Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) (26 page)

Drake turned, pistol in hand. Lloyd, Díaz, and Ellison stood with several marines over the dead bodies of a pair of Apex drones. Ellison had a nasty gash on her arm, but was grinning along with the rest of them. The marines regrouped and set off. More gunfire sounded down the corridor.

“Man your posts!” he ordered the three officers.

Action drew his attention to the viewscreen.

Drake’s heavy cruisers kept pounding away with their cannon. A pair of destroyers joined them, and three corvettes streaked in, followed by two more. They took position just off
Dreadnought
’s flank as she continued to put distance between herself and the harvester, which kept up a stream of withering fire. Corvettes fired their smaller cannon and launched missile salvos. Frigates added their own missiles.

A wave of torpedo boats rolled into the fight. They dropped their loads and banked away. Their torpedoes accelerated toward the harvester and rang its hull with a series of hammer blows. The harvester hit one of the torpedo boats before it could escape, and it exploded. Another drifted off, wounded.

Lances and spears were entering the fight, too, and the harvester, wounded and showing gaping scars along its hull, moved behind them as if to make its escape.

“Like hell you will,” Drake said. “Lloyd, get me Tolvern. No, belay that order.”

No need to send the message because Tolvern was already moving with
Blackbeard
and the other cruisers to block the harvester’s retreat. The massive enemy ship lashed out in desperation, trying to clear the cruisers from its path.
Dreadnought
followed the harvester and laid down a vicious barrage of missiles.

Drake needed one more blow. One more crashing, punishing strike.

“Throck,” Drake said, “what the devil is holding up the main battery?”

Throckmorton looked up from the defense grid computer. “That last enemy attack knocked two guns off their carriages. The gunnery says ten minutes.”

“We don’t have ten minutes. Make it faster.”

“Yes, sir.”

Pinned by Tolvern’s cruisers, the harvester turned back and laid everything into destroying the enemy battleship.
Dreadnought
rocked as she took blows. Simon warned of failures to the number two and three shields, with critical damage mounting in the five and six as well. The four was completely gone, and if it took one more hit, he was in trouble.

Drake gripped his hand rests. “I need that battery, by God, and I need it now.”

Throck looked up from the computer, eyes wide. “It’s ready!”

“Fire!”

Dreadnought
’s cannon fired. The ship shuddered as the force of the barrage came through the hull all the way to the bridge. Tons of hot metal spewed out the side and blasted into the harvester ship. It rolled to one side and flared its engines, like it meant to come at
Dreadnought
and grapple with her again.

But the broadside had opened a gaping hole in the side of the enemy ship. Explosions continued along its hull. A piece of plating the size of one of Drake’s torpedo boats exploded from the side, then another. The enemy ship could no long maneuver, and it was breaking apart along the seams.

Drake’s cruisers pulled away, even as they continued to rain torpedoes and missiles on the dying ship. The weapons stabbed into the open wound, where they detonated deep inside. The harvester was launching pods now, escape bubbles that blasted off in all directions. Drake ordered his crew to keep firing.

Blackbeard
came up and fired a blast with her belly cannon right at the open wound. The harvester exploded, and the viewscreen went black. Debris pummeled
Dreadnought
, and there was nothing to do but weather it. At last the screen cleared.
Blackbeard
appeared to one side, smoking and venting debris, her engines leaking plasma. But intact.

The harvester was gone. Nothing but wreckage and chunks of debris spiraling away from the battlefield.

Drake slammed his fist into his palm and joined the others in letting out a cheer. There was still mop up action ahead of them, but the battle had been won.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ak Ik came screeching out of the boarding vessel, rage filling her head with a burning white light as she entered the other ship. Smoke clogged the air, and a warning tone clanged with the sound of metal striking metal. An enemy drone, wing broken from the impact of the boarding vessel slamming through the wall, tried to crawl away. Ak Ik fell upon it and tore out its throat.

Another drone came around the corner, wearing a breach-sealant tank with a nozzle attached to its beak. The queen opened her wings, pointed twin barrels at the drone, and fired. The drone danced grotesquely as it went down, and Ak Ik threw back her head and screamed her pleasure.

