Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) (17 page)

No doubt that was paranoia—Sool Em had reached her adult size years ago—but Ak Ik eyed her daughter with jealousy and fear. This one was growing too powerful, and though she’d been promised her own flock as a reward for destroying the human military base, she seemed determined to aggrandize her position within Ak Ik’s flock. That would have to be corrected soon, or the queen herself would be threatened.

One misstep, daughter, and I will tear out your heart.
 

Two drones returned to the chamber, pushing more than a dozen stumbling, naked humans. These were no Ladinos or Singaporeans, or even civilians, but warriors from the Albion fleet. Ak Ik had been saving them in a stasis chamber for the past three months, ever since raiding a navy supply depot on the edge of enemy territory.

The drones wore disruptor vests, which they turned on the prisoners, bathing them in a pale green light that left them in a torpor. It was the same technology that the battle drones—fighters, walkers, and shock troops—used to subdue and collect victims, but at a weaker frequency. One man lifted his head and looked around, but though he was more alert than his fellows, his eyes remained glazed and wandering.

The princesses stopped their preening and cocked their heads as the drones drove the humans into their midst. The drones turned off the disruptor vests and fled the room. One princess started keening, and the rest took up her call as they encircled the prisoners, until the banquet chamber rang with their cries.

The humans came to as soon as the light fell off them. They looked around, eyes widening as they took in the chamber with its curving supports designed to look like the bones of a rib cage. The skulls of humans, Hroom, and other slaughtered species lined the walls. The room was designed to inflict terror so as to sweeten the flesh of its victims, and it served that purpose now. One human fainted, and two others fell to their knees, babbling for mercy. The one who’d remained more alert than the others shouted at his companions to stay together, to go down fighting, but few humans paid him any attention.

Meanwhile, the princesses encircling them had resumed squawking and nipping at each other, each one anxious to be the first to feed. Several turned toward Ak Ik, silently begging her to release them to their meal.

“Are we going to join the feast?” Sool Em asked.

“No, daughter.”

“But I am hungry,” Sool Em said. “And these ones are high status. They’ll feed our power.”

“You’ve taken too much power already.”

“Too much power?” A derisive shriek at this. “I have my own prisoners. If you think that by withholding my rightful prey you’ll keep me weak and subservient, you are wrong, Queen Commander.”

“Rightful prey?” Ak Ik jeered. “I should pluck your eyes out. You were not even in the battle that secured these prisoners. You were too busy working on your human victims, learning how to control their brains. This is my prey, and I will use it as I see fit.”

“How many more humans do you have on board?”

“Thousands. My stasis pods are full of them.”

This was a lie. The queen commander had plenty of Hroom, even a few hundred lesser humans on board, but these few were the only Albion warriors.

Nevertheless, from the way Sool Em greedily clacked her beak, it was obvious that the younger queen believed her.

“Thousands,” Sool Em repeated. “Let me eat.”

“No.”

Sool Em screamed in frustration. The princesses looked over, and several of the humans made a break for it. Before the princesses could react, the humans were charging. They fought their way through and ran for the door where the drones had disappeared. It didn’t open, and the humans threw their shoulders into it to no avail.

“Feed!” Ak Ik screamed. “Feast on their flesh!”

The princesses launched themselves through the air and fell on the humans. The prisoners fought back with their fists, but were no match for claws and beaks. Soon, all seven of the runners had been dragged back, bloodied and gashed, to the center of the banquet chamber, where they were thrown down with the others.

The princesses were more aroused than ever, and gobbled chunks of flesh until Ak Ik screeched for them to stop.

“Bring me the leader, the one who fought.”

They hauled the man to his feet, but his leg muscles were shredded, and he couldn’t stand, so they dragged him across the floor. A bloody streak marked his passage. Ak Ik’s stomach rumbled in hunger, and Sool Em clucked as the two princesses dropped him and returned to the other humans.

Ak Ik pinned the man with one claw. He writhed, but couldn’t get free.

“You will be the last to go,” Ak Ik told him.

He stopped struggling and looked up with a grimace contorting his face. “You speak. And English, too. What traitor taught you?”

