The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (3 page)

Racing down the next alleyway, she was almost upon them. But that was when, still running, Fastolf’s companion smacked a large, ogre-like alien on the back of the head as they ran past. When the Crunklin turned around, already growling and ready to kill whatever had hit it, Fastolf and his fellow thief were well past it and turning the next corner. The only thing it saw was Morgan.

She skidded to a halt and sheathed her sword, holding her hands out to show she didn’t mean trouble. The Crunklin was hunched over but was still a foot taller than her. Its arms were as thick as her waist. When it roared its displeasure, she saw thick teeth as long as her fingers.

“I don’t want trouble,” she said.

It growled at her but didn’t move forward.

To be safe she withdrew her Meursault blade again. A circle of dark mist made its way around her as she twirled the sword into a defensive position.

“I don’t want trouble,” she said again. “It was them, not me.” She pointed in the direction of the two figures that had disappeared into the distance.

The Crunklin turned and listened to the footsteps racing away, then gave a softer, lower growl.

“Are we okay?” Morgan asked.

The Crunklin gave a hum and backed away to let her pass.

The race was back on.

Even with the extra time to get away, it only took another three blocks for her to see Fastolf again. The man was hunched over, still trying to get away, but too out of breath to do anything but hobble forward. His fellow thief, just as wide as Fastolf, stood next to him, urging him forward.

“You don’t even know how bad I’m going to hurt you,” Morgan shouted as she closed the distance between them.

Fastolf looked at her racing toward him, then groaned. His companion waited a moment longer to see whether the fat man would attempt to climb over the next fence. Then, seeing that Fastolf was done for, the other thief began scaling the fence and was almost all the way over when Morgan got there.

She yanked on the first thing her fingers found: a bit of fabric. Instead of pulling the other thief off the fence, she came away with a cloak that was full of thick padding.

In the shadows, safely out of reach, the other thief stopped to look back at Morgan, and Morgan noticed the person Fastolf had been with wasn’t as big as him at all. Not even half his weight. Knowing that she had to choose between going after the other thief or remaining near Fastolf, she stopped the chase. She was alone with the one person she managed to like and detest at the same time.

“Fastolf, Fastolf, Fastolf. What am I going to do with you?”

After running farther than he had run in his entire adult life, he was still too exhausted to say anything. Each time he sucked in a new breath of oxygen he sounded like a ship’s engine struggling to start. Gasping, he couldn’t form clear words. Instead of saying anything intelligible, he whimpered a series of noises like a newborn baby. As he did, he raised his eyebrows as if she would understand what he was saying and take pity on him.

“Why don’t you ever learn?” she said, cracking her knuckles.

She paced back and forth in front of him, slapping a fist into the palm of her other hand. He saw this and put a hand up to protect his nose.

“I’m a captain,” he gasped, “in the army.” After another heave of his chest, he managed to muster, “You can’t treat an officer like this.”

She still had no idea what had possessed Vere to appoint her buddy as a captain to the CasterLan army. Maybe Vere had thought the sense of responsibility would straighten him out and help him get his act together. If that had been her intention, she had been sorely mistaken. Of course, it was also possible Vere thought it was funny to mock the strict code of the CasterLan military by appointing a fat drunken thief as an officer.

“A captain?” Morgan said. “A captain? I’m the general in charge of the entire fleet!” she yelled. “Do you know what that means? Your boss’s boss reports to me, you dumb slug.”

She reached down with one hand and raised his chin so he was looking up at her.

“Well, let’s get this over with,” she said, pulling her fist back.

His yells could be heard many blocks away, all the way to the bar where the brawl had started and where everyone had finally settled back down to enjoy themselves.

