The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (7 page)

What she appreciated most about her new copilot, even more than his eagerness to learn how everything worked and his willingness to go wherever she wanted, was his discipline. He didn’t dare touch or do anything until he knew exactly what he was doing.

He towered over her. His tail could break her in half if he swung it at her with violent intentions. His claws and fangs were longer than her fingers. But he was the most considerate and agreeable copilot she could ever imagine. And that was coming from someone whose previous copilot had never said a single word—until her last breath. Instead, Traskk sat in the seat, his tail curled up behind him so as to not get in her way, with his clawed fingers politely in his lap until he was given a specific order.

“Set the comms to point three,” she said. “I want to make sure we know who’s out there. The last thing we need is to run into any other ships along the way.”

Her reptilian friend dutifully found the correct controls, then typed in the sequence with the tip of one claw. She could see him squint with concentration, making sure he was not only thinking about doing the right thing, but that his claw tapped on the correct sequence of buttons to ensure the command was executed.

After she saw him do it the way she had taught him, she returned to the sight in front of her: an open expanse of black space filled with speckled stars.

Vere said, “I hope this works. I don’t have much faith that it will, but I have to do something, and this is the only thing I can think of.” She smiled then before adding, “It can’t go any worse than when I accepted the Green Knight’s challenge in that bar, can it?”

Traskk didn’t share in her sense of humor. He merely grumbled and looked out at the stars.

Years earlier, when she accepted a random knight’s game of chopping off his head in exchange for him to be allowed to do the same, it had never crossed her mind that the knight might bend over, pick up his head, and live to collect on his half of the deal. Now, speeding toward the Vonnegan fleet of over two hundred Athens Destroyers and over three hundred total ships, she was fully aware of what she was getting herself into and yet was still doing it.

Did that make it better or worse?

She had no idea.

12

Outside the walls of Edsall Dark’s capital, fields of grass waved in lines as the wind passed over the land. Unlike years earlier, when Vere and her companions had raced across the fields of Aromath the Solemn, there were plenty of people out and about.

In three different parts of the field, automated plows moved over the ground, harvesting crops. Everyone knew the Vonnegan fleet was approaching. The farmers wanted to make sure they had as much grain as possible stored within the city walls in case a prolonged siege began.

A group of five hovering robot hybrid vessels, each the size of Fastolf, flew across the field, returning from collecting minerals from the Forest of Tears and the mountains beyond. Like the farmers, the tradesmen who owned these hybrid mechs knew that if they needed anything for their metal work, woodwork, or any other type of project, they had better get it before the sky was blotted out by Athens Destroyers.

There were even dozens of children playing games. A girl with a bouncy ball as big as her arms chased after human, Lerk, and Yern-i-gan children, trying to touch each one with the ball before they were able to collect all of the orbs floating around her. Unlike the farmers and the miners, the children were able to play their games anywhere. When the Vonnegan fleet arrived, they could just as easily play a game behind CamaLon’s walls as they could out in the fields. But they relished the chance to play amongst the breezy rolling hills while they could.

Further out in the fields, the hills gave way to rocks and caves. The sound of children could be heard there as well. One cave in particular, filled with green moss and going deep down into the earth, was a favorite place for children to explore. Vere and Galen had ventured into the same cave countless times when they were children.

And just as they had explored the cave then, a boy and girl slowly made their way through the dark expanse of rock and dripping water, careful with each step, because of the slippery moss and the angled rocks that made it easy to twist an ankle.

“How far do you think it goes?” the girl asked, holding her ion-powered lantern up to illuminate the way ahead. No matter how far they could see, the cave never seemed to end.

“I’m not sure,” the boy said. “Maybe if we keep walking and walking we’ll come out on the other side of Edsall Dark!”

“It doesn’t work that way, silly,” she said. After a cold breeze washed past her, she shivered and added, “I think I want to go home.”

