Nate had rose and crept halfway across the room almost before he realized what he was doing, the soft moss padding his steps quite nicely. It was only when he noticed that the sounds of fighting had stopped elsewhere that he paused, listening.
The ship was too quiet. Nothing but the faintest rumble of troglodan voices somewhere down the corridor.
He stared at the columnar recesses of the escape pods just ahead—his salvation—trying not to think about what that meant for the gorgon and whatever crew she might’ve had, trying instead to think about how the pods might work, and what he might do with his salvation once he was groundside.
He didn’t have an answer. Not one with any actionable steps, at least. Because as much as he’d kicked and screamed for another chance to make all this right, he didn’t have the faintest clue how he was supposed to find the Beacon or stop the trogs without the gorgon Knight—wasn’t even sure he should try, now that the Excalibur had so kindly blown the lid wide open on how much he wasn’t the man for the job.
You wanted the truth.
What I want is my friends, he started to snap back. Then it hit him like a bolt of lightning.
The node.
The node that had disappeared from Marty’s ear only to wink back to life moments before the trogs struck, headed straight for them. He’d forgotten all about it in the mad dash from the cell, but now…
I killed all contact the moment I realized, Ex said, but you are correct. Whatever happened to your friends, the troglodan Knight appears to have captured our node from them. Perhaps directly. Perhaps not.
That pretty much settled it, then.
He didn’t want to think about how the big crimson bastard had come to possess the earpiece that’d been strapped to his best friend’s head the moment he’d winked off the communication board. He just scanned the room, looking for anything that might be useful in whatever came next.
I’d be remiss to not point out that you already have the most useful tool in the known galaxy riding in your head.
Great, Nate thought, tugging uselessly at a mossy panel he thinly hoped might be hiding a secret weapons arsenal. The crate was locked. You go kill the trogs, then.
I was merely providing tactical analysis. Perhaps I could do more if I weren’t trapped inside a baby snargladorf.
Nate pinched his temples, wondering if the other Knights had to put up with this kind of ornery bullshit from their Excaliburs. Any chance you could provide me with a discreet communication link to the gorgon, at least?
Ordinarily, I would say yes. Given that she’s currently under attack by an undisclosed hostile intelligence, though, I am hesitant to expose us any more than I already have.
“Most useful tool in the known galaxy my ass,” Nate muttered under his breath.
Give the word, little hobbit, and I will gladly open the broadcast. Are you ready to test your mighty human intellect against the entity that just brought one of the eight most advanced synthient beings in the galaxy to its metaphorical knees?
Nate thought about that, his mind swimming with images of straitjackets and exploding heads. Maybe we should go have a look first, he conceded quietly. Assess the situation. Quietly.
What a fine plan, Ex said, rippling with smug satisfaction. Allow me to find us a suitable—Oh.
Nate tensed as a pale blue light winked to life on the left, but there was no one there. Just a ladder well, nestled in the leafy green wall.
I believe the ship is offering us directions.
So it is intelligent?
As if in response, the light shifted and began tracing the length of the ladder upward in rhythmic pulses. Creepy smart-ship speak for come hither, Nate could only assume.
Okay, then.
He glanced from the pulsing ladder back to the escape pods, unable to shut out the thick, ominous silence of the ship, and the uncomfortable feeling that this was a no turning back kind of moment, quiet peek or no. Then he remembered the node, and his friends, and the fact that, without the gorgon Knight, they might well be looking at a no turning back kind of existence for the entire damn planet.
The pulse of the guiding light quickened as Nate turned back to the ladder.
“All right, then,” he murmured, stepping forward to take the first rung.
36
All Hands
The maintenance way at the top of the ladder was as dark as it was cramped. A gorgon probably would’ve had to crawl. A troglodan wouldn’t have fit at all. Nate, on the other hand, could’ve managed at a stoop, had he been able to see.
He was about to ask Ex if the most useful tool in the galaxy happened to have a flashlight when the ship’s pale blue guiding light skipped from the ladder over to the low ceiling, and pulsed on down the narrow tunnel, pointing the way to the left at the fork ahead.