5

Vere’s hair stopped before her shoulders. The monster in front of her, twice Vere’s size, had tentacles hanging from its chin that were the same length. Vere stepped sideways, brought her sword down diagonally, and cut through its left arm, which fell from the creature’s body and slowly evaporated. The monster screamed in pain and reached for her with its other arm. This one she also chopped off, and the beast yelled again. With its final attempt, it lunged, trying to impale her chest with its tentacles and rip her to pieces. She easily sidestepped, though, and thrust her sword through the middle of its head. The monster’s nose, eyes, and cranium flew off, dispersing into pixels, while its mouth and chin tentacles remained attached at the neck.

The two of them stood far enough apart that the monster wouldn’t have been able to reach her even if it did have arms. It was also the distance at which, with her arm fully extended, the tip of her blade could touch the closest part of the computer-generated beast. Just when she thought the armless and eyeless monster might make one last lunge toward her, the hologram gave a low cry of defeat, then the entire creature evaporated.

“Any updates?” she asked.

Pistol was standing in the corner of the training room. His emotionless face made him appear supremely unimpressed by the vanquished monster and by Vere’s skill in defeating it.

“The Vonnegan fleet will be here in nine and a half days.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, used to hearing daily reports of how soon Mowbray would arrive.

Ever since the CasterLan army had managed to defeat the waves of Athens Destroyers coming through the portal, mainly by destroying the portal itself, she had been told that the Vonnegan ruler would be coming for revenge.

First, she had received daily intelligence updates about the progress of Vonnegan efforts to rebuild their fleet of Athens Destroyers. The information was so specific and detailed that it was obvious that Mowbray wanted her to know how many ships he was building. To him, that would be the best way to make her regret having destroyed the first, smaller fleet, along with his son, who had been aboard one of the Destroyers.

Those reports had occurred each day for two years. Then she started receiving daily updates on the fleet’s progress toward Edsall Dark. Without the Tevis-84 portal, the ships wouldn’t be able to appear right at her doorstep. It would take them years to make their way through the galaxy to her solar system. As they came closer, other Athens Destroyers were still being built. These did use portals, but only to catch up to the main fleet as it traveled across the galaxy.

As the years went by, she did everything she could to prevent another war from breaking out. She began efforts to have a new fleet of Solar Carriers and Llyushin fighters constructed. She sent communications to Mowbray to tell him the first battle had been a great mistake caused by an even greater misunderstanding. Although she knew he received these communications, he never replied to them. It was obvious that nothing she said or did would make him waver from trying to settle the score.

Another year. Two more years. The Vonnegan fleet made its way through space, directly toward Edsall Dark. Whenever Mowbray’s ships had the option of arriving earlier by taking a portal, they ignored it and continued on the same course. In addition to giving the Vonnegans more time to build additional Athens Destroyers, it sent a clear message to the rest of the galaxy: Mowbray wouldn’t let his need for revenge blind him with rage. He was calculating and determined and knew that any kingdom that even considered aiding the CasterLan cause would rethink their position when they saw how large his fleet was. Once they saw the hundreds of Athens Destroyers, no one would ever defy Mowbray again.

The idea seemed to be working. There wasn’t a single colony in the entire galaxy that didn’t know the Vonnegan fleet was crossing the farthest reaches of space to destroy everything Vere held dear. And yet none of them answered her requests for help.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said after hearing Pistol’s announcement. “Wait, what?”

“There was an emergency council meeting last night to discuss it,” the android said.

“What happened?”

“The fleet altered from the course they’ve been taking and passed through the Glyndwr portal, causing them to appear—”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“Westmoreland gave an update on the fleet.”

“Same status?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“Baldwin mentioned the Excalibur again, but no one paid him any attention.”

Vere sighed. Baldwin was always mentioning the Excalibur. Everyone else had heard the same stories the physician had heard and yet he was the only one bringing it up each time they talked about the Vonnegan fleet. She would have thought that someone raised to believe in science and what could actually be proved wouldn’t be the one holding on to myth and superstition.

“Anything else?”

“Morgan told everyone to proceed as they had been, then broke part of her chair.”