The boy could have made fun of her, could have told her that he wasn’t scared like she was. But then a second draft rushed out from the depths of the cave, causing both children to shiver, and the boy nodded. After an hour of walking back toward the entrance there was still no sign of daylight.

Behind them, a rock clattered across the ground.

“What was that?”

“Probably just the wind,” the boy said.

“I didn’t feel any wind that time.”

“Come on, let’s go.”

Another rock moved from where it had been balanced on top of two other rocks. It slid down a short length and clacked against the stones already on the ground.

“Who’s there?” the girl shouted.

No one answered.

A figure in dark robes stepped forward from shadows where the rocks had been disturbed.

“Who’s there?” the girl shouted again. The last remnants of her previous shout were still echoing off the cave walls all around her. This made her second yell compete with the first, as if mocking her.

The robed figure, completely in the shadows, moved forward.

The girl held her lantern up, but nothing was there.

“I don’t hear anything,” the boy said. “Let’s go.”

They turned and began back toward the entrance, but their progress was slow. The robed figure, without any urgency, narrowed the gap between them. But anytime she held the light up to see who was there, the figure was gone.

Another rock clattered.

“Stop it!” the girl yelled. “I don’t care who you are! This isn’t funny!”

She was crying now. The boy took her hand and told her everything would be okay, that they would be outside again in a few minutes.

The robed figure was only a few arm lengths behind them now. The next time the two children stopped to listen for the sounds of movement, the shadowy figure could have reached out and touched them. But when the girl turned around and shone her light, there was no one there.

“Hello?” the girl said.

The robed figure was directly in front of the girl. He reached out, his dark hand protruding from within the cloaks wrapped around him, and let his fingertips rest on the girl’s forehead.

“Hello?” the girl said again, still looking deep into the cave, seeing only rock and moss and darkness. She sounded less worried now, however.

The shadowy figure removed his fingertips from her forehead, then looked at both children for a moment. They were so innocent, so young, so hopeful for what the future might hold.

The two children kept looking into the depths of the cave to see if something or someone was there. They saw nothing.

“Come on,” the boy said, pulling the girl’s hand.

The robed figure watched them. After they were gone, the apparition turned toward the cave wall, having found a spot of stone that was particularly vibrant with bright green moss. Even in the darkness, the moss seemed to be in the shape of a giant knight. The figure reached out, letting his fingertips brush against the cave wall the same way he had against the girl’s forehead. Then he stepped forward, toward the cave wall, and disappeared into the rock as if he had never been there.

13

“You have to be quiet to see them,” Galen said to Vere. “Not just silent, but with a quiet mind as well.” They sat on the floor of the damp cave, surrounded by rocks and moss. “Mortimous’s only power is that he can see them more clearly than anyone else.”

She blinked as hard as she could, trying to force his words to make sense. When her eyes reopened, she was sitting in the pilot’s seat of the Griffin Fire, the autopilot doing most of the work.

Looking at Traskk, she realized she felt completely alert, as if she had been awake the entire time and had merely slipped off into a daydream.

“I think I might have fallen asleep,” she said to him, unsure of whether she actually had or not.

If anyone could sympathize with her, it would be Traskk. Basilisks dreamt just like almost every other species of creature around the galaxy. But unlike humans or other aliens, Basilisks had a difficult time waking from their dreams and often carried out the actions they were dreaming about in real life while they were still asleep. The problem with this was that Basilisk dreams almost always tended to be violent nightmares.

Evolutionary biologists theorized that this was a mechanism to keep the reptiles from over-reproducing. Basilisks were at the top of the food chain on their home planet of Basilerk. They possessed strong immune systems and could regenerate lost skin and even organs. For centuries, nothing existed that could threaten the giant reptile predators. Since nothing else on its home planet could kill it, nature had to find some way for the species to be kept in check. Scientists hypothesized that this was why almost all Basilisk deaths occurred at the hands (or claws, teeth, or tail) of other Basilisks. Not because they were going around fighting each other in organized armies, the way humans tended to do. Rather, they killed each other in their sleep.

