“We will ascend from here,” Iveera said, yanking his attention back to the cathedral, where she was studying the hemorrhaging ceiling with a focus he didn’t like one bit. “Can you manage?” she called without looking back.
“Manage?” Nate gaped from her retreating form back toward the cavernous landing bay they’d come down in. “But your ship—”
“Is dead for now,” she called, turning to face him from a ways down the aisle. She didn’t flinch as a large hunk of stone slammed down to the growing pool beside her. “We will make our own way.”
His heart sped up, the sounds of the cracking dome and the unfathomable weight above all pressing in that much closer. Trapped under an ocean. No ship. No way out.
“And Groshna?” he croaked, taking a few steps after her, trying to watch everywhere at once for falling boulders.
“Groshna has paid the price for his betrayal,” Iveera said, pacing backward, still looking up, until she drew to a halt just shy of a rapidly thickening jet stream from the cathedral dome.
He barely heard her words—wasn’t even sure why he’d asked at all, outside of some feeble attempt to distract the icy hands of fear clenching down on his lungs. It didn’t work. Especially not when she looked down from the cracking panel above to focus on him. “Are you ready to fly?”
“Ready?” Nate looked desperately from Iveera to the cracking dome and back. “I can’t—”
But she took off like a copper rocket before he could get another word out. He had a second to gape, then she punched straight through the panel high above, and there was nothing but the sound of shattering and the roaring rush of water.
Blind terror spiked from his manhood up to his eyeballs as the first wild wave crested through the cathedral and slapped into his knees with startling force. Then the ceiling started to collapse in earnest.
Focus.
“Focus my ass!” Nate screamed, diving clear of a falling hunk of stone that could’ve crushed a troglodan. He floated more than pushed his way to his feet. Christ, the water was rising fast. To his hips already, rushing past him, pushing him toward the open cathedral door. A fist-sized rock struck his helmet, and he almost slipped and lost it. Too much water, filling up. The wall wouldn’t hold behind him. And when it went, he’d—
Focus, Nathaniel.
Breathing too fast for actual air, vision swimming with ripples of blackness, Nate somehow found the widening hole Iveera had torn through the dome high above. Then he pointed his fists like freaking Superman and flew as hard as he could, not thinking about the thrusters, or the control, just screaming for the flight to happen with every ounce of his frantic will.
He broke clear of the chest-high water just as the rear of the cathedral gave out behind him. He flew harder, straight for the torrential downpour above, doing his best not to think about the drowning city around him. What he should have been thinking about was the fact that he was about to plunge straight into a vacuum current. But he found that out quickly enough anyway.
He lost control the moment he punched through the opening, raging currents spinning him like a goddamn umbrella in a hurricane. He fired the thrusters harder. Smashed into a solid surface. Tried to thrust away from it, and only spun faster. He fought helplessly against the currents, terrified he was about to be sucked back into the drowning city, gunning his thrusters and frantically trying to discern up from down. He hit the dome again. Felt it crumbling beneath him. Spun some more. Gunned the thrusters.
“Help!” he gasped in the frantic whirl, lungs paralyzed, icy ocean water crushing in from every direction. “Help me!”
He wasn’t sure who he was praying to. He just lost it—kicking and thrashing like a madman, blindly jetting through the fading blue luminescence of the dying city, no godly idea which way was up or down.
It didn’t matter that he had air in his helmet, or that the deep ocean pressure didn’t seem to be killing him outright. He couldn’t breathe anyway. By the time he calmed himself down enough to actually start thinking, he couldn’t see a damn thing, either.
He was floating. He knew that. He rotated slowly, searching for the glint of sunlight, or any sign of the drowned city, but it was complete and utter darkness down there, even to his helmet vision.
He forced a deep breath. It only accentuated the hammering pulse in his ears and throat, and the crushing expanse all around. But he could still breathe. He wasn’t being crushed. He just had to find his way up. Ex hovered there at the edge of his mind, waiting to see what he’d do—if he’d ask for help. Nate took another breath and tried to think, hesitant to debase himself even further after having just lost his shit so completely. He could figure this out. Ex seemed content to let him.
All he needed was a gauge. Something that would reliably rise in the water. Something he could see.
Tentatively, he willed there to be light. It blazed into existence from his chest and shoulder plates, casting illuminating rays that, while quite bright, didn’t penetrate the darkness nearly far enough to spot any substantial landmarks. What it did illuminate, though, were the bubbles. Thousands of them. Millions, maybe. The dying breath of the lost city of Atlantis, pointing his way back home.
It was a sobering reminder of everything they’d just lost.
Moving as calmly as his leaping heart would allow, he orientated himself in parallel with the rising streams and eased on the thrusters. He focused on his breathing as he went, keeping course with the bubbles, wondering each and every moment how deep he was, how much farther he had to go. As if in response to the repeating question, a translucent blue number winked to life at the bottom left of his helmet display: -2,833m.
A little under three kilometers, he registered after a moment’s surprise, and the number was ticking steadily upward, rising closer to zero by several meters each second.
