Margaret sighed and shook her head as she watched the disarray brought on by the hundreds of people who had approved the campaign that sent her husband and son across the galaxy but could agree on nothing else.
“I don’t think I’ll see Julian again. Talbot either.”
“Don’t—” Portia started to say but was immediately interrupted.
“I’ve felt this way for a while. Each time he went away on one of those giant ships the idea crossed my mind. But this time I actually believe it.”
Portia put her arm around Margaret once again. This time, Margaret let it remain there.
“They’ll both come home,” Portia said. “You have to believe that.”
When she didn’t get a response, she ushered her friend out of the gallery and they began walking home.
68
The latest Carthagen offensive had ended, leaving one of the barges a useless heap of flaming metal. As soon as the last burst of violence had come to an end, Talbot ordered Lieutenant Marv-Lel to provide a lookout down one direction of the tunnel and Ensign Burn-Ees to watch the other end. The other seven officers, Talbot included, set about removing any weapons from the fallen officers’ CABs that were still useful. He didn’t have to tell the others why this was necessary; Without more ammunition, they wouldn’t be able to repel the Carthagens much longer. After they ran out of charges for their laser cannons and no longer had missiles or ion grenades, they would be helpless.
As they worked, an occasional streak of laser flashed through the tunnel, hitting either one of their CAB suits or the rocks near them. These posed no real threat and Talbot knew the shots weren’t meant to cause harm as much as they were intended to keep them unsettled, to remind the Round Table forces that the Carthagens were still watching them and preparing for another attack.
He didn’t know why the Carthagens were pausing their offensive, but he also wasn’t going to complain about it. Perhaps they needed to reload their own supplies. One of them might have been injured and killed and the others were removing the body. Or it might be a sacred part of their day in which no violence was permitted. The truth was that they had no idea what motivated the Carthagens because they had come here without understanding anything about the alien race.
After getting the weapons off of Exeter’s CAB and the other dead officers, Talbot looked at Warwick and at Lieutenant Alia. The brigadier was going to die inside a perfectly good CAB and Alia was lying in a useless shell of armor.
“Sorry, sir,” Talbot said to Warwick for what he was about to do.
Warwick, rather than answer, continued to sweat profusely while his teeth chattered.
Talbot motioned to two other officers to help him. As fast as they could, they disassembled Warwick’s CAB and left the pieces on the ground between him and Alia. Then they did the same with Alia’s disabled suit. Once he was out of his CAB, Alia groaned and slowly got to his feet.
“Every part of my body is cramped,” the lieutenant said, finally able to move for the first time in two days.
He continued to stretch and loosen up while Talbot and the others put his powerless CAB onto Warwick. Once they were done, they began assembling Warwick’s operational CAB around Alia.
Talbot nodded with approval at what he saw. His officers had stockpiled the remaining ammo and now they had one additional fighter to help them against the Carthagens. It wasn’t ideal, but it was an improvement over their status from an hour earlier.
A second hour of silence passed with only the occasional laser blast here or there. After a while, the stream of lasers began to increase and a low roar came from further down the tunnel. It was a noise Talbot had grown accustomed to—a Carthagen battle cry.
“Careful, everyone,” he said to the other officers. “It’s going to start again.”
He and another ensign moved beside the officer who was covering what they referred to as the 6 o’clock direction of the tunnel, although any real sense of direction was meaningless. Two other officers moved beside the CAB providing watch over the 12 o’clock direction of the tunnel. Like everything else, they really had no idea where they were and so they had no way of knowing which direction they were facing because of how utterly lost they had become.
Another battle cry sounded. The Carthagens were becoming more confident.
“Careful, everyone,” Talbot whispered again.
Instead of the usual laser streaks up and down the tunnels, the Carthagens sent a burst that almost filled the entire cave with deadly energy.
Within seconds, the initial burst died out, followed by dozens of laser blasts against the stone fortifications, the ceiling above them, and the walls next to them. Everywhere. Chunks of rock fell on them from above. Dust sprayed them from either side, coating their CAB visors. Each of them had to wipe away the grime while they were hiding.
The lasers blasts continued for what felt like an impossible amount of time. They had all trained in the academy for every possible type of battle scenario and yet none of them had ever trained for a situation in which hundreds and hundreds of laser blasts flew all around them while they did nothing but hide and hope they were still alive when it was done.
It took a while, but eventually the pace with which the lasers flew all around them began to slow. Talbot counted ten laser blasts in five seconds. A little while later, it was down to five laser blasts in five seconds.
With a comms channel open to the other officers, he whispered into the microphone in his helmet. “On my count, Ensign Sprigg and I will fire at 6 o’clock. Lieutenants Marv-Lel and Qual-Mak will fire at 12 o’clock.” Making sure there was no room for confusion, he added, “Throw everything you have at them. I don’t want anything to survive.”
The rate of Carthagen laser blasts had slowed to one every three seconds.
“Three, two, one...”
As he and Ensign Sprigg rose to their feet, a fresh onslaught of laser fire and ion grenades came down the tunnel at them. In that moment, Talbot knew one of two things was happening. It was either terrible luck, or the Carthagens could hear what the officers were saying to each other through their CABs and were prepared for the attack.
