The Excalibur Alternative

by David Weber

  "No, of course not." She drew a deep breath and smiled at him. "Indeed, my love, I am prouder of you now than ever I was on Earth. Certainly none of the King's other captains have ever had so intricate a measure to dance as you!"

  "In some ways, no doubt," he agreed. "Yet I've enjoyed much assistance and advice, with yours not least among them. And—" he grinned suddenly "—however intricate the measure, at least my goals have had the advantage of both clarity and simplicity!"

  She had to chuckle in response, and he stood and drew her against his side, then put his free hand on Edward's shoulder and drew him into a rough, shared embrace.

  "God only knows how far we are from the world we once called home," he told his wife and son more quietly. "But however far it is, we'll soon be traveling still further, and at the end of the next stage, there will be fresh battle for us to face. And after that, another, and yet another." He held Matilda's gaze for a moment, then bent his head to look down into his son's eyes. "We do not move to our own purposes or by our own choice," he told Edward, "but wherever God sends us, we will face whatever task awaits us and do whatever we must. We have no choice in that, but whatever befalls us, we will not forget that wherever we may be, we are still Englishmen and Englishwomen, and we will remember our duty to those who look to us."

  Edward gazed silently up at him for a long, still moment. Then he nodded firmly, and Sir George smiled proudly and ruffled the boy's hair.

  "Very well," he said, turning back to his wife. "At least we know how much vacation we'll enjoy, and Sir Bryan and his lady have bidden us to a picnic this afternoon. Would you wish to join them, My Lady?"

  "I would, indeed, My Lord," she replied, and his arm tightened about her for just an instant before he nodded in satisfaction.

  "Good," he said. "In that case, my love, let us go."

  -VII-

  The starship's lander was less than a tenth the size of its mothership, little more than eight hundred feet in length, and made out of the same bronze-tinted alloy. Despite its smaller size, its main cargo hold was a vast and empty cavern, for it was configured to lift heavy loads of cargo out to the starship... and to deliver loads of English soldiers to the surface of the worlds they were sent to conquer. Those same soldiers had seen far too much of the hold's interior over the years, but at least this deck didn't pitch and dance like the decks of those never to be sufficiently damned cogs.

  The thought wended through a well-worn groove in Sir George's mind as he leaned forward to pat Satan's shoulder. The destrier shook his head, rattling the mail crinnet protecting his arched neck, then stamped his rear off hoof. The shoe rang like thunder on the deck's alloy, and Sir George smiled thinly. He and the stallion had been through this all too many times. By now both of them should be accustomed to it, and he supposed they were. But neither of them was resigned to it.

  The warning gong sounded, and Sir George rose in the stirrups and turned to regard the men behind him. A score of orange-skinned, wart-faced Hathori stood beyond them, clad once again in their heavy plate armor and armed with their massive axes, lining the holder's inner bulkhead, but their function wasn't to support the Englishmen. As always, it was to drive them forward if they hesitated, and to strike down any who attempted to flee.

  Not that any of Sir George's men were likely to flee... or to require driving.

  The baron and his company were completely adrift in time. Father Timothy had been forced to concede that it was impossible for him to truly know what the day or date was back on long-banished Earth, despite how long and hard he had attempted to maintain some sort of accurate reckoning. Sir George had attempted to ask Computer to keep track of that for them when the priest had finally been driven to admit defeat. Surely such a task would not have been impossible for the mysterious, all-knowing creature invisible at the other end of the voice that whispered in his ear. Not compared to all of the other impossible things Sir George had seen Computer do, at any rate.

  But Computer had refused. More than refused, for Computer had informed the baron that he was expressly forbidden to tell the humans how long they had been unwillingly in the service of the demon-jester's guild.

  That in itself told Sir George a great deal. The demon-jester had been almost careless in regard to many of the things Computer was allowed to share—or, at least, not specifically prohibited from sharing—with the English. Much of the information which Computer had let slip had been useful to Sir George in the subtle bargaining he'd done with the demon-jester on planet after planet. It was always helpful to know as much as he could about the local terrain and the opposition which might be expected in the field, and Computer had often provided him with odds and ends of the history of a given world. More than once, Sir George suspected, he had in fact learned more about a particular planet and the relative value of its produce (if not why its products had value) than the demon-jester would have preferred. Armed with that knowledge, he'd been able to delicately wrangle specific privileges or extra time upon a given planet out of his "Commander" as a quid pro quo for bending his own skills and insights upon the demon-jester's current problem.

