Space Knight

by Samuel E. Green

  “Do you know where they retrieved the gauntlets from on Brigantes? Was it a particular kind of Grendel?” I asked Zac as the knights vanished into the bushes.

  “I’m not sure. But I did overhear them speaking about a cache.” Zac winced a little as if admitting he’d eavesdropped on the knights caused him pain.

  “Cache?” I asked.

  “It’s kinda like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow,” the artilleryman explained. “I thought they were joking, but maybe they weren’t.”

  “That’s not exactly reliable information to act on,” Nathan said.

  “I don’t think we have any better ideas,” I said before turning to Zac again. “Can you find the portal’s precise location?”

  The artilleryman nodded and images flashed across his visor. He then scanned the area at the bottom of the gorge before indicating a pocket of caves just beyond the stream.

  “There it is,” he said. “You might have to magnify the location.”

  I allowed my visor to enhance the area, and I saw the faint bluish glow of a Grendel portal between a group of twisted palm trees. A rippling sensation travelled along my arms and legs, and I tried to shake it off. It brought back memories of Tyranus and the fellow cadets I’d lost. But most of all, it reminded me of Alice.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and estimated the time it would take us to travel down the naturally-formed mountain path and reach the portal.

  “It’s gonna take us a while to get there,” I said.

  “We can always take the skiff,” Zac said.

  I sighed and turned to face the aircraft. It’d be much faster, but flying so close to the knights would inform them of our presence. We’d also risk enemy fire from the Grendels, although I imagined the skiff could take a few shots.

  We didn’t have a choice. The knights were dealing with lizard-men like they were neophytes, and they could clear the portal long before we ever got there.

  My eyes ran over the layout of the gorge, and I noticed a few mountains around the southern perimeter. Any one of them was big enough to hide us from view while we traveled in the skiff. I pointed the place out to Zac while I explained my plan.

  “I reckon they are having too much fun to notice us even if we flew right in front of their faces, but I can circle around if you want,” Zac said.

  “Great,” I said.

  “So back in the skiff then?” Nathan asked with a hint of disappointment.

  “Sorry, bro, they don’t make them for guys with ‘big bones.’” Richard laughed as he avoided a punch from his twin.

  I was about to step back into the skiff when the tingling sensation came back to me. This time, it almost felt like the smallest parts of me were trembling. It reminded me of what happened immediately before I’d teleported, only this sensation was less intense.

  I paused and breathed through my nostrils. It was probably just my subconscious freaking out because I was about to face another Grendel portal.

  I noticed Neville staring out into the gorge. He hadn’t made a move to enter the skiff yet.

  “Something wrong?” I asked him before I noticed the reflected image on his visor. He was gazing at the portal, and I could see a slight frown on his face through the glass.

  “What the fuck is happening to that Grendel portal?” he whispered almost too softly for me to hear, and I spun to face the portal. I magnified the location, so a small image of the magical doorway showed on the bottom right of my visor.

  “It appears to be expanding,” Neville continued. “Why would it do that?”

  “Uhh . . .” The Academy ship’s commander came to my mind. I remembered the comment she’d made, that somehow a mutation event had caused the Grendel portal on Tyranus to increase in strength.

  Was the same thing happening now? Was it because of my presence here?

  Suddenly I was back on Tyranus as the Grendel Elites surged from the Level Three rift and killed my fellow cadets. Alice flashed before my eyes as plasma balls burned away her arm. Then, her last breath fluttered from her mouth as she died.

  Would the knights face a similar fate? Had I made a mistake coming here?

  “What is it, Nick?” Neville grabbed my arms and shook me out of my stupor.

  My vision cleared, and I focused on what we needed to do next. I’d messed up by coming to the portal. I should have known my mutation would affect it, but would I have done any differently?

  The portal’s image on my visor darkened to a deep purple, and sparks flashed within the whirling gases of the arcane rift.

