The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

“
Blackbeard
still has her weapons. Let’s die on our own ship instead of this floating coffin.” Carvalho gave a solemn nod. “Also, please stay away from that harvester ship. That is
not
how I would choose to go.”

Commander Li came on the com. He sounded exhausted, beaten. “It’s no good, Captain. I spoke to the ringleader. He would rather die than surrender and live in dishonor.”

It was the most inane thing Tolvern had ever heard. What honor was there in staking out a position that would have them fighting against allies while their sworn enemy—Apex—closed in for the kill? Commander Li had been right. The Sentry Faction was a group of fanatics.

Li continued. “I would suggest that we keep negotiating, but”—a pause—“but a scan of the power plant shows they may have opened the containment field. They may be attempting to flood the base with radiation.”

That was it. Tolvern closed the channel and ordered her forces to the ready. Seconds later, Carvalho and two others had charges against the doors. They blew them open, and more than thirty
Blackbeard
crew charged inside.

Tolvern swung her gun around as she got inside the control room, but saw no enemies. Banks of electronics sat undamaged on either side of the room, monitoring electric current, water flow, and valves. No signs of sabotage or even defenders. If she hadn’t been assured there was no way out of the plant except the doors they’d just knocked down, she’d have guessed that the mutineers had fled. But the people who’d been so recently shooting at her must be around somewhere.

The command module reported no elevated radiation levels in the plant, but the containment field had definitely been breached. Tolvern’s forces pushed out of the control room and toward the plant itself, a rather standard nuclear reactor that supplied all of Sentinel 3’s power needs.

They didn’t find the defenders until they reached the containment field. There, on the far side of a semitransparent, shimmering wall that separated the plant from the radiation inside, lay the bodies of nearly a dozen Singaporeans. They’d passed through the containment field and subjected themselves to lethal doses of radiation. And done so voluntarily. In the end, they’d apparently decided it was better to die than surrender and be forced to admit their mistake.

Tolvern and Carvalho stood back a pace for several seconds without speaking. The dead men and women lay on the floor, all in a line, as if they’d come in, carefully taken their places, and waited. Others of Tolvern’s crew moved through the corridors and auxiliary rooms, looking for anyone who might still be hiding. They found no one.

Carvalho spoke first. “There is one thing you can say, Captain. These people believed in their cause. I do not know whether to respect them or to pity them for defending it to the death.”

“Come on, we can’t stand here gawking. We have our own cause to defend to the death.”

Chapter Nineteen

Ak Ik opened her wings to show her colors as eleven princesses fluttered into the perch that served as the command center for the ship. The other birds flapped their wings, bobbed their necks, and strutted back and forth to show their feathers. They boasted brilliant displays of gold and green and red.

The drones in the perch cowered as the princesses bobbed and weaved, squawking and boasting while the queen commander herself waited with her wings open, but otherwise not participating in the display.

The brightest colors among the princesses belonged to Sool Em, her plumage almost rivaling Ak Ik’s own splendor. Only a few days had passed since Sool Em’s humiliation and near death, when Ak Ik had crushed so many of her drone eggs and threatened to destroy her princess eggs as well. Those eggs were now at the end of their incubation period, and if Ak Ik permitted them to hatch, Sool Em would be a queen commander. Would split away with her ships and form a rival flock. Eventually, the two queens—mother and daughter—would come into brutal conflict.

But first, this glorious battle against the human battle station and the wounded warship that had taken refuge behind its formidable guns. The queen commander’s fleet was only two hours from entering combat. Ak Ik could barely contain her excitement, and a loud caw came from her beak.

This stopped the flapping, head-bobbing dance of her princesses. They shuffled and fluttered as they folded their wings, then lined up in front of the queen commander.

The drones tittered nervously and returned to their work. They used beaks to peck at keyboards, squawked voice commands, and manipulated joysticks with claws and tongues. The crew on the perch of Ak Ik’s harvester ship had absorbed so many secretions over the years that they’d lost any ability to act independently. The chemicals secreted in the queen commander’s saliva had forged such deep channels in their brains that when given orders, they would carry them out intelligently, but with a single-minded purpose, unable to bend or deviate.

