by Greg Pace
When the floor came to a drastic stop, I let out a shaky breath. How much more of this craziness could I take?
The curves of the tunnel ended at two enormous steel doors in front of us.
“What do you keep in there?” Tyler asked, mouth agape. “Godzilla?”
“Maybe you can wrestle it,” Kwan joked.
An electronic scanner glowed red at the side of the door. Pellinore leaned down and smiled, letting the device get a read on his teeth. The glow turned green and the massive doors slid open, revealing an empty room the size of two football fields, at least, with a ceiling that was a hundred feet high.
With a twinkle in his eye, Pellinore turned and shouted into the vast space. “Reveal X-Calibur!”
Nothing happened. The five of us looked at each other, confused. Had Pellinore and Merlin gone senile in their old age? There was a hiss in the center of the room, along with the faint whirr of gears turning below the floor. A section of the ground suddenly split in two.
My hands clenched and unclenched at my sides. As I took a step forward, my mind raced back to the stories Dad would tell me about the most famous sword ever crafted, and how it had been kept in an underground cavern before rising up from a magical lake to reveal itself to King Arthur.
I looked to my left and realized that Malcolm had also taken a step forward, standing next to me, tense with excitement. As the floor opened wide, something rose up on a steel platform.
My jaw dropped. X-Calibur wasn’t a sword at all. It was the most kick-butt spaceship I had ever seen.
14
118:10:36
IT BECAME CLEAR TO ME that HQ and everything in it had been designed to imitate the look of X-Calibur. The ship was twenty feet long and shaped like a rounded arrow. Its wider front end consisted of four panels with seams that came together to form an X. From there the windowless sides sloped closer together as they got to the tail of the ship, ending in a crisp metallic point. X-Calibur was beyond impressive. It was downright . . . otherworldly, like nothing that could have ever been created by human hands.
“This is an alien ship, isn’t it?” I breathed.
Merlin nodded. “Precisely.”
The ship had two short wings that curled at the ends into gleaming points, like razor-sharp steel talons. Were those “wings” there to help the ship fly? Maybe. But they were lined with holes, and inside those holes were tiny globes that held swirling energy inside them—yellow or purple or red, depending on the angle you looked at them, like they had been filled with colored lightning. Even though Merlin and Pellinore had insisted that there was no such thing as magic, the energy inside those round mechanisms seemed like the next closest thing.
“I’m so ready for this,” Malcolm whispered.
“Can I touch it?” Darla asked Pellinore.
“Of course, Darla. If we stick to schedule, in roughly forty-eight hours you’ll have to do a great deal more than just touch it.” He added to the rest of us, “All of you will.”
As Darla carefully placed a hand against the side of X-Calibur, her eyes widened. “It’s humming!”
Now that she’d broken the ice, the rest of us followed suit. Darla was right: The metal (if that’s what it was) felt slightly warm to the touch, and the longer I held my hand against it, the deeper the warmth got. I had the strange sensation that the feeling was moving up my arm. I looked to the others, but they made no mention of it. When the warmth continued up the length of my arm and entered my chest (was I imagining it?), I yanked my hand away, startled.
Merlin, who had been watching me all along, smiled brightly. “It doesn’t bite, Benjamin.”
I managed a nod and walked to the ship’s tail. Tyler, Kwan, and Darla followed. There were eight glowing panels at X-Calibur’s rear, four on each side, where the body came together to make a perfectly sharp point. The panels were sunken inside recessed cavities, giving off a dim, otherworldly glow. It reminded me of the red-hot embers of a campfire after the flames had died down. I was pretty sure we were looking at the ship’s thrusters, or power source.
“Where did you get this?” Kwan asked Pellinore. “I’m guessing they don’t sell these at Walmart.”
“I found it in my travels, centuries ago.”
“Carbon dating on the surrounding rock told us the spacecraft had been untouched for ages. Long before Earth was populated by man,” Merlin said.