  A humanoid creature lumbered through the portal. The Grendel monster was almost twice the height of the two-meter tall palms, and it carried a flail in each hand with spiked balls the size of boulders. Unlike the other Grendels, this creature didn’t have a serpentine face, nor were its limbs in any way lizard-like. But the viridescent scales covering its muscles confirmed it as a Grendel.

  My studies at the Academy hadn’t prepared me for such a creature, which meant this particular portal was far above anything my schooling thought we would face.

  A fleeing llama bounded past the scaled giant, and the monster dropped the handle of one of its flails so it could swipe the ground with surprising alacrity. It seized the llama in its massive right hand, raised its fist to its mouth, and chomped the small creature’s head. Its crimson eyes scowled in disgust, and the giant spat the contents of the mouthful out in a glob of bones, brains, and feathers, glued together by yellow slobber.

  The scaled monstrosity turned its head to the portal as two more creatures entered the gorge, equally as large and monstrous as the first. One brandished a tree-like club that looked like it could have been plucked straight from the ground. The other giant didn’t carry any weapons, but a second head stuck out from its right shoulder like a cancerous growth. The two-headed giant raised its left head to sniff the air, and then the right head said something to the other giants. Immediately, they entered the thicket of purple trees and traveled south toward the stream.

  And the knights.

  I heard Zac gasp behind me, and he rushed over to the precipice. He started shaking his head as his eyes took in the terrible sight of the three newcomers. The artilleryman didn’t speak, and I understood he was too shocked to say anything.

  “Shhhhhhhit,” Nathan whispered as he appeared beside me, and I guessed he’d come to see what the hold-up was.

  Richard joined the rest of us as we gaped at the trio of giants. “Those three don’t look particularly nice, do they? Not your typical Grendel type. The database doesn’t say a thing about them. So, what the fuck are they?”

  “Grendel Ogres!” Zac yelled as he rushed back to the skiff. “We gotta get down there and warn the knights!”

  The portal was open, disrupting communication channels, so we wouldn’t be able to contact the knights through our comms.

  “Let’s go!” I yelled to the other squires as I followed Zac.

  A Level Five shouldn’t have brought such dangerous enemies. The knights wouldn’t be ready for one Ogre, let alone three of them.

  Chapter 23

  I strapped myself into the chair beside the pilot’s seat while Zac twisted his hands in front of the skiff’s steering sensors. The engines hummed to life, and we quickly lifted off the ground. The aircraft drifted over the cliff while I looked out the front windscreen and down into the trees for the Grendel Ogres.

  Zac maneuvered the vehicle like an expert, and I got the feeling he’d flown a few skiffs in his time. He looked about ten years older than me, and his hardened features made me think he had lived an eventful life. Even though the squires technically outranked him, I was glad to have an experienced soldier with us.

  The skiff’s nose dipped as it crossed the stream and descended toward the portal. A line of movement rippled through the purple-leaved trees, and I saw the Ogres slowly make their way south through the thicket, but they vanished from view as we flew over them.

  There was a console in
front of my seat with a double-stick yoke extending from the center control board. I remembered the single mounted cannon, and I figured this stick was used to control it. I waved my hand in front of the console, and the monitor turned on, showing the sky above the craft. I moved the yoke, and the turret shifted so the rear of the skiff was visible.

  Red lights flashed from a hundred meters south, and I guessed those were Grendel Warriors firing their plasma rifles at the knights. I moved the cannon until I located the Ogres. They left the edge of the thicket and came to the stream’s bank.

  “Don’t land just yet,” I said to Zac. “I’m gonna try something while we’re still in the air.”

  “You’re gonna try and shoot the Ogres, aren’t you?” Nathan asked from behind me.

  “That’s the plan,” I responded.

  “The other Grendels will shoot at us. If we get hit enough, this craft is gonna blow apart. But I’ll get you closer,” Zac said with a dry laugh.

  The skiff moved toward the Ogres, keeping a vertical distance of about fifty meters from our targets. Either the monsters were deaf and blind, or they didn’t care we were coming for them.

