The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2)

by Chris Dietzel

  “Can you imagine what those ships must be made of to be able to withstand that heat?” Baldwin said.

  The possibility of the technology, the impervious material that allowed a ship to withstand thousands of years of space flight and hundreds of close encounters with a blue sun, along with the number of starships there for the taking, were exactly why men and aliens, kings and emperors, had spent their entire lives trying to figure out how to free the armada from the Excalibur asteroid. To see the fleet, to contemplate its potential, was to become intoxicated with the power it teased.

  Baldwin could only shake his head. Ever since he was a little boy and his father had told him stories of the Excalibur Armada before bed, he had created an image in his head of what it must be like. As a teenager, he had seen images of the famously elusive fleet in interactive holograms embedded in his textbooks. While stories of the armada captured everyone’s imagination, it had called to Baldwin more than others.

  He had missed an entire day’s lesson on the Mesa-War Triumvirate because he sat at his desk, looking down at the hologram of the asteroid and the ships it held prisoner. With his fingertips, he had tapped the edge of the three dimensional hologram so that the textbook’s image revolved in the air in front of him, showing him different angles of the mysterious fleet. His teacher, a four-winged Terridian, called on him to answer a question, and all that young Baldwin had been able to say at the time was, “It’s so incredible,” and the entire class burst out laughing until the Terridian threatened each child with additional homework.

  Unbeknownst to Baldwin at the time, his teacher had asked him why he thought the Mesa-War Triumvirate had managed to conquer five solar systems before its members turned on each other. Baldwin’s answer, “It’s so incredible,” wasn’t exactly what any teacher wanted to hear in response to such a question. After class, instead of giving Baldwin detention, the teacher flew from the room, his four wings fluttering. When he returned, he had a small book in one of his eight hands, which he extended toward Baldwin.

  “The best book on the Excalibur Armada,” the Terridian said, smiling.

  “No detention?” young Baldwin had said.

  “For being interested in history?” His teacher laughed and fluttered away.

  But even that book and the pages of stories covering what others had said about the fleet and about Rumanov Excalibur and the attempts to excavate the ships couldn’t prepare him for what he actually saw with his own eyes.

  Quickly positioned their ship in line with the asteroid as it approached, then turned the transport’s engines to full. When the asteroid passed by, their ship kept pace with it. Gradually, Quickly turned off the ship’s thrusters. The medical transport inched closer to the asteroid until it was resting on its rock surface while the asteroid hurtled through space.

  “Oh my lord,” Baldwin said again.

  He realized then that Fastolf had barely spoken. When he turned to see if the drunk was passed out, he saw that the comedian was even more overcome than the pilot or himself. His mouth hung open. He didn’t struggle for words because there was nothing to be said. For once, his flask hung down by his side instead of poised by his lips.

  Parts of ships jutted out at odd angles from various chunks of rock. There was no discernible organization to how the vessels were arranged and no conceivable reason for why one part or another of each Excalibur craft was exposed. A pair of enormous engines stuck out from an area right in front of where Quickly had landed. Further down, the bow of another ship protruded from the rock. At the far edge of where they could see, a line of cannons protruded from the asteroid’s surface.

  The red hot fleet of Excalibur ships was cooling and fading to an ordinary dull silver as the asteroid moved away from the sun and raced back out toward the cold depths of space.

  Even so, if anyone went out and touched the Excalibur ships for the next few hours, even with a suit of space armor on, they would be burned alive. Baldwin remembered from his textbooks that even after it stopped glowing red, the Excalibur Armada remained hot enough to burn human flesh for days afterward. With space armor on, it would take another couple hours.

  For now at least, each of the three men was fine with simply staring at it. None of them would have a problem waiting a little while until the ships cooled off. They were too overwhelmed by what they were seeing to think straight anyway.

  It wasn’t just the incredible jumbled variety of protruding parts or the faint red glow still trailing each ship that made each man’s knees go weak. It wasn’t just that they knew the ships were tangible parts of a legend that almost every solar system was familiar with—and that they were seeing with their own eyes. It was the sheer scale of what they were witnessing. The pair of engines that stuck out of the rock by them were comparatively tiny parts of one ship. And yet, just one of the engine’s thrust nozzles—each engine had four—was twenty times larger than the medical transport they were in. And the thrust nozzles were comparable to only a man’s feet sticking out of the sand while the rest of him was buried. None of the three men could begin to guess how many thousands of Llyushin fighters or medical transports it would take to fill up just one of the ships in front of them, let alone the entire asteroid. They could walk eight hours a day for the rest of their lives and not see every part of every ship. Almost one thousand of them!

  Here was a fleet greater than any ever recorded in the history of galactic war, and not only was some civilization advanced enough to build that size and quantity of ships, but they had managed to somehow embed the entire army in stone.

  “I will never see another thing so amazing as this,” he said.

  And still, Fastolf remained mute and motionless.

  “Baldwin?” Quickly said.

  “Yes?”

  “What do we do now?”