“Your feeble human languages are trivial to master. A few minutes with a prisoner is all it took.”

“Liar,” the man said. “It’s a computer implant or something.”

“Our brains are superior, engineered over hundreds of generations to dominate our enemies, just as our weapons and tactics are superior. We are the apex predator of the galaxy, human. You are nothing, a grub, a beetle. Hardly worth bending to pluck you up.”

The man spat at her, a gesture that not only failed—the spit fell back in his own face—but left Ak Ik amused.

“We’ll crush you,” the man said. “Wait until you face
Dreadnought
, then you’ll see.”

“You have been asleep. You don’t know.”

“How long?”

“Twenty years.” The lie tasted delicious on Ak Ik’s tongue.

His face paled. “Years? It can’t be.”

“Yes, twenty of your human years. This is a celebratory event. Your warships are long gone, your planets, too. We have just exterminated the last human colony, all the way to your home world and beyond, which makes the lot of you the last humans in existence. And that will make you the last human ever, once you watch your companions die.”

“Damn you!” Fluid leaked from his eyes and his mouth trembled.

Sool Em and the princesses cawed and jeered at how easily the man had been fooled. Behind him, his suffering compatriots groaned and cried out.

“Feed,” Ak Ik told her daughters. “Feast and gorge yourselves.”

They renewed their frenzy. The humans screamed. Sool Em made as if to join the others.  

“Not you, daughter,” Ak Ik told her.

Again, Sool Em cried out in frustration as the princesses tore apart their victims. In a few minutes, the last of the humans stopped struggling, and all that was left was the sound of tearing and swallowing as princesses dipped their beaks, tilted back their heads, and dipped again.

Ak Ik looked down at the man pinned beneath her claw. “And now, I will eat their commander.”

The man had gone still. “I’m nothing of the sort. I’m only private in the Royal Marines, so the joke’s on you.”

“You are the leader here, and that makes you delicious.”

He screamed as she fed. When the man stopped struggling, she tossed Sool Em a strip of meat, which the other queen gobbled down before letting out a plaintive cry.

“Please, Queen Commander. Let me feed.”

“Very well.”

Ak Ik stepped back, and Sool Em swooped in. She tore and fed, and was still eating after the others had finished their meals. The princesses waddled to the edge of the room, dull and sated. Drones would come and clean up the mess, eating everything down to the bones and hair.

Ak Ik expected Sool Em to continue eating until she was fully engorged, but she stopped early. She eyed Ak Ik with a cunning expression.

“Your plan has failed, old crone,” Sool Em said. “You tried to lay an egg in the enemy’s nest, and it failed.”

“We don’t know that.”

“You gave your precious Hroom general a serum, did you not? He was to deliver it to the human commander, who would then turn traitor. Instead, you lost your precious harvester, and very nearly your life. If I hadn’t carried you off with the fleet, you would be dead, and I would be queen commander in your place. Instead of waiting for the bloody scraps you deign to toss my way.”

Ak Ik clucked in dismay. The loss of her harvester was devastating. If not for the second command ship she’d seized from a rival two years earlier, she’d be without a harvester at all, and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to keep hold of her flock long enough to build another. The other queens of the Apex race were struggling openly now, each jostling to become the empress, and they would have fallen on her in a frenzy.

Instead, Ak Ik had sacrificed the crippled harvester to save her fleet. Then, by jumping sequentially across systems, they’d put distance between themselves and the enemy, until now they were approaching the final jump that would take them to Singapore. There, the other flocks were gathering. There, the humans would be lured to their death.

This was a certainty. The doubts came over who would emerge on top. Ak Ik needed Sool Em until that happened.

“You are still weak, daughter,” Ak Ik said. “Your princesses are barely chicks, and your drone armies are no match for my own. Any of those princesses would take your place. If I give the word, they will tear you apart.”

“I will challenge you some day.”

“Yes, some day. But not now. You are feeble and pathetic, hardly a queen at all. I can pluck you anytime I wish, and mostly likely I will.”

