“What for?” Modred said, stepping backward and clenching his jaw.
“We think to try and find a way to shut off the portal, sir.”
“Shut off the portal?” Modred erupted into a fit of boisterous laughter. “Shut off the portal?”
The private tried to smile but could only grimace in a way that made it look as though he had to relieve himself. “Sir?”
“There is no way to shut off the portal from here!” Modred howled with laughter.
The private stood there for a moment, giving Modred time to get over his fit of hysterics. When the king’s stepson kept laughing, though, he backed away toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Modred said.
“I thought I would get back to my post, sir.”
“In such a hurry?”
“I thought you were done with me, sir.”
“Are you planning something against me?”
“What?”
“Are you?” Modred said, yelling so fiercely that spittle hit the private’s face.
“No, sir, I just—”
“This would all be over if I just happened to die, right? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“No, sir, I—” The private backed toward the door.
Modred let both arms return to his side. The hand that had been behind his back was now visible. But when the private looked, all he saw was a handle and crossguard. He frowned, trying to make sense of what the king’s stepson might be holding. Then Modred turned his wrist and the blade came into view. A Chameleon. The Invisible Death.
“Sir, I—”
The private stepped back once more but his back was against the closed door. Modred was coming toward him with a crazed look and a sword that kept appearing and disappearing as the blade changed angles.
“Sir, please,” the private said, but he saw in Modred’s eyes that the other man wasn’t listening.
Self-preservation took over and without thinking of the repercussions, an excuse, an alibi, or anything else, he raised his blaster and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing happened. The private looked down at his blaster, confused.
Click.
Again, nothing happened. That was when he realized the king’s chambers must be protected by a Treagon barrier and that his blaster would never work there. In the next instant, a flash of sun-colored light came sweeping at him as the blade came down.
After the private’s body had crumpled to the floor, his head bouncing across the room, Modred let the sword hang by his side. Blood dripped from the invisible blade.
“Shut the portal off?” Modred said, laughing once more.
68
From underneath Hector’s ship, Morgan held her hand out so Fastolf could see it. “Wrench,” she commanded.
“Is there anything we can help with?” Baldwin said, looking over at Fastolf with doubt.
Morgan’s voice came from under the ship: “Just stand there and look pretty.” And then, “Calibration spanner.”
“I already handed you one,” Fastolf said.
“Another one!”
She said it in the tone that he associated with having his nose broken or his ear torn from the side of his face and he immediately thrust his hand into the bag of tools to retrieve what she had requested.
The two men stood next to Hector’s ship while Morgan banged away at the Llyushin’s underside. Traskk stood watch at the nearest entrance to make sure no one came to try and kill them. Finally, Morgan slid across the ground so she was out from under the ship, then reached back under and dragged out another of the ship’s blast plating panels.
Leaving the tools on the ground, she took one of the panels and began jogging back toward the control room. After a few steps, she looked behind her and said, “Don’t just stand there, each of you grab a panel and let’s go.”
She was off then, with Baldwin and Fastolf hustling as quick as they could to keep up with her.
Back at the blast-proof control room door, Morgan dropped a satchel of blasters on the ground and began sifting through them for her favorite type of weapon. Fastolf and Baldwin arrived a minute later, both out of breath, neither of them with a metal panel in their hands. She was just about to scold them when Traskk appeared, holding the entire stack of panels—a few hundred pounds’ worth of blast-proof paneling from Hector’s ship.
“What now?” Fastolf asked, hunched over.
“Place a sheet parallel with the control room door,” Morgan said. “The door is blast-proof, but that’ll only last for so long.”
Baldwin looked at the panel nearest to him, then the bag of blasters. “I don’t get it.”
“Traskk is going to hold this panel in place. I’m going to stick a blaster through the gap and keep shooting. The blast coating will wear off after it gets shot a couple thousand times.”
“A couple thousand times?” Fastolf said. “You need a drink if you think the war will still be going on by the time we get done.”
“That’s your entire plan?” Baldwin asked, shaking his head.
Above them, a monitor outside the control room showed a pair of Solar Carriers that had been reduced to burned out hulks. Others had exploded and were nothing more than space debris. And still more Athens Destroyers were coming through the portal.
She looked at the group in front of her. A physician’s assistant she had never seen before they both happened to appear at Eastcheap. A fat thief she never wanted to see again. A Basilisk with a temper to match her own. Seven days earlier, she never would have guessed that these people would be all the help she would have to stop a war.
“It’s the only plan we have,” she said.
Traskk growled something and everyone looked at him. With Pistol and Vere gone, no one could understand what he was trying to say. He hissed a second time and held his hands up to show them.
“I think he wants to know if you’re going to shoot his hands off,” Fastolf said.
Almost all of Traskk would be protected by the blast panel he was holding, but his hands could still get hit, or a blast could get past him, ricochet off the wall, and hit him in the back.
Morgan smiled and said, “I guess we could let Fastolf hold it instead.”
