The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (6 page)

While parts of over one hundred ships stuck out from the giant rock, a scan of the asteroid revealed almost nine hundred more vessels inside the stone that no one could see. A batch of scientists modeled a replica of the ships based on those scans.

Some people referred to the vessels as the Excalibur Armada, after Rumanov Excalibur, the explorer who first discovered them. Some people called it the Army in the Stone, for reasons that are obvious once anyone sees the asteroid. Others called it the Gordian Armada, after Gordian the Stubborn, the ruler who had spent his entire life and all of his kingdom’s riches trying to find a way to procure the fleet for himself. Instead of achieving his goal, he lost thousands of men due to self-detonated explosions, thus proving no ruler could claim the army for himself. Others called it the Red Armada after the way the ships glowed every seventy-five years when they got to the nearest part of their orbit around the mighty blue star, Eta Orbitae.

No matter what people called it, the armada was the subject of stories that every parent told their children before bed. It was mentioned in legend and lore and history books alike. But what fascinated people even more than the tantalizing possibility of owning one thousand warships and conquering the entire galaxy was the fact that no one knew anything about how the ships were made, from what type of metal they had been constructed, or, most important, how they had become encased in stone.

For as long as humans and aliens had been exploring space, stories had surfaced about this armada in the stone. But no one knew how it had gotten there. Early spacefaring ships were nothing like the Solar Carriers or Llyushin fighters that Vere and Morgan knew. They were primitive looking things, unreliable and slow. And yet, while humans and Toadens and Feedorians were learning to explore the galaxy, someone else, some ancient civilization, had already built a fleet more advanced than any that would be made for thousands of years.

There were more questions than answers. Who was this ancient civilization that had somehow created a fleet more technologically superior than what was thought possible? Why was there no other trace of this civilization left anywhere in the known galaxy? Why would they go to the trouble of building such a massive fleet, only to encase it in stone? How had they imprisoned the ships inside naturally occurring rock? Though modern technology could build vessels that could travel at nearly the speed of light and space portals that connected one spot in the galaxy to another, scientists still did not know how to wrap an asteroid around a ship, let alone an entire armada of ships.

Further inspection only revealed even more mysteries. The asteroid did not seem to have been tampered with. It was not a collection of rocks or space dust that had been artificially compacted to form a stone. As far as scientists could tell, no part of the asteroid had been chiseled or lasered away. And yet one thousand ships existed within its stone.

But there was more. Any time someone tried to chisel away too much rock near one of the ships, the nearest vessel would explode with such an intense and thorough eruption that no trace of the ship existed any longer. The same thing happened when someone tried to drill into one of the ships, no matter which part of the ship they selected. There’s a reason Rumanov Excalibur didn’t give any interviews about his discovery. Only hours after coming upon the asteroid, he was blown up when the vessel he was trying to get inside of detonated.

Why would a civilization that went to the trouble of making the vessels also go to the effort of installing a self-destruct capability inside each one? And even if they were able to install explosives inside each ship, how were they able to install sensors into the asteroid that would trigger the nearest ship’s detonation if it was disturbed too much?

Even after the mapping of the asteroid revealed one thousand ships, and the modeling showed exactly what the vessels looked like, there were still more unknowns than there was information available. How were the ships able to sustain no damage? Most people didn’t realize it, but space travel was extremely taxing on vessels. Even the most fortified Solar Carrier or Athens Destroyer had to go in for routine maintenance every two years. People thought of space as a vast void of emptiness. In fact, it was the exact opposite. There was space dust everywhere. Debris orbiting every planet. Intense radiation. Tiny meteors that pelted the vessels’ exterior. All of this slowly weakened a ship’s outer shell. And yet the ships protruding from the Excalibur asteroid look as new as they must have looked thousands of years earlier when they were constructed. No known alloy could do that. Scientists couldn’t determine what the armada was made of because any attempt to cut away a section of the ship for analysis resulted in it self-destructing. There were tales that Meursault, the legendary swordsmith who made the blade named after him, was somehow able to take a piece of metal from one of the Excalibur ships to craft his famous swords. However, this was only a rumor.

