The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (13 page)

There were scavengers in the galaxy who were known for traveling from one colony to another, putting on space armor, and walking the outside perimeter of each uninhabitable area for the bodies of people who had either panicked or worn malfunctioning space armor. The scavengers picked over the bodies for anything of value, then left the forgotten to mummify.

“It’ll be fine,” Quickly told him. “Just stay focused on the rock in front of you. Don’t look away from the asteroid.”

It was sound advice. Baldwin wished, as soon as the words had been spoken, that he had been close enough to Quickly to grab his arm. Already, he was incredibly close to having a panic attack. What he did next was inevitable.

Just like standing at the top of an overhang and looking down after being told not to, Baldwin couldn’t help himself. Knowing it was a terrible idea, he looked at the one place Quickly had told him not to: the vastness of space as the Excalibur asteroid hurtled through the solar system at twenty miles per second.

One moment Baldwin had been looking directly down at the boots of his space armor, taking one step after another. The next moment he was looking out at a sea of black so immense that he knew if he accidently drifted away from where he stood he would never make it back.

His pulse doubled.

Everything was unending and empty. Even with the millions of stars twinkling, there was a complete void. So empty there wasn’t even any color, only infinite black space and dots of white stars. For millions and millions of miles in every direction, there was nothing but a vacuum of life and air. And in the middle of that great void, the asteroid that Baldwin and Quickly were standing on didn’t seem very large any more. This was because, when he looked out at the rest of the solar system, he realized just how fast the asteroid was racing through space and how easy it would be to jump one time, break away from Excalibur’s almost nonexistent gravity, and begin drifting on his own course.

He was sweating profusely.

If he looked down at his feet when he stepped out onto the asteroid, it was impossible to tell it was moving at all, the same way he couldn’t tell that a planet he was standing on was orbiting at thousands of yards per second around its sun. But, unlike when he stood on Edsall Dark and looked up at the sky, as soon as he looked away from the Excalibur he began to appreciate how fast they were speeding through the galaxy.

He wobbled, felt as though he were going to fall.

He was standing on a rock that was flying through space at incredible speeds. If it collided with another asteroid, both rocks would break into pieces and Baldwin would go drifting away into space. The worst way to die.

That was when he began to scream.

As he choked inside his helmet, his legs began to tremble and go weak. Everything began to spin. This was where he was going to die.

“Breathe,” Quickly said, grabbing Baldwin around both arms. “Calm down and breathe.”

For a few seconds, Baldwin’s arms tried to thrash out at the area in front of him. Quickly wrapped his arms around the physician, not letting him move from where he was standing, until he calmed down. The bear hug not only ensured Baldwin knew he was protected and could stop flailing, it also kept his arms from grabbing at Quickly’s space armor or his own and accidently changing a setting on it that would further endanger their lives. Baldwin’s hands, outside Quickly’s grasp, continued to shake.

“You’re going to be fine,” Quickly said in a soothing and steady tone. “I’ve got you. You’re in a suit of space armor. You have oxygen. Just breathe.”

The trembling in Baldwin’s hands began to subside. A minute later, his fingers stopped grabbing for anything they could find and fell to his side.

“Breathe,” Quickly said, scolding himself mentally.

He never should have let Baldwin come out on the asteroid with him for his first experience wearing space armor. Only because the physician had been so insistent on seeing the legendary Excalibur Armada had he relented. If something happened, how would he explain going back to Edsall Dark with only Fastolf? And worse than that, he would have had to live the rest of his life knowing that someone had died under his watch. He had known it was a bad idea and had still allowed it.

Even with space armor on, going out into the solar system and seeing just how far you are from everything else in the galaxy is more than most minds are prepared for. It takes training and drills to get people ready.

“Are you okay?” Quickly asked, his arms still holding Baldwin in place. When Baldwin nodded, Quickly said, “Say something. Tell me you’re all right.”

For a second, Baldwin was silent. Then, when he tried to speak, only gibberish came out. Finally, his tongue started obeying his brain and he said, “I’m okay. I’m better now.”

