The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2)

by Chris Dietzel

  She was running.

  Both bodies were face down on the ground. Neither were moving. Without bothering to see who was who, she did a quick assessment. One wasn’t moving but seemed uninjured. She guessed because he was out of air. The other was missing an arm and might have sustained other injuries as well. And, because his space armor had been torn open from the meteors, he would not only be without air but would soon freeze to death.

  Without any hesitation, she withdrew the Meursault blade she had attached to the back of her armor and, winding up, took one giant swing. In the vacuum of space, without any air to slice through, there was no trail of black mist following the blade. The blade came down a fraction of an inch to the left of where the third meteor had destroyed everything at the shoulder.

  Drops of blood hovered in the air, then began to drift toward the asteroid’s surface. A small sliver of torn and raw flesh fluttered away, a mist of crimson dancing around it. On the other side of where the Meursault blade had slashed, the skin looked like wet sand from where it had been burned by the blade before solidifying again.

  This would cauterize the wound so he—whoever it was—wouldn’t lose more blood while she got him back to the ship.

  With one knee on the ground, she yanked the limp body over her shoulders. With a grunt, she stood and began walking back to the Griffin Fire.

  At the top of the ramp, Traskk, wearing only a space armor helmet that fed him oxygen, scooped the body off of her shoulders and disappeared into the ship. Racing back for the second person, Vere realized she still didn’t know who had lost an arm—or if they had even been worth trying to rescue because of the shape they had been in. No matter.

  She was breathing heavily now. If it wasn’t for the extremely light gravity on the Excalibur, she would have needed to rest after unloading the first body. Instead, she darted back and scooped up the second body without pause.

  “Thank my lucky stars Fastolf wasn’t out here,” she mumbled to no one but herself.

  This body she also hoisted over her shoulders, then began walking back to her ship. Traskk wasn’t there when she got to the top of the ramp. Exhausted, she shrugged and let the body fall onto the padded bench beside her. Only then did she see that it was Baldwin, meaning that Quickly had been the first person she had brought aboard.

  From the red light on Baldwin’s space armor, she saw that he was completely out of oxygen. Calculating how long he might have been without air, she unclasped his helmet and ran to get an oxygen mask. Before putting it over his mouth, she gave him CPR and he coughed back into consciousness. As he came to, she held his hands down by his sides in case he was oblivious to what was going on and reflexively tried to take the oxygen mask back off. Once he was alert and blinked in acknowledgment, she let his arms go.

  “Traskk?” she yelled.

  He roared from the medical bay.

  “Stay here,” she told Baldwin.

  In the little room that served as part first aid room and part storage room, Traskk was lowering a scanner over Quickly’s upper body. The top half of his space armor had been removed and was on the floor.

  “Is he alive?”

  Traskk said he was.

  She came closer. Quickly was still unconscious. Much of his chest and shoulder region were showing the first signs of frostbite. The equipment aboard her ship would be able to counteract the damage that the freezing temperatures had done. His shoulder and missing arm, however, were a different story.

  “We can make sure he survives,” she said. “But we don’t have the equipment to get him a new arm.”

  Later on, when he had recovered from the frostbite and was back on Edsall Dark, Quickly would have a couple different options for what to do with his shoulder. If he was a match for the genetic programming, a new arm could be grown and attached. If he wanted a stronger and nearly impervious option, he could have an android’s arm secured to his torso. Either way, the important thing was that he was alive.

  Vere’s eyes narrowed. “Did you get in contact with Fastolf?”

  Traskk growled and shook his head.

  “Then I think you know where we’re going next. And when we get to the medical transport, he better have a really good explanation for all of this.”

  34

  Fastolf could hear Vere’s voice yelling across the Tearsheet-3’s comms system, sometimes sounding concerned, other times angry.

  “Fastolf! If you’re in there, you better answer.”

  He had lost track of how long it had been since the first signal had been sent from the Griffin Fire to the medical transport. The first one—or, at least, what he thought had been the first—woke him up from another stupor.

  Wiping drool from his mouth, he said, “Baldwin? Quickly?”

  When neither of them replied and he had instead heard Vere’s calls from her ship, he had stumbled into the cockpit and found it empty.

  “Guys?”

  A holographic display beside the pilot’s seat showed the terrain surrounding the ship. Neither Baldwin nor Quickly were out on the Excalibur anymore. Instead, both were aboard the Griffin Fire.

  “Fastolf, is everything okay?” Vere asked.

  What should he say? That he had been asleep while his two companions were doing the dangerous exploring? Or that he might have had just a little too much to drink and had blacked out? He didn’t want to admit either of these things, and so he remained silent.

  In the medical transport’s cockpit, he had the computer show him a rapid succession visual of everything that had happened in the last few minutes. A holographic version of Baldwin and Quickly appeared not far from the holographic version of the ship Fastolf was in. A moment later, a three dimensional meteor shower went directly toward his buddies.

  “Uh, no,” he muttered.

