The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) (19 page)

“That’s not nearly as interesting as the things your mother used to tell me,” Fastolf said and laughed.

Morgan turned to the rest of the group. “Seriously, why is this guy here?”

Occulus shrugged. Baldwin, thinking the same thing, looked to Vere for an answer.

“He’s not hurting anyone,” Vere said, continuing to walk.

A moment later, Fastolf passed her the flask and she took another sip.

“This is ridiculous,” Morgan whispered to Occulus. “She’s more interested in drinking and laughing than she is in getting to the kingdom.”

“Try to be patient,” replied Occulus. “She’s doing the best she can. She has a lot to come to terms with.”

Morgan knew he was right but still didn’t like his answer. She shook her head and stepped over a fallen tree.

“How long to get through the forest?” Vere asked.

Pistol didn’t need a map to calculate. A second later, his eyes glowing, he answered, “Two days.”

“As long as we don’t have any delays?” Morgan said.

The android nodded. “Correct.”

She turned to Vere and Fastolf. “Then maybe you should put the flask away and focus on the job at hand.”

“Worry about yourself,” Vere said. “You aren’t the one with an appointment to have your head chopped off.”

“That was your own doing,” Morgan said, but no one else said anything.

Fastolf gave her a mocking laugh and danced in place. “Maybe you wouldn’t be so miserable if you had a sip.”

Morgan raised her fist and said, “Don’t forget what I did to you the last time you irritated me.”

He laughed again, but also made sure he stayed outside of her punching distance as they walked through the trees.

Traskk growled something but Vere was too busy drinking and laughing with Fastolf to pay attention.

“I don’t know about you guys, but it looks just like every other forest I’ve seen,” Fastolf said.

Pistol moved a fallen tree aside with one arm, barely slowing down as he did so. “Everything in this forest—the trees, the animals—is larger than you will find elsewhere in the galaxy. You should fit in perfectly here.”

This shut the man up. Morgan walked up beside Occulus and asked what Fastolf had done to the android to earn his resentment.

“Nothing. Vere and Fastolf got drunk one night and made a bet on who could steal more wallets in ten minutes. If Fastolf won, Vere got to reprogram Pistol to insult Fastolf’s weight every chance he got.”

“And if Fastolf won?”

Occulus scratched his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think Vere ever thought that far ahead. She just assumed she would win the bet.”

“Just like she thought she would win the Green Knight’s game?”

Occulus cringed.

“I should have guessed.”

Traskk said something else, but Vere was trailing behind the others, giving Fastolf a friendly push as he tried to climb over a fallen tree. It was obvious that he should have walked around it but after seeing everyone else climb over with no problem his pride got the better of him and he tried to heave himself up and over it.

“She’ll never amount to anything as long as she associates with people like that,” Morgan said to Occulus.

All around them, leaves fell from above, matted the forest floor, or blew across their paths as they made their way forward. As they walked, the sun went further and further down below the horizon. As the light faded, the leaves turned from vibrant shades of yellow and orange into dark shades that at first resembled rotten fruit filling with shadows and pockets of darkness.

Pistol was right about the size of everything in the forest. The trees were twice the size of similar trees found on other planets.

Vere looked up to appreciate the sight of the forest she had loved so much as a child, then noticed a sparkle of light high up in a tree they were approaching. Everything else around them was leaf, wood, or sky. The tiny pin prick of light seemed out of place, a single glittering star in the middle of a black hole. But rather than disappearing, the light glimmered as the moon reflected of its surface.

A piece of metal?
she thought, handing the flask back to Fastolf.

Still, the light flickered. Small enough that it was barely noticeable. Consistent enough for her to know her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.

When she realized what it was, she screamed, “Bounty hunter!”

But by then, the first blasts of laser fire were already going off all around them.

39

High up in the tree, the amphibian bounty hunter had been watching his targets. He was only getting paid to kill the woman positioned toward the back of the group, but that didn’t mean he had to let the others live.

With the tip of one of his suction-cup fingers, he tapped the visor that rose in a curved line from the shoulder pad of his gear and came up alongside his head. Every part of the Toaden was yellow and orange—perfect camouflage for the Forest of Tears. The only part of him that wasn’t a natural adaptation to forest hunting was his armor, but most of this was painted to match his skin color. The only bits that revealed their true metal shine were parts that had been scratched during his previous mission and hadn’t yet been repainted.

From his perch fifty feet above ground, halfway up the tree, he watched the Basilisk wander off from the rest of the group. As it did, the Toaden’s bulbous eyes squinted shut in disgust. He considered hopping to a different tree for a clearer shot of the disgusting reptile and to keep it in his sight but decided against the possibility of making unnecessary noises. The primary target was what he was going to be paid for. She and her friends would all be dead quickly enough. When they were, the Toaden would turn its attention to the repulsive Basilisk.

The bounty hunter blinked his eyes, causing the bar that curved next to the side and top of his head to come down in front of his face and over his eyes. As soon as it was in place, the gray panel became illuminated, turning the Toaden’s view of the forest from his natural eyesight to the refined imagery that the targeting system afforded. He blinked once and the tiny screen in front of his eyes showed the group of people as a series of purple objects in a gray forest. He blinked again and the screen showed his targets by their heat signatures.

The woman and the largest of the humans were at the tail end of the group. The Basilisk was nowhere in sight. The android at the front of the group was useless. The Toaden would get no reward nor any satisfaction out of killing it. Behind it, slightly obscured by tree branches, were an old man and a younger woman. Still further back was a man of slender build, walking by himself.

