The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3)

by Chris Dietzel

  Still, nobody could blame the mech drivers for taking the path into the narrows. After all, it meant escaping the vast array of Round Table cannons situated on the rest of the battlefield.

  Swerving around the mechs that had been destroyed by the landscape-changing blast, dozens of additional mechs and hundreds of armored transports continued forward, taking their chance on the unknown of the narrows and the Gur-Khan who waited there for them.

  89

  Once she got back to her feet, Morgan observed the same modified landscape and overall destruction from her perspective at the Vonnegan side of the battlefield. A tremendous explosion had wiped out everything near the wall. The blast had continued along much of zone one, enveloping everything in its path. Looking through her binoculars was of no use until she changed the setting. With normal lenses, all she could see initially was a cloud of dust. After the optics were switched to a different spectrum, she could clearly see that, as powerful as the blast had been, the capital wall was unscathed. The Gur-Khan must have used extremely precise directional explosives to confine the damage to one place and not another, while also forming the two long ridges that created the narrows.

  Walking back inside Mowbray’s command center, her soldiers looked to her for new orders. They had taken over the command center simply because they were there—unlike anyone from the Vonnegan side.

  In the corner, a lone Vonnegan trooper had his helmet off and his hands bound together. He had entered the command center following the explosion to see if any officers had been injured.

  “Where’d they go?” Morgan asked him.

  She expected him to remain silent, fearing some kind of reprisal from Mowbray.

  Instead, the Vonnegan trooper shrugged and said, “Must have gone forward.”

  “Forward?”

  Again, the Vonnegan trooper shrugged.

  Morgan gripped the handle of her Meursault blade as hard as she could. The hope was that by doing this she would release some of the frustration building up inside her. She had missed her chance to drive her sword through Mowbray’s chest, and now, he was heading in the direction she had just come from.

  It wasn’t just the fact that she missed him that drove her mad, it was the realization that an all-out Vonnegan assault had begun. That was the only explanation for the command tent being abandoned. By now, between both the Vonnegan and CasterLan trenchers, there would be close to two hundred different tunnels underground. Mowbray’s forces would be making their way toward CamaLon via these underground paths. Above ground, the field was being flooded with Vonnegan transports and mechs.

  “Did he go above or below ground?”

  Rather than look at Morgan, the Vonnegan trooper scanned the room and the rest of her squad. Taking his chin in her hand, she forced him to look at her.

  “Above or below ground?” A moment later, when he still hadn’t answered, she added, “I’ve broken my own friends’ noses more times than I can count. You don’t want to see what I’ll do to you.”

  The corner of the trooper’s mouth twitched. Even if he believed her threat, it was likely he had also seen exactly what Mowbray and his Fianna were capable of. Looking around the empty command center one more time, seeing it filled only with his enemy, he sighed.

  “Underground, I think.”

  Immediately, Morgan was at the entrance to the tent. “You two,” she said, pointing to a pair of her soldiers, “search the room for any intelligence we might be able to use. Everyone else, come with me.”

  And then she was running. Down into the tunnels. Racing to find Mowbray. She would have her revenge on him before anyone else had the chance.

  90

  Mowbray’s nine Fianna surrounded him as he walked. As he made his way through the tunnels, he tapped buttons on a display wrapped around his wrist, trying to gather information about the blast that had taken place moments earlier. While he strode through the darkness, smooth dirt walls on either side of him, he learned that an explosion had just turned the fields of Aromath the Solemn into the hills of Aromath the Solemn. In addition to creating two long crests, the blast had been strong enough to shake the tunnels and cause many of them to collapse. Reports were coming in that dozens of his mechs, the ones closest to the capital wall, had all been destroyed. It was unknown exactly how many mechs and transports were still above ground. His generals were actively collecting that information.

  In the tunnels, his Fianna moved with fluidity, ensuring they always encircled him without bumping into him or each other. When he turned left at a fork in the tunnels, they adjusted their speed to maintain the same distance around him at all times without slowing him down.

  At the beginning of a long stretch of tunnel, a CasterLan soldier jumped out of the shadows with his staff blaster. Before he could swing the weapon’s blade or point its barrel at the Vonnegan leader, the soldier was cut into two pieces and lay dead on the ground. Mowbray continued forward without slowing his pace or saying a word.

  In a tunnel like this, with noises and explosions all around them and the ground shaking, the Fianna knew to kill anything at all that moved. Not even Mowbray’s highest ranking generals would survive trying to approach their leader in such an unpredictable setting.

  No matter what the latest reports said, Mowbray knew there was only one tactic that made sense. He had set his forces on attacking. Not just now, but at each phase of the operation. From armored mechs coming out of the forest to trench machines burrowing underground to Thunderbolts flying above the surface. He had set this path, a path that had to be followed to its end. The only alternative was turning around and leaving. If he did, the Round Table forces would be victorious, his own subjects would revolt, and he would lose his kingdom. He would die before allowing that to happen, and so he continued straight ahead.