Talbot’s instinct was to duck back down for cover. Ensign Sprigg’s sense of self-preservation took a different form. She triggered both shoulder cannons at the same time, and two thick bursts of energy roared down the tunnel. But a split second later, an ion grenade exploded squarely against her chest. Blue light swirled around her CAB and Talbot heard her grunt. Another ion grenade hit her faceplate and erupted. Her visor disappeared behind a storm of fiery blue flashes. At the same time, dozens of laser bursts pelted her CAB. One shoulder cannon was ripped away, then the other.
Talbot reached up to take hold of her suit and yank her back down to safety. Before he could, a grenade exploded just above them. Dark matter napalm sprayed every part of Sprigg’s face, chest, and torso.
She was screaming now, her fear and agony being transmitted into the ears of the few remaining officers. Dozens more laser bursts hit her until finally the combination of blasts and napalm silenced her forever. Her lifeless body, the dark matter still dissolving her suit and flesh and everything else it came into contact with, fell into the trench beside Talbot.
Turning, he saw Lieutenants Marv-Lel and Qual-Mak faring slightly better. A cluster of proton grenades exploded all around Qual-Mak. He stumbled backward, still firing blasts from his thermo launchers and also from the cannon at his shoulder. The eruptions of white light were so brilliant that Qual-Mak was able to see a projectile coming right at his face. In a rare feat of athletic prowess, he actually managed to put both hands in front of his face and catch a proton grenade in the gloves of his CAB before it exploded. It was a short-lived testament to the soldier’s agility because the grenade erupted in white light that tore off both of Qual-Mak’s gloves, destroying every part of the CAB below his wrists, along with both of his hands.
Marv-Lel pulled Qual-Mak down into the trench and began racin
g to dismantle and remove the CAB’s sleeves from the lieutenant. Both of them knew the lining to Qual-Mak’s thermo cannon had to have been compromised. If it exploded, everyone near them would be killed.
“I’ve got you,” Marv-Lel said, ignoring the lasers passing above his head while Talbot and the others returned what little fire they could manage.
As soon as one sleeve was off of the sub-zero side of the suit, Marv-Lel threw it down the tunnel as far as he could. A single laser blast hit the storage cell that was attached under the shoulder plating. A burst of freezing air came rushing back at them. The area of the tunnel that had gotten the brunt of the blast was thoroughly frozen.
He unclipped the shoulder fasteners of Qual-Mak’s other armor sleeve and began yanking off the solar part of the CAB as well. As soon as it was off, he threw the down the other direction of the tunnel, past Talbot’s head. It landed a hundred feet away, where laser blasts hit it and detonated the weapon storage. A wall of fire erupted that momentarily filled the tunnel from side to side and floor to ceiling. Anyone within ten feet of it would have been burned alive.
Talbot closed his eyes for a moment and asked himself what they should do next. When he reopened them, he saw the other remaining officers all looking at him with the same expectant gaze.
69
Julian lifted his head off the blanket, propped himself up on one elbow, and looked directly at Lancelot. Half an hour after the medical bots had finished working on him, instead of feeling like a Solar Carrier was resting on top of his skull, he merely felt as if he’d been on the losing end of a fight, which he had.
“Arc-Mi-Joan?” he said. “You can’t be related to Arc-Mi-Die. He’s...”
“Not human?” Lancelot said.
Julian nodded.
“A mix of so many species no one can tell for sure what he is?”
Another nod.
Julian had never met the warlord but he had seen enough images to know there was little resemblance between the olive-colored alien with two mouths and a tail, and the blond-haired and blue-eyed woman in front of him.
“You know what’s funny?” he asked.
The corner of her mouth curled but she didn’t say anything.
“Arc-Mi-Die has four arms and four legs and you’ve been pretending to have the same thing.”
This amused him enough that he chuckled until a searing pain shot through his temples and he was forced to put his head back on the blanket.
“Yes,” Lancelot said, not amused in the least. “Hilarious.”
“But… how?” Julian asked.
“My father’s mother was related to one of Arc-Mi-Die’s grandparents. Most of him is a combination of traits from various species. But part of him, at least the part that runs through my father’s lineage, is quite human.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe that’s where he gets the urge to go places he’s not wanted and bring pain and misery with him.”
“That’s not fair,” Julian said, but it wasn’t an argument he wanted to have again because he knew it would get him nowhere.
“My father was one of the first people to realize Arc-Mi-Die was a sociopath. When family members started disappearing, he took me away.” She looked up at the ceiling, as if recalling a memory. “I was three or four. I remember asking my father why we had to leave and he had this look of panic in his eyes. He just kept saying we had to go.”
“What happened?”
She shook her head and sighed. “Arc-Mi-Die killed everyone. He killed my mother, both sets of my grandparents, and every other person who was related to him.”
“That’s insane. Why?”
“You answered your own question.” She offered a fake smile for a moment before letting it drop. “It’s what he does. People are used to it now that he’s double-crossed everyone he has ever known, including all the other gangsters and pirates who helped him smuggle the Excalibur vessels that were left over. At the beginning, they weren’t used to it, though. My dad was the first to realize what he was capable of.”