“What was it doing there?” I asked.
“It was piloted by an extraterrestrial being, I believe. There was a data recorder on the ship. An onboard diary, if you will.”
“Where’s the alien now?” I looked around with new dread. I wasn’t in the mood to be surprised by the appearance of any intergalactic monsters just yet.
“He was long deceased when we found him,” Merlin explained. “It took our team many decades to work up a rough translation of his audio diary, but he apparently flew the ship here, to Earth, to hide it from his own people.”
“Why would he do that?” Tyler wondered, still gazing at the ship.
“He created this spacecraft as the ultimate weapon,” Merlin replied, his voice heavy with respect. “His people had become increasingly violent. A planetwide civil war broke out, and he had second thoughts about letting his creation be used for battle. So he brought it here, to a planet that was still uninhabited at the time. He sacrificed himself to protect his own race from his finest work.”
Merlin placed a hand against the ship and looked up at it, his ancient eyes filled with hope. “I believe we can make him proud by using his work for good. To protect our humble planet.”
“Why is it named X-Calibur?” I asked, as Malcolm snooped around the front and sides.
“I named it,” said Pellinore, then walked to the front of the ship and pointed out the X created by the ship’s seams. “In homage to my glory days with the Round Table. Arthur had his sword, and we have a weapon for modern times.”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Shall we have a look inside?” Pellinore pressed a hand against the side of the ship. A small, previously invisible panel glowed, and a hatch slid up.
“Brilliant!” Malcolm rushed over.
Pellinore patted him on the back. “It took my team nineteen years to figure out how to open it.”
A set of glowing, holographic stairs appeared from thin air. They didn’t look like they could bear even the lightest of us, but Malcolm charged forward, and we heard the unmistakable thunk of his boots as he hit each step.
“Whoa,” Tyler gasped. “He’s standing on light!”
“How’s that even possible?” Kwan asked, bending down for a closer look and rapping his fist against the shimmering stairs.
Pellinore sighed. “I wish we knew. We’ve been trying to figure it out for decades. The aesthetic of X-Calibur, and some of its more . . . accessible technology, has steered us in the development of things here at HQ. But much of the rest is, well, still a mystery.”
Malcolm rushed into the ship. When the rest of us hesitated, Pellinore urged, “No time like the present, knights. We are on a bit of a deadline.”
• • •
The inside of X-Calibur was as smooth and spare as its outer body. I’d been expecting all sorts of crazy alien buttons and gauges, but there was none of that. And with all seven of us inside, the ship felt a little cramped. It definitely hadn’t been designed for this many people: There was only one seat.
And Malcolm was already sitting in it.
“Look at this,” he boasted. “The pilot seat fits me like a glove.”
Kwan, Tyler, and I moved for a closer look. Malcolm had a seat belt across his waist and chest, constructed out of blue holographic light; two straps projected from the ceiling and crisscrossed his chest to make another X.
There was a control console in front of the pilot seat, rectangular
, about three feet long, with a horizontal handle sticking out of each end with buttons on it. They looked like ultra-modern joysticks. I figured that Darla, being our own video game master, would be super pumped about those controls. But when I turned to see the look on her face, she was still lingering well behind all of us again, hanging out by the ship’s door.
She’s not going to last here, I thought.
“The seat molds itself to whoever sits in it,” Merlin explained, and I turned my attention back to the group. I took a better look at the steering console, which bore no markings whatsoever—just a round glass panel, about ten inches across, throbbing as it changed colors.
On the floor beneath the steering console were four more glowing panels, two on each side. I assumed those panels were for the pilot’s feet, but I couldn’t see any labels.
“Let’s have each of you get a feel for the seat,” Merlin instructed. “Go on, Benjamin. You next.”
