The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2)

by Chris Dietzel

  The robed figure was only a few arm lengths behind them now. The next time the two children stopped to listen for the sounds of movement, the shadowy figure could have reached out and touched them. But when the girl turned around and shone her light, there was no one there.

  “Hello?” the girl said.

  The robed figure was directly in front of the girl. He reached out, his dark hand protruding from within the cloaks wrapped around him, and let his fingertips rest on the girl’s forehead.

  “Hello?” the girl said again, still looking deep into the cave, seeing only rock and moss and darkness. She sounded less worried now, however.

  The shadowy figure removed his fingertips from her forehead, then looked at both children for a moment. They were so innocent, so young, so hopeful for what the future might hold.

  The two children kept looking into the depths of the cave to see if something or someone was there. They saw nothing.

  “Come on,” the boy said, pulling the girl’s hand.

  The robed figure watched them. After they were gone, the apparition turned toward the cave wall, having found a spot of stone that was particularly vibrant with bright green moss. Even in the darkness, the moss seemed to be in the shape of a giant knight. The figure reached out, letting his fingertips brush against the cave wall the same way he had against the girl’s forehead. Then he stepped forward, toward the cave wall, and disappeared into the rock as if he had never been there.

  13

  “You have to be quiet to see them,” Galen said to Vere. “Not just silent, but with a quiet mind as well.” They sat on the floor of the damp cave, surrounded by rocks and moss. “Mortimous’s only power is that he can see them more clearly than anyone else.”

  She blinked as hard as she could, trying to force his words to make sense. When her eyes reopened, she was sitting in the pilot’s seat of the Griffin Fire, the autopilot doing most of the work.

  Looking at Traskk, she realized she felt completely alert, as if she had been awake the entire time and had merely slipped off into a daydream.

  “I think I might have fallen asleep,” she said to him, unsure of whether she actually had or not.

  If anyone could sympathize with her, it would be Traskk. Basilisks dreamt just like almost every other species of creature around the galaxy. But unlike humans or other aliens, Basilisks had a difficult time waking from their dreams and often carried out the actions they were dreaming about in real life while they were still asleep. The problem with this was that Basilisk dreams almost always tended to be violent nightmares.

  Evolutionary biologists theorized that this was a mechanism to keep the reptiles from over-reproducing. Basilisks were at the top of the food chain on their home planet of Basilerk. They possessed strong immune systems and could regenerate lost skin and even organs. For centuries, nothing existed that could threaten the giant reptile predators. Since nothing else on its home planet could kill it, nature had to find some way for the species to be kept in check. Scientists hypothesized that this was why almost all Basilisk deaths occurred at the hands (or claws, teeth, or tail) of other Basilisks. Not because they were going around fighting each other in organized armies, the way humans tended to do. Rather, they killed each other in their sleep.

  The result was a loving Basilisk couple who go to sleep in the same bed, only to wake in the middle of the night after one of them had a nightmare. Instead of being comforted by their partner, they might find that they have eaten the face off their lover, broken their loved one’s neck with their tail, or torn their vital organs out of their chest.

  The one time Vere had ignored Traskk’s warning and slept in the same room as him, thinking she would be fine if she slept on a cot that had storage bins positioned between her and her friend, she had woken up one second before he engulfed her entire head in his massive jaws and crushed her skull to pieces.

  “Traskk!” she had yelled, punching one of the Basilisk’s eyes.

  He had blinked awake then. Seeing his claws wrapped around his best friend’s neck, he had let out a series of apologetic whimpers.

  “It’s okay,” she had said, patting him on the shoulder once she was sure he was awake. “You warned me. I was the one who was too stupid to listen.”

  After that, she made sure no one she knew, or at least no one she liked, slept in the same room as the Basilisk.

  Other times, she would open the Griffin Fire’s cockpit door in the morning and find a metal panel with a giant dent in it from where Traskk had smashed it with his tail in the middle of the night. Or a pipe that had four deep puncture marks from where he had sunk his fangs into it during a nightmare. Each day, the first part of his morning was spent fixing whatever he had destroyed in his sleep the previous night.

  “I’ve been having odd dreams,” she told him. “Sometimes I can’t tell if I was really asleep and dreaming or awake and hallucinating.” Traskk’s tongue waved up and down in acknowledgement. “I’m sure that’s happened to you,” she added.

  He nodded.

  She didn’t feel like going into the details of what her dreams had been about. She easily could have, though; they were all as fresh in her mind as if they had just happened. And, of course, they almost always took place in the same cave she had gone to six years earlier.

  In this last dream, everything about her visit with Galen had been the same as it had been then. In both instances, she had been unable to tell if the Green Knight was still there, lurking in the shadows, or if he had simply disappeared into the moss and stone. In both, Galen had avoided her touch, lest his death sentence transfer to her. And the things she and Galen had said to each other—word for word, the conversation had been the same until the very end. Galen didn’t die in her dream, however. Instead, he began to tell her more about Mortimous.

