The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1)

by Chris Dietzel

  “It wouldn’t be open space,” Hotspur said. “We have the benefit of knowing our terrain better than our enemy.”

  “Terrain?” Modred laughed again. “Terrain? It’s space, not a battlefield!”

  Hotspur’s shoulders crackled when he became tense. “The same principles apply. We know which moons are suitable for hiding our ships where they won’t be detected. We know which asteroid belts will interfere with their systems and leave them open to ambush.”

  Part of Hotspur wanted to echo Modred’s dumb laugh. Why was he wasting his time talking to someone about the tactics of galactic warfare when that person didn’t know a Solar Carrier from his own shadow?

  “I have made my decision,” Modred said, turning back toward the window and dismissing one of his stepfather’s greatest warriors.

  “Then I suppose we’ll see what Vere has to say when she arrives,” Hotspur said.

  Modred turned and laughed. “The king’s daughter is too busy drinking and stealing to have the slightest idea what situation we are in here. We, the people who are actually here, are the ones who have to make the tough choices. Not her.”

  “You haven’t heard?” Hotspur said. “Her ship was spotted leaving Folliet-Bright a few hours ago. She’s heading this way.” He turned and walked toward the doorway. Before disappearing, he added, “Odd, my sources told me you already knew.”

  Then he was gone.

  22

  Another succession of laser blasts passed by the Griffin Fire. Vere yanked hard on the control stick and the ship’s nose shot up toward the closest moon, pushing Vere and A’la Dure back in their seats.

  The cockpit door slid open and Traskk growled a slithery noise with his tongue.

  “I don’t know,” Vere answered. “Maybe they don’t care who we are.”

  Occulus, Morgan, and Baldwin appeared behind the reptile. Fastolf was probably passed out in the back of the ship and Pistol wasn’t programmed to care about what was happening unless given a command.

  Traskk made another raspy noise.

  Vere said, “Don’t ask me. Ask the Vonnegan fleet!”

  Another shot of blaster fire hit the ship. More alarms began sounding.

  Morgan stepped forward and pointed—arm outstretched in front of Vere’s face—toward the top left of the cockpit. “It’s not the Athens Destroyers.”

  Vere smacked her arm away. “Somebody turn off those alarms,” she shouted.

  Occulus went to the corner of the cockpit and pressed some buttons until the alarms went quiet.

  “It’s not the Vonnegan fleet,” Morgan insisted.

  Another two blasts sailed past the Griffin Fire, flying off into the distance of space.

  “If I haven’t known you for more than a day,” Vere shouted, “Get out of my cockpit.”

  Baldwin inched back to the edge of the cockpit where Vere wouldn’t notice him. Morgan, though, didn’t budge.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing in front of Vere’s face again.

  Immediately after completing a series of loops and twists, Vere saw what Morgan was talking about. The Vonnegan fleet wasn’t shooting at them. There were so many laser blasts coming at her that she assumed it must be them, but the Athens Destroyers were still too far away to be within targeting range. Instead, a pair of ships, each half the size of the Griffin Fire, were attacking them.

  “Who are they?” Vere asked.

  A’la Dure punched a series of buttons. A display popped up with the holographic outlines of two ships highlighted. The ships were identical in make and model—a pair of old V-Type Dotted Fighters—but were slightly different in color and weaponry based on how they had been maintained over the years.

  “Bounty hunters,” Vere said before pushing and pulling at the control stick, causing Occulus to stumble forward until Traskk effortlessly caught him with one hand.

  “Who are they?” Baldwin asked.

  Vere looked behind her just long enough to see that neither he nor Morgan were gone. Then another blaster shot hit their engines and she began a new series of spirals and turns.

  “The heir to the CasterLan Kingdom is returning home,” Morgan said between gritted teeth. “It looks like someone isn’t too happy about that.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Vere said, punching the controls. An automated cannon popped out of the Griffin Fire’s tail and began firing timed bursts of laser blasts back at the two ships. “Prepare the tinder walls.”

