The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) (11 page)

Only four hundred years earlier, Wallace the Giver had been assassinated by his own daughter in the hopes she could prevent an all-out galactic war from starting. Instead, she killed the best military leader of their time, and she and her entire family were eventually beheaded. A thousand years ago, Taggart the Tyrannous was shot in the back by his own general when they disagreed on how best to deter the Twi’Lek invasion. The general (also later beheaded) had thought it more important to protect the people than put them all in jeopardy by following his king’s orders. Throughout recorded history were accounts of people who found a place in its annals solely because war had prompted them to act in a different way than how they otherwise would have.

It was not war, but the prospect of war, that would make Lady Percy and Modred the targets of would-be assassins. It was why Hotspur wore armor everywhere he went. And it was why he trusted fewer and fewer people the closer he got to battle.

Hotspur cleared his throat. He didn’t want to address Modred as Lord because he didn’t deserve the title. He didn’t say Sir because it conveyed a level of respect that the captain didn’t have for the king’s stepson. And yet referring to him by his first name was too casual.

Modred turned and looked at Hotspur as if surprised he was still there.

“Yes?”

“The army is ready.”

“Yes, I heard you.”

Hotspur let out a long breath. “When will I take the fleet out to meet the Vonnegan army?”

“You won’t,” Modred said. “You’ll meet them here.”

Hotspur narrowed his eyes. The thick line of his jaw moved ever so slightly. “They are destroying everything in their path.”

“Yes, they are.”

“They have destroyed our colonies.”

“Yes. They have. And?”

Hotspur’s jaw clenched. Between the hard lines of his face and the armor he wore, he looked twice the size of Modred.

He said, “And we can prevent any more losses by meeting them.”

“And give up our best defenses?” Modred laughed. “To meet them out in open space?”

The muscles in Hotspur’s hands rippled with tension. He envisioned himself becoming another person in the pages of history who became immortalized for taking extreme measures prior to the onset of war. When they found Modred dead in the king’s chamber it would be Hotspur’s word against a corpse’s. The king certainly wasn’t in a state to know what was going on. More and more, Lady Percy disappeared for long stretches of time, locking herself in her room and crying. Hotspur could say the king’s stepson had become maniacal. He could say Modred had lunged toward the king’s body.

“It wouldn’t be open space,” Hotspur said. “We have the benefit of knowing our terrain better than our enemy.”

“Terrain?” Modred laughed again. “Terrain? It’s space, not a battlefield!”

Hotspur’s shoulders crackled when he became tense. “The same principles apply. We know which moons are suitable for hiding our ships where they won’t be detected. We know which asteroid belts will interfere with their systems and leave them open to ambush.”

Part of Hotspur wanted to echo Modred’s dumb laugh. Why was he wasting his time talking to someone about the tactics of galactic warfare when that person didn’t know a Solar Carrier from his own shadow?

“I have made my decision,” Modred said, turning back toward the window and dismissing one of his stepfather’s greatest warriors.

“Then I suppose we’ll see what Vere has to say when she arrives,” Hotspur said.

Modred turned and laughed. “The king’s daughter is too busy drinking and stealing to have the slightest idea what situation we are in here. We, the people who are actually here, are the ones who have to make the tough choices. Not her.”

“You haven’t heard?” Hotspur said. “Her ship was spotted leaving Folliet-Bright a few hours ago. She’s heading this way.” He turned and walked toward the doorway. Before disappearing, he added, “Odd, my sources told me you already knew.”

Then he was gone.

22

Another succession of laser blasts passed by the Griffin Fire. Vere yanked hard on the control stick and the ship’s nose shot up toward the closest moon, pushing Vere and A’la Dure back in their seats.

The cockpit door slid open and Traskk growled a slithery noise with his tongue.

“I don’t know,” Vere answered. “Maybe they don’t care who we are.”

Occulus, Morgan, and Baldwin appeared behind the reptile. Fastolf was probably passed out in the back of the ship and Pistol wasn’t programmed to care about what was happening unless given a command.

Traskk made another raspy noise.

Vere said, “Don’t ask me. Ask the Vonnegan fleet!”

Another shot of blaster fire hit the ship. More alarms began sounding.

