While the rest of the Vonnegan fleet watched, Mowbray’s Supreme Athens Destroyer vanished from one sector and then appeared above the desert moon he had visited two years before.
No explosions were triggered. No alarms sounded. There was no trap.
“Send a message back through the portal,” he told his comm officer. “Tell them we’re fine.”
“Yes, my lord,” the officer said.
Almost immediately, another Athens Destroyer passed through. It was untouched as well.
“Get me to Edsall Dark,” he said. “Immediately.”
“Yes, my lord.”
All around him, he could feel the ship’s pressure rise slightly as it began to hurtle through space as fast as its engines would take it. They would arrive at Edsall Dark in a matter of hours.
67
Vere and Hector stood over a map of the surrounding land, which noted the Forest of Tears, the fields of Aromath the Solemn, and the giant wall bordering the capital. On either side of them stood a general. One was from Kaiser Doom’s army. The other was from Baron Von Wrth’s. On the far side of the command center, Quickly spoke to Surrey in whispers so as to not distract anyone. Traskk stood in a corner by himself, his nostrils flaring as he breathed in the scents around him—an attempt to detect who might be a traitor.
When the tent flap opened and the first of the Gur-Khan appeared, Vere and the others stopped talking and stared at them as all the soldiers in the field had. One of the new arrivals surveyed the room, scanning from left to right. After he finished, the entire group moved forward in unison, none leading and none following.
The Gur-Khan were not the least bit apprehensive about being in an enclosed tent with so many different types of armed military leaders. Vere had the impression that the one soldier had scanned the room for the entire group, and that in that single moment, each of the Gur-Khan had fully assessed every possible threat in the tent as well as precisely how to deal with it. As a result, they moved with a rare confidence.
A small part of her was curious to see how the Gur-Khan would have reacted if Quickly or Traskk or one of the generals had pulled out a blaster and aimed it at them. She had heard all the same stories everyone else had heard about the undefeated Gur-Khan, who never left survivors. If someone had made a wrong move at that moment, she didn’t expect she would ever have had the opportunity to tell anyone else what she had witnessed.
“Greetings,” Vere said. “Thank you for coming.”
None of the ten Gur-Khan moved or made a sound.
Morgan entered the tent and took a position beside the main battlefield map, next to Hector.
Vere motioned for the Gur-Khan to come closer. “We were going over a battle plan. Please, join us.”
All ten Gur-Khan took two steps forward. At the same time, all of their visors turned to look at the map. For a few seconds, there was perfect silence in the tent. From their silence, Morgan was beginning to believe the rumor that the Gur-Khan were able to communicate telepathically with one another.
The battlefield map they were looking at was divided into three zones. With their backs to CamaLons’s main perimeter wall, looking out across the field at where the enemy would be approaching, zone one was the right region of the battlefield. Zone two comprised the middle of the fighting. Zone three was the left side of the round table’s forces.
When one finally spoke, Vere had no idea which of them it was because the voice came from the helmet speakers of all ten. “We take zone one,” they said.
Vere had already committed her army to being in the middle zone, along with Kaiser Doom’s forces. Three other armies were positioned at either side. Some groupings had hundreds of soldiers. Some had thousands. The ten Gur-Khan were suggesting that they perform the same task as thousands of soldiers from other kingdoms.
“That’s insane,” Baron Von Wrth’s general said. The battle was still hours away but both he and Kaiser Doom’s general were already wearing their officer’s armor and helmets. “I’ve heard all the same stories about the Gur-Khan as everyone else, but we’ll need at least a full battalion of soldiers in zone one.”
“We work alone. None else nearby,” all ten Gur-Khan said. “Not safe for them.”
Kaiser Doom’s general laughed. “I appreciate your bravery, but your strategy leaves much to be desired. You’ll be eaten alive by Mowbray’s forces. There won’t just be hundreds of his troops coming in your direction. There will be thousands. Probably with limited air support on our side and a lot of heavy armor land support on their side.”
“We take zone one,” a Gur-Khan voice said from all ten helmets.
Quickly and Surrey had stopped their discussion to watch what would happen. Traskk, sure that this could be the perfect opportunity for someone to betray Vere, took a step forward.
“We take zone one,” the Gur-Khan said again. “Not safe for others to be near.”
“Yeah, yeah, we heard you,” Baron Von Wrth’s general said.
Vere looked back at the map. As they spoke, thousands of soldiers were setting up emplacements on the region of the battlefield that made up zone one.
The Gur-Khan said, “Make sure all things and equipment gone from there. Not safe. Be destroyed.”
The way the Gur-Khan spoke, with almost no breaks in between words, gave Vere the impression a computer was translating their true native language into Basic on their behalf.
Vere looked at the map again, then at Hector and Morgan. Both of them shrugged.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll send out the order now.”
Without saying anything else, all ten armored soldiers turned and filed out of the tent.
“Thank you,” Vere called after them, but they were already gone.
“Those guys aren’t messing around,” Morgan said.
Even Hector was impressed by how resolute and dispassionate they had been: “They didn’t waste a single word. Just in and out.”