  Silence. This was the part Baldwin didn’t like to think about.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Figure out a way to release the army from the stone, I suppose.”

  Fastolf stepped forward and bumped into Baldwin as if he had forgotten anyone else were there. “You really think you’re going to find a way to free these ships when the smartest and wealthiest men in history have tried and failed to find a way?”

  Now that he had finally spoken, Baldwin wished Fastolf had remained quiet.

  “What choice do we have?” When Fastolf chuckled, the way he always did before he offered a smart reply, Baldwin added, “We aren’t generals or leaders. We can’t organize the CasterLan fleet or try to get other armies to join our cause. Those are jobs for others. But the Vonnegan fleet is coming, whether we like it or not. Our homes will be destroyed. Our families will lose everything they have known. Maybe even their lives. So either help or keep your mouth shut.”

  Without waiting for a response, he walked out of the cockpit and began organizing the pieces of a suit of space armor even though he wouldn’t be able to go out and touch one of the ships for another few hours.

  Quickly looked at the Excalibur Armada, then at Fastolf. Then he too walked out of the cockpit to begin getting a suit prepared.

  18

  Peto’s starship and its pair of Llyushin fighter escorts flew toward the largest moon of the planet Chyshakk. Although the moon’s air was naturally toxic to most living things, almost all of Chyshakk’s biggest satellite had been turned into a vast expanse of interconnected colonies with artificial atmospheres.

  “Hopefully this one goes better than the last,” Peto said to his pilot.

  “I still don’t understand why Vere would want a warlord’s army,” the pilot said.

  “Simple: an army is an army.”

  A trio of ships flew up toward them from the moon’s surface. Each had been repaired so many times that it was impossible to tell what kind of vessel any of them had originally been.

  “I wouldn’t trust those things to make it through a portal,” the pilot confided.

  Peto cringed at the idea of convincing such a poorly maintain
ed army to join the CasterLan cause. With unreliable tinder walls, the pilots might not even survive the jump to join the battle, and yet this was one of their only chances at gaining any ally at all.

  “What is your purpose?” a voice said across Peto’s radio.

  “We are here as representatives of Vere CasterLan. We seek an audience with the warlord Kahn-Able.”

  Two more ships left the moon’s surface and joined the three that were already circling Peto and his Llyushin escorts. These two ships looked like they might have also been Llyushin fighters at one point, maybe salvaged from a battlefield, but now were outfitted with armor and wings that were disproportionate to the frame of a Llyushin.

  The voice came back through Peto’s radio: “The warlord Kahn-Able is not interested in fighting your war for you.”

  “It’s not for us,” Peto said. “It’s for our entire solar system and all the other solar systems nearby. What do you think will happen once the Vonnegan fleet occupies our kingdom? Do you think they’ll stop there? They won’t. They’ll keep taking solar systems one at a time until they possess the entire galaxy.”

  Three more bastardized ships left the moon’s surface and joined the other five already keeping Peto’s ship in their target sights.

  “I don’t like this,” one of the escort pilots said across the Llyushin transport’s comms.

  “Don’t fire,” Peto said, then added, “unless fired upon.”

  “The warlord Kahn-Able is not concerned with your war,” the alien voice said. “He does not fight for others. He fights for himself.”

  Another junkyard ship made its way from the moon’s surface to join the others.

  “Sir,” the second Llyushin fighter pilot said into Peto’s comms, “We are already outnumbered. Ragtag ships or not, if they start firing on us we’re dead.”

  Two more ships left the moon’s surface and headed toward them. Both looked like they might have belonged to the Vonnegan fleet decades earlier, before being given new cockpits and engines.

  “You’re right,” Peto said, then nodded to his own pilot.

  Maybe the warlord would be able to provide thirty or forty single-man fighters to the cause, but how many of them would be in any condition to make it through a portal safely, let alone take on the Vonnegan fleet?

  Having been given the okay, the transport’s pilot pulled up on the controls, bringing the ship into an arc that led it away from the colonized moon. The pair of escort fighters immediately performed the same maneuver.

  Once all three ships were heading away from Chyshakk’s largest moon and were on their way to their next destination, Peto said, “We are rapidly running out of options.”

  His pilot had no response other than to nod in agreement.

  19

  No longer orbiting the moon, Morgan’s ship rested on top of one of the many sand dunes covering Dela Turkomann. When the rear ramp lowered, Morgan and Pistol walked down toward the moon’s surface, being careful of their footing when they stepped from metal to thick sand.

  All around them, there was nothing but golden granules, millions and millions of specks of the sun-colored molecules. Sand fields. Sand dunes. Nothing but the bits of what was once rock and now was ash.

  In school, she had learned that there were more stars and planets in the universe than there were grains of sand in the entire solar system. Looking out at the vast emptiness of yellow and orange on just this one moon, she found that hard to believe. If she were honest with herself, she didn’t like believing that notion specifically because of what it said about her. Each single grain of sand beneath her feet was meaningless and inconsequential. If there were more planets and stars than specks of what lie beneath her feet, what did that say about the importance of her life and of everything she did? If she was but one of billions of life forms throughout the galaxy, set amongst infinite stars, the only conclusion was that she was as insignificant in the grand scheme of the galaxy as the sand beneath her feet.

