Project X-Calibur (8 page)

13

119:00:49

“INFORMING THE WORLD
of the coming threat will almost certainly bring about our extinction.” Merlin crumpled the slip of paper.

“But how can you keep
everyone
from seeing aliens when they arrive?” I asked doubtfully. “Won't that be impossible?”

“Next bay, please,” Pellinore ordered, and the hallway floor started moving again. I was thrilled to get away from the eerie black box. That thing was the largest, scariest fortune cookie ever created.

The next room was the most impressive so far. It was circular, like the atrium, but at least three times as large, and every inch of space of the curved walls was lined with
thousands
of flat-screen TVs showing broadcasts from all over the world. From a series of control panels in the room's center, lab techs with high-tech earphones closely monitored the footage.

My heart skipped a beat when I noticed a screen showing the early morning newscast we watched at home every day. These techs really were monitoring
every single
newscast, even from Breakwater.

“As you've probably figured out already, this is where we keep an eye on the news,” Pellinore said dryly.

“Why?” Kwan asked, but Malcolm was the one to answer quickly.

“To intercept alien sightings. Right, sir?”

“Correct. We must be ready to intercept any and all human communications related to aliens. As you saw just moments ago, we've proven time and again that the aliens' arrival must be kept secret.”

“Wait, so even after the aliens show up for battle, nobody will know we're the ones defending Earth?” Malcolm asked, deflated.

“Exactly. This project will always be a secret. Before, during, and—hopefully—afterward,” Pellinore replied.

“This is only our first line of defense, knights,” Merlin added. His face looked shadowy against the light from the screens behind him. “Once we become aware of intel, we can hijack or block any transmission known to man before it spreads. TV signals, radio, cell phones, internet, email. If people use it to communicate, then we have access to it.”

Something dawned on me. “At home yesterday I saw on the news that NASA was tracking space debris headed toward Earth. Are they actually tracking the aliens?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Merlin replied. “But NASA doesn't
know
they're tracking alien ships yet. They really do believe it's just space debris—”

“You mentioned an elite team of fighters . . . You mean us?” Darla asked from the back of the group.

“Absolutely,” Pellinore confirmed.

Tyler raised his hand. “Will we be fighting alongside older people, too? You know, adults?”

“Just you five,” Pellinore said bluntly.

“You can't be serious,” I blurted. I had seen the devastation these aliens were capable of. This was suicide. “How the heck can five
kids
fight off an alien attack?”

Pellinore grinned. “That's where X-Calibur comes in.” He looked up. “Accelerate, please. Destination: X-Bay.”

The hallway floor
surged
forward, the force so powerful that a few of us swayed backward. I gritted my teeth. The incline of the moving floor got steeper, and we rocketed deeper and deeper below ground.

When the floor came to a drastic stop, I let out a shaky breath. How much more of this craziness could I take?

The curves of the tunnel ended at two enormous steel doors in front of us.

“What do you keep in there?” Tyler asked, mouth agape. “Godzilla?”

“Maybe you can wrestle it,” Kwan joked.

An electronic scanner glowed red at the side of the door. Pellinore leaned down and smiled, letting the device get a read on his teeth. The glow turned green and the massive doors slid open, revealing an empty room the size of two football fields, at least, with a ceiling that was a hundred feet high.

With a twinkle in his eye, Pellinore turned and shouted into the vast space. “Reveal X-Calibur!”

Nothing happened. The five of us looked at each other, confused. Had Pellinore and Merlin gone senile in their old age? There was a hiss in the center of the room, along with the faint whirr of gears turning below the floor. A section of the ground suddenly
split in two.

My hands clenched and unclenched at my sides. As I took a step forward, my mind raced back to the stories Dad would tell me about the most famous sword ever crafted, and how it had been kept in an underground cavern before rising up from a magical lake to reveal itself to King Arthur.

I looked to my left and realized that Malcolm had also taken a step forward, standing next to me, tense with excitement. As the floor opened wide, something rose up on a steel platform.

