The Eighth Excalibur

by Luke Mitchell

  Okay. And it was… only an attempt? You’re not about to go all Skynet on me or anything?

  My self-diagnostics have yet to turn up any notable irregularities, Nathaniel, Ex repeated in a robotic monotone.

  Ha-ha.

  It IS possible the process was simply prematurely terminated by the Merlin’s arrival.

  The comment sounded too speculative for Nate’s liking.

  Highly likely, his companion amended, clearly sensing his concern. Rest assured, if I should happen to turn into a maniacal traitor, you will be the first to know.

  Kind of my point here, Ex, Nate thought, shaking his head.

  Iveera flicked him a sideways glance, like she wasn’t quite sure whether his shaking head was sloppy, or just an odd twitch Earthlings were prone to at times. Nate was just starting to settle back into his own little world when Ex spoke again.

  There is something else.

  Nate waited several seconds. Yeah?

  It’s… highly uncertain.

  He frowned. The suspense is killing me, Ex. What is it?

  Only that, in the aftermath, I was struck by a strange feeling that—

  A strange feeling?

  Do you want to hear this or not?

  Of course I do. It’s just, well, I didn’t know you did, you know… strange feelings.

  Call it an artifact in the signal or a recursive data stream harmonic if that makes you feel better about your squishy human words. I am telling you there is something here.

  Despite everything, Nate couldn’t help but grin a little at actually having Ex in a tizzy rather than the other way around. He was even thinking about going so far as to point out that that all sounded an awful lot like superstition when Ex spoke up.

  Something about the Black Knight, Nathaniel.

  His grin evaporated. What kind of strange feeling?

  The kind that would appear to be reaching past my memory restrictions to tell me that that blackened fiend was there on the day Arthur Pendragon died. And no, to answer your next question: that one’s not in the history archives.

  Nate felt his mouth hanging open at patient attention while his brain struggled to chew that one down to something workable.

  How is that—

  “We approach your city of New York, Runt Knight,” rumbled a voice from behind, catching Nate’s scattered thoughts like a battering ram. He blinked around to where the trog captain was favoring him with a look of pure disgust.

  “Kindly be prepared to piss off,” the captain all but spat before turning his beady-eyed glare to Iveera, then down to Groshna’s head and back again. “And may the blackened pits swallow you whole for what you’ve done, gorgon.”

  Iveera held the captain’s gaze until the troglodan flinched away, then she plucked the Dread Knight’s head from the deck and stalked off of the bridge without a word. Nate, realizing a few shocked seconds later that he was still standing there, surrounded by twenty trogs undoubtedly itching to rip his spine out, promptly followed, doing his best not to flinch as the frustrated captain rounded on his crew and began barking harsh orders to make preparations for their arrival.

  The fact that Nate actually took some small comfort in jumping out of an alien ship a half mile above the smoking New York City skyline seemed to say a lot about how far he’d come since this madness had started.

  Of course, it might’ve also had something to do with the thirty or so glaring trogs that’d paused in their work to watch him and Iveera go, and the way they’d eagerly eyed Nate the moment the gorgon had dropped out of sight.

  Either way, he was glad to make his leave from the troglodan carrier. At least until he remembered that, Excalibur Knight or not, learning to fly with any amount of grace was going to take some doing. Not that looking good was exactly chief among his concerns as he dropped into a herky-jerky hover, and oriented himself after Iveera’s smoothly sailing form.

  Even so, you would be wise to try gravitonic manipulation over these crude thrusters of yours.

  “And you’re just telling me this now?” Nate muttered, scared that even that small effort might throw him off his precarious balance.

  I would have done so earlier, had your mind not been chittering like a frightened squirrel at every pertinent moment. It is hard to make myself heard over such racket.

  Well forgive me for being human.

  Someday, perhaps.

