The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (3 page)

Li was about to ask Anna this, when his com link opened. It was the base computer. He glanced away, as if looking at the potato plant, so they wouldn’t catch from his expression that he was receiving a message.

“The unknown transmission has been successfully decoded,” came the dispassionate voice. “It is an audio message. The voice is human.”

Li walked down the row, glancing at the plants as if distracted by his thoughts. In reality, his heart was pounding. The other two followed.

He responded subvocally to the computer’s message. “Play the audio.”

What followed was a string of nonsensical sounds. The speaker was undoubtedly human, but she didn’t speak one of Singapore’s known dialects, or any language that sounded remotely familiar. It was a woman’s voice, no tonal quality to it at all, but pleasant and melodic at the same time. He’d heard Old Earth languages, not spoken, but sung in ancient recordings of operas, and assumed it must be one of those.

“What language is it?” he asked, again subvocally. “Italian? German?”

“Negative. Unknown language.”

Anna tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned around. “Well?” she demanded. “Are you going to keep ignoring me?”

Belatedly, Li realized she’d been talking to him as he walked. He’d been so swept along in that mysterious unknown language and his queries to the computer that his sister’s voice had faded into the background, along with the hum of the air purifiers and the bubbling of water in the hydroponic system. Whatever she’d been saying, he had no time for it.

“I have nothing more to discuss,” he said. “Return to your posts and await my orders.”

#

Li waited impatiently as Dong Swettenham listened to the audio for what had to be the hundredth time. The man wore headphones, had the sound turned up loud, the audio slowed. He held his hand computer, which he used to make notes or scroll through what appeared to be a dictionary. Whenever Li tried to interrupt him or peer over his shoulder at the notes he was taking, Swettenham waved him off with an impatient air.

Swettenham was possibly the most unusual last name on Sentinel 3. Singapore had been settled by colonists from a small city state during the Great Migration half a millennium ago, and almost all of the surnames were Chinese or Malay in origin. Swettenham claimed he was descended from a British governor of the Old Earth version of Singapore. People teased him about it.

He certainly didn’t
look
any different from anyone else, but having such an ancestor—mythical or not—had made him a student of old European languages. Swettenham claimed to speak two different forms of English, plus German, a little Spanish, and a smattering of French. Not that there was anyone around to test his knowledge. For all Li knew, he was making it up and mumbling nonsense.

At last, Swettenham peeled off his headphones. “Yep, it sure is.”

“Sure is what?”

“An unknown dialect of Old Earth English.”

“You told me that already,” Li said. “You said it five seconds in. That was what? Two hours ago?”

Swettenham glanced at his screen. “Seventy-eight minutes. I’m telling you it’s English. You wanted confirmation, and I’m giving it to you. Definitely English.”

Li gritted his teeth. “That’s not confirmation. That’s a reassertion of a statement without confirming facts.”

Swettenham blinked, looking chastened by the heat in his commander’s voice.

Good. Li had been standing in the man’s tiny quarters all this time while Swettenham listened and listened, and this is what he got for his efforts? Swettenham was a low-level engineer who didn’t merit either a kitchen or a private bathroom. He owned a single piece of furniture that converted from a chair to a bed and had minimal storage underneath it. Every inch of wall in the room was covered by scribblings in some Roman-style script or with pictures of unknown Old Earth figures, most of them with long faces, wide eyes, and big noses.

Romans? Americans? Li didn’t know enough about that sort of thing to differentiate.

“So there’s nothing else you can give me?” Li pressed as Swettenham listened to the audio yet again.

“I didn’t say that, sir. I was only confirming that it’s English.”

“Dammit, will you get to the point? I need to decipher this message, and I’m running out of time to do it.”

In the ten hours since the unknown vessel was detected, it had swung around the sun and changed course. It would approach Sentinel 3 much closer and much sooner than had initially been supposed. Discussion was heating up throughout the base, and would practically explode once word got out about the intercepted transmission.

