Above them, more blaster shots came down through the ceiling and Fastolf renewed his yelling. Behind Vere, the first Siren came charging at her. She leveled her blaster at it and shot it straight through the temple. Its momentum kept it sliding toward her for a while, but by the time it came to a rest by her feet, the once beautiful hostess had turned into a blob of silvery goo.
Vere heard footsteps above her. She looked up and saw Baldwin wasn’t there, and guessed he was running to help Fastolf fight off the third Siren. Behind her, Morgan kept circling Traskk, trying to get a clean shot, but it didn’t matter where she moved because he was jumping and thrashing all over the place. The only thing saving him from getting bitten and having his bones turn to mush was the fact that he kept throwing his hands behind him, jamming his claws under the hostess’s chin to keep her venom away. When he slammed his back against the wall, the Siren gave up the form of a woman and went flat against the wall, causing Traskk to hurt only himself.
They did this deadly dance around the great room while Fastolf and Baldwin took shots at a Siren that kept falling through one part of the floor—from Vere’s perspective, the ceiling—and then pulling herself back up through a different part of the floor to attack them again and again.
A pair of laser blasts landed right next to Vere and she yelled, “Hey, watch it,” but neither man heard her.
Across the room, Traskk looked at her. He still had the second Siren bounty hunter on his back, his claws under her mouth, but he couldn’t get the shapeshifter off him because she would change forms just long enough to free herself from his grasp. Seeing that Vere was looking back at him, he quit thrashing for just a moment. The Siren, thinking she had broken his spirit or had tired him out, gave a yell of victory and turned her mouth so she could sink her fangs into his flesh.
The Siren’s victory cry came to an abrupt end when a laser blast passed straight through Traskk’s hand and then into the shapeshifter’s face. The bounty hunter fell off his back and immediately turned from a ravishing hostess to a silvery blob just as the other had.
Vere lowered her weapon and hoped Traskk would understand. Without the Siren on his back, the enormous reptile hissed in anger as he used his good hand to hold the injured one. Morgan and Vere could both see a hole the size of a human eye going straight through Traskk’s palm.
He looked down at the remains of the dead siren and growled. Knowing enough to stay away from the silver goo but also needing to get his anger out, he slammed his tail against every wall and piece of furniture within reach until there were huge gaps of the structure where open air came into the cabin and no chairs or tables remained in one piece. Morgan and Vere waited while he got it out of his system.
When he finished, Vere said, “I’m sorry.”
Traskk lumbered over to her, patted her on the shoulder and gave a gentle purr.
Morgan looked at the reptile’s hand and saw the hole was no longer there. In its place was flesh that was brighter than the rest of his skin.
“He regenerates,” Vere told her.
“Apparently so.”
They heard footsteps from above, then saw Fastolf and Baldwin walking down the few steps that still remained.
“Is it clear down here?” they asked in unison.
Vere nodded and said, “How about up there?”
“Got one,” Fastolf said.
Morgan looked at a device on her wrist. “Well, there goes our chance for a rest. It’s time to get going again.”
Outside, Pistol was frozen in place, standing upright, as if in an android version of sleep. As soon as they exited the inn and began crossing the moat to join him, a circle of light illuminated around both irises and he turned his head toward them.
“There are eighteen more hours,” he said. “And a twelve percent chance we arrive there by the deadline.”
“I know, I know,” Vere said. “We’re going.”
Without looking back at the inn and the collection of dead aliens inside, the group walked toward the forest’s edge to where the fields of Aromath began.
53
All around the CamaLon spaceport, pilots of every species congregated around their ships, trying to figure out what they should do. Their homes were on Edsall Dark. Their families were there. But word was spreading that the Vonnegan fleet was on the other side of the portal, waiting to come through.
“Why don’t they just turn the damned thing off? Keep the fleet from coming through.”
“Beats me.”
On a dare, one of the pilots had gone through the portal. That was ten hours earlier. He hadn’t returned. Although no one knew for sure, everyone suspected a Vonnegan coat of arms was probably glowing in space to indicate where they had destroyed yet another ship on their way to Edsall Dark. No one else was willing to go through the portal to verify this, though.
That caused yet another problem. If the pilots did decide to have their families board their ships and leave, where would they go? The closest portal had an entire fleet of Athens Destroyers on the other side of it. As far as any of the commercial pilots could tell, the CasterLan fleet of Solar Carriers wasn’t doing anything in response. That meant that traveling out into space would be riskier than normal. Any ship leaving the relative safety of Edsall Dark—for as long as it remained safe, anyway—would fall prey to bands of traveling pirates or mercenaries looking for ships to steal.
The dilemma led to hundreds of personal vessels remaining at the spaceport, no one sure of what to do or where to go in order to be safe. The one thing everyone was sure about: don’t go through the portal if you want to live.
54
They walked through the last of the forest and entered open fields for as far as they could see. In front of them, the sun was coming up, bathing everything in a golden light. Somewhere over the rolling hills were the Edsall Dark spaceports, commercial district, and Vere’s father. Even though all of those things were out there, the group paused at the forest’s clearing.