  Vere’s calls to the transport’s cockpit became more urgent, more irritated. But now that he had been silent for so long, he couldn’t just start responding as if he had been there the entire time. That would look worse than if he just stayed quiet, he thought.

  Intermittent with Vere’s calls were Traskk’s growls. Fastolf didn’t understand Basilisk, and so he convinced himself it was still the best course of action if he just kept quiet.

  A while went by with nothing but silence. He wished he was back on Edsall Dark. He wished he had never agreed to tag along with Baldwin on this fool’s mission. He wished he had never brought his flask along, and he swore that if he got out of this without getting in too much trouble he would never have another drink.

  “Fastolf?” Vere said. “We have Baldwin and Quickly. We’re heading to your ship.”

  The anger in her voice made him wince. Still, he said nothing. What was he supposed to say?

  From the transport’s cockpit, he saw the Griffin Fire land on the asteroid directly beside the Tearsheet-3. Fastolf rocked back and forth in his seat, not knowing what to do.

  Vere’s voice came over the comms again: “Fastolf, if you don’t open the hatch door, I’m going to blow it off.”

  He knew, both from her tone and from all the times he had seen her follow through with her threats, that she was serious. He gave a slight whimper, stood, then pressed the button for the hatch door to open.

  35

  “Each neutron cylinder is in position,” the lead engineer said over the comms system.

  When they weren’t busy preparing for the oncoming war, Morgan and Pistol had watched as much of the portal’s preparation as possible, the teams working their way across all three hundred and sixty metal units that formed the enormous circle.

  While the five crews had been making their way around the portal’s outline, a sixth team had departed from one of the Solar Carriers and had begun working at the very middle of the empty circle. That crew’s responsibility was to determine exactly where the center of the circle was, to within less than one ten-thousandth of a centimeter. After marking the spot, they began setting up the quark collider, a glowing sphere the size of a human hand.<
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  If Morgan didn’t know what they were doing, she would have thought the precision with which they maneuvered the collider into place, as well as the diminutive size of the object they were taking such great pains to be careful with, must have been a waste of time. But because the lead engineer kept her informed about each step, she not only knew exactly what the teams were doing, she also knew that she would never have a chance to witness this moment again no matter how long she lived. That was why she watched without blinking instead of getting some much needed rest.

  The team of men, floating in space at the very middle of the empty portal, signaled to the Solar Carrier. Then they set their suits of space armor to propel them back to their ship with a gentle burst of air.

  A moment later the lead engineer radioed to Morgan, “The quark collider is in place.”

  “Proceed when ready,” Morgan replied into her own ship’s comms.

  The other five crews received instructions from the lead engineer to begin departing from the portal ring where they had completed their work.

  Only once in history had a portal accidently been activated while a team of workers was still in the field of space where the white energy would be ignited. No trace of the team, a group of six Lipiddians, has ever been found. Mystics insisted that the winged aliens still haunted the Lipid-10 portal and that anyone who passed through the portal there could hear the screams of the dead crew.

  In the Dark Ages of the Hursh-Die sector, the insane ruler Brutus the Unimaginable had sent people to their deaths by launching them from a spaceship into the nearest portal. He made sure each person to be executed was outfitted in a suit of space armor so they remained alive and conscious as they drifted toward the portal and so Brutus could listen to their screams as they did so. Historians noted that Brutus had visible goose bumps each time the screaming stopped, after the body vanished into the portal.

  These days, however, the only people who died in portals died accidentally, and only because of faulty or damaged tinder walls on their ships.

  The lead engineer, who ensured the portal itself was perfectly safe, sent a comms message: “No one remaining in open space. Everyone accounted for. Portal activation in ten, nine, eight…”

  “This is fascinating,” Pistol said. Although it was impossible for him to inject any emotion into the words he spoke, he too hadn’t left the cockpit for a single moment so as not to miss something.

  Morgan got the impression that, whereas she was interested in seeing this for her own curiosity, Pistol was recording the moment for history’s sake.

  “Seven, six, five…”

  Since the very first pair of portals had been constructed hundreds of years earlier, people had been writing songs and painting pictures of what was going to happen next. For Morgan, it was the only moment in her life that compelled her to do something other than learn how to fight or to lead forces into battle. Nothing else in the galaxy could compare to those two things. Until now.

  “Four, three, two…”

  Instead of saying one, there was a moment of silence. In that instant, it was as if time paused. Nothing happened. Everything was perfectly quiet.

  Then Morgan saw it. A single dot of light, as small as a drop of water but impossibly bright, appeared from each of the three hundred and sixty cylinders. The drops of energy all moved exactly in line with each other, toward the center of the portal and the small sphere of light there. The moment they reached the glowing sphere at the center, all of space became a blur of brilliant white light. Everything, even the space to her right and left, was nothing but white. It was as if a sun were forming right in front of her. Morgan had to put a hand up to block the light from her eyes. Every part of the Pendragon’s cockpit looked as though a thousand spotlights were pointed at it.