“I can definitely help you decipher it,” Swettenham said. “I picked out a proper name, which will help the computer parse the audio. I have also identified three words, and possibly five others.”

“That’s all?” Li said. “There’s 137 seconds of audio. It goes on and on—sounds like one babbled nonsensical phrase. What can three words and a few guesses help us?”

“It will help us plenty. Narrowing it to English allows the computer to run it against a database of known words, especially once it can identify sound shifts. It’s not a trivial operation—human language has always been hard for computers to master—but I could theoretically program rudimentary translation software. Grasp the meanings to enough words and we can construct a small lexicon and build on it.”

“You can do all of that? I thought you were a mechanical engineer. What is your engineering rank? A nine?”

Swettenham met his gaze. “I’m only a nine as an engineer. In communications I was a level one. Head of communications, in fact.”

“Were you?”

“I’m not surprised you don’t remember. Com is mothballed, and we never had much respect in the first place.”

That explained a few things. There was no need for com, because Sentinel 3 was silent. Everything to do with external communication had been automated by the computer, even long-range scans, and communications personnel reassigned. Swettenham had apparently been someone important in his previous iteration.

“How long do you need?” Li asked.

“Ten hours. Maybe less.”

“Really?” Li said, surprised and impressed.

“Sure, I’ll grab a few others, pick up a couple of programmers to help. I assume you’ll give me whatever computer resources I need. A good team and adequate computation time will move it along quickly. The first one I want is Hillary Koh, she’s brilliant. She can head the software efforts.”

“No, no. You can’t do any of that. I need this kept quiet.”

Swettenham pushed up his glasses and studied Li’s face. “We can’t keep this quiet.”

“We can and we will.”

“Commander, no. This is too important to suppress.”

“How do you mean?”

The man’s eyes bugged. “It’s our salvation! You’ve got to see what this means.”

Ah, so that’s what he was. If there had been a warning light on Swettenham’s face, it would now be flashing red.

“How exactly do you see this as saving us?” Li asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? There’s a human ship coming right at us. They’ve got Imperium codes and are urgently trying to send us a message.”

“You know who else might have Imperium codes?” Li said. “Apex.”

Swettenham talked on, as if he hadn’t heard. “We’ve been found by another human colony—some other descendants from the Great Migration. Someone from what they used to call the Anglosphere. They must have whole fleets, a planet of their own. Maybe multiple planets.”

Even if all of this were true, five hundred years had passed since humans set out for the stars. The history of Earth itself was so bloodstained that there was no reason to believe that another human civilization would be friendly. But there was something that concerned Li more.

“How did the ship get the Imperium communication protocols?” he asked.

“What?”

“The message came through with our protocols. That’s how we are able to read it. Some other human population surely has a radically different way of communicating, right? They wouldn’t use the same string of data to indicate that it was an incoming message. That would be impossible.”

“They must have had contact with the Imperium,” Swettenham said, his voice even more tight and excited. “They must
already
be our allies!”

“You are an Opener and naive,” Li said. “This is exactly the sort of tactic Apex used to trap us in the first place. The mining ship, the distress call. That’s how the war started, or have you forgotten all of that because you’re so eager to talk to someone?”

The initial Apex attack had nearly killed Li. He’d been commanding a light carrier, patrolling the outer region of the Dragon Quadrant, when he’d received a distress call. A mining ship was under attack by an unknown craft. Probably pirates. Two war junks had already moved to intercept, and would no doubt have the firepower to chase off the raiders, but Li was ordered to follow up.

He arrived to find the war junks defeated and several long, needle-shaped craft picking apart the carcasses. It was later determined that the mining ship had been captured and had sent out a fake distress signal to see who would respond. The enemy ships attacked Li’s light carrier. He sent out his three strikers, sacrificing them while he fled for the jump point.

That was Singapore’s first encounter with Apex, an alien race of bipedal, birdlike creatures that destroyed everything it touched, that took prisoners only so that it could eat them. They had special ships for the purpose, giant harvesters for the ritual torture and consumption of sentient life.