  Plasma balls shot up to meet us, and the skiff’s limited shields depleted until all I could hear were blaring warning sirens. The vessel trembled like we were in a windstorm, but I ignored the movement and framed the two-headed Ogre in the weapon’s crosshairs. I guessed this creature was the leader of the trio, so taking it out first was a good idea.

  The fingers on my right hand navigated around the yoke until I found the switch to engage the turret. A red point appeared in the middle of the crosshairs, and text blinked on the bottom right of the screen to let me know the weapon was ready to fire.

  I kept my eyes fixed to the monitor as the Ogres lurched through the stream. I reached further on the right prong of the control stick for the firing trigger, but I couldn’t find it, and my heart pounded as I watched the two-headed Ogre move toward the edge of another thicket. We were still attracting enemy fire like a magnet, and Zac’s face was streaming with sweat as he battled to keep the skiff from going down.

  My stomach surged with relief as my left hand found the trigger, and I punched it with my thumb. A projectile shot from the mounted cannon to make the twenty-meter distance to the Ogres. The missile projectile was travelling slowly enough for me to pin what kind of ammo the skiff’s weapon fired.

  It was a kinetic energy penetrator or a KEP. The ammo was used primarily as anti-vehicle, which made sense given that we were in a skiff.

  The round hit the ground behind the unsuspecting Ogres, narrowly missing the two-headed creature I’d targeted. The area exploded into a cloud of smoke and dirt, and I hissed with frustration.

  “Does the aircraft have some way of seeing through the smoke?” I asked Zac. The still air kept the thick haze from dissipating quickly, but I guessed the Ogres and Grendel Warriors would also have a hard time seeing the knights through the smoke.

  “Not that I can see,” Zac said as he scanned the pilot’s control board.

  I tried to squash my frustration as I flicked the yoke’s arming switch. The countdown descended from ten while I lined the crosshairs into the smoke. I picked a section of land a little south of where I’d fired the first cannon and hit the trigger as soon as the countdown completed.

  The KEP spewed out of the ship with a trail of thruster vapor and vanished into the smoke on the ground. A half-second later, another explosion carved a crater into the earth. Chunks of lizard flesh shot out in multiple directions, and I figured I’d hit a squad of Grendel Warriors. They weren’t my targets, but at least there’d be fewer plasma balls slamming the skiff from now on.

  There would be no hiding our location from the knights now. They would have heard the explosions if not seen the fireworks. But I didn’t care; we needed to take out the Ogres before they killed the knights. I imagined even warriors as powerful as Olav and Moses would have difficulty dealing with the giants.

  With another press of a button, I loaded the cannon with a third projectile and looked for my next target. The entire area around the southern thicket was shrouded in the smoky aftermath of the first two KEPs, so I guessed where to aim next. After I pulled the trigger, a rocket launched into the haze, and the shockwaves from the resulting explosion rocked the skiff back and forth.

  I readied the weapon for another shot just as an Ogre showed itself about fifty meters into the thicket. It was skirting a hill, and I caged it within the crosshairs on the console. But when I hit the trigger, there was no sound of the weapon firing. Confused, I pressed the button again.

  “Is the weapon blocked?” I asked myself aloud.

  Zac frowned as he read from the monitor on his console. “Hirsch is a cheap bastard,” he muttered. “He only put three rounds in the cannon.”

  I watched the Ogre disappear into a crop of trees, and felt my stomach churn. I growled in frustration and racked my brains for some way to take out these assholes. We were in a skiff, so we were able to fight the enemies much easier than the knights on the ground. Typically the RTF didn’t clear rifts using vehicles or heavy artillery because it damaged the Dust. It was also one of the reasons why knights tended not to use firearms.

  But protecting the Arcane Dust these Ogres might offer didn’t matter now. I doubted even the Stalwart’s knights could defeat three of them, and I imagined Moses would thank us once we found a way to kill the monsters from afar.

  The Ogres had disappeared into the cover of the trees, so even a KEP round wouldn’t get them.

  “Uhh . . . I think I see one of them,” Neville said as he pointed at a figure on the upper left corner of my monitor.