“At least one of you will die during this battle,” Ak Ik told her daughters. “The humans will try to kill you first—it may be that you fall to the enemy guns. The princess or princesses whose spear ships fall will die with their drones. But if our prey does not deliver a mortal wound to at least one of your number, I will kill the weakest of you myself.”

The queen commander lifted one claw and flexed it to show its tearing power. The princesses watched her with cocked heads.

“The weakest will die, will feed the others, and I will raise another princess to take her place. Thus will the flock be strengthened, our power to destroy the weaker species of the galaxy unchallenged. Let none of my daughters show cowardice today, lest she be the one to fall.”

They squawked their assent.

“Should we emerge victorious,” Ak Ik continued, “my daughter Sool Em shall be made a queen. It was she who secreted the chemicals into the brain of the human, she who forced the battle station to reveal itself, and she will be given any captives taken from the warship. We will consume the so-called Singapore humans together, while sending a select number of Albion humans back to their fleet to open the path to our ultimate conquest of their kingdom.”

There was more squawking and displays at this. Other princesses showed jealousy, anger at Sool Em and at Ak Ik herself, anger that another had been chosen in her place. Every princess harbored the same ambition, to become a queen commander, allowed a flock of a hundred thousand to command. And every queen harbored an equally powerful ambition, to someday become empress of the entire species, to devour the other queens and their princesses and raise a flock that was composed of their descendants and their descendants only.

Such a thing had not happened in more than three centuries, but everywhere the queens were jockeying, making temporary alliances. Three queens had already formed a super flock as they thrust deep into the Hroom Empire, feasting and multiplying.

And now, Ak Ik, her flock having cracked the code to control the brains of the humans, found her own ambitions swelling. If only she could keep Sool Em from splitting at the end of the battle with the humans. The queen commander cocked her head and studied the younger bird as she strutted about, nipping the feathers of her sisters.

I lied to you, daughter. When the battle is over, you must die.
 

They kept up their display for nearly a minute before settling down. Sool Em let out a croaking, hooting request to be heard.

“Speak.”

“My hunter-killer pack is positioned at the rear.”

“Being held in reserve, daughter. You will see combat, I promise you.”

“With the rest of the flock in front of my lances, I’ve kept my instruments trained outward. Watching for the Albion forces being sent to relieve our prey.”

“We determined that the intercepted subspace was intended as deception,” Ak Ik said. “No enemy warships will arrive in time to affect the battle.”

“Are you certain, Queen Commander?” Sool Em asked. There was something cryptic in her voice. “What if I were to tell you that an enemy fleet is on its way?”

Ak Ik hesitated at this. Did the princess mean Hroom ships? The empire was in disarray, attacked from the rear by Apex queens, from within by a still smoldering civil war, and on the outskirts by the raging addiction to sugar that humans had fostered for generations to weaken their rival. There was an antidote now to the addiction, but it was spreading slowly.

All of this had come from numerous sources. The Hroom brain had been cracked open long ago, and spies and saboteurs were placed throughout their worlds. Ak Ik herself had six different Hroom returned to their people with secretions to control their brains, though she was not currently moving against that race. There was more glory to be found in fighting humans.

“If you mean the Hroom,” Ak Ik said at last, “I find that implausible. They have shown no ability to move their sloops of war into independent combat against our flocks.”

“I do not mean the Hroom,” Sool Em said. She smugly ruffled her feathers, an action that made the queen commander twitch with rage. “Or the humans. Other flocks are coming to share the spoils.”

Sool Em shared her discovery. A flock that had been feasting on abandoned Singaporean mining colonies had broken away with its harvester ship and had jumped into the system, apparently laying claim to the battle station as part of its spoils. It was a large, powerful flock, with numerous resources for a protracted battle. It also enjoyed the glorious status of being one of the flocks participating in subduing a human civilization. That had never happened before.