“Nowhere to hide if more bounty hunters try to get us,” Vere said.
Morgan nodded. “When they try to get us, not if.”
“There’s no other way?” Fastolf asked. He turned away from Morgan when he took a sip from his flask, but also refrained from offering any to Vere.
Pistol’s eyes lit up. “The next best route would take us an additional four days and five hours of walking.”
“You could have just said no.”
The android added, “As it stands, there is now an eight percent chance we arrive before the Vonnegan fleet.”
“We really don’t have any other options?” Baldwin said, looking out at the expanse of open fields where they would be easy targets for hours and hours.
“I’m afraid not,” Morgan said.
Without another word, Vere began walking. The others, even Traskk, gave each other shrugs, then followed.
“I used to walk in these fields every day when I was little,” Vere said to no one in particular. “Not this far out, but it’s all the same for miles and miles.”
She looked to her left, at the fields all around her. To her right, there was more of the same. Hills and fields. Fields and hills. She smiled at the sight as if it were a long lost friend. The thought crossed her mind that for all the bad memories a place could have, it could offer just as many good memories; it was just that the bad times worked their way into her head more often than the others, making the good times easy to forget. How had she gone so long without walking in these lovely wheat-colored fields? The tan grass flowing in the breeze. The rolling hills, one after another. It made her feel young again.
She walked in silence as the others talked to each other of what they were most looking forward to when this was all over. Baldwin said a good shower. Traskk said a good night’s sleep, although no one except Fastolf and Vere understood what he had said. Fastolf, unsurprisingly, wanted a big plate of dumplings and bread. Morgan didn’t have an answer.
As she walked, Vere wondered
what her own answer would be. What was she looking forward to? The first thing that popped into her head were images of Occulus and A’la Dure—dear friends already departed.
The only other image that appeared was the Green Knight. Once he entered her mind, it was impossible to think of anything else. His absurd green armor. His helmet covering who or what he was. His axe and its green painted handle and green tinted blade. The next thought was only logical: a vision of the Green Knight bringing the axe down upon her neck. She imagined her head bouncing across the ground until it came to a rest on the other side of the room. There, she would look back at the rest of her body, still standing where it had been, minus the head.
Unlike the Green Knight, she wouldn’t walk over to the head and place it back atop her own shoulders. She wouldn’t have any other challenges to accept. After a moment, the muscles in her body would relax and the headless body would tumble to the ground, the way the knight’s should have. How lucky the Green Knight was to have been able to collect himself, to have a second chance.
If Occulus were here, he would have somehow known that right now was the perfect time to ask what things Vere would have done differently in life if she too were given a second chance. When she tried to think of an answer, there were too many regrets to keep track of. She would have spent more time with her mother after she became sick. Being young and naïve, she hadn’t appreciated just how fast the days went by. She would have spent less time goofing off with Galen and spent more time asking him questions. If he vanished without a word, there was obviously a whole part of his life that she had no idea about. She had thought of him as the person she knew best in the galaxy. Obviously, she had known very little. She would have reminded her father that just because her true love had left didn’t mean she was some piece of the kingdom’s property to be bartered with. She wouldn’t have run to Folliet-Bright. She wouldn’t have agreed to chop off a big green menace’s head without thought to what might happen next. She might have, she could have, she should have.
Looking back on her life up until this point, her lungs burned at the idea that if she ever did earn a name it very well could be Vere the Might-Have-Been. The thought made her groan and cast her eyes downward. There were so many better ways to be remembered. Occulus had been loyal and understanding. A’la Dure had been contemplative and serene. These were the things she wanted people to remember her as. Not as a thief or a drunk. Not as someone who didn’t live up to her destiny.
She was brought out of her daze by a low hum in the distance. As they listened, the humming grew louder and louder.
“Pistol, what can you tell me?”
“A modified Newleb rover, running on a single Trexel type engine.”
Before she could ask if it was a ship found in her father’s fleet, she saw it coming at them from the side, in line with the forest’s edge rather than straight across the field from the direction of CamaLon.
“Bounty hunter,” she mumbled, and then to everyone, “Find cover if you want to live!”
Except for Morgan, the group dispersed. She remained out in the open, arms folded, staring at the vessel as it raced toward them. Everyone else scrambled for a place to hide. However, there were few options for protection. Baldwin found a boulder that he curled up behind. Vere did the same. Fastolf and Traskk, much too large for any of the rocks to hide them effectively, looked at each other, then started running back into the forest, with Traskk getting there in less than a third of the time it took Fastolf.
As Vere watched from behind her rock, Morgan remained in the open, blaster in hand, refusing to move. She also didn’t shoot at the bounty hunter’s ship. Probably, Vere suspected, because she knew a handheld blaster would have little or no effect on a ship of that size. Once the bounty hunter’s vessel was close enough for the pilot and Morgan to see each other, the ship began firing. But instead of shooting at Morgan, it targeted the rocks where Vere was crouched. One by one, the rocks burst into sprays of tiny stone projectiles.