  But perhaps even more importantly, the baron had learned other things along the way, things which would have been pronounced rank heresy on the Earth he had left behind. He'd shared most of that knowledge with Father Timothy and the other members of his council, although he'd kept one or two of Computer's more disturbing facts (or theories, at least) to himself. He rather doubted that the demon-jester realized just how much Sir George now understood, however imperfectly, about the larger universe in which the demon-jester's starship moved. Computer routinely used a host of terms which continued to mean but little to the baron—words like "quasar," "nova," "neutrino," "spectral class," and any number of other words whose meaning he was barely beginning to puzzle out. But the demon-jester appeared unaware that Sir George had learned about what Computer called the "speed of light" (although the very notion that light could have a limiting "speed" had flown in the face not only of all he'd ever been taught, but all he'd ever seen) and about what Computer called "relativistic time dilation." The precise meanings and consequences of the terms continued to elude him, since Computer had never specifically explained them to him, but he grasped them well enough to know that if a vessel spent time at or near the speed of light then time aboard it passed far more slowly than it did for the rest of the Creator's universe.

  Given the fact that the demon-jester's starship seemed to spend all of its time ferrying the English from one blood-soaked field of battle to another, the "time dilation" effect had to have been considerable. It was impossible to know just how considerable, but Sir George suspected that Computer had been forbidden to tell them the date on Earth so that none of the English would know how many years had elapsed since their departure. It was quite possible, he thought, that everyone they'd ever known was dead by now, even though no more than eleven years had passed by Timothy's reckoning. Of course, that was eleven continuous years of wakefulness; none of them had the least idea how many years they'd passed in the unknowing slumber of phase drive stasis.

  Well, they did know one thing for certain: far more than eleven years had passed while they slept.

  Not that any of them could have told that by looking at one another, or at any of the other adults of the company, at least. Solely on the basis of the time that he personally had spent awake and aware, Sir George was at least forty-six by now. In fact, he was certain, he was considerably older than that, yet not a single one of his hairs had turned to frost. There was no stiffness in his joints, his teeth were still sound (indeed, three he had lost long ago had regrown), his vision was actually keener than it had ever been on Earth, and in every way that he could judge, he was not a single day older than he'd been on the storm-sick evening when the demon-jester plucked them from the sea.

  Computer and Physician had spoken to him of "nanotech," "retroviruses," and "self-replicating regenerative techniques." For all of the explanation th
ey'd ever given him of what those words meant, they might as well have spoken of wizard's spells or black magic, but he couldn't question the effectiveness of whatever those things were. The demon-jester had promised them extended life as one of the "rewards" for serving his guild, and it seemed he'd meant it. Just how long their lives might have been extended for was something Sir George had often speculated upon, but none of his people were so credulous as to believe the demon-jester had truly provided it to reward them. It only made sense for him to insure that his tools lasted as long as they could.

  And he had insured that they would. Oh, yes, that he had! By now, almost all of Sir George's men had "died" at least once. Some of them, less skilled or perhaps just more unlucky than their fellows, had been "killed" two or three times. Indeed, Stephen Meadows had the hapless distinction of holding the record; Physician had brought him back from the dead no fewer than five times. Sir George himself had been seriously wounded only once, and hadn't required resurrection even that time, but that was atypical.

  At least the constant round of resurrections had put the men's last, lingering fears of the Lazaruses in their midst to rest! And the other thing it had done was to permit Sir George's men to amass a degree of combat experience he very much doubted any other humans in history could have matched. Perhaps they'd spent only eleven years awake in the time away from Earth, but they'd also spent an enormous percentage of those eleven years actually in battle on world after world. They had become accustomed to changes in the air they breathed, to learning what Computer had meant by the word "gravity" and how it affected them and their weapons as it changed from world to world. They'd developed tricks and stratagems to use those changes, and they'd acquired a smooth, economical precision in the field. Death was an excellent teacher, particularly when he was not allowed to keep his students after their lesson.

  The Physician's medical marvels, combined with the constant warfare demanded by the demon-jester, had allowed Sir George's men to pack the experience of a soldier's entire lifetime into bodies which remained physically at the peak of their performance. Even without the impressive, steadily improved upon armor the demon-jester's industrial modules provided, his men-at-arms and archers had become the most lethally effective field force on a man-for-man basis the baron had ever seen or imagined commanding.

  Which brought him back to the task at hand.

  * * *

  Many of the men behind him had once been sailors, but that had been before they found themselves with precisely the same choices, or lack of them, as Sir George's soldiers. By now there was no real way to distinguish them from any of the professional troops who'd once been their passengers. After all, they were professionals now, and their experience showed in their expressions—not relaxed, but calm and almost thoughtful as they recalled their prebattle briefings and waited to put them into effect. The mounted men-at-arms and handful of knights sat their mounts closest to him, forming a protective barrier between the still closed wall of metal and the more vulnerable archers. All of his men were much better armored than they had ever been on Earth. That had been true from the very beginning, of course, but the difference was even greater now. Sir George, Tom Westman, and Computer had spent many long hours refining the designs of his troopers' armor. It had been an almost intoxicating experience to be completely unhampered by financial or manufacturing constraints. For all his other faults, the demon-jester had never placed a price on the equipment he supplied to his captive soldiers. Given the creature's sensitivity to profits and losses, that suggested that the industrial modules could produce whatever was required at little expense. But it also meant that he'd raised no objection to completely scrapping existing armor in order to provide Sir George's men with newer, improved equipment, and in many ways the marvelously light alloys available to them had seemed almost more miraculous to the baron than any of the other wonders which had enveloped them.