Two battle drones joined the queen from the boarding vessel. They were armed with repeaters, and boasted red feathers around their necks and green ones on their breasts to offset their otherwise drab colors. She’d have brought more drones, but her own ship was smashed, birds dead and dying, her nesting chamber a wreckage of yolk and burned chicks.

“It’s all gone,” she said. “Everything destroyed.”

“Queen Commander?” one of the drones said. It cocked its head, alert.

“Never mind that. I will rebuild. Lay eggs and breed a new army to do my bidding.” Ak Ik squawked. “I will give the two of you excretions for your loyalty and turn you male. You will be my consorts and the fathers of my new army.”

They made keening sounds and ruffled their feathers. It was as much excitement as one could expect from a drone, yet even that seemed curiously muted. What the queen meant, what these two knew, was that this honor would only be given them if they survived. And first they had a rival to subdue.

Ak Ik led the pair down twisting passageways toward the center of the ship. Alarms clanged everywhere. The air smelled first of burned feathers, then of liquid waste when they came across foul effluvia spraying under pressure from a broken pipe. Two more bodies lay in the hallway.

Everywhere she looked she saw disaster. Unmitigated disaster.

Ak Ik’s rage had first centered on the cowardly birds of her own flock and those of her treacherous allies. Then, as she fled toward the jump point in the sun, she threw her ire at the humans pursuing her relentlessly instead of allowing her to limp away to recover. Two harvester ships annihilated, yet the humans hadn’t paused to gloat, had instead hunted the survivors.

We are Apex. I am the queen, and there are none above me. The human race is marked only for extermination.
 

Yet the humans had proven wily, dangerous opponents. That might have earned them respect if not for their inherent weaknesses. Instead of crushing the Hroom, the Albion nation had allied itself with a lesser species, with lesser nations of their own kind. Instead of purging their ranks of the weak members, the humans allowed them to flourish.

Ak Ik had forgotten about the humans now, gave no thought to the schemes she was contemplating to return and give them battle. Instead, she was thinking about Sool Em. Ak Ik swore on her own blood that she would tear out her daughter’s throat.

Sool Em’s perch was empty. There was nobody at the helm, nobody piloting the ship. No drones worked the controls. If an enemy approached, there was nobody to fire the weapons. From what Ak Ik had seen from her own ship, there wasn’t much left of the weapon systems anyway.

“Did my daughter flee the ship?” Ak Ik asked. “She must have. She must have known I was coming and has flown away in an escape pod.”

“Queen Commander,” one of her drones said simply.

“She can’t have got far, not in this system. If she escaped on a ship, it won’t be big enough to jump. That means she’s gone to the habitable planet. Can we find her before she lands?”

Again, the drone spoke. “I don’t understand, Queen Commander.”

Ak Ik screeched. “Quiet! If you’re too stupid to think, then be clever enough to keep your beak shut before I tear it off.”

The three of them made their way out of the perch and past the roosts. One of the airlocks had been burst, and they had to go around it to stay where there was oxygen.

“The ship appears to be abandoned, Queen Commander,” one of her drones said at last.

“There’s one place left to check.”

The nesting chamber. She pushed her way into the warm, humid room, not expecting to see anything but shattered eggs, but thinking perhaps Sool Em had taken her final refuge here.

Unbroken eggs covered the floor. Most of them were gray, drab, but there, in the back, gleamed four shiny blue eggs with yellow speckles. The arrogance was unbelievable. Sool Em had already hatched three princesses, and now she was trying to hatch four more. To go with what drone army? And did she really think Ak Ik would permit her to grow in power now, after everything that had happened?

The queen was so focused on those eggs, so anxious to crush them, that she didn’t immediately notice the movement at the edges of the room. Her two battle drones had stumbled into the room behind the queen, and one of them cried a warning.

Gunshots rang out, and Ak Ik’s drones fell. The queen lifted her wings to show her own weapons, but before she could whirl around to face her attacker, a warning scream stopped her in her place.

“Put your wings down or you die.” It was Sool Em’s voice. “That’s right, now turn your back to me.”

