The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (16 page)

The Griffin Fire was already approaching the Excalibur when Vere saw trails of light racing toward the asteroid. She knew exactly what the thirty or forty objects were: a meteor shower. She did a scan to make sure the medical transport wasn’t near the impact zone even though she knew Quickly would be capable of getting the ship out of danger’s way if it were.

The Griffin Fire’s systems located the vessel. It was near the area that was about to be pelted, but didn’t appear to be in imminent danger of being hit.

“Vere to Tearsheet-3, do you copy?” When she didn’t get an answer from anyone aboard the ship, she added, “Quickly, are you there?”

No answer. The meteors continued to approach the asteroid. The trail of light behind the rocks were the bits of mineral and ice that were burning off of the meteorites as it approached the Excalibur. By the time the shower hit the Excalibur, they would be the size of coins. But even coins flying thousands of miles a minute would be deadly.

“Quickly, are you there? It’s Vere.” Silence. “Fastolf?” And then, a moment later, “Baldwin?”

She told Traskk to scan for life while she brought the Griffin Fire in closer to where the transport had landed on the Excalibur. After carefully pressing a series of buttons, Traskk growled and pointed to where the meteor shower was approaching.

Although Vere and Traskk were too far away to see their friends, the sensors said there were two life forms on the asteroid and another in the transport. The two out on the asteroid were exactly where the meteors were going to hit. Without knowing for sure, she assumed Quickly was aboard the ship and that Baldwin and Fastolf were out on the rock trying to figure a way to free the ships.

Traskk hissed a question and Vere said, “I don’t know. Maybe they don’t see it approaching.”

The meteors got closer and closer to the Excalibur. As fast as the meteorites were traveling, it was amazing how slow everything seemed to be happening. She guided the Griffin Fire away from the transport and began heading toward where the two people were standing out on the asteroid. By the time the pair of figures came into view, the meteor shower began impacting the Excalibur. Most of the tiny fragments of rock missed her friends. Most. Not all.

She watched in dismay as one of the figures, already stumbling, managed to avoid getting hit. But then a series of three rocks struck the second figure. In rapid succession: his hand, his elbow, his shoulder. Instead of helping the man who was hurt, the other figure kept crawling and then also became still.

She jumped out of the pilot’s seat while the Griffin Fire was still racing toward the asteroid.

“Land her right next to them,” she said, darting out of the cockpit and not waiting to hear Traskk’s response.

It was risky letting him try to land the ship himself, especially without her there to watch, but there was nothing else to do. Asking him to put on a suit of space armor was out of the question. With his tail, it would take three times as long for him to put it on and ensure it was correctly sealed. Her friends would be dead by then. Instead, she could have her suit on in two minutes, by which time Traskk should have the ship in position.

As she stepped into the space armor’s boots and pulled the attached leggings up to her waist, the scene of what had happened kept replaying in her mind. She latched the leggings to the harness that stabilized the entire suit. The bottom half of the space armor was done. A thought occurred. Neither of the men she had seen out on the asteroid had been overly large.

“Keep calling to the transport,” she yelled to the cockpit as she dressed. “Fastolf is aboard it. See if you can find out what’s happening.”

She had finished putting on the top half of her armor and was getting ready to put on her helmet when she was thrown across the room. The good news was that Traskk had managed to land the Griffin Fire. The bad news was that he had done so with all of the finesse of a Gthothch in a china shop.

A loud hiss of irritation came from the cockpit.

“You did fine,” she called back. “Don’t worry about it.”

With the helmet on and sealed, she pressed the button for the back hatch to open. Peering out in open space, she looked down and saw that Traskk had managed to park the Griffin Fire only ten feet from where the two bodies were. Not bad.

She was running.

Both bodies were face down on the ground. Neither were moving. Without bothering to see who was who, she did a quick assessment. One wasn’t moving but seemed uninjured. She guessed because he was out of air. The other was missing an arm and might have sustained other injuries as well. And, because his space armor had been torn open from the meteors, he would not only be without air but would soon freeze to death.

