Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) (15 page)

“I can’t understand that chirping, General,” Drake said. “You know that.”

Mose Dryz switched to English. “By the gods, I’m glad to see you here. That cultist locked me up and convinced them I was a danger. She wanted control of the fleet. I never should have brought her on. I had bad feelings about it. She agreed too quickly.”

“That problem is over,” Drake said. “She rammed a harvester and killed herself.”

“That’s what they tell me.” Mose Dryz took his unshackled hand and twisted his wrist in the Hroom manner indicating a shrug. “What I don’t understand now is why they don’t release me.” He glared at Lenol Tyn. “Colonel, I mean you.”

Lenol Tyn looked away. Drake studied them both, the uncomfortable expression on the younger Hroom’s face, the anger smoldering in the general’s eyes. What exactly was going on here?

“What happened to my thirty sloops?” Drake asked.

“By the gods, I tried. There were few to be had, and it took longer to persuade their commanders than I’d hoped. I might have found the last eight, but it would have taken me several more weeks and carried me into hostile territory, where the cultists are even more zealous than Dela Zam.” The general hesitated. “How many survived the fight?”

“Seventeen. We lost five.”

“It could have been worse.”

“Yes.”

“Let me out, James Drake. I am the general of this fleet, nobody else. I serve the empress, may she live forever, and by her pleasure, have put my ships under your command. But I must be released.”

Drake narrowed his eyes. “Are you a danger in any way?”

“Of course not. I brought you your ships, didn’t I? I have behaved honorably in our past transactions, have I not?”

Drake looked at Lenol Tyn. “You really don’t have the key to those restraints?”

“No, and neither does anybody else.”

“Then fetch a plasma torch and we’ll cut them off.”

“I can’t.”

“Are you claiming that you lack basic tools used in routine ship maintenance?”

“Of course we have plasma torches.”

“Then bring me one, and let’s get the general out of there.”

Lenol Tyn tapped at the pad, cutting off the sound from the general’s cell. “I am disappointed, James Drake. I thought you would see through the general’s lies. Humans have a reputation, not just for deception, but for uncovering deception in others. Yet you were also persuaded.”

“Mose Dryz has never lied to me before. The Hroom idea of deception is to refuse to answer a question.”

“The general doesn’t lie,” she said, “but other people do. Come with me, I’ll show you.”

Drake cast a glance at the general, who was gesturing urgently, continuing to talk and plead his case. He looked absolutely sincere. And yet, so did his adjutant. She seemed both sincere and sorrowful, and there was something strange about the entire situation.

Lenol Tyn led Drake to the bridge. It was a large, round room, with Hroom officers sitting in egg-shaped seats. They were eating their supper, served in square trays with molded cups for the individual portions. The food was green mush, pink mush, gray mush, and three shades of brown mush. Between the heat, the curved room, and the strange smell of Hroom food, it was as if Drake had left the intestines of the strange beast and entered its stomach. The Hroom all stared, and a few glared with hostility.

“You weren’t entirely wrong, James Drake,” Lenol Tyn said. “I am partly to blame, as was the high priestess. I am not a sugar eater, but would never judge one who is. I know what sugar has done to our people, and even the most devout are not immune. But the general’s addiction offended Dela Zam. She convinced me to force him to take the antidote. Mose Dryz would be a better commander once he’d regained control of his faculties, she said.”

“Tolvern told me he was off the sugar and suffering withdrawal,” Drake said. “He seems to be over it now, though. There’s even color coming back to his skin.” He shook his head. “But your timing was poor.”

“There was no better time. The general was in the sweating room, alone and vulnerable. He was running low on sugar, and I was sure it would be a quick recovery once he swallowed the capsule.”

“What does this have to do with why he’s locked up?”

“All this time, I thought Mose Dryz was stubborn, an eater who couldn’t leave the sugar behind for anything. What I didn’t know was that the drug was covering up something more sinister. Once we took the sugar away, there was nothing to hold it back.”

The colonel was still standing, and tapped at the console next to one of the egg-shaped chairs. The viewscreen had been divided into panels, with one showing
Dreadnought
, another focused on
Blackbeard
and
Richmond
picking through the wreckage of the battle station, and a third showing Captain McGowan’s task force as it finally arrived on the scene.