“Get away from the rocks,” Morgan said, still standing out in the open, still wondering what she could do to hurt the ship.
“There’s nowhere else to hide.”
Although Morgan couldn’t see him, she recognized the voice as Baldwin’s.
“If you’re standing behind one of those boulders when it explodes you’re going to wish you’d died from a direct blast. They’ll be picking rock out of your dead body for days.”
Vere’s head popped out from behind a stone, saw what remained of some of the other boulders, and sighed. As the bounty hunter’s ship arced into a wide turn for another approach, Vere and Morgan stood side by side, waiting for it to get close enough for a lucky shot. Baldwin remained behind the rocks, either because he didn’t believe standing out in the open could possibly be better than standing behind some form of cover or because he guessed the bounty hunter would take aim at Vere before anyone else.
“Any plan?” Vere said as they watched the ship race toward them, low to the ground, for its second pass.
Morgan shook her head and smiled. “I don’t think there are plans for situations like this.”
The ship zipped toward them across the tree line. Vere and Morgan both had their blasters pointed at it, waiting to see the pilot before they bothered wasting shots. If they got lucky, they might be able to hit a fuselage tube or a weapons system panel.
“And to think you’re going to miss out on getting your head chopped off,” Morgan said.
“I know, right. Hilarious.”
Each part of the ship came into view as it got closer—its cockpit, the various panels that had been repaired after previous shootouts. Vere’s trigger finger twitched. But before she could fire, a group of three dots flew out of the forest and landed directly in front of where the ship was flying. An explosion erupted, large enough to damage the front of the rover, forcing it to swerve upward and gain elevation. From the forest edge, Traskk hissed a cheer and showed them he only had one more ion grenade left.
But before turning back around, the bounty hunter’s ship launched a proton missile. At first, the missile was directed away from them, racing out toward space. As it flew, though, it arced until it was flying in the opposite direction, racing directly for them. At the same time, the bounty hunter’s ship turned in the opposite direction until it was also flying toward them again, ready to clean up anything the missile didn’t destroy.
“This isn’t the way I envisioned dying,” Morgan said.
“How did you?”
“With a sword in my hands. Taking on an entire army by myself.”
“Really?”
Morgan nodded. “That was always my fantasy growing up, anyway.”
Vere shook her head in disbelief. “And you think I have issues.”
Both of them leveled their blasters at the approaching ship. Before they could think about the improbability of trying to shoot the missile out of the sky or hope it somehow missed them, another projectile came racing through the air and destroyed it.
She looked up and saw a second ship approaching. It was round with a pair of wings that raced around it in circles like giant propellers.
“Pistol?” she said, then realized she hadn’t seen where he had gone during the fight.
Looking around, she saw him atop a hill, only a small distance away, standing perfectly upright with his arms by his side as if he wasn’t a part of the battle.
“A Corsecc Type E modified—” he started to say but she waved him off from finishing the sentence.
“I’ve never even heard of that type of ship,” she told Morgan. “Definitely not a friend.”
The two of them were sitting targets. The second bounty hunter raced past them once to verify they were the correct targets. When it did, the force of its spinning wings flung the women off their feet, sending them flying backward. Then the ship began a loop to come back around and face them. Before it could, though, the first ship fired a series of laser blasts at it. The second ship respond
ed by releasing a series of atom mines, which were attracted to the ship and then, upon contact, dissolved small sections of it. A hail of shrapnel and burning metal fell from the sky after a mine dissolved the ship’s engines. Vere and Morgan ran to a part of the field not being littered with molten metal.
A third ship appeared, smaller than the others, painted a matte black and with a tinted cockpit. In space, it would be nearly invisible. The fighter immediately began firing at the other bounty hunter, then at Morgan and Vere. Any time either ship got close enough, the two women used their blasters. Neither did any discernible damage, though.
“We aren’t going to last long like this,” Vere said.
“I can’t argue with that.” But even as she said it, Morgan refused to stop firing at the two ships each time they raced by.
At the edge of the forest, Traskk had the last grenade in hand. With a growl and a big windup, he threw it as hard as he could. The black attack ship swerved slightly downward, causing dust and debris to get kicked up all around them. The grenade sailed over the ship, missing completely and exploding near where Baldwin was hiding.
Explosions and blaster fire were going off all around them. Pistol, for all of his maddening quirks, remained on the hilltop watching the explosions without reaction and would continue to do so until given a command to do something else.
Then his head turned, saw yet another ship racing across the open field, and in a booming monotone, said, “M-model Llyushin fighter approaching.”
Vere and Morgan both whooped a cheer, knowing any model of Llyushin was most likely someone sent by the king.
The heavy, armor-plated fighter came in low over the field. The two remaining bounty hunters were still busy firing at each other and at Vere when it appeared over the closest hilltop. Before anyone could respond, the M-model let loose a pair of ion rockets. A trail of energy vapors zipped past the two women, then arced up toward the first bounty hunter’s ship. It exploded so ferociously that there was almost no debris left to fall down from the sky, not even one of its spinning wings.
The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) Page 20