Still, Ak Ik was surprised to be challenged so directly.

“This can only mean one thing,” Ak Ik said. “The queen commander has pretensions to take her place as empress of the race. We’ll pluck her feathers if she tries.”

“And there is another threat, Queen Commander,” Sool Em said. “A second challenger to our prize.”

Ak Ik could only clack her beak at this. A second challenger? How could that be?

“Explain at once!”

This turned out to be three of the flocks that had been working together to attack and devour the defenseless Hroom systems. There was little glory in preying on the Hroom, but the worlds were rich in resources and allowed the flocks to grow in strength for more serious battles elsewhere. And now Sool Em claimed they were returning to steal Ak Ik’s glory.

“We cannot stare down four flocks at once, Queen Commander,” one of the other princesses said. “Maybe we’ll have to share our prize.”

Ak Ik squawked her anger, both at the princess for saying something so obvious, and at the ugly reality.

“Verify these claims at once,” she ordered the drones working the computers. She turned back to Sool Em. “You had better not be lying, or I will tear out your feathers and eat your liver.”

There was no heat in this threat, it was merely symbolic, like the strutting and preening of a few moments earlier. The princess wasn’t lying; that was obvious in her smug manner.

But what to do? The prudent thing would be to negotiate, to allow the strongest of the arriving parties to share her glory in capturing the human battle station, and then fight off the others. She could still claim the warship as a lesser prize and use its crew to infiltrate the Albion worlds. Preserve her secret until it was too late for the others to stop her. The true glory lay in that direction.

But she balked at this plan. It would show weakness.

“We’ll call in the rest of our forces,” Ak Ik decided at last. “They won’t arrive in time, but that will broadcast our intentions. Any queen who dares challenge me will realize that it is a fight to the death, that I intend to prove my dominance.”

The others stared at her, and Sool Em’s flapping wings managed to look both eager and worried at the same time. To challenge the other queens so directly meant only that the queen commander was declaring her own pretensions. That might leave her princesses dead, or it might make them ascendant, queens in their own right through the glory of their mother, the empress.

Ak Ik strode across the perch to her drones. “You will increase speed. Prepare all weapon systems. Ready boarding parties. Bring the harvesting facilities online. We must defeat the humans at once.”

The drones moved quickly to comply. Such was Ak Ik’s command over them that nothing would stop them but death. There was no longer any turning back.

#

Captain Tolvern followed Li into the depths of the battle station’s fire control system. He stopped in front of a bank of tubes holding small missiles, each no longer than a grown man. There were dozens of missiles in the battery, and conveyor belts lined up additional missiles to reload the tubes. Technicians checked the equipment, while others prepared powersuits to maneuver heavier items.

“This is a new weapon system since the first war,” Li said. “Well, new as of eleven years ago. I suppose the enemy has faced them by now, including in our skirmish a few days ago.”

“They don’t look like much,” Tolvern said. “My cannons fire larger shells than these missiles.”

“The lances are hard to hit,” Li said, “but if you can land a blow, their armor is insufficient. This was our mistake in the first war, trying to strike them hard instead of striking them often. More, smaller guided munitions was the key.”

“But what’s their range? They don’t seem large enough to carry sufficient fuel.”

“The fuel stage is added at the end as they’re loaded into the tubes. It’s all automatic, very efficient. Come on, let me show you the bomb clusters. Then, I want to show you how the plasma ejector fires.”

“I’m here to see the big gun,” Tolvern said impatiently. “The rest of the stuff I can figure out in combat. Tell me where to position my ship for maximum protection, and that’s good enough for now.”

She wasn’t impatient out of boredom. Far from it. There was a wealth of information in here that she wanted to get into the hands of the Admiralty. Weapon systems designed from lessons learned during a bloody war with Apex might just save Albion if they could be adopted quickly enough. Whatever else she’d learned about Li and his people, the Singaporeans were excellent technicians, strategic thinkers, and prepared to fight it out with the enemy using all of the tools in their arsenal.