The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3)

by Chris Dietzel

  Within five minutes, they came upon another group of purple and gray armored Vonnegans marching in the darkness toward CamaLon. This group was four times the size of the previous batch. Without saying anything, Morgan broke into a sprint, leaving her soldiers to catch up. The faster she ran, the more steady the trail of dark mist that followed as her Meursault blade passed through the air.

  In one running stroke of her sword, a quarter of the soldiers were sliced apart and on the ground, felled by a weapon they had never even seen. By the time the Vonnegans realized the enemy was behind them, Morgan was already in the middle of their formation, cutting down more troopers with each motion of her invisible blade. In the darkness, her position could only be guessed at by following the sound of clanking armor and the trail of mist behind her weapon.

  Rather than fire and kill each other, the Vonnegan troops each swung the blade end of their weapons. Each time they did this, though, Morgan brought her sword up, slicing off the energized halberd blades from their poles.

  A moment later, her soldiers caught up to her and began engaging the few Vonnegan troopers that still remained. She had already killed nearly one hundred of them by herself. Yet it was the soldiers in her group who were hunched over, exhausted and thirsty, while she was ready to begin hunting Mowbray again.

  In each of her soldiers’ eyes she saw that they wanted something very different than she did. They gasped for air, their hands on their knees. Every part of their body language said they wanted to stop and get some water. Their legs were tired. Their throats were dry. They had been down in the tunnels for hours. There was no telling how many miles they had run. Each of them wanted nothing more than to sit down on the ground, rest for a few minutes, and feel cold water moisten their cracked lips.

  And yet none of them wanted to let her down. Not one of them was willing to speak up and say, “General Le Fay, we’ve been running all day below the planet surface with these insufferable breathing masks on; please just let us rest and recover for a moment.” They had trained for this. Many of them had dreamed since childhood of serving in the CasterLan Corps. Here they were now, elite soldiers, fighting on their own planet, defending their own families, their own homes. There was no chance any of them would ask for a moment of rest even though they lagged further behind her with each length of tunnel.

  They raced through more underground paths. At the next intersection, she looked at the display on her wrist. Showing various colored dots everywhere—the display’s version of the chaos of war—it told her nothing useful, nothing to indicate where Mowbray might be. She listened for the sounds of troop movements far ahead of her, using that to gauge which fork in the path was the best choice. However, with the clamor of war above her and with the trench machines still burrowing holes in various places under the fields, she couldn’t be sure if there were noises down each path or not. By the time her soldiers caught up to her, their breathing was so loud she would never know for sure.

  More sprinting. Through another tunnel. Another enemy in her sights. Once again, by the time her squad caught up to her, the small group of Vonnegan troopers who had gotten separated from the rest of their party were already laying motionless on the ground and the last remnants of her Meursault blade’s vapor was dissolving into the air.

  She was running again. At a place in the tunnel where the dirt had caved in, she saw a dirt-covered hand sticking out of the debris. Without the time needed to find out which army the struggling life belonged to, she allowed her soldiers, gasping for air, to catch up to her.

  “It’s okay,” she said, looking at each of them. “Stay here and help this solider out. If he’s one of ours, get him medical help. If he’s a Vonnegan, take him prisoner.”

  Not a single one of them could speak until they had gulped air and lowered their heart rate. Each of them knew what she was saying. Without specifically stating as much, she was telling them that she was going to continue on her own and that they were free to take a break.

  “Morgan, we—”

  But she held up a hand to silence the soldier who had tried to speak for the rest of the group.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “You’ve all done your job. Rest here as long as you need. Watch your backs for Vonnegan troops arriving late to the party.” She smiled, trying to make them feel like they weren’t letting her down, but they were all too tired to return the well-wishes. She added, “After you get some water and regroup, make your way back to the wall.”

  Without waiting for a response, she began running alone, back down the same tunnel to the previous intersection.

  It did no good to listen for any indication of where Mowbray might be. The collective noises and rumbles and echoes were too great to make any sense of.

  Frustrated, she growled and shouted, “Mowbray!”

  After her voice finished echoing in the empty tunnels, there was still no answer.

  All she could do was run down the other branch of the forked path. She passed the remains of a trench machine that had been so thoroughly destroyed she couldn’t tell which way its drills had been facing. She couldn’t even decide if it had been Vonnegan or CasterLan. She passed the remains of a group of Vonnegan troops intermingled with CasterLan soldiers. All were lying in unnatural positions on the ground. None of them were breathing.

  “Mowbray,” she screamed again.

  All of this was because of him. Going all the way back to the unnecessary war that had caused her to pick between Hotspur, her mentor, and Vere, an undeserving drunken thief who just happened to be the king’s daughter. It was because of Mowbray that her life had changed forever. Many of the people she had been cadets with were dead. And now, because of the round table, the CasterLan Kingdom, the very thing she had gone to the academy to fight for, would also fade away.

  She raced down another tunnel, always getting closer to Vere and her friends and the place she had started, but never finding Mowbray.

  Down another section, she found the remains of a group of Kaiser Doom’s soldiers. Through another, she found more CasterLan and Vonnegan troops, all dead on the ground.