My jaw dropped. X-Calibur wasn't a sword at all. It was the most kick-butt
spaceship
I had ever seen.

14

118:10:36

IT BECAME CLEAR TO ME
that HQ and everything in it had been designed to imitate the look of X-Calibur. The ship was twenty feet long and shaped like a rounded arrow. Its wider front end consisted of four panels with seams that came together to form an X. From there the windowless sides sloped closer together as they got to the tail of the ship, ending in a crisp metallic point. X-Calibur was
beyond
impressive. It was downright . . .
otherworldly,
like nothing that could have ever been created by human hands.

“This is an alien ship, isn't it?” I breathed.

Merlin nodded. “Precisely.”

The ship had two short wings that curled at the ends into gleaming points, like razor-sharp steel talons. Were those “wings” there to help the ship fly? Maybe. But they were lined with holes, and inside those holes were tiny globes that held swirling energy inside them—yellow or purple or red, depending on the angle you looked at them, like they had been filled with colored lightning. Even though Merlin and Pellinore had insisted that there was no such thing as magic, the energy inside those round mechanisms seemed like the next closest thing.

“I'm so ready for this,” Malcolm whispered.

“Can I touch it?” Darla asked Pellinore.

“Of course, Darla. If we stick to schedule, in roughly forty-eight hours you'll have to do a great deal more than just touch it.” He added to the rest of us, “All of you will.”

As Darla carefully placed a hand against the side of X-Calibur, her eyes widened. “It's humming!”

Now that she'd broken the ice, the rest of us followed suit. Darla was right: The metal (if that's what it was) felt slightly warm to the touch, and the longer I held my hand against it, the deeper the warmth got. I had the strange sensation that the feeling was moving up my arm. I looked to the others, but they made no mention of it. When the warmth continued up the length of my arm and entered my chest (
was
I imagining it?), I yanked my hand away, startled.

Merlin, who had been watching me all along, smiled brightly. “It doesn't bite, Benjamin.”

I managed a nod and walked to the ship's tail. Tyler, Kwan, and Darla followed. There were eight glowing panels at X-Calibur's rear, four on each side, where the body came together to make a perfectly sharp point. The panels were sunken inside recessed cavities, giving off a dim, otherworldly glow. It reminded me of the red-hot embers of a campfire after the flames had died down. I was pretty sure we were looking at the ship's thrusters, or power source.

“Where did you get this?” Kwan asked Pellinore. “I'm guessing they don't sell these at Walmart.”

“I found it in my travels, centuries ago.”

“Carbon dating on the surrounding rock told us the spacecraft had been untouched for ages. Long before Earth was populated by man,” Merlin said.

“What was it doing there?” I asked.

“It was piloted by an extraterrestrial being, I believe. There was a data recorder on the ship. An onboard diary, if you will.”

“Where's the alien now?” I looked around with new dread. I wasn't in the mood to be surprised by the appearance of any intergalactic monsters just yet.

“He was long deceased when we found him,” Merlin explained. “It took our team many decades to work up a rough translation of his audio diary, but he apparently flew the ship here, to Earth, to hide it from his own people.”

“Why would he do that?” Tyler wondered, still gazing at the ship.

“He created this spacecraft as the ultimate weapon,” Merlin replied, his voice heavy with respect. “His people had become increasingly violent. A planetwide civil war broke out, and he had second thoughts about letting his creation be used for battle. So he brought it here, to a planet that was still uninhabited at the time. He
sacrificed
himself to protect his own race from his finest work.”

Merlin placed a hand against the ship and looked up at it, his ancient eyes filled with hope. “I believe we can make him proud by using his work for good. To protect
our
humble planet.”

“Why is it named X-Calibur?” I asked, as Malcolm snooped around the front and sides.

“
I
named it,” said Pellinore, then walked to the front of the ship and pointed out the X created by the ship's seams. “In homage to my glory days with the Round Table. Arthur had his sword, and we have a weapon for modern times.”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Shall we have a look inside?” Pellinore pressed a hand against the side of the ship. A small, previously invisible panel glowed, and a hatch slid up.