Quickly let his arms move away from Baldwin’s torso once he was sure the man could stand on his own power and wasn’t going to do something stupid like jump off the asteroid and start floating away.

“Sorry,” Baldwin said.

“It’s fine. I know how overwhelming it can be. I’ve seen guys do a lot worse than yell like you did.”

“Quickly?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you do me a favor and not tell anyone about this?”

The pilot nodded and gave a courteous smile. “Of course, buddy. You want to sit down for a while and get your wits back?”

“We can’t. The Vonnegan fleet isn’t going to wait for me to toughen up.”

Quickly wasn’t going to be the one to suggest their next course of action. If Baldwin wanted to go back to the ship, Quickly was fine doing the exploring by himself. If Baldwin wanted to tag along, that was fine as well.

“You ready to explore the Excalibur?” Baldwin asked.

Somehow, he had already recovered enough that he was actually smiling at the thought of seeing firsthand the fabled fleet of ships he had loved hearing stories about as a child. Quickly guessed it was either the physician putting on a strong face or else unconsciously compensating for the moment of terror by being a little too manic afterwards. Either way, Quickly nodded and let Baldwin lead the way so he could keep an eye on him.

It took five minutes to walk to the closest area where one of the ancient ships was sticking out of the rock. The part of the ship they came upon appeared to be a corner of the vessel’s aft end, but, now close enough to touch, the ship was so ponderously large that it was difficult to tell one part of the behemoth craft from another.

They both ran their gloved fingertips along where the rock met the ship. The metal jutted out of the stone, curved slightly, revealing the edges of what were probably two cannons, then sank back into the rock about a quarter of a mile away, where the rest of the ship was buried. There was no gap between ship and asteroid, no tiny crevices where rock had been chiseled away so the ship could be embedded. It really was as if the asteroid and the ship had been merged in some natural phenomenon.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Baldwin said, almost whispering.

Quickly nodded in astonishment. “Honestly, I know most people who come here are drunk on the idea of what technology the ships possess and what the Excalibur Armada can do for them, but I’ve always been more fascinated by the race of beings who were able to embed a thousand ships in stone, as if the rock just grew up around them somehow. I can’t get over it.”

When they had first landed on the asteroid, the pair of exposed cannons appeared to be about as large as the medical transport they had arrived in. Directly in front of the Excalibur ship, though, it was apparent that thirty or forty Llyushin transports could be dropped inside each cannon with room to spare.

Touching the nearest part of the ship, Baldwin looked straight up. Smooth, flawless metal rose out of the asteroid for hundreds of yards. Just this one cannon looked strong enough to cause significant damage to an Athens Destroyer. From the books he had devoured as a kid, he remembered that most Excalibur experts agreed that each ship had approximately thirty cannons.

“Can you imagine what this would do?” he said, the fingertips of his space armor gently caressing the metal.

“These ships could destroy the entire Vonnegan fleet,” Quickly said. “And any other ships they tried to build in my lifetime. Heck, they could wipe out the Vonnegan fleet and the CasterLan fleet combined.”

Baldwin tapped the ship with his knuckle. “It sounds and looks just like the metal our ships are made out of.”

He knew it wasn’t, though. Sensors couldn’t determine what was different about this metal that enabled it to remain flawless for thousands of years, but normal metal could never withstand the harsh environment of this solar system. Only hours earlier, the ships had passed so close by the sun that the Excalibur Armada had glowed from the heat. A normal ship would have been incinerated. These ships, however, didn’t even have minor scorch marks.

They walked to the far side of where the cannon disappeared into the asteroid. Both men let their gloves run back and forth between metal and rock as if that would give them clues as to how the fleet could be freed.

Baldwin said, “I couldn’t perform an operation where I tried to make a foreign object seem like it belonged where it obviously didn’t. But this... it’s seamless.”

Everywhere the two men turned their attention, the ship disappeared into the asteroid without looking as though the rock had been manufactured around the ships.

