The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3)

by Chris Dietzel

  To get started, she had her soldiers use some of the supplies they had brought with them to rig a makeshift platform eight feet off the ground. Only then were they elevated high enough to reach the roof of the tunnel that the trench machine had created. There, they dug upwards, scraping away little bits of dirt at a time. There was no pretty or easy way to do it. The two men assigned to the job were soon covered in so much dirt and sweat that they looked more like Truskdurian swamp monsters than CasterLan soldiers. When they finally did compromise the integrity of the tunnel ceiling, the two soldiers gave a soft whistle to everyone else below, then tucked their chins and held their breathing masks tightly to their faces to make sure the eventual avalanche didn’t pull them off.

  The tunnel ceiling sagged, then caved in. Sunlight poured down on the squad. After being in the dark for so long, Morgan had to squint to see anything. Looking up, she expected to see a squad of Vonnegan troopers appear at the rim of the hole, their blasters pointed down. Instead, there was only sunlight.

  As eager and she was to get at Mowbray, she forced herself to remain underground for a few seconds—long enough for her eyes to adjust to the light. There was no use in popping out of the tunnel if they could only see vague gray blurs.

  A moment later, she smiled and said, “Ready?” and all of her soldiers nodded.

  She was the first one out. If Vonnegan troops were waiting for someone to appear, she didn’t want to be sitting down in the tunnel listening to the blaster fire and the screams from above.

  What she saw when she pulled herself up, however, wasn’t an ambush party at all. No one had taken notice of the man-made hole in the ground just behind the Vonnegan firing line. With all of the explosions and blaster fire on the surface and the Thunderbolts and Llyushin fighters roaring through the air, she could talk to her squad and the enemy still might not notice they were there.

  Waiting for all of her soldiers to join her above ground, she scanned the forest for activity. Once her team was assembled, she gave a quick series of hand gestures to let them know they should break into three groups. After another series of gestures, the three teams were off in different directions.

  The first team sneaked up behind a pair of heavy C-class surface-to-air ion cannons. There were crews of Vonnegan troops working to keep the cannons’ energy supplies maxed out and a pair of troopers taking turns between targeting CasterLan Llyushin fighters, the capital wall, and anything else that Vere’s side was sending toward them.

  The second team came up behind a group of three Vonnegan generals who were using the forest to shelter themselves from the main battle. Each was in a purple and gray officer’s version of the traditional Vonnegan battle armor, each with a cluster of medals and campaign badges decorating their chest.

  “Give Mowbray time and he will be victorious in any battle,” one of them said.

  “Hail, Lord Mowbray,” another said with a nod.

  The last general was the one to see the team of CasterLan soldiers, only three yards away, aiming a dozen blasters at them.

  The third team, Morgan’s team, made their way even further into the forest, toward a small clearing the Vonnegan forces had carved out. Mowbray’s command center.

  All three teams struck at once.

  The first team used their blasters to take out the crews who were manning both ion cannons. The second team told the three generals to put their hands in the air. When one began to call for help, he was slashed to the ground with the glowing blade of two CasterLan staff blasters. At the same time, Morgan’s team burst into the command center, where Mowbray and his highest-ranking military leaders would be.

  Nothing played out the way it was supposed to, though.

  The first team easily took out the nearest pair of cannon crews. But as soon as they did, every other nearby Vonnegan trooper took notice of them. A firefight broke out before the team could find cover. Vonnegan troops had the soldiers surrounded on three sides, sending laser fire in every direction. The team began to take heavy casualties.

  The second group, with two of the three Vonnegan generals still available as potential prisoners, suffered a similar fate. Instead of being captured, the two remaining generals pressed a pair of small buttons on their wrists. A brilliant white light engulfed them both. When the light dissipated, each had been vaporized, along with the closest dozen CasterLan soldiers.

  Things didn’t go any better for Morgan’s team. She rushed into the command tent expecting to face Mowbray and his nine Fianna guards—the same soldiers who had stood against she and Traskk two years earlier on the desert moon.

  Rather than find any of them, however, she found no one at all. Mowbray wasn’t there. Neither were his Fianna. Not even any generals. No one was there. The Vonnegan command tent was completely empty.

  Turning to the soldier beside her, she said, “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”

  Before the soldier could say anything, the explosions started and they were all thrown to the ground.

  86

  In a Llyushin fighter hundreds of feet above the fields, Quickly saw what happened before anyone on the ground.

  The already impressive amount of Vonnegan mechs had been joined by over two hundred more units. With an open path to zone one of the CasterLan defenses, Mowbray had decided to flood the battlefield with even more armored transports. Almost all of them were avoiding zone three of the battlefield in favor of the portion without any discernible defenses.

  Already, the first mech was at CamaLon’s perimeter wall. If it weren’t for the Thunderbolts swarming all around him, Quickly would have targeted the mech and blown it up. As it were, all he could do was get glimpses of its progress.

  Although that first mech was soon destroyed by the CasterLan cannons that were mounted atop the capital wall, the next armored mech and the one after that and the one after that would soon also be there. Vere’s defenses wouldn’t be able to stop them all.

