“We’ve got company,” he said into the ship’s communication system, just in case Cade hadn’t also noticed them.
Coming by for another pass, he saw the Pendragon’s blaster turrets begin to swivel and he knew Cade had also seen the threat. There was only one group of soldiers as a result of the initial alarms. Only ten men. Easily dispatched by one or both of their ships.
As he watched, Cade prepared to fire. But instead of using the Pendragon’s blaster turrets, mounted underneath the ship’s hull, Cade released a proton torpedo.
Quickly gasped. “No proton torpedoes when you’re on the ground!” he shouted into the comm system. It was too late, though.
Proton torpedoes were designed to detach from a ship in a zero gravity environment. Any pilot would know that. Cade, unfortunately, wasn’t trained as a pilot.
Instead of shooting across the spaceport, the proton torpedo dropped ten feet and clanked against the ground, directly under the Pendragon.
A wave of nausea came over Quickly. He was going to watch not only Cade explode, but also the ship that Vere, Morgan, and the others were supposed to escape in. The entire rescue would be over before they ever got out of the Cauldrons. Not only would the prison’s impeccable record remain intact, with Vere dying there like every other inmate, all of her friends would die there as well.
He brought the Griffin Fire into a tight turn, punched the controls to speed up, and began racing right at the Pendragon. If their plan was ruined, he could at least try something crazy like shooting the proton torpedo off the platform so it dropped into the lava sea before it exploded.
Before he could, though, the proton torpedo’s engine began to glow. The torpedo’s metal casing scraped against the platform as it dragged itself toward its target, kicking up sparks on the ground behind it as it moved. Finally, after it was already half the distance between the Pendragon and the security forces who were running toward the ship, the proton torpedo was moving fast enough to get off the ground, correct its approach angle, and went crashing into the group of troopers in purple and black armor. A brilliant explosion erupted. When the smoke cleared, nothing remained except charred rubble.
“Cade?” Quickly said.
“Yes.”
“Don’t ever do that again. Blaster turrets only.”
“Roger that. I won’t do that again.”
12
From the windows high above the prison yard, Le Savage watched the scene as it unfolded. His arms remained crossed. His eyes did not blink.
“Colonel Krat?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Why is the group of raiders still alive?”
If his colonel’s response was that the guards on the grounds didn’t carry blasters, only vibro whips, Le Savage swore he would run across the command room and tear the officer’s head right off his shoulders.
But instead, the colonel said, “The shooters on the wall have regular blaster rifles, sir.”
“They don’t have sniper blasters?”
“No, sir. The ones they have are meant for general inmate control, not longer range precision.”
Le Savage watched the blaster fire scatter around the yard, hitting random prisoners, the ground, even the occasional shot at Balor. Every once in a while, a shot came within a foot of one of the intruders, but none of them was struck.
“Send a message to all of the shooters,” Le Savage said. “I want them to change their focus of fire from zones seven, eight, and nine, to zone four.”
“Yes, sir.”
The colonel turned and began relaying the order to the guards high above the prison yard.
The coordinated blaster fire, even if his troops were incompetent, would concentrate so many laser blasts in one direction that the four raiders would have no choice but to fall back. Eventually, they would run out of room and be pinned down.
“Also, Colonel.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Order another squad of troopers through the prison yard entrance.”
“They are already on their way, sir.”
“And the two ships they arrived in?”
“They destroyed the first group of security forces I dispatched, sir.”
Le Savage turned from the fighting down below, amidst the bubbling lava and the raging beast, and looked at his colonel.
“And?”
The colonel winced slightly, then recovered.
“And the nearest Athens Destroyer will be here in approximately”—he looked at the display screen for a moment, then back at Le Savage—“in three minutes, sir. They have a full complement of Thunderbolts. It is a matter of time until the four intruders down below and the two ships they came here in are destroyed.”
“Very good, Colonel. One other thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Find out who gave the order to hand out blaster rifles to the guards on top of the wall rather than sniper blasters. Then bring him here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Le Savage turned his attention back to the fighting down below. Something he saw made him not only smile, but made him burst with laughter. In the middle of all the fighting, his most prized prisoner, the former leader of the CasterLan Kingdom, was still pushing the Circle of Sorrow. When he told Mowbray this hilarious bit of information, he was sure he would be promoted.
13
Baldwin had to shout over the noise. “Vere, we have to go.”
He had taken cover near the base of the Circle of Sorrow and the little bit of protection it provided, but blaster fire continued to pepper the ground by his feet.
Vere was oblivious to him, though, and to the rapidly escalating chaos around her. She didn’t run for safety or join them in attempting to escape. She didn’t even turn to glimpse in his direction. Baldwin looked into her eyes and saw they were dead to the world. It was as if she were in a chronic state of shock and exhaustion and simply didn’t realize what was going on around her.
