The Eighth Excalibur

by Luke Mitchell

  At the mention of wings, Nate glanced down and caught a glimpse past the trog’s bulk of the light repulsor gauntlets he’d somehow summoned into existence along with his repulsors. That was all the crazy he needed to try his next stunt.

  He eased his struggles, ignoring the trog’s rumbled taunts as he settled his closed fist against the beast’s thick torso and thought as hard as he could about Iveera, and her handy little wrist cannon. Iveera, who’d kept him imprisoned just so he couldn’t go dying and handing over his Excalibur all easy like. Iveera who’d apparently decided this entire situation was so fucked she might as well just throw him out of a moving ship and hope for the best anyway.

  Iveera who, if the horrendous explosion high above was any indication, had just reengaged with the Dread Knight and his army to buy little Nathaniel Arturi time to do his goddamn job.

  Best not disappoint her, little hobbit.

  Not disagreeing, Nate squeezed his fist and fired, not even remotely sure whether there was anything there to fire. Fairly sure, in fact, that he’d finally lost his freaking mind, good and proper. He fired all the same, then cried out in surprise when the sharp whine of a blaster punched the air, recoiling lightly through his arm. The troglodan’s arms jerked tighter then loosened, a wet-sounding groan rumbling from its mouth. Nate clenched his teeth and fired again.

  This time, the troglodan didn’t resist when Nate struggled free, planted his hands on the beast’s massive shoulders, and shoved down. Whether the troglodan moved down or Nate moved up, he couldn’t have said. It hardly mattered. Especially not when he realized they’d reached sea level.

  The dull roar of rushing water swallowed them whole before he could so much as shout. In bare, breathless seconds, the sky had vanished completely, leaving nothing but endless walls of white water racing all around, everywhere he looked.

  He kept descending. The shapes of the tunnel mouth and the trog carrier shrinking high above. The roaring darkness all around thickening with frightening rapidity. Closing in on him like a physical pressure, his eyes darting wildly from one black wall of water to another, sure the entire goddamn ocean would come crashing down on him at any moment. He didn’t understand how it wasn’t. A growling curse from below drew his attention before he could even try.

  The troglodan he’d shot was weakly fumbling to retrieve the cannon slung across its back. Nate raised his gauntlet, only then getting his first dim glance at the slender blaster mount that had appeared on his wrist. He took aim, squinting against the bright wink of lights that had appeared farther below. Took aim… and hesitated.

  As little as he could make out in the outline of those distant lights, he swore he saw something like fear in the troglodan’s beady eyes. Maybe he really had lost it, but in that moment, he couldn’t help but feel a sickly pang of sympathy for the creature bleeding out down here as the pair of them were swallowed by the ocean itself. It was enough to give him pause. Then the troglodan gave one last mournful groan and went still, and all Nate felt was sickened, and alone. Alone in the crushing depths, sinking toward the circle of harsh light below, where the cyclone tunnel appeared to come to an abrupt end.

  It was farther away than he’d thought, judging by how slowly the light appeared to be approaching. He didn’t even want to think about how deep he already was, or how fast he was still descending. He just kept his blaster trained on that slowly growing light, trying to get his head on straight and figure out what was going to happen when he touched down.

  The first thought his mind snagged onto was that the grav lift might simply dump him out, and that he’d be wise to have his repulsors at the ready. The second and far more pressing bit, as the tunnel went from distant circle to gaping maw with startling suddenness, was that there’d almost certainly be some kind of guard detail watching the lift below. And that he’d just sent one of their dead friends down as a warning flag.

  No sooner had the thought struck a thrill through his heart than he watched the dead trog speed through the opening below and heard the first rumbling cries go up. He thrust his hands hopelessly out, trying in vain to stop, to slow down. Too late.

  The bay the roaring water tunnel opened into was positively cavernous, spotted with a grid of raised platforms that stretched until it disappeared to the spacious darkness at the edges of the dozens of floodlights posted around the landing site. And at that landing sight, gathered among the several glaring floodlights pointed straight up into Nate’s squinting eyes…

  Armor, he thought frantically, as the blinding light resolved into dozens of hulking forms turning his way on the dark bay floor. Turning with weapons. So many weapons.