Malcolm grudgingly stood up. The seat belt disappeared, and the buttons on the steering console went dark. When I took his place, the console buttons began to glow again, then the holographic seat belt appeared out of nowhere to strap me in. The seat felt like a large hand that adjusted to grip me tighter. It was incredibly comfortable, too. I had to give props to the dead alien dude: He knew how to design a chair.
I reached out to grab the steering handlebars on the console, and the second I made contact, the entire column slid closer to me, moving on a hidden track in the floor. There was a surge of power throughout the ship as the console and floor panels lit up. The curved, blank wall in front of me suddenly became a crystal-clear piece of glass, as if the metallic look of the wall had been simply turned off to become X-Calibur’s windshield.
Startled, I pulled my hands off the steering console and everything went dull again. The windshield winked off, becoming just the front wall again. I looked to Merlin and Pellinore and the other kids, heart pounding.
“It does that for everyone, too,” Pellinore said dryly. He motioned for me to get out of the seat.
“So, are we all going to be in here when the aliens show up?” Kwan wondered.
Pellinore shook his head. “One of you will be chosen to fly X-Calibur.”
“But if the seat molds to fit whoever sits in it, why a kid?” I asked. “Why not find the greatest pilot in the world to do it?”
Pellinore and Merlin exchanged an unsure glance. We all saw it, so Kwan scoffed, “More of that need-to-know BS, right?”
I had to smirk. There was something to be said for not beating around the bush.
Pellinore nodded to Merlin, who took a deep breath. “In truth, we would have loved to employ the best pilot we could find. It would have made our job . . . far easier. But we’ve found that the ship responds best to children.”
“Only to children,” Pellinore corrected.
“How come?” Tyler asked.
“My techs tell me it’s most likely a system that requires a distinct bio-signature range. And that range seems to be a bio makeup under fifteen years old.”
“So are we really just five guinea pigs?” Tyler asked. “You wanna see which one of us is best for this thing, and then the rest of us are sent home?”
“Aww, man.” Kwan threw up his hands. “I’m missing two surf competitions to be here for nothing.”
The mood inside the alien ship was turning increasingly sour. Merlin coughed loudly. “The rest of you will be utilized to the fullest, believe me.”
“Doing what?” Kwan snapped. “Twiddling our thumbs in front of a computer monitor?”
Pellinore turned toward to the ship’s door. “This way, knights. I’ll show you.”
We followed him and Merlin across the underground hangar, our footsteps echoing throughout the vast space.
“There will be no thumb-twiddling,” Pellinore said. He pressed a panel on the wall to reveal three more spaceships in a second underground hangar. But while Pellinore and his team of engineers had obviously tried to duplicate the alien ship, these new ships were still pale imitations at best. You could see the metal seams all over them, and the windshield was plain glass, always visible. The power source panels on the back looked a lot like regular engines.
“As you can see,” Pellinore continued, “we’ve built four fully functional X-Calibur prototypes that the rest of you will use in battle. My techs have copied everything to the best of our abilities, and I’ve spared no expense. These ships shall also have child pilots. For better or worse, I fully trust the intentions of X-Calibur’s creator.”
His eyes rested on me, Kwan, Tyler, and Darla as he spoke, further proof that he expected Malcolm to be the one flying the real X-Calibur.
“But, wait—there are only three ships there and four of us,” Darla pointed out.
Pellinore turned for a look, confused.
“She’s right,” Merlin said, his little brow furrowed. “Where is the final ship?”
VROOO-WHISSHHHH!! Another X-Calibur prototype suddenly soared over our heads, startling everyone as it flew around the very top of the hangar airspace.
“What on Earth?” Pellinore practically choked as the prototype roared deeper into the hangar that housed X-Calibur, executing some dazzling twists and twirls along the way.
Someone else was showing off some major skills down here. “Whoa. That dude can fly,” I gasped.
Pellinore raced over to a panel on the wall and shouted into it, “We’ve got a one-nineteen in X-Bay! Repeat! One-nineteen in X-Bay! I want full lockdown!”
