The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (19 page)

“You’ve won nothing,” she said. “My people are everywhere.”

“We’re spreading the word. You’re a failure, a traitor. What you did is far worse than anything the Albion people did, and your followers will desert you. There’s no reason for a Sentry Faction anymore—Apex knows we’re here, and now we need all the help we can get.”

Her smile became even more arrogant, until it was almost a sneer. “You think you’re clever because you have command, communications, and fire control? I have food, I have power.”

“We’ll go hungry if we have to. And you can cut power to my parts of the base, but I can run on auxiliary until we hook up to
Blackbeard
’s power plant. And when Apex reappears, would you still stand off stubbornly while we’re destroyed for lack of power?”

“How about water? Can you do without that? How about oxygen?”

Now Li scoffed. “You cut off our oxygen supplies and you’ll be the first to suffocate. The command module has its own scrubbers. That gives me three days. By the time they run out, you’ll be blue and stiff, and I’ll turn the system back on.”

“I’ll blow them apart. You’ll never get them back on.”

“Suicide, that’s your plan? You’re insane.”

Insane, maybe, but serious, yes. He could see it in the set of her jaw.

“Someone cut her off,” he said. “I’m sick of looking at her face and listening to her treason and lies.”

Koh hit some buttons. There was some resistance from the partially compromised system, and Anna stared, willing him to do it. At last, Koh managed to cut the connection, and the screen returned to its view of the assault ducts connecting them to HMS
Blackbeard
.

“Come on, Swett,” Koh piped up. “Get those pipes retracted already.”

“Right,” Li grumbled. “How are we supposed to convince them we’re not hostile while we’ve still got our tubes shoved into their orifices?”

“I can’t,” Swettenham said. “The seals won’t deploy. They seem to have been deliberately torn out by the Albionish.”

“You must be wrong,” Li said. “Why would they do that?”

“I figure they’re trying to damage the ducts anyway they can,” Swettenham said. “Keep us from trying another attack down the line.”

“But for now, it simply leaves them connected to our station. What’s to keep another fifty men from running down the duct, firing away as they jump in. Koh—” he started to say, then stopped when he saw her expression.

She’d raised her eyebrows and her mouth was slightly open. A look of understanding dawned in her eyes.

“You’re right, Commander, anyone
can
run down the ducts,” Koh said. “In either direction.”

Chapter Fourteen

To those on
Blackbeard
, it felt as though Tolvern’s ship were being hugged in a death grip by the Singaporean battle station. But the distance was deceptive when one was used to dealing in measurements of millions of miles or even light years. The tunnels connecting the ship to the base were nearly four hundred meters long.

As soon as they entered, Tolvern and her assault group saw that the invaders had ridden on rail cars, which had no doubt zipped them across in seconds, but nobody could figure out how to activate the cars to fling
Blackbeard
’s crew across in the opposite direction. At least not figure it out fast enough for the captain to keep messing around with it. What’s more, the gravity disappeared the instant they got outside of
Blackbeard
’s hull, and presumably wouldn’t resume until they’d gained the battle station.

That’s when Chief Engineer Barker came up with the clever idea of sending several of them across on boarding rockets. That was how
Blackbeard
got inside disabled enemy warships, streaking through the vacuum on a wire. But instead of flying through the vacuum, they simply followed the tunnels, sending the boarding rockets back and forth to get all fifty members of the assault group across. It was roughly half the crew, with the other half staying behind to continue emergency repairs.

Tolvern was leaving no defenders to repel a counterattack. She was going all in. If the Singaporeans mounted any sort of operation in the interim, anything at all,
Blackbeard
was finished. The captain had a hunch, a strong one, and meant to take her chances.

Tolvern was in the last group across, sitting with Smythe and two others, straddling a boarding rocket. It launched, and they were off.

Air blasted her face, and momentum jerked her body back in the harness. Tiny lights on the inside of the tunnel turned into a single smear of blue. And then she was jerking to a stop on the other end and Capp was pulling her off.

“You alright, Cap’n?”

“Good enough.” Tolvern swung her assault rifle over her shoulder and thumbed off the safety as she pointed it at the ground. “Let’s go.”

