Project X-Calibur (18 page)

40

I RAN THROUGH
the crumbling halls of HQ with Ivy, Kwan, Darla, and Tyler. Entire sections of the walls and the floors fell away around us, forcing us to change direction and take new paths.

“Where are we going?!” Kwan panicked as he dodged a piece of flying debris.

“We've gotta get up there and fight!” I shouted. If we could get to our equipment and weapons in time, we'd still stand a fighting chance. “We'll need our helmets, then we'll get into our ships!”

I led the way down another corridor as the ground shook beneath our feet. The lights above us flickered and sparked, and we had to brace ourselves against each other as we ran just to keep our balance.

“Who's going to fly X-Calibur?” Darla asked.

“I am,”
I told her without hesitation.

Up ahead, I spotted something moving down the hallway. I almost mistook them for hefty, oversized humans at first, but one of them wasn't wearing a helmet, and when it looked our way, I heard Kwan let out a small cry of surprise. Its eyes were two long slits, and its nose was a shortened hook. A large mouth stretched around its head, all the way under its ears, full of hundreds of tiny, jagged teeth, and a row of fleshy spikes ran across the top of its head.

The creature hissed, and then he and his crew turned and came rushing toward us with metal clubs, the tips sizzling like cattle prods.

“This could be a problem,” Kwan whispered.

“C'mon!” I grabbed Ivy's hand as we all turned and ran. How on earth were we going to get out of this?

Another blast practically knocked us over, but we stayed close, using each other as support. Tyler pulled Darla up as she tripped on a cracked floor panel. I stole a glance behind me and saw the aliens struggling through falling debris.

“Uh, guys?” Kwan pointed to the ceiling. “There's more coming from up there, too.”

A handful of them were climbing down from a hole in the ceiling, like termites crawling out of the woodwork. I felt Ivy's hand squeeze mine tighter. This didn't look good.

Suddenly, a wall crumbled up ahead and then collapsed, giving us a view into another hallway. “That way!” We climbed through the wall and down the hall, but we didn't get far. The floor had collapsed into the level beneath it. When I saw what was down there, I was flooded with new adrenaline.

It was Pellinore's secret room.

“We gotta get outta here!” Kwan shrieked, the aliens getting closer with every second. But there was no place else to run now, and we had backed ourselves into a corner at the end of this hall.

“Stay here!” I shouted, but Ivy grabbed me by the shoulders. “Trust me,” I breathed, before she could say anything.

The hallway floor had collapsed at an angle, with one side of it still intact. I got down on my butt and slid down the fallen floor, entering the secret room and rushing to the glass display case in the wall, the one that held Excalibur. The glass already had a crack running down the center of it, but it was still intact and strong, six inches thick. I could see a vague reflection of myself in the glass. I smirked at the ridiculousness of me wearing a suit and tie right now, then grabbed a chunk of broken concrete and smashed it against the glass until it shattered around me. As I grabbed the legendary sword, I was overcome by memories of Dad at my bedside, whispering to me the stories about King Arthur and Excalibur. In that moment I felt the closest I'd felt to Dad since his death.

I heard Darla scream above me, so I whirled and scurried up the fallen hallway, taking the heavy sword with me. Back in the hallway, a dozen aliens were ready to pounce on my fellow knights. Tyler didn't waste any time in unleashing a guttural battle cry and charging the nearest alien. It was so taken aback that Tyler managed to grab it around the belly and send it flying backward into its peers, who toppled like bowling pins. That was all I needed to rush forward and raise my sword.

“Hey! Butt-uglies!” I yelled, and the aliens turned, scrambling to get up. A few charged at me, and, with both hands around the handle of Excalibur, I went to work.
Doing, not thinking.
The crazy thing is that the weight of Excalibur made
me
feel bigger and stronger, like I'd been wielding a sword my whole life.

I had already taken out half the aliens by the time Tyler finally got his wrestling opponent to pass out. As he scrambled out from under the unconscious creature, Ivy rushed over and grabbed the cattle prod thingy the alien had dropped. Then she turned and rammed it into the back of another alien I was fighting. The creature shuddered and shook, its eyes lighting up blue. There was a horrific odor, like something rotten being cooked over an open fire, then the alien toppled forward, fried from the inside out.

