Moray had been the first planet. Then Mentieth-B. The next target was Gleassagarion, a planet with a single colony. But the Vonnegan fleet didn’t set their navigational computers to go directly there. Instead, they remained in orbit, waiting a few minutes for both of Mentieth-B’s moons to come back around for another revolution. Both moons had small colonies of their own.
At least, that was, they both had colonies until the Athens Destroyers set their targets on them. After that, there would only be more death and more Vonnegan flags left above the moons to let everyone know they had been there.
A Colony, by Tim Barton - Digital Art
20
“We need to do something,” Morgan said, looking out the Griffin Fire’s cockpit viewport at the decimated planet.
“What are we supposed to do?” Vere said with derision. “You want me to track down the Vonnegan fleet in this thing and take them on myself?”
Lazy or not, thief or not, no one else in the crowded cockpit could argue with her point.
“We need to do something,” Morgan said again.
No one bothered to reply this time, not even Vere. In front of them, with Zephyr’s containment field destroyed, lay death and destruction the likes of which none of them had ever seen. During the course of their lives, all of them had become familiar with what happened when a ship with malfunctioning tinder walls passed through a portal or when a random asteroid collided with a vessel. Life was fragile everywhere, but most of all in space. Amongst the stars, life could be extinguished just as quickly as it appeared. But those were isolated incidents. A passenger ship carrying four people. A freighter carrying a pilot, co-pilot, and a lot of cargo.
This was something entirely different. A series of colonies, where aliens and humans of every type had come to live, work, and grow old, where they had built homes, offices, and towers—all of it was gone. Under the force of Zephyr’s gravity, there wasn’t a single structure that was still standing. Everyone would have died from either breathing the toxic atmosphere or being crushed under the falling buildings. The remnants of each colony were nothing more than a disorderly intergalactic cemetery.
The mere sight caused Traskk to give a low hiss.
Of the many colonies scattered around the planet, amid the thousands of structures and hundreds of thousands of life forms there, there may have been random survivors here and there. In the rubble, a child might have been able to climb into her space armor before the containment field collapsed. Amid the debris, an alien might have managed to close the door of the safe room within his dwelling. But they too would eventually die. There were too many collapsed structures to search each one for survivors. Too much wreckage to clear to save the few who might have miraculously survived the initial wave of death. Their only reward now would be waiting for the oxygen in their suit of space armor or safe room to exhaust itself. Then they too would die like everyone else.
Even if Vere did take the Griffin Fire down to the planet surface and she and everyone else aboard her ship climbed into space armor and began searching, they would never find anyone in time. Meanwhile, the Vonnegan fleet would be making its way closer and closer to Edsall Dark.
Baldwin said, “Maybe we can find the Vonnegan fleet’s general and tell him this is all a misunderstanding.”
“It doesn’t sound like it was, though,” Occulus said.
To which Fastolf added, “Unless you would take it as a misunderstanding after someone destroyed a civilian ship and killed all the innocent passengers.” He laughed when he said this, as if it were hilarious and not a precursor for war.
Morgan turned and punched Fastolf in the chest as hard as she could. His face turned purple and he stumbled backward, coughing for air.
When she turned back to look out the cockpit again and saw everyone else staring at her, she said, “I felt his hand reaching into my back pocket. Dirty thief.”
“Was not!” Fastolf gasped, but no one believed him.
The others sighed and returned their attention to the chaos in front of them.
“Maybe if you contact the Vonnegan general yourself,” the physician tried again, looking at Vere. “Tell him you’re headed to Edsall Dark to personally figure out what happened.”
“I’m not getting involved in my father’s business,” replied Vere.
But Occulus leaned over and said to A’la Dure, “See if you can get the coordinates on their fleet.”
She nodded and began tapping on one of the displays in front of her.
“I’m not getting involved in my father’s business,” Vere said again, louder this time so there was no excuse for anyone to ignore her.
On one of the Griffin Fire’s displays, one of the colonies became magnified. The bodies of the dead were everywhere. Zephyr aliens, twice as large as humans, with exoskeletons that made them look like they were wearing armor, were mixed in with a variety of other species. All deceased.
Occulus leaned closer to Vere and whispered, “It can’t hurt to try and fix this. If nothing comes of it, fine.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “But look at all the life that has been lost so far, and think of all the additional lives that will be lost if you wash your hands of the matter.”
She gave him a dirty look, but rather than silencing him with a cutting retort as she would Fastolf, or becoming belligerent as she would with Morgan, she sighed and asked A’la Dure if she had managed to find the fleet.
In response, a holographic display of planets and stars popped up in front of one of the cockpit windows. A mass of one hundred densely packed dots was slowly making its way from one planet to another. When Vere looked at the top corner of the display, she saw the fleet had just left the planet Moray, where even more colonies were located. She didn’t hold out hope that their fates would be any different than those of the Zephyr colonists.
“Looks like their fleet is only one solar system away,” Occulus said.
