“Yes, of course.”
“And you’re going to stand around and let it happen?”
“No, I—”
“Follow me if you want to prevent more war.”
“I’m not following you anywhere, Carthagen.”
“Oh, now you have your courage back?”
Talbot’s face burned with the shame of having closed his eyes in the face of death only moments earlier.
“Why are you here, Carthagen?” he asked again.
He had said the final word as an insult, but he still wasn’t ready for the thick glove that once against grabbed him by the throat with such speed he didn’t even see it coming.
“Your people are killing each other and you’re worried why I’m here?”
Before he could respond, the Carthagen let go of his neck, then pushed him back so hard he went tumbling over a soldier and guard who were fighting each other on the ground. When he got up, the Carthagen was already running. The four-legged alien took ten giant leaping paces to get in front of Octo and Winchester. With the Round Table guards engaged in battle, the pair of representatives had only two alternatives: flee or stand their ground. To their credit, neither man turned and ran.
“The Cartha campaign was—” Octo began to say.
Two swishes of mist appeared in the air and a second later, both Octo’s and Winchester’s heads fell to the ground, followed by their bodies.
Talbot reached for his own Meursault. The Carthagen turned and faced him with its own pair of invisible blades.
“You don’t want to do that, Talbot. I’m trying to help.”
“By killing the two men my father trusted?”
“Your father is dead. These two men wanted others to fight their battles for them. Everyone will be better off without them.”
“What about them?” Talbot said, pointing at Cash and Cimber.
He expected the alien to take sides. Instead, it galloped off across the courtyard at the two representatives. With two flashes of mist through the air, both fell to the ground, their heads hitting the stone and rolling away from their bodies.
The Carthagen galloped back toward him, but instead of stopping, continued past him.
When he didn’t follow, the alien paused and said, “I thought you wanted to save these people.”
Talbot shook his head and reached down to pull a guard off a soldier. The Carthagen let out a sigh of impatience.
“Two dozen people? I’m more concerned with the thousands that will die if we don’t get those flagships to stand down.”
Then the Carthagen began to run again and Talbot had no choice but to follow.
4
Captain Cornelious stood on the command deck of the Solar Carrier Heroic. Alongside him were Captain Mudrow’s Athens Destroyer and Space Commander Yoesh-Ser’s Havoc Gunship. Opposite him was the Legacy, led by Brigadier En-O-En and two other flagships that were loyal to Hector.
Like En-O-En, Cornelious was watching a magnified image of what was going on in the courtyard outside the Great Hall. A Carthagen had arrived and revealed the decapitated head of the warlord Arc-Mi-Die before slaying Hector.
“How about that,” Cornelious had said with relief, thinking any need for violence that day might have been averted. Julian’s assassination had been avenged, albeit by the unlikely hand of a Carthagen, but avenged all the same. But then the fighting had broken out between the Round Table guards that had been protecting Octo and Winchester and the Round Table soldiers that had been protecting Cash and Cimber. Amidst the violence, that same Carthagen had slain all four representatives.
Without Julian, there was still a chance for peace. Talbot was young and naïve but he was the spitting image of his father and had also come back from the Cartha campaign as a hero of sorts. Octo and Winchester would have done whatever it took to ensure their plan for Julian came about through Talbot instead. Now, however, both representatives were gone. The opportunity for peace was over.
“Ready the cannons,” he said to his weapons officer.
He also had his comms officer send word to Captain Mudrow and Space Commander Yoesh-Ser to do the same.
Captain Cornelious hadn’t gone on the Cartha campaign with General Reiser, but he had been visited by the general a week earlier. Julian had made it clear that the Round Table wasn’t able to keep everyone safe because that it was barely functioning. He has also said that the fragile collective of former empires and kingdoms would shatter if someone didn’t take the lead and instill confidence in the governing body. Cornelious had shared that vision and accepted it as truth. He had seen firsthand how paralyzed the representatives had been in trying to decide how to deal with Arc-Mi-Die.
That was why, following Julian’s assassination, he took to the skies. Hector and the others like him, the people who didn’t realize how ineffectual the Round Table was, were rallying troops of their own. The sooner people like Cornelious acted, the quicker the other side would be forced to either cooperate or fall by the wayside.
If Julian’s vision was ever going to come to pass it needed to be now. Cornelious wasn’t going to let the galaxy devolve back into endless conflict between warring factions. Future generations would forever be aghast at how many people had lost their lives in the senseless battles that had come before the Round Table.
He was aware of the irony of trying to prevent further war by firing on the flagships in front of him. He also knew that one Solar Carrier had never attacked another. For the greater good, however, things that had never happened before needed to happen now. If the Round Table wasn’t altered as Julian had recommended, the entire body would fall apart. To prevent that, to prevent millions or even billions of deaths, he would accept the loss of the lives aboard the three flagships across from him.
“All cannons ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fire at will.”