These scenes vanished when the colonel touched her console. Replacing it was the general. He was pale in this view, and his hand shook as he wiped drool from the corner of his mouth. When he spoke, his words came out as creaky as an old rocking chair.

“This recording is for Captain James Drake.” He paused, grimaced. “Excuse me,
Admiral
James Drake. My mind is going, and I only have a few hours until it’s taken from me entirely. As the sugar loses its effects, I fall under the sway of an Apex queen commander. Soon, I will be hers entirely.

“My adjutants forced me to take the sugar antidote. You will know that by now, Admiral, if my instructions to Lenol Tyn have been followed. They held me down and shoved the antidote in my mouth. I fought, spit out some of it, and swallowed the rest.

“It proved to be a blessing from the gods that I didn’t swallow it all. If I’d taken a full dose, the sugar swoon would have left me sooner. Instead, I’ve had these few days to see the addiction falling from my mind and to prepare.

“As for how the buzzards took me, the details are not important. They’ve attempted to control me from afar for some time now, but I’ve deceived them.” A whistle through his nostrils. “Yes, ironic, isn’t it? A Hroom deceiving an Apex queen commander. If we could do that more regularly, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this position.

“The queen commander, a brutal enemy by the name of Ak Ik, gave me a vial of a serum to force into you, James Drake. Your mind would have gone the same way as Djikstra and Megat’s. You’d have betrayed your people and opened a path for the birds straight to Albion.

“I have put the vial in a stasis chamber with a randomly selected passcode so that not even I could open it. This was to protect you, as well as give you something to study. You’ll have to find a way to cut your way inside, but if your science officers want to study how the birds mean to control the human mind, there is your key.

“And next I will do the same thing to myself—put myself in restraints and make it difficult to get me out. I’m leaving messages for my officers to tell them exactly what happened. Hopefully, they will be smart enough to believe this message, and not the lying mouthpiece the birds will soon turn me into. And hopefully, you will be, too.

“Put me in stasis, cut me apart to study if you wish, but by all of my gods and yours, please do not let me live in this state of waking nightmare.”

The transmission ended. The viewscreen returned to focusing on activity among the fleet.

A hollow, dead feeling settled into Drake’s stomach. The poor devil. What horror.

“I will put the general in stasis and send him to your ship,” Lenol Tyn said. “We will be safer with him there, and maybe at some point in the future your scientists will find a way to cleanse the alien serum from the brain.”

“I agree. Freeze him, and I’ll store his body in one of
Dreadnought
’s stasis chambers. We’ll help him later, if we can. No guarantees he pulls out of this, but that goes for all of us, doesn’t it?”

“Thank you, James Drake.”

Lenol Tyn nodded at one of the other Hroom on the bridge, who made a call.

“Who is in command of your fleet now that the general is no longer in charge?” Drake asked.

“Technically, I am,” she said. “As the surviving adjutant, it’s my duty to select two others for my triumvirate. But I was thinking of stepping down and letting one of the other captains of the fleet take my place.”

“It’s none of my business how you select a commanding officer, but can I ask why?”

“I am lacking imagination, surely you have seen it. And there is another thing.”

“Most Hroom lack imagination. What’s the other thing?”

“I’m terrified of leading my sloops into battle. There are so few of us left. If I make a mistake, I will wipe out the last remnants of Hroom naval power.”

“Ah, that. Being afraid doesn’t disqualify you, Colonel. Only sociopaths, the mentally ill, and death cultists don’t feel fear. The key is to learn how to control it. Can you do that?”

“I am not sure, James Drake. I am really not sure.”

“Like I said, it’s none of my business, but you did the right thing with the general, and I’d rather have you in charge than one of the cultists. Whatever your decision, I expect to know who is in command before we ship out. That gives you ten hours.”

Chapter Thirteen

A week after the battle, Tolvern listened in growing disbelief as McGowan tried to justify himself in the admiral’s war room. The fleet was hurtling through space, and Drake had called over his cruiser captains for a council.

