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

“Hold on, sir, I’m sending another skimmer to pull you out.”

“God of Death,” Mose Dryz cursed. “I told you not to use the com. We don’t know who might be listening.”

“Sorry, Lord General. I thought you’d lost control. Did you . . .? Is everything all right?”

“Did I what? Eat sugar? Yes, of course I did. I am an eater. And when the urges are too strong, they must be obeyed. Is this new to you?” He sang this last bit with harsh sarcasm, and the colonel didn’t respond. “Now keep this channel closed or I’ll send you to the priests for twenty stripes.”

Hroom may not lie, but they had no problem with hyperbole. Twenty stripes was an idle threat, and they both knew it. Humiliate an officer like that, and you may as well strip her from the war forces altogether. But the priests would demand some sort of penance for disobeying such a clear order if he reported her, most likely hours of prayer and meditation.

The rush of sugar continued to fade, and Mose Dryz got a better look at the planet as he regained control of the skimmer. It was a watery world with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, but inhospitable to settlement. Too cold and dry for Hroom, too small for humans, whose bones grew weak and brittle if they lived anywhere with less than sixty percent of their standard gravity. But that didn’t mean the planet was free of life.

The atmosphere buffeted the skimmer as it came down. Mose Dryz had no idea where he was going, and by the time he was a hundred thousand feet above the ground, he wondered if he’d be forced to land the craft and wait for orders.

The small ship descended toward a vast desert plain broken by dusty brown mountain ranges running north to south. The valley floors between the ranges were sand and bare rock, but gray-green vegetation capped the mountains. One of the valleys had a large, celestial blue lake that seemed to glow. No visible outlet—it must be briny and sterile. Still, the lake looked like the best target, and he guided the skimmer toward it, thinking to land by its shore and wait for instructions.

No sooner had he made his decision than someone else took control of the skimmer. The ship turned north, the pulse engine flared, and the altitude stabilized at 20,000 feet. He raced north at three thousand miles per hour, and left the desert behind to find himself over a shallow, brackish-looking sea. The sea gave way to plains covered by tall, waving grass even as the ship began to slow and descend.

He was only going a few hundred miles an hour by now, and came over the top of a vast herd of giant grazing beasts, twenty meters tall. The wind blew from the south, and the herd was migrating north, making it look like the giant animals were swimming through waves of a green, living ocean. A collective bellow rose into the air as he passed, tens of thousands of animals all trumpeting their alarm, and the sound was enough to penetrate his ship and rise above the wailing wind that buffeted his canopy. It looked like there was a storm to the north, dark, roiling clouds that ate up the blue sky ahead of him.

The herd vanished, then the grasslands. One moment it was a green, waving sea stretching from horizon to horizon, and the next, a churning mud pit. Machinery the size of buildings chewed up the ground and spat it into huge mounds. Other machinery belched plumes of smoke—this was the origin of the so-called storm he’d noted earlier. Buildings, factories, barracks—all had a temporary, ramshackle appearance, and most of the work appeared to be mechanized, although he saw figures moving about on the ground and in the air.

Mose Dryz’s heart was thumping in his chest by the time the ship finally came down, spewing up dust as it landed on the edge of one of the excavations. He thrust a hand into one of his hip packs and fumbled out a glass sugar vial, desperate to relieve the terror. His fingers were plucking out the stopper before he remembered. He’d already taken sugar, and must carefully control his dose, or he would be lost. It took all of his self-control to return the sugar to his hip pack.

He popped the canopy and took a tentative breath. The air was cold and dry, and carried the bitter tang of burning oil and other chemicals that scratched his throat and lungs. He coughed and spat, then coughed some more. When he looked up, a giant bird stood a few meters away, staring.

The drab feathers on its breast were falling out, and there was something old and tattered in its appearance. Another bird circled overhead before landing nearby. Two more came striding up, and several others winged down from the sky. Soon, nearly two dozen of the giant birds stood in a half-circle in front of him, with the skimmer at his back. All drones.

