The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) (34 page)

Hotspur couldn’t return to his ship, though. The entire thing would explode as the battle continued. He also couldn’t make his way to any other CasterLan ships because they would also be destroyed by the time he got there. So he found the only place he could think of—the portal—and pressed the button on his wrist.

A small puff of gas sent him forward. When it did, he immediately let his arms and legs hang loose as if he were dead. He saw out of the corner of his eye that the captain had gotten his lungs back and had begun flailing his arms and legs again. He was probably screaming too, although there was no way Hotspur or anyone else would be able to hear him. As Hotspur drifted toward the portal, a Thunderbolt flew past at a terrific speed, fired a single blaster shot at the captain, and killed him.

Everywhere Hotspur looked, CasterLan ships were being destroyed or CasterLan soldiers were being shot as they floated in open space. And still he drifted toward the portal.

He didn’t intend to fly through it. First of all, Vonnegan ships were still appearing from it. If he ran into one, he would be the equivalent of a little bug splattered across an air-scout bike. And secondly, while space armor allowed him to survive for a few minutes in space, it didn’t have the protection necessary to keep him alive if he passed through the portal. He would go from being the leader of the combined CasterLan forces to being an unidentifiable mass of gore inside an otherwise undamaged suit of space armor.

What he intended to do was fly to the rim of the portal, to where a small maintenance room was located. He wouldn’t be able to contribute anything else to this battle, but he would be there for the next one. His priority right now was somehow getting back down to the planet, finding Modred, and snapping his neck.

All he had to do was hope that no fighters decided to take target practice on a seemingly dead officer, and that he didn’t
 
accidently get hit by a vessel, fly into the portal, or wander wide of its rim. The situation he was in was even more dire than the stories he had learned about in the academy of great war heroes who had overcome insurmountable odds. He would become a legend when he returned to Edsall Dark. And because of that he grinned as he drifted closer to the portal, war and death still surrounding him.

76

“What are you doing?” Vere said, standing beside her father’s body.

“Watching the battle,” Modred answered, sounding neither dismayed nor encouraged by what was going on above the planet. If she didn’t know better, she would have guessed him to have been made by the same specialists who built Pistol.

Vere took her father’s hand in her own. It was cold and stiff, nothing like the hand that had tickled her belly or swept over her eyes when she was a child.

“What are you doing here?” Modred asked, not turning from the window. “Isn’t there a bar somewhere where you should be getting drunk and fighting?”

She looked up from the gray form of her father’s corpse. Modred still had his back to her, still had her father’s sword by his side.

“I came back to try and prevent exactly what has happened.”

Her stepbrother laughed. “Too little, too late, huh?”

Her jaw twitched and flexed. “What do you know about everything that’s happened?”

Finally, Modred turned from the window and faced her. He was bigger than she remembered. Not nearly as muscular as Hector or Hotspur, but also no longer the lanky and awkward kid he had been when she last saw him. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was disheveled and long enough to cover his eyebrows.

He stared at her for a moment, then shrugged.

“What’s it matter?” he said. “None of it makes a difference any more.”

She was about to ask if her father had ordered the attack on the Ornewllian Compact in Vonnegan space when Modred said, “I poisoned him. Is that what you’re wondering? It was me.”

She returned her father’s hand to his side. Without even realizing she had done so, both of her hands curled into fists.

“Why?”

Modred laughed. “He wouldn’t die on his own. I had to speed up the process.”

Her face was turning red. She could feel her heart thumping, begging for revenge.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

He laughed and pointed up at the sky. “Don’t you see? It’s too late. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

Gritting her teeth, she asked why he had killed her father.
 

He cocked his head to one side as if confused by her question or unsure whether she was playing games with him by asking such stupid questions.

“Why?” he said. “The oldest reason. The original reason. The reason every king has ever been killed over the last million years.” His eyes got big as if she should know the answer, but when she didn’t reply, he said, “To take his place, of course. To become king myself.”

Anger made it difficult for her to breathe. “By having the entire kingdom destroyed? There won’t be anything left to rule over.”

He threw his hands in the air. When he did, the Meursault sword momentarily changed angles and she saw the blade before it once again vanished. A tiny trail of colored vapors appeared where the blade had passed through the air, then quickly dissipated.

“Don’t you think I know that? Like I said, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Hotspur wasn’t supposed to attack. The Crown wasn’t supposed to be activated.”

“And you really think the Vonnegan general would have just arrived, let you rule over the lands, and then gone peacefully away?”

“They said so. They said that’s what would happen. They were going to claim the CasterLan Kingdom as part of the Vonnegan Empire. They were going to leave everything else alone and let me rule the planet.” Then, looking up at the battle above Edsall Dark, he yelled, “But that idiot Hotspur had to go and ruin it!”

“Who told you that?” she asked, every muscle in her arms tense. “Who did you make a deal with?”

Modred wasn’t listening, though. The answer was clear, anyway. Nobody would speak on Mowbray’s behalf on such an important matter. It had to have been the Vonnegan ruler himself.

“The funny thing is, your father really did order the attack on those innocent aliens. I drugged him, of course. Gave him a dose of hallucinogens. There’s no telling what he was actually talking about when I whispered about the Ornewllian Compact. He was so out of his mind by then that a bit of prompting was all it took to convince him it was absolutely necessary. That old fool was so drugged and delirious that he would have repeated anything I said.”

“Is Lady Percy behind this too?”

Modred laughed. “My mother? You’ll find this hard to believe, but she actually loved your father. I don’t know why, but she did. If she knew what I’d been planning, she would have disowned me.”

