The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) (21 page)

The woman was tall and thin, with no hair and leathery flesh. Scrope guessed she was half human and half something he couldn’t identify.

“All of these security precautions might seem like a hassle, but I can assure you they are all necessary,” the woman said with a slight alien accent. “You wouldn’t believe how many people have tried to assassinate me. Nor would you believe how many more would love the chance to try.”

“Well, I’m not one of them,” Scrope said, smiling and offering a slight bow. “It is very nice to meet you, Ballona.”

47

“Please,” said Vere. “I need your help.”

The Griffin Fire was somewhere behind her in the distance, although it was no longer visible. For all practical purposes, she was completely alone on an asteroid hurtling through space.

“I’m running out of time. If you’re out there, please help.”

If her microphone were on and Baldwin or Traskk could hear her on the Griffin Fire, they would think she was dying. She wasn’t, though. She was simply wandering the Excalibur—every surface, every crater, every part of every exposed ship—trying to find a way to free the legendary army from the rock that contained it.

At first, her pride had gotten the better of her and she had refused to ask for help from the imaginary matron Mortimous said was out here. But as the hours passed and as the Vonnegan fleet kept getting closer, she had begun calling for help every time she approached a new ship or a new crater. She still didn’t believe the Matron of the Mineral was a real person, figuring it was another trick Mortimous was playing on her. But it was the only thing she thought she might know about the asteroid that none of the other explorers had realized. Or maybe they
had
also heard about the Matron. Perhaps that was why Gordian the Stubborn and many others had been tricked into wasting their fortunes and the decades of their lives out on the Excalibur.

All she could do was keep walking in two-hour shifts, returning to the ship just long enough to replenish her oxygen supply, and then venture out again. The first thing she always did, upon exploring a new part of the Excalibur, was to call out in the desperate hope the matron was a real person.

This had been going on for two and a half days. Each time she returned to the Griffin Fire, Baldwin and Traskk looked at her with pleading eyes but neither of them said anything. She knew exactly what they were thinking: when was she going to give up and lead her forces into battle? Would the two fleets battle each other without her there?

In her anguish she had even begun getting up while Baldwin and Traskk were still asleep and going out for additional hikes. Traskk had woken up on one of these occasions, discovered that she had left the ship without telling anyone, and had nearly ripped her head off when she returned. After that he had made her promise to tell him when she was going out on the rock, even if she had to wake him to do so.

The only reason the reptile hadn’t told Baldwin about it, she suspected, was that he had seen something in her eyes as she boarded the Griffin Fire in the middle of the night. It was something he had only seen on her face once before, as they walked across Edsall Dark on their way to meet the Green Knight and the approaching Vonnegan fleet.

Desperation.

It was something he never wanted to see in her gray eyes ever again. He longed to protect her and would gladly fight any attacker on her behalf, but he couldn’t help her fight the mental battles or the panic forming in her head.

If Traskk had told Baldwin about her panicked secret missions, it would have been an admission of the sheer hopelessness of their situation. After all, if she was the leader of the CasterLan Kingdom and she was this desperate, the kingdom’s outlook could not be very promising.

Rather than trying to prevent her from going back out on the asteroid, Traskk had hugged her and asked if he could join her on the next walk. When he got the same answer she always gave, he had put her helmet on her head and wished her good luck. After that, she was sure he not only sat in the Griffin Fire’s cockpit during the day but also slept in there at night just on the chance she did run into trouble and radioed back for help.

She looked around at the vastness of the asteroid she was walking on. It was so large that wherever she looked, the rock appeared flat, the same as if she were on a planet. In the distance, instead of mountains, she saw the front quarter of one of the ships jutting out into space. In another direction, instead of a lake, she saw a wide swath of flat metal, the side of an Excalibur ship.