  “ARMOR!” he cried, thrusting his repulsor gauntlets helplessly out in front of him. Then a lone, booming battle cry reached his ears from below, and the troglodans opened fire.

  39

  Starved

  The fighting had well and truly started out there.

  The Merlin could feel it in his rather pronounced bones, buried somewhere between wandering intuition and the imperceptible murmur of subconscious perception. He supposed, on some level, that the Lady’s Light might’ve slipped his intuition a cutesy whisper or two as well, despite the fact that her pervasive energies were overwhelmingly being wielded against him at the moment, but the details scarcely mattered.

  Whatever vessels were to thank, he could practically taste the essentials.

  The Beacon was near at hand. They were somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean (which could really only mean one thing). And his Knights—his once proud fellowship of the galaxy’s most powerful, chivalrous heroes—were coming to blows out there like a band of ill-mannered inbreds tussling behind a barnyard dance.

  A short but pertinent list of shoulds and woulds buzzed at the back of his mind like a swarm of gnats, right along with the quiet reminder that Groshna, warmongering brute that he was, might not even truly be responsible for his current actions, given the state of his Excalibur.

  He ignored the maelstrom of useless thoughts. Ignored the vestigial impulse of his long-lost mortality, telling him that he had to do something, for the love of all that was good and just. He would act when it was time. And if he wasn’t acting now, well then, it was surely only because time was precisely what it wasn’t.

  A few lifetimes ago, his Lady might’ve ribbed him on the self-fulfilling hypocrisy of it all. Apparently now wasn’t the time for that, either.

  The fact that Groshna had left him obscured in the belly of the Crimson Tide with nary a single viewing pane by which to experience and savor the full pain of his betrayal and gallant rebellion was proof enough that the Dread Knight still harbored some shadow of a doubt in that big brute head of his. It certainly wasn’t a lack of sadism that had stayed the troglodan’s hand at such a supreme opportunity to rub it in the Merlin’s face. No.

  On some level, likely deeply buried under several glacial tons of denial and bloodlust, Groshna was still frightened that he’d made a fatal error, turning on the Merlin. Probably, funnily enough, more frightened than the Merlin would’ve been himself, had they somehow switched places. Because as arrogant as countless generations of unrivaled power had clearly made him, for the first time in longer than he could remember (hells, in longer than history could remember), the Merlin honestly wasn’t sure what would happen next. Even once he was freed from this cell—

  He frowned at the thought, attuning his senses more carefully to the Lady’s voice. A premonition, maybe? Or just immortal inevitability?

  Nothing but good old subconscious perception, he finally decided—right as the Crimson Tide gave the first barely distinguishable vibration of impact.

  “Hmm,” he said to the empty brig, the ghost of a humorless smile tugging at his lips. Almost time, then.

  No sooner had he thought it than the ceiling collapsed inward in a groaning crash of slagged metal and superheated carbon, and a copper-armored angel of vengeance slammed down to the deck, radiating with a kind of rage he’d only ever seen fro
m her once before, nearly six hundred years past.

  That rage had matured into something truly breathtaking to behold.

  It died the moment Iveera Katanaga caught sight of him, serpentine jin freezing in place around her head, dark faceplate peeling back like she couldn’t trust anything less than those captivating bioluminescent eyes of hers.

  “Emrys,” she whispered, like she still couldn’t quite believe it.

  “My clever huntress.”

  “My Merlin, I…” Those radiant eyes took in his ragged, emaciated state and the cell he was in, flickering with understandable confusion, then she snapped her bladed kaija up, as if she’d just remembered she had a bloodthirsty Dread Knight on her tail, and not a moment to spare.