  It was this very line of thinking that either drove people to great deeds or to their deaths. Hotspur had surely had the same inklings of irrelevance when he had blindly followed orders he knew would lead to war just so he could be the hero of that war. In his head, he must have thought it was the only way the galaxy would remember him.

  On the other side of the spectrum was Hector, who not only knew he was a grain of sand but would surely like to be a piece that rested on Dela Turkomann, where there was no wind and no life, and thus no way for him to disturb another living thing.

  These were the kind of thoughts that made Morgan grow restless and irritable. Her life had been dedicated to serving her kingdom, to doing whatever she thought was best for the planets under the CasterLan banner. To think that none of it really mattered, that everything she would do in the span of her life might be equivalent to a gust of wind blowing sand from one mound to another was to question everything she believed in.

  “We are all time’s subjects,” she had once heard Hector say.

  Looking out at land that contained no life at all, not even a little lizard hiding in the sand or a prickly plant that could survive without rain, she couldn’t help but agree.

  It was a good thing Fastolf wasn’t there. If he were around her when these thoughts forced their way into her consciousness, he would have had a broken nose without even having done anything wrong.

  She reached down, picked up a handful of sand, then let it filter through the gaps between her fingers. Each granule fell straight back down to the moon’s surface. The information she had collected was right: although there had been storms and oceans millions of years earlier, there was no longer any wind here.

  “It’s like one giant graveyard,” she said.

  “I’ve never heard of a graveyard in the desert,” the android replied, and she thought she was going to have to explain that she didn’t mean literally. But then he added, “If there was one, however, this would certainly be it.”

  “My ears are ringing.”

  Without any life on the moon, without any wind, there was no noise of any kind. The result was absolute silence and stillness to a point that was disconcerting. In bed at night, trying to fall asleep over the din of starships taking off and landing or of aliens yelling at each other in fifty different languages, it was nice to think of such a place as this. But actually setting foot on the barren moon, looking up at the sky, engulfed in stillness, she found herself wishing for a bed near a busy spaceport.

  “This is most likely where I’m going to suggest the portal be towed,” she told Pistol.

  The android nodded. “There do not seem to be any options that are more advantageous.”

  “Our rebuilt fleet—what little we have—is going to be taking on roughly two hundred Athens Destroyers and another hundred Vonnegan ships.” She bent down, picked up another handful of sand, let it sift through her fingers once more. “There’s not much to be encouraged about here.”

  The monotone response Pistol offered was, “It’s a desert moon, just like we expected it to be,” which only made Morgan shake her head and wish she had the code to be able to reprogram the android to say even less than he already did.

  “Maybe we can get them to engage us in a ground battle,” she said.

  Pistol looked around at the endless sand in every direction. His eyes glowing, he began to analyze the air and ground. There were sparse pockets of water deep below the sand. Although there were bugs down there too, there was no substantial life anywhere near the moon’s surface.

  When his eyes stopped glowing but he didn’t say anything, she shook her head. “Yeah, I guess not either.”

  Still, Pistol looked around at the ocean of sand. “There are no colonies,” he said.

  “Yeah. The air is breathable, but there’s no reprieve from the sun. You have to go a mile underground to find the limited amount of water. No food. But the main reason is the electromagnetic disturbance from Mego Turkomann that would mess with the local equipment. It’
s a nice place to take a day trip and get some sun, but no one in their right mind would try to live here.”

  All over the galaxy, humans and aliens alike were finding ways to colonize nearly every possible planet, even the most inhospitable ones. Thousands of people died every couple years when the artificial barrier of their colony failed and the population was exposed to toxic air before the emergency backup containment field could be formed. Hundreds more died each year as they tried to lay the groundwork for those colonies, either getting caught in super storms or having their work suits compromised. The workers died horrible deaths, either getting picked up and thrown hundreds of miles by never-ending storms, their bodies never to be found, or else by gagging to death before help could arrive. Here, though, was a moon that could sustain most forms of life, and yet no one had ever converted it into a colonized world. It made no sense when she thought about how difficult it was to establish colonies on other planets and moons.

  Who was to say what did or didn’t make sense, though? Two armies had rebuilt their fleets just so they could be sent back into another war. For six years, both sides had dedicated their kingdom’s resources to building a replacement navy just so this one could also be blown to pieces. Compared to that, not colonizing a livable moon made all the sense in the galaxy.

  Morgan’s mouth curled up at the side. “Any ideas?”

  Pistol’s tactical system was processing as much information as it could. When he was finished, he said, “If we can draw them into a prolonged land battle, they might not be prepared for the amount of food and water needed to sustain an army. If this were to occur at the same time as a particularly bad electromagnetic storm, it might disrupt their communication and prevent them from being able to bring in more supplies. If we can identify and target their supply vessels before they can reach the surface, we might be able to keep them without food and water in the middle of the largest desert in the system.”