The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (28 page)

“There won’t be an armada to take with us by the time help arrives,” she sighed.

Two more pirate vessels approached and immediately began docking next to one of the Excalibur vessels. The new ships were so heavily armored and modified that not even her ship’s computer could guess what they might have been.

The pair of heavily armored frigates and the Signellian Battlecruiser began firing at these ships, destroying any competition on sight. The Griffin Fire raced between the giant ghost ships as a way of evading any of the pirates’ targeting computers.

Ships of every size, make, and model were scattered all around them. Some were trying to seize the Excalibur Armada. Others were content to battle with each other, thinking that the winner would earn the entire fleet for themselves. Whenever one of the pirate ships came into sight, Vere fired at it, then guided the Griffin Fire back between the legendary ships for protection.

She lost track of how long this went on for. Maybe only thirty minutes. Maybe a couple hours.

When a different kind of beeping began in the cockpit, she dreaded what it would tell her. Looking down, she saw on a display that over one hundred ships were approaching.

“This is it,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “I tried, but I can’t beat them all.”

But the beeping didn’t come from the targeting system. It was coming from the navigation system to warn that the ships were approaching on a potential collision course. They weren’t pirate ships. They were CasterLan ships.

“It’s about time,” she said, giving Traskk a smile.

The Basilisk’s tail moved faster now, but in wide, happy strokes.

The cavalry had arrived.

Traskk
, by Zaina.A. - Digital Art

64

In the medical ward of CamaLon, it took a while for Quickly to gain his senses. The medical bots brought him out of the artificial sleep in stages, giving his mind time to process where he was and what had happened to him before his body was able to begin obeying its owner’s commands. It was better this way, lest the newly awakened patient gather his wits too fast and panic at the sight of a biomechanical arm attached to his side.

He mumbled something, but not even he knew what he was trying to say.

“You’ll be fine, sir,” said the first medical bot, the more traditional-looking of the two, as it stepped toward him. “Try to remain still.”

The second bot hovered across the floor toward Quickly’s other side and offered a glass of water. Quickly tried to take the glass with both hands but only his normal arm worked. That was when he realized his right arm was no longer flesh and bone, but metal and wires. It would function all right, but it would take some getting used to.

“You were on the Excalibur asteroid when a meteor shower hit,” the first bot said. “Do you remember anything?”

“Some,” Quickly said, sounding as if he had been walking for hours across a desert. He took the glass of water with his normal hand and drank it. “I remember everything up until I got hit. Then it’s a blank.”

“You lost consciousness immediately,” the bot said, its voice fluctuating as part of its
Kind and Compassionate
setting. “Vere rescued you from the asteroid and—”

“Vere?”

“Yes.”

“Why was she there?”

“I do not have that information.”

Quickly leaned forward. “What else?”

“After rescuing you, she had a Mr. Fastolf bring you back for medical attention.”

He groaned. “Where is Fastolf now?”

“I do not have that information.”

“My arm…”

“You were given a Generation-KL Type III bio arm. It is superior to your original arm in every way.” The bot’s fluctuating tone affirmed that this must be true.

“I can’t move it.”

“We will assist you with learning how to use it.”

Quickly looked out the window of the medical bay. “When can I get out of here?”

“Typical recovery lasts eight to ten days.”

“How much longer until the Vonnegan fleet arrives?”

“I do not have that information.”

Then, looking more closely at the scene outside, he squinted and frowned, trying to think of what was different. He blamed the remnants of the chemicals in his system for how long it took because once he realized what the answer was it was glaringly obvious: there were no ships at all. Not flying into or out of the spaceport. Not docked. Not being loaded with equipment. Except for an old man walking behind a group of little children over a bridge, he also couldn’t see any people.

CamaLon was a ghost town. Edsall Dark was a ghost planet.

“Where is everyone?”

He expected the bot to tell him that it didn’t have that information, but instead, the machine switched to its
Confidential
setting and said in a hushed voice, “Orders came in a few hours ago: everyone with a starship of any kind, along with all citizens, were to rendezvous near the Excalibur asteroid.”

He thought to ask why that command had been given but didn’t bother. The bot wouldn’t know and would only give its canned response. Anyway, there was only one possible reason: Vere had found a way to release the Excalibur Armada from the rock! She had managed to do what no one else had ever been able to, and now all of those ships would be used to obliterate Mowbray’s fleet of Athens Destroyers.

The metal arm, connected to Quickly where his shoulder used to be, suddenly seemed a lot less significant. Instead of asking any other questions, a huge smile spread across his face.

65

With the Solar Carriers already orbiting Dela Turkomann and the Athens Destroyers on their way, the newly activated portal went largely unused for the first few days of its existence. After the initial tests to prove the portal was safe, the only other ship to appear through it had been a Cirellian frigate. The ship’s crew immediately realized they were in a completely different part of the galaxy than they wanted to be and wasted no time turning around and disappearing again. Other than that, no ships had come through the circular energy field over the previous three days.

The next ship to burst through the portal was the Griffin Fire.

Vere joined the formation of Solar Carriers orbiting the desert moon and, upon locating Morgan’s ship on the surface, she descended into the moon’s atmosphere. For as far as the eye could see, there was only sand. The one exception was the command center Morgan had set up. Westmoreland and other senior officers were also there, meeting to discuss the approaching war. A detachment of Llyushin transports was stationed around the command center, spread out over a quarter of a mile in every direction, ready to ferry their generals back to the Solar Carriers they commanded. In the distance, Vere saw at least five more Llyushin transports, a Llyushin fighter, and a pair of small frigates. Closer to the tents was Morgan’s ship, the Pendragon.