  At another fork in a tunnel, she yelled the Vonnegan ruler’s name again. Once more, she heard nothing. After another minute of running, she came across not a dozen or two dozen dead CasterLan soldiers as she had in other places, but easily a hundred. They were littered across the ground as if a tornado had picked them up and thrown them into every wall. Something about the scene made her pace slow to a walk. The carnage was unreal. Even in the midst of war, with battles going on in every direction around her, the soldiers in front of her had been torn apart with inconceivable savagery.

  Then her eye caught something in the middle of the piles of bodies. Purple armor. Purple cloth. One of Mowbray’s Fianna.

  Over one hundred CasterLan soldiers had come across Mowbray and his nine Fianna. In the end, all one hundred of those men and women had died while only one Fianna had been brought down.

  “Mowbray!” she yelled again.

  Finally, she knew she was on the right track, and not only that, she suspected he was close enough to be able to hear her calling his name.

  Even though it had taken a hundred soldiers to bring down one of Mowbray’s Fianna, one of them had indeed died. They weren’t invincible. No one was. It was proof that she could do the same thing. Not only to one of them but to each of the remaining eight. And then to Mowbray himself.

  Just like that, she was running down the tunnel again, into the darkness.

  94

  There was chaos everywhere on Edsall Dark, including over it and beneath it. But nowhere was there as much pandemonium as in the narrows, where so many laser blasts were being fired that it burned the retinas of anyone who looked directly at it for too long.

  And yet no one could be certain where the Gur-Khan were firing from. They seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Laser blasts erupted from cannons that no one could see, obliterating everything in front of them, but when the Vo
nnegan forces targeted one area, a thousand other cannons seemed to fire at them from elsewhere. Moments later, the places that the Vonnegan forces had targeted flashed into a frenzy of laser blasts once again as the Gur-Khan’s advanced weaponry began sending bursts with such frequency that it was almost a continuous laser aimed at everything that approached.

  One of the Vonnegan generals watching the scene from an Athens Destroyer must have called in every available Thunderbolt to clear the area of the Gur-Khan because they no longer made any effort to engage the Llyushin fighters. Instead, they dropped all of their gravity bombs and fired all of their proton torpedoes into the funnel. Of course, this made it easier for the Llyushin fighters to destroy their Vonnegan counterparts, but the Vonnegan general must have thought that was a sacrifice worth making if it meant opening the narrows. Groups of two or three Thunderbolts dived at the pass, unloading their entire ordinance, then unwittingly becoming missiles themselves after being shot out of the sky by Quickly or one of the other CasterLan pilots.

  One after another, Thunderbolts exploded into the hidden gap between the two ridges that the Gur-Khan had created. There, they joined the wreckage of dozens of armored transports, two hundred armored mechs, and many more Vonnegan troopers.

  Seeing that his fighters had become easy targets, the Vonnegan general who had ordered the Thunderbolts to change tactics now called in a group of Athens Destroyers to provide support. Six of the giant ships made their way across the far side of the planet’s surface until they appeared at the forest’s edge. There, they proceeded across the field—a trip that took the better part of a day to walk but that took the flagships only a few seconds. Each Athens Destroyer began unloading its cannons on two targets. The first was the pesky squadron of Llyushin fighters. The second was the narrows with the Gur-Khan fighters who were destroying half of Mowbray’s ground forces all by themselves. Too low for the Crown to be able to target them, they could at least ignore the famous CasterLan defense system.

  As soon as the Athens Destroyers broke ranks and entered the fray, ten Solar Carriers did the same thing, forcing the Athens Destroyers to engage them rather than the ground forces. It was a matter of moments before Mowbray’s entire fleet of Athens Destroyers and Vere’s entire fleet of Solar Carriers, along with Kaiser Doom’s HC Ballistic Cruisers and Baron Von Wrth’s Mach-Z Cruisers and every other Round Table ship were all battling one another, only a short distance above the planet’s surface.

  The sun was blotted out behind the enormous ships. The battlefield, previously filled with daylight and free of wind, became dark and stormy under the force of the giant ships’ powerful engines. Instead of a momentary eclipse, the darkness would continue as long as the two sides sought to destroy the other.

  Dramatically larger than the armored mechs, Llyushin fighters, and everything else battling near the surface, the enormous starships crashed to the ground each time one of them took too much damage and its systems gave out.

  During one such crash, a legion of one thousand Vonnegan troopers was crushed under an Athens Destroyer that fell on top of them. During another, a Solar Carrier crashed at the base of the capital wall. A section of it, two hundred yards long and hundreds of stories tall, came crashing to the ground.

  And still the battle raged.

  95

  Further into the tunnel from which the Vonnegan troops had launched their assault on Vere’s bunker, Traskk was still advancing, tearing armor and limbs from anyone in his path. Pistol had taken up a stationary heavy blaster and was firing shots just over Traskk’s head, aiming at the tunnel’s ceiling a few yards further back in an attempt to cause a collapse. The majority of Vere’s forces were mustered in designated areas at the edge of the bunker, while others sent laser blasts and ion grenades out of the bunker’s opening to keep Vonnegan troopers from getting at them from the surface. Even after suffering Traskk’s full ferocity, Vonnegan troopers continued to stream forward from the darkness in overwhelming numbers.

