It seemed to take forever, but he eventually walked an entire city block. What would normally have taken him ten seconds to sprint had taken him almost six minutes of stumbling around.
A small blur of movement caught the corner of his eye. Instead of turning his neck, which would have brought about another round of blinding pain, he turned his entire body. If it was a mech, he would be dead by the time he finally managed to shuffle his feet in the right direction.
It wasn’t a mech, though. It was a Vonnegan women, her head sticking out of the remains of a destroyed bunker.
It was Dindraine, peering at him from across the street, a blaster pointed at his chest.
73
Dindraine saw Philo stumbling through the streets well before he noticed her. For a moment, she thought someone else must have found the dead Fianna and dressed in his armor for the added protection it offered. That was the only explanation for seeing someone walking through the street after being shot at point blank range in the back of the helmet. But from his condition, the way he could barely stand upright, she knew it really was him.
Hesitation held her in place—should she lower her head and go back to hiding in the bunker or shoot the Fianna a second time? She was past the point of needing revenge. After dashing away from her original bunker, she had run right into a firefight between two pairs of Vonnegan fighters and the gray mech. It hadn’t lasted long. The soldiers’ remains littered the ground. If the mech hadn’t had its back to her she would probably be dead too. After that, she didn’t have the nerve to get back out and run any further.
It wasn’t the need for revenge at all that drove her to consider shooting Philo a second time, it was seeing him walk through the middle of the street, his raspy breathing loud enough for anyone to hear. He was announcing his presence to the mechs, wherever they were, and she didn’t want anyone giving them a reason to come back. That was why she brought the blaster back up and aimed it at his heart.
Right as her index finger moved to the trigger, he turned and faced her. She thought she heard him whisper her name but she couldn’t be sure. Then, even though he couldn’t use his weapon, he began to hobble toward her.
Before she could fire her blaster, a loud rumble came through the air. Thinking it was one of the mechs, she dived for cover. The noise was different, though. It belonged to a ship rather than a hover transport. After analyzing the noise, she also realized the engine didn’t belong to one of the few Thunderbolts still patrolling the area. The Vonnegan fighters emitted a screech. This ship sounded like more like a low growl.
Looking up, she saw a vessel that would have been unthinkable on Greater Mazuma years earlier because it had belonged to Mowbray’s sworn enemy. A Llyushin transport. It wasn’t alone. Some kind of shuttle was beside it.
The two ships flew in a circle over the middle of Greater Mazuma. After one pass, they split up and she lost track of the transport. The shuttle also disappeared, but only momentarily. The next time she saw it, it was coming in low, one street away.
Her eyes darted to the Fianna. She could still shoot him if she wanted. Self-preservation took hold, however. The arrival of more ships was basically screaming at the mechs to come find them. Dindraine wanted no part of it and lowered herself as far down in the bunker as possible.
A minute later, the ship faded into the distance. When Dindraine lifted her head up again, not only was it gone, but Philo was as well.
74
“Don’t land,” Lancelot told Swordnew as he piloted the Carthagen shuttle above the torn landscape of Greater Mazuma. “Keep it just off the ground in case the Hannibal appear.”
The Carthagen warrior nodded and angled the ship between two rows of destroyed skyscrapers so it was ten feet above the street.
Lancelot’s original plan had been for them to arrive at Greater Mazuma after the Hannibal had departed so she could see if they could learn anything. That plan changed when they saw the Juggernaut during their approach. The behemoth vessel was impossible to miss. Instead of searching through the ruins of the former Vonnegan financial capital, she would have her pilots, Swordnew in his shuttle and Quickly in his Llyushin transport, navigate the battle and see how the enemy was choosing to face the resistance on the ground. Any information she could gather would help.
The last thing she expected was to not find any of the mechs. The Juggernaut was still in orbit above the planet but there was no sign of the four armored units. Wanting to get in and out as fast as possible, she had Quickly and Swordnew split up and see what they could find.
