Project X-Calibur (9 page)

“Ivy?”
Malcolm gasped, then jumped off her and took several steps backward.

“Hey, Malcolm,” the girl said in a British accent. Then she grinned and added, “Nice tackle.”

It was kind of cool to see Malcolm so out of whack for once. He and this girl obviously knew each other, but why did he seem so . . . embarrassed? I noticed the stunned look on Pellinore's face. He gaped openly, trying to find words as his cheeks turned red.

“How . . . did . . . you . . . get in here?” he finally seethed. “And how did you learn to
fly
like that?”

Ivy got up and dusted herself off, then gave us all a self-satisfied smile. She was enjoying every second of this. “I can do lots of things, Father. You'd know that if you gave me a chance.”

15

116:28:11

AFTER THE FIASCO WITH IVY,
the five of us had been whisked back to our rooms, probably so Pellinore could sort things out with his daughter and avoid any more embarrassment. Although, if you'd asked me, Ivy's introduction to the rest of us was full-on rock star material. Not only had she found a way to sneak into HQ without her father knowing (no easy task), she had seemed to
enjoy
it. The upside of this sudden change in schedule was that we were given a chance to call home.

“What's the royal academy like?” Mom asked. “Is it nice?”

I scooted back on my bed so I could sit against the wall, the phone to my ear.

“The HQ—I mean, the
academy
—is cool. We're, uh, learning a lot already about science and . . . stuff.”

My improv skills were starting to crumble. Merlin and the techs were probably listening in on our calls right now, ready to cut the line if we said anything we weren't supposed to.

I glanced across the room at Kwan. “Yeah, Dad. I
know
it's my last year,” he was whispering into his phone. He sounded frustrated—nothing like the happy-go-lucky jokester I'd come to know and (kind of) like. “Just make sure you sign me up for the competition next month. Please.”

Next to Kwan, Tyler was also on the phone. When he saw me looking, he turned away uncomfortably, trying to keep his conversation private. I did manage to hear him whisper something about “lots of smart kids here, Ma” and “I'll try my best.”

“Sorry, Mom, but they're telling us we gotta get back to work,” I sighed into my phone.

“Of course, honey. I love you, and I'm so proud of you,” she gushed, making me feel guilty for lying.

“Love you too,” I whispered, not wanting to sound too cheesy in front of the others. I felt my gut tighten as I looked up at the big countdown clock on the wall: a hundred and sixteen hours left.

I hung up and turned back to Malcolm's bed, intending to ask him about that medal he was polishing. It was attached to the tattered ribbon I'd noticed earlier; it was what had gotten him so wound up. But now he was standing at his open closet, pulling out his padded sparring outfit. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Going to the gym,” he said flatly. “Do you really think Pellinore would rather have me sitting around doing nothing?” He turned and headed toward the bathroom.

“Wait—how do you know Ivy?” I called out. “When you tackled her earlier, you already knew her name.”

That stopped him. “I was just trying to help. You don't think Pellinore is angry about it, do you?” His expression softened with genuine worry. I probably could have messed with his head, but I wasn't going to lie to him, even if he had been kind of a jerk so far.

“Nah.” I grinned. “I think he was impressed.”

He surrendered a rare smile. “Ivy and I go to the same academy.”

“Academy for what?”

“
School.
Same as yours at home, I'm sure.”

I was pretty sure Ivy's and Malcolm's “academy” was
nothing
like my school at home, unless of course it had an ancient air-conditioning system that broke down every summer.

“You think Ivy'll be flying with us now?” Tyler joined in now that he'd finished his call home. “She can already rock and roll up there.”

Malcolm's smile fell away. “You better hope not.”

“Why not?” Kwan asked, also joining us.

“Because unless there's another ship somewhere, there were
five
ships—X-Calibur, plus the four others built by Pellinore's team.”

Tyler squinted, not grasping what that meant.

“If Ivy is given a ship, then one of you is out,” Malcolm clarified.

“What about you?” I asked Malcolm. “You could be out too, you know.”

He gave me a look like I had just said pigs could play baseball. He had zero reason to be worried.

“Not likely, Benjamin,” he replied and leaned toward me to make it count.

I stiffened. He'd love nothing more than to see me lose my place here.

“I guess we'll see,” I said stoically.

“Guess we will,” he replied, stone-faced, and disappeared into the bathroom.

I let out a long exhale. Keeping cool in the midst of Malcolm's aggressiveness could be exhausting.

Tyler whispered to me, “Maybe we should go to the gym too?”

