Without acknowledging the first victory, Hector tapped a series of buttons and a new holographic radar map popped up in front of his face.
“Three minutes to home,” he said.
The second bounty hunter came in from behind and fired a series of cannon blasts as the Llyushin’s engines. Hector’s giant arms flexed as he pulled the controls left then right, maneuvering his ship away from their ultimate destination just long enough to turn and face the bounty hunter. The two ships exchanged fire, but whereas the bounty hunter’s blasts did little damage to the heavily plated Llyushin, Hector’s shots tore the bounty hunter’s ship to pieces.
Without pausing, he resumed course and began once again flying toward the capital.
Above them, at the Tevis-84 portal, another Athens Destroyer appeared. Then another.
At the back of the ship, Pistol said, “Seventy-one percent chance we arrive before the war erupts.”
A moment later, the line of Solar Carriers arranged near the Tevis-84 portal opened fire on the ships in the Vonnegan fleet that had already come through the portal. Streaks of yellow and white light erupted from the sides of every Solar Carrier as their laser cannons sent barrage after barrage of shots toward the Athens Destroyers.
A display popped up near Fastolf and the others in the back of the ship, allowing them to see what was happening. One of the Athens Destroyers had lost power and was drifting aimlessly through space. Another suffered catastrophic damage to its hull, triggering a chain reaction of detonations that made the ship explode from within.
“What did I tell that dumb android about his stupid percentages?” Fastolf cried.
With one of their ships already disabled and one drifting away in pieces, the rest of the Athens Destroyers that had already come through the portal returned fire at the Solar Carriers. The entire sky above Edsall Dark was a network of crisscrossing laser fire. If the sun hadn’t already risen, the continuous streams of lasers above the planet would have illuminated the sky just the same.
If anyone other than Pistol had said the words that followed they would have been slapped and told to shut up, but when Pistol announced it, it was taken for granted.
“There is now a zero percent chance of arriving before the war starts.”
59
“On my mark… fire!” Hotspur screamed, watching a third Athens Destroyer go from a functioning ship to a ghost vessel carrying hundreds of soldiers who didn’t realize they were already dead.
As he watched, Vonnegan troops began disembarking from one of the annihilated Athens Destroyers. Each Vonnegan fighter was encased in a suit of space armor similar to the one Hotspur wore. Each Vonnegan drifted into the void of space with the hopes of either making it to the next closest Destroyer or else having a smaller Vonnegan ship come by and pick them up. If neither of those things happened, their air supply would eventually run out as they wandered aimlessly away into infinite space. If that happened, they would die all the same.
Hotspur watched them with amusement. The battle was over for them already, and yet the leader of the CasterLan forces was only getting started.
“On my mark… fire!” he screamed again and again.
But even as his ships unloaded their laser cannons upon the Athens Destroyers, more and more Vonnegan ships came through the portal.
“When we get back to the planet,” he announced to everyone on his deck, “I am personally killing the man who left the portal open.”
In the time it took to destroy the first two ships, four more Destroyers had appeared. In the time it took to destroy the third ship, five additional members of the Vonnegan fleet had come through the portal. In a matter of minutes, they would be outnumbered.
Already, the CasterLan fleet was sustaining heavy losses as the cannon blasts were being returned. Hotspur saw the Solar Carrier next to him become pock-marked with black dots of sizzling energy where laser fire had first burned away any existing armor plating. After three or four more hits, the lasers penetrated further into the ship’s core until no amount of containment precautions could keep the crew alive. At that point, only the crew members who had been wearing their space armor would survive when the Solar Carrier lost pressure. Even those who survived the lack of oxygen, kept alive by their armored suits, would die if the ship exploded before they could get out into open space or if they were hit by shrapnel that damaged their suits in any way.
A line of three more Athens Destroyers came through the portal.
Hotspur pointed to a ship on the other side of the battlefront. “Shift all cannon fire to the Destroyer in the very middle of their fleet. Let the devils roar.” Then, yelling again, “On my mark… fire!”
60
Vere’s mouth hung open as she looked up at the sky. Ships from both her father’s fleet and the Vonnegan fleet were unleashing their entire arsenals at each other. As she watched, a Solar Carrier got hit with so many blasts that it broke into two evenly sized pieces, both of which began erupting in a series of explosions that reduced the ship to nothing but twisted metal.
There were too many laser cannons being fired for her eyes to be able to distinguish each one. Flashes of light erupted all over the sky, fired back and forth between the two sides, the light lingering in a haze of smoke. Next to her, Morgan was shaking her head as she stared at the madness. Only Hector, who had seen enough war for ten lifetimes and never wanted to see it again, ignored the chaos above them as his ship raced toward the capital wall.
Seeing her old home approach, Vere thought of A’la Dure’s last words—her only words—and sighed.
Be better.