  Nate ignored the Excalibur, trying instead to think about the gravitonic lifts he’d encountered. He had no idea how the things worked, but he tried to evoke a similar effect from his armor anyway, mostly just thinking floaty thoughts. There might’ve been a slight steadying of his jerky thruster dance. He couldn’t really tell. He was too busy staring down at the war zone that’d become of New York.

  “Come now,” Iveera said in his helmet comms. “Keep up.”

  With a careful thought and even more careful movements, Nate angled himself around and thrust off after the gorgon, not quite able to pry his eyes away from the ruined streets below, and the bodies that littered entirely too many of them.

  “Why did they do this?” he asked quietly, almost to himself. “If they were just looking for me and the Beacon…”

  “Perhaps they intended to distract from their main objectives,” came Iveera’s voice in his ears. “Given the number of major cities they currently occupy, it’s possible they bore intentions of establishing a more permanent foothold on this planet. There was even a time when the Greater Troglodan Empire might’ve committed such atrocities for little more than the simple sport and spoils of conquest. But something is afoul with this entire operation.”

  “The Black Knight?”

  “Let us find out if that is the entirety of it,” she said, angling around one of the taller skyscrapers and setting off for what Nate was pretty sure must be Central Park, where several troglodan ships had congregated overhead, presumably to monitor the operation below.

  It was another few blocks before he saw the extent of it. The dull roar of voices preceded line of sight, tinged with an edge of hysteria that set the scene even before Nate cleared the last line of buildings and caught sight of the crowd.

  There were thousands of people in the park. Tens of thousands of desolate men, women, and children herded in like cattle by patrolling troglodans and a crude network of barriers and crackling energy beams.

  Some shook their fists, yelling at the passing trog patrols, who either ignored them completely or rewarded them here and there with a bone-crushing smack or a prod of the oversized stun rod. Most just huddled together in some futile search for safety. He spotted a few army combat uniforms scattered throughout the pens, but most of the military personnel looked to have been sorted over to a separate holding area on the near end of the park. Which was exactly where Iveera was headed.

  Prisoners and troglodans alike looked up at their arrival—the humans pointing and shouting, the trogs mostly just aiming their weapons, clearly raring for a fight.

  Iveera alighted to a graceful landing at the edge of the park, striding from the air down to the grass like a glimmering warrior goddess. Nate, by contrast, thudded down beside her with all the grace of a drunk hippopotamus. He tucked into a roll out of necessity and staggered back to his feet, painfully aware both of the battered state of his body and of the multiple tufts of grassy dirt he’d pick up on impact.

  “Allow me to do the talking,” Iveera said, starting forward with a thankful lack of commentary about his shoddy landing. She headed straight for the gates at the head of the trog encampment. Plucking a dangling clump of dirt from his helmet, Nate followed her.

  Despite having been there when the good captain had radioed ahead that two diplomatic envoys were inbound, Nate was still a bit surprised when the perimeter guards didn’t open fire. Maybe they had some kind of troglodan warrior code or galactic wartime law to thank for that. Or maybe the trogs, like Nate, were honestly just not sure whether they could take Iveera down, even outnumbering her several thousand to
one.

  “Is this... just, like, business as usual for you?” he asked nervously, glancing from the wall of pointing cannons to the troglodan head still dangling from her hand.

  She didn’t see fit to dignify that with an answer.

  Once inside the rust red encampment walls, it wasn’t hard to guess who was in charge. From what little Nate had picked up on, there seemed to be a pretty reliable correlation between physical size and rank, and the troglodan stomping through the yard was nearly as big as Groshna had been. His hide was a darker gray, mottled with muddy spots beneath his imposing blue armor. And he looked pissed.

  Four military men were bound and on their knees in front of the trog commander. Judging by the behemoth’s agitated pacing, whatever was happening didn’t look to be going well for them. Especially not when the commander caught sight of Iveera and her Groshna trophy, and completely lost his shit.

  Whether self-control simply wasn’t a critical virtue in trog leadership or this trog was just having a spectacularly shitty day, Nate didn’t know. But he hardly blamed the two military guys who pitched over backward as the commander roared and backhanded a rather large, heavy-looking crate across the yard. He didn’t blame the third man, who hit the dirt moving forward, head tucked and shoulders packed in survivor mode.

