Avalon

by Chris Dietzel

59

  Through one of the slits of her bunker’s protective cover, Dindraine watched as the rust-colored mech appeared from a portal two blocks down the street, brought its giant glowing sword down like a stake, and impaled two soldiers hiding under the street level. A moment later, the mech moved ten feet down the street and vanished into another portal.

  The white mech appeared from a circle of energy positioned almost directly above her, where it hovered twenty feet off the ground and shot one ion arrow after another. She heard a Vonnegan man grunt and fall, and even without seeing him, she knew he was dead. She heard a woman yell in anger while firing her blaster at the mech. She too was hit with the energy of the mech’s bow.

  Dindraine thought about pushing the false panel aside. She would have an easy shot at the underside of the mech’s transport. The transport was directly overhead, and the heat from it made her hidden bunker thirty degrees warmer. Sweat ran down her face. However, she had just seen what the other woman’s blaster did to the mech. Nothing. The mech hadn’t been slowed the least bit before returning fire and killing the soldier. Even if Dindraine got four or five shots off, it was likely none of them would do a thing.

  Her head swirled with a thousand doubts and unanswered questions. Why had she remained in Greater Mazuma? Why was she in the bunker? Why was the dead Fianna still inches away from her? And why was she holding a blaster when such small arms had no impact on these monsters? Why had she thought her limited training would prepare her for this madness? As much as she hated to admit it, she was even beginning to second-guess having killed the Fianna. If there was anyone on the ground who had a chance of killing these things, it was Philo.

  She cursed herself and her situation. Because the white mech’s hover transport was still humming overhead, she chastised herself quietly and hoped it didn’t detect her presence.

  An explosion rocked the ground ten feet away, spraying the false covering of her bunker with bits of stone. She didn’t see where it had come from but she guessed another resistance fighter had tossed a grenade at the white mech. If it had landed on top of her hiding spot, she would be dead. The insanity of nearly dying at the hands of a fellow Vonnegan made her close her eyes and clench her jaw until veins popped out of her temples. Of course, Philo had died by her own hand, but in that moment the irony escaped her.

  With her eyes closed, she noticed the city street had become quiet. At first, she thought it was because the noise of the grenade had damaged her ears. But then, opening her eyes and peeking out of the bunker, she realized it was because the white mech had vanished into a portal and was gone.

  Scanning the street, she saw no signs of mechs in any direction. Without another thought, she pushed the bunker’s cover to the side, jumped out of the trench, and ran as fast as she could.

  60

  Teams of technicians worked without break. Their goal was to convert the control systems that Arc-Mi-Die had attached to each Excalibur vessel so the Round Table could control the legendary ships instead. At the same time, other engineers worked to figure out the cloaking system created by the scientists Arc-Mi-Die had kidnapped. Their goal was to replicate the technology the same way they had with the containment field surrounding Lancelot’s ship.

  “Necessity really is the monster of all invention,” one of the scientists said to Talbot as they watched crews go about the delicate work.

  “The mother of invention,” Talbot said, not taking his eyes away from the work.

  The man, in his sixties, a beard and head full of gray hair, went by the name Angro. He had been the first person in Edsall Dark’s scientific community to volunteer for Talbot’s mission.

  Angro frowned. “Isn’t that what I said?”

  “You said ‘monster.’”

  “Huh, guess I did. Maybe it’s both.”

  Talbot said goodbye and boarded a shuttle on its way to Arc-Mi-Die’s main base, located in the middle of the collection of ships the warlord had assembled.

  The hangar there looked to have been the scene of a massacre, and he knew it must have been the place Lancelot had landed her own ship in her quest for vengeance. Scorch marks dotted every wall, the result of hundreds of laser blasts being fired in every direction. Bits and pieces of combat bots lay scattered across the hangar floor. The remnants of what appeared to be of a heavy blaster were burned to a crisp. A mechanized unit lay in the middle of the hangar, face down on the ground, its torso shredded by explosives, its appendages cut off and scattered around it. So many explosions and laser blasts of all sizes had gone off inside the landing platform that almost every other craft in the hangar was completely destroyed.

  The scene brought one image to Talbot’s mind: the warrior who had arrived to Edsall Dark with the infamous warlord’s head in a satchel, the women who had taken off her helmet to reveal beauty the likes of which he had never seen before. Without a single ally, without anyone else who cared about her, she had arrived here and decimated the forces belonging to the galaxy’s most feared criminal.

  The epic array of destruction all around the transport as he landed made him wish he had known Lancelot sooner. He would have come here and fought alongside her. Anything he could do to help, he would have. Not that she had needed his help, at least not here. The remains of dead aliens three times Talbot’s size lay strewn across the metal floor. They were beasts that would have torn him in half, and yet they lay defeated, scores of them, brought down by a lone warrior. Once again, the mere thought of her made him shake his head in awe.

  Just to be sure that everyone was dead and that no other traps were nearby, he disembarked from the transport in a suit of space armor. It wasn’t the heavy version he had worn into the Carthagen tunnels. The CAB suits would have taken too much time to prepare.