Nate couldn’t help it. He gunned the thrusters harder, his relief surging in synchrony with the altimeter’s race to zero. For a few seconds, he was so giddy with the sudden likelihood of survival that he almost ribbed Ex about feeding metric units to an American. Then he saw the first faint ghost of daylight overhead, and he forgot about everything else.
Fast as he was going by that point, the last kilometer seemed to bleed away over an eternity. He almost laughed when he found himself holding his breath in anticipation. Then he broke through some critical depth, and the agonizingly slow approach of the distant light shifted into high gear.
He broke the surface of the Atlantic Ocean with an unfiltered cry of relief, already willing his helmet to return back to Ex’s magical storage locker. The helmet complied, peeling back and flooding his face with the first kiss of blessedly fresh air he’d tasted since he’d rode the grav lift down that stormy cyclone portal.
For a few wonderful seconds, he just hung there, too relieved at first to even realize he’d unconsciously accomplished the previously unmanageable feat of coming to a controlled hover. Taking in the sight of the ocean thirty or so feet below, he almost lost the precarious balance. When he managed to steady out this time, it was with a grin and a ripple of self-satisfaction.
Then he noticed the troglodan ship in the distance, and the copper-armored figure watching him from her own perfectly stable hover closer by, and his giddiness went the way of Atlantis.
“Good,” came her directionless voice across the distance, as if he still had his helmet earpieces in. But the method of her communication was the least of his immediate concerns.
“Good?” he growled, anger rising at the complete lack of empathy in her tone. “You left me to die down there! I fought my ass off to help you, and you just—”
A twitch of movement was the only warning he had before she was rocketing toward him. Time might’ve slowed, but he still wasn’t nearly fast enough to dodge the gorgon. She crashed into him, driving them both down.
They hit the water fast enough to hurt, but a wet smack on the back was hardly his biggest concern as she plunged them farther into the depths. He felt
the panic returning. Felt her pushing him deeper. He wasted precious seconds clawing at her titanium grip before it occurred to him to get his helmet back on. It snapped back into shape around his head with a frantic thought, the excess water draining away down his neck and chest and pumping out elsewhere.
“Are you drowning, human?” Iveera asked, faceplate going transparent seemingly just so he could see her electric blue glare. They weren’t moving any longer.
Nate took a few shaky breaths in the safety of his helmet, refusing to play her game and state the obvious.
“I left you to survive,” she said, quiet fury in her tone, “and if you are not prepared to contend with that, then I had best do the merciful thing and reclaim your Excalibur now.”
Nate stopped struggling, searching her alien face for some sign of intent. All he saw was his own anger reflected in her burning eyes. “What’s your problem with me? I did what you asked. I—”
“Spare me your indignant self-pity. You have no idea what manner of hell we have wrought on the galaxy this day.”
She released him then and allowed them to float apart, regaining her cool composure. “The Beacon is lost, and the Merlin captured. That alone constitutes a greater calamity than I can adequately convey. But so too have both of our Excaliburs been… contaminated. By what, I cannot yet say. So too have the old treaties been broken.”
She wavered, almost as if she wanted to look away.
“So too has my crew been murdered,” she said softly, her swirling jin flattening down against her head. “Murdered by a member of my own order. Murdered by the savage bearing this.”
She produced a small dark something from e-dim. Nate didn’t have to look too closely to recognize Marty’s earpiece.
“And yet you persist, human. You persist while five valiant souls lie scattered and wasted below. You persist. Bearing an Excalibur, no less.”
He stared at the quantcomm node in her hand, wanting to deny it all, wanting to point out that there’d been a hell of a lot more than five good souls lost today, and that it was her fault he’d been separated from his friends when the trogs had found them—her fault the trogs had even found them at all, goddammit. He wanted to be furious with her. Wanted to scream that this was her fault every bit as much as his, that he hadn’t asked for one damn bit of any of this.
But he wasn’t sure he believed any of it.
“I’m sorry,” he found himself whispering.
He was furious with her on some deep, smoldering level. Or he would be, he imagined, once he’d had time to actually process everything that had happened in the past twelve hours. But right then, floating in the dim depths of the ocean while Atlantis sputtered out beneath them and the world above still ran rampant with the ongoing trog invasion—still missing the only four people he longed to see…
He was tired. And he hurt. And tough and collected as she was, he couldn’t imagine Iveera felt any better right now.
“I’m sorry.”
Iveera’s jin swayed lightly back and forth in the silence, like maybe he’d misunderstood some point.
“It is not the drowning that kills an Excalibur Knight,” she finally said, and something in the way she said it made him sure he’d missed the point this time. She sounded beyond weary. Positively ancient. But she shook it off, focusing back on him. “You no longer have the luxury of apologizing your mistakes away. You no longer have any luxury at all. Not on this side of death. Do you understand?”
Nate dropped her gaze, sure that he didn’t, but sobered anyway by the words, and by the tone that was dangerously close to something sympathetic. He didn’t understand a damn thing.