Darla and Kwan took Ivy's lead and seized two more of the fallen weapons from the aliens I had already defeated. We worked like a team, and the floor was soon littered with aliens we'd defeated.

But we still had plenty to do. The hallways were hardly distinguishable anymore, just crumbled walls and floors and ceilings everywhere. It could take all day to find our way out.

“Which way do we go?” Ivy asked. “Any idea?”

Then I saw it: a lone ceiling light that had remained intact about fifty feet away. It was pulsing. I looked twenty feet past it and saw another one, also pulsing, beckoning me forward.

I sighed with relief. All the others looked down the hall, confused.

“What is it?” Ivy asked.

“X-Calibur.”

41

AS X-CALIBUR'S
virtual seat belt strapped me in with Excalibur at my side, I could still hear the walls of the underground hangar rumbling around me. I was pretty sure that all of HQ would be nothing more than a cavern of dust in a few minutes.

Ivy, Darla, Kwan, and Tyler had rushed to their own ships without a single word or glance. No good lucks, or hugs, or anything else—there was no time for good-byes.

The hangar wall in front of us slid up and revealed the underground runway. I gripped X-Calibur's steering mechanism and took a shaky breath as I lifted off. So far, the ship didn't feel all that different from a prototype.

The others hovered in place, waiting for me to take the lead.

“Let's do this,” I commanded, and blasted into the tunnel. Within seconds, it sloped steeply upward, and then daylight appeared like a lightning flash. We soared out into the dreary dusk.

“Let's go higher,” I told the others. “Above the fog. Maybe the aliens won't be able to see us.”

As the five of us climbed, the fog grew thicker, making visibility weak. We were more vulnerable than I would have liked, but then we rocketed above the murk and into a wide blue sky. It was exhilarating, like sitting on top of the world. I flew ahead and spun around, toward the heart of London. That's when exhilaration turned to fear.

“Holy ravioli,” Kwan breathed.

“Are you seeing this, Ben?” Ivy asked.

“Yes. Unfortunately.”

Dozens of alien ships were lurking in the dense shroud of fog over London. They were firing down into HQ. I thought about Merlin and Pellinore and Malcolm and everyone else down there who had dedicated their lives to protecting Earth.

“We have to catch 'em off guard!” I ordered. “Hit 'em hard!”

We all rocketed down at once, unleashing a storm of weapon fire, catching the aliens by surprise. Some of their ships exploded brilliantly around us. But then the aliens spotted us, and they abandoned their attack on HQ to fight back. It was five of us against almost two dozen of them.

“Try to corral them!” I shouted.

“There's too many,” Darla cried back, her voice badly garbled by a faulty reception. “They keep coming!”

“Same here!” Tyler and Kwan agreed. Even through the bad reception I could hear the terror in their voices. I kept blasting alien ships out of the sky, but there seemed to be more now than there had been two minutes ago.

“There's no . . .
-ay
we -an stop all—!” Kwan's voice broke up as the comm system failed.

I looked up through my windshield at a layer of clouds high above. That's when I saw the ships rocketing down from the clouds.
There's something up there.

“Can any of you still hear me?!” I bellowed. Only Ivy responded.

“Listen,” I told her as I scanned the trail of aliens above me. “I have a plan. Help the others fight while I'm gone. They'll follow you!”

I blasted straight up and disappeared into the clouds. The comm system was useless now. I was all alone. Faster and faster I climbed as X-Calibur seemed to pick up speed on its own. In less than a minute I approached the edge of the atmosphere.

Looming ahead, like a dark floating mountain, was the alien mothership.

42

THE MOTHERSHIP
looked like it had been constructed out of a million tons of junk, a hodgepodge of welded-together spaceships—hundreds of them, easily. It was shaped like a gigantic beehive, with the mangled and rusty ships poking out of it like thorns. I leveled out and flew closer, trying to figure out what to do next. Shooting at it would be a waste of time. By the time I could do any damage, I'd probably have fifty fighter ships attacking me.

I had to get inside it.

I veered off to go wider and circle the mothership. I was still too far away to see every nook and cranny, so I needed to get closer—a risk, but one I had to take.

Sure enough, some of the fighter ships spotted me.

“Welcome to the party,” I muttered. I gave X-Calibur more power as I whisked around the ship, still looking for a way in. I soon had a line of fighter ships trailing me, with more and more aliens blasting out of the mothership like angry bees.

