The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1)

by Chris Dietzel

  She could have asked A’la Dure, but her friend never voiced an opinion—or said anything at all. Traskk didn’t care about human problems. And Fastolf, who was returning with a fresh round, was always too drunk to offer sound advice. Occulus was the only person in her group who she could trust to be objective and reasonable when called upon.

  “Something else has to be going on,” he said. “I can’t believe that a king on his deathbed would want war.”

  “The king did order the fleet to destroy a ship in Vonnegan space,” Morgan said.

  “And the king doesn’t have much longer to live,” Baldwin added.

  Occulus rubbed his chin as he thought. “Even so, one plus one always equal two. In this case, however, it seems to equal three, which means we are missing something.” Lacking any hair on top of his head, he ran a hand through the white hair of his beard. “The king has no reason to call for an attack before he dies. He hasn’t lost his mind. He’s Artan the Good, not Artan the Vicious or Artan the Warmonger.”

  Baldwin was cringing at something Occulus had said.

  “Out with it, doc,” Morgan snapped.

  “Well, it’s that, well, the king’s mental state has been deteriorating.”

  Vere’s mouth dropped open. Occulus shook his head in disbelief. Morgan said, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” and then smashed another empty glass on the table.

  9

  The scum of Folliet-Bright wasn’t limited to Eastcheap. The entire colony, the area of the otherwise inhospitable planet, was filled with thieves, gamblers, and murderers. They were the retched of the galaxy and they were in every alley and at every corner. And they weren’t dumb. Steal enough spaceships and you become attuned to every possible security measure and life form near you. Evade intergalactic bookies to whom you owe a debt for long enough and you gain a sixth sense of danger around every corner. Kill one other alien, just one, and you know that you have to do everything you can think of for the karma of the universe not to pay you back.

  When a gust of wind came through the alleys near Eastcheap, a Trungghodorian who had killed a dozen men in another part of the galaxy, shivered and found someplace else to go. A pack of Pol-Ites, in the middle of dividing the contents of a wallet between them, pulled their hoods over their heads and darted away. A Zzer, sure he was about to have all ten of his hands chopped off, hid in a trash bin in the hopes that the goons hired by Arc-Mi-Die wouldn’t find him there.

  Another gust of wind passed through the alleys. In the confines of the colony’s protective barrier, there was no wind. Even though this was out of the ordinary, none of the aliens had a particular reason to suspect trouble was coming. And yet all of them sensed they had better move on from where they were.

  All of them except the Zzer, who didn’t dare move from his hiding spot under the trash. Wrappers and old papers scuttled down the alley as the wind picked up. The Zzer gave a faint whimper.

  Something was coming. Something big and monstrous.

  10

  “Why doesn’t anyone else know about my father’s condition?” asked Vere.

  The physician shrugged. “Lady Percy didn’t want us to tell anyone, so we didn’t.”

  “Sickness can make good men evil,” Morgan said.

  Occulus nodded. “That’s true, but it still doesn’t add up. There is something we’re missing.”

  Baldwin turned to Vere. “So you’ll come home then?” he said, eyes large and pleading.

  Although the same height as Fastolf, Baldwin was easily half his weight. Traskk towered over him and outweighed him by hundreds of pounds of muscle. Baldwin was sure every woman gathered around the table could beat him in an arm wrestling match or a fistfight. So, after he spoke, begging Vere to return home, the only person he felt comfortable making eye contact with was Occulus.

  Fastolf laughed and got up from the table to get more drinks for everyone.

  “Just give me a little bit of time to get my head straight,” Vere said. “Go back to acting like it’s a normal day.”

  “If it was a normal day, I’d be on a Solar Carrier,” Morgan said.

  “I’d be taking care of your sick father,” Baldwin said.

  “Damn you both, you know what I mean.”

  Occulus cleared his throat and said, “Mentioning Artan the Good makes me wonder: if you could describe your life in one word, what would it be?”

  “Discouraged,” Morgan muttered.

