The only person who visited their home and didn’t share in this sentiment was Hector. No matter where he was in the house, Talbot could hear the way the two men raised their voices when they spoke. Both tried to keep their patience, tried to refrain from yelling at the other, but neither was successful.

  Not even these arguments concerned Talbot. Instead, he was fascinated by the way the galaxy worked. His father had ignored clear warning signs and had led the fleet into the Orleans asteroid trap. He had also become the first and only prisoner of the Carthagens. While Talbot and the other officers had fought for their lives, Julian had been locked in a stone room. And yet even as each senior officer had perished and all of the men and women fighting alongside Talbot had died, Julian had survived. Not only that, he had returned home to be treated like a hero.

  If any number of things had happened just a little differently—their ship hitting straight into an asteroid instead of Brigadier Maceus’, the Carthagen warrior’s weapons killing his father rather then injuring him—they would all be living in extremely different circumstances. In that regard, even though they faced a colossal ship with advanced technology and a crazed warlord without compassion, it was miraculous that they were there at all.

  He couldn’t help but wonder, if things had turned out differently, if someone else would have become the hero instead of his father. Would the people still clamor for someone to lead the Round Table? Talbot had no answers. That was okay, though. It was the questions that interested him, the possibility.

  From the window of his bedroom, he looked out and saw yet another representative approach the house. This one was a Vonnegan with robes down to his feet. The man would likely also request that Julian listen to the desires of the people and lead the Round Table.

  Weeks earlier, he and his father had been in CAB suits, the two of them on either side of a cave opening on the ledge leading to the abyss of space. At the precipice, his father had talked about Talbot avenging his death. Now, he was going to be the leader of every planet, moon, and colony that had once been part of dozens of different kingdoms. His father would become ruler of the greatest expanse of the universe that anyone had ever known.

  Talbot shook his head in amazement. The course of events that unfolded in the galaxy was truly astounding.

  62

  Lancelot’s eyes fluttered open. At first, all she saw was a haze of light. Gradually, as she blinked over and over, shapes and colors began to return.

  Traskk was standing overtop her. Behind him, a stack of medical supplies was strewn about. Above her, a medical scanner was repairing some of her injuries. It looked to be the medical bay of a ship, only it wasn’t the Ronan.

  “Where am I?” she groaned.

  He hissed a comment back at her. After pausing for the translation software to tell her what the reptile had said and seeing nothing, she gathered her senses enough to realize she wasn’t wearing her helmet. Blinking, her head spinning, she looked down and saw she wasn’t wearing any of her armor. Instead, a medical gown covered her.

  Memories started to come back. The fight in the streets. The plasma grenade going off. Waiting at the back exit of the bar, knowing J would want to make its escape. Slashing the android in half with one sword and cutting its head off with the other. A brilliant flash of light as it self destructed. That was the last thing she remembered.

  “My armor, where is it?”

  She tried to push herself into an upright position but didn’t have the strength to do it, and when she moved at all her head blazed with pain. One of Traskk’s hands eased her back to a flat position.

  “I need my armor,” she said weakly.

  In all the years she had spent living amongst the Carthagens, they had never seen her without every piece of her armor on. Only recently had she allowed Julian and now Traskk to see her without her helmet on. Her identity, her sense of comfort, still relied on having the heavy plating over every part of her, even her face.

  Once she was lying on her back again, he put his palms out and gave a gentle hiss. She squinted, trying to make sense of where she was and what Traskk was saying. Understanding his mistake, he looked at the nearest control panel and hissed something else.

  The next time he spoke in Basilisk, his words were converted into Basic and appeared in the air as holograms.

  Calm down. You are safe. I found you in the rubble and brought you back here. I should add that you weigh a ton in that armor.

  Her head blazed with pain as she focused on reading the words. A thousand questions needed answering.

  “Where am I?”

  After a hiss, more words appeared in the air. In the Griffin Fire. Lancelot squinted and shook her head, causing Traskk to hiss again. Vere’s ship... Her old ship.

  Lancelot’s eyes darted around the medical bay. “My weapons...”

  Traskk’s long tongue curled into the equivalent of a Basilisk smile.

  Safe. I brought all four back with me, along with all of your armor that I could find.

  “Where?”

  His tail tapped the floor of the medical bay with slight exasperation.

  It’s safe. You’re safe. Relax. Everything will be fine.

  Her eyes roamed the area for any sign of her armor. If she could just put the helmet back on or the main torso pieces she would feel more comfortable. The medical scanner finished on her forearm and moved to her left clavicle.

  Her thoughts once again went back to her last memory—finding Arc-Mi-Die’s android. More memories began to come back. As soon as the android took one look at her and identified her as the person who had tracked it across the sector, J had self-destructed. It had all happened impossibly fast. She had slashed one Meursault across its neck to cut its head off, the place where J’s memory unit would be stored.

  There had been a click of some internal charge activating. In the instant it took her to bring the android’s head close to her chest, the eruption was already forming.

  “His head,” she said. “J’s head. Where is it?” She tried once more to get back up but Traskk’s oversized reptilian hands kept her flat on her back.