  All of his knights and men-at-arms were now in full plate, yet that armor, although far tougher and more resistant to damage than even the best steels Earth could have offered, was unbelievably light. Sir George had grown to manhood accustomed to the weight of chain and steel plate. By comparison, his new armor was but little more cumbersome than the one-piece garments the demon-jester had provided all of them for normal wear. Even his archers now wore finely articulated plate armor, which was something that would never have happened in the army of Edward III. Protection had always been welcome to Earthly archers, but they'd always known that their true protection lay in mobility, the devastating fire of the longbow, and the wardship of the more heavily armored knights and men-at-arms who protected them from the enemy's axes and swords.

  Now Sir George's bowmen enjoyed almost the same degree of armored protection as his men-at-arms, and all of them were far better protected than they had ever been on Earth. Of course, none of that changed the fact that archers were still trained for archery, not for hand blows, or that they still relied upon men-at-arms to hold the enemy far enough away for them to use their bows effectively rather than becoming embroiled in the melee. Armor or no armor, Sir George's entire small army could have been swarmed under by sheer force of numbers by almost any of the native forces they'd faced over the years if not for the long-range killing power of the longbow and the iron discipline of the foot and horse which formed the armored wall that held the enemy while the clothyard shafts decimated him. Over the years of constant warfare, the company had acquired a well-honed ability to combine the effectiveness of its components well beyond anything any of them had ever seen on Earth. In the process, every one of them had learned to rely upon and trust all of the others as totally as they had come to trust Sir George. So they stood now, their faces showing grim confidence, not uncertainty, and returned Sir George's regard with level eyes.

  "All right, lads." He kept his voice even-pitched and calm, disdaining histrionics and relying upon Computer to carry his words clearly into each man's private ear. "You know the plan... and Saint Michael knows we've done it often enough!" His ironic tone won a mutter of laughter, and he gave them a tight grin in reply. "Mind yourselves, keep to the plan, and we'll be done in time for dinner!"

  A rumble of agreement came back, and then there was the very tiniest of lurches, the metal wall before Sir George hissed like a viper and vanished upward, and he looked out upon yet another of the endless alien worlds he and his men were doomed to conquer.

  The sky was almost the right shade, but as always, there was something odd about it. This time it was a darker, deeper hue than the blue he remembered (and Sweet Mary, but did he remember? or did he simply think he did?) from home, and the sun was too large by half. Once again, the gravity had changed, as well, although it was less noticeable because of the way Computer had adjusted the gravity aboard ship to accustom the English to it before they were committed to battle. The "trees" rising in scraggily, scattered clumps were spidery interweavings of too-fine branches covered with long, hairy streamers for leaves, and leaves and grass alike were a strange, rust-red color like nothing anyone had ever seen in any world meant for men.

  Not that there were any men in this world. Not born of it, at any rate. Yet another army of not-men, too tall, too thin, and with too many limbs, had drawn up in a ragged line well beyond bowshot of the ship. This variety of not-man possessed three arms and three legs each, and although they clearly knew how to work iron, they were but little better armed or armored than the natives of Shaakun who had been the English's very first victims in the demon-jester's service. True, they carried large wicker shields and spears, and most wore leather helmets, but aside from that, they were unarmored, and only a very few bore any weapon other than their spears or quivers of javelins. He saw maces and a handful of swords, but no decent pikes or other true polearms, and none of them were mounted. Square placards on poles rose above them at ragged intervals—banners, he realized—and he wondered how long they'd been gathered.

  He knew rather less about this world and these oppon
ents than he had become accustomed to knowing. For some reason, the demon-jester had chosen to exercise a much more direct and total control over the planning of this conquest. Computer had briefed Sir George upon the types of weaponry he would face, discussed the basics of the local clan structures, and, as always, allowed him to actually share their crude, direct tactics through the still-daunting office of the "neural interface." But for all of that, the baron was singularly uninformed about what the demon-jester's guild wanted of this world or how the battle he was about to fight would help obtain its goal.

  For that matter, the demon-jester hadn't even deigned to tell him why this particular army of aliens had gathered here. Clearly they were there to fight, but had they come for an open battle, or simply to besiege the lander? Small though the craft was compared to the mountainous ship he'd first seen hovering motionless in a storm-sick sky, it was still bigger than any mobile object these natives had ever seen before, and he barked a bitter, humorless laugh. Surely the thing was huge enough to be mistaken for a castle, albeit the most oddly formed one any man—or not-man—could ever imagine!

  Whatever had brought them hither, a stir went through them as the side of the ship opened abruptly. Spears were shaken, a handful of javelins were hurled, although the range was too great for that to be anything more than a gesture, and he had no need of magically enhanced hearing to recognize the sound of defiance. It was a thready, piping sound beside the surf roar a human army might have raised, but it carried the ugly undertone of hate.