The passageway out of the duct connecting ship to battle station was larger than she was accustomed to in the tight confines of a Punisher-class cruiser. The ceiling was more than nine feet high, and the corridor was wide enough for three to walk abreast. The lighting was a cool white, not the more natural yellow on
Blackbeard
. And the air was warmer and more humid than she was accustomed to—hardly the tropical hell of Hot Barsa by any stretch, but clearly set for people accustomed to a different climate.

From the exterior, the battle station had appeared as sets of rings with other structures built against the interior, but it was all a maze of passages and lifts in here. Signs marked various passages, but though Smythe could scan and translate the literal meaning of Chinese characters, the English version came across as gibberish: “element control,” “suppression of fullness,” “alimentary natural,” “unusual and unnecessary,” and the like.

“I’m making a map as we go,” Smythe said as they came to the first
Blackbeard
-controlled checkpoint, where three of Tolvern’s crew had forced a half-dozen prisoners to lie face-down on the floor. The tech officer pointed to a passage on his right. “I think that direction is where we’ll find what passes for the bridge.”

“What does that sign say?” she asked, pointing to the Chinese letters.

He frowned. “Potency skillful.”

“Better than ‘alimentary natural’—that sounded like an herbal anti-constipation remedy.”

Lieutenant Capp had gone ahead with several more crew, and Tolvern caught up with her a few minutes later. Capp had taken some more prisoners and was trying to interrogate them. Five more
Blackbeard
crew were up ahead securing the next passageway, and Tolvern held until she got word. She studied Capp as the woman tried to menace and threaten information out of the Singaporeans, who answered back . . . but not in English.

“King’s balls,” Capp said. “It’s no good, Cap’n. Thought maybe these blokes could talk English like that one we caught on
Blackbeard
. But it’s just that singy jabbering.” She poked one of them in the back with her rifle as he looked up. “Plenty agreeable, though. Don’t figure none of ’em will give us trouble. As mellow as a Hroom sugar eater waiting for their next fix of the white stuff.”

Tolvern remembered the fierce battle in the engineering bay, how the Singaporeans had taken the initiative. “Don’t count on it. These ones are probably just techs.”

“Hey!” Smythe said.

“No offense, Smythe. Or maybe they’re the ones on our side.”

“You still sticking with that theory?” Capp asked.

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? Someone sending us a message, someone else trying to kill us. A quick attack, followed by nothing. No armed response when we got over here.”

Tolvern nodded, feeling more confident as the words came out, confirmed by the last fifteen minutes as they’d already taken over a good section of the Singaporean base without opposition.

“There’s some struggle going on here,” she added. “One side wants to kill us, one side doesn’t.”

“If that’s the case, then where’s all the kill-y people?” Capp asked. “And how do we take care of them?”

“I think we’ll find them nearby, in potency skillful.”

“Huh, what?” Capp said.

“The bridge,” Tolvern told her, pointing to one of the Chinese signs. “It’s that way. Capture their bridge, and the rest of the base is ours. Assuming most of the kill-y people fell into our hands over on
Blackbeard
, we might not even have much of a fight.”

That all sounded logical, but when had it ever been that easy? Never in any battle Tolvern had ever fought, and after a decade in the navy, fighting Hroom, Albion traitors, pirates, and Apex, she’d been in her fair share. Something always went wrong, and it wasn’t always immediately apparent what.

So she was cautious, perhaps overly so, as they followed the signs leading them to the bridge. When they got to the last corridor, she held position while Carvalho and three others jogged up and joined them. Together with Capp and Smythe, they made seven in all. It would have to be enough.

Capp poked her head around the corner. She pulled back scowling. “Looks like someone beat us to the party. What do you make of that, Cap’n?”

Tolvern looked. A man slumped dead on the floor. Looked like gunshot. The doors behind him had a hole blown in them, big enough for people to go through. Her hands itched on her assault rifle. An unknown, and Tolvern didn’t like unknowns.

“Go in hard and fast,” she said. “But hold your fire unless they shoot first.”

“You must fancy getting shot full of holes,” Capp said. “Shoot first, hold fire later, that’s my vote.”