“You do always turn left,” Nate murmured to himself, creeping forward at a crouch, and hoping the thing didn’t plan on leaving him in the dark.
The path got smaller before it got bigger. Nate tried to strike a balance between moving quickly and keeping quiet. It didn’t help when he had to drop to all fours and crawl, but he heard the voices ahead now. They weren’t far. The guiding light pulsed quicker, as if urging him to hurry, and he did, rising back to a crouch as the space began to widen back out—right into a dead end.
He frowned at the dead end bulkhead in the pulsing light, then over to the service ladder on the left, wondering if this excitable ship intelligence had led him all the way up and through the maintenance tunnel just to drop him right back down in plain sight at the end. Then, with a faint click and a tiny creak, a panel slid open just beyond the ladder, and the muffled sound of voices clarified.
“—enturies before the crusty old fool admits he was wrong?” rumbled a troglodan voice. “How long would you continue this stubborn refusal to see the truth, Huntress?”
There was a response, but it was too faint for Nate to make out as he lay carefully down to crawl through the new opening. Peering through, the first thing he saw was a wide patch of open sky. A viewport, he realized. He must’ve reached the ship’s bridge. He crawled carefully forward, taking in the smattering of alien consoles and instrumentation. Then he poked his head fully through the opening, and froze.
There were four troglodans on the deck below—two standing guard on the far edges of the room, one stationed toward the center with a struggling gorgon pinned to the deck, heavy troglodan pistol held just clear of her writhing hair tendrils, or her freaking jin, as Ex might’ve insisted. It was the fourth troglodan, though, that commanded Nate’s attention.
He was gargantuan, towering head and shoulders over his dark-armored compatriots, and nearly twice the size of the trogs Nate had fought back in State College. His armor was a dark, bloody crimson, and where his right hand should’ve been, there was only the barrel of a massive cannon continuing on from his tree trunk arm. In his left hand, the crimson monstrosity held the gorgon Knight by her comparatively small skull.
She was pinned to her knees, his massive hand clamped to the top of her head. Her serpentine jin were pressed flat, her face twisted in an unmistakable mask of pain. Three crackling metallic rings surrounded her torso, pinning her arms to her body, and her copper armor was flickering with odd ripples and undulations, as if it might simply sputter out of existence any moment.
Four gorgons lay dead among the consoles down in the front pit of the bridge. The last non-Knight survivor of the crew had been hauled up to the captain’s overlook with the two Knights. She watched her copper-armored ally with grim desperation, agitated jin pulsing like dull embers, paying no mind to the dark-armored troglodan holding a gun to her head.
“Huntress!” she called.
The troglodan smacked her to the deck and hauled her right back up.
“I am… going to… kill you all,” the gorgon Knight groaned through whatever was happening to her.
Mind made, Nate began creeping forward as the crimson Knight gave a deep, booming laugh
below, shaking the gorgon Knight by the head as if to remind her how small and powerless she was.
“You cannot fight this forever, Iveera Katanaga,” he rumbled, sweeping his cannon arm toward the viewport. “Soon, we will have the Beacon.” He swept the cannon back toward the belly of the ship. “And unless my senses told me fibs, we already have the Eighth Excalibur and its spotted human runt back there as well. Why do you resist?”
Nate, having frozen mid-creep at the mention of him and Ex, was vaguely aware both that the gorgon—Iveera Katanaga, apparently—was making some reply, and that Ex was also saying something about how they might interrupt whatever was attacking the gorgon’s Excalibur by breaking the physical connection between her and the troglodan. Beyond that, though, he was too distracted by the sudden Frightened Rabbit Shuffle of his heart, and by what he saw when he looked out the viewport from his new vantage point.