  Traskk growled something in Basilisk that no one except Vere and A’la Dure could understand.

  Baldwin said, “I’d like to aim for how Artan the Good is known. Or Krüger the Sympathetic. But I guess anything is better than some of the ones that were given out centuries ago: Krakuan the Incontinent, Merknon the Impotent, or Crazy Anne the Maniac. Talk about the Dark Ages!”

  Fastolf came back with another round of drinks. As he pushed one to everyone except Morgan and Baldwin, he said, “I’ll be known as Fastolf the Hilarious.”

  “More like, the Fat Mess,” Morgan said.

  “Fastolf the Deceitful,” Vere said, smiling.

  Fastolf held a hand to his heart, acting as if he had been stabbed. “When have I lied? If I have ever told a lie, spit in my face.”

  A’la Dure, closer to him than Vere, spit in his face. But even as she did, she winked at the buffoon and it was impossible for him, even as he yelled and wiped her spit off, to truly be mad at her or at Vere for starting it.

  “All of you are of questionable virtue,” he announced, taking a gulp of his drink, then belching.

  “As much fun as this is,” Morgan said, picking up another empty glass and getting ready to either smash it or throw it at Fastolf’s head. “I really hope this isn’t how the future leader of the CasterLan Kingdom has been spending the past six years.”

  “How I spend my time is my business.”

  “You need to come back to Edsall Dark,” Baldwin and Morgan said at the exact same time.

  Vere shook her head. “I’ll do no such thing. My father’s problems aren’t my problems. And that planet isn’t my home. This”—she said, palms open to Eastcheap—“is my home. And these people”—she motioned at the fat man, the quiet woman, the old man, the angry reptile—“is my family.”

  They went back and forth like this for another minute.

  Morgan reached into her pocket to show something to Vere. Withdrawing an empty hand, she looked confused, then narrowed her eyes at Fastolf. With a bark of laughter, Fastolf tossed a leather pouch back to her, continuing to giggle until she made a fist and aimed it at his nose.

  Baldwin, still standing over their table after another refusal by Vere, threw his hands in the air. “This is insane,” he yelled, turning to see if anyone else in the bar could talk sense to her.

  But when he did, he bumped shoulders with an alien walking toward the next table. The alien looked like one of its parents was human and the other a Synthpron. The general features of a man’s face still existed—two eyes, a nose, a mouth—but they were all greatly distorted in size and color from anyone gathered around Vere’s table. The creature’s eyes were twice as large as a man’s, with one massive eyelid that slid down to cover both eyes when it blinked. Its nose was narrow from the bridge down to the tip, but at the very end, the nostrils flared out as wide as the creature’s mouth. And its lips, instead of being pink or brown, were a pale blue, one shade lighter than the rest of its skin.

  “I’m sorry,” Baldwin said after bumping into the alien. “I—”

  But the alien didn’t want to hear an apology. It pointed at Baldwin and then at Fastolf and yelled in a language no one at their table understood.

  A little rodent-like alien two tables over called out, “He says your heavy friend stole his wallet.”

  Everyone looked at Fastolf.

  “I did not!” Fastolf said with indignation. “That… thing, is lying.”

  “I’m sorry, I—” Baldwin started to say, wanting to excuse himself from the situation, but h
e was the closest person to the Synthpron-man and that was why, when the half alien-half man picked an empty glass off their table, he didn’t smash it across the thief’s face but across Baldwin’s.

  Vere turned to see the physician on the ground, the Synthpron-man bending over him to continue the attack, then her hand shot out in its direction. A thin stream of black air wafted between her and the attacker. She was three feet away from him, but he stopped where he was, balancing on his toes, not wanting to move. A thin bead of blood appeared at his neck and he cried out. Still, Vere had her hand pointed at him.

  The creature’s blue lips strained in a grimace as he looked for what could be piercing his neck. When he tried to look down at the man whose face he had smashed, the pain intensified and he gave an embarrassing squeal.