With nothing in the streets except rubble, fires, and charred wreckage, the soldier she saw walking in purple armor was easy to spot. Both Lancelot and Swordnew recognized the armor as not just any Vonnegan fighter but as the Fianna. Both of them had been educated on the Vonnegan elite guard by the Dauphin, who thought Mowbray capable of invading the Cartha sector. He very well might have done so if his forces hadn’t been defeated by Vere and her allies.
Although it looked like the Fianna had come out on the losing end of the fight, spotting one of the infamous Vonnegan fighters was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. That was when she had told Swordnew to take the ship down toward the street without actually landing it.
The ramp at the rear of the shuttle lowered. Before jumping down to the ground, Lancelot braced all four legs to stabilize herself. Fifteen feet away, the Fianna was still stumbling down the street, not giving any indication that he cared about the ship overhead. The shock absorbers in Lancelot’s armor took the brunt of the impact when she hit the pavement.
“Where are you going?” She asked the Fianna, no weapons out, no concern that he might try to take a swing at her.
The Fianna stopped, looked as though he was going to turn his head but instead turned his entire body.
“Dindraine,” he mumbled, then shuffled back in the original direction he had been walking. “Must save Dindraine.”
Lancelot had no idea who or what a Dindraine was, and quite frankly it didn’t matter to her. She leaned forward, scooped her two lower arms behind the Fianna’s legs, then caught his weight as it fell backward into her upper arms. The supposed elite warrior groaned in agony as she picked him up.
“Dindraine,” he mumbled again, swiping a hand at her as if offering some type of pitiful resistance.
“The battle here is lost,” she told him as she walked back under the shuttle’s waiting ramp. “We can still beat the Hannibal, though.” She leapt back into the vessel, then added, “But to do it, we’re going to need to get you fixed up.”
His response was the same. “Dindraine.”
75
Swordnew leaned to his side so he could look down the corridor that led out of the shuttle’s cockpit and into the main cargo hold and passenger area. What he saw wasn’t encouraging. Although he hadn’t been asked for his opinion, he agreed with Lancelot that a member of the Vonnegan elite guard should be helpful in confronting the Hannibal. But the figure Lancelot placed onto the passenger bench appeared to be more of a liability than an asset. Instead of a trained and lethal killer, Swordnew glimpsed a tattered and beaten sack of armor covering a nearly lifeless body. The Fianna not only didn’t look capable of helping them in a battle, he looked to be in need of prolonged medical attention to survive.
Lancelot saw him glancing at their new guest and said, “He’ll be fine after we get him into the medical scanner.”
Swordnew turned away without answering.
As he brought the shuttle up toward space and to their next stop, he tried but failed to ignore the destruction underneath him. Half of the planet, which looked to be one giant city, was on fire or buried under rubble. It was astounding to realize the destruction was caused not by millions of soldiers but only four mechs. Surely there was no way only four mechs could cause so much death and carnage.
A feeling crept into the pit of Swordnew’s stomach. It made him anxious and tense. It wasn’t fatigue or anger, it was something else. It w
as an emotion the elders had taught each Carthagen warrior to ignore. It was fear.
Even when he had faced Lancelot in one-on-one combat and had known he was going to lose, he hadn’t feared for his life or for the temporary pain brought on by Lancelot’s vibro lances. After all, the medical bots would easily fix those injuries within minutes. This, however, was not something that could be repaired. This was extinction.
When the Round Table forces had arrived in the Cartha sector with their giant flagships of war, Swordnew hadn’t been concerned. He knew the technology the Dauphin possessed would destroy the invading ships while the warriors killed the soldiers in the asteroid tunnels.
Now, it was only he and Lancelot, a severely injured Fianna, and the human pilot of a Llyushin transport. And instead of facing a known enemy that they knew they could defeat, they were facing an enemy that even the Dauphin had limited information about and who had defeated three times as many Round Table ships than the elders had repelled. Instead of fighting for the safety of their fellow Carthagens, they were fighting to help the very forces that had invaded the Cartha sector. It was lunacy.