The Llyushin transport carrying Baldwin and Fastolf appeared through the Chrunsington-Ph Portal. In front of them, the mighty blue star, Eta Orbitae, illuminated a trio of planets. One was a ball of mostly flame and gas. Another had a surface that swirled in blue and white. The third was a gray sphere pockmarked with craters. Further off, the blue sun was thousands of times larger than the three planets. Just looking at the giant star made both men perspire, thinking about how much heat it must generate.

“Where to?” Fastolf asked.

He had been drinking from his flask the entire flight, and Baldwin now found himself regretting having accepted his invitation to tag along, even if he was the only person who wanted to.

The pilot, Quickly, looked at the displays in front of him, then pointed to their left.

“The Excalibur will be approaching from our three o’clock in six hours.”

“Let’s go meet it,” Baldwin said. “We need all the time we can get.”

Quickly punched in the command and the transport raced in that direction.

“So,” Fastolf asked, “what’s your plan when we get there?”

He didn’t have to remind Baldwin that men much smarter, richer, and with more resources than the physician had been trying to recover the armada for as long as they had known about it. Suddenly, Baldwin looked ill and sat down in the copilot’s seat. Quickly, unlike Vere or Morgan, was nice enough to ignore someone sitting in his cockpit without his explicit permission.

“What’s the matter?” Fastolf asked.

But he took another look at Baldwin and realized what was wrong without needing an answer. He had seen that face a hundred times before, and each time it was when he looked in the mirror after doing or saying something he regretted.

A fleet of ships that could defeat any known army in the galaxy existed, and yet no one could free the ships from the rock that held them without also destroying the very vessels they wanted to use. It had been that way for thousands of years. The only difference was that now Baldwin had tried to convince his friends that the Excalibur Armada was their only hope in defeating the Vonnegan fleet. Fastolf knew why Baldwin was sick to his stomach: he had spoken without any thought to what he was saying. He had never actually thought about
how
he might do something that no one else had been able to do.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Fastolf said, patting him on the back. “Have a drink. It’ll make everything better. Never fails for me.”

But Baldwin only groaned and put his face in his hands.

“Check this out,” Quickly said, tapping a button that brought a tinted lens down over the cockpit windows.

They could still see the stars and planets in front of them, but now the giant blue sun wouldn’t blind them if they looked directly at it. Fastolf and Baldwin squinted at Eta Orbitae to figure out what the pilot was calling their attention to. Then they saw it.

In the distance, glowing red, a tiny dot was leaving a long trail of light behind it as it raced around the sun and began to head toward them.

“Here you go,” Quickly said, tapping another button.

The screen magnified. The entire object wasn’t red, only the ships that glowed from the tremendous heat put off by the largest blue sun in the known galaxy. The asteroid itself was still a mass of brown and grey rock, but the glowing red ships shone so brightly that the entire asteroid seemed to glow.

The Army in the Stone. The Gordian Armada. The Excalibur Armada. It was here.

Their only hope for defeating the Vonnegan fleet.

10

Peto’s ship arrived at the cloud planet, Desho-Win, where every city was elevated miles in the air, high above the ferocious storms that raged on the planet’s surface. But his Llyushin transport and his two Llyushin fighter escorts were still approaching Desho-Win’s atmosphere when a pair of Trans-Ion D fighters raced toward them.

Both fighters let off a pair of laser blasts on either side of Peto’s ship.

“Don’t return fire,” he told the fighter pilots alongside him. “They missed on purpose.”

His own pilot said, “The fact that they are firing at all should trouble you more than if they hit us or missed us.”

A light came on in the cockpit. When the pilot tapped a blinking yellow button, a holographic image of a scaly-skinned alien with a huge mouth appeared.

“You are hereby ordered to turn around and return to Edsall Dark,” the alien from Desho-Win said.

“We are here as emissaries of Vere CasterLan, leader of—”

Another pair of laser blasts sailed just past the ship, causing Peto to flinch.