The drunken thief immediately stepped away from the rest of the group. “I don’t think so.”
Traskk gave a resigned hiss, his long tongue slithering in and out from between his fangs as he did so. Without another word, he picked up the first panel and moved in place.
Morgan patted him on the back and said, “Hold it still and I’ll try my best. I promise.”
He inched forward even more, allowing less room between the panel he was holding and the control room door.
Without another word, she began to fire.
The first shot hit the control room door, bounced off, hit the blast-proof panel of Hector’s ship, ricocheted back at the control room door, over and over again. By the time she fired the second shot, the first laser streak had already bounced back and forth between the two panels a dozen times. By the time she fired the third blast, the previous two blasts had bounced back and forth more times than she could keep track of.
Over and over her finger pulled the assault blaster’s trigger, causing flashes of laser fire to burst forth. Each one struck the control room door, then immediately bounced off and headed back toward her. But just as quickly, the shots hit the blast panel of Hector’s ship and once again were deflected at the control room wall.
Hundreds of lines of laser fire bounced back and forth like a science fair project. Slowly, the blast coating on the control room door began to deteriorate and the laser streaks began to burn into the panels. Brown spots of tinged metal began to spread across the once mirror-like door. When the first assault blaster ran out of a charge and the lasers were all absorbed into the burning metal, Morgan tossed it aside.
“New panel,” she said.
Traskk tossed the charred and smoking blast-proof panel behind him,
picked up another, then aligned it in front of the control room door. Once it was in place, Morgan began firing with the fresh blaster.
After a minute, a burst of laser hit the metal panel right where Traskk was holding it, burning two clawed fingers. He knew, though, that if he dropped the atomized metal panel he and Morgan would both die from having hundreds of more laser blasts hit them, and so all he could do was roar and keep holding the panel as steady as possible.
Another blaster was empty and Morgan tossed this one aside too, then picked up yet another. At the same time, Traskk grabbed a fresh piece of blast-proof paneling.
“And you guys thought this was crazy,” she said, laughing as she fired.
69
Everywhere Hector and Pistol went, they passed people who were running one way or the other. Some were in uniform, some not. Some ran with a purpose, others were simply driven by panic.
People were beginning to whisper that not only was Hotspur’s fleet losing the battle, they were being slaughtered. That meant it was a matter of time until the Vonnegan ships either began firing on the city from high above the planet or deployed troops to overtake the capital. No one wanted to be around when either of those things happened.
Hector’s hover platform carried him to another intersection of hallways. When he looked around he didn’t see anything. Up the next hallway he began. Everywhere he went, Pistol followed.
Finally, Hector stopped and said, “Do you have any idea where a secondary control room might be? A command center? Anything?”
“I do not.”
“If we get you to a terminal, can you plug into the capital’s system and check where it might be?”
Pistol’s face remained absolutely emotionless when he spoke. “We can try, but it is extremely unlikely that I will have access to anything so sensitive.”
“Any other suggestions?”
A circle of light arced around both of Pistol’s irises as he processed the information. “Nothing that is likely to produce an advantageous outcome.”
Hector nodded. He had been all over the city center. He had been in the main control room and knew enough to realize there were no portal controls there. He had been on almost every level of the upper tiers of the capital center, and yet he had no idea where a portal command center might be—if it even existed.
Out a window, he saw a Solar Carrier’s power go out. The entire ship went dark. A moment later, it began drifting into the combat zone. It wandered, powerless, for a few seconds before more cannons ripped it apart. Hundreds of men would never have the choice of receiving replacement bionic legs, or no legs at all. Their destinies had been made for them.
He sighed, then leaned forward. When he did, the energy platform that his torso rested on began to race up the next hallway.
70
As Vere made her way across the fields leading to CamaLon and the heart of her father’s kingdom, she thought about Occulus and A’la Dure and Galen and everyone and everything else from her past. She thought of the last six years—fun, but a waste compared with how it could have been spent. She thought of Occulus’s last words and also of A’la Dure’s and Galen’s.
You can be whatever type of person you want.
Be better.
The galaxy is an incredible place when you start to see how it works.
She couldn’t help but wonder what her father’s last words would have been if she had been there to hear them.
Above her, a line of orange fire streaked through the Edsall Dark sky as part of a mangled Athens Destroyer entered the atmosphere and plummeted toward the ground. In front of her, the gate to CamaLon got bigger and bigger as she approached. No bounty hunters were coming for her any more. Instead, there was an eerie silence that seemed inconsistent with the death and destruction going on everywhere over the planet.
Why hadn’t she come here sooner? What had been more important? Drinking? Thieving? Just because a man she had loved had chosen a life without her rather than one with her? Because her father, usually understanding and loving, had momentarily seen her through the eyes of a ruler rather than those of a father, had thought more of what might be better for his people than for his daughter? Because it had been so easy for him to forget about her mother and marry someone else?