The laser blasts near Baldwin slowed down, then stopped. When he peered out from behind the metal base that the thick wooden beam passed through, he saw that the guards had begun shooting toward the entrance where he and the others had arrived. Knowing he would never have a better chance, Baldwin darted out from his hiding spot and ran to Vere’s side.
With a hand on her arm, he yelled, “Vere, it’s me, Baldwin. Come on, we need to get out of here. Now.”
Her bicep was as hard as the lava rock underneath them. When he reached out and wrapped both hands around her forearm to pull her away, she didn’t budge.
“Vere, we’re here to save you,” he said. This didn’t register with her either. She was so strong he couldn’t make her move if she didn’t want to. Defeated, he looked for Morgan. She would have a better idea of what to do. Through the smoky turmoil, he was able to spot her only by the trail of colored vapor that her Meursault blade left in the air each time she swung it. Swirls of red and orange and black lingered in the air wherever she had struck down a Vonnegan guard.
After making sure the guards atop the wall were no longer paying attention to him, he ran toward her. She was closer to the entrance than he was, though, and the blaster fire from the guards on top of the prison wall created a barrier of deadly lasers. He spotted the closest place where he could find cover, the remains of a rock wall that one of the prisoners had been building, and ducked behind it. Swarmed with blaster fire, Morgan hid behind a far section of the same crumbling wall. They were less than thirty feet from each other, but the laser blasts were slowly making their way closer to her, pushing Morgan back out into the open and toward the same door she had entered the prison yard through.
When he called her name, she didn’t seem relieved that he was safe. In fact, she frowned at the sight of him.
“What are you doing?” she yelled as blaster fire sprayed her face and hair with rock dust. “Why don’t you have Vere?”
A prisoner jumped over the rock wall next to Morgan. The cream-colored alien, with a patterned shell that cov
ered his chest and back, laughed and yelled maniacally and then lunged at her. Morgan dodged to the side and punched the alien in the face as he slid past her, knocking him out with one blow.
Seeing Baldwin still down the wall from her, she yelled, “Don’t just stand there, get her!”
Baldwin held his palms in the air. “I tried. She won’t move from the wheel she’s turning.”
“Make her move,” Morgan growled, as if it were that simple.
“I tried!”
Rolling her eyes, Morgan turned to see where Vere was.
“Why do I have to do everything myself?” she mumbled.
But instead of finding her friend, she spotted Balor. The one-eyed giant was shambling across the yard toward Baldwin. At five or six times the height of an adult human, Balor’s shadow cast a long dark shroud across the prison yard. She had been so focused on the barrage of blaster fire and guards with vibro whips that she had lost track of the colossal monster. She gritted her teeth, seeing it lumber toward her friend.
“Morgan, I need help over here,” Baldwin said.
The monster roared as it continued to approach, its head eclipsing the sun far off on the horizon. A quarter of the work grounds became cloaked in the veil of the monster’s shadow.
“Morgan, what should I do?”
She thought about trying to create a diversion. Maybe she could catch the monster’s attention with the light of her sword. The only problem was that by making it turn its attention toward her, she was also focusing its poisonous eye in her direction. One look from it and she would shrivel up and die.
“Baldwin?”
He continued to huddle behind the rock wall without answering. Either he didn’t realize the giant was right behind him or he thought that huddling for safety might make him a less attractive target than the running and screaming inmates.
“Baldwin, run!”
Peering out from her hiding spot, she saw that he was still crouched against the wall, still motionless. Balor was only a few feet away now. The one-eyed giant was directly above Baldwin, looking right at him. Balor hunched forward and dragged his massive hands along the ground.
“Damn it, Baldwin, get out of there!”
Baldwin finally moved, but instead of running for safety, he swayed to the side, then fell backwards, crashing to the ground like a toppled statue. When he smacked the rock surface, Morgan saw that Baldwin’s skin looked more like marble or granite than it did human skin. Gray and textured, the driest places cracked and crumbled away.
Balor reached down with one of his gigantic hands and picked Baldwin up in the air. In his scaly and dusty face, Morgan saw that her friend was already dead. The monster roared, then clenched the fist that held Baldwin’s corpse. As Morgan watched, Baldwin’s body broke into dusty chunks that scattered on the ground.
Knowing she was next, Morgan looked all around for something to protect her from the one-eyed horror that would be coming her way. Seeing the unconscious alien inmate by her feet, she yanked him up by the edge of his shell and held him in front of her just as Balor took two giant steps forward.
The alien she was holding as a protective shield went from having soft, fleshy skin where his shell didn’t cover him, to the stone skin of a Gthothch. As she held it, the alien in her arms was completely dehydrating, withering into a dried out husk. And after it was dead, Balor would swat it aside and do the same to Morgan.
14
Vere dug her foot into the ground, got her shoulders squared, then heaved forward as hard as she could. The Circle of Sorrow turned another few inches.
A tiny part of her was cognizant of the fighting and yelling all around her. However, it didn’t register as anything out of the ordinary. The same part of her was aware that she was on Terror-Dhome performing grueling labor at the Cauldrons. While she understood her circumstances, they were not a burden, a thing to dread.
