The cannons alongside Colonel Krull’s flagship burst into life. Simultaneously, the projectiles that the Juggernaut launched also ignited. Each formed a giant circle of energy that resembled a portal. They were as large as the portals Krull and everyone else was familiar with but they were missing the rim of three hundred and sixty metal cylinders that gave traditional portals their form. Each circle of glowing light was many times larger than the Athens Destroyer, and their quantity ensured the path between the flagships and the Juggernaut was blocked on all sides by various fields of energy.

  The first blasts sent by the Athens Destroyer disappeared into the newly formed circles of light. Instantaneously, a laser blast rocked the colonel’s ship.

  “Someone tell me where that came from,” he said, noting that the defense system display showed the Juggernaut hadn’t fired.

  “It was our own blast, sir. It came back out through a different energy field, one behind us.”

  Krull watched the Solar Carrier fire toward the Juggernaut. Its path was also obstructed by one of the temporary portals, and right away the laser that disappeared into the energy field reappeared from a portal located next to the Solar Carrier and blasted the side of the flagship. The same thing happened to the other Athens Destroyer.

  “Stop firing,” Krull said.

  Glancing at the holographic display, he noticed that the number of fighters confronting the mechs was dwindling. The Thunderbolts’ lasers didn’t seem to be damaging the mechs while the mechs’ weapons were capable of destroying the fighters with one shot.

  “Get us toward those things,” Krull said.

  “Sir, we’re surrounded by energy fields.”

  Krull looked out the viewport and saw the other two ships were as well. There were gaps between the portals but not large enough for the flagships to maneuver safely between. A second layer of portals was positioned behind the first layer to fill most of the gaps.

  Krull’s eyes narrowed. Was it his imagination or was the portal in front of them larger than it had been moments earlier?

  “Sir, the portal is drifting toward us.”

  “Back! Full reverse!”

  “Sir, there’s another portal behind us.”

  The ensign waited a moment, not wanting to ignore an order, then, seeing Krull had no better option to offer, she set the Athens Destroyer to move backwards at a pace that kept it away from the portal in front of them. After a minute, the large vessel ran out of room. The rear portion of the ship began to touch the portal located at the back of the battlefield.

  “Lower all the tinder walls in the back half of the ship,” Krull said. “And tell me what’s happening.”

  He didn’t need to be told, however, because he could see it for himself. The back edge of his ship, the mighty Athens Destroyer, was appearing through a portal on the opposite side of the battlefield. As he watched, more and more of his vessel was transporting from one side of the battlefield to another. The Solar Carrier beside him, rather than move, had allowed the portal ahead of it to begin engulfing its front ports. That ship had also lowered the applicable tinder walls and was also appearing from a different portal.

  Krull gave no commands because he had no idea what he was supposed to do. As he watched, the mech with the energy bow sent another ion arrow into a Llyushin fighter, then another into a Thunderbolt. Further away, two more fighters soared off into space, their pilots somehow dead because of the black mech’s poison cloud.

  “Half of our ship is through the portal, sir.”

  Krull appreciated the effort, but he could see for himself that half of his damn ship was sticking out of a portal on the other side of the Juggernaut. Half of the Solar Carrier was also through. The second Athens Destroyer had a quarter of its front engulfed by one portal and a quarter of its rear section through a different portal.

  As Krull watched, every circle of energy vanished. In an instant, a hundred portals that had covered almost every part of space they could see changed back into one hundred small metal cylinders. Instead of a blanket of energy fields, they saw the Juggernaut and the vastness of black space.

  Alarms blared. The colonel closed his eyes for a second as he began to comprehend what had happened. All three flagships had been halfway through some kind of portal when the energy fields had all been deactivated. The flagships had, effectively, been cut in half. Part of Krull’s Athens Destroyer floated away from one side of the Juggernaut while the front half remained where it had been. The alarms screaming throughout the command deck were to signal not only the immense structural damage but also the vast portions of the ship that had been exposed to the harsh environment of space. The same thing had happened to the other two flagships.

  Automatic containment walls slammed shut in an attempt to confine the damage and the exposure, but no response would save the lives of anyone who was near the oxygen tanks that exploded or the ion cells that had been sliced in half. Both parts of his ship, maybe both of the others as well, were going to be unsuitable for life within a matter of minutes.

  “Full evacuation,” Krull said.

  The portals burst back into brilliant fields of energy, each one returning from a small cylinder to a portal large enough for a flagship to pass through with ease. Once again, each one began to drift toward the pieces of the flagships, guided there somehow by the Juggernaut.

  Everyone around Krull sprinted toward the command deck’s exits. Already dressed in space armor, they hoped to get away from the ship before it exploded. The nearest safety hatch was a thirty-second run. Alarms blared the entire time they dashed through the corridors. When Krull and the others got to the nearest hatch, they all saw the same thing. Through the tiny viewport, they groaned as a portal moved toward their section of the ship. If they evacuated they would float right into it.