  Words appeared in the air after he hissed. It’s safe.

  He gestured toward the bins behind him. The android’s head was on top of one of the storage containers. J’s eyes were still open, staring at Lancelot’s face, but there was no energy behind the pupils. She groaned.

  “I feel like I got run over by a flagship,” she said.

  The Griffin Fire’s medical scanner is repairing the damage to your body. You should be fine in a few minutes.

  She asked how her armor was as her eyes looked for the suit. She had lived with it for so long that she sometimes forgot she didn’t actually have four arms and four legs.

  A series of hisses turned into floating letters that read: Not pretty. I was working on it while you were unconscious. There are many parts I can’t fix. I would take it to someone on Folliet-Bright but this isn’t the type of place to trust strangers.

  “I appreciate it.”

  After closing her eyes, she heard Traskk walk to a different part of the ship. Beside her, the medical scanner continued to operate. Her mind was already processing what to do next. She had to fix the rest of her armor. She had to find someone who could analyze J’s processor. After that, Arc-Mi-Die would finally get what was coming to him.

  63

  Durect-Duher watched with his son as the line of ships rose from the spaceports at 16-Tuero and headed toward the sky and out to space.

  His son squeezed his hand. “Where are they going, dada?”

  Durect-Duher, half human and half Vonnegan, looked down at his boy and at the little fingers holding firmly onto his own. The boy wasn’t old enough to remember the CasterLan Kingdom or Vonnegan Empire. Nor was he of the age that he could understand what the Round Table was. The child had no concept of some Juggernaut approaching from another sector, wasn’t even old enough yet to understand what sectors were. To his son, when he looked up at the stars, it was all just space.

  “They’re leaving,” he said, trying hard to keep any anger or frustration out of his voice.

  “All of them?”

  Durect-Duher looked over his shoulder. It wasn’t just his colony that had a line of ships stretching up into the sky, it was every colony on the planet. He nodded.

  “Why, dada?”

  What could he possibly say to get his son to understand how the galaxy worked? After Lieutenant Ruins gave notice to the colonies that he had been ordered to rendezvous with other Round Table forces and that the Hannibal were approaching 16-Tuero, everyone was trying to save themselves. Many people either had their own vessel, knew someone who did, or had enough money to buy their way to safety. For people like Durect-Duher, though, who had spent his entire life working the fields, there was no such access. Not for himself and not for his son.

  “They’re afraid,” he said, trying to contain the emotion in his words.

  “You’re not afraid?”

  He squeezed his boy’s hand again and smiled. “What do I have to be afraid of? You’re right here with me and you’re the only thing I need in the entire galaxy.”

  He could tell this pleased his boy immensely even though the child remained silent, eyes fixed on the ships departing from 16-Tuero.

  “You want to play a game with me?” Durect-Duher said with a smile.

  “A game?”

  His boy was already grinning. Durect-Duher could have said anything in that moment and as long as his son believed it was a genuine game, he would gladly partake.

  “Let’s go around the colony and burn every single thing with the Round Table banner on it. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  A hint of skepticism crossed his son’s face. “Dada said never play with fire.”

  He smiled and put his other hand through his son’s hair, which he knew simultaneously pleased and annoyed the boy.

  “You’re too smart,” Durect-Duher said with a grin. “You got me. Let’s just tear them down then.”

  “Okay, dada.”

  “Whoever tears down more wins.”

  “Okay.”

  He expected his son to ask why they would do such a thing. The question didn’t come, though. If it had, Durect-Duher would have said that when you put your trust in someone and they abandon you, they don’t deserve to have any place in your life. For a farmer on 16-Tuero who grew his own food and had built his own house, he didn’t need other people for very much. What the Round Table had offered, and Durect-Duher had appreciated receiving, was safety. Now, after only a few months of its existence, that safety was being taken away.

  He and his son would go around the colony, tearing down and ripping up everything with the blue, red, and yellow symbol of wedged circles. And as soon as his son fell asleep, if the Hannibal hadn’t arrived yet, Durect-Duher would burn it all to ashes.

  64

  “We need to do something, and we need to do it now,” Cash said.

  Beside him, Cimber gave a nod. Hector rubbed at his eyes and turned away. Portia was watching him from the window of their home, a look of concern on her face as she watched the three men in a huddle in the backyard.

  Cimber said, “He carries that damn Meursault everywhere he goes because he knows people think the Sword in the Stone is some kind of sign.”

  Cash put a hand on Hector’s shoulder. “I know this is difficult for you to hear, but if we don’t act soon the choice will be made for us. The Round Table will become another empire and its ruler will be Emperor Reiser. The people are calling for it. Most of the representatives are too stupid to realize the danger of it. They’ll be the first people Julian doesn’t need once he’s in control.”

  “Stop,” Hector said. “I can’t listen to this.”

  Cimber respected Hector as the true hero he was. He never publicly questioned his friend and in every Round Table session he argued on behalf of Hector’s ideas because the man stood for peace above all else. However, even he had seen more stubbornness than he could tolerate.