“Permission to return fire,” one of the fighter pilots said, but Peto ignored him.

“I know who you are,” the alien said. “And you are ordered to leave our space immediately. The Vonnegan fleet is approaching and we do not want any association with your kingdom when they get here.”

Peto started to speak, but before he could say anything else, a single laser blast hit the Llyushin transport as an even clearer warning.

“Don’t fire back,” he yelled at the fighter pilots on either side of him. Then to the Desho-Win alien, “Okay, okay.” The alien’s hologram image disappeared.

“On to the next planet?” his pilot asked.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

11

Although Morgan’s ship was too far ahead for Vere to be able to spot it from the Griffin Fire’s cockpit, she could see on the displays in front of her that the Pendragon was beginning to drift away from the course that would have taken it directly toward the approaching Vonnegan fleet. Instead, Morgan piloted her ship slightly to the side, in the direction of the desert moon, Dela Turkomann. Rather than follow a similar course to one of the planets or moons within their sector, Vere kept the Griffin Fire pointed straight ahead, toward where the Vonnegan fleet would arrive in a matter of days.

Traskk was beside her in the copilot’s seat, his tongue slithering back and forth across his lips, a rumble of displeasure coming from deep in his throat. He had agreed to come along on what he considered to be a foolish mission, but only because he would go anywhere Vere went. He had also agreed not to tell anyone else where she planned to go, but only because she had made him promise before she revealed her plan.

No one in their right mind would fly toward the entire fleet of Athens Destroyers, let alone by themselves. Especially not when they were the leader of the CasterLan Kingdom and the person Mowbray blamed for his son’s death more than any other.

“You’ll just have to trust me,” she had told him, but he had flicked his tongue anxiously then, too.

Now, with Morgan’s ship going toward Dela Turkomann, she increased the Griffin Fire’s speed.

“Full power to the engines,” she said. When Traskk hissed a question, she replied, “No shields. No weapon’s systems. Send everything to the engines. I want to get to Mowbray as fast as possible. If this doesn’t work, we’ll need to go with plan B.”

Her reptile copilot was nice enough to remind her there was no plan B to speak of.

The Griffin Fire soared through space at a faster and faster rate of speed. Every couple of minutes she would teach him something else about how to pilot the ship. Each time she did, the vertical slits of his reptilian eyelids would focus on the control or button she was explaining.

He tried his best to pick up everything she said, but flying a ship didn’t come naturally to him the way that ripping things apart with his fangs and claws did. Whenever he needed her explain something more than once or if he felt overloaded with information or began confusing two different buttons, his tail would tap harder and harder against the cockpit deck.

Every time this happened, Vere would tell him it was okay and not to be too hard on himself, then change the subject. She asked him about his life before they met on Folliet-Bright or what he would do if he were in her place. Regardless of the question, most of his answers involved tearing other species of aliens apart with his bare hands.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked him.

Traskk turned from the copilot’s chair and glared at her, his feelings hurt that she thought he might not want to be wherever she was when her life was at risk. From his throat, he produced a soft hiss.

“I could drop you off somewhere, you know. You don’t have to do this,” she said.

In response, he gave a deeper, louder hiss.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Just figured I’d check.” And then, “You know, Morgan and the others would kill us if they knew what we were doing.”

Traskk shook his head and produced a series of guttural scratching sounds from his throat.

She still hadn’t adjusted to seeing him next to her in the cockpit. She rarely had a chance to fly these days, but the few times she did, she still expected A’la Dure—the only copilot she had ever had—to be there.

Every time she wasn’t there, Vere found herself thinking about how simple life had been back in Eastcheap. She often found herself wishing she could return to the days of sitting at a table with Occulus, A’la Dure, and the others, without a worry in the world. When she tried to envision herself back there now, it was always at the same bar and the same table, but without her two lost friends. The truth was that it wouldn’t be the same even if she did return there, which made it easier to reminisce less about the good old days and focus more on the present.