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

Years ago, as he had given the orders to have his fleet rebuilt, he had already known he was going to personally accompany the new army when they returned to Edsall Dark. That time was now.

A buzzing sound echoed across the command deck. A moment later, the ship’s tinder walls raised and he saw the rest of his fleet in front of him. It was a sight that would make any Vonnegan swell with pride. Mowbray smiled, and his shiny white teeth made his lavender skin seem even more bright.

“Open a channel to General Vion,” he told the officer down by his feet. Mowbray had designed the walkways in his modified Destroyer so he could walk across platforms that were elevated above the officers who carried out his commands. Because of this, the head of the Vonnegan who nodded and carried out his order was at the same level as Mowbray’s boots.

The officer turned to the console in front of him. After pressing a series of buttons, a hologram appeared of a Vonnegan in full space armor.

“Lord?” the General said from the deck of his own Athens Destroyer.

“Set a course directly for Edsall Dark.”

“Yes, My Lord.”

One by one, each of the hundreds of Athens Destroyers made a slight starboard adjustment to their course and began fading off into the distance, away from the portal and from the cargo ship that still remained there.

3

“Someone tell me what’s going on.”

In a room overlooking the capital were the highest officials in Edsall Dark. Political advisors, military experts, and trusted confidants gathered at a long table to share their opinions. Presently, all eyes were on Morgan.

“Well?” she said. “Is it good news or bad news?”

But she already knew the answer. Impromptu meetings like this weren’t called when there was something to celebrate.

A rosy-cheeked man sat between Traskk and Baldwin. He looked barely old enough to have gotten his degree. “We have reports the Vonnegan fleet changed course and will be here sooner than we expected,” he said.

“When?”

The young man closed his eyes and breathed deeply before saying, “Ten days.”

Traskk let out a low growl. Everyone else cringed and moved slightly away from Morgan, expecting her to pick up her chair and throw it out the nearest window, where it would fall hundreds of stories before hitting the ground. She surprised them all by sinking her teeth into her lower lip and remaining quiet.

Baldwin knew her well enough to know this meant she was actually more angry than if she had broken someone’s nose. He, too, scooted his chair back a little bit.

“What’s your name?” Morgan said.

The young man smiled, but looked like he was going to vomit. “Cade, ma’am.”

“Cade, we’ve had six years to prepare for the Vonnegan fleet’s arrival. We all knew they were rebuilding their fleet and would return someday. But we also thought they wouldn’t be here for another year. Why am I now hearing they’ll be here in ten days?”

“They changed course?”

Morgan remained expressionless when she said, “Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I’m telling?” Cade said with the same raised inflection at the end of his sentence.

Morgan dug her fingers into the armrests of her chair. “They changed course?”

“Yes?”

Morgan stood up from her chair. “If you say something like that again, I’m going to break you in half.”

Cade squinted and turned to see if anyone else in the room would help him out. When no one said anything, he asked, “Like what?”

“Like you’re asking me a question when you’re really telling me something.”

Cade looked at the men and women on either side of him. All of them were staring out the windows as if the spaceships on their way into and out of Edsall Dark’s spaceport were more interesting than anything going on at the table. Combined, they were as quiet and still as Pistol, the android standing in the corner of the room.

“Just tell me,” Morgan growled, disgusted that she was surrounded by people who had nothing to say. “Tell me how it is that the projections had the Vonnegan fleet arriving a year from now, but now you’re telling me ten days.”

“All of our intelligence said they were planning to skip the portals and fly here through open space. Our projections were created for that model. And they had done exactly that with all of the other portals they passed. Every time they had the chance to go through an energy field and get here quicker, they continued in a direct path from Vonnegan space. Our intelligence said it was to give their shipyards more time to produce additional Athens Destroyers that could meet them along the way. But then, in the Ankoman-3 Sector, they changed course, went through the portal there… I can’t remember the name of it.” He turned to the others sitting near him. “Does anyone remember the name of the portal in the Ankoman-3 Sector?”

