Westmoreland sat back in his chair and shook his head. “The point I was getting to is that even with all of our resources directed at this effort, it takes more than one month to build each ship. We’re lucky we’ll have this one additional Carrier. The vessels that are partially constructed on Bercilak and Nede-Mum aren’t far enough along, no matter what we do, to get them operational in the next nine days. The one on Bercilak is nothing more than a steel frame. The two on Nede-Mum have no power or guidance systems installed. They would just take up space in the battle and get in the way of ships that can actually fight.”
“What are the current numbers?” Morgan asked.
Without needing to explain what she meant, Westmoreland said, “They have two hundred and sixteen Athens Destroyers, including ten Commander Class Destroyers and one even larger that we’re calling a Supreme Athens Destroyer. In addition to these, they have roughly one hundred more ships, smaller, but combat-ready nonetheless.”
“And us?” Morgan said. As general of all CasterLan forces, she already knew the numbers. It was important, though, for the rest of the room to know the situation they were in.
“Seventy-seven Solar Carriers,” Westmoreland said, “and a few additional ships, but most weren’t built for war and have never been in a battle.”
Baldwin closed his eyes and clutched his face between his hands. Cade groaned. To keep everyone from seeing the hopelessness in her eyes, Vere turned and looked out the window. Everyone in the room would interpret the far-off stare as solid resolve. That was her intention, at least. Little did they know she thought this situation was even more desperate than six years earlier when she had seen a fleet of Athens Destroyers appearing through the portal above her planet. At least then they had only been outnumbered two to one. Now, it was even worse than three to one.
There was no way they could win. Why fight at all? It would only result in death and suffering. Wasn’t the just and right thing to give over the kingdom to the Vonnegan army, turn herself over as their prisoner, and whatever else she could do to prevent the bloodshed? Even if it meant giving herself over for execution, if it could save another galactic war and thousands, maybe a million lives, how could she not do it? She had faced one potential beheading before and lived to tell about it. Surely she could face another.
From the silence around the room, it was obvious no one wanted to be the next person to speak after Westmoreland’s discouraging statistics.
Whether to be realistic or to further antagonize Vere, Morgan made sure everyone knew exactly what the numbers meant. “We cannot beat them in a face to face battle. There is no way. No general, no amount of space warfare tactics, and no maneuvers will give us a chance of winning. We can turn it into a prolonged battle and hope their resources start to run low, or we can hope to destroy as many of their ships as they destroy of ours. But we cannot be naïve enough to think we actually have a chance of winning.”
If Morgan’s goal had been to further discourage everyone gathered in the room, she succeeded. Traskk’s tail stopped moving. Cade leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling.
If someone else had said it, Vere would have thought them a coward looking for a way to avoid the conflict altogether. Morgan, though, with her chin raised and her eyes unblinking, seemed to be daring Vere to send her into the impossible battle.
From somewhere further down the table, however, someone started clapping. Fastolf.
“That’s why they call her Ms. Motivation,” he said with a laugh. “Bravo!”
“Enough, Fastolf,” Vere said, not looking the least bit amused.
Her friend gave an injured expression and sank down into his chair as much as his oversized frame would allow.
Turning back to Morgan, Vere asked, “What do you suggest?”
“We can only do what we can do. We use the ships Westmoreland has.” She pointed to a pair of men seated at the far side of the table who were wearing the light blue uniforms of CasterLan diplomats. “We use the next nine days to see how many other forces Scrope and Peto can muster. If we’re lucky, maybe at least one other army will be dumb enough to join us.”
Scrope frowned. “Even if we can convince someone to join us, how will they ever get here in time?”
Vere pointed up at the sky above them. Through the windows looking out above the Edsall Dark capital, a new portal had been constructed. Three hundred and sixty irregularly shaped metal cylinders formed a circle that any vessel would be able to pass through. It looked exactly like the Tevis-84 portal that Morgan had destroyed six years earlier. The only difference was that this one didn’t have a mesmerizing swirl of white energy in its middle. Instead, there was only black space, like the rest of the sky.
