The Excalibur (Space Lore Book 2) Read Free Page A

and chest twice as broad as he was tall, but arms so short they weren’t good for much else than drinking and throwing things. A pack of Wolvertons swarmed a pair of Gthothches, their sharp claws scraping and sparking against the latter’s stone skin.
    Everywhere Morgan looked there was fighting, chairs and tables being broken, aliens grunting as they punched and kicked one another, and groaning each time someone was hit. A chorus of growls and threats from dozens of different alien species echoed through the din of breaking bones and shattered glass.
    A tiny alien, the size of a human child, flew past Morgan’s head as she walked through the doorway. She dodged to the side just quickly enough to avoid having its razor sharp wings slice the side of her face open. It squealed in terror as it fled the bar, happy to survive another day.
    She scanned the fighting for a moment before her eyes settled right in the middle of the room.
    “I knew it,” she said, one hand curling into a fist and the other gripping the handle of the sword at her waist.
    Fastolf. The fat man was in the center of the brawl. Not only that, he was laughing, loving every minute of the chaos.
    She noticed, however, that he wasn’t actually fighting anyone. Instead, he would push one alien in the back, causing it to sprawl into the aliens in front of it. By the time it turned around to see who had pushed it, Fastolf had already moved to a different creature and was doing the same thing. The result was a room full of aliens spurred into fighting because each one thought someone else was bringing the fight to them. All the while, though, Fastolf refrained from hitting any of his fellow bar patrons because it was more fun—or more lucrative at least—to pick the pocket of each one as he pushed them. All around the bar, he would push some alien, starting a new fistfight, only to duck out of the way, wait for the fighting to begin, and then quickly snatch whatever money the alien had in its pockets as it fought some other alien that had no idea why it was being attacked.
    “Fastolf,” she screamed.
    Even over the fray of fighting, he heard his name called and turned to see who had yelled it. After scanning the room, his eyes focused on her in the doorway. The smile immediately vanished from his face. He turned his head to look for the nearest exit. Without pause, he darted for it.
    She tried to run after him but was immediately ensnared in the fighting.
    “Stop,” she shouted at the aliens nearest to her as they fought each other. A QuaQuall was latched onto a human’s back, tearing at the man’s scalp with its suction cup fingers. Another man was kicking at a pack of ten tiny Tulins, who were all too fast to be caught by a boot.
    When no one listened to her, she withdrew her Meursault blade, the one Vere had given to her, and brought it down in a slice in front of them. A trail of dark vapor lingered where the sword had cut through the air. The table she had cut, made of solid metal, fell into two equal parts.
    The group closest to her stopped fighting long enough for Morgan to make her way past them. But there were still too many other aliens and humans fighting all around her to catch up to Fastolf. Instead of chasing him through the back exit, she turned and raced through the entrance. There, she turned left, then left again, and ran through the alleyway beside the bar. With one sweeping motion of her arm, her sword sliced through a stack of crates that blocked her way, a yellow mist lingering where the blade passed through them. At a barbed metal fence, meant to keep burglars out, she slashed a V, then kicked the top portion of the fence away, hopping over what remained.
    She saw him in the distance, running down a side alley. Squinting, she realized there was a second person with him. Without another thought, she took off after both of them.
    In the dark, she raced past the shadows of aliens of every variety, each carrying out some mundane daily