Morgan stepped forward and pointed—arm outstretched in front of Vere’s face—toward the top left of the cockpit. “It’s not the Athens Destroyers.”

Vere smacked her arm away. “Somebody turn off those alarms,” she shouted.

Occulus went to the corner of the cockpit and pressed some buttons until the alarms went quiet.

“It’s not the Vonnegan fleet,” Morgan insisted.

Another two blasts sailed past the Griffin Fire, flying off into the distance of space.

“If I haven’t known you for more than a day,” Vere shouted, “Get out of my cockpit.”

Baldwin inched back to the edge of the cockpit where Vere wouldn’t notice him. Morgan, though, didn’t budge.

“Over there,” she said, pointing in front of Vere’s face again.

Immediately after completing a series of loops and twists, Vere saw what Morgan was talking about. The Vonnegan fleet wasn’t shooting at them. There were so many laser blasts coming at her that she assumed it must be them, but the Athens Destroyers were still too far away to be within targeting range. Instead, a pair of ships, each half the size of the Griffin Fire, were attacking them.

“Who are they?” Vere asked.

A’la Dure punched a series of buttons. A display popped up with the holographic outlines of two ships highlighted. The ships were identical in make and model—a pair of old V-Type Dotted Fighters—but were slightly different in color and weaponry based on how they had been maintained over the years.

“Bounty hunters,” Vere said before pushing and pulling at the control stick, causing Occulus to stumble forward until Traskk effortlessly caught him with one hand.

“Who are they?” Baldwin asked.

Vere looked behind her just long enough to see that neither he nor Morgan were gone. Then another blaster shot hit their engines and she began a new series of spirals and turns.

“The heir to the CasterLan Kingdom is returning home,” Morgan said between gritted teeth. “It looks like someone isn’t too happy about that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Vere said, punching the controls. An automated cannon popped out of the Griffin Fire’s tail and began firing timed bursts of laser blasts back at the two ships. “Prepare the tinder walls.”

As A’la Dure began typing a series of commands into the ship’s computer, Vere turned the ship toward the nearest portal.

“You’re going to run away?” Morgan said. “Get out of the chair and I’ll show you how a ship should be piloted.”

Vere stood from her chair and turned. But instead of giving over control of the Griffin Fire, she clenched a fist. Seeing that a fight was going to break out in the cockpit while they were being shot at, Traskk scooped Morgan up under one arm and darted out of the room, her muffled yells echoing as the cockpit door closed behind them.

The Griffin Fire was only twenty seconds from the portal. Blaster fire was shooting past every side of the ship. Another alarm began sounding.

“I’ll get it,” Baldwin said, leaning over to hit the same buttons Occulus had tapped to quiet the alarm that indicated their shields were almost depleted.

“Don’t touch anything,” Vere yelled. “Unless you don’t want to be able to use that hand again.”

“I was only trying to help—”

“It’s not the shields,” she told him. Then, to A’la Dure, she said, “What’s wrong?”

A red holographic display popped up between them, showing areas of the ship glowing darker red than others.

“Pistol,” Vere yelled into the ship’s intercom. “Tinder walls are out. I need them fixed right now.”

A monotone voice came across the speakers a moment later. “I will need a moment to determine the cause of the—”

“Now!” Vere yelled, jerking the control stick sideways, then down.

With the Griffin Fire’s automated laser cannon firing, the pair of bounty hunter ships had to evade blasts of their own. But the automated cannon, operated by the ship’s computer, would never be able to perform better than a good shooter.

“Traskk,” Vere said into the intercom, “try to keep our friend from barging into the cockpit again by putting her in one of the turrets. It looks like we aren’t going into the portal after all.”

She sent the Griffin Fire into an elongated arc. By the time the ship came out of it, a light signaled on her display that her ship’s manual turrets were active and ready to use against the bounty hunters.

A burst of twenty rapid-fire shots went at the Griffin Fire. No amount of piloting could evade all of them. With a thud and jolt, one of the engines went out.

“Pistol,” Vere said into the intercom, “Ignore the tinder walls. I need engine number three back up.”

The android did not bother to acknowledge the change in priorities but she knew he would do what was required.