  Already, the portal in front of them was beginning to touch the viewport. By the time they ran to the next emergency hatch, half a mile further down the ship, the Athens Destroyer would be engulfed in energy again.

  As Krull watched, he saw the nearest circle of energy blaze with finality. It was close enough to reach out and touch.

  The next thing he saw, he was staring at Quad-Lun from the opposite side of the battlefield. A circle of energy was directly behind him. Miles away, he saw the remnants of his ship disappearing into the portal before reappearing where he now was.

  His first thought wasn’t of his lost flagship or even of his last moments of life, which were surely approaching. It was, I passed through a portal and lived? How did the Hannibal figure out how to do that? What else can they do? And then, finally, We were never any match for them.

  As he watched, the portals all deactivated again, once more slicing away the parts of the ships that had been passing through them. Without firing a single cannon, the Juggernaut had defeated three flagships.

  Meanwhile, all of the Llyushin fighters and Thunderbolts had been destroyed and the four mechs, barely slowed by the diversion, were splitting off from each other, each on their way to delivering their unique version of death to the colonies below.

  40

  Julian watched a feed of the battle knowing everything he was witnessing had already happened. Even if he could offer some tactic to help Colonel Krull or issue an order for the ships to retreat so the crews would live to fight another day, it would be pointless. By the time the hologram showed the three flagships being cut into pieces and the mechs descending to the planet’s surface, everyone would have already been dead for a few minutes.

  As Julian watched the final moments of the battle, Hector’s words echoed in his head.

  How much longer until we come upon someone who isn’t intimidated by our ships of war? How much longer until we go too far and reach someone who wants to do to us what we have done to everyone else... or worse?

  His first sighting of the Hannibal and their Juggernaut seemed as fresh in his mind as if it had happened the day before. He had suspected the hologram in the middle of the Orleans asteroid field as being nothing more than a giant threat, something imagined by the Carthagens to scare away the Round Table fleet. Never had he seriously thought a ship that large could actually exist.

  He still remembered his thoughts at the time, that while the hologram was obviously made with amazing technology, a floating image would never deter him from his mission. What Julian had thought to be a monstrous imagination was actually something real. What he had guessed to be a visual deterrent was actually death travelling across the galaxy. Coming for them.

  Wherever the Hannibal had been, either in the sector just beyond Cartha or somewhere else, Julian was all too aware that they were heading in the general direction of Edsall Dark. The Carthagens, aware of the Hannibal, had been offering Reiser a genuine warning: Turn around now and hope you never see this Juggernaut again.

  “They’re going to keep destroying each colony and planet they come across until they get to Edsall Dark,” he said.

  Hector, still beside him, still looking at the spot where the holographic battle had been, said they might not.

  Julian turned to face his friend. “What’s going to stop them? They just went through three of our flagships without firing a laser. Do you know how many more colonies are in between Quad-Lun and Edsall Dark? Do you think they’re just going to get tired and turn around?”

  Hector narrowed his eyes, and Julian knew the man beside him was trying to determine if he was speaking to a friend or to the returning war hero.

  Julian said, “They’re going to destroy everything in their path unless we stop them.”

  “Julian—”

  “Even if they do turn around after killing millions of lives, are we going to ignore what they’ve already done? If we do, why would anyone think the Round Table could actually protect them?”

  “But when will it end?”

  “When we destroy them.”

  “And what about the next ship after them?”

  Julian bit his lip and held his breath to keep from saying something he would regret.

  When his head cleared he said, “I see now what Octo and Winchester were right. The Round Table will never be able to function in its current form.”

  “Because it has someone who wants to avoid war?”

  “Because it has someone who clamors to avoid conflict even when a clear threat exists,” Julian said, raising his voice.

  “And why does that threat exist?”

  Julian clenched both fists. He would never strike his friend, wasn’t foolish enough to think he would get the better end of the deal, but he wanted awfully bad to hit something. Not because Hector was wrong, but because he was right.

  “That isn’t what matters right now. I wish you could understand that.”

  Without waiting for a response, he turned and left the control room.

  41

  Only weeks earlier, while his father was prisoner to the Carthagens, Talbot had been fighting for his life in the asteroid tunnels. Now, as he watched what was unfolding and realized his father would once again answer the call of the Round Table, Talbot was content to sit in his backyard with his mother and watch from afar. The two of them sipped tea and listened to the leaves rustle in the wind.

  Talbot didn’t care if the people cheered his father or not. The man they called General Reiser had gone unnoticed for most of his military career. Now, after being captured, seriously wounded in battle, losing part of the fleet, and having some of his fellow officers die in the Carthagen trap, his father was suddenly a hero. By itself, Talbot wasn’t sure what there was to celebrate about the Cartha campaign. Maybe it was the fact that the people needed something, anything, to cheer. Maybe it was liking the thought that the Round Table was achieving something good or maybe it was because Julian had destroyed the Excalibur ship that had paralyzed the representatives with indecision. Surely, the fact that his father now possessed the Sword in the Stone contributed to the legend that grew around him.