Baron Von Wrth’s general said, “You aren’t really going to leave an entire third of the battlefield to ten soldiers, are you?”
Just as Morgan and Hector had done, Vere shrugged. “They’re the Gur-Khan,” she said. “They work alone. And they never lose.”
Kaiser Doom’s general laughed, but there was a tinge of violence in the sound. Both he and Von Wrth’s general excused themselves so they could report this development back to their respective rulers.
“You did the right thing,” Hector assured her.
Vere turned to make sure the only people remaining in the tent were those she trusted. “Quite frankly,” she said, “I’d have considered giving them the entire battlefield if they had asked for it. They’re the Gur-Khan.”
The others couldn’t help but nod.
68
The next four hours were hectic. The other two sections of the battlefield saw soldiers from every military filling sandbags, building defensive walls, and moving equipment. The trench machines, which normally dug paths through the dirt at ground level or just below the planet’s surface, acted more like tunnel makers. Each unit ran without stopping, digging tunnels underground in various directions and depths.
These underground paths would house the majority of the Round Table soldiers, keeping them safe from Mowbray’s ships. It also gave Vere’s forces a chance to work their way across the battlefield, toward Mowbray, without being out in the open. Thousands of soldiers coordinated with the generals of each army to build tunnels at various depths. None could be too close to the next or it might weaken the ground and cause both to collapse. The pace was feverish and frenzied.
The exception was in zone one, where there was no discernable activity at all. Vere had offered the Gur-Khan the use of her trench diggers but they had declined. She offered them additional ion cannons, gravity mines, anything they wanted. These too, they declined. As far as she could tell, the Gur-Khan weren’t digging tunnels or fortifying defenses for their portion of the field. Various rumors had spread along the front that th
e Gur-Khan had deserted.
Traskk, sure they would betray Vere, told her she needed other soldiers there instead.
“All I can do is trust them,” she told him. After his snarling response, she added, “I know, it didn’t work out two years ago, but I have to learn from my mistakes. Trusting other armies wasn’t what got me in trouble.”
To this, Traskk gave another growl.
She did have to admit that the morale of the other soldiers seemed to rise and fall depending on the news about the Gur-Khan. When the ten soldiers had first arrived, everyone else on the battlefield had been sure it was a good day to be a part of the Round Table army. Minutes after having left the command center tent, word spread that anyone who got too close to zone one during the impending battle would be killed. Half of the soldiers in the middle section began to look at holograms of their loved ones. Some requested permission to transfer as far away as possible, to zone three. Then the Gur-Khan disappeared and the spirit of almost everyone across the front was visibly deflated. Soldiers from various armies, all of whom had been working in cooperation with one another, began to quarrel. One of Kaiser Doom’s soldiers shot one of Gerchin the Suspicious’s soldiers in the face with a heavy blaster from a yard away, killing him instantly. A pair of Baron Von Wrth’s soldiers got into a brawl with two CasterLan fighters.
Each time a fight broke out or was about to, senior officers from both sides rushed to quell the violence and to remind everyone they were fighting for a common cause. Nothing could lower the tensions, though, and as soon as one quarrel was broken up, another started.
Vere closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. The noise and chaos around her subsided and was replaced by the hazy image of Mortimous in his robes.
Am I doing the right thing?
Mortimous nodded.
I’m not making a mistake like I did with the Excalibur Armada?
Mortimous shook his head.
Do you still think the round table will be the answer?
His reply, although impossible for anyone else to hear, resounded inside Vere’s thoughts. “Of course. You are on the right path, Vere. Do not stop now.”
Another fight was getting ready to start, this one between one of Gerchin the Suspicious’s soldiers and a thick, brown alien wearing the rust-colored uniform of one of the smaller kingdoms that had joined the round table’s cause. Before the violence could escalate, a rumble began to shake the ground under everyone’s feet. At first, everyone looked to zone one to see what the Gur-Khan were up to. That portion of the field was still empty, however. The rumbling persisted. Every part of the ground felt as if the trench diggers were directly underneath. And yet the earth-moving machines were more than a mile away, underground somewhere, working toward the center of the field.
A humming could be heard, unrelated to anything the collective forces were doing. Far away, barely perceptible, the trees on the outer edge of the Forest of Tears began to sway.
“They’re here,” a soldier said.
A horn sounded.
“They’re here!”
“Positions, everyone.”
Hector had been right. Mowbray’s forces didn’t want to go any place where they were susceptible to the Crown. Knowing they would be easy targets of the Round Table’s flagships if they centered their attention on destroying the Crown, they avoided a low approach as well. They also didn’t want to enter into a battle with the combined navies of every military that had answered Vere’s request. Instead, Mowbray’s fleet was forced to enter the planet’s atmosphere from the far side of Edsall Dark, coming in low but stopping well away from where the battle would take place. As a result, they were now between the mountains and the forest, unloading ground forces in preparation for the war. The rumble everyone felt and heard was the pounding of dozens and dozens of Athens Destroyers landing in the distance.