The result was a loving Basilisk couple who go to sleep in the same bed, only to wake in the middle of the night after one of them had a nightmare. Instead of being comforted by their partner, they might find that they have eaten the face off their lover, broken their loved one’s neck with their tail, or torn their vital organs out of their chest.

The one time Vere had ignored Traskk’s warning and slept in the same room as him, thinking she would be fine if she slept on a cot that had storage bins positioned between her and her friend, she had woken up one second before he engulfed her entire head in his massive jaws and crushed her skull to pieces.

“Traskk!” she had yelled, punching one of the Basilisk’s eyes.

He had blinked awake then. Seeing his claws wrapped around his best friend’s neck, he had let out a series of apologetic whimpers.

“It’s okay,” she had said, patting him on the shoulder once she was sure he was awake. “You warned me. I was the one who was too stupid to listen.”

After that, she made sure no one she knew, or at least no one she liked, slept in the same room as the Basilisk.

Other times, she would open the Griffin Fire’s cockpit door in the morning and find a metal panel with a giant dent in it from where Traskk had smashed it with his tail in the middle of the night. Or a pipe that had four deep puncture marks from where he had sunk his fangs into it during a nightmare. Each day, the first part of his morning was spent fixing whatever he had destroyed in his sleep the previous night.

“I’ve been having odd dreams,” she told him. “Sometimes I can’t tell if I was really asleep and dreaming or awake and hallucinating.” Traskk’s tongue waved up and down in acknowledgement. “I’m sure that’s happened to you,” she added.

He nodded.

She didn’t feel like going into the details of what her dreams had been about. She easily could have, though; they were all as fresh in her mind as if they had just happened. And, of course, they almost always took place in the same cave she had gone to six years earlier.

In this last dream, everything about her visit with Galen had been the same as it had been then. In both instances, she had been unable to tell if the Green Knight was still there, lurking in the shadows, or if he had simply disappeared into the moss and stone. In both, Galen had avoided her touch, lest his death sentence transfer to her. And the things she and Galen had said to each other—word for word, the conversation had been the same until the very end. Galen didn’t die in her dream, however. Instead, he began to tell her more about Mortimous.

“He is no more powerful than you or I,” he told her. “His power lies in the fact that they listen to him. And they only listen to him because he has been devoted to hearing them for so long.”

Just as with the other dreams, when she woke up it was as if she hadn’t been dreaming at all, but simply staring off into space, replaying the memory of the Green Chapel in her head.

In the dream prior to that, the same conversation occurred in the same cave. The only difference was that it was a six-year-old Vere talking to the little boy she had explored the caves with so long ago. Galen was still afraid to be touched, the Green Knight was still there—or not there—in the shadows. The only difference was that both of them were children.

“They are all around us,” Galen had said, but even after she woke up she had no idea what he had been talking about.

“What are Basilisk dreams like?” she asked Traskk.

He growled and hissed in his native language, telling her that he saw images that sometimes made sense and sometimes didn’t and that he sometimes knew when he was dreaming and sometimes didn’t.

“Sound just like human dreams,” she said, and he agreed. “Do you ever have particularly odd ones?”

The corner of his mouth curled up and his head tilted to one side. He told her he had a recurring nightmare involving a pack of Toadens, the amphibian alien that was the sworn enemy of his reptile race, but he refused to go into further detail. Other than that, he dreamt mostly of people he had known back on his own planet. Sometimes they were good dreams. Mostly not.

She tried to chalk her own dreams up to her fraying nerves. After all, considering what she was planning to do, she had every right to think she would never see her home planet again.

With the Griffin Fire racing ahead at full speed, headed directly at the Vonnegan fleet, it would only be another two days before she was in front of more Athens Destroyers than she could keep track of… and a Vonnegan ruler who wanted nothing more than to see her suffer.