“Don't think.
Do,
” I hissed through clenched teeth, then spun X-Calibur around and started firing at the aliens chasing me. As I unleashed all I had, I spotted a gap in the mothership's exterior up ahead, but it was too thin for X-Calibur to fit through it.

If only I could slip through that crack.

A mysterious round gauge on X-Calibur's console began pulsing, just like my countdown watch had. And, with my heart thudding in my chest, I was hit by the biggest realization of all:
The gauge was pulsing in perfect time with my heartbeat.

“What the—” I gasped as X-Calibur's walls started to shift around me. They shimmered and softened, like liquid metal. The entire shape of the ship was
changing
, its arrow-like design transforming into a flattened disc. I remembered the X-ray Merlin showed me in his lab: Thousands of intersecting rods inside X-Calibur's walls. That skeleton was going to work now, molding the ship to become what I needed. Not what Malcolm or anyone else needed. What
I
needed. It was mind-boggling.

With the transformation complete, I soared forward. The aliens came at me, but I slipped through the crack in the mothership's exterior, leaving them in my dust. Once inside, X-Calibur began returning to its original shape.

The inside of the mothership was lined with flight bays, stacked on top of each other like towering garages that held hundreds of fighter ships. Many of the ships were already headed toward the open panel at the front. I couldn't let them reach it.

All the buttons on X-Calibur's control console now pulsed in time with my heart. If I could get X-Calibur to change shape just by thinking it, what if I could also command its console with my thoughts? I looked to the huge open panel at the front of the mothership, trying to envision something that might stop the fighter ships from using it as a door.

Something to block them. A force field.

“Here goes nothin'.” I pressed one of the buttons and kept my finger on it. That feeling of warmth I'd felt when I first touched the side of the ship days ago returned, racing up my finger, across my chest, and into my head. I gasped as I felt an indescribable rush, and X-Calibur fired.

When the blasts from X-Calibur's wings got to the open panel, they expanded outward to form a barrier across the exit, sizzling and glowing like a huge, electrified spiderweb. Some of the fighter ships that had been on their way out crashed into the barrier and exploded. Flaming debris rained down.

“THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT!!” I gave a whoop and pumped my fist in the air.

The flames from the dozen or so ships crept up the slick, oily walls and into the bays. The mothership was becoming a time bomb. I had to get out, and fast. I turned to fly back the way I had come and envisioned the ship flattening out again.

Everything was going my way—until I spotted something in the middle of the mothership coming toward me. Some
one,
about six feet tall. At first he seemed to be magically flying through the air, but as he got closer, I spotted dozens of sinewy green tentacles coming off his torso. They were hundreds of feet long and ultra thin, stretching to the mothership's walls and floor and ceiling, allowing him to bounce around the massive interior like an insect

He made a sudden lunge at me. When our eyes locked, there was no doubt in my mind who he was.

Dredmore.

43

UPON CLOSER INSPECTION,
Dredmore didn't look much like a bug at all. For one thing, he had a body that resembled a human—two arms and two legs. For another, even though those weird tentacles of his were green, his skin was fleshy and gray, like a corpse. He had sharp spikes growing out of his head and back like a dinosaur, and his nose wasn't just hooked like the aliens who had invaded HQ—it was thick and wide and protruded from his elongated face like a snout. His head was huge, and his dark draconian eyes narrowed as they locked onto mine. I dug my fingers into the edges of my pilot seat and braced myself as, with a ferocious snarl, Dredmore dived straight for my windshield.

The process of changing the ship into a flattened disc again had already started. Everything around me was shimmering and gooey, so Dredmore's lunge pushed him right through X-Calibur's soft windshield. In the blink of an eye, he smashed into me with such force that the pilot seat toppled backward. The tentacles that had been connected to him unlatched from hooks on a weathered vest he wore. They hadn't been part of his body at all; they were merely an accessory. I had the vague sense that those sinewy things were
alive
as they whisked back through the windshield with multiple
TWAAANNNNG
s.

I was on my back, kicking and flailing with Dredmore on top of me. I could hear one explosion after another outside. I had to get out of there, but my mind was a mass of confusion and panic, and that had halted X-Calibur's transformation. Dredmore's breath was foul-smelling, like putrid garbage, and hot.
Really
hot. As he snarled and sneered, I could see past his razor-sharp teeth and thick, purple tongue. There was an orange glow in the back of his throat, building in intensity and heat. He had the same glow in his nostrils.

