The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) (28 page)

There were too many laser cannons being fired for her eyes to be able to distinguish each one. Flashes of light erupted all over the sky, fired back and forth between the two sides, the light lingering in a haze of smoke. Next to her, Morgan was shaking her head as she stared at the madness. Only Hector, who had seen enough war for ten lifetimes and never wanted to see it again, ignored the chaos above them as his ship raced toward the capital wall.

Seeing her old home approach, Vere thought of A’la Dure’s last words—her
only
words—and sighed.

Be better.

She had promised A’la Dure that she would be. The opportunity to save the planet, her father’s kingdom, was now gone, though. There was no chance of figuring out why her father had ordered the attack. She hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye to him before he died, let alone to find out what had driven him to order an attack in Vonnegan space. There was also no chance of preventing war. Above them, dozens of people were dying with each cannon blast. Hundreds were dying with each exploding vessel. She dreaded the thought of A’la Dure still being here, casting one of her silent looks that had more impact behind it than nearly anything she could have said.

Be better.

In front of her. Above her. Everywhere she looked, there was proof that she had failed in being the person her friend had thought her capable of being.

Be better.

She had wanted to be. She had hoped to be. She would have liked to come back to Edsall Dark and show A’la Dure and Occulus that she could do more than drink and thieve. After all, she hadn’t just promised one person that she would live a better life, she had promised two. Occulus’s final words were also sounding in her head.

There is a Green Chapel. You spent much of your childhood there
.

No matter how many times she replayed the words, she knew he had to be wrong. There was no Green Chapel. If there were, if she had spent her childhood there, she would remember it.

Hector’s ship was close enough to the wall that she could make out the lines of mortar that held it together. She was within sight of all the places she had been within walking distance of when she was a child. The hidden creek. The wishing pond. The cave that she and Galen had explored so often. They were all—

A bolt of light went off in her head.

There is a Green Chapel. You spent much of your childhood there
.

“Stop the ship.”

Hector looked over at her, but said nothing. The Llyushin continued to race ahead.

Morgan told her they were almost there.

“Stop the ship,” Vere said again, already packing her bag and slinging it over her shoulder.

This time Hector did as he was told and brought the Llyushin to a halt.

“I don’t know if you realize it,” Morgan told her, “but there’s a war starting up there.”

Above them, in front of the portal, two fleets of ships were in such close proximity to one another that every single cannon blast hit its mark. The two sides were tearing each other apart. While death and destruction reigned, even more Vonnegan ships continued to appear through the portal.

“I know,” Vere said. “But I gave my word.”

“What are you talking about?” Morgan yelled, but Vere was already turning to leave the cockpit.

When she grabbed Vere by the arm, she expected to see a fist coming at her face, but instead Vere only offered a sad smile, as if she were going to executioner’s row, then walked to the storage bay, where Fastolf, Traskk, Pistol, and Baldwin were sitting.

“Hector.”

A voice came over the intercom: “Yes, Vere.”

“Lower the ramp.”

The Llyushin fighter’s back ramp lowered to the ground. Vere turned to Fastolf and Traskk to explain but the reptile took hold of her with his giant Basilisk hands and wouldn’t let her go.

“I know, Traskk. I know.” She put her arms around him and hugged him, feeling the hard scales of his skin through his vest.

“What’re you doing?” Fastolf said.

“This is where I get off.” And then, feeling that Traskk wasn’t letting go of her, added, “Alone.”

Fastolf held his flask out to her but she waved it away. Instead, he took a sip on her behalf.

“Hector.”

The voice sounded from the speaker again: “Yes, Vere.”

“I’m getting off here. Please take everyone else to CamaLon as you had originally planned.”

“Yes, Vere.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Fastolf asked.

Morgan was standing behind her, listening to everything that was said.