“Construction is complete,” Vere said. “We can energize it any time we please. If either of you can convince an army to join us, we’ll turn it on.” Then, looking around the room to make sure they knew the repercussions this could have, she added, “But once the portal is on, there’s no way to shut it off.”
“Without destroying it again,” Morgan said, offering a pleasant smile.
“Exactly. And we can’t allow that. I’m still having to explain myself to the other kingdoms on why we violated intergalactic law by destroying the previous one. It doesn’t look good when I’m already trying to explain to them that destroying that vessel in Vonnegan space was a terrible error and not the way we treat innocent crews.”
“So, that’s it?” Fastolf said. “We see if other armies will join us even though they have no reason to do so? And we take our meager fleet to face certain destruction?”
“Be quiet,” Vere said, beginning to wonder why she had risked inviting him to such a meeting.
He threw his hands in the air. “Morgan can talk back to you but not me? Not lovable Fastolf?”
Vere cringed. Why didn’t he ever learn? She knew for a fact that he had spent most of the previous night sitting in a medical bay having his nose healed after Morgan had broken it again. Maybe some men were just set on a path and there was nothing she nor anyone else could do to change it.
Morgan ignored the incurable jester and said, “We need to find a place for the battle to occur. We can’t afford another conflict above our planet. In addition to the casualties on the planet below, we spent half of our resources over the last six years rebuilding the parts of the capital that were destroyed when ships crashed into them. If we meet the Vonnegan fleet away from Edsall Dark, maybe we can catch them off guard and save some lives here.”
“War is still war, regardless of where it occurs.”
Everyone looked at the doorway to see who had spoken. Turning, Morgan was ready to tell off whoever had said it. After all, she had been the one to quit her post as Hotspur’s first lieutenant. She had been the one to risk her life getting Vere back to the capital six years earlier. The last thing she needed was to have some pencil-pushing bureaucrat lecture her on war.
But then, facing the man hovering in the doorway, she only nodded. Hector was there, his torso attached to the energy disc that kept him floating above ground.
“You can take it away from this planet, but the men and women who have families here will still die,” he said, his voice low and deep.
No one said anything. Vere and Morgan could only accept that what he said was the truth.
Fastolf laughed. “So, this is it? This is our glorious plan?”
“Do you have a better idea?” Morgan said, clenching her fist.
But before Fastolf could say anything else, Baldwin said again, “The Excalibur.”
Vere and Morgan looked at him, then at each other.
“We’re not wasting our time talking about the Excalibur Armada,” Vere said.
Traskk gave a confused growl. Fastolf giggled. For once, Morgan and Vere shared each other’s impatience.
“Why not?” Baldwin asked, looking back and forth between the two women as if it were a personal insult that his idea was so easily dismissed.
; “Fine,” Vere said. “If you want to recover an army no one else has been able to free, have a blast.”
Instead of sinking back in his chair, he excitedly tapped a palm against the table in front of him and beamed with joy. “Fine, I will. Anyone want to come with me?”
No one raised their hands.
8
A series of ships took off from CamaLon’s primary spaceport.
In the front was a trio of O-Model Llyushin transports, a larger, modified form of the popular CasterLan fighter that was designed to carry delegates and high-ranking army officers to their posts. The first of these belonged to Westmoreland, who was on his way back to Ryl-Minor to oversee construction of the last Solar Carrier they would have available for battle. The next ship belonged to Scrope, as he made his way to the nearest corner of the Oman-S system to see if he could convince anyone there to join forces in the upcoming battle. The third ship belonged to Peto, who was on his way to meet representatives from the Ecator system to see if they would be willing to join in the fight. Each of the three O-Models was joined by a pair of M-Model Llyushin fighters. At the edge of Edsall Dark’s atmosphere, the three ships and their escorts began to arc away from each other, all of them heading their separate ways, each soaring to different parts of the galaxy as quickly as they could.