Her eyes returned to the battle overhead. A line of Athens Destroyers took an amazing amount of cannon fire, three of the ships losing their structural integrity and two of them breaking into hundreds of pieces. But at the same time, another group of Destroyers moved into place beside the Solar Carriers that had been focused on the first ships and obliterated an entire row of her father’s armada.
The battle wouldn’t last much longer, and still the ground defenses weren’t providing support to Hotspur. Even if they did win, her father was already dead, as was Galen—the love of her life—and both Occulus and A’la Dure.
Only days earlier, her life had consisted of avoiding this planet, drinking and stealing and fighting along with people who didn’t care about one kingdom or another. Now, two of those friends were dead. Her father’s kingdom was being taken over. And she was there to witness it firsthand.
She continued walking across the field until she arrived at the massive gates that divided the wilderness from the capital. Although she wasn’t sure if they would consider her an enemy or an ally, she certainly did expect guards at the gate. No one was there, however.
“Hello?” she said, passing through the open gate and making her way into the capital. The guard post was vacant. No kids or anyone else were around either. Everything was perfectly silent.
She passed by the area where she and Galen had played hide and seek so many times as kids. She passed by the area she had walked every morning with her mother. Every place she went, instead of the activity and people she associated with that place, there was only silence and emptiness.
“Hello?” she said again, but once more there was only quiet as the battle raged above, and she shuddered at the sight. This was what her father’s kingdom would be like if everyone were dead and CamaLon were a ghost town.
With that thought in mind, she quickened her pace, heading for the lift that would take her up to the top of the city center. Someone there should be able to tell her what was going on.
71
General Agravan stood at the main window of the command deck of his Athens Destroyer. His ship had taken some direct hits but nothing that the blast panels and shields couldn’t withstand. Fourteen of his Destroyers were out of action, nine of them complete losses—all personnel aboard assumed dead. But that was only one side of the story.
The other side was that only a few Solar Carriers remained. Already, more than thirty of the CasterLan flagships were decimated. Six more were still functioning, but for the purpose of battle they were also lost.
Mowbray had been wrong about there being no fighting at all, but Agravan preferred it this way. A victory without bloodshed inspired no one. What would Minot have to be proud of if the CasterLan army allowed their invaders to take over the kingdom without a fight? Minot’s reputation needed to be built on conquering defiant peoples, not on accepting the surrender of weaklings. This way, everyone would see what the Vonnegan fleet was capable of. Everyone would see that even a kingdom as mighty as the CasterLans had no forces capable of withstanding the Athens Destroyers.
“It is glorious,” Minot said, standing next to him on the deck, watching the same death and destruction.
“That it is,” Agravan agreed. “And soon, it will be yours.”
Whereas Mowbray had been wrong about there being no resistance at all, he had been right about the CasterLan defenses not being utilized. How Mowbray knew such a thing would happen was beyond Agravan’s grasp. It was part of what made Mowbray such a cunning and effective leader; he always knew more than anyone else. The proof was in front of the Vonnegan fleet as they destroyed Solar Carrier after Solar Carrier without any of the famous CasterLan defenses being initiated.
“Ca
ptain Murrow,” he said, not turning away from the window.
“Yes, General.”
“It’s time to mop up the remains.” In the space between the two fleets, hundreds of men in space armor drifted, waiting to be rescued. “Release the fighters.”
The captain nodded and punched in a series of commands on his display panel.
Deep inside the ship, a notification sounded. The side hangars of each Athens Destroyer opened up. From within each one, dozens of Vonnegan Thunderbolts, the single-manned attack fighters of the Vonnegan army, lifted off and joined the fight, swarming the already overwhelmed CasterLan fleet.
72
“We’re almost there,” Morgan said, peeking through the gap where Traskk was holding yet another panel so every blaster shot could be reflected back and forth. His fingers had been hit by lasers four more times. Each time this happened, he roared and bared his fangs as if he were going to attack everything around him. With every angry bellow, Morgan cringed and refused to look his direction for fear that acknowledging what was happening might prompt the Basilisk to start ripping the closest living thing to pieces.
Each time she peered around the edge of the blast panel, more and more laser shots were absorbing into the control room’s door rather than bouncing off of it. She had emptied four blasters into the door and was now on her fifth.
“Two more Solar Carriers without power. It looks like the Thunderbolts are in the battle now, too.”
She had asked Baldwin to watch the monitor above them and report on what was happening in the battle, but each description was so discouraging that she didn’t want to hear any more.
“It’s a matter of time until Hotspur releases the Llyushin fighters to counter them,” she said.
In the academy, Hotspur had been worshipped as an idol, a military leader who craved being at the front of every battle. Now, though, she saw him differently. His leadership style was built on intimidation rather than respect. His desire for glory above all else led him to be reckless and had single-handedly jeopardized the entire kingdom. But he was also the only person keeping the Vonnegan fleet from descending to the surface and changing CamaLon from the capital of the CasterLan Kingdom to yet another Vonnegan territory, along with the rest of Edsall Dark.
The Green Knight (Space Lore Book 1) Page 25