Sool Em clipped off Ak Ik’s harness with her beak. The twin-barreled gun clattered to the floor, cracking one of the drone eggs as it fell. Ak Ik’s mind churned, trying to find a way out of her predicament.

“There are only the two of us now,” she said, “so fighting would be pointless. We must rebuild.”

“You attacked my ship.”

“My communications are down,” Ak Ik lied. “This is the only way I had to communicate. I came over to discuss our next plans. We have to rebuild our flock.”

“Keep talking,” Sool Em said. “Let me hear your lies. They will amuse me.”

Ak Ik turned to look into her daughter’s arrogant eyes. “They’re no lies. It seems like we’re defeated—and maybe we are, as far as the humans are considered—but there will be other Apex survivors. We can gather them, force them to serve us. First, dominate the flocks, then face the humans. That might take generations, but someday we will see them eliminated.”

“I like most of that scheme,” Sool Em said. “Except the part where you’re in command. I will be the queen.”

Ak Ik screeched her derision. “You have nothing. A few eggs, a few surviving drones, perhaps.”

“And you have less.”

Ak Ik launched herself with a cry. She threw herself at her daughter, talons outstretched as her wings batted the air. She would sink her claws into Sool Em’s breast and hurl her to the ground. How sweet to tear out her enemy’s innards while she was still alive. A feast to strengthen the queen before she began the—

A sharp report, a searing pain in Ak Ik’s wing bone. She fell flapping to the ground, crushing eggs as she landed awkwardly. The pain, the awful, terrible pain. Terror followed. She was wounded, at the feet of her enemy, and she was bleeding all over. Sool Em straddled Ak Ik and pointed her gun at the other queen’s head.

“You should not have done that.” There was triumph in Sool Em’s voice.

“Mercy.”

“You serve
me
, now. You bow to
me
.”

“I will!”

“You live at my pleasure, you survive only so far as I need you.”

“Yes!” Ak Ik cried. “Anything you say.”

Ak Ik’s right wing was broken, and the pain was exquisite. She used her other wing to push herself up and tried to get her legs under her. Yolk mixed with blood and dripped off her feathers. Sool Em seized her in a claw and slammed her back down. Ak Ik cried out in fresh pain and fear.

Sool Em tossed back her head and keened. Two figures moved out of the shadows of the nesting chamber.

Sool Em’s drones. The younger queen must not mean to kill her mother, or she’d do it herself so as to revel in the defeat of a rival and enjoy the taste of her flesh. Sool Em must have called the drones to care for the older queen’s wounds.

Ak Ik tried to call out her relief, but there was such pain in her chest that she couldn’t get the sound out. She took a ragged gasp and tried to speak instead. Her words wheezed out one by one.

“Thank you, my daughter. Help me, let me live. I swear I will worship you. You will be my queen, my empress.”

“Yes, you will serve me. As the weak serve the strong. As prey serves a predator.”

The other two birds strutted forward. Their wings were green, and the feathers around their necks a scarlet red on the tips, as if they’d been dipped in blood. Not drones, princesses. Barely fledglings, but already grown in their power.

“So big already,” Ak Ik gasped.

“They have been feeding well. Imagine how they will grow when they are done with you. Eat, my daughters.”

“No, please—”

One of the chicks nosed at Ak Ik’s belly. She snapped and drove it back. The princess squawked her rage. The second chick came in from the other side and nipped Ak Ik’s injured wing. She whipped her head around and screeched to chase it away. Sool Em bent over her, beak flashing downward.

A ripping pain as the younger queen tore out one of her mother’s eyeballs. Then Sool Em’s claw slammed down and pinned her head. She held Ak Ik’s uninjured wing with her other claw.

“She will do you no harm now,” Sool Em cried. “Eat!”

And then the chicks were on their victim, screaming and crying in joy and hunger as they pecked and slashed. Feathers came apart, skin parted. Beaks buried themselves in Ak Ik’s belly with a tearing, ripping sound.

And pain. So much pain.

Chapter Twenty-Three

General Mose Dryz was in human territory. He sensed it even before he came fully awake. The air was dry, and his skin tight and chilled. By the gods, these humans must have evolved on a cold desert world.