The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3) (17 page)

“Everything will be fine,” she reassured.

Rather than reply, Traskk unbuckled himself from the copilot’s seat and left the cockpit to see how Vere was doing.

At the next portal, things weren’t any better, as Morgan had predicted. In fact, they were worse.

Instead of Athens Destroyers blocking the portal, three large frigates were aligned to block the majority of the opening. In the gaps between each vessel, minefields had been set up. And beyond those, dozens of Thunderbolts patrolled in formation, along with a group of Athens Destroyers.

Traskk had returned to the cockpit by then. Instead of growling or slamming his tail back and forth, he merely closed his eyes and gave a resigned hiss, each of his flared nostrils larger than her entire nose. She knew him well enough by now to know that if she said anything at all, he would return to growling and letting his tail hit whatever it wanted.

There was no alternative other than to continue on the course they had set and hope their luck turned around. Without speaking, she made a wide loop around the blockade and continued on toward the center of the Vonnegan Empire before the enemy ships could target her.

Looking at the navigation hologram, she saw that the next opportunity for a portal jump wouldn’t come in the form of just one portal, but a group of four. The commercial district of the Vonnegan Empire, which they were approaching, brought ships from all over the galaxy. Dealers, traders, cargo vessels—everyone with anything to buy or sell—converged on Greater Mazuma and its pair of ice moons. Morgan doubted there would be enough Athens Destroyers in the sector to block all four portals. Even if there were, she doubted Mowbray would allow the commercial operations to be disrupted. It would be an admission that four raiders and an escaped prisoner were enough of a nuisance to put up a blockade around the busiest area of his empire.

It was the only shot she had left.

Just when she thought she had gotten past the last of Traskk’s tantrums and wouldn’t have anyone else question her orders, Vere and Pistol appeared at the doorway.

Pistol’s damaged eye had been cleaned and a temporary gel poured around the seared area. The gel would harden and keep the damaged edges of the synthetic skin from deteriorating. Vere no longer looked like she was dying of thirst.

Morgan expected Vere to give a sarcastic comment, something about being freed from prison just to die in a different part of the Vonnegan territory. It didn’t help that as soon as Traskk saw her, he hissed a series of noises relating every dumb idea Morgan had acted on and asked Vere to take over for the rest of the flight.

Instead, Vere merely smiled, patted Traskk’s shoulder with one hand and Morgan’s shoulder with the other and said, “She’s doing what she thinks is best. That’s all any of us can do.” Then, to Morgan, she added, “Keep up the good work.”

With a nod, Vere turned and left the cockpit without even bothering to ask what the next part of the plan was.

Morgan and Traskk stared at each other, still unable to figure out what happened to the Vere they had known. The Vere they had known would have told Morgan that she was not only incompetent but dim-witted.

Then Morgan shook her head and said, “They must have really done a job on her in that prison.”

42

Vere knew they were headed deeper into Vonnegan space. An angry Traskk had just told her about their predicament. She could have asked him what they could do about it but that would only encourage her friend to growl in frustration even more.

What could any of them do? She could demand that Morgan turn the ship around, but they would only be facing the same Athens Destroyers and Thunderbolts they had already evaded. She could tell Morgan that she never should have attempted a rescue party in the first place. That wouldn’t take her friends out of the danger they had placed themselves into on her behalf. It also wouldn’t bring Cade or Baldwin back. She could say something pessimistic to Morgan, the way she would have done years earlier, but that wouldn’t help them get through this either. She could worry about what would happen to them, the way Traskk was, but that wouldn’t help any of them.

As she saw it, they had one option and one option only: to trust that Morgan was making the right decisions and to do whatever she thought was best. Everything else was wasted time and energy. She could regret the past or worry about the future but neither were in her control. Only the present, sitting in the Pendragon with her friends, was of any concern.

In front of her, she saw the person she strived to be. Pistol, a mere android, did nothing but stare at the wall in front of him as the journey progressed. He didn’t worry about what would happen next, he simply lived moment to moment. It didn’t matter if Thunderbolts were somewhere in the distance. It didn’t matter that more Athens Destroyers might be blocking another portal. He remained calm through it all.