  As much as he glanced down, though, nothing was there. No claws, no blade, certainly nothing electronic since those things wouldn’t function with the Treagon barrier. And yet, something was cutting his neck. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a mirror and noticed something glimmering there.

  The woman holding her hand out at him was holding a sword! But when he looked away from the mirror and back down between her hand and his neck, there was nothing there. Only then did he notice the small crossguard above her fist where a blade should have been protruding. And yet no blade was visible. Shifting his eyes back to the mirror, he saw the same crossguard, noticed part of a sword’s handle below the woman’s closed fist, but a blade definitely was there, extending from her hand and jutting into the soft flesh of his neck.

  “How?” he tried to say, but Vere extended her hand ever so slightly, forcing the Synthpron-man as far back against the next table as he could go. “How?” he tried to say again.

  Once more the brawler looked down at the space between her hand and his neck and saw nothing, then shifted his eyes to the mirror and saw a blade.

  “A chameleon!” people around them cried.

  “But no one has a Meursault sword except,”—the Synthpron-man cringed and closed his eyes—“except the six heirs of Coetzee the Knowing.” And then the brawler, almost crying, said, “But that must mean you’re”—the creature’s giant eyelid closed in dismay—“Vere CasterLan, heir to”—

  Vere poked the sword even further. “That’s enough,” she said and the Synthpron-man became quiet, afraid even to take a breath, knowing that if his neck moved at all it would be sliced open.

  If there had been anyone in the bar who didn’t know who she was, now they did.

  Baldwin got to his feet, one hand holding onto the closest table to steady himself and the other pressing against his temple, where rivers of blood were escaping between his fingers.

  “Go,” Vere said, lowering her hand, and the Synthpron-man immediately gasped for air and, feeling lucky to be alive, darted for the bar’s exit to tell everyone he knew that the mark on his neck had been caused by a legendary weapon.

  The Meursault sword had many names. Some called it the Chameleon blade because of the way it left a vapor of light the same color as the area through which it passed. In a smoke-filled gambling hall, the sword would leave a gray streak wherever the blade had passed, a colored streak that dissipated after a few seconds. In the swamps of Dynth-5, the blade would leave yellow streaks of mist everywhere it slashed through the air. Near the pure lakes of the smallest moon of Reccreen, the blade would leave a beautiful blue trail behind. And in the darkness of Eastcheap, everyone wanting their privacy and no one wanting to be recognized for one reason or another, the blade left a black vapor.

  Some called it the Hidden Death because its blade, when viewed straight-on, was invisible to whomever was trying to look at it. Not a single alien species in the galaxy had eyesight fine enough to see the microscopically thin blade. Only when the angle was shifted to its flat side did the sword become visible. Because of how thin the blade was, it could cut through objects no other blade in the galaxy could. A normal metal blade would cause sparks to fly from a stone wall. A Meursault blade slashed straight through the stone without problem.

  And some called it the Emperor’s Saber. Not only did you have to be royalty to own one, you had to be one of the six members of royalty in the galaxy, related to the last Holy Emperor, thereby holding a greater birthright than anyone else. There were countless dukes and lords. There were a handful of princes and princesses. There were a couple kings and queens. Not enough Meursault swords for all of them. Only six in the entire galaxy.

  More than a thousand years earlier, Meursault, the most famous swordsmith in the history of the galaxy, had discovered how to make the blade. He had only had time to craft seven of the weapons before his apprentice, filled with jealous rage, murdered him. Not only did the secret of how the blade was crafted disappear with its maker, but also the material that the blade was made of. Glass, no matter how it was finished or glazed, would shatter if someone attempted to do with it the things that a Meursault blade could do. Metal wasn’t strong enough. Diamonds were too thick.

  Over the centuries, one of the swords had been stolen or lost. Only six still existed, passed down from one ruler to another. Some people went their entire lives thinking the blades were an old wives’ tale because they never got to see one for themselves. Some people saw glimpses of the swords when a king gave a great speech. But now, here was one in Eastcheap, the dirtiest and most disreputable bar on Folliet-Bright, and it was being held by one of the grimy bar’s most loyal patrons, who also happened to be a woman.