Mowbray’s army was here, and they were going to be coming out of the woods at any moment.
69
“Watch yourselves,” Morgan said as she walked along the outside of the capital wall.
Most of the soldiers, regardless of what armor they wore or what insignia it had on the chest plate or shoulder, were either eating or resting before the battle.
Morgan continued, “All of you have trained for this. You’ve prepared for this. Do what you know how to do and you’ll get through it.”
Hidden in the bushes beside her and crouched on an elevated platform, a sniping duo, a man and a woman in camouflage armor, worked to get a long sniper blaster mounted atop a tripod concealed in the heavy vegetation. The two specialists leaned over the sniper’s computer, adjusting the scopes.
“Over one degree,” said the sniping male, a huge pair of binoculars up to his eyes. “Down one click.” After a moment’s silence: “See him?”
“I see him,” the sniper woman said, entering a command into the long-range blaster’s computer.
Other sniper teams were set up atop the wall behind man-made barriers. Some were so well hidden Morgan couldn’t even spot where they were.
As she watched, the closest sniper team finished setting up the shot. The soft tick of the sniping blaster’s trigger sounded. A burst of laser went streaming out across the field in a straight line. Miles and miles it went, all the way across the fields of Aromath the Solemn, into the line of trees beyond.
The sniper pulled her head away from the scope of the long blaster and looked at her partner.
“Got him straight through the chest,” the other soldier said, the binoculars still up to his eyes.
The pair began targeting for another shot, slightly to the right of the previous one.
Morgan scanned the area beneath the team, near a group of soldiers who were lying on the ground, just inside the mouth of one of the newly created tunnels. She had thought to remind them why they were there. The truth was, though, that she didn’t really know herself.
All her life, she had been fighting for the CasterLan Kingdom. For its banner. Its people. Now, she was fighting for other kingdoms to sit at a table together and tell her how to live. Rather than say anything else, she nodded to the soldiers and walked further along the wall.
After a few more steps, a bright light passed across the field and went past her. She turned just in time to see a laser hit the sniping specialist in the bushes who had been holding the binoculars.
“Everyone down,” Morgan said, but they already were.
She knew what would happen next. One of the other sniper teams behind her would work on finding Mowbray’s sniper and would eliminate him. In turn, a different Vonnegan sniper, hidden somewhere at the edge of the Forest of Tears, would begin targeting them. And on and on. Teams of snipers would continue killing anyone they saw moving on the other side of the field.
The battle had begun, not with two fleets unloading their cannons against one another, not even with two armies racing across the field, but with a single laser blast. Then another. Then another.
70
Hector was the only one in the command tent when the first laser blast sailed miles across the field and into the forest. If everything unfolded according to his predictions, Mowbray would begin sending trench machines under the planet’s surface, toward the capital wall where the Round Table forces were assembled. Not wanting to confront a superior force in space and knowing the troops he sent across Edsall Dark’s surface were easy targets, it was his only option. Both sides would send squads of fighters through vast lengths of underground tunnels, not only to defeat the other side but to try and destroy each other’s trench machines. This effort would ensure both sides kept their fleets intact and allowed a relatively small number of soldiers to determine the momentum of the battle.
Meanwhile, Mowbray’s Athens Destroyers and the largest ships belonging to the Round Table forces would maintain their positions because they would only wipe each other out if they did anything else. It was in Mowbray’s best interest to conduct the battle at or below the planet’s surface, whe
re a Vonnegan strategy could lead to overtaking CamaLon and controlling the Crown. And it was in the Round Table force’s best interest to limit the battle to one area if possible. Rather than have hundreds of thousands of people die in space, they would cut off Mowbray’s forces at the neck.
Each side would keep the other occupied by sending multiple armored hover mechs across the surface of the fields. These would be destroyed by the opposite side’s heavy blasters but their true purpose would be in the distraction they provided. Each time a mech was being targeted, it meant the forces working their way to the other side, via the underground tunnels, were not.
Hector shook his head in disgust. The greatest civilizations that the galaxy currently possessed had all gathered in one spot. And the reason was the oldest one the universe knew. War.
His chin sank to his chest. He rubbed at his temple, trying unsuccessfully to make the throbbing behind his eyes go away. Other than the ghost pains he still suffered from legs he didn’t even have any more, the pain behind his eyes was the most frequent symptom he still carried with him from his old injuries.
There was no telling how many people would lose their lives today, tomorrow, and the next day—however long the battle raged. While he had sworn never to take up a blaster again, he knew he could help bring about an end to all of this madness. What better cause was there, even if he died in those tunnels, than to never have to see this insanity again?
His stomach muscles tensed slightly, enough to move his energy platform forward. With only the hum of his hover disc making any noise, Hector traveled across the command tent, passing through the opening and then over to where a group of CasterLan soldiers were gathered.
All of them, even the ones who were exhausted and wanted nothing more than to sleep, stared at him as if he were a god. He leaned to the side, picked up a spare blaster, checked its charge, then continued into the darkness of a tunnel that one of the trench machines had already dug.
The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3) Page 21
