadily for the opening, waves of nausea rolling through him in the aftermath of the blast. Christ, his ears were ringing. But he was free. He ducked through the twisted breach in the cell wall and started unsteadily across the bay, giving the rushing hole in the deck a wide berth as he tried to orient himself enough to figure out what he should do with that freedom.

  Then a speeding mountain of dark armor shot through the howling opening beside him, struck the ceiling at a low angle, and thudded to a jarring landing right at his feet. Nate froze, gaping down at the cursing troglodan, too startled to move as the latecomer shook itself off, caught sight of him, and lunged forward with a roar.

  35

  Hostile Intelligence

  The troglodan roared, and Nate ran like hell.

  So much like hell, in fact, that he forgot to even turn tail first.

  “Come back, little Earthling,” growled the dark-armored troglodan, making a sweeping grab for his leg. Nate fell halfway to his ass in the frantic rush to distance himself from the hulking troglodan. By some miracle of reflex and adrenaline, he slapped the ground and was back on his feet before he knew it, facing the proper direction this time. Running like hell.

  Behind him, the deck gave a frightening thud, and the troglodan roared, “Come back and I will couple your ass with my fist!”

  “What the hell is it with these things and fisting?!” Nate cried, veering wildly out of the loading bay and into the next hallway fast enough that he was forced to use the pristine white wall as an impact brake.

  They are not an elegant species, Nathaniel, Ex said as a crimson blaster bolt splashed into the wall behind him. I believe we have more pressing concerns at the moment.

  That seemed easier for the one without an ass to say, but as Nate drew up to the end of the bright hallway and saw nothing but doors without discernible handles, he conceded the point.

  “Earthling!” came the troglodan’s booming taunt from around the corner, followed by a grunt that sounded a little too much like a huge troglodan picking itself up.

  “Where do we go?” Nate hissed, giving the two closest doors each a fruitless shove.

  As if by reply, the third door on the left slid almost noiselessly open. Nate eyed it uncertainly for a hair’s breadth, then darted in. The door whizzed shut behind him of its own accord, and he found himself in a dim room that looked at a brief glance to be some kind of pantry or storage. He didn’t have time to investigate.

  Nice save, Nate thought, padding down the first row of shelves for somewhere to duck out of sight.

  That was not me.

  Oh. But then—

  A thud from the hallway killed the thought. Now wasn’t the time to get picky about safe havens. He looked around the back of the room, and flinched at another thud from outside, closer than the first. A thin scraping noise from above nearly startled a yelp from Nate. He tracked the sound and saw a loose panel hanging down from the ceiling.

  That also was not me.

  Do we have a new friend? Nate wondered, moving for the loose panel in the corner.

  I am attempting to establish communications and validate as much.

  There was a deep thud on the storeroom door, followed by a muffled rumble of, “Earthling!”

  Nate froze.

  Something is wrong here.

  You think?! Nate only barely avoided hissing out loud.

  I recommend you calm yourself…

  THUD. THUD.

  “I smell your wretched fear, Earthling!”

  … And also advise that you do something about that.

  Do something.

  Nate looked down at his hands, remembering how the repulsor gauntlets had appeared in his moment of life-and-death need, brain churning for one audacious second. Then a troglodan-fist-sized dent appeared in the door, and he jumped without thinking about it. He caught quietly onto the mysteriously convenient opening overhead by the tips of his fingers, ashamed for a moment to be running, then just mortified as the trog struck again and the storeroom door gave a wrenching groan of deforming metal.

  In a panic, Nate yanked himself up through the opening and plopped onto the deck of a long room of viny green hammocks and moss-coated walls. Crew quarters? Didn’t matter. The room was thankfully unoccupied at the mo
ment.

  He reached back to pull his fortuitous escape panel closed behind him and was surprised to find nothing but mossy deck beneath his hand. The panel had already sealed itself back in place. And not a moment too soon.

  The crash of the troglodan bursting into the storeroom below was somewhat muffled through the deck, but it was still enough to freeze Nate solid. He held his breath, not daring to move and risk the beast hearing him through the deck. Elsewhere in the ship, he could hear the sounds of fighting now.

  That was probably a good sign. He’d watched the gorgon Knight slice through a couple dozen troglodans without breaking a sweat, after all. She’d probably have the ship cleared in no time.

  I wouldn’t be so sure.

  What do you—

  That’s what I was trying to tell you, Nathaniel. Something is wrong. That crimson… monstrosity. That was an Excalibur Knight, attacking this ship.

  “There’s a troglodan Knight?” Nate hissed, then promptly clamped a hand over his own mouth, staring down toward the storeroom in horror.

  Nothing happened.

  Evidently, the Excalibur drawled, as if he were speaking to a child. And something is wrong with his Excalibur.

  Wrong?

  Corrupted. In a manner with which I am unfamiliar. Additionally, the ship is claiming the gorgon’s Excalibur is under attack by some modality of inorganic intelligence.

  The ship? This thing was intelligent? And…

  Wait, like, a computer virus? That’s a thing for you guys?

  A thousand years, Nathaniel. A thousand years of horrific innovation I have not been privy to. I do not know what’s out there. Logic merely suggests the two phenomena might well be related.

  So what do we do? Nate wondered, looking around the flora-rich living quarters for anything that might be used as a weapon—or for escape.

  What we do is ostensibly up to you, Nathaniel, Ex said, as his eyes settled on a pair of tall, bulbar recesses in the wall that seemed to be the only two parts of the room not covered in greenery. But I am not under attack. And those are indeed escape pods.