Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) (7 page)

For a moment, it looked as though she would escape, but more tentacles snagged her just as she began to accelerate. The leviathan was moving faster now, more alertly, and a thinner, darker appendage lanced out and speared the cruiser in the side, plunging out the other side moments later.
Repulse
vented gases from both sides.

Dreadnought
had circled around until she sat a few dozen miles behind the leviathan’s outstretched tentacles, which twitched, greedily trying to get hold of the battleship.
Repulse
was still blasting her engines, and that kept the monster from moving closer to
Dreadnought
.

Drake gave instructions for the gunnery. “Hold all explosives. Kinetic fire only.”

“It swallowed the frigate whole!” Manx said. “We’re not going to hurt it with cannons.”

“Keep calm, Lieutenant. We’re not aiming for the body. Bring us about and target that mass of tentacles.”

Dreadnought
swung around to present a broadside, and this finally brought it within range of the leviathan’s grasping appendages, one of which snared her. Engines flared, pulling the monster along, even as the battleship wriggled to get into position to fire. Drake gave the orders. A massive battery of cannon let loose.

Thousands of tons of cobalt shot tore into the tentacles. The leviathan recoiled in visible pain, as dozens of appendages were torn loose.
Repulse
was suddenly covered in what looked like massive squirming snakes, none of which were any longer connected to the leviathan.
Dreadnought
fired again, this time at the tentacle holding the battleship, and then both ships were free and pulling away from the thrashing, flailing leviathan. For a moment, it looked as though it would give pursuit, but instead it retreated, still squirming with pain.

Repulse
quickly sealed its hull breach, and its engines were still functioning, thank God. It joined
Dreadnought
in scooping up the pods containing the survivors from the missile frigate. The destroyer and corvette arrived on the scene and kept a wary eye on the leviathan until the battleship and cruiser were ready to set off. The monster settled onto one of the larger asteroids to sit and digest its meal.

“How long do you suppose that frigate will keep it fed?” Manx asked. “You don’t suppose that was enough to allow it to spawn, do you? Or will it need to regrow its tentacles first?”

“We’ll be long gone before either of those things happen,” Drake said. “But either way, the charts are going to show the Manx System as off-limits.”

He mused gloomily on the destroyed missile frigate as the ships left the asteroid belt behind. Its loss was a blow. But it could have been worse. Much worse.

Chapter Seven

There was something strange in the posture of the other two Hroom as General Mose Dryz entered the sweating room. Both the colonel and the priestess were naked, sitting on the wooden platform at the back of the room, legs folded to their chests, but they weren’t meditating, as he’d expected, but watched him carefully as he approached. A glance passed between them.

It must be nerves. Unnecessary worry. The general’s sloops of war were fully cloaked, but though the enemy was theoretically too blind to see the fleet, nobody could fully relax with Apex searching for its next victim.

Mose Dryz ladled water onto the hot coals, breathed in the steam, and said a silent prayer to the god of higher consciousness.

Glorious being of higher thought. With gratitude, I thank thee for the gift of sentience. To be aware, to think and dream. To sense the old gods. To rise above the beasts and partake of the feast of consciousness. To recognize beauty, to feel love, and to share compassion with all living things.
 

Beauty, love, and compassion.

Did Apex know any of those things? For that matter, did the birds have gods, did they even possess full sentience? Didn’t sentience include the ability to extrapolate into the mind of another? If so, how could they be so cruel, so ruthless?

Mose Dryz poured more water on the coals, then pushed his way through the billowing steam to take a position on the lower bench, with his adjutants behind him. He had hung his robe outside the door of the small stone-lined sweating room, and was naked alongside the other two. There were sugar vials in the pockets of his robes outside, and an itching sensation crawled along his skin as he thought of them. It was too soon; he needed to wait another hour or two for his next dose.

“How do you feel, Lord General?” Lenol Tyn asked.

“Confident,” Mose Dryz said. “Ready to defeat the birds.”

“You do not feel unwell?”

The general turned with an inquisitive hum, uncertain what she meant. Lenol Tyn studied him, searching his face. There was concern in the young colonel’s expression, but also intense inquisitiveness.

“I am healthy,” Mose Dryz said. “Does this satisfy you?”

“Not at all,” the other woman said.

She was Dela Zam, a high priestess and cultist. Dela Zam seemed to hate humans only fractionally less than she hated Apex. She’d commanded three sloops of war and demanded that the general include her in the triumvirate—the council of general and two adjutants that ruled the fleet—as a condition of committing her sloops to his forces.

Mose Dryz had been happy to do it. The colonel Dela Zam replaced was loyal to the general. Better him in command of the priestess’s three sloops, and Dela Zam here, under the general’s watchful eye. He’d take her “counsel,” such as it was, under advisement.

She had more to say. “According to the ration log, you have reduced your sugar dose. Do you have an explanation for this?”

“That is privileged information,” Mose Dryz said. “The dispenser should not have shared it with you.”

“You gave me the right when you made me your adjutant,” Dela Zam said. “Why did you reduce your dose?”

“This is a sweating room. It isn’t a place for interrogation.”

Lenol Tyn gave a cautious buzz, and when she spoke, sounded more circumspect than the priestess. “We are not angry, Lord General, we are hopeful. If you reduced the dose because you took remedies to reduce your cravings, we would be satisfied.”