  “Hello?” he said as he got to the bottom of the transport’s ramp, a heavy blaster in one metal glove of his armor and his Meursault, the famous Sword in the Stone, at his hip, ready to draw with the other hand.

  Across the hangar, a single bot appeared. It was an outdated IV-range model, twice the size of his head and hovering two feet off the ground. The dirty gray bot beeped twice, scanned the rest of the hangar, then disappeared again. Talbot made his way across the platform, his metal boots clanging against the floor.

  That one bot wound up being the only sign of activity he saw the entire time he was there. He moved slowly to ensure he didn’t trigger any booby traps, but it was obvious with each turn of the walkway that Lancelot had already followed the same path and had already activated and borne the brunt of the traps. One wall was covered with burnt metal that flaked to the touch. Another had a collection of combat bots lying on the ground in a pile. He followed the corridor until he got to its end, an open room with two enormous guards lying dead on the ground. Like the rest of the base, every tinder wall had been lowered to protect the inhabitants from the intense rays of the sun outside.

  He walked across the room to where Arc-Mi-Die’s headless body lie. Like Lancelot, the warlord had four arms and four legs. Amazing that two beings could be so alike and yet so different. Without anything else to do there, he turned and made his way back to his transport, thoughts of Lancelot filling his head with every step.

  61

  Pompey watched as his forces on the ground did their best to wage a counterattack against the mechs. A team of resistance fighters, located in the southwest quadrant, waited for a mech to appear through the nearest portal, then triggered another set of explosions that toppled the high-rise across the street. It only took seven seconds for the array of controlled explosives to vaporize the foundation and for the skyscraper to come crashing down toward the mech. By the time it did, however, the mech was easily able to move backward, into the portal and to safety.

  In the northeast quadrant, a pair of resistance fighters tried to lure one of the mechs into the oversized entryway of a building. Pompey looked at his charts to verify the building had been set as a trap. It was, but not in the normal fashion. This one ha
d a series of sub-zero mines that would hit any nearby targets with bursts of cold capable of making solid metal brittle as plaster. The soldiers trying to entice the mech into the building were going to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

  The only problem was that the mech didn’t rush into the high-rise. Instead, it waited while a collection of the Hannibal portals collapsed back into projectiles and moved into the building’s interior. There, the capsules exploded back into portals that instantly transported anything that was within their radius. An atomized steel wall was teleported to a city street three blocks away. Part of the ceiling was transported to the northwest quadrant. Dozens of capsules traveled into the building and exploded into circles of energy while three portals remained outside the structure, giving the mech possible escape routes. The mech never did enter the building. Instead, the network of portals continued to ignite, vanish, move to another spot of the building, and over again.

  “Get out of there,” Pompey said into the comms device, willing the resistance fighters to understand what was going on.

  Being inside the confines of the building, the pair of soldiers likely thought the mech was searching for them rather than having the portals do its dirty work. It only took three instances of the portals exploding into circles of energy and transporting away the material that had been there before the Hannibal’s goal was accomplished. Too much of the base of the high-rise had disappeared. The building started to whine, then fell in on itself.

  The mech watched the scene from across the street. Great puffs of dust covered it but it remained there until its scanners verified there were no survivors. Once it was sure that part of Greater Mazuma was clear, the mech moved through a portal to search for more Vonnegans in a different part of the city.

  Another mech hovered in place in a part of the city that had no visible signs of resistance. It faced one way for a couple seconds, then slowly rotated atop its hover platform until it had scanned the entire surrounding area. While it did, not a single Vonnegan soldier jumped out and fired at it, no combat bots targeted it, no Thunderbolts went screaming by. And yet the mech remained in place, looking all around, until its attention settled beneath where it was hovering.

  Pompey knew exactly what it was doing. It had detected a life form but had trouble pinpointing where it was. Pompey knew. It was underneath the street, where millions of Vonnegans were hiding. He was helpless to anything but watch as the mech took its time in assessing the situation.

  A series of capsules arrived at the street beside it. One exploded into a portal of energy that was parallel with the ground and touching street level. A second later it vanished into capsule form again and the area of street where the energy had been was gone, revealing a circular hole leading into the underground.

  Pompey looked at a different holographic feed to see what was happening in the tunnel system below the surface. A series of projectiles entered the hole and traveled down the underground corridor where they formed into portals that surrounded the mech. Only after they were in place did the mech’s hover transport lower its rider down below the streets and into the dank and dark underground. It was surrounded on all sides by energy that would shield it from any threats and that would allow it to teleport back out of the tunnel system if danger was detected.

  Pompey closed his eyes and groaned. None of the traps they had set were going to work, not if the portals could move through the underground system. That meant the millions of people under Greater Mazuma’s surface weren’t hiding in safety. They were huddled together in one easy mass-casualty target for a giant metal predator.

  62

  In the middle of Greater Mazuma, near the spot where the four quadrants met, the historic Mustcrim skyscraper toppled and crashed to the ground. Mustcrim was one of the only high-rises that was still standing from the atom age of the Vonnegan Empire. If Pompey and Thidian could have been picky about how to repel the Hannibal mechs, they would have preserved the classic structure. Knowing they were in a fight for the very existence of Greater Mazuma, they had no choice but to rig the building with explosives.