They could pilot the Griffin Fire through the next portal and be in front of the fleet within minutes.
“The tinder walls work?” she asked Pistol, who was standing behind everyone else, just outside the cockpit doorway.
“Yes, Vere,” the android said without emotion.
“Are you sure?” Fastolf said, giving the life-like machine a friendly jab in the side with his elbow.
Without blinking, without raising his eyebrows, Pistol turned and answered in the same monotone, “I would be more concerned about the ship’s engines being strong enough to get you across the solar system.”
Vere chuckled. “Okay everyone, go buckle up.”
Everyone except A’la Dure filed back out of the cockpit. After they were gone, Vere tapped a button on a side display, then turned forward and took hold of the flight controls. With a lurch, the ship arced right and doubled its speed.
“We’ll be at the Proteus-II portal in five minutes,” she said over the intercom.
The portal soon came into view, its blinding white energy like that of a miniature sun. If the portal had been near a busy spaceport it would have had dozens of ships lined up in front of it, each one waiting its turn to vanish into the portal and appear in a different solar system. Now, the only ships they saw were the charred remains of vessels that had been unlucky enough to appear in that sector as the Vonnegan fleet passed through.
She directed the Griffin Fire right at the portal, then tapped a red button above her head. A chime sounded. Sheets of metal began sliding down over the cockpit windows. But it wasn’t only the windows they could see that the tinder walls would cover, it was every part of the ship that could possibly have a crevice or material that would allow the portal’s energy anywhere into the main cabins.
Every kid had stumbled across pictures of what happened when tinder walls weren’t used when trying to pass through portals—pictures they immediately shared with their friends or younger siblings. Vere had been six years old the first time she saw a picture of a giant cargo vessel that had tried to pass through a portal. Unbe
knownst to the ship’s captain, his vessel had a defective tinder wall and a faulty wire running to the tinder wall failsafe system. The picture she had seen was of the freighter’s mess hall. But instead of dozens of men and aliens gathered around for supper, their were only shadows burned into the chairs and tables.
“Isn’t that freaky!” Galen had said with a squeal.
Vere hadn’t even understood what she was looking at until he explained that any organic matter touched by the portal’s energy immediately exploded on a molecular level. All that remained were the shadows where each living thing had been.
Seeing Vere’s horror, Galen had added, “My brother says that if you go to the portal where this happened you can hear the ghosts of the dead passengers howling into the void of space.”
For the next month, of course, Vere had suffered through a series of nightmares featuring the horrors she had seen in those pictures. It was only when her mother heard of her daughter’s nightmares and comforted Vere that the bad dreams had faded.
Her mother had smiled and tapped a playful finger on Vere’s little nose. “That only happened because the ship’s Captain was too lazy to get the tinder wall alarm fixed. He would have known about it being faulty if he’d just taken the ship in for service when he was supposed to. You’ll be perfectly fine if you ever go through one.”
It was the same memory Vere had every time she passed through a portal.
A second chime sounded, signaling the tinder walls had lowered over every part of the ship. A’la Dure tapped a button and imagery of their surrounding area popped up where the cockpit windows had been replaced by solid steel. This was to give the pilot and co-pilot a sense of the space around them when they couldn’t actually see it for themselves.
No one knew what it would be like to pass through the portal if they could see it with their own eyes because no one had ever lived to witness such a thing. Some artists painted pictures of the stars stretching into white lines, followed by a flash of light. Some people said that the entire color spectrum of lights would flash, one after another, in such rapid succession that the human eye wouldn’t be able to see all of the colors.
But even with the entire ship encapsulated with atomized steel, there were still some aspects of the portal shift that Vere and everyone else was aware of. There was the invisible force, almost like G-pressure, as the ship entered into the portal. Vere described it as feeling like time was grinding to a halt over the course of one very long second. Fastolf said it felt like, instead of falling down, he was falling straight back.
However one described it, it was what Vere and A’la Dure and everyone else aboard the Griffin Fire experienced as the ship passed into the Proteus-II energy field.
Then there was the lurch forward on the other side of the portal. Most often, people described this as the feeling of the ship traveling faster than the speed of light on its way to the next portal. Ships couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light, however, and even if they could, vessels that passed through the portal weren’t actually traveling that distance, they were disappearing at one point in space and reappearing at another.
When Vere experienced this lurch and then felt the ship go back to normal, she knew, even with the tinder walls still down, that they had disappeared from a point near the destroyed planet of Zephyr and reappeared in a neighboring solar system where the Vonnegan fleet was likely in the process of destroying another planet’s colonies.
She pressed a yellow button above her head. A chime sounded, asking if she was sure she wanted to raise the tinder walls. In response, she pressed the original red button. The sheets of curved metal that had lowered at every window and viewport raised back up.
Zephyr was no longer in view. Instead, she faced two of the three moons of Acedees-TRak. Even as large spheres in front of her, the pair of cream-colored moons were too far away for her to see if the colonies were intact. She knew better than to fly closer, though. The Vonnegan fleet, visible in the distance, wouldn’t have a change of conscience just because they had passed from one solar system to another.