Next, Morgan piloted her personal ship, the Pendragon. It was part transport and part fighter, a craft that resembled a Llyushin fighter if it were taken completely apart and then reassembled in the dark.
True to her word, following the Battle of Tevis-84 she had returned to Folliet-Bright and begun searching for the thieves who had stolen her ship. It had taken a while, but she eventually found the Pendragon two sectors away in a mining colony run by a local gangster. The thug, a short, feather-covered alien named Dyyn-Mite, had added her ship as part of his fleet.
After breaking her way into his lair and killing all of his bodyguards, she had tortured him until he revealed the name of the alien he had bought it from. By the time she left his mining colony, Dyyn-Mite was featherless and begging for his life. He could hear the slaves he used as free labor chanting his name as they set fire to his lair.
From there, Morgan had tracked down the alien who had sold the ship to Dyyn-Mite. The creature, roughly the same size as a human, walked on hands and knees and was covered in wood-colored armored plating. It had four antennae on its head and bulbous black eyes that swiveled around the side of its face.
She had torn out two of its antennae before it told her the names of the thieves who had actually stolen the ship. She tore out the other two to ensure it had learned its lesson.
The thieves, when she tracked them down, fared even worse. None of them would forget her face, and none of them would steal from her ever again. Not only that, the stories of how far she was willing to go to get her ship back spread through each sector until every thief knew not to steal from Morgan Le Fay. She was confident she could leave the Pendragon at the same Folliet-Bright spaceport where it had been stolen six years earlier, this time leaving the ramp open and the engine running, and no one would steal it.
Now, seated in the pilot seat of the Pendragon once again, she flew in the same basic direction as the approaching Vonnegan fleet. Her goal wasn’t to face them by herself. Instead, she wanted to scout out the space around the desert moon of Dela Turkomann, which the fleet of Athens Destroyers would be passing, to see how well it might serve as a field of battle.
“Pistol,” she said. “On our way there, calculate every possible strength and weakness that a conflict around Dela Turkomann could have for us, factoring in its gravity, speed of revolution around Mego Turkomann, and anything else you can think of.”
“Yes, Morgan.”
The android’s pupils became glowing orbs of yellow light. As he processed the information, she remembered why she loved riding with him so much and why she was glad Vere let him come along: he didn’t speak unless spoken to.
The Griffin Fire was the next ship off the planet. Without saying where they were going, Vere piloted her ship for a course similar to Morgan’s. It had taken months for her kingdom’s best mechanics to rebuild the ship after its crash landing on the far side of the Literac Mountains. Now, the ship was better than ever, with some special modifications she was eager to test out.
Except for Traskk, who sat beside her in the copilot’s seat, no one knew where she planned to go. She had failed to prevent one battle, which had resulted in countless unnecessary deaths and suffering. She would do whatever it took to not fail again. If there was a way to prevent this battle from taking place, she would find it. Currently, there was only one option she could think of. If anyone knew what it was they would have tried to keep her from leaving Edsall Dark.
The last ship to leave was a small D-Model Llyushin transport, older and slower than the ones used by Westmoreland and the diplomats. Aboard it, Baldwin and Fastolf, along with their pilot, headed directly for the Excalibur.
“Thanks for coming,” Baldwin said.
“We’re all gonna die anyway,” Fastolf said, then took a drink.
“That’s all you have to say?”
Fastolf shrugged. “It’s the Excalibur Armada.” When he saw that Baldwin didn’t share his skepticism, he took another swig from his flask and added, “Ha! Maybe you haven’t heard the same stories I’ve heard. If you had, you’d have brought your own flask. Or, even better, we wouldn’t be going there at all.”