  It didn’t matter that more than fifty armored mechs had either been destroyed outright or had been sent flying through the air so far that they were useless once they came to rest. It didn’t matter that his forces were currently streaming into a narrow divide created by two newly formed ridges. All that mattered was continuing the attack. He would not only show his troops that he was invincible, he would prove it to the leaders who had answered Vere’s call. The round table would be history before it started, and those that survived its miserable failure would never recover from their error.

  There was one choice and one choice only. Keep moving forward. Destroy everything in his path. Defeat Vere CasterLan so thoroughly that she would wish she had never escaped the Cauldrons of Dagda or thought of this preposterous round table.

  91

  One message after another came through the comm system, each reporting that every Vonnegan machine of war entering between the ridges was being destroyed. At the narrowest part of the pass, where only one mech could proceed forward at a time, the smoldering and charred remains of other armored mechs now blocked the way. As a result, a line of transports and mechs was bottlenecked with no way through.

  Some of these transports opened their hatches to unleash squads of Vonnegan troopers, all of whom immediately rushed out to kill the Gur-Khan. Instead, they were obliterated by laser fire that had no discernable source. When the next team of Vonnegan troops tried to determine the location of the weapons that had just decimated the previous squad, they too were blasted away. Some of the mech drivers looked for a way to back up and exit the funnel. This was pointless. There was nowhere to go because they were blocked in by other Vonnegan machines on all sides.

  In addition to the weapons leveling every Vonnegan trooper as soon as they appeared, other hidden Gur-Khan weapons caused a series of explosions to rock a group of the trapped mechs at the far end of the narrows. This ensured they couldn’t move and thus guaranteed no other mechs could get away. Some of the armored mechs were so thoroughly devastated by the Gur-Khan’s blasts that their entire armor plating was turned to ash. All that remained of these machines was the metal skeletons of their frames. Everything else was vapor
ized. Others were hit by directional explosives powerful enough to throw one armored mech into the air where it went careening into others.

  Vere watched a video feed of the action, sent down by one of her Solar Carriers. It was clear why the Gur-Khan never lost a battle and why no one invaded their home planet. Ten soldiers had tricked Mowbray into focusing almost all of his forces into one part of the battlefield and they were now destroying hundreds or thousands of Vonnegan forces with ease. Through it all, she realized that she never actually saw the Gur-Khan. She saw laser fire and explosions, but never the actual soldiers who had sworn to defend zone one of the battlefield and were doing just that.

  A voice came over the comm system: “Athens Destroyers, incoming!”

  A series of alarms began to sound.

  “That’s not going to have a positive outcome,” Pistol said.

  Traskk growled and pointed at the forest’s edge. One of Mowbray’s massive flagships had come in low, just above the Forest of Tears, in order to avoid the Crown and the fleet of Solar Carriers orbiting in space. The Athens Destroyer dwarfed the Thunderbolts and Llyushin fighters that were still zipping around the sky—except for zone one in case the Gur-Khan detonated another series of landscape-changing blasts. Immediately, the Destroyer began unloading its heavy cannons on the narrows and also on the Crown—on the narrows in hopes of destroying the Gur-Khan and stopping the slaughter of Vonnegan forces taking place there, and on the Crown to give the Vonnegan fleet safe access toward the capital.

  All of the Round Table forces’ ground-based cannons changed their focus and began targeting the enemy flagship. These cannons were meant for taking out smaller vessels, however. The blasts, even hundreds of them, did nothing to damage the giant ship.

  A minute later, a group of three Solar Carriers moved away from the rest of the fleet and began sending thick streams of ion cannon fire down into Edsall Dark’s atmosphere, pelting the Athens Destroyer from above. Instead of being absorbed like the smaller laser blasts, the blasts from the Solar Carriers gradually ripped parts of the Athens Destroyer away. Chunks of debris, as large as Thunderbolts and Llyushin fighters, flew in every direction.

  The Athens Destroyer, having one mission, kept firing the majority of its laser cannons into the funnel created by the Gur-Khan and the remainder toward the Crown. It was inevitable that the Destroyer would be lost. That much was obvious even to Vere. She only hoped it was defeated before it broke through the Crown’s shields. She watched without reading the next comm report. Mowbray had shifted his focus, as she would also have done in his situation, from trying to breach the capital wall to merely not allowing ten fighters to destroy all of his ground forces.

  Moments later, having taken too much damage from the Solar Carriers above it, the Athens Destroyer stopped firing. After another few seconds, the energy faded from its engines. All of its electrical systems were lost. The ship descended toward the surface, crashing into the ground and rattling the entire landscape.

  “I can’t see anything,” Vere said.

  She walked up the bunker steps to the ground level to get a better view, but the crashing Athens Destroyer had once again kicked up much of the dust that had settled from the Gur-Khan’s explosion.

  Pistol came up beside her. His eyes were glowing, observing things with his optics that no human could see. Before he could give her an assessment of what was happening, a laser blast sailed just wide of Vere’s face and out into the fields. Traskk growled and dived back into the underground bunker.