  The portal was activating. Once it was calibrated to connect with another portal, any ship with working tinder walls could disappear into this light and reappear someplace else in the galaxy. Likewise, now ships from all across the universe could come to the CasterLan Kingdom. They were no longer cut off from the rest of the galaxy.

  After a minute, the initial burst of intense light faded and was replaced by the localized glow that was contained within the portal ring. The portal’s energy was in the process of stabilizing. Sparks of white energy, almost liquid in the way they moved and reacted, bounced against each other and against the portal’s cylinders. More energy was being created within that field than the explosive power of every Solar Carrier that could be built in the next decade.

  The bursts of white energy continued erupting against each other, fighting for space within the confines of the portal ring. With nowhere to go and with the energy having filled the entire circle, the portal had become a steady pool of energy, a door into another part of the galaxy.

  The engineer’s voice said across the comms, “We’ll do some tests to make sure it works properly, but everything we’re seeing here shows that it should be fine.”

  “Very good,” Morgan said. “Let me know when you complete the tests.” Then, turning to Pistol, she added, “As soon as I know it’s ready I’m going to begin assembling the entire fleet here for the final battle.”

  In less than five days, this spot of space, above a desert moon and next to the newest portal in the entire galaxy, was where the fates would determine who would live and who would die and which fleet would be victorious.

  A Portal, by Tim Barton - Digital Art

  36

  “My Lord,” Mowbray’s first in command said. “We are receiving a communication from General Stormson in the lead Athens Destroyer.”

  “Put him through.”

  The three-dimensional holographic image of a Vonnegan general appeared, standing in front of the windows of one of the Commander Class Athens Destroyers.

  “My Lord, we are being given orders not to pass through this space. We are being told that if we continue, we will be attacked.”

  Anyone else with two hundred Athens Destroyers at his disposal would have burst into laughter at such a statement, but Mowbray only raised his eyebrows and asked who was giving the orders.

  “The warlord Zoo-Rahn, My Lord.”

  “We are passing through his territory?”

  “According to him, yes, My Lord.”

  Mowbray nodded. Rather than being insulted by a local warlord making such extravagant threats, Mowbray appreciated ambition when he saw it. These remote sectors were lawless until someone with an iron fist forced them to live under their rule. If Zoo-Rahn didn’t stand his ground, even if it was against the entire Vonnegan fleet, everyone else would see that he had backed down. And as soon as that happened, another warlord would challenge him for his territory.

  “Continue ahead, General,” Mowbray said. “Do what you must.”

  Respecting ambition was one thing. Giving into it was another.

  Out the viewport of his Supreme Athens Destroyer, Mowbray saw faint flashes of light at the front of his fleet of ships. Zoo-Rahn had followed through with his threat and was attacking the first Vonnegan ships as they entered his territory.

  “Good for him” Mowbray said to no one. “He would have made a fine Vonnegan general.”

  The flashes of light—the battle—was over as quickly as it had started. Mowbray guessed that only four or five of his Destroyers had been given the opportunity to participate in the destruction of Zoo-Rahn’s forces before every fighter belonging to the warlord had been turned into space junk.

  By the time his Supreme Destroyer passed by where the battle had briefly taken place, there were only pieces of seared and bent metal floating in space. Nothing else was there to indicate what had happened other than the Vonnegan warhawk flags floating in space in front of the destroyed vessels.

  Any other ships that passed through the area would know who was responsible for the deaths that had occurred there. A series of local wars would now be waged between various thugs, each vying to claim Zoo-Rahn’s territory as his own. But no m
atter which warlord it was, they too would know that if Athens Destroyers came through this part of the sector again, the warlord would be smart to allow them to pass without a single cannon shot being fired.

  None of that mattered to Mowbray, though. The Vonnegan fleet continued ahead, moving closer and closer to its ultimate target.

  37

  “I’m sorry,” Fastolf said in the loud, boisterous tone he used every time he got in trouble. “I’m so sorry.”

  For the people who received this apology, it wasn’t how he almost shouted the insincere words, it was that he had a smirk each time he offered them.

  Vere grabbed him by his shirt collar so he couldn’t keep bouncing from one foot to the other. The maddening smile immediately disappeared.

  “This isn’t stealing some money or getting into a bar fight,” she said. “Quickly lost his arm. He’s lucky he didn’t lose his life.”

  “I know! I’m really sorry.”

  She pushed him as hard as she could. He stumbled backwards, hitting his head against one of the medical transport’s metal storage bins.

  “Stop saying that. You say you’re sorry for minor things. For mishaps. You don’t say you’re sorry when you almost get two people killed.”

  Fastolf opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Quickly was sedated and back at the Griffin Fire’s medical bay, but Baldwin and Traskk were both standing behind Vere to see what would happen.

  Seeing the physician there, Fastolf directed his attention to the one man who forgave everyone and who never held a grudge. If he could just convince Baldwin that everything was okay, Vere would have to forgive him as well.

  “Buddy!” Fastolf said, stepping by Vere.

  But when a hand came to pat Baldwin on the shoulder, the physician stepped away.