  Vere ducked under the vibro blade of an oncoming trooper’s staff blaster, kneed him in the sternum, disarmed him, and fired a shot from the blaster portion of the trooper’s own weapon into his chest plate at point blank range.

  With the staff blaster in one hand and a traditional blaster in the other, she ran through groups of battling forces. She shot a Vonnegan trooper in the stomach with her blaster, then swung the glowing blade and cut down another. She blocked a blow from a Vonnegan trooper, their staffs clanging like a thunderclap, then shot him with the weapon in her other hand.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Traskk throw a trooper back down into the darkness of the tunnel. A group of five more Vonnegans circled him. Baring his fangs, he wound up with his tail, spun as fast as he could, and knocked all five of them into the walls or into other troopers.

  Her attention came back to her own area of the bunker when a laser blast singed the tip of her hair. She scanned for the shooter and found the Vonnegan trooper coming at her from the side. She leveled her own blaster and hit him directly between the tinted lenses of his helmet.

  Yelling—a familiar voice. Looking around, she realized it was Morgan’s voice. The only faces Vere recognized, however, were Pistol’s and Traskk’s.

  “Hello?” Morgan said. “Is anyone there?”

  Only then did Vere realize the voice was coming from the comm device on her wrist.

  “Morgan?” Vere asked. “Where are you?”

  True to form, Morgan didn’t waste time asking how the battle was going above ground. Instead, she got right down to business: “I’m at 23, 37, point 6731, approximately one hundred yards below ground. I need a bunker buster at 23, 38, point 6300.”

  Vere looked up just in time to see the glowing blade of a Vonnegan staff blaster coming down at her, missing the front of her face by inches. She slammed the end of her own staff blaster on the trooper’s foot, then kicked him in the stomach. As he hunched over, the wind knocked out of him, she brought an elbow down on the back of his neck.

  “Hello?” Morgan said.

  Vere brought the comm device back up to her mouth. “There’s a war going on up here, Morgan. We’re kind of busy.”

  A display screen showed an Athens Destroyer that must have lost control of its navigation system because it was drifting off toward the mountains on the far side of the forest. As it did, a trail of thick black smoke trailed behind it.

  “Just relay my message to the Solar Carriers. I need that bomb right now.”

  “Morgan—”

  On one of the other bunker displays, Vere saw a Solar Carrier overhead breaking in half after being hit by a series of proton torpedoes across the main part of its frame. Half of the ship drifted off behind her and would soon crash into some part of the capital. Hopefully everyone there was already in a safe place. The other half of the giant vessel was falling right toward where they were all fighting in the bunker.

  “Move!” Vere screamed to everyone around her.

  No one, neither CasterLan nor Vonnegan, knew what she was talking about but they all understood the urgency in her voice and began to run, friend and enemy following her out of the bunker.

  “Vere?” Morgan said. “I need—”

  “I know,” Vere snapped. “Damn it, I know.”

  “Vere—”

  “It’s coming,” she called behind her as she got out of the bunker and was out in the open, still running.

  Some of the Vonnegan troopers stopped as soon as they were back out in the open fields. Either they didn’t want to risk another Vonnegan seeing them run alongside CasterLan soldiers or they knew they were outside the area where the front half of the Solar Carrier was going to crash.

  Vere kept running, though, and prayed that the CasterLan soldiers behind her did as well. The Vonnegan troops didn’t realize it yet, but avoiding the impact zone was the easy part. It was the residual force of the impact that would kill anyone close to it. And surely enough, further away than anyone else, she turned in tim
e to see Vonnegan troopers who thought they were safe, getting flung a hundred yards by a tidal wave of rock and dirt as thousands of tons of Solar Carrier crashed into the planet.

  Before the ship had impacted, she would have been worried that the bomb Morgan was requesting was going to hit too close to her own forces. Now that the Solar Carrier had wiped out the forward bunker and any organized resistance near it, she went ahead and relayed Morgan’s request to the command center.

  Although she didn’t hear the relayed signal, her request would be forwarded to the nearest Solar Carrier within seconds. Which meant in a matter of moments, the ground was going to start shaking and trembling again.

  96

  The scene was unlike anything Quickly had experienced. In all of his years as a pilot in battles and reconnaissance missions, he had never before witnessed anything like what was happening above Edsall Dark.

  The Thunderbolts, the Vonnegan ships he had faced off against more than any other, had given up on attacking the Llyushin fighters and were blasting everything and anything they could target within the dust and fog that engulfed the Gur-Khan’s narrows. Obviously, it was the only way they hoped to clear a way through and enable the ground forces to get to the capital wall.

  It had never been so easy to shoot Thunderbolts out of the sky. If Surrey were still there with him, Quickly was sure he would have heard a running commentary from his friend about how the Thunderbolts were just as easy to shoot as usual.