A group of small two-man speeders shuttled back and forth across the desert, taking officers to and from their ships after having received their orders from Morgan and Westmoreland.

Vere planned on landing the Griffin Fire at the same distance away as the Pendragon for the same reason she assumed everyone else had landed so far away: her ship’s landing thrusters would kick up so much sand into the air that the tents would be buried if she brought the Griffin Fire any closer.

No matter where she brought the ship down, though, she was going to lose visibility the closer she got to the surface. Even a hundred feet off the ground, a fog of sand began forming around the ship, covering the cockpit glass with grime and reducing visibility to near zero.

“Switch over to visual setting zero, zero, four,” she said.

Traskk looked at the controls in front of him, then looked back at her and shrugged. His tail came forward, between his legs, in embarrassment.

“The pair of blue buttons over there,” she said, pointing. “Then the dial.”

It was easier to remain calm while teaching him how to operate the ship without an entire fleet of Mowbray’s ships using them for target practice.

After Traskk did as she directed, a series of images and displays appeared just in front of the glass. Inside the cockpit, everything had temporarily gone dark because of the sand blotting out the daylight. For a moment, the only lights around them came from the blinking dials and switches all around the cockpit.

Then, in a flash, the area around the pilot and copilot’s chairs glowed with virtual images of the moon’s surface in greens and blues and grays. The command center appeared in the distance as a blinking red X. A holographic counter displayed how much farther she had until the ship reached the surface.

After the Griffin Fire landed, they had to wait inside the ship for a couple of minutes. There was no point in going outside until the sand in the air had settled once more. She could put on a suit of space armor and walk to the command center, but with the amount of sand in the air, it could bury her alive as it settled. Better to let it drift back to the moon’s surface first than to tempt fate one more time that day. And anyway, after practically living in a suit of space armor back on the Excalibur, Vere had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t wear one again for a very, very long time.

Once the sand had finally settled and the air was clear enough for them to see the command center flag—the five-tailed blue dragon of the CasterLan crest—waving in the distance, Vere lowered the ramp.

Looking out at the desert, she told Baldwin and Traskk that it would only take five minutes to walk to the tents. Rather than wait for a land cruiser to pick them up, they set off across the sand on foot.

“Omf,” Vere and Baldwin said at the same time.

The sun and the heat were overpowering. Traskk, being cold-blooded, managed the heat better than the humans and strode across the desert in comfort. As he walked, his long tail left wide swaths of sand pushed to either side of his claw marks. If someone looked at the trail he left and didn’t know what a Basilisk was, they would think that whatever creature had left the marks in the sand must be five or six times larger than a man. They were the type of tracks that caused confusion and gave rise to claims of the existence of monsters long thought to have been extinct.

“Fascinating,” Baldwin said, looking at the tiny imprints that his and Vere’s feet left in the sand compared to the wide swaths of disturbed desert caused by Traskk.

Vere, sweat already running down her cheeks, only shook her head and quickened her pace.

“Do you think Morgan will be happy to see us?” Baldwin asked, his eyebrows raised.

Traskk offered a low grumble. Vere grunted, trying to think of a single time when Morgan had been happy to see anyone.

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll be happy to see me,” she said, smiling at her own joke.

The pair of CasterLan guards outside the command tent were wearing desert armor instead of the traditional heavy variety, allowing them to blend in with the yellow sand and also stay cooler. Even so, nothing could keep them from soaking every piece of the armor with sweat as long as they were on Dela Turkomann’s surface.

The guards took one look at Vere, recognized her, and let her enter the main tent without saying anything. As the tent flaps opened, a breeze entered the makeshift command center and the galactic maps that had been arranged on the tables fluttered away. Morgan looked up in annoyance to see who was bothering her. When she saw who it was, she rolled her eyes.

“Nice of you to finally join your own fleet,” she said, not wasting the time or energy to shake hands or engage in other pleasantries. After the maps and papers were collected, she added, “Hello, Traskk, nice to see you again.”

“Uh,” Baldwin said.

“Yeah, sure,” Morgan said. “Nice to see you again, too.”

“I told you she’d be happy to see us,” Vere said, looking around the room.

Westmoreland was on the opposite side of the command center, reviewing ship diagrams with a collection of middle-aged officers. He looked up momentarily and nodded at Vere, then returned to his discussions without interruption.

An old fashioned map, made of paper and pinned with colored tacks to note various celestial bodies, ships, portals, and other key space items, took up one entire wall in front of Vere.

She nudged Traskk and said, “We’re really in trouble if we can’t afford three-dimensional map imagery.”

Morgan sighed. “No electronics are allowed inside the command center. No visuals, no scanners, nothing. I don’t want someone sending our plans to Mowbray.”

Vere shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

“Speaking of which,” Morgan said, reaching for the communicator on Vere’s shoulder.

Vere grabbed Morgan’s wrist before it got to her, and two women stared at each other. Neither of them offered any emotion, but also neither were willing to remove their hands.

Morgan, in a perfectly even and calm voice, said, “Everyone follows the rules. No one is above them.”

“If you don’t remember, I’m the one who put you in charge,” Vere said.

“Then let me do my job.”

As she unbuckled the communicator from her shoulder, Vere said, “It’s my kingdom. Do you really think I’d betray my people?”