  As A’la Dure began typing a series of commands into the ship’s computer, Vere turned the ship toward the nearest portal.

  “You’re going to run away?” Morgan said. “Get out of the chair and I’ll show you how a ship should be piloted.”

  Vere stood from her chair and turned. But instead of giving over control of the Griffin Fire, she clenched a fist. Seeing that a fight was going to break out in the cockpit while they were being shot at, Traskk scooped Morgan up under one arm and darted out of the room, her muffled yells echoing as the cockpit door closed behind them.

  The Griffin Fire was only twenty seconds from the portal. Blaster fire was shooting past every side of the ship. Another alarm began sounding.

  “I’ll get it,” Baldwin said, leaning over to hit the same buttons Occulus had tapped to quiet the alarm that indicated their shields were almost depleted.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Vere yelled. “Unless you don’t want to be able to use that hand again.”

  “I was only trying to help—”

  “It’s not the shields,” she told him. Then, to A’la Dure, she said, “What’s wrong?”

  A red holographic display popped up between them, showing areas of the ship glowing darker red than others.

  “Pistol,” Vere yelled into the ship’s intercom. “Tinder walls are out. I need them fixed right now.”

  A monotone voice came across the speakers a moment later. “I will need a moment to determine the cause of the—”

  “Now!” Vere yelled, jerking the control stick sideways, then down.

  With the Griffin Fire’s automated laser cannon firing, the pair of bounty hunter ships had to evade blasts of their own. But the automated cannon, operated by the ship’s computer, would never be able to perform better than a good shooter.

  “Traskk,” Vere said into the intercom, “try to keep our friend from barging into the cockpit again by putting her in one of the turrets. It looks like we aren’t going into the portal after all.”

  She sent the Griffin Fire into an elongated arc. By the time the ship came out of it, a light signaled on her display that her ship’s manual turrets were active and ready to use against the bounty hunters.

  A burst of twenty rapid-fire shots went at the Griffin Fire. No amount of piloting could evade all of them. With a thud and jolt, one of the engines went out.

  “Pistol,” Vere said into the intercom, “Ignore the tinder walls. I need engine number three back up.”

  The android did not bother to acknowledge the change in priorities but she knew he would do what was required.

  She tried to minimize the amount of spins and spirals she sent the ship into because she wanted Traskk to get clean shots at the two bounty hunters. Experience had proven that there was no other pair of eyes she would rather have than those of her huge reptilian friend. Basilisks had crystal clear eyesight, superior to almost any alien in the galaxy, which made up for their almost complete lack of hearing. When Traskk listened to conversations, he was actually feeling the vibrations of voices, not actually hearing words in the traditional sense.

  Only a moment later, one of the V-Type Dotted Fighters erupted into a ball of white and blue flame before quickly exploding into metal shards and debris.

  She took the Griffin Fire into a nose dive, dropped its speed, then brought the nose back up and to the side. The other bounty hunter’s ship came into view, almost directly to their left. A second later a streak of laser shot out from the Griffin Fire and hit the bounty hunter’s craft. The ship wobbled to th
e side before exploding.

  Vere turned and gave A’la Dure a smile. Moments later, Traskk and Morgan came into the cockpit. Vere reached up and patted Traskk on the shoulder.

  But when he hissed a series of noises, Vere said, “She got both of them?” and the reptile nodded.

  Everyone in the cockpit turned and looked at Morgan, who had her arms crossed and a smile plastered on her face after destroying both vessels with little effort.

  “Anything you want to say?” Morgan asked.

  Vere’s mouth was hanging open, but she couldn’t get the words out that she was looking for. A’la Dure’s big eyes didn’t blink. Traskk shrugged in a way that indicated he would have been able to get the bounty hunters himself, eventually, if Morgan hadn’t blasted them both so quickly.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Morgan added.