5
Talbot and Lancelot looked up just in time to see the first blast. One of the Solar Carriers fired lasers into the other. A second later, the other ship returned fire. And a moment after that, all six flagships, all belonging to the Round Table but following two different allegiances, began to unleash their weapons.
Civil war was breaking out directly above the planet.
Lancelot grabbed Talbot by the shoulder. “A control room or command center. Where is it?”
He pointed to the building next to the Great Hall. Without pause, she turned and galloped toward the main door. By the time he caught up to her, she had reared back and was kicking forward with her front two boots. The metal door that provided perimeter security whined. After a second kick, the thick panel broke from the frame.
They ran through a twist of narrow corridors before coming to another steel door. This one was reinforced and covered in blast-proof coating.
“Do you have a code?” she asked, nodding to the security keypad beside the door.
“My father did, but not me.”
“What good does that do us?”
“None,” Talbot said, looking down at his feet.
In his resignation she saw a glimpse of his father after she had bested him in combat. In her private living quarters, Julian had realized he was in over his head. Outside the door to the control room, Talbot had the same understanding.
Rather than argue with him, she drew both Meursaults and brought them down in a pair of horizontal and then vertical slashes. As she had done many times in the past weeks, she then slammed her shoulder into the square she had cut and watched the chunk of metal fall away from the rest of the door and slam against the ground.
She was immediately pelted with laser blasts from inside the control room. With a growl, she darted forward. Her pair of Meursaults cut the hands off of two of the soldiers aiming blasters at her. Before the other two could react, their hands were gone as well. Each cried out and instead of continuing the fight, held their remaining hand over the injury.
She moved to the side to allow all but one of them to le
ave the room, then told them to get medical attention. Each realized they were being allowed to live another day and did as she ordered.
“I don‘t get it,” Talbot said. “You killed the representatives out in the courtyard but you’re letting them go?”
“You’d prefer I killed them?”
The final technician, the one she had spared so he could help them, withdrew a blaster and aimed it at her.
“That’s what I get for trying to help,” she muttered before striking the man down.
Talbot grimaced, but rather than acknowledge the latest fatality he said, “You could have spared the representatives.”
“The men who got us into this mess?”
Even in the cold, inexpressive voice of her modulator, her hot scorn for the four politicians was obvious. Without waiting for him to provide a retort, she asked if he knew how to contact the flagships fighting above them.
“How would I know?” he said, genuinely baffled. She was giving him far too much credit. He nodded toward the body on the ground and said, “He surely knew.”
“Listen, you,” she said, starting toward him.
He backed away and put his hands up in surrender.
“We can push buttons,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
However, with hundreds of buttons across the wall, they would have to be much more than lucky. Her head hurt from the absurdity of it. She was on a planet she didn’t care about, trying to save people she didn’t know or want to know, all because a pair of robed phantoms had told her it was worth doing. Perhaps it was she who was irrational and everyone else was perfectly reasonable.
“Honestly, I don’t see why you care, Carthagen.”
In her mood, she had no patience for anything Talbot said. Her upper right hand snatched him by the neck. Her upper left hand grabbed his wrist before he was able to bring his Meursault up to defend himself. Talbot coughed under the force of her grip but otherwise was motionless.
Her lower arms reached up and unlatched the clasps of her helmet. Then her neck craned forward and her helmet was in her hands. Her blond her fell down over her shoulders. Her eyes shone with blue ferocity.
“I don’t care if you call me a Carthagen or anything else, but you should know two things.” Her grip tightened on his neck. “First, if you say it with disdain you’ll irritate me, and you don’t want that. And second, calling me that only shows how little you know of what’s really going on.”
She let him take in the features of her very human face. He made no noise but his eyes were wide with shock.
He didn’t beg to be let go. He didn’t ask why a human was dressed in Carthagen armor. When he did finally speak, he uttered the same two words Julian had said weeks earlier.
“You’re beautiful,” he gasped.
For the second time, he reminded her of his father.
With a disgusted sigh, she dropped him to the floor and turned her attention back to trying to figure out how to operate the control panel.
6
In an instant, an already utterly baffling situation became so incomprehensible that Talbot thought he might be losing his sanity. The thought actually crossed his mind that perhaps he had never gotten off the Carthagen asteroid after all. Maybe everything in the weeks following the Cartha campaign had been a part of another highly advanced Carthagen trick. That would be the only explanation for the same alien who had taken his father prisoner somehow showing up on Edsall Dark and revealing itself—herself—to be a human. Not just any human, though, but the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes upon.
One of the many differences between him and his father was that Julian didn’t care about the why of things, he was focused on the when and the how. That was what had made him such a decisive leader that soldiers and citizens alike wanted to follow. Talbot knew those things were important but he had always been more focused on the why.
As a result, his mind was unable to get past the immediate shock of a Carthagen warrior, who had ambushed them many sectors away, now being in CamaLon, being a human, and for some reason, wanting to stop the civil war before it spread throughout the rest of the Round Table. Why did she care if the flagships destroyed each other or not? Why was she wearing Carthagen armor? None of it made sense and it brought on a stupor of inaction.