  He knew he was supposed to be happy that Julian was receiving the praise he had worked so hard to earn, Julian had been the leader of the Cartha campaign, but he had also been the only officer captured by the Carthagens and had missed almost all of the fighting in the tunnels. The fortunes of man seemed a funny and fickle thing to him.

  When he blinked out of his thoughts and focused on the tiny two-winged creature fluttering in the trees, chirping and signing its beautiful songs, he realized Margaret was staring at him.

  “My little dreamer,” she said and winked the way she had when he was a boy and had done the same thing.

  It was the type of comment that would have bothered him to no end when he was younger. If she said the same thing around one of his childhood friends his face would have reddened and he would have complained about not wanting her to embarrass him. Now, though, he merely smiled and nodded.

  She asked what he had been thinking about. He almost said, “Everything that happened in the Cartha sector,” but that wasn’t true. That was merely a product of his thought that he dearly wanted his life to be as different as it had been as possible.

  “The future,” he said.

  Her eyes lit up and the wrinkles near her temples became exaggerated when she smiled. “What else would a dreamer be thinking of? And what do you think of the future?”

  The tiny, fluttering animal in the trees was joined by two other of the same species. The three spoke in lovely continuous chirps back and forth as they flew between a pair of branches.

  “I don’t know. I guess I keep thinking about why I ended up in the Cartha sector. I didn’t even want to be in the academy. I just did what was expected of me. And then I see dad and watch how he’s able to make the exact future he wants. It’s like he was destined to step into whatever role he chooses for himself. I keep wondering why I can’t create the future I want for myself. But of course, I don’t even know what I would want that future to be.”

  “You and your father are completely different people.”

  Talbot cringed, trying not to focus on the negative aspects of that comparison. Most people considered Julian to be a great person, maybe the greatest living man in the galaxy. If Talbot was his opposite, what did that say about him? What were the antonyms of greatness and being universally liked? They certainly weren’t positive traits.

  He knew what she meant, though. His father sought greatness and quests while Talbot was content to sit in an empty room and contemplate while entire days passed.

  Anyway, he didn’t want or need to be universally revered. He just wanted to be happy. The singing little creatures in the trees understood that. So too, apparently, did his mother. Why then was it so difficult for Talbot to accept the notion?

  When he figured that out, he guessed he would know what the future held for him.

  42

  The next Round Table session was in progress but Hector was no where to be found. Cash and Cimber were capable of presenting all of the same arguments as their friend, but both representatives knew their words had less influence than the man Vere had personally requested to sit on the Round Table, the man who had gone into the blood tunnels and wiped out masses of Vonnegan soldiers. Hector had been the one to lose his legs while commanding a Solar Carrier and an arm while fighting the Vonnegans. His words carried weight when he spoke out against the prospect of war. Compared to Hector, Cash and Cimber were just another two people sitting at a table full of nearly one thousand representatives.

  Everyone in the Great Hall argued over what should be done in response to the Hannibal and their Juggernaut. Too many voices tried to speak at once. The result was an echoing jumble of complaints and suggestions that became indistinguishable.

  Cash felt a charge of electricity approach from behind and knew what it was even before he turned to find Hector’s energy disk hover into position next to him.

  “I came as soon as I could,” he said.

  Cash nodded, trying not to worry about why Hector looked shaken because it could only mean the conversation with General Reiser hadn’t gone as planned. Julian arrived to the room as well. Instead of joining Hector, the general stood behind Octo and Winchester once again. Cash sucked air in between his teeth, guessing it was an understatement to say the conversation between Hector and his old friend hadn’t gone well.

  To Cash’s other side, Cimber was staring at Reiser, pure disgust on his face. Julian raised a hand. At first, only a few people stopped talking, but as more and more representatives saw that the general wanted to speak, entire sections of the Round Table fell silent.

  Finally, he said, “Recent events make it clear we must send a large portion of the fleet to confront the Hannibal.” The room broke into excited murmurs. “I know there will be some who say diplomacy is called for in times like this.” Julian stared straight at Hector when he said this. “But trust me, as the general you sent across the galaxy to bring more planets to this table, that the time for diplomacy is over. It was over as soon as they attacked three of our flagships. We need to act and we need to act now, before more sectors are destroyed.”

  Julian rested a palm on the handle of the Sword in the Stone as he spoke. Cash was sure it wasn’t by accident. What better way to remind the room of representatives of his supposed claim to rule than by touching the physical representation of that idea.

  The vast majority of the representatives, usually unable to agree on anything, began to applaud. Cash suspected they did so partly because they appreciated being told how to react rather than needing to figure it out for themselves.

  Hector put both hands on the table in front of him. “And what if this supposed Juggernaut destroys those ships as well? What then?”

  Julian blinked in confusion. “There’s a huge difference between an enemy vessel being able to defeat three flagships and thirty.”