“How are you going in and out of the rock?”
“I’m not. It’s an energy field of some kind. It only looks like normal rock on your side. There’s a bunch of openings like this all up and down the cavern.”
Talbot’s helmet disappeared back inside the secret system of corridors.
“Hey, where’d you go?” Marv-Lel asked. When he didn’t get a response, he added, “Talbot?”
Still, the lieutenant didn’t get an answer. Streaks of laser began streaming down at him from up and down the tunnel. The Carthagens were beginning another assault.
79
Lancelot walked through the shadowy stone corridors that led away from the Dauphin, away from her private quarters, and away from where the Carthagen warriors were attacking what remained of the invaders—away from everything she knew. All she carried with her were her four trusty weapons. Halfway to the landing bay where the shuttles were located, she felt a presence behind her and paused, unsure of who it was.
“Where are you going?” Swordnew said from further down the tunnel.
She sighed and turned to face him, wishing he were Mortimous or even Julian. The Carthagen warrior, considered by the Dauphin to be the second best fighter in their group, continued to walk toward her, closing the distance between the two of them with each step.
“I told you. I’m leaving,” Lancelot said.
A dozen feet from Lancelot, Swordnew stopped. They both knew it was the distance that would keep him safe if a vibro lance were to be ignited and pointed in his direction.
At least he has enough sense to do that, Lancelot thought as she faced the Carthagen she had defeated too many times to count. Those contests had been controlled by the Dauphin to ensure the loser wasn’t too severely injured. In the caves leading to the shuttle, there would be no such mercy. If Swordnew came any closer, if he threatened her in any way, he would face someone who wasn’t going to consider whether an injury could be healed by medical bots.
If he had beaten her even once out of the dozens of times they had faced each other, she could see how he might believe he could win again. Given that she had demonstrated he could never beat her, not in a hundred contests or a thousand, she hoped he had the sense to remain where he was.
“I mean, where are you leaving to?” Swordnew asked, not taking another step forward.
“Away from here.” She didn’t owe any Carthagen a better response and didn’t need to explain herself.
“Why are you leaving?” There was no accusation or anger in the warrior’s tone, only confusion.
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding in some asteroid.”
Swordnew seemed to consider this for a while in silence. The entire time he did, Lancelot wished she could turn and continue walking toward the vessel that would take her away.
Swordnew’s front right foot twitched then, followed immediately by his front left foot.
“Don’t do it,” Lancelot wanted to say. “Don’t make me kill you when I’m so close to leaving.”
But instead of coming toward her, the Carthagen simply lowered himself so his two front knees were touching the ground, and he lowered his helmet so he was looking down at her feet.
“It was an honor to have faced you,” Swordnew said.
He held the Carthagen bow of respect for a few seconds, then rose back up to all four feet.
“It was an honor for me as well,” Lancelot said. “Be safe.”
Swordnew nodded, and without waiting for anything else, Lancelot turned, relieved she wouldn’t be responsible for further diminishing the Carthagen’s already meager numbers.
80
After being hidden away in Lancelot’s private quarters for days, Julian was finally free to leave. The only problem was that he wasn’t sure where to go.
Lancelot had said that if Julian turned right, he would pass down a corridor that would lead back to his soldiers. If that were the case, the Dauphin were probably in the opposite direction. They were the ones ordering the Carthagen warriors to attack Talbot and the others. If Julian could convince them to hear him out, they might change their minds and join the Round Table after all. He might also be able to find the controls for the system that disrupted their CABs and also the flagships. If he could disable all of it, the tide of the battle would change in an instant.
When he reviewed his options, his stomach dropped. After his many crushing defeats at the hands of Lancelot, he no longer felt like the great Round Table general who had brought entire kingdoms to their knees by merely appearing in his CAB. If he had ever been the Terror of the Cartha Sector, he certainly didn’t feel like it anymore.
In the golden age, ancient rulers had claimed to be gods. Some did so just to control their subjects. Others honestly believed they were the descendants of all-powerful deities. Julian realized that by having one kingdom after another bow to his wishes, he too had begun to think of himself as a man above men. He hadn’t even been aware of the seed of that exalted self-image until Lancelot had shattered it by repeatedly tearing him apart.
Of course, he would never admit the beliefs that had begun to form inside his head. Nor would he confess to anyone but Margaret that he had been soundly defeated by the lead Carthagen warrior—who, in his telling of the story would be a four-armed and four-legged alien and not a human woman pretending to be a Carthagen.
“Come on,” he muttered, a vibro lance in one hand and a sword in the other, as he tried to decide which way he would go once the door opened. “You can do this.”
He could follow Lancelot’s advice by turning right and attempting to find his forces. However, his only hope of success was in being able to hear the fighting or see distant flashes of light. If all he heard was silence and all he saw was darkness, he could wander in the asteroid tunnel system for the rest of his life without finding them.