The Toaden croaked a slight laugh. Sometimes it took actual skills and ruthlessness to collect his pay. Other times, like now, it was as easy as watching his targets walk right into his targeting range. A few more steps and blaster fire would cut them all down.

One of his suction cup fingers touched a button on his shoulder. A soft whirling noise sounded but was easily masked by the rustling leaves all around him. A cannon moved into place on the shoulder opposite from his visor screen. A light on his screen blinked to indicate when he had a clear shot. It blinked once, blinked again, blinked once more, then three times in rapid succession. The light on the display he was looking through turned from red to yellow.

The Toaden narrowed his eyes. As he did, the woman at the back of the group yelled, “Bounty hunter!” but it was already too late. Bracing his bowed legs against the tree in preparation for the force of his shoulder cannon, he pressed the trigger and watched a blast of light shoot out from beside his head, right into the chest of one of the men below.

Walking into an Ambush
, by Chris Dietzel –
 

Digital Photo Manipulation

40

“Bounty hunter!” Vere yelled, darting past Fastolf, toward the rest of the group.

The others, save for Pistol, turned to look at her rather than duck for cover. Before she could say anything else, a beam of energy shot out from the tree top and struck Occulus’s chest. The laser beam passed through him, sizzling where it struck the ground a few feet away.

Occulus gurgled and put his hands to his chest. He stumbled backward.

It wasn’t the laser blast that was pushing him backwards, however. Although a laser destroyed almost anything it hit, it didn’t have actual force behind it the way a club or an ancient metal cannonball did. Rather, it passed directly through flesh and matter, incinerating any organic material it came in contact with. The sensation Occulus was feeling, of being forced backward, was a trick of the mind as the body went into shock. Other people who were hit by laser fire, either to their arms or legs, remained perfectly upright and complained of a burning sensation that pulsated through the area of their body that had been hit. Having been hit directly in his chest, though, a large portion of his ribs and an entire lung now missing, Occulus wouldn’t notice this. His body was already shutting down. He immediately went into shock, stumbling about until Vere raced up and held him so he didn’t fall. In her arms, she lowered him until he rested on the ground.

Morgan and the others had realized they needed to find cover. Everyone except Vere, who was still cradling Occulus in her arms, fled for the protection of the nearest tree trunk.

“Where is he?” Morgan shouted.

“I don’t know.”

“Beats me.”

A’la Dure just shrugged.

“Pistol?” she said, looking for the android. He was the one she had been looking for a response from anyway.

“Halfway up a tree, approximately two hundred and twenty feet away,” the android said.

Pistol and Morgan both knew it was pointless to try and explain which tree when they were surrounded by hundreds of giants that looked exactly alike. Only when the bounty hunter moved positions or fired again would they be able to see where the blast had come from and begin sending back any kind of meaningful countermeasures.

She would have been content to let that take as long as necessary, but seeing Vere out in the open, an easy target, she cursed under her breath, and darted from one tree to another. As she did, she let off three shots of her blaster, hoping one would come close enough to the bounty hunter to make it think she might know where it was. After a deep breath, she darted to another tree and sent another four laser blasts sailing through the trees. Other than yellow and orange leaves drifting to the ground from above, there was no indication that her shots were doing anything at all.

“Traskk,” she said, “Aim halfway up the trees directly in front of me.” And then, a moment later, “Traskk?”

No matter where she looked, she couldn’t find the reptile. The first person she did see, however, didn’t restore any confidence in their situation. Behind a tree, roughly twenty feet away, Fastolf was sticking out a blaster and sending laser streaks into the forest.

“It’s better than nothing, I guess,” she muttered before running toward another tree, sending another three blaster shots as she did.

She hoped that between the two of them they might get close enough to at least make the bounty hunter move to another location and reveal where he was hiding.

Behind the tree closest to Vere, A’la Dure’s feet kept dancing in little semicircles, inching toward Vere and then back toward the direction of the bounty hunter as she tried to decide between darting out into the open and dragging her friend to safety or trying to shoot at whatever was targeting them. Perhaps realizing that if she were the one dying she wouldn’t want to be left to die alone, she turned and began half-heartedly shooting in the same direction as Fastolf and Morgan.

“Get down,” Morgan said to Vere as she fired, seeing her out in the open with the dying man in her arms.

But Vere either didn’t hear her or didn’t care because she remained there, on her knees, with Occulus’s head in her lap.

He was gasping for breath he didn’t have. As he did, he let out a stream of stuttered noises, either trying to find the words he was looking for or in such a complete state of shock that he didn’t even know how his teeth clattered together and his tongue floundered. His eyes looked through Vere at nothing.

There was no blood on his chest, no puddle spreading across the ground underneath him. The laser blast destroyed every part of him it had touched as it passed through him but it also cauterized everything in the process. The result was a man, dying in her arms, smoke coming from his chest, that, if she pulled back the loose cloth that flapped in front of his wound, would reveal a hole the size of a human fist, straight through his chest and back. The opening would be sealed on all sides by flesh that had melted and then reformed into a scarred mess.

He gasped for air.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said, holding his head.

Morgan was yelling and firing her blaster as rapidly as it would allow, trying to get the bounty hunter’s attention off the easy target. “Get down!” she yelled at Vere again, but saw nothing she said was being heard.

“You,” Occulus said, gasping, spittle forming at his mouth and running into his white beard.