He looked me in the eye and growled,
“Ah-gankan-ruh-mana.”

I had no clue what the heck that meant, but after getting a look inside his mouth, I had a pretty good idea what was coming, so I rammed my fingers into his eyes in a last-ditch effort to get free. He roared in pain and I squirmed out from under him as a burst of
fire
shot out of his mouth and nose, missing me by inches. I scrambled backward and felt something hard hit my foot. It was Excalibur, lying on the floor. I reached for it, energized. “You want a fight—”

But as I grabbed the jeweled handle, the blade melted into a shimmering metallic puddle. It was stuck mid-transformation, just like the rest of the ship.

WHAM!
Dredmore tackled me from behind, sending us both flying forward. I plunged part of the way through the windshield and dangled outside it. The heat from the fires out there was excruciating. I was going to be barbecued. I reached for the gooey nose of X-Calibur, trying to pull myself back into my ship, but there was nothing to grab onto.

“A handle,” I grunted in blind agony, then envisioned it in my head. “I need a handle.” Nothing happened until I pushed my hand into the silver goo. Amazingly, the goo molded itself into a handle for me.

“Thank you!” I used the handle to heave myself back through the spongy windshield and into the ship.

Inside the cabin of X-Calibur, Dredmore had gotten to his feet. He lunged at me again, but now that I had this “envisioning” thing under control, I was just getting started. I laid a hand against the shimmering wall and thought about what I wanted.

As Dredmore came at me—
BAM!
A large metallic fist, molded from the wall itself, clocked Dredmore in the side of the face. As he went down, I reached for the sword again, thinking that I needed it back to normal, and the metal of the blade quickly hardened. As Dredmore got to his feet again, I stood to face him. How fitting this was, a knight and his sword squaring off against a fire-breathing dragon.

“Ekah-mun-haza,”
Dredmore seethed as he looked me up and down, examining me with both disdain and curiosity.

“Easy for you to say,” I shot back, then swung at him.

He blasted a fireball at me and I had to dart sideways to avoid it; my swing missed. The flames clipped my legs and I fell, then went into a shoulder roll to get away from him (not an easy task while holding a massive sword). His second flame blast missed me, but one of my legs was stinging like crazy from the first one. I'd been burned, badly. I tried to limp, but went down on one knee—the pain was too much.

The mothership was probably going to detonate at any second. I stole a glance through the gooey windshield. We were almost to the back wall of the mothership, and now that I was down, Dredmore came at me again, his confidence renewed. He sucked in a big breath of air, getting ready to roast me once and for all, but I gritted my teeth against the pain of my leg and lunged, sinking my sword into his gut. The blade came out of his back.

He gasped and went to his knees as I yanked the sword out of him. His breathing was raspy and labored. Wisps of smoke drifted from his mouth and nostrils. His ability to create fire was gone; he was dying.

“Why?” I asked him through gritted teeth. “What did we ever do to you?”

He winced, holding his gut, his hands covered in a thick, purple blood. He managed a wicked grin, then looked past me, toward the windshield.

I turned.
Uh-oh.

The mothership's wall with the crack in it was almost upon us.
Inches
away. I'd waited too long; X-Calibur wouldn't have enough time to continue flattening out. We were a second away from crashing when I realized I had any weapon I needed at my disposal.

“Something big.
Powerful,
” I cried, then pressed one of the console buttons. The familiar feeling of warmth raced up my arm, chest, and head, and then—

KA-POW!! POW!!
Two blasts of concentrated energy rocketed out of X-Calibur, one on each side, then came together in a split second to blow open a massive hole in the mothership. I soared through the hole and into outer space as the mothership exploded in a spectacle of monumental proportions behind me.

I grinned. I was exhausted, with my burned leg screaming, but victorious. I turned, expecting to see Dredmore's corpse on the floor.

But he was gone.

I raced over to where he had fallen only moments before and ran my hand over X-Calibur's wall. Faint splotches of purple stained the ship's interior: Dredmore's blood, mixed into the metal. He must have pushed himself out of the ship just in time.

I turned back to the windshield. Outer space was a vast sea of twinkling black that seemed to go on forever. For most it would be peaceful and serene, but not me. Not anymore. I would never look at it the same way again.