  Aliens began whispering excitedly in every possible language known in the system. A different group of MaqMacs than the one that had been scared earlier were bleeping and chirping. The Gthothch had made friends with a different set of Watchneens than the ones he had crippled and was offering a grinding noise that his species was known for. Even the Feedorian bartender was partaking in the gossip, leaning in close to a Basilisk that was slightly heavier than Traskk, with brown scales instead of the creamy yellow that Vere’s friend had.

  “Well, it looks like it’s our time to leave,” Vere said, returning the gaze of every imaginable type of alien.

  “Here,” Fastolf said, tossing a leather wallet to Baldwin. “Your reward.”

  “I don’t want your money,” said the physician.

  Fastolf only laughed. Occulus rolled his eyes. Morgan gave a disgusted gurgle. Vere didn’t want to laugh, but she couldn’t help it.

  “What?” Baldwin said, not getting it.

  It was Vere who answered, “It’s not Fastolf’s wallet. It belonged to the alien who smashed a drink over your head.”

  “You lied?” Baldwin said, but no one—certainly not Fastolf—bothered to reply.

  The others followed Vere’s lead, making their way toward the door. Morgan put a hand on Baldwin’s back to help guide him out.

  They were halfway to the bar’s exit when a giant figure appeared in the doorway, almost completely blocking all light from entering through the door. As the body moved forward, into the little bit of illumination the bar offered, Vere saw it was human in shape, or at least something with two arms and two legs, only much larger, and dressed in full knight’s armor.

  The man, if that’s what he was, was the largest person she had ever seen, not just in height but in thickness. His neck was as broad as both of her legs put together. His legs were so thick and long that he looked like he must be half human and half giant.

  But an odd thing: every part of the knight’s armor was green. Varying shades and varying materials, but everything from his helmet to his boots was green. His helmet, shoulder guards, and chest plate were either some sort of emerald metal or had a layer of paint that made it shine even though there was little light to make it do so. His arm and leg protection looked to be made of thick animal hide rather than iron. But this too was green, although a darker shade than the metal. The little bit of cloth lining Vere could see was the lightest shade of all, the color of unripe fruit. His boots, his gloves, the stitches between each piece of clot
h—all green. Even all of the parts of the knight’s axe that she could see were varying shades of green.

  “I’ll bet you anything he has a green spaceship,” Fastolf said, chuckling, but no one else laughed and no one took the bet.

  Vere was too busy hoping she could get out of the bar before someone challenged her for her sword.

  Of course, that was when the giant pointed a green finger at her and bellowed, in a thunderous and booming voice, “You!”

  The Green Knight, by Zaina.A – Digital Art

  11

  From the General’s quarters of the Athens Destroyer, all that could be observed were other destroyers and the vastness of space. As far as General Agravan could see in front of him and behind him, ships just like the one he was aboard stretched into the distance. All of them hurtling through space on their way toward Edsall Dark.

  The General, like Mowbray and all other Vonnegans, was slightly taller and thinner than an average human. And like all others of his race, he had no hair anywhere on his body or head. His skin glinted with a purplish complexion. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes were two different shades of gleaming purple.

  “Tell me,” a second Vonnegan male said from the other side of the room, “What is the reason for using a gravity mine in fixed warfare but proton mines in unconventional warfare?”

  The person speaking was roughly the same height as the General, but his skin was smoother, his eyes larger. Both were indications that he was a teenage Vonnegan rather than an adult. He was also the only person on the entire ship who wasn’t wearing a Vonnegan naval uniform. Instead, he wore intricately woven fabric that was such a light shade of purple it was almost gray.

  General Agravan turned from the viewport and walked back to where the teenager sat at a desk. In front of them, scattered about, were diagrams of various space warfare tactics, miniaturized holograms of some of the most famous space battles of all time, any one of which, when touched, would expand to fill the room and allow General Agravan a chance to explain why one fleet had won a battle and the other had lost.