  “He is no more powerful than you or I,” he told her. “His power lies in the fact that they listen to him. And they only listen to him because he has been devoted to hearing them for so long.”

  Just as with the other dreams, when she woke up it was as if she hadn’t been dreaming at all, but simply staring off into space, replaying the memory of the Green Chapel in her head.

  In the dream prior to that, the same conversation occurred in the same cave. The only difference was that it was a six-year-old Vere talking to the little boy she had explored the caves with so long ago. Galen was still afraid to be touched, the Green Knight was still there—or not there—in the shadows. The only difference was that both of them were children.

  “They are all around us,” Galen had said, but even after she woke up she had no idea what he had been talking about.

  “What are Basilisk dreams like?” she asked Traskk.

  He growled and hissed in his native language, telling her that he saw images that sometimes made sense and sometimes didn’t and that he sometimes knew when he was dreaming and sometimes didn’t.

  “Sound just like human dreams,” she said, and he agreed. “Do you ever have particularly odd ones?”

  The corner of his mouth curled up and his head tilted to one side. He told her he had a recurring nightmare involving a pack of Toadens, the amphibian alien that was the sworn enemy of his reptile race, but he refused to go into further detail. Other than that, he dreamt mostly of people he had known back on his own planet. Sometimes they were good dreams. Mostly not.

  She tried to chalk her own dreams up to her fraying nerves. After all, considering what she was planning to do, she had every right to think she would never see her home planet again.

  With the Griffin Fire racing ahead at full speed, headed directly at the Vonnegan fleet, it would only be another two days before she was in front of more Athens Destroyers than she could keep track of… and a Vonnegan ruler who wanted nothing more than to see her suffer.

  14

  Scrope’s pilot pulled his headphones from his ears and said, “Sir, I’m getting reports that Peto’s ship was turned away at Desho-Win after receiving blaster fire.”r />
  Scrope’s own Llyushin transport, along with his pair of Llyushin fighter escorts, was speeding across the galaxy on its way to the Oman-S system. To their right, barely visible, was an asteroid field that marked the border between the two sectors. In front of them, a small blue planet with dazzlingly bright gray rings of particles began to get closer.

  “I don’t expect CasterLan dignitaries to be very popular these days,” Scrope said, his brow furrowed.

  The transport’s pilot shook his head. “Desho-Win has been a more loyal ally to the CasterLans than anyone in Oman-S has ever been.”

  Scrope nodded. “Maybe it would be a good idea to send a communication before we arrive.”

  The last thing he wanted was to travel all the way there just to turn around, or worse, get blown out of the sky by a pack of Oman-S ion fighters.

  They passed by the ringed planet while waiting for a response. Further ahead, a solid gray planet, covered in craters, some as large as the planet they had just passed, began to come into view.

  The Llyushin’s comm system beeped twice.

  “We have a reply,” the pilot said.

  “Yes?”

  The pilot looked down at the message as it came across the screen located next to the ship’s navigational controls, then sighed.

  “They say any CasterLan ships that enter their territory will be blasted out of space.”

  Rather than become discouraged, Scrope chuckled.

  “Well, I guess they saved us some time, didn’t they? Looks like we can cross them off the list. Plot a course for the Dan-Two-Ine system. Maybe we’ll have better luck there.”

  “Changing course,” the pilot said, tapping a series of buttons next to his left hand. “Proceeding to the Dan-Two-Ine system.”

  The Llyushin transport came about in a long arc as it headed toward the new destination. As it did, the pair of Llyushin fighters followed in formation, and the three ships left the Oman-S sector just as fast as they had arrived.

  15

  Morgan’s customized starjet, the Pendragon, had already made one orbit around Dela Turkomann.

  “Not much here,” she said.

  “It’s a desert moon,” Pistol said. “What did you expect?”

  She looked at the android out of the corner of her eye. If Fastolf had said the same thing she would have shown him her fist. But the android wasn’t trying to be sarcastic at all. His response was merely a combination of his software causing him to be as blunt as Vere had programmed him to be, along with him trying to find a way to be helpful.

  “We’re from this system,” she said. “We should know the terrain better than our enemy. I’m looking for it to give us some kind of an advantage.”

  “There is no recorded battle in all of galactic history where an army won or lost purely because the ships fought above a certain celestial body.” He said this in his typical matter-of-fact deadpan, as if it didn’t matter that Morgan and everyone else he had ever known on Edsall Dark might soon be dead.

  “You’re really a wellspring of optimism, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Morgan. I don’t understand.”

  “Nothing, Pistol. I was joking. Just because something has never happened before doesn’t mean it can’t happen at all. There’s got to be a first time for everything.”

  “That is objectively and scientifically correct,” he said, as if she had proven a long mathematical equation instead of having offered a general outlook on life.

  The two of them looked out at Dela Turkomann, the desert moon orbiting the largest planet in the entire system, Mego Turkomann. Although it was five times larger than Edsall Dark, Mego Turkomann couldn’t sustain any life. No colony had ever been successfully built on the planet due to the powerful, deadly, and constant storms that raged across its surface. Not even floating colonies were possible because of the massive mesospheric hurricanes that caused swirling clouds over every part of the planet.