She had promised A’la Dure that she would be. The opportunity to save the planet, her father’s kingdom, was now gone, though. There was no chance of figuring out why her father had ordered the attack. She hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye to him before he died, let alone to find out what had driven him to order an attack in Vonnegan space. There was also no chance of preventing war. Above them, dozens of people were dying with each cannon blast. Hundreds were dying with each exploding vessel. She dreaded the thought of A’la Dure still being here, casting one of her silent looks that had more impact behind it than nearly anything she could have said.
Be better.
In front of her. Above her. Everywhere she looked, there was proof that she had failed in being the person her friend had thought her capable of being.
Be better.
She had wanted to be. She had hoped to be. She would have liked to come back to Edsall Dark and show A’la Dure and Occulus that she could do more than drink and thieve. After all, she hadn’t just promised one person that she would live a better life, she had promised two. Occulus’s final words were also sounding in her head.
There is a Green Chapel. You spent much of your childhood there.
No matter how many times she replayed the words, she knew he had to be wrong. There was no Green Chapel. If there were, if she had spent her childhood there, she would remember it.
Hector’s ship was close enough to the wall that she could make out the lines of mortar that held it together. She was within sight of all the places she had been within walking distance of when she was a child. The hidden creek. The wishing pond. The cave that she and Galen had explored so often. They were all—
A bolt of light went off in her head.
There is a Green Chapel. You spent much of your childhood there.
“Stop the ship.”
Hector looked over at her, but said nothing. The Llyushin continued to race ahead.
Morgan told her they were almost there.
“Stop the ship,” Vere said again, already packing her bag and slinging it over her shoulder.
This time Hector did as he was told and brought the Llyushin to a halt.
“I don’t know if you realize it,” Morgan told her, “but there’s a war starting up there.”
Above them, in front of the portal, two fleets of ships were in such close proximity to one another tha
t every single cannon blast hit its mark. The two sides were tearing each other apart. While death and destruction reigned, even more Vonnegan ships continued to appear through the portal.
“I know,” Vere said. “But I gave my word.”
“What are you talking about?” Morgan yelled, but Vere was already turning to leave the cockpit.
When she grabbed Vere by the arm, she expected to see a fist coming at her face, but instead Vere only offered a sad smile, as if she were going to executioner’s row, then walked to the storage bay, where Fastolf, Traskk, Pistol, and Baldwin were sitting.
“Hector.”
A voice came over the intercom: “Yes, Vere.”
“Lower the ramp.”
The Llyushin fighter’s back ramp lowered to the ground. Vere turned to Fastolf and Traskk to explain but the reptile took hold of her with his giant Basilisk hands and wouldn’t let her go.
“I know, Traskk. I know.” She put her arms around him and hugged him, feeling the hard scales of his skin through his vest.
“What’re you doing?” Fastolf said.
“This is where I get off.” And then, feeling that Traskk wasn’t letting go of her, added, “Alone.”
Fastolf held his flask out to her but she waved it away. Instead, he took a sip on her behalf.
“Hector.”
The voice sounded from the speaker again: “Yes, Vere.”
“I’m getting off here. Please take everyone else to CamaLon as you had originally planned.”
“Yes, Vere.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Fastolf asked.
Morgan was standing behind her, listening to everything that was said.
Vere gently removed herself from Traskk’s arms, then said to Morgan, “You’ll have a better plan than I would have anyway. I don’t know how to stop wars. My father is already dead. All I can do now is follow through to the person I gave my word to.”
“And who’s that?” Fastolf asked.
“The Green Knight.”
Traskk roared in disapproval and bared his fangs.
Fastolf shook his head and said, “You’d come all this way just to knowingly get your head chopped off?”
“I gave my word.”
Baldwin shook his head in disbelief. “We walked through a mountain range. We fought off bounty hunters. I can’t even count how many times we almost died.”
“I gave my word,” she said again. “If I don’t have that, what else do I have?”
“You’d still have your head,” Fastolf said, sitting down on the floor of the cramped storage bay and taking a drink. Above him, Traskk was still baring his fangs and whipping his tail so that it banged against either side of the doorway he was standing in.
Vere turned to Morgan and said, “Lead them. They’ll follow you.” Then she turned and began down the ramp.
“Vere,” Morgan said. When the other woman stopped and turned around, she added, “Occulus would be proud of you.”
In response, Vere simply turned away and continued down toward the ground.
After she was off the ship, the Llyushin’s ramp raised and the ship began flying toward the capital wall once again.
“Okay,” Vere said, all alone in the field, then began walking toward the cave she knew was nearby, the cave she had spent so many days of her childhood exploring.
61
“What are they doing?” Modred yelled in the control room, hundreds of stories below the king’s chambers on the ground level of CamaLon.
Seeing the battle raging above the planet, he had rushed down to find out why the two sides were destroying each other.
A young man with freshly cut hair and perfect posture turned from the table where he sent and received communication updates. “The Solar Carriers have engaged the Athens Destroyers in—”
“I know what they’re doing, you buffoon,” Modred screamed. If it were someone smaller, a little less athletic looking, he would have smacked the man across the face. “Why are they firing?”