She knew better than to ask if any progress had been made in getting other kingdoms to join their fight. Six years after the destruction of the Ornewllian Compact triggered a galactic war and the CasterLan Kingdom still had no one willing to hear their side of the story.

“There isn’t much else we can do, is there?” she said.

Pistol’s human-looking irises began to glow with dull yellow light as he processed every possible action and outcome. When his eyes returned to their normal color, he said simply, “No.”

She took a deep breath, then exhaled. What would her father say? Would he realize she was doing everything she possibly could to prevent the kingdom’s destruction? Would he have found a solution that she was missing?

After a second deep breath, and a third, she nodded and turned away from Pistol.

“Next level,” she said.

On the far side of the room, a new hologram began to form. As she watched, particles of light melded together, piece by piece. A series of claws formed in midair before the fingers and hands that would bear them had appeared. A pair of three-foot long fangs came into focus, followed by the snout-like mouth from which they protruded. A tail started slithering back and forth before there was any body for it to be attached to.

Pieces of the creature continued to combine as she got her breath back from the previous round. As the monster materialized across from her, she tried to formulate a strategy for how to attack it, but each time she started to think of an approach, it was altered by the unpredictable formation of the beast as it appeared. It ended up having six claws on either hand but none on its feet. This led her to think about attacking low. But then an additional pair of hands materialized on another set of long arms positioned at the beast’s waist. Attacking low would be just as dangerous as attacking high. She considered circling it until she was able to get to its side, but then it formed a second tail, then a third, each with a spike at the end, and she knew there was no angle at which the monster would be any less dangerous.

“You really aren’t making things easy for me, are you?” she said to the room.

That was when the monster’s audio program finished loading. Even though the creature wasn’t completely formed and ready to stalk her through the training room, it began to bellow a series of thundering roars. Hologram or not, her knees went soft for a moment. Even the Green Knight, she was sure, would have wanted no part of the thing in front of her.

The audio program was inconsequential, really. It didn’t matter if the creature in front of her was quiet or yelling, just like it didn’t matter if an army on the other side of a battlefield was silent or clanging swords against their shields. The training program was simply using every tactic it knew to gain a psychological advantage.

As if the monster in front of her needed the help.

The holographic monstrosity had finished forming. It was unlike anything she had seen before. Fangs longer than her legs. Four arms, each with claws longer than her fingers. Three tails, each as long and as powerful as Traskk’s. And now that its skin was complete, she saw a series of sharp spikes protruding from the thing’s knees, shoulders, elbows, and back.

“Did you skip right to the hardest setting?” she asked.

The monster replied on behalf of the system that had created it. Its response was to stomp each paw on the ground and let loose another deafening roar. Somehow, the program was smart enough to make the room shake when the hologram stamped its feet. Then it began toward her, completely ignoring Pistol.

There was no use in racing toward it. Meursault blade in hand or not, the creature would kill her. She might be able to lop off two of its arms or all three of its tails before it did get her, but no matter what, attacking it looked to be suicide.

She backed away and to the left, but the monster immediately cut off any angle she would have to circle to the side and gain more space. When she started moving to her other side, the monster moved diagonally to cut off that part of the room as well. It refused to let her escape, and while it did so, it kept moving forward.

She twirled her sword in circles in front of her. The blade, only visible when the flat side came into view, began leaving trails of colored air where it passed through the training room.

She started to bring the sword back so she could slash off one of the monster’s arms, then paused. If she sliced off one arm, even two, the other arms would grab her and tear her to shreds before she could bring the blade back into a defensive position.

She moved right in order to edge away from the beast. Once again, it cut off her angle and narrowed the gap between them.

She started to angle the Meursault’s blade so she could thrust it forward, piercing the creature’s chest, then decided against this tactic as well. She would be even more open to attack that way. Without knowing where the monster’s vital organs were, she would have to be very lucky to kill it before it killed her.