The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (8 page)

14

Scrope’s pilot pulled his headphones from his ears and said, “Sir, I’m getting reports that Peto’s ship was turned away at Desho-Win after receiving blaster fire.”

Scrope’s own Llyushin transport, along with his pair of Llyushin fighter escorts, was speeding across the galaxy on its way to the Oman-S system. To their right, barely visible, was an asteroid field that marked the border between the two sectors. In front of them, a small blue planet with dazzlingly bright gray rings of particles began to get closer.

“I don’t expect CasterLan dignitaries to be very popular these days,” Scrope said, his brow furrowed.

The transport’s pilot shook his head. “Desho-Win has been a more loyal ally to the CasterLans than anyone in Oman-S has ever been.”

Scrope nodded. “Maybe it would be a good idea to send a communication before we arrive.”

The last thing he wanted was to travel all the way there just to turn around, or worse, get blown out of the sky by a pack of Oman-S ion fighters.

They passed by the ringed planet while waiting for a response. Further ahead, a solid gray planet, covered in craters, some as large as the planet they had just passed, began to come into view.

The Llyushin’s comm system beeped twice.

“We have a reply,” the pilot said.

“Yes?”

The pilot looked down at the message as it came across the screen located next to the ship’s navigational controls, then sighed.

“They say any CasterLan ships that enter their territory will be blasted out of space.”

Rather than become discouraged, Scrope chuckled.

“Well, I guess they saved us some time, didn’t they? Looks like we can cross them off the list. Plot a course for the Dan-Two-Ine system. Maybe we’ll have better luck there.”

“Changing course,” the pilot said, tapping a series of buttons next to his left hand. “Proceeding to the Dan-Two-Ine system.”

The Llyushin transport came about in a long arc as it headed toward the new destination. As it did, the pair of Llyushin fighters followed in formation, and the three ships left the Oman-S sector just as fast as they had arrived.

15

Morgan’s customized starjet, the Pendragon, had already made one orbit around Dela Turkomann.

“Not much here,” she said.

“It’s a desert moon,” Pistol said. “What did you expect?”

She looked at the android out of the corner of her eye. If Fastolf had said the same thing she would have shown him her fist. But the android wasn’t trying to be sarcastic at all. His response was merely a combination of his software causing him to be as blunt as Vere had programmed him to be, along with him trying to find a way to be helpful.

“We’re from this system,” she said. “We should know the terrain better than our enemy. I’m looking for it to give us some kind of an advantage.”

“There is no recorded battle in all of galactic history where an army won or lost purely because the ships fought above a certain celestial body.” He said this in his typical matter-of-fact deadpan, as if it didn’t matter that Morgan and everyone else he had ever known on Edsall Dark might soon be dead.

“You’re really a wellspring of optimism, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Morgan. I don’t understand.”

“Nothing, Pistol. I was joking. Just because something has never happened before doesn’t mean it can’t happen at all. There’s got to be a first time for everything.”

“That is objectively and scientifically correct,” he said, as if she had proven a long mathematical equation instead of having offered a general outlook on life.

The two of them looked out at Dela Turkomann, the desert moon orbiting the largest planet in the entire system, Mego Turkomann. Although it was five times larger than Edsall Dark, Mego Turkomann couldn’t sustain any life. No colony had ever been successfully built on the planet due to the powerful, deadly, and constant storms that raged across its surface. Not even floating colonies were possible because of the massive mesospheric hurricanes that caused swirling clouds over every part of the planet.

Dela Turkomann, however, was the exact opposite. The planet’s third and smallest moon, Dela could sustain human life without the need for artificial atmosphere. Not only weren’t there any super storms, there was no wind nor any other kind of noticeable weather phenomena at all. The result was a planet of nothing but sand, where a footprint would remain for thousands and thousands of years without anything to disturb it. Everything was stillness. Golden, granular stillness.

“Any ideas?” she asked.

“Mego Turkomann’s storms generate electro-magnetic disturbances,” Pistol said.