“Are you going to listen to
Malcolm
over Pellinore and Merlin?” I scoffed, already shaking my head.

“I guess not.”

Kwan moved to the enormous window screen and flipped through each background, pretending to channel surf. “Repeat . . . Seen it . . . Blah . . . Whatever.”

I looked up at one of the wall clocks. Even though it only showed the countdown at the moment, it was still basically a flat-screen TV.
Hmm.
I climbed onto my bed for a closer look.

“You're wasting your time, bro. There are no buttons,” Kwan said.

“No remote, either,” Tyler added. “I looked everywhere.”

There was an inch of space between the TV and the wall, so I grabbed the corner of the TV and pulled. It didn't budge at first, but then it squeaked loose a few inches, revealing an adjustable viewing arm installed behind it. “Anybody have a screwdriver?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. I always travel with tools,” Kwan cracked.

“Maybe a dime will work,” I suggested, so Tyler fished out a dime from his stuff. I went to work, using the dime to loosen the TV's screws.

“Mind telling us what the heck you're doing?” Kwan barked.

“HQ has been here for decades, right?” I gritted my teeth as I struggled with the screws. “Long before the RTR knew exactly when the aliens would show up. The countdown was probably only started recently. Which means—”

“These TVs were probably
real
TVs before that,” Kwan finished excitedly.

“Yup. Remember all those newscasts we saw on the tour? This place is getting a whole bunch of channels already.” I pulled the final screw loose and gently pulled at the TV frame. “We just have to find a way to access them.”

I had taken apart more than a few old televisions in my day (not to mention rusty toasters, broken washing machines, radios, and just about anything else I could find to play around with), so I felt pretty comfortable giving this a shot. I separated the back corner and looked inside. The good thing about newer TVs is how little there actually is inside them. All of the working guts are contained on one circuit board. The
bad
part is, unless you know what you're doing, that circuit board might as well be a fifty-sided Rubik's Cube. But then I saw something that gave me hope.

“Anybody know what SkyTV is?” I asked. A three-inch cylinder had that name printed on the side of it, with an audio/video feed snaking out of the side. Could it really be that easy?

“SkyTV is a satellite TV provider here in London.”

I turned. It was Malcolm, standing in the bathroom doorway in his heavily padded sparring outfit.

“What are you
doing
up there?” he hissed.

“Even if you could get that thing to show something other than the countdown—which I
doubt
—we'd still have no way to change the channel, remember?” Kwan pestered me.

He was right, of course. But a casual glance toward the atmosphere window gave me an idea. I pulled the descrambler through the back of the TV, then carefully yanked on the wire it was connected to. There were at least seven or eight feet of extra wire coiled into the wall. I jumped down from the bed and kneeled next to the window's control pad, using the dime again to loosen its screws. Malcolm, Kwan, and Tyler watched me with baffled looks on their faces.

“Earnhardt's crazy,” Kwan chirped. “I
love
it.”

In less than a minute I had connected the SkyTV descrambler to the window's control pad. I gave everyone a wide-eyed grin. “Here goes nothing.”

The view of London suddenly disappeared, and the entire window was now full of . . . static.

“Impressive,” Malcolm deadpanned. “What do you do for an encore?”

I held up a finger. “Wait for it.” Then I pressed the little “up” button on the window pad.

“Holy guacamole!” Kwan gasped as the window displayed a soccer game. The game's announcer yelled “GOOOAALLLLL!” as one of the teams on the field celebrated.

“Let me try that!” Kwan wedged in next to me and hit the “up” arrow again. The channel changed to a cooking show. Kwan grabbed my shoulders and shook me like a rag doll. “You just became my new best friend, Earnhardt!” he shouted.

Tyler also gave me vigorous pats on the back (almost slapping my lungs through the front of my chest). “Awesome, Ben! No wonder Merlin picked you! You're like . . . a genius!”

Malcolm's expression turned so icy that I might have needed earmuffs.

“I wouldn't exactly say
genius,
” I mumbled. This wasn't much different from the million times I had taken the guts out of a broken toaster and replaced them with new ones—but I wasn't going to tell them that.

“It's not like we're going to have time for TV, anyway,” Malcolm said stiffly. “While you bozos watch television, I intend to defeat a spar-bot or two—”

KNOCK-KNOCK.
Someone was at the door.

Kwan, Tyler, and I froze in terror. Malcolm turned to give me a grin. “Good luck explaining this one, genius.”

“Who is it?” I called out to the door.