  Despite having been built to contain rather than to repel, the cell was no fragile egg to be cracked. But nor was Ser Katanaga one to be deterred. As soon as she saw the first sizzling blue blaster bolt splash uselessly against the cell wall—and as soon as the Merlin had hobbled to his feet and stepped as clear as he could—she hauled back and unleashed a force that probably could’ve torn a ship in half. A force that quite likely had torn a ship in half a few weeks earlier, he now suspected, prior to his unfortunate arrival at Golnak mining installation C-73.

  Which is to say, inside the cell, things got more than a little toasty. He smelled the charring flesh. Was aware of the curling wisps of smoke drifting up from his own person. Was infinitely more interested in the deep, satisfying crack of his infernal prison making like an egg, and relenting its hold.

  Before he could so much as thank his rescuer—before he could even properly see her in the dwindling afterburn of the torrential blast—a howling crimson mountain ripped through the wrecked ceiling in a speeding blur and punched straight through the deck, carrying Iveera Katanaga with it.

  “Thank you,” the Merlin murmured to the empty brig and to the sounds of groaning metal and rushing wind. He crossed to the cracked corner of the cell and let out a groan as he encountered the infinitely complex borders of e-dim space unfurling into the breach. The energy began trickling back into his body. He reached a still smoking hand through the jagged gap, and allowed the trickle to become a veritable flow.

  Immortal or not, refeeding was never a pleasant sensation.

  Then again, he thought, reaching out for his loyal Fifth Knight with his mind, neither was getting smashed through the ventral hull of a Knight ship by an Excalibur-powered troglodan.

  “My Merlin,” came Iveera Katanaga’s voice in his mind a moment later, strained with the sounds of ongoing battle, and possibly even a bit pained. “I will return for you as soon as Ser Groshna is—”

  Even through the comms, it was hard to miss the sound of Groshna’s furious roar, and the thunderclap of impact that followed.

  “Do not worry about me, my huntress,” said the Merlin, raising a foot entirely too laboriously, and kicking a loose piece of the shattered cell free as the sounds of fighting escalated in his head. “Ser Groshna is…”

  He took a ragged breath and kicked out another piece, hesitating over his next words, wondering if they were really true.

  The Lady said nothing.

  “Ser Groshna is beyond our ability to help. You have my permission to stop him by any means necessary.”

  He felt more than actually heard the gorgon’s acknowledgement, immersed as she was in the heat of battle. He kicked out one last piece of his cracked egg prison, widening the gap enough to let him slip through, and stood there staring.

  “Iveera…”

  He felt her mind hovering there like an inquisitive hummingbird. So young and loyal. So attentive, even in the midst of a genuine fight for her life.

  Nine sodding hells, was he tired.

  “There is something else I must tell you.”

  40

  Excessive Force

  “Shiiiit!” Nate screamed as he tore free from the grav lift’s beam and immediately spiraled out of control with nothing but thin air and a hail of trog gunfire between himself and the bay floor a few hundred feet below.

  If he’d had more than a split second to think about it, Nate might’ve realized just how many ways it could go wrong, throwing his repulsors to full burn from the center of a grav beam. He might’ve remembered that he’d been riding that grav beam for a reason.

  In that moment, though, watching a few dozen trog weapons all swiveling up to end him, all he’d been able to think about was breaking free of the beam ferrying him straight down like a nice little bit of target practice.

  And now…

  Now, something caught him in the ribs like a speeding fist as he fell. He thrust his hands and legs out and tried a stabilizing repulsor burst that only seemed to make things worse. A few more somethings smacked at his legs and arms, and it was all he could do to hope his prayer for armor had somehow been answered.

  It hardly seemed to matter as the dark ground leapt up to meet him.

  He did his best to tuck and roll, just like he’d done a few lifetimes ago, jumping from Emily Atherton’s rooftop. Just like that—except for the army of space ogres shooting at him, of course, and for the breakneck speed with which he struck the dark floor, which happened to feel just like solid, bone-breaking stone.

  He couldn’t have said how many total revolutions he bounced through. Only that he was rather surprised to be bouncing at all, and that it seemed to last longer than it should’ve before he finally rolled to a jerky halt on his knees, apparently not dead. By some minor miracle, he’d even ended up tucked behind the cover of one of the bay’s elevated landing platforms.