After once more having been thrown by the warrior, he slowly picked himself off the ground and asked what he could do to help. The woman had her back to him and was scanning the console in front of her for any indication of which controls she needed to use.
“You can either sit there and do nothing while your people kill each other, or you can figure out how to communicate with the flagships and convince them to stop fighting.”
He moved beside her to the main console and began reviewing the buttons. Some were white, yellow, or red. Others were unlit. A few were green. Some blinked and some were constant. None conveniently said exactly what they did but most had indicators as to what system they were connected to.
“Maybe this?” he said, reaching over one of her four arms and pressing a glowing white button.
Nothing happened.
She sighed and continued pressing other buttons around the console.
“Freeze!” someone shouted from the doorway behind them.
Talbot turned to see who it was. Lancelot’s only acknowledgement of the new arrival was to put her helmet back on. Other than that, she didn’t even dignify them by turning to see who was there. Instead, she continued to press button after button in hopes that one would bring up a comms signal with the ships above them.
In a different situation, Talbot would have been glad to see more Round Table forces. Now, though, he had no idea if the four soldiers in the doorway, blasters pointed at him, were loyal to his father or to Hector.
As was becoming a habit, he brought his hands up, palms out to show he meant no harm, and began shuffling toward them in slow and small paces.
“We’re trying to bring an end to the fighting,” he said.
None of the guards replied. He noticed too that none of them moved their blasters away from their targets. Two weapons were pointed at him and two were pointed at the Carthagen. He stopped moving toward them and smiled.
“If we can agree on one thing, it’s that we don’t need more bloodshed, right?”
One of the soldiers moved the barrel of his blaster from pointing at Talbot’s chest to aiming directly at his face. “Easy for you to say now that Hector’s dead.”
“My father is dead too. What we need to do now is focus on stopping the killing.”
None of the blasters moved away from their targets.
He pleaded with them to lower their weapons. When he still didn’t get a response, he heard the Carthagen slam her fists down on the console and turn around. She then taunted the soldiers by asking them if they were going to point their weapons at her all day or if they were actually going to fire them.
Without speaking, the two guards that were focused on her each let out a pair of blasts. All four shots deflected off the Carthagen armor or were absorbed. Just as fast, she reached over her back, ignited both vibro lances, and hurled them across the room so they impaled the soldiers through their stomachs. Both men grunted and fell backward.
Talbot planned on moving to the side to get out of the line of sight of the two remaining soldiers. Before he could, the Carthagen was rushing past him. Both of her Meursaults were out.
“Stop,” Talbot shouted.
The Carthagen turned, her swords ready to strike. One of the soldiers ran for reinforcements and disappeared. The other tripped over the body of one of the dead soldiers and looked up at her with helplessness.
“We need him to help us figure out how the console works.”
The soldier grimaced. “I don’t know how it works either.”
The woman in Carthagen armor reached down, took hold of the soldier by his neck, then picked him up so his feet were unable to touch the ground. “That’s the wrong thing t
o say.”
“But I can call someone who does,” the soldier gasped through labored breaths.
She released her grip and let the soldier fall to the ground. “That’s more like it.”
7
From the window of her home, Margaret watched the battle taking place in the sky. It was occurring too far above Edsall Dark for her to see much until she turned on the device beside her. An image appeared in the air a second later. Instead of seeing faint glimmers of light, she zoomed in so she could see what was happening.
The sight made her heart sink. Never in her life did she imagine she would see Solar Carriers fighting each other.
Her husband was dead, killed by his best friend. Her son was off in the capital somewhere, most likely in danger of his own. And instead of protecting the Round Table against the approaching threat of the Hannibal, six flagships were using their arsenals against each other. It was madness. If her husband were there he would think it signaled the end of the galaxy. She turned to see his reaction before remembering once again that he was no longer alive, which in turn made her cringe.
As much as she had wanted to spend the rest of her life with Julian, she had known the risk she was taking by marrying a career officer. He had always wanted to be out among the stars, accepting the missions no one else wanted, putting his life in jeopardy in order to serve the greater good.
What she hadn’t planned for was that he would be cut down in the streets of his own capital, by his own friend. Julian wouldn’t have wanted to have died that way, but being the honorable man he was, he would have accepted it if it had guaranteed peace.
Instead, the exact opposite was occurring.
There had been a time, many years earlier, when Athens Destroyers had arrived and tried to conquer the CasterLan Kingdom. Solar Carriers had met the threat and the two sides had engaged in bloody war. Now, an Athens Destroyer fought beside either Solar Carrier, as the two sides unleashed their cannons on each other.
As she watched, the HC Ballistic Cruiser and Athens Destroyers ignited their main thrusters in an attempt to outflank the opposing flagships. In response, the opposing Havoc Gunship and Solar Carrier diverted their cannons away from the remaining ship in front of them while the Athens Destroyer fighting alongside them remained entirely engaged with the second Solar Carrier.
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