  Mustcrim was made of an outdated metal that was twice as heavy as the newer skyscrapers. It was also built according to old standards, which meant its core was without the crisscrossing atomized steel that reinforced newer buildings. A series of six carefully placed charges managed to bring the skyscraper down at freefall speeds.

  The nearby mech was able to move to the side and avoid being crushed. It did not calculate, however, the increased force that Mustcrim would have compared to other nearby high-rises. The street collapsed underneath its weight. Everything nearby was thrown hundreds of yards away. The force was enough to push the rust-colored mech backward, into the next closest building.

  Four pairs of Vonnegan resistance fighters were located nearby. Of these, one was buried under debris from the destroyed Mustcrim, preventing either soldier from jumping out and firing. Another pair of soldiers was in a bunker directly next to the rubble. They weren’t buried but the reverberations of hundreds of thousands of tons of metal hitting the ground next to them had caused such massive tremors that every bone in both of their bodies was pulverized.

  One pair did jump out but their heads were ringing, their equilibrium impaired by the shockwaves. One stumbled forward, launching ion grenades in quick succession. But even though the reddish-brown mech was only thirty feet away and larger than a Thunderbolt or Llyushin fighter, only two of the fighter’s four grenades struck the mech. One sent blue waves of energy rippling through the mech’s left arm, which went limp and stopped functioning. The other hit the mech’s right knee, buckling it and sending it into a desperate attempt to regain its balance.

  At the same time, the soldier next to the one with the ion grenade launcher began firing at close range with his heavy blaster. It was twice the size of a regular assault blaster and unleashed laser streaks at a much faster rate. In ten seconds, the soldier fired sixty shots, each of which hit the mech squarely in its chest.

  Across the street, the other pair of resistance fighters used a lever to raise a cannon out of their trench, the barrel of which was almost as large as an ion tank’s turret. Before it could get into position, the matte gray mech appeared from a portal half a block away.

  It swiped its scythe through the air, sending a wave of energy toward the cannon. A three-story tall explosion burst out of the bunker where it had been hidden. A second wave of energy tore through the air and decimated the pair of soldiers that had managed to impair the rust-colored mech.

  Without waiting to see if any other threats were in the area, the gray mech hovered across the street and stabilized the other mech until its systems recalibrated and it could vanish into a portal, most likely to return to the Juggernaut for repairs.

  After the rust-colored mech was gone, the gray mech sent four waves of energy streaking from its scythe, one down each direction of the street. Then, it too vanished into the nearest portal.

  The destruction of the old Mustcrim high-rise wasn’t a complete failure. Four blocks down the street, a resistance fighter that had missed almost all of the combat opened his eyes for the first time in a couple hours.

  Philo groaned and rolled over on his side. He tried to ask what was going on but the only sounds coming out of his mouth were unintelligible grunts of gibberish. Nothing made sense. For the first few seconds, he didn’t remember why he was in a dark, confined space. Minute by minute the pieces came back. He remembered that an enemy called the Hannibal were preparing to invade the planet and that he was part of the forces designated to push them back. He remembered having a woman assigned to the same bunker. What was her name?

  Unable to see anything and with most noises not processing in his brain, he tried to ask if she were there. Only after muttering another string of nonsensical grunts did he remember her name. That triggered his final memory: the sound of a blaster’s safety unclicking, the feel of the barrel pressed against the back of his helmet.
/>   “Dindraine,” he mumbled, “you made a terrible mistake.”

  At least that was what he tried to say. The noises that actually came out of his mouth were more like, “Inraine, ewe ay erble isay.”

  No response was forthcoming. If his senses were about him, he would have realized that feigning death would have been a much better tactic than talking to someone who had tried to kill him. In his delirium, though, he was unable to think logically.

  It sounded fairly calm outside. He had no way of realizing that the Mustcrim skyscraper had just been taken down and that the jolt had not only awoken him from his unconsciousness, it had also left an eerie calm in the streets. All he knew was that Dindraine was gone and there was no audible fighting outside the bunker. His hope was that the battle was over, that the resistance forces had been successful in repelling the mechs. From what he knew of the Hannibal, however, he doubted this was true, and so the fact that he was alone, only brought about confusion.

  The thought entered his mind that maybe he had killed Dindraine without remembering it. He was a lethal killer; it was possible his instincts had taken over. But when he tried to roll onto his side, pain racked the inside of his skull, sending bright flashes of light behind his eyes. A wave of nausea forced him to keep perfectly still.

  It would help him breathe if his helmet were off. Lying face down on the ground, both hands fumbled about until they found the sides of his helmet. However, trying to pull the demon armor off his head caused excruciating pain and his hands froze in place so the agony would stop.

  After lying flat on his stomach for a moment, he realized what must have happened. The laser blast that had been fired at point blank range into the back of his helmet hadn’t killed him, although it had come close. Instead, it had melted all the skin off the back of his head. It had eventually solidified again, but with the helmet on, his skin had effectively glued his helmet to his head.