  It was the fourth man Nate didn’t understand.

  The guy barely flinched. Just took a steely-eyed look over to Nate and Iveera, assessed both them and the severed head in the gorgon’s hand, then turned back to the troglodan commander. “Whatever this is, Commander, I need you to—”

  “Silence, insect!” barked the commander. “This does not concern you and your pathetic world.”

  As the trog spoke, an awkward, mechanical voice regurgitated the words over again with a slight delay, and Nate realized he must be listening both to Ex’s translation and to whatever translator the troglodan was packing to communicate with the humans. The effect was a little disorienting, but hardly chief of Nate’s worries.

  Especially not when the military man with balls of steel coolly replied, “With all due respect, Commander, if it happens on this world, it concerns me.”

  For a second, the trog commander looked too taken aback at the raw insolence to even react. Then he bared his teeth and stomped forward, clearly satisfied to have found such a willing outlet for his fury.

  “Do not touch him, troglodan,” Iveera snapped as the commander reached for the man.

  The troglodan hesitated, slitted nostrils working furiously at the air. Nate half-expected the creature might simply explode with unspent rage.

  “You know who I am,” Iveera said. “Let us not mince words and idle threats. I have come to demand your immediate withdrawal from this planet.”

  With that, she tossed her trophy forward.

  Groshna’s head hit the ground right between the trog commander and the balls of steel army man, and stuck the landing with a disgusting wet thunk. The commander rippled with a low, ominous growl that was taken up by every troglodan soldier in the vicinity.

  The army guy, on the other hand, just cocked his head at the gruesome trophy. “Pardon my interruption,” he said, turning back to Iveera, “but if you’re about to make some kind of declaration of war on our planet, I’d prefer if we could all understand what’s being said.”

  Maybe it was just the slight drawl talking, but Nate couldn’t believe how calm the guy sounded. It was only when Iveera glanced over at him that he registered what the man meant. Iveera had somehow been speaking in troglodan, and now she was offering Nate a chance to be useful here.

  “It’s okay,” he said, showing his empty hands to the army man before realizing his lack of visible weapons might be the opposite of reassuring, given what he said next. “We’re here to get them off this planet.”

  The army man looked like he might have a few things to say about that, but the trog commander beat him to it with a harsh bark of laughter. He relayed Nate’s words to his soldiers, adding a few choice insults of his own, and soon the entire yard was filled with chortling troglodans.

  “You slay our Knight,” boomed the commander, pointing to Iveera. “You defile his memory, and offer us open insult. Why should we pay any mind to your so-called authority? Why should we not enjoy the weak spines and bountiful spoils of this planet?”

  “Have you no respect for the old treaties, troglodan?” Iveera asked.

  The commander spat in the dirt. “I respect the old treaties as you respected our Dread Lord, gorgon.”

  “And do you wish to see Trogarra burn for your crimes?”

  “Crimes.” The commander growled the word like a curse. “The Alliance does not give an olar’s shit about this planet. It is nothing more than the Merlin’s backwater playground, and fair salvage at that, I wager, under the accords. They would not dare risk war with my people over these insects.”

  “Then I would see Trogarra burn myself!” Iveera boomed, her voice amplified for all to hear and brimming with an authority nearly as dark and fearsome as the ground-shaking bellow the Black Knight had loosed back in the lost city.

  The encampment fell silent around them, troglodans and prisoners alike all watching the gorgon until she released the spell—not relaxing her proud stance so much as somehow releasing the tension from the air itself.

  “And I imagine I would have little trouble finding allies in the endeavor,” she added, almost off-handedly. “The Asgardians, for instance, would no doubt revel at the chance after the dishonor your noble emperor recently bestowed upon their queen.”

  Nate was already frowning at the word Asgardian when the commander made a disgusted sound and grunted, “Bah. Neo-Terran scum.”