Far ahead and far below, where the crimson Knight had suggested the Beacon would soon be theirs, two huge troglodan ships hovered low in the morning sky above an endless stretch of ocean. Beneath them, the dark waters were unnaturally agitated, ripping and churning with the frothing fury of what looked like the beginnings of some enormous cyclone. Only it couldn’t have been a cyclone, Nate’s brain insisted, because the ships themselves floated on above, perfectly unperturbed. And because the raging waters were flowing down—mixing and churning and falling straight down into a widening abyss, like someone had pulled a giant drain stopper at the bottom of the entire goddamn ocean.
There is something down there.
Before Nate could reply with a well-deserved no shit, or ask if Ex had any less vague conclusions, the thunder crack of a heavy troglodan pistol tore his attention back to the deck.
The last of the gorgon crew members crumpled to the floor. Half of her head was missing. Nate clamped a hand over his mouth to keep from gasping or screaming. He didn’t know which. His head was ringing. He felt sick. Couldn’t even remember how to breathe for the sheer shock of the graphic violence.
A small voice in his head pointed out that that was technically one of his captors who’d just been shot, and he was appalled to even have the thought. Especially when he saw the look in the gorgon Knight’s eyes.
Alien or no, something about that look reached down with icy fists and wrenched at Nate’s soul. She didn’t make a sound. No cry of shock or outrage. No seething death threats. She just looked like she’d come to some final realization about what was truly happening, and what she had to do about it.
Ahead, the downward-draining cyclone was widening, the troglodan ships lining up as if they intended to disgorge their troops straight down the hatch. Nate looked back and forth between the unfolding scenes, inching his way quietly out of the maintenance shaft almost without thinking about it, bit by bit onto the ledge overlooking the bridge, not even remotely sure what the hell he was planning to do once he was out there, only that his window seemed to be rapidly closing.
“Even that spotted runt… deserves the mantle… more than you, Groshna,” the gorgon Knight said, still clearly in pain, but eerily in control of herself.
Judging by the stirring of the trogs on deck, it was quite the insult.
“Very well, Ser Knight,” said Groshna, raising his cannon arm to Iveera’s copper-armored chest, his hand still clamped to the top of her head. “I told the wizard I would bring him your head. If you will not see reason, another will.”
A low whine built along the massive cannon. Nate tensed, filled with the urgent need to act. Paralyzed with the lack of any defined plan. Now was the moment. The last chance. The cannon’s whine built louder, and—
“Dread Lord!” called a heavy troglodan voice from somewhere outside the bridge, where Nate now heard the rhythmic thudding of incoming footsteps. “Dread Lord, I saw the—”
The dark-armored troglodan burst into the bridge and drew up short, looking confusedly between Groshna and Iveera.
“Report,” said Groshna, not lowering his cannon or even looking away from Iveera.
With agonizing slowness, Nate got his hands beneath him, getting ready to move.
“The human, my Lord. The human has escaped.”
Nate froze, painfully aware of how easily he’d be spotted if a single troglodan were to look the wrong way right now. Groshna finally turned his attention to the newcomer, who instantly shrank under his Dread Lord’s gaze.
“What do you mean, he escaped?”
“Our entry breached his cell, my Lord. I pursued him below decks, but…”
Whatever else the trembling troglodan said, Nate missed it when Iveera’s electric blue eyes cut straight across the bridge to lock with his. He froze harder, eyes widening. She gave no reaction at all. Just met his gaze with a solemn depth he could scarcely understand, then flicked her eyes straight up to Groshna’s hand on her head, back to Nate once more, and finally front and center, as if nothing had happened.
Gorgon sign language for get this goddamn hand off of my head?
“If I might,” Iveera cut straight into the string of insults Groshna had been dishing at his underling, drawing disbelieving troglodan glares from all around. “Whatever happens to me, I request you see to it that my friends here are granted safe return access to the Kalnythian Wilds, that they might once again know peace.”
The trogs exchanged uncertain glances.
The Excalibur, on the other hand, was radiating satisfaction.
Clever gorgon.
What?
I don’t believe that request was meant for the troglodans. The ship just pinged me access to its control systems.