“That’s nicer than I would have done.” Her own hands were raw from where her fingernails dug into them. “Nicer than I’m going to do.”

Modred rolled his eyes and laughed.

“Do you know what it’s like coming here and seeing how everyone is treated?”

Vere didn’t say anything. The roar of rushing blood in her head made it difficult to care about anything else he said. On another day, she would have said that everyone in her father’s court, all of the people on Edsall Dark, and the rest of the CasterLan Kingdom were treated fairly and honestly. Now, though, all she could do was keep from screaming with rage.

His voice got louder: “You were lazy and entitled and yet you were always your father’s favorite. Nothing I did mattered. Even when you ran away and became a thieving drunk, all he talked about was you. ‘Oh, Vere’ and ‘I miss my daughter’ and ‘What did I do wrong?’ and ‘Do you think she’ll come back?’ and ‘She’s the only one I trust to rule after I’m gone.’ He said those things about a piece of trash! A drunk! A thief! And the entire time, there I was, being a diligent son, studying, helping everywhere I could. Did it make any difference? Of course not!” Modred screamed, saliva spattering the window in front of him as he yelled.

“Modred, I—”

“So I adapted. If being here and being the exact opposite of you didn’t work, I’d change my tactics. I contacted the Vonnegan high command and told them what I was planning. They promised they would send their fleet as a show of force, and to make sure everyone on Edsall Dark accepted me as their new leader. But they weren’t going to do anything else. They swore.”

“Modred, I—” she tried again.

“Now it’s too late. None of it matters. Even if the Vonnegan fleet doesn’t destroy us, there won’t be anyone left for me to rule over.”

“Modred?” Her voice was calm and even.

He blinked back into the present moment. “Yes! What do you want?”

She stared directly at him. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

Leaving her father’s body behind her, she stepped forward, withdrew her own Meursault blade, and charged.

Ready For a Fight
, by Molly Evans, watercolor and ink

77

 
“What else do we do?” Baldwin asked.

Morgan leaned back against the chair she was sitting on in the control room. On the hologram displays in front of her, she was able to see a three dimensional depiction of the battle going on over the planet. Hotspur’s ship was destroyed. Almost all of his other Solar Carriers were inoperable or were complete losses. The Crown was still firing, still obliterating a single Athens Destroyer each time it fired a shot, but there were too many, and still more appearing every minute.

No matter how much they had looked through the control room’s various systems, there was nothing to shut off the portal, and nothing else besides the Crown, that could pose a serious threat to the Vonnegan fleet. Already, she saw displays that showed Destroyers descending toward the spaceport, readying to unload battalions of Vonnegan troopers.

“I don’t think there’s anything else we can do,” she admitted.

There was a small squadron of Llyushin fighters remaining above the spaceport, fending off incoming Vonnegan ships. However, they would be no match for the quantity of Vonnegan vessels everywhere, and so she didn’t concern herself with watching how they were faring. Hector and Pistol were in the top levels of the capital building, but she didn’t think there was a secondary control room or any means of deactivating the portal.

“This is it?” Fastolf said. “We’re just going to quit?”

She turned and looked at him, then smiled. “You know,” she said, “when you aren’t stealing from me and you’re not intoxicated, you’re not too bad.”

He blushed and smiled.

“Is anyone there?” a voice asked.

She looked at everyone in the room, knew it wasn’t any of their voices, then faced the communications system.

“Hello?” the voice came again.

She realized it was coming through the speakers to her side.

“Hello?” she said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Hotspur, leader of the combined CasterLan—”

“Hotspur is dead.”

“I’m not dead,” the voice came over the system, sounding distinctly annoyed. “Who is this?”

“Morgan.”

“Morgan?”

“Yes.”

There was silence for a moment, and she guessed Hotspur was trying to figure out why his former lieutenant was in the CamaLon control room when she had abandoned her post a week earlier and hadn’t been seen since.

“Is anyone else there?” he asked. “I don’t speak to traitors.”

She thought to herself that if trying to prevent a war made her a traitor, she would gladly be known as the galaxy’s greatest turncoat of all time. But the absurdity of a man saying such nonsense after watching his fleet be decimated only made her laugh with exasperation.

“Sure,” she said. “You have your choice of a drunken thief or a physician’s assistant.”

Fastolf gave her a pained look but kept silent. Baldwin tried to offer an encouraging look but only seemed even more out of place than ever before. Traskk’s tail slid back and forth across the ground after not being considered as an option.

“What?” Hotspur yelled. “What are you talking about? Put someone else on.”

She knew from his voice—and from seeing him do it firsthand—that if he were in the room with them he would try to kill everyone he could get his hands on.

“Sorry, ‘Spur, I’m all you’ve got,” she said. “Where are you, anyway?”

“I’m in the command room of the Tevis-84 Portal.”

Her gaze darted toward the displays in front of her. “Where?”

“I’m in the portal ring, inside cylinder 001. The Athens Destroyers are coming through the portal right next to me.”

She wanted to ask how he had gotten there but it could wait. There were more important things to address.

Leaning close to the displays in front of her, she asked if there was a way to shut off the portal.

There was silence for a moment while Morgan and her cohorts waited.

When his voice came back over the speaker again, he sounded resigned: “I don’t know. There might be, but I’d need someone who understands these things. I’m a general, not an engineer.”

Morgan slumped back in her seat again. Nothing would stop the rest of the Vonnegan fleet from coming through the portal and destroying everyone she knew and everything she loved.