She still remembered the ghost story that Galen had told her when they were both children. Even as a seven-year-old, she was familiar with stories of the Excalibur, but she had never heard the story Galen recounted that day. There was an explorer, he said, who had landed on the Excalibur, thinking it was just like any other asteroid. But after walking for only one hour, he was in the middle of what appeared to be a frozen sea of stone and trapped ships. Every direction he turned, he saw nothing but more rock and more ships sticking out of that rock. Before long, he wasn’t sure which direction he had come from. Realizing that the electronic system on his space armor was faulty, he had no way to communicate with his ship or to determine where it was located. It was only an hour away, but it could have been an hour in any direction.

“People say the explorer’s spirit is still wandering the Excalibur, calling out for help as he looks for his ship,” Galen had said with a devilish grin as he reached the end of the story.

Vere had punched him on the shoulder as hard as she could and told him it was a dumb story. She would never admit that the tale had given her nightmares for the next week.

Again, she called out to anyone who might or might not be out there, “If you’re here, whoever you are, please help.”

She got into the habit of pausing for a few seconds after each plea for help. There was never any response, though, and each time she yelled for some mystical matron to help her she found herself cursing Mortimous under her breath.

Everywhere she walked, she inspected the rock as if it were something other than a giant stone racing through space. She looked for doors leading to secret tunnels. She looked for hidden keys or touch panels. She looked for anything at all other than ships and stone. But that was all she ever saw.

“Everyone I know is going to die. If you’re out there, you have to help me.”

Of course there was no answer.

When she got frustrated she picked up a stone and threw it as far as she could. With the Excalibur’s extremely low gravity, the rock sailed through the air further than she could walk in one two-hour session. Another time, overcome with anger, she kicked the side of an Excalibur ship until she thought she had broken her foot. Her tantrums never made her feel any better.

Every once in a while she got to a section of the asteroid where a crew of workers had set up camp decades or centuries earlier. Tools still lay where they had been abandoned. However, only fragments remained after the asteroid passed by the blue sun. Otherwise, she might have been able to find an equipment tent or a tiny containment field with old gear still inside.

There were chisel marks in the stone where the workers had gone about trying to free the ships. These indentations were always light, never penetrating more than a few inches into the rock because the crews knew that anyone who dug too far would set off the Excalibur’s self-destruction sensors.

“I don’t want the ships for myself,” Vere said to no one. “I don’t want to conquer the galaxy or anything. As soon as I turn the Vonnegan fleet away from my kingdom, I’ll never use them again.”

How many other people had come to the rock with the same idea? Would she really have it within her to return nearly one thousand starships when she was done with them? Surely not. Anyway, if she did just send them floating off to space, pirates would get them and begin terrorizing every sector in the galaxy. She would have to hold onto them. She wouldn’t live forever, though. Whoever followed her might want to expand the kingdom. With the Excalibur Armada, nothing would stop them from doing so.

Every time she spoke it was to some person that Mortimous had mentioned, never to the asteroid itself. Every child knew the tale of Vinion the Longer, who, as a twenty-year-old king, had spent his remaining fifty years on the asteroid, asking its permission to take the ships. He had asked in every possible language, in every possible word order, in every possible fashion. He became obsessed with the idea that carving the rock away would never lead to the treasure beneath it. What you had to do instead, he told everyone, was simply
ask
the rock for permission to take the ships. No matter how many languages he spoke, no computer or being or anything else within the rock had given him that permission.

“This is all a waste of time,” she said, kicking a rock. “My people are going to die and I’m not going to be able to protect them.”

“Starships don’t prevent death and suffering.”

Vere spun around to face whoever had spoken to her.

Someone was there, almost within arm’s reach of her. Like Mortimous, the figure was covered in robes. But this one, unlike the seer, was shorter and more delicate in stature. The robes covering the figure were a light cream, almost white. Vere didn’t question whether it was Traskk or Baldwin playing a joke on her because they were both much too large to be the person in front of her. Not to mention that the voice that had spoken obviously belonged to an older woman, not a young man or a Basilisk.