  “If you’re so happy with yourself, maybe you’d like to be the one to talk to the Vonnegan general,” Vere said. When Morgan didn’t say anything, Vere added, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  23

  The one hundred Athens Destroyers that made up the Vonnegan fleet were in a loose formation around the sixth planet of the Targeen-TRak system. In front of them, the giant orange and blue swirling clouds of Decil-TRak covered the many colonies that lay beneath it. Almost the entire planet had been transformed to provide land and air that could sustain life. A couple of the colonies had grown so large that they had merged, creating some of the largest containment fields in the galaxy.

  General Agravan stood at the viewport of his modified Commander-class Destroyer, surveying the extent of the damage. More life had been extinguished on this one planet than on all of the other colonies they had destroyed along the way. The lesson to be learned was simple: enter Vonnegan space and destroy a ship you have no right attacking and expect to endure so much death and suffering that no one else in the galaxy ever thinks of doing the same thing.

  “Any more communications?” Agravan asked the officer to his side.

  “No, sir.”

  Some of the colonies below had tried to make contact with the Vonnegan fleet prior to being slaughtered. They were probably begging to be left alone, would most likely say they had nothing to do with the attack of the Ornewllian Compact. What they failed to understand was that it didn’t matter if they had given the order or not or if they were complicit or not. Anyone and everyone in the CasterLan Kingdom was going to learn what kind of vengeance Mowbray Vonnegan was capable of.

  That was why the pleas for mercy had gone unheeded. It wasn’t that the general was afraid that he or his troops would see the crying families and decide to give up their mission. Orders were orders. No, he ignored the pleas for help because they were a waste of his time and the time of those on the planet surface who were going to die. Rather than beg for mercy that wouldn’t be given, they should make peace with whichever god or gods they believed in. Or else hug their relatives and say goodbye. The planet was going to suffer the same fate if he allowed their communications through to the bridge or if he didn’t.

  “Sir,” one of the men behind a control panel at the right front of the command deck said, “The ship that was just in the firefight is trying to contact us.”

  Unlike Hotspur’s ship, where only the captain always wore space armor, all essential Vonnegan crew members, including everyone manning the command deck, wore their space armor at all times. Because of this, the face of the man who spoke couldn’t be seen. Only his gray helmet was visible. Behind it, under the fogged diamond shaped lens, the man’s facial expressions were hidden. The result was a bridge of officers who appeared to be heavily protected cyborgs. Unlike the CasterLan suits, which were varying shades of grey mixed in with matte black and blue tinted plates, the Vonnegan space armor was mostly black, with purple insignias, shoulder plates, and lining. The shade of purple each officer wore on their space armor reflected how senior they were within the Vonnegan military. It was why the junior officer who announced the Griffin Fire’s communication was wearing space armor with light purple scattered on it and General Agravan’s was such a deep and dark shade of purple that it sometimes appeared black.

  “They are probably dumb enough to ask us for help,” Agravan said. “I do not want distractions. Ready a Keiser torpedo.”

  “Sir, the ship is approaching fast from Sector 9.”

  The general’s neck stretched upward slightly. His massive back, muscles buried under protective plates, widened when he held his breath. Rather than continue the back and forth from across the command deck, Agravan strode across from where he had been looking out at the blue and orange swirls of a decimated Decil-TRak to where the crewman was hunched over his display panel.

  The crewman was whispering now: “Sir, the person contacting us insists she is Vere CasterLan and she wants to speak with you.”

  The general put both of his gloved hands up to where his chin would be if it weren’t hidden behind his helmet. After seeing what the Vonnegan fleet had done to every colony in its path, everyone should be looking for a way to avoid the line of Athens Destroyers. Yet this ship was intentionally trying to open communications. What better way to do that than to claim to be royalty? The problem was that his crew was supposed to be better than to fall for some outrageous claim like this. Even acknowledging it was a shame on the fleet.

