But there was more. Any time someone tried to chisel away too much rock near one of the ships, the nearest vessel would explode with such an intense and thorough eruption that no trace of the ship existed any longer. The same thing happened when someone tried to drill into one of the ships, no matter which part of the ship they selected. There’s a reason Rumanov Excalibur didn’t give any interviews about his discovery. Only hours after coming upon the asteroid, he was blown up when the vessel he was trying to get inside of detonated.
Why would a civilization that went to the trouble of making the vessels also go to the effort of installing a self-destruct capability inside each one? And even if they were able to install explosives inside each ship, how were they able to install sensors into the asteroid that would trigger the nearest ship’s detonation if it was disturbed too much?
Even after the mapping of the asteroid revealed one thousand ships, and the modeling showed exactly what the vessels looked like, there were still more unknowns than there was information available. How were the ships able to sustain no damage? Most people didn’t realize it, but space travel was extremely taxing on vessels. Even the most fortified Solar Carrier or Athens Destroyer had to go in for routine maintenance every two years. People thought of space as a vast void of emptiness. In fact, it was the exact opposite. There was space dust everywhere. Debris orbiting every planet. Intense radiation. Tiny meteors that pelted the vessels’ exterior. All of this slowly weakened a ship’s outer shell. And yet the ships protruding from the Excalibur asteroid look as new as they must have looked thousands of years earlier when they were constructed. No known alloy could do that. Scientists couldn’t determine what the armada was made of because any attempt to cut away a section of the ship for analysis resulted in it self-destructing. There were tales that Meursault, the legendary swordsmith who made the blade named after him, was somehow able to take a piece of metal from one of the Excalibur ships to craft his famous swords. However, this was only a rumor.
The Llyushin transport carrying Baldwin and Fastolf appeared through the Chrunsington-Ph Portal. In front of them, the mighty blue star, Eta Orbitae, illuminated a trio of planets. One was a ball of mostly flame and gas. Another had a surface that swirled in blue and white. The third was a gray sphere pockmarked with craters. Further off, the blue sun was thousands of times larger than the three planets. Just looking at the giant star made both men perspire, thinking about how much heat it must generate.
“Where to?” Fastolf asked.
He had been drinking from his flask the entire flight, and Baldwin now found himself regretting having accepted his invitation to tag along, even if he was the only person who wanted to.
The pilot, Quickly, looked at the displays in front of him, then pointed to their left.
“The Excalibur will be approaching from our three o’clock in six hours.”
“Let’s go meet it,” Baldwin said. “We need all the time we can get.”
Quickly punched in the command and the transport raced in that direction.
“So,” Fastolf asked, “what’s your plan when we get there?”
He didn’t have to remind Baldwin that men much smarter, richer, and with more resources than the physician had been trying to recover the armada for as long as they had known about it. Suddenly, Baldwin looked ill and sat down in the copilot’s seat. Quickly, unlike Vere or Morgan, was nice enough to ignore someone sitting in his cockpit without his explicit permission.
“What’s the matter?” Fastolf asked.
But he took another look at Baldwin and realized what was wrong without needing an answer. He had seen that face a hundred times before, and each time it was when he looked in the mirror after doing or saying something he regretted.
A fleet of ships that could defeat any known army in the galaxy existed, and yet no one could free the ships from the rock that held them without also destroying the very vessels they wanted to use. It had been that way for thousands of years. The only difference was that now Baldwin had tried to convince his friends that the Excalibur Armada was their only hope in defeating the Vonnegan fleet. Fastolf knew why Baldwin was sick to his stomach: he had spoken without any thought to what he was saying. He had never actually thought about how he might do something that no one else had been able to do.
“It’s okay, buddy,” Fastolf said, patting him on the back. “Have a drink. It’ll make everything better. Never fails for me.”
But Baldwin only groaned and put his face in his hands.
“Check this out,” Quickly said, tapping a button that brought a tinted lens down over the cockpit windows.
They could still see the stars and planets in front of them, but now the giant blue sun wouldn’t blind them if they looked directly at it. Fastolf and Baldwin squinted at Eta Orbitae to figure out what the pilot was calling their attention to. Then they saw it.
In the distance, glowing red, a tiny dot was leaving a long trail of light behind it as it raced around the sun and began to head toward them.
“Here you go,” Quickly said, tapping another button.
The screen magnified. The entire object wasn’t red, only the ships that glowed from the tremendous heat put off by the largest blue sun in the known galaxy. The asteroid itself was still a mass of brown and grey rock, but the glowing red ships shone so brightly that the entire asteroid seemed to glow.
The Army in the Stone. The Gordian Armada. The Excalibur Armada. It was here.
Their only hope for defeating the Vonnegan fleet.
10
Peto’s ship arrived at the cloud planet, Desho-Win, where every city was elevated miles in the air, high above the ferocious storms that raged on the planet’s surface. But his Llyushin transport and his two Llyushin fighter escorts were still approaching Desho-Win’s atmosphere when a pair of Trans-Ion D fighters raced toward them.