Quickly shook his head. “I know this will sound silly, but even after hearing all of my life that the asteroid was one giant rock, I always expected to get here and find little seams or signs of tampering that would show there wasn’t as much mystery behind the Excalibur Armada as everyone said there was.”

It was a common sentiment; many people felt exactly the same way. And then everyone found that when they arrived at the Excalibur they saw the legend really was true. There really was an asteroid the size of a small moon with nearly one thousand ships made of a type of metal no one could identify.

“Fastolf,” Quickly said into the comms system that was also patched into their ship, “we’re going to be returning in a few minutes.” When he got no response through his speaker, he said again, “Fastolf? Are you there?”

Baldwin sighed. “He’s probably passed out again.”

They circled the second cannon. When they were satisfied that everything they had heard about the Excalibur was true, they began walking back to the medical transport.

“People have been trying to get these ships out of the rock for thousands of years,” Quickly said, then added, “Without causing them to detonate.” He shook his head, dumbfounded at what he had seen. “Any thoughts yet how we can do something that no one else has tried?”

A second wave of panic came over Baldwin. This time, however, it wasn’t because he was overcome with the void of space in all directions around him and the phobia of drifting off and running out of oxygen. It was because, deep down, he knew he had no idea how to free the armada from the asteroid. And yet, if he didn’t come up with something soon, the Vonnegan fleet would be appearing near Edsall Dark, ready to kill everyone.

26

A group of four Woghort guards, each wearing armor and carrying energy pikes, met Scrope and his two escorts at the spaceport. Woghorts were the same height as an average human, but every part of them—legs, arms, chest, neck—was twice as thick. That, along with their wart-covered skin and enormous upturned noses, made them appear less human than they acted.

The two Llyushin pilots, one on either side of Scrope, began to reach for their blasters. The Woghorts were known across the galaxy for their bad tempers and appetite for fighting. Seeing four of them with energy pikes was enough to make any soldier move his index finger toward his blaster’s trigger.

“It’s fine,” Scrope said under his breath to his escorts as he offered a giant smile for the guards.

To ensure they did as he said, he casually let his hands drift away from his side and lightly rest on either man’s wrist. Anyway, a pair of blasters against four energy pikes was like a pair of old fashioned swords against four Meursault blades; better to avoid the confrontation at all costs than to die in a matter of seconds.

“Take a look around you,” he told the two Llyushin fighter pilots, smiling in a way that looked like he was posing for a vacation photo.

Rather than being on an exotic beach, however, they were surrounded by a containment field that maintained the artificial atmosphere needed to keep everyone alive. Inside the protective field, there were plants, trees, and even a small lake. Outside the colony, though, explosions boomed all across the horizon as the planet’s gases reacted with the lightning storms.

Sure that the pilots saw what he had wanted them to see, Scrope added, “That’s where Arc-Mi-Die sends people after he’s done torturing them. So let’s not annoy his guards, okay?”

The two pilots let their hands drop back down to their sides.

Once they were in range of using the energy pikes, the four Woghorts stopped.

“Why are you here?” one of them asked with a snort.

Even an arm’s reach away, Scrope detected the other characteristic they were known for. Doing his best to ignore the stench of filth, he smiled once more.

“Listen,” the Llyushin pilot to Scrope’s right said, not liking the way they were addressing one of Edsall Dark’s most prestigious politicians.

But before the pilot could say anything else, two of the energy pikes burst into a glow of faint blue light. With a blink, the tips of both weapons were an inch away from either side of the man’s neck. Another movement and the pilot’s head would be sliced from the rest of his body. The other two guards left their energy pikes off, but didn’t stop staring at the man to Scrope’s left, daring him to do or say something.

Scrope smiled and slowly raised his hands, palms out, to let the guards know he was sorry for any rudeness. “We are here as emissaries of Vere CasterLan,” he said. “She seeks Arc-Mi-Die’s help, as his reputation for war precedes him.” To his own men, he said, “Trust me, this will all be fine. Just stay calm and don’t say or do anything and we’ll be okay.”