  “You’re being a fool, Hector.”

  “Maybe,” Hector said softly, looking up at Portia’s silhouette again in the distance. “But I don’t think Julian will accept the crown. If he does, we—”

  Cimber gave an exasperated sigh. “Don’t you see? If he does, it’s already too late.”

  65

  Lancelot knew she looked ridiculous. With large segments of her armor damaged and in need of repair, she couldn’t wear her helmet, chest plate, or half of her arm protection. One of her artificial Carthagen arms was missing and the other was a burnt stub. Even so, she still felt more comfortable wearing the few pieces that were undamaged than pants and a shirt. The result was a human female torso sticking out of the mid section of armor with four legs below it. She looked like some mythical creature more than she did a Carthagen warrior.

  Traskk sat across from her as she worked with a blowtorch and laser to fix another piece of her battle suit. Two buckets of tools had been retrieved from the Griffin Fire’s equipment closet so Lancelot had all the tools she might require.

  She attempted to fix her helmet first because as soon as it was done, she would put it over top her head and feel more at ease. Without spare pieces of protective grade sheeting available and knowing that her chest plate was one of the many ruined pieces that would have to go in the garbage, she took the few sections of it that were still useable and melded them around the spot where her visor had been. While she worked, Traskk hissed just enough questions to help him understand what was going on without asking too many and taking Lancelot’s attention away from the task at hand. Each time he hissed something, she would glance up and read the holographic words floating in the air before going back to melding pieces of armor.

  Where is Vere?

  Lancelot saw the words, frowned, then went back to patching a crack next to the tinted blast-proof panel that let her see out of her helmet without allowing anyone else to see her face.

  “I don’t know,” she started to say, but was greeted with an unhappy growl that let her know a better answer would be needed. She added, “Some of what I’m going to say might sound unbelievable at first.”

  She allowed herself to look up long enough to see Traskk settle back on the bench across from her and fold his arms. His tail waved back and forth in gentle strokes in anticipation of whatever she could tell him.

  Before going back to work, she kept her attention on the Basilisk so she could see his reaction. “There is a race of aliens who learned to live beyond the type of existence we know. We think of a past, present, and a future, a here and a there. Time and space mean nothing to these aliens.”

  To his credit, while Traskk’s tail faltered in its swaying, he remained silent and unquestioning, ready to hear whatever else she had to say.

  Lancelot said, “Remember the Green Knight?” Traskk let out a guttural hiss and barred his fangs. “Okay, geez, calm down. Anyway, they allowed him to appear at Eastcheap.”

  The Basilisk’s oblong eyes narrowed, assessing what he had been told. His large reptilian nostrils, a thousand times more sensitive to smells than human noses, flared in anger without him even realizing it.

  He gave an abrupt hiss that was translated into a single word: Why?

  “Because of a man named Mortimous.” Lancelot went back to work on her helmet, burning and lasering pieces of metal as she spoke. “Very few people know these aliens exist. Even fewer have ever been able to move past our limited comprehension of the universe to actually see them. And only one person, Mortimous, has ever learned to move beyond time and space enough to directly communicate with them. Although from what I understand, even basic concepts such as friendship are lost on these aliens. They don’t even have a word or name they use to refer to themselves by. Vere calls them the Word.”

  She held up her helmet. It wasn’t pretty—the original brown and bronze was now mixed with streaks of orange and silver where the armor had been melded. She also didn’t have a replacement lenses where the visor had been destroyed. It was an improvement, though, over how it had been an hour earlier. She made a note on a pad beside her to add another spare part she would have to find, then picked up a piece of armor from one of her damaged arms.

  Traskk asked, What does Mortimous have to do with Vere?

  “He saw potential in her. He knew she was capable of great things so he began to visit her. First in her dreams, like Vere is doing with you, then in person.”

  The reptile gave a sad hiss, his tail falling limp.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “Some people aren’t as receptive as others. Some people understand what’s happening right away while others go their entire lives thinking they’re just having bad dreams.”

  Why Vere? Why not someone else.

  Either Lancelot was beginning to understand Basilisk or else the sound of a sad alien was universal. She assumed part of Traskk’s true sadness came from the opposite question: Why not me? The person he had spent most of his adult life with had vanished for some unknown reason. It was natural for him to feel that if he were special he could have joined her. Instead, he was all alone, nothing to contribute to the galaxy.

  At the same time, another question formed in her own head: Why me? She had managed to survive for twenty years on her own until Mortimous showed up and made her question everything she thought she knew. It had eventually led to her needing to repair her armor and being lucky she was alive at all.

  “The people I know who have been visited by Mortimous,” she said, frowning at what remained of a blast plate after being inches away from an incineration blast, “are people who needed guidance. Vere calls it ‘needing to be pushed to do the right thing’ because she knows the Green Knight’s arrival was the only way she was forced to return to Edsall Dark so long ago.” She gave a half-hearted laugh. “I’d still be living in an asteroid if Mortimous hadn’t visited me.”