“But all modern starships are equipped with computers that can detect and react to those disturbances.”

“Correct.”

“Anything else?”

“Dela Turkomann has the slowest revolution of any known moon within ten systems. It takes ten years, one hundred and twenty-two point eight days on Edsall Dark for this moon to complete one revolution around Mego Turkomann.”

“And?”

“And you asked for anything out of the ordinary about this moon, so I’m telling you,” he said.

Again, his face and voice were without emotion, and she knew he was just being as straightforward as he was programmed to be, without regard for how she might react. She liked knowing he always delivered the unvarnished truth, never colored by pride or ego. It was why she had brought Pistol along and no one else.

“Okay,” she said. “So we have a moon that is pelted with electromagnetic disturbances from its mother planet, and it also revolves incredibly slowly. Anything else?”

The android’s attendant software was optimized for specific questions, so Pistol responded to Morgan’s open-ended question with a clarifying question of his own. “Why don’t you tell me why you are considering this moon for the battle?”

“Because it’s away from Edsall Dark. We can’t afford to have another battle break out above the most populated planet in the system. And because it’s a place where our forces can survive on the surface if a Solar Carrier needs to land.”

The android’s eyes lit up, then a dot of blue light circled the glowing yellow irises as he analyzed this against the information that was already known.

When his eyes stopped glowing, Morgan asked, “Anything?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“So this is where our fleet gets wiped out again, and we all probably die?”

Pistol looked at her without any regard for the significance of what she was saying and responded in a complete monotone. “Most likely, yes.”

16

 
“What are you doing here?” Vere said, squinting to see Galen in the darkness of the Green Chapel.

Water dripped near her feet. Tiny puddles splashed each time another drop fell from the cave’s rock ceiling.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said, his voice soft. “I’ve missed you.” But when she was within arm’s reach of him and extended her hands, he whispered, “Don’t touch me.”

She stopped, cocked her head to one side, then said, “You were the one who left me. Not the other way around. I’m the one who should be mad.”

She moved closer to him.

Outside the cave, a war was being waged above her planet.

“Galen?”

“Yes.”

“Did you send the Green Knight?”

“You know I did.”

“Why?”

“I had to make sure you came back.”

“Who is he?”

“The Green Knight?”

“Yes.”

She saw Galen’s shoulders shrug. When he saw she needed some better explanation, he pointed to where the Green Knight was standing.

But when she turned and looked, even though the knight was standing closer to the cave’s entrance than either Vere or Galen, she could barely make out his form in the shadows. And the harder she squinted, the more she couldn’t differentiate between what was rock and green moss and what was the Green Knight. She closed her eyes for a moment, let them refocus, but when she looked again it appeared that there was no distinction between the rocks and the knight at all.

She closed her eyes a second time. When she reopened them, the faint outline of a figure was still there, but she couldn’t be sure of who or what it was.

When the figure stepped forward, she gasped. It wasn’t the Green Knight at all, but a man in dark robes covering every part of him except his eyes. The figure reached out for her face.

Vere’s eyes burst open. She was in the cockpit of the Griffin Fire. Traskk was next to her.

“Was I asleep?”

Traskk shrugged and went back to reading the section of the ship’s manual that discussed making portal jumps—the same section he had been reading when she had decided to close her eyes just for a moment.

17

“Oh my lord,” Baldwin said, his mouth open.

Everyone talked about how awe-inspiring the Excalibur Armada was, but until he saw it for himself, he couldn’t appreciate the sheer scale of a rock large enough to incase one thousand enormous starships. As the asteroid hurtled through space, finishing its loop around Eta Orbitae, each of the one hundred exposed ships glowed like iron in a forge.

The pilot, Quickly, brought their medical transport to a near stop so they could see the asteroid approaching, but far enough that the incredible heat produced by the blue sun, Eta Orbitae, didn’t burn up the ship’s mechanical systems and leave them floating helplessly in space.