  Dela Turkomann, however, was the exact opposite. The planet’s third and smallest moon, Dela could sustain human life without the need for artificial atmosphere. Not only weren’t there any super storms, there was no wind nor any other kind of noticeable weather phenomena at all. The result was a planet of nothing but sand, where a footprint would remain for thousands and thousands of years without anything to disturb it. Everything was stillness. Golden, granular stillness.

  “Any ideas?” she asked.

  “Mego Turkomann’s storms generate electro-magnetic disturbances,” Pistol said.

  “But all modern starships are equipped with computers that can detect and react to those disturbances.”

  “Correct.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Dela Turkomann has the slowest revolution of any known moon within ten systems. It takes ten years, one hundred and twenty-two point eight days on Edsall Dark for this moon to complete one revolution around Mego Turkomann.”

  “And?”

  “And you asked for anything out of the ordinary about this moon, so I’m telling you,” he said.

  Again, his face and voice were without emotion, and she knew he was just being as straightforward as he was programmed to be, without regard for how she might react. She liked knowing he always delivered the unvarnished truth, never colored by pride or ego. It was why she had brought Pistol along and no one else.

  “Okay,” she said. “So we have a moon that is pelted with electromagnetic disturbances from its mother planet, and it also revolves incredibly slowly. Anything else?”

  The android’s attendant software was optimized for specific questions, so Pistol responded to Morgan’s open-ended question with a clarifying question of his own. “Why don’t you tell me why you are considering this moon for the battle?”

  “Because it’s away from Edsall Dark. We can’t afford to have another battle break out above the most populated planet in the system. And because it’s a place where our forces can survive on the surface if a Solar Carrier needs to land.”

  The android’s eyes lit up, then a dot of blue light circled the glowing yellow irises as he analyzed this against the information that was already known.

  When his eyes stopped glowing, Morgan asked, “Anything?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “So this is where our fleet gets wiped out again, and we all probably die?”

  Pistol looked at her without any regard for the significance of what she was saying and responded in a complete monotone. “Most likely, yes.”

  16

  “What are you doing here?” Vere said, squinting to see Galen in the darkness of the Green Chapel.

  Water dripped near her feet. Tiny puddles splashed each time another drop fell from the cave’s rock ceiling.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said, his voice soft. “I’ve missed you.” But when she was within arm’s reach of him and extended her hands, he whispered, “Don’t touch me.”

  She stopped, cocked her head to one side, then said, “You were the one who left me. Not the other way around. I’m the one who should be mad.”

  She moved closer to him.

  Outside the cave, a war was being waged above her planet.

  “Galen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you send the Green Knight?”

  “You know I did.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to make sure you came back.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The Green Knight?”

  “Yes.”

  She saw Galen’s shoulders shrug. When he saw she needed some better explanation, he pointed to where the Green Knight was standing.

  But when she turned and looked, even though the knight was standing closer to the cave’s entrance than either Vere or Galen, she could barely make out his form in the shadows. And the harder she squinted, the more she couldn’t differentiate between what was rock and green moss and what was the Green Knight. She closed her eyes for a moment, let them refocus, but when she looked again it
appeared that there was no distinction between the rocks and the knight at all.

  She closed her eyes a second time. When she reopened them, the faint outline of a figure was still there, but she couldn’t be sure of who or what it was.

  When the figure stepped forward, she gasped. It wasn’t the Green Knight at all, but a man in dark robes covering every part of him except his eyes. The figure reached out for her face.

  Vere’s eyes burst open. She was in the cockpit of the Griffin Fire. Traskk was next to her.

  “Was I asleep?”

  Traskk shrugged and went back to reading the section of the ship’s manual that discussed making portal jumps—the same section he had been reading when she had decided to close her eyes just for a moment.

  17

  “Oh my lord,” Baldwin said, his mouth open.

  Everyone talked about how awe-inspiring the Excalibur Armada was, but until he saw it for himself, he couldn’t appreciate the sheer scale of a rock large enough to incase one thousand enormous starships. As the asteroid hurtled through space, finishing its loop around Eta Orbitae, each of the one hundred exposed ships glowed like iron in a forge.

  The pilot, Quickly, brought their medical transport to a near stop so they could see the asteroid approaching, but far enough that the incredible heat produced by the blue sun, Eta Orbitae, didn’t burn up the ship’s mechanical systems and leave them floating helplessly in space.

  “I’ve been lucky enough to see the Army in the Stone on two other occasions,” Quickly said, shaking his head in amazement. “But I’ve never had the chance to see them glow before.”

  Of all of the names it was known by, the mythical fleet was currently living up to its moniker of being the Red Army. Having just gotten closer to Eta Orbitae than any other known object ever did, each ship was hot enough to burn a hole through normal vessels. And yet the indestructible Excalibur ships had made this loop around the sun hundreds of times over the course of many millennia and still looked as new as if they had just come out of the shipyards.