Morgan raised a hand and said, “The name of the portal is irrelevant.” Her knuckles turned white from how tightly the fingers of her other hand curled into a ball. “Where did they appear?”

“Just outside our sector.”

She bit down on her lower lip again before asking, “Just outside our sector?”

Cade nodded.

“And they’ll be here in ten days?”

He nodded again.

The armrest of Morgan’s chair creaked from the pressure of her grip on it. “Well, what are we going to do about it?”

The young man’s cheeks became a darker red when, after staring at her for a few seconds, he finally realized it hadn’t been a rhetorical question. “Uh, ma’am?”

Morgan walked behind her chair and wrapped her fingers around the back support. The wood there also creaked under the pressure.

“What are we going to do in the next ten days?” she said between gritted teeth, veins popping out of her hands as they squeezed the chair.

A man with a thick grey beard, sitting on the other side of the room, said, “We are already at full production on our Solar Carriers, but even with the additional time to build ships while the Vonnegan fleet has been in transit, we cannot match their resources. We estimate they currently outnumber us two to one.”

“Thank you, Westmoreland,” Morgan said.

The man nodded. Being that he was the oldest person in the room, and the most respected, everyone else wished he would continue to speak. But one of the very reasons he was well liked was that he knew when to speak and when not to. And because of this, he realized his part in the discussion had already ended.

Baldwin whispered something to the woman next to him about the Excalibur, but Morgan ignored it.

“Anyone else?” she said. “Traskk?”

The reptile gurgled and hissed a series of noises that no one understood except Pistol. The android had been instructed to translate Traskk’s comments only if they weren’t threats toward the Vonnegan fleet. Pistol remained silent and Morgan couldn’t help but smile. Maybe, in a different life, she had been an angry Basilisk.

“Peto?” Morgan said.

A man two seats down from Westmoreland shrugged. “We’re outgunned and outmanned. As I see it, one of the only things we can do is send representatives to the other kingdoms to see if they’ll help.”

Morgan nodded. “And who do you suggest would be qualified to serve as emissary?”

Peto chewed on a long piece of straw as if he were tending to cattle rather than sitting in the most important council meeting in the solar system. “I’d suspect Vere would be best suited.”

Morgan, still standing behind her chair, dug her fingers into the back of her chair once more. This time, instead of merely creaking, the wood broke in half. Splinters sprayed the people on either side of her.

After taking a deep breath, she looked at the only empty chair in the room, which also happened to be the chair at the head of the long table—the chair Vere was supposed to be sitting in—and said, “Yes, you would think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Does anyone know where she is?” Baldwin asked.

Traskk gave a low hum as his tongue flicked side to side. Pistol shook his head.

“Just like our other meetings,” Morgan said, using her boot to push the bits of her chair to the side.

A young man came to the doorway: “Cade, sir, we have a problem down in district four.”

Cade, rather than standing for duty, blushed so much that his rosy cheeks looked unhealthy. “I thought I told you not to interrupt me during these meetings.”

“You’re what passes for security these days?” Morgan said, looking at the young man.

Instead of answering in the affirmative, he simply groaned without even realizing he had done so.

“We’ve discussed everything we can for the day. Proceed as you were,” she told the group. Then to the young security guard at the door, she said, “I’ll handle the disruption in district four.”

“It’s turning into a near riot, ma’am,” the guard told her.

Morgan looked at the empty chair where Vere should have been sitting and narrowed her eyes. “I said, I’ll handle it.”

Leaving everyone else to organize their papers and excuse themselves, she stormed out of the room.

“I feel sorry for the poor bastards in district four,” Baldwin said, and everyone shook their head in agreement.

4

The entire bar had turned into a giant fight with no clear teams or groups supporting one another. One second, a bulbous-eyed Terrangulan was strangling the life out of a little drunken MaqMac. The next second he was having a chair broken over his head by a Khrrut with a back and chest twice as broad as he was tall, but arms so short they weren’t good for much else than drinking and throwing things. A pack of Wolvertons swarmed a pair of Gthothches, their sharp claws scraping and sparking against the latter’s stone skin.