“Brilliant!” Malcolm rushed over.

Pellinore patted him on the back. “It took my team nineteen
years
to figure out how to open it.”

A set of glowing, holographic stairs appeared from thin air. They didn't look like they could bear even the lightest of us, but Malcolm charged forward, and we heard the unmistakable
thunk
of his boots as he hit each step.

“Whoa,” Tyler gasped. “He's standing on light!”

“How's that even possible?” Kwan asked, bending down for a closer look and rapping his fist against the shimmering stairs.

Pellinore sighed. “I wish we knew. We've been trying to figure it out for decades. The aesthetic of X-Calibur, and some of its more . . .
accessible
technology, has steered us in the development of things here at HQ. But much of the rest is, well, still a mystery.”

Malcolm rushed into the ship. When the rest of us hesitated, Pellinore urged, “No time like the present, knights. We
are
on a bit of a deadline.”

• • •

The inside of X-Calibur was as smooth and spare as its outer body. I'd been expecting all sorts of crazy alien buttons and gauges, but there was none of that. And with all seven of us inside, the ship felt a little cramped. It definitely hadn't been designed for this many people: There was only one seat.

And Malcolm was already sitting in it.

“Look at this,” he boasted. “The pilot seat fits me like a glove.”

Kwan, Tyler, and I moved for a closer look. Malcolm had a seat belt across his waist and chest, constructed out of blue holographic light; two straps projected from the ceiling and crisscrossed his chest to make another X.

There was a control console in front of the pilot seat, rectangular, about three feet long, with a horizontal handle sticking out of each end with buttons on it. They looked like ultra-modern joysticks. I figured that Darla, being our own video game master, would be super pumped about those controls. But when I turned to see the look on her face, she was still lingering well behind all of us again, hanging out by the ship's door.

She's not going to last here,
I thought.

“The seat molds itself to whoever sits in it,” Merlin explained, and I turned my attention back to the group. I took a better look at the steering console, which bore no markings whatsoever—just a round glass panel, about ten inches across, throbbing as it changed colors.

On the floor beneath the steering console were four more glowing panels, two on each side. I assumed those panels were for the pilot's feet, but I couldn't see any labels.

“Let's have each of you get a feel for the seat,” Merlin instructed. “Go on, Benjamin. You next.”

Malcolm grudgingly stood up. The seat belt disappeared, and the buttons on the steering console went dark. When I took his place, the console buttons began to glow again, then the holographic seat belt appeared out of nowhere to strap me in. The seat felt like a large hand that adjusted to grip me tighter. It was incredibly comfortable, too. I had to give props to the dead alien dude: He knew how to design a chair.

I reached out to grab the steering handlebars on the console, and the second I made contact, the entire column slid closer to me, moving on a hidden track in the floor. There was a surge of power throughout the ship as the console and floor panels lit up. The curved, blank wall in front of me suddenly became a crystal-clear piece of glass, as if the metallic look of the wall had been simply
turned off
to become X-Calibur's windshield.

Startled, I pulled my hands off the steering console and everything went dull again. The windshield winked off, becoming just the front wall again. I looked to Merlin and Pellinore and the other kids, heart pounding.

“It does
that
for everyone, too,” Pellinore said dryly. He motioned for me to get out of the seat.

“So, are we all going to be in here when the aliens show up?” Kwan wondered.

Pellinore shook his head. “
One
of you will be chosen to fly X-Calibur.”

“But if the seat molds to fit whoever sits in it, why a kid?” I asked. “Why not find the greatest pilot in the world to do it?”

Pellinore and Merlin exchanged an unsure glance. We all saw it, so Kwan scoffed, “More of that
need-to-know
BS, right?”

I had to smirk. There was something to be said for not beating around the bush.

Pellinore nodded to Merlin, who took a deep breath. “In truth, we would have loved to employ the best pilot we could find. It would have made our job . . . far easier. But we've found that the ship responds best to children.”