  “They wouldn’t be having this problem,” Surrey said so that every CasterLan pilot would also hear, “if they had more Surreys. One to fly this fighter. One to man the cannons. One to fight on the ground.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” another Llyushin pilot said.

  Quickly didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he tried to convince himself that everything would work out if he kept fulfilling his role in all of this. Setting his ship’s sights on another Thunderbolt, he pressed the trigger and sent a pair of laser blasts streaking toward it. The Thunderbolt erupted into flames, then exploded.

  “They could use one of me underground too,” Surrey said.

  “You don’t even know how to fight,” another pilot said. “All you know how to do is fly.”

  Surrey ignored this. “One of me to capture Mowbray. One to command the entire battle!”

  Before Quickly could respond, his ship was hit with so much force it almost broke the Llyushin fighter in half. He strained to keep control of the vessel, which was hurtling through the air as if a giant had picked it up and tossed it across the sky. Inside his cockpit, alarms of every sort were blaring.

  Even as he tried to figure out what happened, he expected Surrey to offer some commentary about why he was a better pilot than everyone else. Surrey didn’t have anything to say, though. Nor did anyone else.

  It only took a moment to scan the controls for Quickly to realize his ship was still flyable. Another second to shut off the alarms that were screaming into his ear.

  “What was that?” he asked, but no one answered.

  He began to look around, surveying the battlefield for some explanation.

  “Oh my...”

  Half of the battlefield was covered in smoke. Plumes of black and gray billowed toward the sky, obstructing much of what Quickly could see. In between the smoke, he saw glimpses of destruction the likes of which he had never seen before. It was almost as if half the battlefield had been turned into the lava fields of Terror-Dhome.

  “Surrey, what happened?”

  Th
ere was no way an explosion from the ground would be powerful enough to rock his ship. The only explanation he could come up with was that some super weapon had been fired from a flagship out in space. None of his sensors indicated that, however.

  “Surrey?”

  Still no response from his friend.

  Looking down at his display, he saw that Surrey’s ship no longer registered on his display of the surrounding area. Down on the ground, there were bits and pieces of machines where no mechs had been, and he realized they were the remains of Thunderbolts and Llyushin fighters. Most likely, Surrey’s ship was one of them. Along with his friend, everything that had been above zone one of the battlefield was turned to ash and rubble. That included everything on the planet surface and everything that had been flying as well. Maybe, also everything that had been underground. The Round Table forces from the middle portion of the wall that had begun to wander toward zone one also suffered the same fate.

  The force of the explosion was so incredible that Quickly didn’t doubt that even people gathered on the Vonnegan side of the field would have been knocked off their feet.

  What had already been the scene of destruction and death was now utter chaos. An inferno of misery.

  87

  Vere watched the battle unfold with a combination of horror and resignation. The death tolls were continuously reported across the comm system from the main command center to her forward bunker. One update said a group of Doom’s soldiers had ignored their orders and tried to charge across the battlefield. The entire group had been wiped out with one blast. Another report said a tunnel had collapsed seventy yards below the surface. All of the CasterLan soldiers down there were suspected to have died. A Thunderbolt, shot out of the sky by one of her Llyushin fighters, had blown up on the other side of the capital wall, crashing into a community shelter and killing innocent families.

  And yet this battle was only occurring because she had made it happen. One conflict would end war for the rest of her lifetime. Maybe forever. At first, the idea had sounded naïve, even ridiculous. But as long as people used the round table to discuss their problems, as long as the galaxy was represented by ordinary people with ordinary aspirations rather than by power hungry tyrants, there could be peace. Mowbray would see he was a dying breed, along with anyone else who would dare bring misery and suffering to people just to satisfy their own cravings. And so this battle had to happen even though it was a terrible thing to witness.

  Each time the scene and the reports became too much, she closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and took comfort in the presence of Mortimous and the countless other vague presences, all of which gave her a reassurance that this was the correct path.

  Opening her eyes again, she watched as a Llyushin fighter lost one of its wings and began spiraling out of control. The ship hurtled toward the Vonnegan side of the field, a trail of flames and smoke behind it. The cockpit latch exploded away and the pilot, still attached to his seat, ejected and was shot up into the sky. The booster on his pilot’s suit slowed his fall so he would survive the landing. But this also made him an easy target. Halfway to the ground, a Vonnegan laser blast decimated the pilot, whose remains wouldn’t be identifiable—if there were any remains to be found. In the distance, the ship the pilot had ejected from exploded as it hit at the forest’s edge.

  Watching this death and so many others like it, Vere wondered if she had actually learned anything over the years. She had gotten into trouble with the Green Knight because she had acted without thinking. Rather than consider any possible repercussions, she had lopped the knight’s head off. Later, she had gotten into trouble with the Excalibur Armada because she had been mesmerized by the possibilities of what the fleet could do for her rather than considering the realities of what she could actually control.

  Those were the obvious times—the forks in the road where she had been given a choice between two paths and had chosen incorrectly. But there were other times as well. There was fleeing to Eastcheap and drinking away her troubles. There was meeting Mowbray on the surface of Dela Turkomann while her fleet and her friends approached an ambush. There were all the times she had let her anger guide her rather than her conscience.