  I will explain later, Ex promised, as the commander pressed on.

  “You propose to do away with idle threats, gorgon, and yet here you stand, speaking as if you are not cut off on this planet, alone and surrounded, and outnumbered by the tens of thousands.”

  “Then give the order and have done with it,” Iveera said, her jin swirling calmly through the air. “Your Dread Lord failed to destroy me with two full carriers of reinforcements at his side,” she added, pointedly looking up to the three massive ships floating low over the park, then back down to their leader. “Do you think you can do better, Commander?”

  Nate was no negotiation specialist, but he was pretty sure by the tangible tightening of every alien trigger finger in the encampment—not to mention the tightening of his own scrotum—that those words had constituted the last straw. The gauntlet was irrevocably thrown to the troglodan commander: initiate open war with an Excalibur Knight—possibly even one-and-a-half of them—or turn tail and forever lose the respect of his fist-happy armada.

  The commander hovered on the moment, muddy gray jowls caught in a perpetual snarl, until one of his underlings came shuffling up to pass a quiet message into his ear. Whatever it was—if it was anything at all, and not just a good underling tossing his boss a nice lifeline—a brief moment of surprise crossed the commander’s face before he nodded and turned back to Iveera.

  “Word from your new master?” she asked.

  The commander only sneered and puffed up to his full formidable height, as if the question wasn’t worthy of a response. “Mark my words, Ser Katanaga. You will burn for what has happened here.” At a gesture, one of his underlings shuffled forward to collect Groshna’s head from the grass. “For now, however, we will agree to withdraw until such time as the will of the Council can be made clear, and my people’s Excalibur returned to its rightful owner.”

  Nate felt Ex bristle at the last bit, even as Iveera’s jin made a sharp slash through the air.

  “An Excalibur has no owner, troglodan,” she said. “Only a partner. And such honors are not decided on the authority of the Council. Your people will reap what you sow, Commander. Nothing more, and nothing less.”

  “Mmm,” the trog commander grunted, looking satisfied to have ruffled her feathers, even if it was only by a hair’s br
eadth. “Rest assured then, gorgon, that I will personally look forward to the reaping.”

  With one last sneer at the lot of them, he turned and started barking orders for his soldiers to pack up and return to the ships. To Nate’s relief, no one argued. The trogs sprang into action, packing up what supplies and fortifications they deemed worth bothering with. Nate was just letting out the breath he hadn’t noticed he’d been holding when the commander turned back like he’d forgotten something and stooped down to jut his face closer to the calm and collected military man who’d spoken earlier.

  “The Greater Troglodan Empire hereby expresses its apologies for this minor misunderstanding, human. May we meet again in honor and glory.”

  Nate wasn’t positive how well Ex’s translations conveyed nuances like sarcasm and unspoken threats, but if the trog commander was apologetic, then Nate was a ten foot clown named Bo-Bo. Mr. Balls of Steel, who’d somehow become the voice of Earth in the matter, seemed to feel about the same.

  “I’ll be sure my superiors get your message, Commander,” he said, holding the troglodan’s gaze steady.

  The commander eyed the man with an odd expression—like he couldn’t quite decide whether he wanted to eat him or be impressed. Then he turned and stomped off into the encampment, booming orders all the way.

  All around the park, trogs were busy hauling supplies to their ships’ waiting grav lifts. The human prisoners, they essentially paid no mind to, save for the few who moved about, powering down energy beam perimeters and removing collars and shackles from those few who’d been individually restrained. Even then, the trogs seemed more concerned with reclaiming their property than with the freedom of the prisoners themselves. The rest, they simply ceased to notice—taking some minor care not to step on them as they went about packing up, maybe, but making no effort to stop or acknowledge them.

  Like goddamn insects.

  As soon as it became clear that the gates had all been unlocked and that the first brave wave of fleeing civilians wasn’t going to be ruthlessly gunned down, the exodus from Central Park began en masse.