McGowan started with a lengthy description of his non-adventures traveling from Albion territory to the Kettle System, then tried to explain why he’d lingered at the jump point while
Blackbeard
and the Hroom sloops made a desperate charge. There were multiple excuses, which only made him sound more pathetic.

McGowan’s justification? He needed to guard the jump point—who knew what might come through? Also, he wanted to keep his fleet intact. Oh, and since he and Tolvern were at loggerheads, he thought inaction prudent. After all, disarray in the ranks was dangerous. And finally, the admiral’s orders were too ambiguous.

This last bit was too much, and Tolvern could no longer keep her mouth shut.

“Oh, please. How were they ambiguous?”

McGowan crossed his arms. “We were told to rendezvous at the battle station, not throw away our ships defending it.”

“And how were we going to rendezvous once it was blown into a million pieces?”

“Better to lose a foreign battle station than half the Royal Navy.”

“Good heavens, what kind of logic is that?”

“The impeccable kind.”

Tolvern looked around the table to see if anyone else was buying this bucket of tripe. The captains of all six cruisers were present, plus the admiral, of course. In addition, Drake’s pilot, Manny Díaz, was present, and the Singaporean tech, Hillary Koh, was supposed to be joining them soon.

Díaz was studying his charts on the far end of the table, and wouldn’t be a party to this discussion. Of the others, Drake looked neutral, and four of the captains seemed sympathetic to McGowan’s self-serving narrative. Even Caites, blast her. Caites was aggressive in combat; that alone should have put her in the opposite corner from her more cautious counterpart.

Tolvern finally found a skeptical expression on Woodbury’s face. Thank God someone wasn’t buying it. Woodbury met her gaze and raised an eyebrow.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“I think five hundred dead Singaporeans would have appreciated McGowan’s ships.”

“We were going to lose the sentinel one way or another,” McGowan said.

Woodbury grunted. “You have no way of knowing that.”

“The buzzards wanted it dead and didn’t care how many ships they lost in the process. They were going to launch their boarding parties no matter what we did. Anyway, it all turned out, didn’t it? Our fleet is intact, we have the Singaporean tech, and we wiped the floor with the Apex fleet. In return, we lost an immobile, poorly positioned battle station and a handful of Hroom sloops.”

“What about the torpedo boat?” Woodbury said.

A somber look came over McGowan’s face. “Yes, there is that. A regrettable loss of life. And I understand that several crew lost their lives on
Dreadnought
, as well, when she took enemy fire. But if you’d told any one of us a week ago that we’d destroy a harvester and half a fleet of lances and spears at the cost of a torpedo boat and a handful of other crew, we’d have jumped at the result.”

“That’s true,” Drake said.

Was Drake out of his mind? Tolvern wanted to smack him. She glared, but he didn’t look her direction, and she managed to keep her mouth shut. Instead, she whipped a look at Caites, who looked thoughtful, rather than outraged.

Koh entered the war room and sat at the far end of the table with Díaz, a moment too late to hear McGowan’s dismissal of Sentinel 3’s destruction. Too bad. Koh would have gone off on him for that.

“Tolvern, tell us about the eliminon battery,” Drake said, apparently ready to move on.

She unclenched her jaw. “There are three crew in the capsule, one of them Dong Swettenham. I hate to leave them dangling, but if we extract them, we rupture the containment field, and that will bleed off the stored gravitons.”

“Any trouble hauling the battery through the jump points?” Drake asked.

“No, sir. It’s coming through fine. They’ve still got food and water in there, scrubbers to keep three people in oxygen for a while. They don’t have a solid waste recycler, and Swettenham says it smells like a latrine, but all things considered, that’s the least of their worries.”

“How long will the oxygen hold out?”

“Hard to say for sure. We only just got a com link set up—before that, it was all Morse code. Our best guess is two more weeks before the scrubbers begin to fail.”

“And if we tow them into battle, we can still use the weapon? Are we certain of this?”

Tolvern glanced at Koh, who gave a curt nod. “That’s right, sir,” Tolvern said.

“They’ll probably die if we do it,” Koh said. “You should be aware of that, sir.”

“You thought they were dead already,” Drake said.