  Vere’s first thought was that there was no way a Vonnegan sniper would be able to see her through the field of debris, smoke, and dust. Even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to target her that fast. Her second thought was that the laser blast had come from the wrong direction for it to be a sniper on the other side of the field. She didn’t have time for a third thought before Traskk’s growls and roars resounded from inside the bunker, along with the yells of Vonnegan troopers. Running back down the bunker steps, she saw a laser blast hit a CasterLan ensign across the room from her. He gasped and sank to the ground.

  Traskk roared and lunged to the back wall of the bunker. Vere pulled a blaster from the holster on her hip. Before she could aim and fire, another blast sailed past her cheek and hit the wall behind her.

  Vonnegan forces were coming into the bunker from a small hole on the far side of the underground room. One of their trench machines must have made it all the way to the bunker without being detected, and then the troopers had dug sideways into where Vere and the others were located.

  A laser blast hit Traskk in the shoulder as he lunged toward the Vonnegan troopers. A second and third laser blast flew past Vere as she knelt to get a better angle and avoid shooting Traskk in the back.

  Other nearby CasterLan soldiers joined her in attacking the first wave of Vonnegan troops, but none of them could fire at will until Vere yelled for Traskk to move to the side. With the helmet of a Vonnegan trooper clenched between his mighty jaws, he growled and moved to his left. The trooper, whose head was still inside the helmet, was nothing more than a limp sack of armor.

  Vere pulled the trigger of her blaster over and over. Each time she did, another Vonnegan trooper crumpled to the ground as he appeared through the tunnel opening. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced back at the display system just long enough to see a small holographic feed that revealed hundreds of Vonnegan troops disembarking from the crashed Athens Destroyer. Hundreds more of her soldiers and those from the Round Table armies all rushed across the field to confront the enemy.

  Any semblance of two distinct sides—the invaders by the forest and the defenders near the wall—was gone. The entire field was blaster fire and yelling. The last wave of armored mechs and transports was swerving around the crashed Athens Destroyer. It was so large that it looked out of place, like a Llyushin fighter parked amongst a collection of child’s toy spaceships. With the field flooded with combatants, the snipers on both sides gave up precision and instead used the same rapid fire blaster rifles that everyone else fired.

  Looking back at where the Vonnegan forces had appeared, Vere saw Traskk grab a Vonnegan trooper by his neck before throwing him through the air. Another trooper took a direct hit from Traskk’s tail, causing a crunching noise that sounded as if he might have broken in half. A third was crushed under Traskk’s weight when the reptile jumped on him and began tearing his purple and gray armor to pieces.

  Pistol received another comm update. Turning to Vere, he said, “Vonnegan forces have appeared out of fifteen tunnels near the capital wall so far.”

  “Any behind the wall?”

  “Only one.”

  “And?”

  Pistol’s eyes glowed as he received the information. “They were dispatched by Kaiser Doom’s forces.”

  “Good,” she said, but her tone was melancholy. She didn’t tell Pistol, but if so many Vonnegan troopers had successfully penetrated their defenses, the Round Table forces underground must have taken heavy losses. Hector and Morgan and everyone else she knew was either dead or battling for their lives.

  92

  Hector looked behind him one last time to make sure his soldiers were safe and still walking back in the direction of the capital. He had reminded one of the returning squad members to radio back to the command center and inform them which tunnel opening they would be appearing from. The last thing Hector wanted was for his soldiers to be victims of “friendly fire” when they reappeared near the wall. Knowing what war did to people, he knew it was only natural that once laser blasts started flying, some soldiers withdrew mentally, shooting anything that moved. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he saved some of his squad from enemy blasts just to have them accidently die by allied forces.

  Alone now, he waited at a spot where three tunnels connected. If any Vonnegan forces tried to make their way to the capital wall, they would have to go through him.

  Although he was better off than the soldiers who had be
en buried underground, he still wasn’t one hundred percent. Each time he moved his stomach burned from where a laser blast had hit him. His left arm was limp and useless after being shot multiple times. With a groan, he recalled the same sensation in his legs before a doctor had removed them. If he survived the battle, he would have to ask Quickly how he was getting along with his replacement android arm. It wasn’t much of a thing to have to look forward to. Maybe the doctors would be able to create a gravitational field that could be attached to his shoulder, similar to the disk his torso rested upon.

  War was hell. Only the lucky ones were going to make it home. And even they would have lost family members or limbs in the fighting.

  With his one good arm, he held a staff blaster in front of him and aimed into the darkness of the tunnels. Only a minute later, however, his energy disc began to sputter. Its regulator had also been shot. The energy circulating within the disc, the force that kept him hovering a couple feet off the ground, faded, causing him to sink to the dirt floor.

  Once it was completely dark, Hector lay on his side, his weapon still pointed down the dark corridor, still wishing this madness would end once and for all.

  93

  Racing down one path, Morgan and her squad came across a group of Vonnegan troopers trying to dig their way past a portion of tunnel that had collapsed. She sliced half of them down with her Meursault blade before they knew what was happening. Her soldiers blasted the other half. Not a single Vonnegan laser blast was fired. Rather than continue to look for a solution to the blocked tunnel, she and her squad backtracked to the nearest adjoining section and began racing once more toward the capital wall.