“We’re here,” Vere announced over the intercom. Then, to A’la Dure, “See if you can get a signal on the fleet. I want to speak to their general as soon as you have him. And stay out of blaster range. I don’t want a hundred destroyers deciding we look like target practice.”
Not one second after she said it, a flash of light made her squint. Alarms began sounding. A red holographic display appeared in front of her face, showing her the threat that the Griffin Fire’s computers had detected.
“Shields up!”
A’la Dure began jabbing at the console in front of her.
Another laser blast. This one hit the right edge of her ship. Vere took the navigation controls in her hands and said, “I hope everyone back there is buckled up.” Without pause, she drove the controls forward as hard as she could.
The Griffin Fire took a nose dive, then immediately swerved to the right, beginning a series of evasive maneuvers. Despite Vere’s piloting skills, though, there were still one hundred Athens Destroyers to avoid. Each one would have between thirty and fifty laser cannons. Avoiding all of their blasts would be impossible, no matter who was piloting, and they couldn’t afford to take more hits just for the fun of it.
Another laser blast rocked the ship. She threw the controls back and then to the side. The Griffin Fire dodged a series of three laser blasts, then went into an arcing spiral.
“This is what I get for trying to help,” she said.
Beside her, A’la Dure frowned as she continued to punch buttons.
21
On the other side of the CasterLan Kingdom, Hotspur and Modred stood across from each other in the king’s chambers.
“The army is ready,” Hotspur said, standing as far as possible from where the king lay dying.
It wasn’t that he minded death. In fact, he welcomed facing it each time he went out into space in the Solar Carrier he commanded. But he didn’t feel he had yet earned the honor of standing near the king. Part of him even knew that if the king were healthy, Hotspur wouldn’t be there at all. And so he tried to act as if the leader of the CasterLan Kingdom weren’t struggling for breath in his luxurious bed, only mere feet away from where he stood.
“Very good,” Modred said, staring off into the distance of the business district side of the kingdom.
Unlike Hotspur, Modred had no problem being around the king’s body. He even seemed to take joy in the company, as if he had already proven himself mightier than the leader of the kingdom simply by being healthy while the king was ill.
Hotspur waited for the king’s stepson to say more, but there was only silence. He had recommended that Modred, Modred’s mother, and even the unconscious king, be outfitted in protective suits of space armor. Hotspur certainly was. It was all he wore lately. He was fanatical about learning and understanding the history of the galactic kingdoms. If his appreciation of history had taught him anything it was that impending war did strange things to people. Strange things that made wearing armor at all times a smart move.
Only four hundred years earlier, Wallace the Giver had been assassinated by his own daughter in the hopes she could prevent an all-out galactic war from starting. Instead, she killed the best military leader of their time, and she and her entire family were eventually beheaded. A thousand years ago, Taggart the Tyrannous was shot in the back by his own general when they disagreed on how best to deter the Twi’Lek invasion. The general (also later beheaded) had thought it more important to protect the people than put them all in jeopardy by following his king’s orders. Throughout recorded history were accounts of people who found a place in its annals solely because war had prompted them to act in a different way than how they otherwise would have.
It was not war, but the prospect of war, that would make Lady Percy and Modred the targets of would-be assassins. It was why Hotspur wore armor everywhere he went. And it was why he trusted fewer and fewer people the clo
ser he got to battle.
Hotspur cleared his throat. He didn’t want to address Modred as Lord because he didn’t deserve the title. He didn’t say Sir because it conveyed a level of respect that the captain didn’t have for the king’s stepson. And yet referring to him by his first name was too casual.
Modred turned and looked at Hotspur as if surprised he was still there.
“Yes?”
“The army is ready.”
“Yes, I heard you.”
Hotspur let out a long breath. “When will I take the fleet out to meet the Vonnegan army?”
“You won’t,” Modred said. “You’ll meet them here.”
Hotspur narrowed his eyes. The thick line of his jaw moved ever so slightly. “They are destroying everything in their path.”
“Yes, they are.”
“They have destroyed our colonies.”
“Yes. They have. And?”
Hotspur’s jaw clenched. Between the hard lines of his face and the armor he wore, he looked twice the size of Modred.
He said, “And we can prevent any more losses by meeting them.”
“And give up our best defenses?” Modred laughed. “To meet them out in open space?”
The muscles in Hotspur’s hands rippled with tension. He envisioned himself becoming another person in the pages of history who became immortalized for taking extreme measures prior to the onset of war. When they found Modred dead in the king’s chamber it would be Hotspur’s word against a corpse’s. The king certainly wasn’t in a state to know what was going on. More and more, Lady Percy disappeared for long stretches of time, locking herself in her room and crying. Hotspur could say the king’s stepson had become maniacal. He could say Modred had lunged toward the king’s body.
The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) Page 8