Both fighters let off a pair of laser blasts on either side of Peto’s ship.
“Don’t return fire,” he told the fighter pilots alongside him. “They missed on purpose.”
His own pilot said, “The fact that they are firing at all should trouble you more than if they hit us or missed us.”
A light came on in the cockpit. When the pilot tapped a blinking yellow button, a holographic image of a scaly-skinned alien with a huge mouth appeared.
“You are hereby ordered to turn around and return to Edsall Dark,” the alien from Desho-Win said.
“We are here as emissaries of Vere CasterLan, leader of—”
Another pair of laser blasts sailed just past the ship, causing Peto to flinch.
“Permission to return fire,” one of the fighter pilots said, but Peto ignored him.
“I know who you are,” the alien said. “And you are ordered to leave our space immediately. The Vonnegan fleet is approaching and we do not want any association with your kingdom when they get here.”
Peto started to speak, but before he could say anything else, a single laser blast hit the Llyushin transport as an even clearer warning.
“Don’t fire back,” he yelled at the fighter pilots on either side of him. Then to the Desho-Win alien, “Okay, okay.” The alien’s hologram image disappeared.
“On to the next planet?” his pilot asked.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
11
Although Morgan’s ship was too far ahead for Vere to be able to spot it from the Griffin Fire’s cockpit, she could see on the displays in front of her that the Pendragon was beginning to drift away from the course that would have taken it directly toward the approaching Vonnegan fleet. Instead, Morgan piloted her ship slightly to the side, in the direction of the desert moon, Dela Turkomann. Rather than follow a similar course to one of the planets or moons within their sector, Vere kept the Griffin Fire pointed straight ahead, toward where the Vonnegan fleet would arrive in a matter of days.
Traskk was beside her in the copilot’s seat, his tongue slithering back and forth across his lips, a rumble of displeasure comin
g from deep in his throat. He had agreed to come along on what he considered to be a foolish mission, but only because he would go anywhere Vere went. He had also agreed not to tell anyone else where she planned to go, but only because she had made him promise before she revealed her plan.
No one in their right mind would fly toward the entire fleet of Athens Destroyers, let alone by themselves. Especially not when they were the leader of the CasterLan Kingdom and the person Mowbray blamed for his son’s death more than any other.
“You’ll just have to trust me,” she had told him, but he had flicked his tongue anxiously then, too.
Now, with Morgan’s ship going toward Dela Turkomann, she increased the Griffin Fire’s speed.
“Full power to the engines,” she said. When Traskk hissed a question, she replied, “No shields. No weapon’s systems. Send everything to the engines. I want to get to Mowbray as fast as possible. If this doesn’t work, we’ll need to go with plan B.”
Her reptile copilot was nice enough to remind her there was no plan B to speak of.
The Griffin Fire soared through space at a faster and faster rate of speed. Every couple of minutes she would teach him something else about how to pilot the ship. Each time she did, the vertical slits of his reptilian eyelids would focus on the control or button she was explaining.
He tried his best to pick up everything she said, but flying a ship didn’t come naturally to him the way that ripping things apart with his fangs and claws did. Whenever he needed her explain something more than once or if he felt overloaded with information or began confusing two different buttons, his tail would tap harder and harder against the cockpit deck.
Every time this happened, Vere would tell him it was okay and not to be too hard on himself, then change the subject. She asked him about his life before they met on Folliet-Bright or what he would do if he were in her place. Regardless of the question, most of his answers involved tearing other species of aliens apart with his bare hands.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked him.
Traskk turned from the copilot’s chair and glared at her, his feelings hurt that she thought he might not want to be wherever she was when her life was at risk. From his throat, he produced a soft hiss.
“I could drop you off somewhere, you know. You don’t have to do this,” she said.
In response, he gave a deeper, louder hiss.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Just figured I’d check.” And then, “You know, Morgan and the others would kill us if they knew what we were doing.”
Traskk shook his head and produced a series of guttural scratching sounds from his throat.
She still hadn’t adjusted to seeing him next to her in the cockpit. She rarely had a chance to fly these days, but the few times she did, she still expected A’la Dure—the only copilot she had ever had—to be there.
Every time she wasn’t there, Vere found herself thinking about how simple life had been back in Eastcheap. She often found herself wishing she could return to the days of sitting at a table with Occulus, A’la Dure, and the others, without a worry in the world. When she tried to envision herself back there now, it was always at the same bar and the same table, but without her two lost friends. The truth was that it wouldn’t be the same even if she did return there, which made it easier to reminisce less about the good old days and focus more on the present.
What she appreciated most about her new copilot, even more than his eagerness to learn how everything worked and his willingness to go wherever she wanted, was his discipline. He didn’t dare touch or do anything until he knew exactly what he was doing.