“You’re way ahead of us,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Pistol said, unsure what she had meant.

“What were you thinking about just now?”

His good eye lit up briefly, then went dim again.

“My internal systems were functioning as normal.”

“But what were you
thinking
about?” she asked.

She didn’t know why she was interested. She knew he and every android like him didn’t have thoughts the way people did. But there was something about his demeanor through all of this that appealed to her.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “I was just
being
.”

“You don’t even know how wise you are, do you?” she said, smiling.

Normally, his social programming would have registered this as sarcasm. But something about the way she said it, the way she leaned forward and studied his face, made his verbal interpretation software run in endless circles.

It only stopped when she added, “My goal is to be more like you.” Then she sat next to him and stared at the same wall he had been staring at, saying nothing for the next hour.

In a way, it reminded her of her time in the sleeping quarters at the Cauldrons, the exhaustion giving way to introspection, only without the constant threat of vibro whips or a monster killing her.

“I could get used to this,” she said, when she finally spoke again.

43

There were a lot of places Quickly could have gone to read Vere’s message. He could have visited friends aboard the Solar Carrier,
N.M. World Builder
. He could have gone to the café at the spaceport that had been built within the DorEca asteroid field. Instead, he returned to the Griffin Fire—more specifically, its cockpit—where he put his feet up on the copilot’s seat. After having spent so much time aboard the ship, it felt more like his home than anywhere else in the galaxy, the exception being his actual home on Edsall Dark, which he hadn’t seen in two years. It, like every other part of the CasterLan Kingdom, was now part of the Vonnegan Empire.

Not only had the Griffin Fire become the place he was most familiar with, it offered a sense of consistency that appealed to him so much that he considered sleeping there at night instead of aboard the
World Builder
.

As soon as the message came up on the screen, he forgot about where he might sleep and about everything else. The words were from Vere, as transcribed by Pistol, and said what should happen in the coming weeks and months, regardless of whether she survived the escape from Terror-Dhome.

Quickly read the message over and over, not believing what he was seeing. It had to be a mistake. She must have been delirious after spending so much time at the Cauldrons of Dagda. That was the only explanation for all the things she was saying.

Someone else in the CasterLan fleet has to read this
, he thought.
It has to be some sort of joke.

One thing he was certain of was that there was no way a message like this should be read by anyone outside of Vere’s inner circle.

A tiny flashing indicator at the bottom of the display screen indicated that a secondary program had also been running in the background. When he clicked on it, he saw that the message had been encoded to automatically send itself, using Vere’s secure access code, from the Griffin Fire to the leaders of every realm in the galaxy.

“No!” he gasped, scrambling to his feet, looking for a way to stop the program.

It was too late, though. Ever since the Griffin Fire had reappeared from the mission, the same message had been blasted out to every corner of the galaxy. The same absurd plans he had read and thought to be the ramblings of a woman who wasn’t thinking clearly was now going to be seen by every other kingdom the CasterLan leaders had ever associated with.

He noticed then something he never thought he would ever see. Even as the fleet of Solar Carriers had been destroyed, Vere taken prisoner, and Edsall Dark turned over to Scrope as an extension of the Vonnegan Empire, Quickly didn’t feel they had truly lost the war. Maybe it was blind optimism. Maybe it was unrealistic idealism. But he always thought the CasterLan Kingdom would somehow return to its former glory.

After reading Vere’s message, he knew he was wrong. The shocking thing was that the end of the CasterLans wasn’t caused directly by anything Mowbray had done. The end of the kingdom was in sight, and it would all be because of Vere’s message.

44

In the Kerchin Sector, Gerchin the Suspicious read the notice that his helper dronebot had brought him. He couldn’t believe what he was reading, but Gerchin didn’t believe many things he read and heard. He had, after all, earned the moniker
the Suspicious
by not trusting his first wife, second wife, or third wife, or any of his children by any of those wives. He automatically assumed everything said to him by a relative or assistant was due to that person having an ulterior motive. It was one of the many reasons he had refused to meet with Vere’s emissary two years earlier when she had tried to recruit Gerchin’s help in fending off the Vonnegan fleet. The only source he trusted was the trusty dronebot that had been programmed to be incapable of deception.