Without any hesitation, she withdrew the Meursault blade she had attached to the back of her armor and, winding up, took one giant swing. In the vacuum of space, without any air to slice through, there was no trail of black mist following the blade. The blade came down a fraction of an inch to the left of where the third meteor had destroyed everything at the shoulder.

Drops of blood hovered in the air, then began to drift toward the asteroid’s surface. A small sliver of torn and raw flesh fluttered away, a mist of crimson dancing around it. On the other side of where the Meursault blade had slashed, the skin looked like wet sand from where it had been burned by the blade before solidifying again.

This would cauterize the wound so he—whoever it was—wouldn’t lose more blood while she got him back to the ship.

With one knee on the ground, she yanked the limp body over her shoulders. With a grunt, she stood and began walking back to the Griffin Fire.

At the top of the ramp, Traskk, wearing only a space armor helmet that fed him oxygen, scooped the body off of her shoulders and disappeared into the ship. Racing back for the second person, Vere realized she still didn’t know who had lost an arm—or if they had even been worth trying to rescue because of the shape they had been in. No matter.

She was breathing heavily now. If it wasn’t for the extremely light gravity on the Excalibur, she would have needed to rest after unloading the first body. Instead, she darted back and scooped up the second body without pause.

“Thank my lucky stars Fastolf wasn’t out here,” she mumbled to no one but herself.

This body she also hoisted over her shoulders, then began walking back to her ship. Traskk wasn’t there when she got to the top of the ramp. Exhausted, she shrugged and let the body fall onto the padded bench beside her. Only then did she see that it was Baldwin, meaning that Quickly had been the first person she had brought aboard.

From the red light on Baldwin’s space armor, she saw that he was completely out of oxygen. Calculating how long he might have been without air, she unclasped his helmet and ran to get an oxygen mask. Before putting it over his mouth, she gave him CPR and he coughed back into consciousness. As he came to, she held his hands down by his sides in case he was oblivious to what was going on and reflexively tried to take the oxygen mask back off. Once he was alert and blinked in acknowledgment, she let his arms go.

“Traskk?” she yelled.

He roared from the medical bay.

“Stay here,” she told Baldwin.

In the little room that served as part first aid room and part storage room, Traskk was lowering a scanner over Quickly’s upper body. The top half of his space armor had been removed and was on the floor.

“Is he alive?”

Traskk said he was.

She came closer. Quickly was still unconscious. Much of his chest and shoulder region were showing the first signs of frostbite. The equipment aboard her ship would be able to counteract the damage that the freezing temperatures had done. His shoulder and missing arm, however, were a different story.

“We can make sure he survives,” she said. “But we don’t have the equipment to get him a new arm.”

Later on, when he had recovered from the frostbite and was back on Edsall Dark, Quickly would have a couple different options for what to do with his shoulder. If he was a match for the genetic programming, a new arm could be grown and attached. If he wanted a stronger and nearly impervious option, he could have an android’s arm secured to his torso. Either way, the important thing was that he was alive.

Vere’s eyes narrowed. “Did you get in contact with Fastolf?”

Traskk growled and shook his head.

“Then I think you know where we’re going next. And when we get to the medical transport, he better have a really good explanation for all of this.”

34

Fastolf could hear Vere’s voice yelling across the Tearsheet-3’s comms system, sometimes sounding concerned, other times angry.

“Fastolf! If you’re in there, you better answer.”

He had lost track of how long it had been since the first signal had been sent from the Griffin Fire to the medical transport. The first one—or, at least, what he thought had been the first—woke him up from another stupor.

Wiping drool from his mouth, he said, “Baldwin? Quickly?”

When neither of them replied and he had instead heard Vere’s calls from her ship, he had stumbled into the cockpit and found it empty.

“Guys?”

A holographic display beside the pilot’s seat showed the terrain surrounding the ship. Neither Baldwin nor Quickly were out on the Excalibur anymore. Instead, both were aboard the Griffin Fire.