The truth was she wouldn’t have survived one week at the Cauldrons if she hadn’t learned to block out everything going on around her, especially while she was pushing the Circle of Sorrow. And in fact, it hadn’t been her own doing. The entire journey aboard Mowbray’s shuttle on her way to being processed at the Cauldrons of Dagda, she had been filled with anger and regret.
“This one won’t make it a week,” the android in charge of registering new inmates at the prison had said upon seeing her.
She wouldn’t have either, unless Mortimous had come to her rescue.
“You’re here to get me out of this cesspit?” she had asked, seeing him that first hopeless night.
When he replied, she heard in his voice the same amused smile that she had grown to detest. “In a manner of speaking.”
It wasn’t her body that escaped the Cauldrons, but her mind. Mortimous set about teaching her how to calm her thoughts so he could appear to her more often. After receiving a lashing from a vibro whip for talking while she worked, Mortimous taught her how to communicate with him using her mind rather than her mouth. Eventually, he was able to teach her how to see far-off places she had never been to before. All those years earlier in the caves, Galen had been right when he had said there really was so much more to the galaxy than what people saw in everyday life.
All of this she did while her physical body continued to push the Circle of Sorrow each day. Eventually, she began to get fleeting impressions that the beings which Mortimous had made contact with years earlier were nearby. The aliens weren’t bound by time or space and because of that were unknown by almost everyone in the galaxy.
“What do you call them?” Vere asked.
“I don’t call them anything,” Mortimous replied. “Various people have given them different names, but no single word can be used to identify them. They are known by every word, and by no words at all.”
The more she listened to Mortimous, the more she understood that he wasn’t trying to talk in riddles or confuse her; it was simply that certain aspects of the galaxy weren’t as straightforward as yes or no and black or white.
“Sounds like the exact opposite of an old friend of mine,” she said. “He used to be fond of asking which one word could describe someone’s legacy.”
Mortimous laughed. “Everyone has their own insights on the nature of life. Even Occulus.”
Her eyes widened. “You knew him?”
“I know a great many people, Vere. I was just speaking to Occulus the other day and he asked me the same question.” Then shaking his head in amusement, “I think it was the millionth time he has asked me that.”
Years earlier, she would have thought Mortimous was lying, that there was no way he could be in contact with a man who had died in the Forest of Tears years ago. Now, though, she accepted the statement as being his truth. Everything she had seen in the last few years had taught her she didn’t know much about the way the galaxy actually worked. She had accused Galen of being misled, but everything she had once thought to be preposterous didn’t seem so foolish at all anymore.
She asked Mortimous for explanations. Some times he offered them. Other times he didn’t. Often, he provided an answer and she wasn’t sure which question, if any, he was explaining, and so she could only listen to try to make sense of what he said.
From the time she stepped out into the bubbling prison yard each morning to the time she was allowed to stop for her meals, she let her mind drift away while her body pushed the wheel in its endless revolutions.
That was why she had survived while so many others had perished. Not because she was stronger or because her drive for revenge was greater, but because the other inmates around her dwelled on their circumstances while Vere allowed her mind to forget about not only the past and the future, but also the present.
All of the other prisoners had been preoccupied with what was going to happen to them, about the pain they would endure that day, about never seeing their friends or family again. That had broken each of them as much as the heat, the excruciating work, and the vibro whips. Vere never even noticed h
ow dry her throat was or how many blisters covered her hands until it was time to stop for a meal. That was when she returned to her body.
She never allowed the wounds on her back, left by the vibro whips, to make her feel sorry for herself. She didn’t even think about Edsall Dark or all the people she knew who were now living under Vonnegan rule. All around her, prisoners were begging to be allowed to die while Vere didn’t utter a word or a complaint. All because of the things Mortimous had taught her—the same things that she had once scolded Galen for wasting his time with. Because of this, she was able to continue moving a heavy wooden beam that brought aliens twice her size to their knees. Days passed. Weeks. Months. Maybe even years. It didn’t matter as long as she could go to the places Galen and her mother had talked about.
There were still moments when the same thoughts and fears that burdened every other prisoner also came to her. These instances were rare, though, occurring only in the morning before work or at night when, exhausted, she crumpled on a cot to sleep. But as soon as she was asleep, Mortimous returned and the two of them talked about the beings that were not bound by time or space, about the first time he had seen them, about all of the other people he had helped as part of the Word.
It was during one such talk that Mortimous mentioned the round table for the first time. Vere didn’t know it then, but the discussions about the round table would one day change the entire galaxy.
15
“This is actually much easier than I thought it was going to be,” Cade said.
The man had almost blown himself up, along with the ship everyone was supposed to get away on, and now he was saying how easy the jailbreak seemed.
Quickly shook his head and sighed. “Don’t jinx us.”
The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3) Page 5