Julian frowned and glanced at their stone surroundings. “So he brought you here?” There was an audible tone of doubt in the question.
“Not here. He was just running. He knew Arc-Mi-Die’s henchmen were catching up to him when he got to the Cartha sector. He was lucky to make it as far as the Orleans asteroid field.”
“Some luck,” Julian said with disdain.
Lancelot shook her head in amazement. “You’re being facetious but you have no idea. Carthagens almost never travel outside the asteroid tunnels by themselves, but on that day, one did. They also never go outside the area monitored by the defense systems, but on that day, one did. They also don’t allow guests, let alone take them back into the Carthagen dwellings.”
“But one did that day?”
Lancelot nodded. “If any one of those things would have happened differently, I wouldn’t be here. I would have died as a little girl. If a pair of Carthagens had been together, there was no chance they would have both agreed to take care of a human child. If my father had made his way further into the asteroid field before he was found, the Dauphin would have detected him on their sensors. If it was any Carthagen other than Bookknow, I would have had my head lopped off. It is truly a miracle I’m here at all.”
She paused, and Julian guessed she was remembering an old friend who was no longer around. It was no wonder she was hiding in a suit of armor; it was something she must have been doing every minute of every day since the time she had been saved. Year after year she had grown up, all the while masked behind a Carthagen suit of armor that allowed her the chance to stay alive until she could defend herself.
As if knowing what he was thinking about, she said, “Bookknow was the only Carthagen I have ever met who would take pity on someone like me. He made a smaller version of this armor when I was little. As I grew up, he kept making larger suits. He also taught me to fight.”
Julian smiled. “He did a good job.”
Lancelot grinned and for the first time it wasn’t half-heartedly or with mock enthusiasm but with genuine delight. The sheer beauty on her face made Julian feel like he was running out of oxygen. She was everything poets and painters had tried to capture for millennia in their various forms of art.
Lancelot’s eyes narrowed when she noticed the way he was looking at her.
“Every single day that goes by, I think about the chain of events that unfolded. I’ve been here for—” she frowned and squinted, “for, I don’t know, maybe twenty years, maybe twenty-one, and that same scenario has never happened again. The only time it did happen was that one day.” She looked at the ceiling and then to her side, as if someone else were there. “It’s enough to make anyone believe, regardless of how much pain and suffering exist in this miserable galaxy, that miracles are possible.”
“What happened to Bookknow?”
“What happens to all Carthagens? He died when his immune system became too weak. The Carthagens have technology that your wonderful Round Table”—she waved her hands in a mocking fashion—“can never comprehend. And yet they have never found a way to prevent themselves from getting sick.”
Julian pushed himself to a seated position, then waited until the pain behind his temples subsided. “Why are you still here?”
She shook her head. “Where else would I go? This is all I know.”
70
Lancelot remained in the corner of her quarters while Julian got to his feet. The Terror of the Cartha Sector needed to brace himself by leaning against a wall. Almost everything he did made him wince. Although her guest was moving slowly now, Lancelot knew from experience that the medical bots were proficient in their work and that it would be only a matter of time until Julian could walk and move like he had before. It was for that very reason that Lancelot kept all four of her weapons readily accessible.
She also kept her helmet beside her in case the medical bots came back. Holding it with one of her artificial lower arms, she couldn’t help but acknowledg
e the mere sight of the helmet made her sad, an emotion it had never induced in her until then. After taking it off and being known as something other than a great Carthagen warrior, the helmet began to feel like a prison because it represented never being known as anything else.
“What will you do?” Mortimous asked as he stood next to her.
Lancelot remained motionless. She had grown accustomed to her visitor’s ability to appear and disappear at will. The first few times she had thought she was alone and then heard someone behind her, she had swiveled and drawn a Meursault so fast that no living thing in the Cartha sector could have hoped to survive. Now, though, she didn’t even turn her head.
Julian also didn’t look at the robed figure, and she knew this was because he couldn’t yet see Mortimous the way she could. He also wouldn’t be able to hear Mortimous if he was just now beginning to remember the dreams in which the sage appeared. And so Lancelot was also certain that Julian wouldn’t be able to hear her silent conversation with her other guest.
“I don’t know,” Lancelot said without actually speaking.
“You are at a crossroads.”
“And you are very observant,” she returned.
When Mortimous didn’t reply, she asked what he thought she should do. The shoulders underneath his black robes gave a gentle shrug.
“All I want for anyone is for them to find their true purpose.” He paused for a moment, then added, “There are billions and billions of creatures in this galaxy, each of them trying to find meaning in their lives. You are no different.”
“That’s encouraging.” The side of her mouth curled to let the old man know she was being only partly sarcastic.
“I thought you would find it as such.”
“You still didn’t answer my question.”
True to form, this only made him pose another question. “Will you find what you are meant to do by staying in this room?”
Although she took no pleasure in giving him the credit he deserved and would have liked to turn his inquiry around on him, all she could say was, “No.”
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