Guiding the shuttle away from the massive shadow caused by the Juggernaut, he aimed the craft toward the nearest portal. Beside him, the Llyushin transport set itself on the same trajectory.
Once they were away from Greater Mazuma and the threat located there, he set the controls to auto-pilot so he could get a better look at their new arrival. He found the Fianna on the bench with Lancelot standing over him, trying to take his helmet off. It seemed to be stuck, however, and any attempt to remove it made the newest member of their team scream and flail his arms. Two of Lancelot’s hands were holding the Fianna’s arms in place so he would stop resisting. The other two hands were gently tugging at the helmet.
“I’m sorry,” Lancelot said to the Fianna, “I’m not trying to hurt you.”
The Fianna continued to resist, although the amount of effort he was able to offer was pitiful.
“Help me,” Lancelot said upon noticing Swordnew. “Knock him out with something.”
Swordnew shrugged, then hauled back with his upper right arm and punched the Fianna squarely in the middle of his helmet. There was a loud clunk. The elite guard went limp.
“I meant something to sedate him,” Lancelot said with a sigh.
“Then that’s what you should have said,” he answered, a reply he never would have given back in the Cartha sector where Lancelot had been the leader of the Carthagen warriors and he was expected to remain silent.
He thought Lancelot might turn and confront him for the slight but instead she ignored him. Even though the Fianna was already unconscious, Lancelot apologized again for what was going to happen next, an act of mercy that was completely outside Carthagen standards. He had never once seen Lancelot acknowledge a fallen ally during the Carthagen duels, let alone speak to one who was clearly beneath her skill level.
Pondering this, he turned and walked back to the cockpit as Lancelot ripped the helmet off the fallen Fianna. It wasn’t a pleasant sound to hear.
76
It wasn’t until Quickly had left Greater Mazuma’s atmosphere and entered the portal above the planet that he was finally able to accept that the destruction he had just seen was real. In some ways, it was like the carnage he had witnessed in the fields outside CamaLon during the battle against the Vonnegan Empire. Every acre of land had been ripped apart, charred, or dotted with the debris of ion tanks and mechanized transports. Hundreds of Vonnegan war machines had lain smoking and twisted. The entire field had been a smoke-filled haze of dust and flames. The trauma of seeing it had been bad enough that he had given up flying and gone far away from Edsall Dark.
That battle had taken place on his home world. Many of the pilots and soldiers who died had been his friends. And yet, incomprehensibly, the scene he had just witnessed on Greater Mazuma was somehow more devastating than what he had seen years earlier on Edsall Dark. For one thing, the landscape wasn’t barren fields but highly populated areas. Every part of life would have to be reconstructed. It would take years just to clear the many millions of tons of steel, concrete, and glass wreckage. It would take generations to return it to anything like what it had been prior to the mechs’ arrival.
How can we ever hope to beat an enemy that can do that? he thought to himself.
He didn’t even factor in the Juggernaut—a vessel that had somehow been capable of destroying dozens of Round Table flagships by itself—because it hadn’t caused any of the destruction he had just witnessed.
No matter how ferocious a fighter Lancelot is, no matter how good a pilot I am, we can’t beat them.
And yet, upon seeing the destruction the mechs had caused, his instinct wasn’t to return to Enid so he could live the rest of his life in quiet. Instead, he knew he would face the enemy simply because no one else could defeat them and he would never be able to live with himself if he did nothing.
His hope was that Enid could one day understand that about him.
“Where to?” he said into the ship’s comms device.
It took a while for a response to come from the Carthagen shuttle beside him. When Lancelot’s voice came across the speaker, it was still the deep monotone she had when her helmet was on.
“To see an old friend of yours.”
No one came to Quickly’s mind and he had no idea who she could be referring to.