9
The Excalibur. An asteroid as large as a moon. The Excalibur Armada. A fleet of almost one thousand ships encased within the rock of that asteroid. A fleet of ships larger than any ruler had ever obtained. From what explorers had discovered, the ships possessed technology more advanced than any modern vessel even though they were thousands of years old.
Everyone knew exactly where the ships were located. Ever since its discovery, one ruler after another had wanted it for themselves. But one thing ensured the Excalibur Armada remained elusive: any attempt to free one of the ships from the stone that encased it resulted in its self-destruction, guaranteeing the ship wasn’t commandeered, but also destroying everything near it as well.
Every seventy-five years, the asteroid completed one giant elliptical orbit around the mighty blue sun of the McKessel system. Along its highly eccentric orbit, the asteroid reached the furthest edge of the system before being called back toward the sun by its terrific gravitational force.
But what made the asteroid remarkable wasn’t how large it was—big enough to have its own core and a slight gravitational force. What made it remarkable was the fact that starships stuck out of the rock like sprinkles on a dessert. The side of one vessel protruded from a piece of the asteroid. The rear engine of another vessel stuck out from another part of the rock. A cannon. A deck. Explorers had agreed early on that all one thousand ships were identical, and so many different parts of the ships were visible that scientists were able to create a model of exactly what the ships looked like.
Each one was comparable in size to a Solar Carrier or Athens Destroyer. Each had four engines arranged in a diamond shape at the back of the vessel. They were constructed of seamless metal plates that made it look as if one piece of metal had been stretched over the entire frame.
While parts of over one hundred ships stuck out from the giant rock, a scan of the asteroid revealed almost nine hundred more vessels inside the stone that no one could see. A batch of scientists modeled a replica of the ships based on those scans.
Some people referred to the vessels as the Excalibur Armada, after Rumanov Excalibur, the explorer who first discovered them. Some people called it the Army in the Stone, for reasons that are obvious once anyone sees the asteroid. Others called it the Gordian Armada, after Gordian the Stubborn, the ruler who had spent his entire life and all of his kingdom’s riches trying to find a way to procure the fleet for himself. Instead of achieving his goal, he lost thousands of men due to self-detonated explosions, thus proving no ruler could c
laim the army for himself. Others called it the Red Armada after the way the ships glowed every seventy-five years when they got to the nearest part of their orbit around the mighty blue star, Eta Orbitae.
No matter what people called it, the armada was the subject of stories that every parent told their children before bed. It was mentioned in legend and lore and history books alike. But what fascinated people even more than the tantalizing possibility of owning one thousand warships and conquering the entire galaxy was the fact that no one knew anything about how the ships were made, from what type of metal they had been constructed, or, most important, how they had become encased in stone.
For as long as humans and aliens had been exploring space, stories had surfaced about this armada in the stone. But no one knew how it had gotten there. Early spacefaring ships were nothing like the Solar Carriers or Llyushin fighters that Vere and Morgan knew. They were primitive looking things, unreliable and slow. And yet, while humans and Toadens and Feedorians were learning to explore the galaxy, someone else, some ancient civilization, had already built a fleet more advanced than any that would be made for thousands of years.
There were more questions than answers. Who was this ancient civilization that had somehow created a fleet more technologically superior than what was thought possible? Why was there no other trace of this civilization left anywhere in the known galaxy? Why would they go to the trouble of building such a massive fleet, only to encase it in stone? How had they imprisoned the ships inside naturally occurring rock? Though modern technology could build vessels that could travel at nearly the speed of light and space portals that connected one spot in the galaxy to another, scientists still did not know how to wrap an asteroid around a ship, let alone an entire armada of ships.
Further inspection only revealed even more mysteries. The asteroid did not seem to have been tampered with. It was not a collection of rocks or space dust that had been artificially compacted to form a stone. As far as scientists could tell, no part of the asteroid had been chiseled or lasered away. And yet one thousand ships existed within its stone.
The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) Page 4