  During many of those occasions, Mortimous had come to her and spoken in riddles about the choices she was making. Looking back at the things he had said, she knew he had been trying to gently guide her along the right path, all the time allowing her to ultimately make her own mistakes or her own victories.

  Now, each time an explosion sounded, each time an armored mech blew up, she calmed her mind and looked for any signs that what she was allowing to happen was the wrong thing.

  According to Mortimous, followers of the Word were guided by beings that thought war and suffering and conquests were unforgiveable blunders and weaknesses brought on by hopeless species. She felt the presence of these beings now. As wise as the old man was, only with their help could an ancient green knight be brought back, helping push Vere toward her destiny. It was her wish that she one day find out what it was about her that had allowed Mortimous to convince the aliens she was worth taking a chance on.

  “Vere, we cannot wait any longer.”

  Blinking, returning to the situation at hand, she looked at Pistol. There were others gathered in the forward command bunker too, but only Pistol had spoken. In the corner, Traskk’s feet were clawing at the floor, his tail slithering back and forth, as he was sure the Gur-Khan had betrayed them.

  Through the comm system, her generals and the generals of various other Round Table armies were shouting that the wall was going to be breached in zone one unless they moved troops from other units.

  “The Gur-Khan abandoned their post!” one shouted.

  “We never should have trusted them,” another said.

  Traskk’s tail slammed against the ground in agreement.

  “I’m ordering my forces to zone one,” a third general said.

  She had no idea which officer had said this or which army he was with. Regardless, she shook her head.

  Before she could call them off, Pistol said, “All simulations show the same two possibilities. Either the Vonnegan troops breach the wall and take the capital, or else they muster at zone one and begin to sweep in toward the middle of our defenses.”

  The android was programmed to take orders, not to give them. Yet even he was telling Vere to take swift and decisive action—as much as his programming would allow.

  She nodded. But before Pistol could relay her approval to take forces away from the other portions of the battlefield and focus on defending the unprotected zone one, she was on the ground, along with everyone else in the bunker. Her ears were ringing. The ground was shaking as if a trench machine were right in front of them. Even inside the reinforced bunker, dust and haze filled the air.

  She pushed herself to her feet and ran outside.

  “What happened?” she asked, but no one else was out of the bunker yet and she was speaking to herself.

  Her eyes widened when she looked out at the fields. An explosion had torn the ground apart, obliterating almost half of the landscape. A pair of Mowbray’s armored mechs had been so close to the epicenter of the blast that she could now only glimpse the tail end of their journey hundreds of yards in the distance. Both hit the ground far away from where they had been, tumbling end over end for another hundred yards as pieces of the machines broke away. Another armored mech had been blown to the side with enough force that it flew past where Vere was standing and skidded on its side, to the middle of the CasterLan defenses. Thunderbolts and Llyushin fighters alike were either broken into pieces that rained down on the battlefield or were flying in random directions, their pilots unable to bring them under control.

  Not much else could be seen because of the incredible amount of dust and smoke in the air. Zone one, where almost all of the Vonnegan forces had been going because there was no organized defense, was smoldering and had been ripped apart. Where there was previously
flat ground, there was now a long-stretching hill, large enough in parts that it almost resembled a small mountain had been teleported to the fields.

  The blast had been so strong that the snipers situated hundreds of yards above the blast, on top of the capital wall, had retreated. Soldiers all around were confused and shouting. None, she noticed, seemed to be injured, however, except for those who had abandoned their post to cover zone one. Any of those soldiers were surely gone.

  “What happened?” someone asked.

  Rather than turn and answer, she continued to stare at the area where all of Mowbray’s armored mechs had been going. And she knew the answer.

  Traskk came up beside her.

  With a huge smile stretching from one corner of her mouth to the other, she patted the reptile on the back and said, “See? You just need to have a little faith in people.”

  The Gur-Khan hadn’t abandoned them at all. They had only just started fighting.

  88

  It was true that the Gur-Khan had technology no one else in the galaxy possessed. It was also true they didn’t use the same tactics as other armies. The ten soldiers worked better by themselves than they ever would have functioned if they had CasterLan soldiers or any other Round Table forces near them. It was also a fact that when they said they would defend zone one, they meant it.

  Having disappeared after speaking with Vere the night before the battle, no one was quite sure what the Gur-Khan had done. It seemed obvious now, after the explosion, that the soldiers had set about arranging a vast array of countermeasures that would only detonate once Mowbray had committed the majority of his forces to that side of the field. The resulting blast had not only destroyed every armored mech for hundreds of yards, it had also created a pair of perfectly formed elongated hills that got narrower as they approached the capital wall.

  Mowbray’s forces would have the choice of either entering the newly created isolated path toward the wall or face the open fields and the combined forces Vere had assembled. In the fog of war, with the vast destruction and changed landscape, the Vonnegans didn’t realize that the narrows acted as a funnel. The closer any Vonnegan forces got to the wall, the less room they had to maneuver. Halfway to the wall, a row of nine mechs would have to break into three rows of three mechs. Even closer to the wall, those same mechs would have to form a single file line.