The dronebot was a combination of an android—designed to resemble Gerchin’s alien race—and a simple bot. The result was a machine modeled after a specific alien race and that had the intelligence of someone like Pistol, but that sounded and acted like a classical robot.

“What purpose could she possibly have in sending this message?” he asked.

At two stories in height and weighing one ton, Gerchin was a giant compared to humans. His ears were larger than Vere’s head, allowing him to hear every whisper and whimper for a mile in all directions.

Gerchin’s helper dronebot was programmed to remain silent when his master posed rhetorical questions. Upon hearing Gerchin’s most recent question, the only noise it made was from its power system completing another cycle.

“What kind of trick is she trying to play?” Gerchin asked, narrowing his eyes.

In another part of the galaxy, the reaction was different. As ruler of the perpetually turbulent War-Pon Sector, Kaiser Doom didn’t have any of the same reservations or anxiousness as he read Vere’s message.

The Kaiser knew war made people do crazy things. After all, he had claimed the throne by cutting off his own father’s head. Over the years, he had seen various types of aliens, humans included, become cannibals from the relentless stress of battle, overwhelmed by the ferocity and violence around them. He had witnessed a dozen different varieties of aliens kill their own kind, even when that was one of the few acts forbidden by their species. During the course of a particularly gruesome and prolonged war, he had even witnessed two different alien species driven to extinction. Just the week before, he had squelched an uprising when his most trusted lieutenant tried to take the War-Pon throne for himself. Power, war, prestige, honor—these were the things that made reasonable leaders unreasonable.

Every part of Kaiser Doom was engineered for war. His species had evolved over time to have a shell of naturally occurring armor that was impervious to most weapons. His vital organs were buried underneath three hard layers of rough skin. Horns protruded from his head, shoulders, and most other joints. From the time he had first held a weapon in his hand, he couldn’t remember a month in which he hadn’t taken part in one battle or another.

So when Doom read Vere’s message, he nodded and grinned, taking it at face value, knowing that a defeat like the one the CasterLans had suffered at Dela Turkomann could make any leader lose his or her mind.

Elsewhere, the Expo-CTD Sector was one of the few areas of the galaxy that shared a border with both the Vonnegan Empire and what had been the CasterLan Kingdom. Baron Von Wrth, leader of the Wrth Clan, had an ancestry that mixed human and Vonnegan blood with at least two other species. Parts of him resembled each race, and yet he identified with none of them.

It didn’t help that he knew his time was limited. His fleet of Mach-Z Cruisers wouldn’t have been a match for Vere’s fleet of Solar Carriers, let alone Mowbray’s forces, which were superior to any other near him. And now Mowbray had claimed Edsall Dark and the rest of the former CasterLan Kingdom as part of his extended empire. Two thirds of Baron Von Wrth’s territory was now surrounded by the Vonnegans. He didn’t have to be able to predict the future to know that the next time Mowbray wanted to extend his territory, it would be at the expense of the Wrth Clan. Of course, he had known that before Vere’s forces had been defeated, too. The diplomat she had sent to the Expo-CTD Sector had told him that the last thing he should ever want would be Mowbray starting to encircle his territory. If the Vonnegan forces defeated the fleet of Solar Carriers at Dela Turkomann, Peto had said, nothing would stop Mowbray from doing the same to the Mach-Z Cruisers. It hadn’t been enough to convince the Baron to commit his forces to the battle, though. Now, reading Vere’s message, he thought that if anything would ever get him to send his fleet into battle on someone else’s behalf, this would be it.

Lord Plonnenst was always looking for a reason to spread his brand of righteousness across the galaxy. As ruler of the Plusodien Sector, he had seen some truly miraculous and wondrous things. He had seen the final breaths of a dying star before it went supernova and turned into a black hole. He had seen two planets, each with fully functioning colonies, collide and become space dust. He had witnessed a solar flare so strong and powerful that it engulfed the smallest moon of the nearest orbiting planet. In each of these events, thousands, if not millions, of people had died. The galaxy was a harsh place, full of events that could make you believe in something greater than yourself. You just had to be willing to see it for what it was. Lord Plonnenst was one of the few rulers who didn’t look away.