“Merlin,” the voice replied.
Crap.

“Just a minute!” Kwan shouted. “We're, uh—”

“We're naked!” Tyler blurted in a panic, catching dumbfounded looks from me and Kwan. Even Malcolm scrunched his nose.

“Sorry,” Tyler whispered sheepishly. “It's all I could think of.”

I lunged to the window's control panel, disconnected the descrambler, then jumped onto my bed to push the countdown clock back into place, my heart practically exploding out of my chest.

“All good. Let him in!” I whispered, then jumped off the bed as Kwan opened the door. It was Merlin, all right. And Darla was with him.

“Everything okay in here?” Merlin asked. I was pretty sure my knees were shaking. I'd risked everything just so I could impress Tyler and Kwan and Malcolm with a dumb TV?
Stupid, stupid, stupid!

“Why wouldn't it be?” Kwan asked.

“Yeah. We were just watching the uh, countdown clocks,” Tyler added, and he might have been the worst liar on the planet. “But we weren't naked.”

Merlin and Darla stood there, lost. Darla frowned.

“Why are you dressed for sparring?” Merlin asked Malcolm.

“I was just about to leave for the gym.”

Merlin shook his head. “You're all to come with me right away, dressed in your standard flight training suits. You'll be attending a training session with Nigel Barrington.”

“
The
Nigel Barrington?” Malcolm asked, eyebrows raised.

“The one and only.”

I had no clue who Nigel Barrington was, and, judging by the confused expressions of Tyler and Kwan, neither did they.

“Will Pellinore be there too?” I asked Merlin. I kind of really just wanted to know if
Ivy
was going to be there.

“Percival will catch up later. Now come—you've all got a great deal to learn.” He glanced at me, and I gulped. I couldn't make any more mistakes, or take any more stupid risks.

16

114:47:03

AFTER DOWNING
protein shakes provided by the staff, we were sitting at desks that had touch-screens for tops, which were tilted slightly for maximum efficiency. At the head of the spacious room, Nigel Barrington, retired military legend, showed us photos of death and destruction from the alien planet I had
already seen firsthand.
The pictures hovered behind him, ten feet tall, casting an eerie glow around his bulky silhouette. Tyler and Darla gasped as the next grisly image came up. Judging from the pale faces of the other knights in the room, I'd been the only “lucky” one to take a nightmarish trip to the devastated planet.

“Not pretty, is it?” Barrington growled in a gruff British accent.

He was a stout guy in his fifties with a gleaming shaved head. He had a bushy mustache and tree-trunk arms covered in faded tattoos. Though short, he wore a tight black T-shirt, camouflage pants, and
massive
combat boots that made him look like a distorted action figure. The dude was even chewing on a
nail,
which made the dainty cup of hot tea at his side look hilarious.

“Next photo,” Barrington commanded. I glanced at Kwan. He was slack-jawed at the jarring images, but he still kept whispering to Tyler animatedly, even giggling at one point, and I couldn't concentrate over his voice.

“This isn't a
joke,
Kwan,” I snapped. Everyone turned to look at me. “What if that was our friends or family in those photos? Or any one of us here? Would you joke about that, too?”

Kwan withered. He looked like he wanted the desk to swallow him whole. I didn't want to embarrass him, but I couldn't help it. The memory of what I'd seen on that planet still hurt.

“It's okay to be scared,” I told him quietly. “You don't have to hide behind jokes all the time.”

At the front of the room, Barrington nodded. “If you're not scared—any of you—then you're not
human.
The greatest warriors throughout time have had fear—difference is, they make it work for them.” Then he took a sip of tea.

“Sorry,” Kwan mumbled. He refused to look in my direction. I had a pretty good idea I was going to pay for this one way or another.

Barrington walked closer, standing among our desks. He smelled like leather and tea spices. “Now, we've studied the victims of Dredmore extensively and concluded that the race of aliens on this devastated planet was, for lack of a better term,
weak.
”

Dredmore.
The word felt like a dark wind passing through the room.

“Know yourself and you can win the battle,” he preached. “Know your enemy—”

“And you can win
the war,
” Malcolm finished for him.

A devilish grin made its way onto Barrington's face. “Right you are, my boy. Our enemy's aim is to
kill.
” He stomped his enormous boot and snarled. “But if these bullies want a fight, then we're going to give them one!”

It was right then that I happened to look up, and I saw something that made my heart skip a beat. Someone was crouched high above us, sitting in the shadows of the many ceiling beams.

It was Ivy.