But most of all, she knew it wasn’t them or any other ordinary person because there was no space armor underneath the robes. Also, no way to be heard. And yet this woman had communicated with Vere without speaking through the earpiece in her helmet.

It was the Matron of the Mineral. It had to be.

Vere stared at the figure for a moment, the single sentence the woman had spoken echoing in her head. That familiar voice, along with the woman’s slender frame, triggered a slew of memories. Standing before Vere was the Matron of the Mineral, but Vere knew her by a different name.

“Mother?”

48

A holographic image of Morgan hovered over a display in the Griffin Fire’s cockpit.

“Any luck there?” she said, her eyes fluttering shut in irritation, her tone conveying that she knew exactly what the answer would be.

Baldwin shook his head. “Nothing.”

“When is Vere planning on returning?”

The honest answer was that Baldwin didn’t know if Vere would ever return to Edsall Dark without the Excalibur Armada. She had become obsessed with it the same way as every other ruler who had come here and hadn’t left. In the past three days, he had seen her for less than thirty minutes each day, and only then because she needed to refill her space armor, get some food, or take a brief nap. All the rest of her time was spent out on the Excalibur.

The most troubling part of seeing her consumed by this preoccupation was that she was wasting away in front of him. She looked as though she had lost ten pounds from a combination of not eating and not sleeping enough. Each time he did see her, the dark circles under her eyes were larger than the previous time.

“I don’t know,” he told Morgan.

In the copilot’s seat, Traskk gave a soft grumble.

“Well, it better be soon,” Morgan said. “The portal has been activated. Our Solar Carriers are arriving. The Vonnegan fleet is nearly here.” Her voice grew louder, angrier. “The only thing missing is the woman in charge of the entire kingdom!”

“I’ll let her know,” Baldwin said.

Morgan grunted in disgust. The three dimensional image of her face vanished. The comms link was closed.

What else was he supposed to say? It wasn’t as if he could very well tell the leader of the CasterLan Kingdom that she had to report to her own battle.

Beside him, Traskk growled again.

49

“Mother?”

Vere stared at the figure in the cream robes, almost within arm’s reach of her. She knew she wasn’t dreaming, but she also knew it was impossible for someone to be out on the Excalibur without space armor.

Delicate arms brought both hands up to the hood of her cloak. When the fabric fell back, Vere saw the most beautiful smile she had seen in over a decade.

“Mom,” she said, her voice cracking.

Without thinking about what she was doing, she stepped forward to put her arms around Isabel. If the apparition were a bounty hunter or some other kind of trap, it could have easily withdrawn an ion knife from its robes and driven it through Vere’s ribs. But instead, the figure reached out, put both arms around Vere, and offered a gentle squeeze.

“Mother,” Vere said again, an uncontainable smile across her face.

Isabel had succumbed to her illness months before Vere had run away to Folliet-Bright, which felt like a different lifetime. And yet now she was standing on the Excalibur.

Rather than scream or go into shock, Vere forced herself to remain objective. Nor did she turn on the microphone in her helmet and tell Traskk to bring the ship closer. The apparition of her mother had formed out of nowhere. She was afraid that if she called the Griffin Fire over, Isabel could disappear just as quickly as she had appeared.

Instead, she merely said one word over and over again—Mother—while she enjoyed the way it felt to have her mother hug her once again.

Finally, Isabel spoke as well. “Oh, Vere.”

Her arms squeezed a little harder when she said her daughter’s name. They embraced for an entire minute, long enough for Vere to remember the blanket of protection that her mother had offered. Finally, Vere leaned back and looked once again at Isabel. Her face was rounded and full, yet her hair was gray and she had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, by her mouth, below her jaw. It was her mother as she remembered her, before the sickness had ravaged her body and turned her into a frail and withdrawn figure.

Somehow, it really was Isabel.

Vere couldn’t contain herself. “What are you doing here?
How
did you get here? Where have you been?”