Everywhere Morgan looked there was fighting, chairs and tables being broken, aliens grunting as they punched and kicked one another, and groaning each time someone was hit. A chorus of growls and threats from dozens of different alien species echoed through the din of breaking bones and shattered glass.

A tiny alien, the size of a human child, flew past Morgan’s head as she walked through the doorway. She dodged to the side just quickly enough to avoid having its razor sharp wings slice the side of her face open. It squealed in terror as it fled the bar, happy to survive another day.

She scanned the fighting for a moment before her eyes settled right in the middle of the room.

“I knew it,” she said, one hand curling into a fist and the other gripping the handle of the sword at her waist.

Fastolf. The fat man was in the center of the brawl. Not only that, he was laughing, loving every minute of the chaos.

She noticed, however, that he wasn’t actually fighting anyone. Instead, he would push one alien in the back, causing it to sprawl into the aliens in front of it. By the time it turned around to see who had pushed it, Fastolf had already moved to a different creature and was doing the same thing. The result was a room full of aliens spurred into fighting because each one thought someone else was bringing the fight to them. All the while, though, Fastolf refrained from hitting any of his fellow bar patrons because it was more fun—or more lucrative at least—to pick the pocket of each one as he pushed them. All around the bar, he would push some alien, starting a new fistfight, only to duck out of the way, wait for the fighting to begin, and then quickly snatch whatever money the alien had in its pockets as it fought some other alien that had no idea why it was being attacked.

“Fastolf,” she screamed.

Even over the fray of fighting, he heard his name called and turned to see who had yelled it. After scanning the room, his eyes focused on her in the doorway. The smile immediately vanished from his face. He turned his head to look for the nearest exit. Without pause, he darted for it.

She tried to run after him but was immediately ensnared in the fighting.

“Stop,” she shouted at the aliens nearest to her as they fought each other. A QuaQuall was latched onto a human’s back, tearing at the man’s scalp with its suction cup fingers. Another man was kicking at a pack of ten tiny Tulins, who were all too fast to be caught by a boot.

When no one listened to her, she withdrew her Meursault blade, the one Vere had given to her, and brought it down in a slice in front of them. A trail of dark vapor lingered where the sword had cut through the air. The table she had cut, made of solid metal, fell into two equal parts.

The group closest to her stopped fighting long enough for Morgan to make her way past them. But there were still too many other aliens and humans fighting all around her to catch up to Fastolf. Instead of chasing him through the back exit, she turned and raced through the entrance. There, she turned left, then left again, and ran through the alleyway beside the bar. With one sweeping motion of her arm, her sword sliced through a stack of crates that blocked her way, a yellow mist lingering where the blade passed through them. At a barbed metal fence, meant to keep burglars out, she slashed a V, then kicked the top portion of the fence away, hopping over what remained.

She saw him in the distance, running down a side alley. Squinting, she realized there was a second person with him. Without another thought, she took off after both of them.

In the dark, she raced past the shadows of aliens of every variety, each carrying out some mundane daily task. A short, hairy Ppollop poured hot water down a storm drain after closing up his restaurant for the night. Morgan raced past him without the Ppollop acknowledging that someone had even been there, let alone rushed past. An Ignis Moris was stacking wooden crates on top of each other behind his store. The fiery alien had to wear special gloves so that each crate didn’t burst into flames when he touched them. A pair of feathery, dainty aliens stood face to face in the middle of a lover’s argument. Morgan raced past these as well.

At the next intersection of alleys she paused just long enough to see which way Fastolf and his companion had gone. Turning right, she bolted after them. By the time she got to the next crossing she had cut their lead in half. At the next intersection, they turned left, she followed, and she was only twenty yards behind them. She laughed, knowing Fastolf was tiring and didn’t have much more left in him.