She tried to minimize the amount of spins and spirals she sent the ship into because she wanted Traskk to get clean shots at the two bounty hunters. Experience had proven that there was no other pair of eyes she would rather have than those of her huge reptilian friend. Basilisks had crystal clear eyesight, superior to almost any alien in the galaxy, which made up for their almost complete lack of hearing. When Traskk listened to conversations, he was actually feeling the vibrations of voices, not actually hearing words in the traditional sense.

Only a moment later, one of the V-Type Dotted Fighters erupted into a ball of white and blue flame before quickly exploding into metal shards and debris.

She took the Griffin Fire into a nose dive, dropped its speed, then brought the nose back up and to the side. The other bounty hunter’s ship came into view, almost directly to their left. A second later a streak of laser shot out from the Griffin Fire and hit the bounty hunter’s craft. The ship wobbled to the side before exploding.

Vere turned and gave A’la Dure a smile. Moments later, Traskk and Morgan came into the cockpit. Vere reached up and patted Traskk on the shoulder.

But when he hissed a series of noises, Vere said, “She got both of them?” and the reptile nodded.

Everyone in the cockpit turned and looked at Morgan, who had her arms crossed and a smile plastered on her face after destroying both vessels with little effort.

“Anything you want to say?” Morgan asked.

Vere’s mouth was hanging open, but she couldn’t get the words out that she was looking for. A’la Dure’s big eyes didn’t blink. Traskk shrugged in a way that indicated he would have been able to get the bounty hunters himself, eventually, if Morgan hadn’t blasted them both so quickly.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Morgan added.

“If you’re so happy with yourself, maybe you’d like to be the one to talk to the Vonnegan general,” Vere said. When Morgan didn’t say anything, Vere added, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

23

The one hundred Athens Destroyers that made up the Vonnegan fleet were in a loose formation around the sixth planet of the Targeen-TRak system. In front of them, the giant orange and blue swirling clouds of Decil-TRak covered the many colonies that lay beneath it. Almost the entire planet had been transformed to provide land and air that could sustain life. A couple of the colonies had grown so large that they had merged, creating some of the largest containment fields in the galaxy.

General Agravan stood at the viewport of his modified Commander-class Destroyer, surveying the extent of the damage. More life had been extinguished on this one planet than on all of the other colonies they had destroyed along the way. The lesson to be learned was simple: enter Vonnegan space and destroy a ship you have no right attacking and expect to endure so much death and suffering that no one else in the galaxy ever thinks of doing the same thing.

“Any more communications?” Agravan asked the officer to his side.

“No, sir.”

Some of the colonies below had tried to make contact with the Vonnegan fleet prior to being slaughtered. They were probably begging to be left alone, would most likely say they had nothing to do with the attack of the Ornewllian Compact. What they failed to understand was that it didn’t matter if they had given the order or not or if they were complicit or not. Anyone and everyone in the CasterLan Kingdom was going to learn what kind of vengeance Mowbray Vonnegan was capable of.

That was why the pleas for mercy had gone unheeded. It wasn’t that the general was afraid that he or his troops would see the crying families and decide to give up their mission. Orders were orders. No, he ignored the pleas for help because they were a waste of his time and the time of those on the planet surface who were going to die. Rather than beg for mercy that wouldn’t be given, they should make peace with whichever god or gods they believed in. Or else hug their relatives and say goodbye. The planet was going to suffer the same fate if he allowed their communications through to the bridge or if he didn’t.

“Sir,” one of the men behind a control panel at the right front of the command deck said, “The ship that was just in the firefight is trying to contact us.”

Unlike Hotspur’s ship, where only the captain always wore space armor, all essential Vonnegan crew members, including everyone manning the command deck, wore their space armor at all times. Because of this, the face of the man who spoke couldn’t be seen. Only his gray helmet was visible. Behind it, under the fogged diamond shaped lens, the man’s facial expressions were hidden. The result was a bridge of officers who appeared to be heavily protected cyborgs. Unlike the CasterLan suits, which were varying shades of grey mixed in with matte black and blue tinted plates, the Vonnegan space armor was mostly black, with purple insignias, shoulder plates, and lining. The shade of purple each officer wore on their space armor reflected how senior they were within the Vonnegan military. It was why the junior officer who announced the Griffin Fire’s communication was wearing space armor with light purple scattered on it and General Agravan’s was such a deep and dark shade of purple that it sometimes appeared black.