“Ever been to Eastcheap?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“There’s a ten-foot tall Basilisk there who I’m sure will be happy to see you.”
77
It was slow work, testing the Excalibur ships. Arc-Mi-Die, along with the unwilling accomplices he betrayed and killed, had already outfitted each vessel with external drive systems. The problem was that no one knew where the dead criminal had hidden his guidance system. So Talbot watched as teams of engineers and mechanics worked inside the containment fields surrounding each ship. Nothing was fast about the process. They had to take apart the existing external drive, install new equipment without triggering each Excalibur’s self-destruct mechanism, and they had to do all of this while wearing cumbersome suits of space armor.
The time afforded Talbot a chance to think about everything that had happened and all that was going to happen next. His father’s assassination. His mother’s departure from Edsall Dark. A woman showing up in Carthagen armor. Seeing Lancelot again. Facing the Hannibal.
A sense of wonderment came over him. Only days earlier he had been on Edsall Dark. Now, he was standing inside a sun in order to reclaim legendary ships so he could face an unbeatable enemy. Unlike the sense of gloom and aimlessness that had allowed him to be coaxed by his father to join the Cartha campaign, Talbot knew this was where he was supposed to be. Although he still had no idea what the galaxy had in store for him or why he was here instead of someone else, he knew he was doing something worthwhile and that all of his life had been leading to this moment.
Not that he enjoyed what he was doing. It was nerve-racking work and he was constantly on edge that one of the Excalibur ships might accidently blow up. The blast radius would be great enough to destroy everything nearby. It was necessary, though, so he could help the woman he loved, to help save a planet he called home.
This was where he was supposed to be. This was what he was supposed to be doing. He still didn’t know what was going to happen, but the fact that he was finally on the right path made him gaze contentedly at the teams of workers floating in space.
He did not return to Arc-Mi-Die’s main base. Once had been enough. While he was in awe of Lancelot’s ability to wield a sword, there was also something incredibly sad about seeing the path of destruction she had left in her wake. At first, he couldn’t pinpoint what it was about the remnants of her quest for revenge that made him melancholy. The more he thought about her, though, and the more he looked forward to seeing her again, he began to understand what it was.
It was the fact that she h
ad gone at it alone. It was the fact that no one else had even known of her quest. No one would have cared if she had died along the way. She could have disappeared without the galaxy ever taking note of her. It hadn’t happened, but it could have. Everyone, Talbot included, would have gone on living the rest of their lives without knowing that a young woman had crossed the galaxy to bring justice to a warlord who had terrorized them.
As if to reaffirm the notion that Lancelot was no longer alone, a woman’s voice came over the speaker in the command deck of the cruiser Talbot was aboard. The officer was in charge of the teams floating within the various containment fields, and she told him the first pair of Excalibur vessels were done being outfitted and were ready to depart.
“Good job, Lieutenant Hexley,” he said.
He told her to proceed, then watched as the thrusters fired up on the engines attached to the rear of the closest Excalibur ship. Inside the sun, where they were surrounded by the hottest temperatures found in the galaxy, the cockpit glass was set to drastically reduce the luminosity. As such, everything appeared as various shades of gray. But Talbot was still able to recognize the change in the Excalibur’s external engine when it fired up.
A moment later, the giant vessel, thousands of years old, impervious to lasers and traditional weapons, began to make its way out of the sun from which it had been hidden. It was joined a moment later by a second Excalibur vessel.
“The next pair will be ready shortly,” Lieutenant Hexley said over the comms speaker.
“Very good,” he replied, already thinking about how much longer it might be until he saw Lancelot again.
78
Everything Margaret wanted to take with her was loaded on a cargo ferry and ready to leave Edsall Dark. With three hours remaining until the ship departed, she walked back through the spaceport and the streets of CamaLon one last time. One of the auxiliary military academies was located at the opposite side of CamaLon. She took a transport there and walked the area, allowing the sights and sounds of training cadets to bring back memories of the man Julian had been when she first met him.
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