The Excalibur Alternative

That was the only word Sir George could think of for it. The limbs pounced, striking downwards, their leaves turning inward like the knives they so resembled, and the bush's prey squealed a high, piercing note of agony as hooklike briars seized and tore at it. The bush thrashed and jerked for a few more moments, then all was still once more.

"What progress have you made with training your beasts?" the demon-jester repeated, and Sir George pulled his eyes away from the forest glade.

"Good progress, Commander," he replied. "Some of them aren't really suited to the field, but we have enough good mounts to put under two hundred men. I would prefer to continue training with them, but for the most part, I feel satisfied with what we've accomplished."

"I am glad to hear it," the demon-jester told him. "We have spent too long at half power as it is. We shall be forced to operate at almost ninety-five percent power levels for the remainder of the voyage to make up the lost time. This will entail a certain degree of risk to the vessel and all aboard it, and we must begin immediately. If we wait any longer, the power levels and risk factor will become entirely unacceptable."

"I'm sorry if we've delayed you," the baron said with great insincerity, "but the training time we took was necessary. Without it, we couldn't have fought with full efficiency for you."

"I am aware of that. And if I were not convinced that it was true, then you would be dead," the demon-jester piped.

Sir George made no reply to that. There was nothing he could have said even if he'd wanted to, and he didn't want to.

The demon-jester watched him with all three eyes for a few more seconds, then twitched his ears ever so slightly.

"You and your people and your horses will be placed in phase drive stasis," he said. "The first time you experience this, it may cause some panic, especially among primitives such as yourselves. It will be your task, and that of your officers, to maintain order during the process and after recovery."

"You and Computer have mentioned this... stasis, before," Sir George said in his most reasonable voice. "Neither I nor any of my officers are clear about just what may be involved in it, or even what it is. If we're to `maintain order during the process,' it would be very helpful if we knew what was to happen."

There was a long moment of silence, as if the demon-jester were considering what Sir George had said. Then he spoke once more in the fluting, uninflected voice of whatever accomplished the translating.

"Living creatures ca

"Sleep?" Sir George regarded the demon-jester with carefully hidden skepticism, then glanced at the forever silent, forever expressionless dragon-men standing watchfully at the demon-jester's back.

Despite himself, the baron found himself fascinated by the dragon-men. Over the long weeks he and his people had now been aboard their ship-prison, the wart-faces had begun to emerge as an at least partially known quantity. They had a language of their own—of sorts, at any rate—but it seemed to be a poor and clumsy tongue, composed primarily of grunts and growls, interspersed with an occasional whistle. Unlike the humans or dragon-men, they were not garbed in one-piece suits, either. Instead, they wore heavy tunics dotted with metallic studs, almost like leather jacks... and, also unlike the humans, at least a few of them were allowed to retain weapons. Since the activation of the "phase drive" the demon-jester kept going on about, no one had seen them in proper armor or armed with the axes which appeared to be their accustomed weapons, except in the presence of the demon-jester personally or another of the ship's crew. But several of them carried heavy truncheons, almost maces, wherever they went. They had turned up along the walls of the exercise chamber the first time Sir George's longbowmen had been permitted to practice their archery. Despite the disgusted protests of his archers, their shafts had been headless, which had made the presence of what were so obviously guards more than a little superfluous in Sir George's opinion, but the demon-jester obviously wasn't interested in the baron's opinion.

The wart-faces had put in more frequent appearances in the humans' portion of the ship after that, especially whenever the troops drilled with the blunted practice weapons Computer issued to them for that purpose. Their function, obviously, was to police and intimidate the English, but they were only partly successful. No one was foolish enough to think that the obviously physically strong and tough creatures would be easy opponents, but neither were English soldiers easily intimidated. Like Sir George himself, his troops appeared to be quite confident that they could have swarmed the wart-faces under if they'd had to.

Of course, the attempt would undoubtedly prove fatal in the long run, because the wart-faces who were allowed into the humans' area were no more than expendable bludgeons as far as the demon-jester was concerned. The wart-faces couldn't even open one of the abruptly appearing and disappearing doors unless the demon-jester or one of the other crew members opened it for them. And whatever else the wart-faces might have been, clearly no one, themselves included, thought of them as members of the ship's actual crew.

Sir George certainly didn't. There was an obvious hierarchy of status among the denizens of the demon-jester's ship, and the wart-faces had almost as much status as trained mastiffs... which was to say, considerably more than the humans enjoyed. The baron had seen only a very few true crew members, although he was unsure whether that meant he had seen only a small fraction of the total crew or that the crew was impossibly small for a ship of such vast size. He would have inclined toward the former explanation, if not for Computer's and the demon-jester's casual demonstrations of how much their "technology" allowed one being to accomplish.

Most of the crew members he had actually seen were neither wart-faces nor dragon-men, but rather members of yet a fourth species, very tall and spindly looking. They had very long legs for their height, and Sir George felt certain that the chairs which had been provided for himself and his Council's first meeting had actually been designed to fit their sort of body.

The only other member of the demon-jester's own species any of the humans had yet seen was the Physician, who was clearly the second ranking member of the crew. Computer occasionally referred to the Physician as the "Ship's Doctor," or "Surgeon," but he was unlike any human surgeon. He used none of the instruments with which Sir George's military experience had made him only too familiar. Instead, he relied upon still more of the mysterious devices, with their flickering lights and occasional humming sounds or musical tones, that sometimes seemed to pack even this enormous ship to the bursting point. Precisely what any of those devices did was, of course, yet another mystery their captors had no intention of sharing with them, nor had Dickon Yardley, Sir George's senior surgeon, been able to suggest any answers. Despite their ignorance as to precisely what the Physician did, and how, every single human—men, women, and children alike—had been required to visit him in the chamber Computer called "Sick Bay" and submit to his poking, prodding, and peering.