“
Only
to children,” Pellinore corrected.

“How come?” Tyler asked.

“My techs tell me it's most likely a system that requires a distinct bio-signature range. And that range seems to be a bio makeup under fifteen years old.”

“So are we really just five guinea pigs?” Tyler asked. “You wanna see which one of us is best for this thing, and then the rest of us are sent home?”

“Aww, man.” Kwan threw up his hands. “I'm missing two surf competitions to be here for nothing.”

The mood inside the alien ship was turning increasingly sour. Merlin coughed loudly. “The rest of you will be utilized to the fullest, believe me.”

“Doing what?” Kwan snapped. “Twiddling our thumbs in front of a computer monitor?”

Pellinore turned toward to the ship's door. “This way, knights. I'll show you.”

We followed him and Merlin across the underground hangar, our footsteps echoing throughout the vast space.

“There will be no thumb-twiddling,” Pellinore said. He pressed a panel on the wall to reveal three more spaceships in a second underground hangar. But while Pellinore and his team of engineers had obviously tried to duplicate the alien ship, these new ships were still pale imitations at best. You could see the metal seams all over them, and the windshield was plain glass, always visible. The power source panels on the back looked a lot like regular engines.

“As you can see,” Pellinore continued, “we've built four fully functional X-Calibur prototypes that the rest of you will use in battle. My techs have copied everything to the best of our abilities, and I've spared no expense. These ships shall
also
have child pilots. For better or worse, I fully trust the intentions of X-Calibur's creator.”

His eyes rested on me, Kwan, Tyler, and Darla as he spoke, further proof that he expected Malcolm to be the one flying the real X-Calibur.

“But, wait—there are only three ships there and four of us,” Darla pointed out.

Pellinore turned for a look, confused.

“She's right,” Merlin said, his little brow furrowed. “Where is the final ship?”

VROOO-WHISSHHHH!!
Another X-Calibur prototype suddenly soared over our heads, startling everyone as it flew around the very top of the hangar airspace.

“What on Earth?” Pellinore practically choked as the prototype roared deeper into the hangar that housed X-Calibur, executing some dazzling twists and twirls along the way.

Someone else was showing off some major skills down here. “Whoa. That dude can
fly,
” I gasped.

Pellinore raced over to a panel on the wall and shouted into it, “We've got a one-nineteen in X-Bay! Repeat! One-nineteen in X-Bay! I want full lockdown!”

I whirled to Merlin, pulse pounding. “What's a one-nineteen?!”

Merlin's face was pinched with full-fledged fear: “Intruder.”

The alarm system blared throughout the hangar as the prototype made a sudden flawlessly executed turn and soared past us again before coming in for a quick landing near the hangar entrance. A hatch on the side popped open and the pilot jumped out, stumbling for a moment before finding his footing and running toward the door. He was wearing a gray pilot helmet and matching flight training jumpsuit, just like the ones we were all wearing. But his was clearly not custom-fitted like ours; it hung on him, much too large.

There was no way to see the intruder's face.
What if it's an alien in there?
He was definitely the
size
of a little green man from Mars.

It seemed like the guy would make it to the door, but Malcolm suddenly charged after him. He caught up with the mystery pilot and tackled the dude with a grunt, then flipped him over and held down his arms. I have to admit, it was darn impressive.

Merlin, Pellinore, and the rest of us rushed over as a dozen or more techs in lab coats barreled into the room. Pellinore gave Malcolm a pat on the back. “Good work, my boy!”

I scolded myself. Why hadn't
I
gone after the intruder like that?

As Merlin bent down to yank off the intruder's helmet, I inhaled sharply: We were about to see an honest-to-goodness alien, some horrific creature from outer space here to destroy us all.

Wrong.
It was a girl. A very
human
girl. And even with her hair all messed up from being inside the helmet, she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. She had big green eyes, light brown hair with a hint of blond highlights throughout, and flawless skin. No offense to the girls at my school, but nobody looked like her in Breakwater.