If he walked in the opposite direction and found the Carthagens’ leaders, he might not only convince them that he had come in peace but perhaps be reunited with his soldiers. Of course, he could just as easily become lost wandering the tunnels in search of the Dauphin. Even if he found them, they would surely be well guarded. After being conquered at the hands of one Carthagen, he had no idea what to expect from their leaders or from the safety measures they had installed to protect themselves.
Also, none of the blasters or projectiles on his CAB had functioned inside Lancelot’s quarters. It was obvious that some kind of advanced Treagon barrier had allowed certain systems to operate while blocking the capability of other systems. He had no way of knowing how far that barrier extended. If all he had were a lance and a sword, he wouldn’t last very long against Carthagens who trained every day with those same weapons and who also had laser cannons at their disposal.
“Come on, Julian,” he said to himself, knowing that if he were saying it to anyone but himself he would grab the person by their shoulders and shake some resolve into them.
After closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he exhaled, and a sense of calm washed over him. Opening his eyes, he looked at the stone door in front of him, then stepped forward. It began to move aside with a rumble.
For the first time in days, he stepped out of the stone enclosure where Lancelot had taken him apart and medical bots had put him back together. Passing through the doorway, he breathed a sigh of relief as the weapons system in his CAB began to power up.
Either the Treagon barrier was limited to the living quarters of each Carthagen or else Lancelot had installed additional safeguards to protect her privacy and prevent any of the other Carthagens from stumbling across her true identity. But even more shocking than this was the fact that he could indeed hear the echoes of laser blasts and explosions reverberating through the tunnels. His soldiers. His son. They weren’t hundreds of miles away; they were only minutes further down the path.
Any notion of finding the Dauphin immediately left his mind. Instead, he began to run. Each galloping footfall of his CAB sounded with a thud aga
inst the stone and sent a small puff of dust up behind him. He turned left at the next intersection of tunnels, then right at the intersection after that. The yelling was louder.
Immediately around the next corner, he ran into a wall and stumbled backward. There couldn’t be a dead-end; he could hear fighting from that direction. He realized he hadn’t run into a wall at all because the thing he had crashed into was brown and bronze and growled as it turned to face him.
A Carthagen warrior, startled and off balance, braced itself against the nearest wall with two of its hands, and began to draw a pair of vibro scimitars with its other two hands.
Its roar of indignation and anger echoed through the tunnel, like an entire brigade of warriors was facing him rather than just one. It might as well have been many more Carthagens because the sound would surely alert every other warrior within thousands of feet to Julian’s presence.
As soon as it squared itself and was facing him, the Carthagen used its other two hands to draw a second pair of scimitars. All four curved blades glowed and were aimed at Julian. In response, Julian ignited his vibro lance and sword. In the confines of the cramped tunnel, the lance was only good for trying to keep distance between himself and the Carthagen. The Carthagen focused two of his own weapons on Julian’s lance, pushing it aside as he brought his fourth blade down in a slashing motion toward Julian’s stomach. Reacting purely on instinct, he thrust his sword directly at the warrior. The blow was easily deflected by two of the other scimitars, and a third curved blade came rushing at Julian’s neck.
A burst of light erupted from Julian’s shoulder. For an instant, the entire cave was lit up with enough light to eliminate every shadow. A split second later, the tunnel was cast back into darkness. In the shadows, the Carthagen let out of roar of pain. One of its arms was missing. A stream of smoke drifted from the left shoulder cannon of Julian’s CAB. In the confines of the tunnel, the Carthagen rushed straight at Julian. Another burst of light and laser erupted, this one from his right shoulder cannon. It tore off another of the Carthagen’s arms. The alien’s momentum was too great, though, and before Julian could get another blast away, he was on his back with two of the Carthagen’s feet on his chest. With two sweeping blows of his scimitars, the warrior hacked off each of Julian’s shoulder cannons. Sparks flew beside Julian’s helmet from where the bare wires were exposed.
Julian’s vibro lance was on the ground and out of reach. His sword was in his hand but he had no room to move it forward with enough force to do any damage.
Without a better solution, he ejected the ion knife from his sleeve and stabbed the Carthagen’s foot over and over until it reared back. As soon as it did, Julian pushed himself to his feet and dived forward, trying to get the Carthagen on its back so he could finish the job with his sword. Instead, he became entangled in the alien’s legs and two remaining arms. In the flurry of limbs, a vibro scimitar sliced open Julian’s knee. Another blade barely missed cutting into Julian’s stomach. Meanwhile, Julian was stabbing with his ion knife. He lost track of where he was thrusting the glowing blade, wanting only to get free of the Carthagen before reinforcements arrived.
A scimitar sliced open Julian’s forearm, then into the armor protecting his ribs. Julian kept punching with the gauntlet that had the knife protruding from it until he was covered in the alien’s blood and the Carthagen went from moving slower and slower to not moving at all.
It took all of Julian’s strength to push the four-legged warrior off of him and get back to his feet. The effort wracked him with pain. His stomach was burning. His arm alternated between burning agony and numbness. He wished he could sneak back to Lancelot’s quarters and have the medical bots heal him before what he knew was coming next. Already, he could feel his suit becoming wet and sticky with blood. He had to get going before he lost too much.