But in the brutal first phase of the struggle, the Imperium had learned what tactics and weapons could fight the birds. Most important was silence and stealth—Apex could break any communications, but had a hard time finding a heavily cloaked ship. Stay quiet, stay hidden, and you could evade them almost indefinitely.

Thus, the sentinel battle stations.

Swettenham was still staring at Li, his face eager, his eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. Eleven years may have erased the man’s memory of the brutal war, the millions lost, two entire colony worlds destroyed, but Li remembered.

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to suppress this message,” Swettenham said. “I know what the Sentry Faction believes, and I know what those people will do. They’ll destroy this unknown ship before we have a chance to talk to them.”

“You’re not listening to me. It’s probably a trap.”

“But what if it’s not? Commander, listen to me! Please, before you kill them all—”

“Calm down, Swettenham. I never said I was going to attack the ship, I only need to keep this information quiet. At least until the message is translated.”

“Give me Hillary Koh, then. I need her. I can’t do it on my own.”

Li didn’t know Koh very well, but doubted she’d cause trouble. If Koh was an Opener, she wasn’t a rabid one. And if she harbored sympathies for the Sentry Faction instead, she kept them equally to herself. There was one question above all that concerned him.

“Can Hillary Koh be discreet?” he asked.

“Of course. And when it’s translated, what then?”

Li turned the question over. He was torn in two directions. When he’d been talking to his sister and Megat, he’d been repelled by their hardline position, by the knowledge that they would kill to keep Sentinel 3 silent and isolated. There was a broken, burned-out docking bay where they and their companions in the Sentry Faction had proven that.

The first outbreak of factionalism on the ship had occurred only four years into their long vigil. An Opener—they weren’t called by that name in those days—had rigged a scooter with a subspace transmitter, then hacked into the communications array to send the actual message. Convinced the war was over, that Singapore had won, and the battle station was somehow overlooked, the man had planned to run the single-man ship out behind the nearest of the Kettle’s moons and send a subspace to the home planet.

Giving away their location, of course. Anna had caught wind of the plot, rushed to intercept the rogue pilot before he could escape, and blasted him before he could launch.

Li had authorized the operation, and had always wondered if he’d done the right thing. They’d killed a man and damaged part of the station. Could he do the same thing now? Hard to say. Swettenham and his sort posed a risk not unlike that of the rogue scooter pilot all those years ago.

The risk of remaining on mission was a long, lonely death. They would eventually die of old age, and the last few survivors would probably starve to death, too old and feeble to grow their own food, if the oxygen plant didn’t fail and suffocate them all instead. Sentinel 3 would eventually become another derelict, a floating coffin in orbit around a distant, forgotten gas giant.

But the risk of communicating with the outside world was more immediate and obvious. Brutal and short. Apex might kill the low-level functionaries like Dong Swettenham quickly enough, but a different fate awaited the officers.

If captured, Li would be tortured, then eaten. The Apex queen would peck out his eyeballs, his tongue, his ears, his nose. Then she and her princesses would plunge their beaks into his belly and tear out his intestines.

He would be alive when they did it.

Chapter Three

Ak Ik ruffled her feathers and spread her wings to display her red under plumage. Recognizing the dominance and fertility of a queen commander, the two sentries turned their beaks to show acquiescence and folded their tattered wings inward to show submission. Feathers littered the hallway at their clawed feet.

These two were drones, permitted a bit of color as sublieutenants of a princess commander, but such was their mistress’s disgrace that their feathers were uniformly gray and brown and had begun to fall off. Bare flesh showed on their necks, and bloody scratches marked where they’d been tearing at themselves. Lack of control turned drones neurotic, and they’d eventually kill themselves.

Upon entry to the ship, Ak Ik had found similar levels of distress even among the higher-ranked drones, the taller and more aggressive ones that would have attacked her mercilessly under other circumstances for daring to enter without permission.