“I’ve been lucky enough to see the Army in the Stone on two other occasions,” Quickly said, shaking his head in amazement. “But I’ve never had the chance to see them glow before.”

Of all of the names it was known by, the mythical fleet was currently living up to its moniker of being the Red Army. Having just gotten closer to Eta Orbitae than any other known object ever did, each ship was hot enough to burn a hole through normal vessels. And yet the indestructible Excalibur ships had made this loop around the sun hundreds of times over the course of many millennia and still looked as new as if they had just come out of the shipyards.

“Can you imagine what those ships must be made of to be able to withstand that heat?” Baldwin said.

The possibility of the technology, the impervious material that allowed a ship to withstand thousands of years of space flight and hundreds of close encounters with a blue sun, along with the number of starships there for the taking, were exactly why men and aliens, kings and emperors, had spent their entire lives trying to figure out how to free the armada from the Excalibur asteroid. To see the fleet, to contemplate its potential, was to become intoxicated with the power it teased.

Baldwin could only shake his head. Ever since he was a little boy and his father had told him stories of the Excalibur Armada before bed, he had created an image in his head of what it must be like. As a teenager, he had seen images of the famously elusive fleet in interactive holograms embedded in his textbooks. While stories of the armada captured everyone’s imagination, it had called to Baldwin more than others.

He had missed an entire day’s lesson on the Mesa-War Triumvirate because he sat at his desk, looking down at the hologram of the asteroid and the ships it held prisoner. With his fingertips, he had tapped the edge of the three dimensional hologram so that the textbook’s image revolved in the air in front of him, showing him different angles of the mysterious fleet. His teacher, a four-winged Terridian, called on him to answer a question, and all that young Baldwin had been able to say at the time was, “It’s so incredible,” and the entire class burst out laughing until the Terridian threatened each child with additional homework.

Unbeknownst to Baldwin at the time, his teacher had asked him why he thought the Mesa-War Triumvirate had managed to conquer five solar systems before its members turned on each other. Baldwin’s answer, “It’s so incredible,” wasn’t exactly what any teacher wanted to hear in response to such a question. After class, instead of giving Baldwin detention, the teacher flew from the room, his four wings fluttering. When he returned, he had a small book in one of his eight hands, which he extended toward Baldwin.

“The best book on the Excalibur Armada,” the Terridian said, smiling.

“No detention?” young Baldwin had said.

“For being interested in history?” His teacher laughed and fluttered away.

But even that book and the pages of stories covering what others had said about the fleet and about Rumanov Excalibur and the attempts to excavate the ships couldn’t prepare him for what he actually saw with his own eyes.

Quickly positioned their ship in line with the asteroid as it approached, then turned the transport’s engines to full. When the asteroid passed by, their ship kept pace with it. Gradually, Quickly turned off the ship’s thrusters. The medical transport inched closer to the asteroid until it was resting on its rock surface while the asteroid hurtled through space.

“Oh my lord,” Baldwin said again.

He realized then that Fastolf had barely spoken. When he turned to see if the drunk was passed out, he saw that the comedian was even more overcome than the pilot or himself. His mouth hung open. He didn’t struggle for words because there was nothing to be said. For once, his flask hung down by his side instead of poised by his lips.

Parts of ships jutted out at odd angles from various chunks of rock. There was no discernible organization to how the vessels were arranged and no conceivable reason for why one part or another of each Excalibur craft was exposed. A pair of enormous engines stuck out from an area right in front of where Quickly had landed. Further down, the bow of another ship protruded from the rock. At the far edge of where they could see, a line of cannons protruded from the asteroid’s surface.

The red hot fleet of Excalibur ships was cooling and fading to an ordinary dull silver as the asteroid moved away from the sun and raced back out toward the cold depths of space.

Even so, if anyone went out and touched the Excalibur ships for the next few hours, even with a suit of space armor on, they would be burned alive. Baldwin remembered from his textbooks that even after it stopped glowing red, the Excalibur Armada remained hot enough to burn human flesh for days afterward. With space armor on, it would take another couple hours.