He towered over her. His tail could break her in half if he swung it at her with violent intentions. His claws and fangs were longer than her fingers. But he was the most considerate and agreeable copilot she could ever imagine. And that was coming from someone whose previous copilot had never said a single word—until her last breath. Instead, Traskk sat in the seat, his tail curled up behind him so as to not get in her way, with his clawed fingers politely in his lap until he was given a specific order.
“Set the comms to point three,” she said. “I want to make sure we know who’s out there. The last thing we need is to run into any other ships along the way.”
Her reptilian friend dutifully found the correct controls, then typed in the sequence with the tip of one claw. She could see him squint with concentration, making sure he was not only thinking about doing the right thing, but that his claw tapped on the correct sequence of buttons to ensure the command was executed.
After she saw him do it the way she had taught him, she returned to the sight in front of her: an open expanse of black space filled with speckled stars.
Vere said, “I hope this works. I don’t have much faith that it will, but I have to do something, and this is the only thing I can think of.” She smiled then before adding, “It can’t go any worse than when I accepted the Green Knight’s challenge in that bar, can it?”
Traskk didn’t share in her sense of humor. He merely grumbled and looked out at the stars.
Years earlier, when she accepted a random knight’s game of chopping off his head in exchange for him to be allowed to do the same, it had never crossed her mind that the knight might bend over, pick up his head, and live to collect on his half of the deal. Now, speeding toward the Vonnegan fleet of over two hundred Athens Destroyers and over three hundred total ships, she was fully aware of what she was getting herself into and yet was still doing it.
Did that make it better or worse?
She had no idea.
12
Outside the walls of Edsall Dark’s capital, fields of grass waved in lines as the wind passed over the land. Unlike years earlier, when Vere and her companions had raced across the fields of Aromath the Solemn, there were plenty of people out and about.
In three different parts of the field, automated plows moved over the ground, harvesting crops. Everyone knew the Vonnegan fleet was approaching. The farmers wanted to make sure they had as much grain as possible stored within the city walls in case a prolonged siege began.
A group of five hovering robot hybrid vessels, each the size of Fastolf, flew across the field, returning from collecting minerals from the Forest of Tears and the mountains beyond. Like the farmers, the tradesmen who owned these hybrid mechs knew that if they needed anything for their metal work, woodwork, or any other type of project, they had better get it before the sky was blotted out by Athens Destroyers.
There were even dozens of children playing games. A girl with a bouncy ball as big as her arms chased after human, Lerk, and Yern-i-gan children, trying to touch each one with the ball before they were able to collect all of the orbs floating around her. Unlike the farmers and the miners, the children were able to play their games anywhere. When the Vonnegan fleet arrived, they could just as easily play a game behind CamaLon’s walls as they could out in the fields. But they relished the chance to play amongst the breezy rolling hills while they could.
Further out in the fields, the hills gave way to rocks and caves. The sound of children could be heard there as well. One cave in particular, filled with green moss and going deep down into the earth, was a favorite place for children to explore. Vere and Galen had ventured into the same cave countless times when they were children.
And just as they had explored the cave then, a boy and girl slowly made their way through the dark expanse of rock and dripping water, careful with each step, because of the slippery moss and the angled rocks that made it easy to twist an ankle.
“How far do you think it goes?” the girl asked, holding her ion-powered lantern up to illuminate the way ahead. No matter how far they could see, the cave never seemed to end.
“I’m not sure,” the boy said. “Maybe if we keep walking and walking we’ll come out on the other side of Edsall Dark!”
“It doesn’t work that way, silly,” she said. After a cold breeze washed past her, she shivered and added, “I t
hink I want to go home.”
The boy could have made fun of her, could have told her that he wasn’t scared like she was. But then a second draft rushed out from the depths of the cave, causing both children to shiver, and the boy nodded. After an hour of walking back toward the entrance there was still no sign of daylight.
Behind them, a rock clattered across the ground.
“What was that?”
“Probably just the wind,” the boy said.
“I didn’t feel any wind that time.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
Another rock moved from where it had been balanced on top of two other rocks. It slid down a short length and clacked against the stones already on the ground.
“Who’s there?” the girl shouted.
No one answered.
A figure in dark robes stepped forward from shadows where the rocks had been disturbed.
“Who’s there?” the girl shouted again. The last remnants of her previous shout were still echoing off the cave walls all around her. This made her second yell compete with the first, as if mocking her.
The robed figure, completely in the shadows, moved forward.
The girl held her lantern up, but nothing was there.
“I don’t hear anything,” the boy said. “Let’s go.”
They turned and began back toward the entrance, but their progress was slow. The robed figure, without any urgency, narrowed the gap between them. But anytime she held the light up to see who was there, the figure was gone.
Another rock clattered.
“Stop it!” the girl yelled. “I don’t care who you are! This isn’t funny!”
She was crying now. The boy took her hand and told her everything would be okay, that they would be outside again in a few minutes.
The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) Page 5