I whirled to Merlin, pulse pounding. “What’s a one-nineteen?!”
Merlin’s face was pinched with full-fledged fear: “Intruder.”
The alarm system blared throughout the hangar as the prototype made a sudden flawlessly executed turn and soared past us again before coming in for a quick landing near the hangar entrance. A hatch on the side popped open and the pilot jumped out, stumbling for a moment before finding his footing and running toward the door. He was wearing a gray pilot helmet and matching flight training jumpsuit, just like the ones we were all wearing. But his was clearly not custom-fitted like ours; it hung on him, much too large.
There was no way to see the intruder’s face. What if it’s an alien in there? He was definitely the size of a little green man from Mars.
It seemed like the guy would make it to the door, but Malcolm suddenly charged after him. He caught up with the mystery pilot and tackled the dude with a grunt, then flipped him over and held down his arms. I have to admit, it was darn impressive.
Merlin, Pellinore, and the rest of us rushed over as a dozen or more techs in lab coats barreled into the room. Pellinore gave Malcolm a pat on the back. “Good work, my boy!”
I scolded myself. Why hadn’t I gone after the intruder like that?
As Merlin bent down to yank off the intruder’s helmet, I inhaled sharply: We were about to see an honest-to-goodness alien, some horrific creature from outer space here to destroy us all.
Wrong. It was a girl. A very human girl. And even with her hair all messed up from being inside the helmet, she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She had big green eyes, light brown hair with a hint of blond highlights throughout, and flawless skin. No offense to the girls at my school, but nobody looked like her in Breakwater.
“Ivy?” Malcolm gasped, then jumped off her and took several steps backward.
“Hey, Malcolm,” the girl said in a British accent. Then she grinned and added, “Nice tackle.”
It was kind of cool to see Malcolm so out of whack for once. He and this girl obviously knew each other, but why did he seem so . . . embarrassed? I noticed the stunned look on Pellinore’s face. He gaped openly, trying to find words as his cheeks turned red.
“How . . . did . . . you . . . get in here?” he finally seethed. “And how did you learn to fly like that?”
Ivy got up and dusted herself off, then gave us all a self-satisfied smile. She was enjoying every second of this. “I can do lots of things, Father. You’d know that if you gave me a chance.”
15
116:28:11
AFTER THE FIASCO WITH IVY, the five of us had been whisked back to our rooms, probably so Pellinore could sort things out with his daughter and avoid any more embarrassment. Although, if you’d asked me, Ivy’s introduction to the rest of us was full-on rock star material. Not only had she found a way to sneak into HQ without her father knowing (no easy task), she had seemed to enjoy it. The upside of this sudden change in schedule was that we were given a chance to call home.
“What’s the royal academy like?” Mom asked. “Is it nice?”
I scooted back on my bed so I could sit against the wall, the phone to my ear.
“The HQ—I mean, the academy—is cool. We’re, uh, learning a lot already about science and . . . stuff.”
My improv skills were starting to crumble. Merlin and the techs were probably listening in on our calls right now, ready to cut the line if we said anything we weren’t supposed to.
I glanced across the room at Kwan. “Yeah, Dad. I know it’s my last year,” he was whispering into his phone. He sounded frustrated—nothing like the happy-go-lucky jokester I’d come to know and (kind of) like. “Just make sure you sign me up for the competition next month. Please.”
Next to Kwan, Tyler was also on the phone. When he saw me looking, he turned away uncomfortably, trying to keep his conversation private. I did manage to hear him whisper something about “lots of smart kids here, Ma” and “I’ll try my best.”
“Sorry, Mom, but they’re telling us we gotta get back to work,” I sighed into my phone.
“Of course, honey. I love you, and I’m so proud of you,” she gushed, making me feel guilty for lying.
“Love you too,” I whispered, not wanting to sound too cheesy in front of the others. I felt my gut tighten as I looked up at the big countdown clock on the wall: a hundred and sixteen hours left.