“Fastolf, is everything okay?” Vere asked.

What should he say? That he had been asleep while his two companions were doing the dangerous exploring? Or that he might have had just a little too much to drink and had blacked out? He didn’t want to admit either of these things, and so he remained silent.

In the medical transport’s cockpit, he had the computer show him a rapid succession visual of everything that had happened in the last few minutes. A holographic version of Baldwin and Quickly appeared not far from the holographic version of the ship Fastolf was in. A moment later, a three dimensional meteor shower went directly toward his buddies.

“Uh, no,” he muttered.

Vere’s calls to the transport’s cockpit became more urgent, more irritated. But now that he had been silent for so long, he couldn’t just start responding as if he had been there the entire time. That would look worse than if he just stayed quiet, he thought.

Intermittent with Vere’s calls were Traskk’s growls. Fastolf didn’t understand Basilisk, and so he convinced himself it was still the best course of action if he just kept quiet.

A while went by with nothing but silence. He wished he was back on Edsall Dark. He wished he had never agreed to tag along with Baldwin on this fool’s mission. He wished he had never brought his flask along, and he swore that if he got out of this without getting in too much trouble he would never have another drink.

“Fastolf?” Vere said. “We have Baldwin and Quickly. We’re heading to your ship.”

The anger in her voice made him wince. Still, he said nothing. What was he supposed to say?

From the transport’s cockpit, he saw the Griffin Fire land on the asteroid directly beside the Tearsheet-3. Fastolf rocked back and forth in his seat, not knowing what to do.

Vere’s voice came over the comms again: “Fastolf, if you don’t open the hatch door, I’m going to blow it off.”

He knew, both from her tone and from all the times he had seen her follow through with her threats, that she was serious. He gave a slight whimper, stood, then pressed the button for the hatch door to open.

35

“Each neutron cylinder is in position,” the lead engineer said over the comms system.

When they weren’t busy preparing for the oncoming war, Morgan and Pistol had watched as much of the portal’s preparation as possible, the teams working their way across all three hundred and sixty metal units that formed the enormous circle.

While the five crews had been making their way around the portal’s outline, a sixth team had departed from one of the Solar Carriers and had begun working at the very middle of the empty circle. That crew’s responsibility was to determine exactly where the center of the circle was, to within less than one ten-thousandth of a centimeter. After marking the spot, they began setting up the quark collider, a glowing sphere the size of a human hand.

If Morgan didn’t know what they were doing, she would have thought the precision with which they maneuvered the collider into place, as well as the diminutive size of the object they were taking such great pains to be careful with, must have been a waste of time. But because the lead engineer kept her informed about each step, she not only knew exactly what the teams were doing, she also knew that she would never have a chance to witness this moment again no matter how long she lived. That was why she watched without blinking instead of getting some much needed rest.

The team of men, floating in space at the very middle of the empty portal, signaled to the Solar Carrier. Then they set their suits of space armor to propel them back to their ship with a gentle burst of air.

A moment later the lead engineer radioed to Morgan, “The quark collider is in place.”

“Proceed when ready,” Morgan replied into her own ship’s comms.

The other five crews received instructions from the lead engineer to begin departing from the portal ring where they had completed their work.

Only once in history had a portal accidently been activated while a team of workers was still in the field of space where the white energy would be ignited. No trace of the team, a group of six Lipiddians, has ever been found. Mystics insisted that the winged aliens still haunted the Lipid-10 portal and that anyone who passed through the portal there could hear the screams of the dead crew.

In the Dark Ages of the Hursh-Die sector, the insane ruler Brutus the Unimaginable had sent people to their deaths by launching them from a spaceship into the nearest portal. He made sure each person to be executed was outfitted in a suit of space armor so they remained alive and conscious as they drifted toward the portal and so Brutus could listen to their screams as they did so. Historians noted that Brutus had visible goose bumps each time the screaming stopped, after the body vanished into the portal.