The first bird squawked, which set off the others, who cawed, shrieked, and clucked. One took a nip at its neighbor, and this brought retaliation. Soon, the birds were tearing at each other’s feathers and pecking at eyeballs.

A scream sounded above them, and a larger bird swooped down. No drab feathers on this one, but scarlet, emerald, and azure, gleaming in the sun. The smaller birds scattered. One got airborne, only to be caught in the big one’s talons. She threw the drone to the ground and tore with beak and talons. The smaller bird didn’t resist, only sat limply as it was ripped to pieces. The others were long gone by the time the grisly business was done.

The brightly colored one squawked. Words sounded in Mose Dryz’s head.

So a Hroom can lie after all.
 

“Yes, with your words. The poison you put in my head.”

The bird tilted its head back and jeered her response.

The Hroom know all about poisoning their brains, do they not? What I gave you was only building on what your people have known for generations. Sugar. When we exterminate your race, we will only fly you on a course that you have already piloted.
 

A shiver worked through Mose Dryz’s limbs. He resisted going for a vial of sugar. Did the queen commander know his secret? If she did, then no doubt he’d been summoned here to be consumed.

Come with me.
 

She turned and stalked away with jerky movements, feathers ruffling. Mose Dryz walked behind her. He didn’t control his legs—they moved as if by some unknown force—but he could feel every step. The gravity was light on this world, and he walked as if jumping across springs. The bird was only as tall as a human, and he found himself looking down at her, wondering what he’d do if she gave him control of his body again. Could he break her neck before she stopped him? Would it be worth it to sacrifice his life to destroy one of their queens? Or would another simply step into her place?

They walked alongside one of the factories, where birds used crawling dozers to push slag into a heap the size of a small mountain. The queen commander lifted into the air to fly over the slag heap, but left Mose Dryz to climb his way up one side and down the other. Slag shifted and crumbled beneath his feet, and on the way down he stumbled. The tumbling slag nearly buried him before he got clear, and he choked on the poisonous dust it kicked up.

The queen led him up a filthy hillside, where he came upon a flattened stretch of ground. In front of him, a pool of shimmering, poisonous-smelling water. To his left, a giant, wire-enclosed encampment. There was a Hroom on the inside, looking through, who gave a shout when he saw the general.

Hundreds more Hroom came running from the encampment and pressed their faces against the fencing. A handful of shorter humans jostled through the Hroom to get to the fence. The prisoners were filthy and naked, bony and starving in appearance. The fencing was made of wire coils with sharp edges, and the pressing crowd left some of them screaming as they were shoved into it.

Stand here,
the queen told the general.
You will see something.
 

She tilted her head back and shrieked. Several drones had been roaming the exterior perimeter. A little taller than the ones he’d spotted earlier, with a few bright feathers among the drab, they carried guns strapped to their wings that they controlled with their beaks. At the queen’s command, they lifted into the air, swooped over the top of the fence, and came back holding flailing, struggling Hroom and humans.

They tossed the naked prisoners at the feet of the queen, who darted in, slashing. She tore open bellies, groins, and legs, then ignored the disabled, suffering victims while the guards flew back for more prisoners. Mose Dryz stared in horror.

Are you so surprised? I have seen the fishing fleets on your planets. They drag helpless creatures from the depths by the thousands to squirm and suffocate.
 

“They are animals. We use them for food. These are sentient beings.”

Your species is a race of predators. So is mine. But we stand at the apex of the food chain. As a fish is to you, so Hroom are to the flock.
 

The guards came back with more victims. Again, the queen slashed and tore until they were wounded and helpless, even as the guards flew off for more. Soon, there were thirty or forty victims moaning, pleading, trying to hold their guts in with one hand and crawl away with the other. The guards stalked through, cocking their heads and searching for something. They hooked their talons into the belly of a slender human man and dragged him out, screaming. They had a brief, screeching conversation with the queen, who then spoke into the general’s mind.