  I pulled the screen with my thumb and index finger to enlarge the figure. It was the Ogre wielding the two flails and he stood atop a hill jutting out from the thicket. The creature was spinning in a circle, like he was a child on a playground. His movements confused me, but then he let his flails fly from its hands.

  They spun toward our craft with deadly accuracy.

  “Shit!” Zac yelled as he wrestled with the motion sensors.

  The inside of the skiff blared with warning signals, telling us enemy projectiles were inbound. Zac swatted his hands in front of the sensors in a desperate attempt to evade the weapons. The skiff responded to the artilleryman’s frantic arm movements, shifting aside in a maneuver that made my stomach roil.

  But the evasive move came too late, and one of the flails slammed into the skiff’s fuselage, piercing the interior wall above my head. Electrical sparks showered from the breach as Zac fought to keep the skiff in the air.

  “Visors on!” I yelled as I activated mine. The deafening sound of rushing wind was silenced as my helmet filtered out the noise.

  Zac gritted his teeth as he struggled. “I gotta land this thing,” he said as he twisted his hands in a figure-eight motion.

  The skiff’s engines sputtered while the vehicle hummed over the southern thicket.

  “I’m gonna try and land on the hill!” Zac shouted between heavy breaths, and the skiff’s landing gear activated.

  “By the Ogre?” I saw the hill he was referring to. It was the same landmass the monster had launched its flails from. The creature was still standing on the chunk of rock, and it held its arms to either side of its body as though it was preparing to catch the craft.

  “What’s that thing doing?” Nathan asked.

  “I don’t know,” Zac said, “but it’s about to get an armful of skiff!”

  The aircraft was about thirty metres from touching the hill when the Ogre leaped toward us. The windscreen smashed in two places as the giant’s fists plunged through reinforced glass, and two meaty fists entered the cabin. One hand gripped Zac around the throat as the skiff skidded wildly across the hill.

  I jumped from my seat and drew my rapier. Zac kicked his legs and futilely pulled at the Ogre’s hands while we hacked at the monster’s right arm. The green scales covering the limb were almost impervi
ous to our attacks, but a few dozen strikes penetrated the serpentine armor, and the Ogre released Zac from its death grip.

  A series of booms rocked the skiff until a third hole appeared in the windscreen above the first two cavities. The Ogre’s giant head entered the cabin, and from the bloody gashes in its overly large forehead, I guessed it had headbutted the glass until it was granted entry to the ship.

  Now that it could see, the monster reached at us with its left hand, but this limb was devoid of scales. Before the arm-sized fingers could grip us, our weapons carved the pink flesh like slices of roast ham.

  I climbed over the front console and drove Neville’s rapier into the Ogre’s skull. The monster swatted at me with what remained of its arms, but the blows were like soft nudges as poison entered the thing’s brain. Green-colored drool oozed from the Ogre’s overhanging jaw, and its eyes rolled in death.

  “Well, all we need are two more skiffs to crash into the remaining Ogres,” Zac said as he massaged his neck. “But someone else can drive next time.”

  “We have to find the other monsters,” I said and then paused while I stared at the head of the dead Ogre. We’d only killed this monster because it had been foolish enough to jump at our skiff. We couldn’t bet on the other giants being as stupid. “Or at least we should find the knights before the Ogres get to them.”

  “Maybe they will want to flee,” Nathan said in an optimistic tone.

  “I doubt that,” Zac said. “I’ve never known them to run from anything.”

  “So we’re leaving the safety of this skiff to help the knights because we think those Grendels are too strong for them?” Neville asked as he walked to the exit door.

  “Yeah,” I confirmed.

  “You think we’re going to tip the balance? Four squires and an artilleryman? Don’t you think they are traitors?”

  “Are you with the crew or not?” I asked him. “Until we have definite proof of insurrection, they’re our fellow crewmembers.”

  “I was always going to fight,” Neville said with a slight smile. “I just thought your reasoning was terrible.”