  Harsh troglodan shouts quickly killed his miniscule relief. They were coming, their voices echoing through the cavernous space, their shadows leering every which way in the harsh burn of the floodlights. Nate braced a hand to his knee, thinking to push to his feet and keep moving, but faltered when his repulsor gauntlet brushed against something that was decidedly not his own squishy thigh.

  Congratulations. It appears you’ve managed your first kinetic barrier.

  He looked down confusedly, and stiffened at the sight of the shimmering, pale blue light that clung to his every surface like a holo catsuit. Some kind of energy barrier, he thought, patting himself across the arms and the back and—

  Blackened hands! Behind you!

  Nate spun and found two troglodans leveling heavy rifles at him at the corner of the platform. He threw his arms up by pure useless reflex, wondering if the barrier would hold, noting with dim horror that the shimmering light seemed to wane at the thought alone.

  He opened his mouth to cry for them to stop, to please just wait a goddamn minute. Something slammed into his back before he could. He left ground, and struck back down with a breathless whoomph, tumbling across the damp stone. Tumbling right to a neat stop on his back, looking up from the feet of the two riflemen.

  For a second, they were all too surprised to move. Then a third trog stepped in between his fellows, teeth jutting out in a satisfied trog grin, and shoved a humming pulse cannon in Nate’s face.

  Time slowed.

  There were too many. Even if he could slip free of these three and the one who’d struck him from behind, there were dozens more. He couldn’t. Couldn’t possibly—

  Are you an Excalibur Knight, Nathaniel? Or are you not?

  He saw Iveera’s phosphorescent stare, silently asking him the same. Saw Marty’s face, and Gwen’s. Zack’s and Kyle’s. Saw Groshna’s laughing sneer, and felt the kindling anger he’d been too bounced around since the bridge to even properly register.

  He was a Knight today, Iveera had told him. Whether he liked it or not. And she hadn’t thrown him down here to die. She’d thrown him down here to do a job. To protect his world.

  His armored hand struck out almost before he knew it, shoving the humming cannon barrel out of his face, sending a slow-motion ripple of surprise across the troglodan’s face.

  Maybe Nate was nothing. Maybe the Lady and the Merlin had chosen wron
g. But that hadn’t stopped him from breaking his friends out of that brig, had it? It hadn’t stopped him from prying Iveera out of Groshna’s viral death grip. He had done those things.

  On either side, the other two trogs were raising their rifles.

  He, Nathaniel “IT Guy” Arturi, had acted when every fiber in his body had told him it was madness. And Ex had been there for him. Just like he was now—hovering right there, waiting for Nate to simply reach out and take the power. Waiting like he had been all along.

  Two heavy trog rifles aimed at his head, thick fingers tightening on the firing studs in that strangely dilated slow motion.

  Fuck it.

  Nate threw his arms wide and fired with both of his wrist blasters, no longer questioning if they’d be there or not. He felt the quiet mountain of power hovering all around him, embracing him in its snug grip even as he reached out for it. Felt it as surely as he saw the twin flashes of blue blaster fire light the shadows, and heard the troglodans roar.

  Nate fired again, and time sped right the hell back up all around him.

  He clapped his hands back to the pulse cannon descending for his face, and heaved as hard as he could, intending to rip it free from the troglodan’s hands. What he hadn’t accounted for was the fact that the weapon was strapped around the troglodan’s back.

  The trog staggered forward like a falling tree, and Nate—to his extreme surprise—went shooting the other direction, sliding between tree-trunk legs and across the floor like a man-sized shuffleboard disc. Sliding entirely too far, he noted, right along with the disconcerting scraping sound coming from beneath him.

  Enemy fire rang out before he could question it, pouring in from seemingly all directions, kicking up wet chunks of stone and grit all around him. Something smacked at his legs. Several somethings. He focused on the thought of his defenses and dug a shoulder into the stone, tucking the last of his sliding momentum up into a backward roll.