Vere gently removed herself from Traskk’s arms, then said to Morgan, “You’ll have a better plan than I would have anyway. I don’t know how to stop wars. My father is already dead. All I can do now is follow through to the person I gave my word to.”

“And who’s that?” Fastolf asked.

“The Green Knight.”

Traskk roared in disapproval and bared his fangs.

Fastolf shook his head and said, “You’d come all this way just to knowingly get your head chopped off?”

“I gave my word.”

Baldwin shook his head in disbelief. “We walked through a mountain range. We fought off bounty hunters. I can’t even count how many times we almost died.”

“I gave my word,” she said again. “If I don’t have that, what else do I have?”

“You’d still have your head,” Fastolf said, sitting down on the floor of the cramped storage bay and taking a drink. Above him, Traskk was still baring his fangs and whipping his tail so that it banged against either side of the doorway he was standing in.

Vere turned to Morgan and said, “Lead them. They’ll follow you.” Then she turned and began down the ramp.

“Vere,” Morgan said. When the other woman stopped and turned around, she added, “Occulus would be proud of you.”

In response, Vere simply turned away and continued down toward the ground.

After she was off the ship, the Llyushin’s ramp raised and the ship began flying toward the capital wall once again.

“Okay,” Vere said, all alone in the field, then began walking toward the cave she knew was nearby, the cave she had spent so many days of her childhood exploring.

61

 
“What are they doing?” Modred yelled in the control room, hundreds of stories below the king’s chambers on the ground level of CamaLon.

Seeing the battle raging above the planet, he had rushed down to find out why the two sides were destroying each other.

A young man with freshly cut hair and perfect posture turned from the table where he sent and received communication updates. “The Solar Carriers have engaged the Athens Destroyers in—”

“I know what they’re doing, you buffoon,” Modred screamed. If it were someone smaller, a little less athletic looking, he would have smacked the man across the face. “
Why
are they firing?”

“Hotspur issued the command to begin firing before all of the enemy ships got through the portal and into formation.”

“But I ordered them not to engage! Not now, not later. Not ever!”

The young man turned and looked up from his display screen again to assess the king’s stepson. “Hotspur sent a communication saying that if you had a problem with his strategy, you were more than welcome to take a personal transport up to his ship and talk to him about it.”

“But he’s in the middle of the battle!”

“Yes, he is.”

The young man turned back to the incoming communications, collecting them from every part of the capital and then sending them out to those who could use the information.

Modred stood there for a moment, speechless. Then, realizing there was nothing else he could say or do, he stormed out of the room.

62

As Vere walked toward the cave, the battle raged in the space above Edsall Dark’s atmosphere. No bounty hunter dared come through the portal to look for her. Every once in a while, a giant ship erupted into another explosion, the size and color depending on whether the explosion had started in the ship’s ammunition rooms, oxygen tanks, or engines. There was no way Vere would be able to see single-man fighters in the space above her planet without binoculars, but the giant vessels were so large that they could easily be seen with the naked eye.

An Athens Destroyer disappeared behind a wave of blue and purple explosions. A second later, the eruption over, its aft end crumbled into a thousand pieces. A Solar Carrier’s forward command deck became engulfed in explosions the same color as Edsall Dark’s larger sun. Although it remained in one piece, after the explosion it drifted downward, away from the battle, without firing any more cannons. A couple minutes later, the crippled Solar Carrier drifted too close to the planet’s gravitational force and parts of the ship began streaking through the sky as fiery balls. Some parts of the ship burned up as they entered the atmosphere. Others trailed streaks of orange light behind them as they made impact on random parts of the planet.

And still, the Athens Destroyers were appearing through the portal. What had at first looked like an unfair fight for the few Vonnegan ships appearing through the portal now looked like an unbalanced contest for the other side, with CasterLan ships outnumbered two to one, and more Vonnegan vessels appearing every minute.

And yet Vere ignored the battle, hoping Morgan and the others could make some sort of difference. She knew that her own path lay not in fighting someone else’s battle, but in following through with her own word.