This one is a lieutenant on an Albion warship. Not a true feast, but his status will brighten my colors.
 

She said this even as she pinned the man with a talon and dipped her beak to his face. She came up with an eyeball. The man screamed again. The queen kept pecking away, the man kept screaming, and the general thought he would faint. She left the human before he was dead, moving on to a Hroom, from whom she casually tore flesh from his thighs. She shoved her bill up under another human’s rib cage, came out with his heart, and swallowed it. At least that poor fool was dead.

Mose Dryz refused to look away. The next time he wavered, the next time his hand seemed to move of its own volition toward the sugar that would send him swooning so hard he’d fall into a bottomless pit, he would remember this moment. Remember the horror, the evil that these birds represented.

The guards paced the edge, squawking anxiously. Other birds circled overhead, cawing, begging. The queen ate slowly, deliberately. At last she cleaned her beak on a stone, though it was still bloody when she returned her unblinking gaze to the general.

Your people are defeated, General. Soon, the humans will be, too. Both races will join the Krax, the Zylif, and the others we have consumed. The cave-dwellers of the binary stars, the amphibious race that dared us to chase them to the depths of their home world. Species more aggressive than the humans, and civilizations older than the Hroom.
 

“Civilization?” he asked. “Do you know that word?”

Civilization is the collection of flocks, tribes, and nations that make up an expansionary species.
 

“Is that what it means to you?”

What else would it mean?
 

Mose Dryz hummed. “You have no word for civilization in your language, do you?” He swung his arm wide, a gesture of demonstration that was the same for humans and Hroom alike. “You found a small, unoccupied world and you’re here long enough to strip it of resources, but you won’t build anything.”

We will build lances, spears, and harvesters. We grow drone armies and increase in status and power.
 

“Where are your temples, your palaces, your great cities?”

The work of lesser races.
 

“Your music, art, culture, beauty?”

Beauty is the destruction of your gods, the death of your princesses and queens. I will eat your empress myself. I will see the last Hroom dismembered in front of me.
 

“Go ahead, then. Start with the empress’s general. You captured me, you spat in my face. My brain is yours to control, isn’t it? Yet I stand here defying you. What are you waiting for, Queen Commander? Prove yourself by eating me, if you dare.”

She fixed Mose Dryz with a sharp, predatory gaze. He sensed her anger that he was unbroken, felt her burning temptation to prove her dominance by tearing out his throat and eating his heart. He silently urged her to do it, to end his madness. Lenol Tyn would fly away at the head of the general’s fleet, collecting more sloops to use in the war.

There is no glory to be gained in eating a Hroom drone. That is all you are, General. There are billions of Hroom, and you do not resist. I have more glorious prey in mind.
 

She spread her left wing. A small pouch was secured there by a plastic strap that wrapped around the joint where the wing met the body. She ducked her beak and pulled out a plastic vial from the pouch, not much larger than the glass ones Mose Dryz carried with him. Only this contained a thick, creamy liquid, not grains of sugar.

She dropped it into his hand. He wanted to hurl it away, but his hand moved of its own volition and slipped it in among the sugar vials.

“What is it?”

My name is Ak Ik, queen commander, and I will have my glory. I will rise from queen to empress and lead the Greater Flock to an age of triumph and conquest. But first I must devour the human commander. Then, my ascendance shall be complete.
 

You will carry this serum to Admiral James Drake and force him to drink it.

Chapter Four

Tolvern stared at the viewscreen. The Hroom commander stared back, unblinking. He was a priest, a cultist. The sort who General Mose Dryz had been trying to win over since the Albion Civil War, but with little success.

The cultists seemed unable to switch their hatred from humans to Apex. It was the same animosity that had led them to make suicidal attacks on Albion, one of which had destroyed York Town in an atomic holocaust. That hatred made them blind. Not so different from the Singaporean fanatics on the sentinel battle station, whose hatred had prohibited them from facing their true enemy. Humans, after all, had never threatened the Hroom with extermination.