“Hotspur issued the command to begin firing before all of the enemy ships got through the portal and into formation.”
“But I ordered them not to engage! Not now, not later. Not ever!”
The young man turned and looked up from his display screen again to assess the king’s stepson. “Hotspur sent a communication saying that if you had a problem with his strategy, you were more than welcome to take a personal transport up to his ship and talk to him about it.”
“But he’s in the middle of the battle!”
“Yes, he is.”
The young man turned back to the incoming communications, collecting them from every part of the capital and then sending them out to those who could use the information.
Modred stood there for a moment, speechless. Then, realizing there was nothing else he could say or do, he stormed out of the room.
62
As Vere walked toward the cave, the battle raged in the space above Edsall Dark’s atmosphere. No bounty hunter dared come through the portal to look for her. Every once in a while, a giant ship erupted into another explosion, the size and color depending on whether the explosion had started in the ship’s ammunition rooms, oxygen tanks, or engines. There was no way Vere would be able to see single-man fighters in the space above her planet without binoculars, but the giant vessels were so large that they could easily be seen with the naked eye.
An Athens Destroyer disappeared behind a wave of blue and purple explosions. A second later, the eruption over, its aft end crumbled into a thousand pieces. A Solar Carrier’s forward command deck became engulfed in explosions the same color as Edsall Dark’s larger sun. Although it remained in one piece, after the explosion it drifted downward, away from the battle, without firing any more cannons. A couple minutes later, the crippled Solar Carrier drifted too close to the planet’s gravitational force and parts of the ship began streaking through the sky as fiery balls. Some parts of the ship burned up as they entered the atmosphere. Others trailed streaks of orange light behind them as they made impact on random parts of the planet.
And still, the Athens Destroyers were appearing through the portal. What had at first looked like an unfair fight for the few Vonnegan ships appearing through the portal now looked like an unbalanced contest for the other side, with CasterLan ships outnumbered two to one, and more Vonnegan vessels appearing every minute.
And yet Vere ignored the battle, hoping Morgan and the others could make some sort of difference. She knew that her own path lay not in fighting someone else’s battle, but in following through with her own word.
In destinies sad or merry, true men can but try.
It was something her father had told her over and over again when she was young. She had always wondered why, as he sat at the edge of her bed, telling her how much he loved her, he had always said true men and not true women or even true people or even true life everywhere in the galaxy. What was she supposed to think? Her own father’s words seemed not to apply to her.
“It’s just what he likes to say,” her mother had told her. “He doesn’t actually mean men, he means anyone. He means you.” Her mother had smiled then and tapped Vere on her little nose.
“Then why doesn’t he say me?”
The answers had varied depending on Vere’s age. One time, her mother had said it was because the king was merely repeating the phrase as his own father had said it to him. Another time, the answer had been that Vere’s father was too practical; to him, men meant everyone.
She knew her father hadn’t meant anything by it, but each time he recited the saying, the words had instilled in her a fire to want to beat any man at everything, to show them they had no idea what willpower really was. She would rob and steal better than them if that was the game they played. She would outdrink them. She would even kill better than them. Anything.
In the distance, she saw where the land rolled into more severe dips and climbs and knew behind one of the hills there would be rocks and a cave
leading deep into the planet.
As she got closer, the familiar sights and sounds came rushing back to her. There was the gradual change from grass to pebbles and then to larger rocks. There was the cave and the hill it was under. Most of the day, the hill blocked out the sun, casting long shadows over the land and ensuring the cave was cast into darkness. There was the sound of dripping water from where the moisture collected on rocks, trickling down into puddles everywhere she stepped. Cold air rushed out of the cave. A tiny stream flowed, beside the cave, from where water collected somewhere underground.
When she was little, the rocks surrounding the cave had seemed like steep cliffs rising high above her and Galen. They had climbed up and down every possible route, daring each other to look down at the ground so far below them. One slip would have meant falling to a certain death. Or so it had seemed as child. She saw now that the same entrance to the cave had no cliffs at all, no life-threatening distance to fall. The same rocks that had scared and thrilled her as a child now looked like nothing more than the entrance to a cave. The highest she and Galen could have climbed was roughly ten feet. So exciting and scary when she was young. So ordinary and unremarkable now that she was an adult. Such was the way of everything in life.
Only a short distance away, the cave and its opening began to appear at the side of the rolling hills. It was one of the reasons she had liked this cave so much, because it seemed like a secret that only she and Galen knew about. Another step and the soles of her feet went from coarse grass to old craggy rock.
Inside the cave, green moss covered every inch of the walls and ceiling. This had to be it. This had to be the place that the knight referred to as the Green Chapel. Edsall Dark’s grass was tan. Its forests were orange and red. Only this cave was green. She had no idea how the Green Knight knew about this place, where he had come from, or who he was. The one thing she was certain of was that this had to be the place.
The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) Page 22