A shiver went down Sool Em’s back, from her neck to her tail feathers. She started to squawk a response, then only clacked her beak shut.

“The admiral is mine,” Ak Ik said. “I will eat him myself. But you may have your choice of any of the other captains.”

“I want the woman, the one with the lone starship. The one who fought us at the battle station.”

“Yes, a worthy meal. Very well, she is yours . . . if you can take her.”

“Oh, I will take her,” Sool Em said. “I swear by the blood of our victims I will have her.”

“One of our rivals tried to board her ship already, I understand. Her troops were slaughtered. A pathetic display.”

“And you just lost a harvester ship,” Sool Em said. “Who is more pathetic?”

Ak Ik screeched in anger while her daughter chortled in the back of her throat. Sool Em’s insolence had gone too far.

But rather than show her rage, Ak Ik turned toward her other daughters. “Listen to me, all of you.”

They lifted their heads and stared blearily in her direction. The meals they had been so greedily consuming moments earlier had left them in a bloated stupor, and they would want nothing more than to return to their roosts, tuck their heads, and sleep.

“I have made an alliance,” Ak Ik said.

Eyes opened, heads lifted and bobbed. They squawked questions at each other.

The queen commander continued. “Certain promises have been made. Some we will break, others will bind us until we are more powerful, until rivals have been weakened. But we must work with the other queens to lure the humans into a battle, and we must have their lances, their spears, their harvesters to be assured of victory. There are traps to set, bait to place. All of these things require help.

“The humans are strong, my daughters. Perhaps the strongest race we have faced in generations. Their commanders are clever, their weapons deadly. All the more satisfying when we drive them to extinction. When that happens, the flock shall be reunited, an empress lifted above the others.” Ak Ik spread her wings. “And when I take this lofty perch, my daughters shall all be queens. You will share in my power.”

They flapped their wings and cried out in joy and bloodlust. As they did, Ak Ik cocked her head slightly so as to watch Sool Em joining the display.

Except for you, Sool Em. The only thing you will be sharing is your life’s blood as I tear out your heart.
 

Chapter Fifteen

Admiral Drake’s fleet had returned to the Manx System and set its sights on a jump on the opposite side of the system, a flight of thirty-three hours, counting acceleration. After that, Singapore.

Unfortunately, there was the small matter of a star leviathan to deal with first. With as much firepower as Drake had, he might theoretically battle the leviathan to a stalemate, but it would cost him. He’d already lost a frigate, and easily conjured scenarios in which he fled for his life while the leviathan snarfed his cruisers and corvettes.

So Drake figured he had two choices to get out of the Manx System unscathed. Most tempting was to simply slink all the way around the perimeter to get from one jump point to the next. He had a rough idea of where the leviathan was lurking, and with a little caution could avoid detection. Unfortunately, that would turn a thirty-three-hour journey into 140 hours. Drake couldn’t lose four and half days.

The other option was to cut straight through. But if he did that, he’d need a little trickery or he’d be back to the “fight-it-out-with-a-leviathan” plan.

He had concocted a scheme and sent
Blackbeard
and
Peerless
, Tolvern and McGowan, to execute it. Drake was curious how they would work together. It was no secret that the two despised each other. Would it show in action?

The rest of the fleet slowed so the two cruisers would enter the asteroid belt first. A star leviathan was an insatiable eating machine, half-organic, half-mechanical. They could absorb all manner of punishment—indeed, bombs and missiles seemed to only feed their hunger—and lay in wait to set traps. Once they hauled in a ship, it was done for, as witnessed by the unfortunate frigate.

But they were still animals. There was no sinister intelligence guiding those tentacles and spore cannons.

Blackbeard
went in first, approaching the asteroid where the fleet had been ambushed a couple of weeks earlier. Anxious and incapable of affecting the outcome, Drake almost left the deck rather than watch.

McGowan may have been spouting off, but he’d spoken the truth about one thing: Drake and Tolvern
did
have a history. First on the estate, where Tolvern’s father was steward for Drake’s father, the baron. Then again on
Blackbeard
, growing close as they faced danger together. And now, admiral and captain were lovers.