Secure the Beacon. Save the planet from trog invasion. That had been the plan. The entire plan. But the plan had gone to shit, and now…
A school of fish flitted by, glinting blue and silver in the dim rays of daylight. He felt an embarrassingly potent surge of resentment at their aquatic freedom.
Now, he didn’t know what.
Somehow, in all his infinite wisdom, he’d never really stopped to think about what was going to happen if he actually completed the Merlin’s insane task. Back to school, he realized, had been the default assumption. Planetary crisis averted, life was supposed to return back to normal, where he could start licking his wounds and righting the course of his failed semester. Where he could have his life back, for the love of Christ. Where he could be with Gwen, and his friends, and Copernicus. Where they were all still alive. Still with him.
He felt sick.
He felt like sinking back down into the ocean and never moving again. Wasn’t sure how he ever could move again. Because this was happening. They hadn’t secured the Beacon. They’d lost it to that dark titan. They’d lost the Merlin. And now the troglodans were still here. And so was Nate, stuck right here in the ocean depths, being baptized by an alien Knight straight into this holy pile of galactic shit he had no business being involved in.
“Do you understand?” Iveera’s voice broke into his thoughts.
He focused back to where she was watching him, not even remembering what it was he was supposed to have understood.
“If I had thought you were going to die down there,” she said, “I would have shown you the mercy myself. I left you to survive, Nathaniel Arturi. And now there is much to be rectified, and precious little time.”
No luxury. That was it. Not on this side of death.
He stared into nowhere, wanting to protest that he hadn’t signed up for this Spartan agoge bullshit. But he hadn’t exactly been chosen either, had he? Much as it pained him to even think it, no one else had reached his hand out and pulled that damned sword from the stone. No one but him, and his supreme lack of forethought.
“Come,” Iveera said, apparently accepting his silence for answer enough. “The troglodan forces will scatter when they learn what has become of their Dread Lord, but they may well require a firm push, and every minute we tarry is another minute our true quarry escapes.”
She looked up toward the surface then pointedly back to him, faceplate darkening in preparation. “Are you ready?”
No way in any of their nine hells was he ready. Not for any of this.
He nodded anyway.
“Follow me,” was all she said.
Then the gorgon Knight rocketed out of the dark ocean depths, bound straight for the lone troglodan ship still hovering over the drowned city of Atlantis.
45
The New Deal
Staring silently at the enormous, glassy-eyed head lying on the grimy deck absent a body, Nate had to wonder for the hundredth time why Iveera couldn’t have simply taken a picture—or a holo or whatever—to show the troglodans. But maybe he was being naïve. The trophy of The Dread Knight Groshna’s severed head had worked well enough to earn a quick surrender from the crew, after all.
Then again, that might’ve also had something to do with the raw power Iveera had put on display blasting into the bridge of the lone trog carrier remaining above Atlantis. Or with the fact that the other trog carrier was no longer anywhere to be seen since the gorgon Knight had cut loose up here to buy Nate time below.
Evidently, even war-mongering space ogres could recognize when they were hopelessly outmatched. Not that that had stopped a single trog on the bridge from visibly itching to murder Iveera and have Nate for a light snack at the first possible opportunity, but at least they’d held their tongues since the initial burst of posturing and fist-related threats.
Now, they flew in nearly absolute silence, save for the thuds and whirs of the mechanic crew that was hard at work repairing the damage of Iveera’s violently direct entry.
Nate looked over at the gorgon, wondering again why she’d opted to hitch a ride at all when they could’ve ostensibly limped by with what was left of Groshna’s ship, or even flown back on their own power.
“Better this way,” was all she’d said on the matter.
Given that Ex had agreed with her, Nate hadn’t bothered to argue. W
hat exactly they were going to tell the troglodan commander in New York, he still had no idea, but he was starting to trust Iveera knew what she was doing.
Wise, little hobbit. Now perhaps you should stop staring.
Nate blinked back from his thoughts and realized he was still fixed on Iveera. For a half-second, he thought about trying to copy her little silent communication trick to ask her one or two of the few thousand questions eating at his mind, but before he could even try, her serpentine jin gave a curt horizontal slash in what he assumed was a sign for not now, or keep your bloody eyes to yourself.
He turned his gaze forward and occupied himself with avoiding troglodan eye contact and trying not to think too hard about what Iveera had planned for him and Ex if and when the troglodans packed up and left the planet like she seemed so sure they would.
Any luck figuring out what he did to us in there? he wondered at Ex, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet since he’d started scanning his systems for traces of the Black Knight’s so-called contamination. So far, they had no more clue about what the blackened bastard had done to them than they did about where he’d flashed off to with the Beacon and the one man who might’ve actually been able to answer their questions.
My self-diagnostics have yet to turn up any notable irregularities, Ex said, after an abnormally long pause. Only that the… intelligence was attempting to access my executive functions. And quite discreetly, at that.
Nate recalled the torturous episode with an inward cringe. Discreet was about the last word he would’ve used.
Decoys and distractions, mostly. Pain and a host of system-wide attacks designed to interrupt our coherence and obfuscate the true target, I believe.
The Eighth Excalibur Page 39