In destinies sad or merry, true men can but try.

It was something her father had told her over and over again when she was young. She had always wondered why, as he sat at the edge of her bed, telling her how much he loved her, he had always said
true men
and not
true women
or even
true people
or even
true life everywhere in the galaxy
. What was she supposed to think? Her own father’s words seemed not to apply to her.

“It’s just what he likes to say,” her mother had told her. “He doesn’t actually mean
men
, he means anyone. He means
you
.” Her mother had smiled then and tapped Vere on her little nose.

“Then why doesn’t he say
me
?”

The answers had varied depending on Vere’s age. One time, her mother had said it was because the king was merely repeating the phrase as his own father had said it to him. Another time, the answer had been that Vere’s father was too practical; to him,
men
meant everyone.

She knew her father hadn’t meant anything by it, but each time he recited the saying, the words had instilled in her a fire to want to beat any man at everything, to show them they had no idea what willpower really was. She would rob and steal better than them if that was the game they played. She would outdrink them. She would even kill better than them. Anything.

In the distance, she saw where the land rolled into more severe dips and climbs and knew behind one of the hills there would be rocks and a cave leading deep into the planet.

As she got closer, the familiar sights and sounds came rushing back to her. There was the gradual change from grass to pebbles and then to larger rocks. There was the cave and the hill it was under. Most of the day, the hill blocked out the sun, casting long shadows over the land and ensuring the cave was cast into darkness. There was the sound of dripping water from where the moisture collected on rocks, trickling down into puddles everywhere she stepped. Cold air rushed out of the cave. A tiny stream flowed, beside the cave, from where water collected somewhere underground.

When she was little, the rocks surrounding the cave had seemed like steep cliffs rising high above her and Galen. They had climbed up and down every possible route, daring each other to look down at the ground so far below them. One slip would have meant falling to a certain death. Or so it had seemed as child. She saw now that the same entrance to the cave had no cliffs at all, no life-threatening distance to fall. The same rocks that had scared and thrilled her as a child now looked like nothing more than the entrance to a cave. The highest she and Galen could have climbed was roughly ten feet. So exciting and scary when she was young. So ordinary and unremarkable now that she was an adult. Such was the way of everything in life.

Only a short distance away, the cave and its opening began to appear at the side of the rolling hills. It was one of the reasons she had liked this cave so much, because it seemed like a secret that only she and Galen knew about. Another step and the soles of her feet went from coarse grass to old craggy rock.

Inside the cave, green moss covered every inch of the walls and ceiling. This had to be it. This had to be the place that the knight referred to as the Green Chapel. Edsall Dark’s grass was tan. Its forests were orange and red. Only this cave was green. She had no idea how the Green Knight knew about this place, where he had come from, or who he was. The one thing she was certain of was that this had to be the place.

Without waiting, without calling out to see if anyone was inside, she entered the cave, into the darkness. Rocks ground together under her feet. One skipped across the cave floor when her toe poked it. In the darkness, it clattered against other stones, causing a raucous series of echoes.

One hundred feet into the cave, the last bit of sunlight disappeared and she had to pull her blaster from its holster and let its ion cell illuminate the way for her. After it began to glow, she continued forward, down into the depths. Water dripped. Pebbles scuffed. A slight howl of frigid air rushed toward her, numbing her cheeks.

The next thing she saw was the tip of a blade—the Green Knight’s axe. As broad a blade as she had remembered. As sharp as ever. And still green. She saw it before she saw the Green Knight because of the way it shimmered in the light offered by her blaster. The Green Knight took a step forward, and he too came into sight. In the dim light, his armor and cape seemed the darkest possible shade of green rather than the brilliant emerald color they had been in Eastcheap.

“It seems your word holds good,” the Green Knight said, his face hidden behind his helmet. When he spoke, his voiced boomed through the caverns, echoing like thunder.