“You don’t get a
vote
, Lieutenant. We need prisoners, a forced alliance at the barrel of the gun, if necessary. Kill them all, and that will be hard to do.”

“Thought the bad guys had the bridge. Let’s waste them and make arrangements with those what survive.”

“I do not like this plan,” Carvalho said. His voice was tight, his accent thicker than usual. “I do not like these Chinese at all.”

“Shut up, both of you,” Tolvern said. When they’d complied, she gave a curt nod. “That’s better. On my count. Ready? Go!”

They broke into a run. It was all silent until they came onto the bridge, with Tolvern behind Capp and Carvalho, and four others behind her. Carvalho shouted in Ladino, Capp yelled her own orders, someone on the other end shouted in Chinese, and Tolvern thought shooting would break out before she could calm matters.

There were two men and a woman on the bridge. One of the men had sprung to his feet, and carried a pistol, which he waved back and forth between Capp and Carvalho, jabbering excitedly. The other two Singaporeans shouted at him, and seemed to be yelling for him to put down the weapon. He was a thin, middle-aged man, probably a technician, and seemed uncomfortable with the gun. The other two had dropped their weapons to their feet.

Tolvern came in from the side and grabbed the older man’s wrist. Carvalho sprang in and together they wrenched the pistol away, while Capp and the others from
Blackbeard
pointed their guns in the faces of the two remaining people. They didn’t resist.

Once they had the weapons scooped up, Tolvern lined up the three prisoners. The older man was talking quickly, pleading something. The younger man leaned against him for support. He had a wound on his inner thigh. Must have come during the attack that left the dead man in the corridor outside.

“Calm down, will you?” she said. “Quiet!”

They ignored her and carried on.

She looked them over, trying to determine ranks. They had dragon and tiger pins on their collars, but the uniforms were otherwise identical. The two men looked helpless, confused, even frightened. Only the woman held herself with any confidence. She was speaking with the other two in a quiet, but insistent voice, and they calmed down. She must be in charge.

“Smythe, get your translator and ask this woman her name. Is she the base commander or a mutineer?”

While he worked at his computer, Tolvern took a look around. The command module—the so-called “potency skillful”—was smaller in diameter than
Blackbeard
’s bridge, but with a higher ceiling. A closed door on the other side matched the destroyed door on this one. It seemed to be an exit, rather than a doorway to a separate chamber, like
Blackbeard
’s war room.

Other than that, the command room was more or less the same as a bridge on a Royal Navy warship, with its consoles and viewscreen. The large screen was split into several panels that showed views of interior corridors and open spaces. In some of these, Singaporeans were running in one direction or another. Another screen showed three of Tolvern’s crew taking position with their rifles at their shoulders. A final panel showed a large open room with towers of hanging plants—a hydroponic farm from the look of it. Curiously, a man with a knife was hacking off hanging vines laden with tomatoes and letting them fall to the ground.

Smythe held up his computer with the Chinese letters. The woman glanced at it, eyes moving over the screen. She hesitated, glanced at the older man to her right, then shook her head and pointed to him.

“She must think we’re idiots,” Capp said. “This bloke’s not in charge.”

The other woman said something and pointed to the tiger pin on the man’s collar, then to the dragon on her own.

“What’s that, then?” Capp said. “Does tiger trump dragon?”

“We’ll figure it out soon enough,” Tolvern said. “Smythe, tell him to stand down, to order all forces to stop fighting. We’ll see if he’s in charge or not.”

Smythe showed the new message, and the older man said something and gestured up at the viewscreen. He pointed at the man cutting tomato plants in the hydroponic farms.

“I don’t care about your harvest or whatever it is you’re doing,” Tolvern said. “Your crew will stand down, do you understand? Everyone put down their weapons, approach our people in a nonthreatening manner, and surrender. I’ll send a message to my own people not to shoot. Then we’ll talk.”

This was a lot to translate, and as Smythe did so, the female Singaporean tried to move back to her console. Carvalho blocked her with his gun. She let out a rapid-fire protest. The other three crew from
Blackbeard
had moved to guard the doors, but now they came back, guns leveled as it seemed there would be trouble.