It might’ve seemed like good news, if not for the way Groshna was bristling and leaning in close to Iveera, yellow teeth bared as the cannon whined back to power.
“Peace?” he rumbled quietly. “Peace?!” He yanked her up from the deck with frightening abruptness, holding her at arm’s length in a grip so strong, Nate feared her head would simply cave in. “I will eat your lovers’ hearts, gorgon! I will pick my teeth with their bones, and drape their skins upon my Crimson Tide as a reminder to any vine-loving cowards who would dare think themselves above my kind.” The barrel of his enormous cannon sputtered against her chest with crackling blue electric arcs, filling the air with the smell of ozone. “But first, I will start with you, Huntress. First, I will rend your flesh and—”
“HEY!”
Big as the brutes were, there was nothing slow about the way every weapon on the bridge came to point straight at Nate’s face in the instant after the word left his mouth. It was frighteningly impressive. Almost as frightening as the fact that he’d somehow found his feet in his outburst, and was now standing above four angry troglodans soldiers and their Dread Lord Excalibur Knight.
“I… need to talk to you,” Nate added in the dead silence, trying and miserably failing to establish some kind of don’t shoot me yet footing. “Groshna,” he added, as if that might actually give the demand some weight.
At least it left them too busy laughing to shoot him outright.
Yes, you have them right where you want them. Now, did you happen to have a plan?
Nate’s eyes flicked to the trog ships and the churning ocean waters below. Do you actually have control of the ship?
Informally. In a manner of speaking. Kind of.
Well, that was reassuring.
Says the man without a plan.
“Come, little runt,” Groshna called below, having recovered from his booming troglodan chuckles before Nate could share the plan. Or finish coming up with it, for that matter. “Come down here and say what you will.”
Painfully conscious of the four brutish soldiers regaining their senses behind the weapons that were uniformly trained on him, Nate dumped the gist of what he was thinking to Ex as best he could, then jumped down from his perch before his brain, an itchy trigger finger, or a rightfully skeptical Excalibur could decide otherwise.
His feet nearly refused to leave the ledge, and it didn�
��t help that his legs had gone to some rare and exotic form of ice jelly, but at least he managed not to fall over when he thudded down to a hard three point landing on the bridge deck. Ex didn’t even sound particularly disgusted as he acknowledged the “plan” with a simple, Just say when, little hobbit.
The troglodans watched him, woefully underwhelmed.
“What comes next, runt?” Groshna asked up on the command deck, shoving Iveera to her knees between them and casually planting his smoldering cannon to her back. “How do you imagine this unfolding? Will you save the gorgon? Escape and rescue your feeble planet?”
Nate looked at Iveera, who was watching him with an expressionless emptiness, her armor still giving the odd spasmodic ripple.
“What makes you think I’d wanna save her?” he asked, taking the high step onto the overlook deck, and trying not to piss himself as every gun in the room followed. “She kidnapped me and threw me in a prison cell. No. What I wanna know is…”
He faltered as Groshna bared yellow teeth the size of Nate’s forearms in what was either amusement or warning.
“… is where you found that node,” Nate forced himself to finish, “and what you’ve done with the humans who had it.”
To his surprise, it was Iveera, and not Groshna, who reacted to the comment. A soft hiss escaped her, electric blue eyes darting through some series of revelations, then she jerked against her crackling restraint rings, the hiss taking on a sharp edge as her glare locked back on Nate. He didn’t have time to figure why before the crimson Knight began to chuckle, looking back and forth between Nate and the struggling gorgon.
“Is that all?” he boomed, looking around at his fellow troglodans to see if they, too, were enjoying the show. “How very disappointing.”
“Listen to me.” Nate tried to take a confident step toward Groshna, but his feet wouldn’t move. “You… You took something that doesn’t belong to you. You invaded my planet. You—”
“Killed your pathetic little tribe, from what I gather.”
Nate rocked back on his heels, too shocked, too suddenly horrified, to even find words.
The Eighth Excalibur Page 33