  “Put them on the screen,” the general said. “If Vere CasterLan appears, you live.” He did not have to say what would happen if this was a hoax perpetrated by pirates or by some foolhardy escapees of the planet they had just destroyed.

  In front of the entire command deck, a woman’s face appeared on the primary display. Taking up nearly the entire display area, the woman’s face was fifty times larger than life.

  The general’s head tilted slightly to one side, but he didn’t say anything.

  “General,” the woman said. “I am Vere CasterLan. My father is—”

  “Yes,” General Agravan said, interrupting. He immediately recognized her from the books he had read about the CasterLan lineage. “We will get to you and your planet after we are done destroying everything else along the way.”

  “General, there’s been a mistake. My father would never order one of his ships to destroy an innocent crew. And definitely not in your space.”

  “It happened, though. Did it not?”

  “General, please, let me go to Edsall Dark and find out what happened. I’m sure I can clear everything up.”

  “Do as you wish. My ships will be making our way there, destroying all colonies as we go.”

  “But this is a mistake! I’m sure of it. Something else must be going on.”

  “That is not my problem.”

  “Give me one week and—”

  On the display, the image of an overweight man appeared briefly behind Vere, saying, “Better make it six days. Don’t forget you have to get your head lopped off in a week.”

  Vere took a deep breath, then the video feed went black for five seconds. When it came back on again, Vere was sitting back down in the pilot’s seat of her ship and the fat man’s pained cries faded in the distance.

  “Give me six days,” Vere said. “I promise I’ll clear all of this up.”

  “And if you clear nothing up?” the general said.

  Another voice came from behind Vere. This one, belonging to a young woman, said, “Then you can have her instead of destroying more innocent colonies.”

  As the video feed continued, Vere turned and looked at the woman standing in the cockpit doorway.

  “Who is that?” the general asked.

  “Morgan—” the woman started to say but Vere turned and told her to shut up and get out of her cockpit.

  General Agravan said, “You and the woman behind you.”

  Vere frowned, not understanding what the general was getting at. Then, figuring it out, she smiled and nodded. “You’ve got a deal,” she said. “She and I will both turn ourselves over to you if we can’t straighten out what hap
pened and clear the CasterLan name.”

  The two of them, the general of the Vonnegan fleet and the heir to the CasterLan Kingdom, stared at each other across the pixelated screens hovering at the front of both of their respective vessels.

  Then Agravan spoke: “Six days.” And the screen went black.

  24

  Vere stood with Occulus, Fastolf, Morgan, and Baldwin outside the Griffin Fire’s cockpit. Only A’la Dure remained by the controls, watching the ship’s displays and letting Pistol and Traskk know when any of their repairs on the third engine were successful. Once that was done, work began to ensure the tinder walls were functioning once more.

  “Why would a bounty hunter be coming for us?” Vere asked.

  The side of Morgan’s mouth curled with disdain. “Obviously, someone isn’t excited about the king’s daughter returning to Edsall Dark after being gone for so long.”

  “Who would even know I was on my way, though? We just left.”

  “Did you really think you were hiding from anyone? Look how easily I found you. Look how easily Baldwin found you.”

  Tired of Morgan’s attitude, Vere took a step toward her passenger. Occulus stepped in between the two even though there was nothing he could do at his age to keep them from ripping each others faces off.

  “It was easy,” Baldwin said, trying his best to keep tempers settled. “Even the Green Knight found you, whoever he is. And if we were able to, it wouldn’t be hard for anyone else to find you or know when you were leaving.”

  “It doesn’t help,” Morgan said over Occulus’s shoulder, “that someone pulled out one of the only Meursault swords in the entire galaxy. Everyone in all the surrounding solar systems will know about that before the day’s over.”

  Vere narrowed her eyes at the woman on the other side of Occulus. The old man signaled with his eyes for Baldwin to say something, anything, to keep a fight from breaking out.

  “So a bounty hunter tried to kill you,” the physician said with a shrug. “So what.”