He didn’t have to walk far before finding his officers. At the next bend in the tunnel, he came to a field of energy that extended the entire width and height of the passageway.
Through the energy field, he saw a great cavern with two barges in the middle. One was a smoldering ruin. The other still looked operational. Surrounding every part of the giant room were dozens and dozens of energy fields like the one he was standing behind. Some were on the ceiling. Some were on the ground. Most were on the walls. If each one opened to a tunnel like the one Julian was standing in, it meant there were at least a hundred corridors surrounding the Round Table officers. In two directions—one in front of the barges and one behind them—there were two particularly large energy fields. There were no long tunnels in the distance in either direction even though the transports had been lost in a maze for days. Instead, Talbot and the others were in an over-sized cavern.
From where Julian stood, he could clearly see every other energy field. But as soon as he stuck his helmet through the barrier, just enough to see from the other side, all of the energy fields disappeared and were replaced by solid rock. The shock came when he glanced at the two larger energy fields. They were also gone. In their places were the long expanse of tunnels in both directions that he had originally expected to see. Pulling his head back in, he saw the tunnel once again replaced by energy fields in both directions. Instead of a single large cave, he once again saw dozens and dozens of hidden corridors where Carthagens could hide while they surrounded the Round Table forces.
A haze of confusion kept him from understanding what his eyes were telling him. On one side, too many secret passageways to count. On the other side, a cave tunnel just like the one they had been lost in for hours before the first ambush.
At that moment, something Lancelot had said came back to Julian. And he understood that she had been trying to help him far longer than he had realized.
“To find the path, you have to walk it,” she had said.
Now, watching the one remaining operational transport barge power up its engines but move absolutely nowhere, he understood what she had been trying to tell him.
81
After pulling back inside the energy wall he had stumbled upon, Talbot told Lieutenant Marv-Lel they might be able to escape in the sub-tunnels. When Talbot stuck his head back out of the energy field, Marv-Lel asked if they might be able to use the secret passageways to escape.
“Yeah, I just told you that.”
The two officers stared at each other, the realization dawning on both of them that it was more than just the sensors of their transports that had been disrupted while they were in the caves.
He was coming to understand how completely they had been tricked by the Carthagens. Not only had a Solar Carrier and Flying Fortress both crashed into asteroids that no one could see, the officers in the tunnels had been victim to a similar holographic trick. Instead of miles of tunnels, they had been in the same open cavern the entire time.
The Carthagens could also somehow hear everything they were saying on the secure CAB channels. Meanwhile, the officers were surrounded by hidden tunnels. And now, he realized, nothing they said on one side of the energy barriers could be heard on the other side.
A wave of sickness came over Talbot when he looked back out at all of the various energy fields surrounding the cavern that none of the officers by the transports could see. If the Carthagens could disrupt their sense of sight and sound, disrupting their sense of movement also wouldn’t have been too difficult.
The entire time the Round Table officers thought they had been traveling through miles of endless twists and turns, they hadn’t actually been going anywhere. Instead of never-ending tunnels and paths filling the entire asteroid, there was only this one cavern, and they had been in the same place the entire time. Meanwhile, the Carthagens had been able to pick them off as they pleased. The aliens couldn’t have hoped for an easier target.
“Lieutenant,” he said to Marv-Lel, his helmet sticking through the energy field so he could be heard.
“Yeah?”
“Power up the transport. Take it further through the tunnel for t
hirty seconds.”
“I’m not going to leave you.”
“Trust me, you won’t.”
“Get in and we can head further up the tunnel together,” the lieutenant said.
“Just trust me on this. Go further up the tunnel. I’ll be okay.”
There was silence for a few seconds, and Talbot knew Marv-Lel was trying to figure out why he was being told to leave Talbot behind.
Finally, the lieutenant said, “Powering up transport barge 2.”
Its engines began to glow. Talbot ducked back into the hiding spot to watch what would happen next. For roughly thirty seconds, the barge’s engines glowed. Talbot’s heart sank when the transport did actually begin to move further down the cave. But it only did so for three seconds—far enough that the remains of the other barge and the trenches they had made were no longer close to it and could be hidden behind additional Carthagen holograms.
Right on cue, a Carthagen jumped out of a secret passageway like the one Talbot was in and dropped a device in front of the charred and destroyed transport. A hologram appeared, masking the battleground where Round Table officers had tried to stand their ground. Even though Marv-Lel was still within sight of Talbot, if he looked back at the tunnel he would think he was in a completely new section of the caves because every point of reference was now hidden.
For another twenty seconds, the barge’s engines glowed even though it was no longer moving. After the given allotment of time was over, they faded once again. When it was all over, the barge had only gone a hundred feet.
Talbot stuck his helmet out just enough to hear the lieutenant when he spoke next.
“Hey, kid?” came the unsteady voice.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Where?”
“About a hundred feet behind you,” said Talbot. “I have good news and bad news.”
Marv-Lel sounded more irritated by this comment than Talbot would have thought he should be. “What’s the good news?”
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