“The antidote doesn’t work that way,” the general said. “It turns off pleasure receptors in the brain, and you will never again feel a sugar swoon. There would be no reason to take sugar of any quantity.”

“An attempted self-weaning then, Lord General?” Lenol Tyn said. “To cure yourself of the addiction through force of will?”

“Impossible,” Dela Zam said. “Once an eater, always an eater.”

Lenol turned to her with an accusing stare. “That sounds like something a human would say.”

This brought a derisive hoot from the priestess. “And a human would know, wouldn’t he? Humans are sugar peddlers, slavers, dealers of death and deliverers of misery.”

Lenol Tyn wouldn’t let it go. “You do not know the general’s powers of self-control.”

“I know eaters,” she said. “They have no self-control. Not one of them does. There is something else happening here, and I demand an answer from the general.”

“You won’t get it,” Mose Dryz said. “This whole conversation is a dangerous distraction. There’s a large Apex force in the Kettle System, the human fleets have not yet arrived, and we must decide if we’re going to wait for the others or go to the rendezvous point.”

“Apex will find the battle station if they’re given long enough,” Lenol Tyn said. “If that happens, the Singaporeans will be destroyed before Drake and Tolvern return.”

“That is nothing to us,” Dela Zam said. “Let the humans die. I will rejoice.”

The general was annoyed with his new adjutant, beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to have her commanding her own ship after all. Order her to charge or to hold back, let her obey or not, but he wouldn’t be forced to deal with her on a personal basis.

“Then you will be happy to know that I have decided to wait,” he said.

“I’m not in favor of that course of action, either,” the priestess said with a dismissive hum. “We have twenty-two sloops of war. There hasn’t been a force like this since the death fleet made its glorious charge on Albion.”

“Your so-called glorious charge resulted in the death of millions of innocent humans—”

“There is no such thing as an innocent human.”

“—and the obliteration of the greatest portion of Hroom military strength. A force that might have fought off a harvester ship and saved the lives of millions of our people. Or do
Hroom
lives not matter to you, either?” Mose Dryz paused to let this sink into her head before pressing on. “I promised Admiral Drake thirty sloops. I have twenty-two.”

He glanced toward the door. The itch, the pull to take his next sugar dose, was growing.

Not yet. Perfect self-control. That is the key. Too much and you lose your life. Too little and you lose your soul to the buzzards.
 

The other two followed his gaze, and their nostrils closed as they shared a nasal hum. He could see their minds working.

“The priestess and I are in conflict about a good many things,” Lenol Tyn said. “But we share a mutual concern.”

“Leave that aside,” the general said. “We are here to form a consensus about the position of this fleet, not to argue about personal matters.”

“We feel,” the young colonel continued, “that if you would only take the antidote—”

“Not now. I must be clearheaded.”

“Your dose is low,” Lenol Tyn continued. “Your addiction manageable. Maybe the recovery would only last a few days. The priestess and I both agree.”

Mose Dryz suppressed a derisive whistle. His adjutants had no idea. The sugar addiction had its claws wrapped around his spine, its tendrils buried into his brain. But there was an even deeper, uglier threat buried in his head. Only the sugar addiction kept it at bay.

“You have us waiting,” Dela Zam said. “Waiting, waiting, doing nothing. Use this time, Lord General. Shake off this human curse. Reclaim your birthright as a Hroom.”

“And if the situation changes while I am shaking and drooling? If the birds find us and charge, or if the human warships arrive and Admiral Drake orders an attack? Who will lead you then?”

“Let us form a consensus,” Lenol Tyn said. “I will take command of this ship, Dela Zam the fleet itself. We will carry out the orders you have given us.”

“I won’t have a cultist leading the fleet. She would ram the enemy, then use the remnant to attack the humans.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Dela Zam said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You accuse me of lying?” the priestess said. “Do you think me so low that I would attempt a human deception?”

“You’ll tell me one truth, while holding another in your heart. That second truth would seem more and more important as the battle continued.”

“There is something else, isn’t there?” Dela Zam said. “Something you’re hiding. Information we should know that you refuse to share.”

“You would not understand if I explained it to you.”

“Tell us, Lord General,” Lenol Tyn urged. “We can help.”

“No.”

“The human sugar is wicked, an abomination to the gods,” Dela Zam said. There was zeal in her voice. “Your faith is weak, Lord General, but surely it exists. I feel the ember burning in you. Take the antidote. If not for the sake of the god of death, then for His younger brother. You are in His shrine. Pray for higher consciousness, and allow your mind to cast off its shackles. The god will strengthen you.”

Yes, throw them off. Not only the sugar addiction, but the gnawing at his brain from the Apex poison. For a moment, he was almost convinced.

Mose Dryz didn’t remember how the birds had captured him. During the Battle of Kif Lagoon, he’d gone up against Drake, who was then the captain of HMS
Ajax
, the ship that would later be overhauled and renamed
Blackbeard
.

The cunning Drake had ambushed Mose Dryz’s forces with a powerful armada of cruisers. He split the general’s fleet in two, smashing one force, and pinning the other until
Dreadnought
arrived and obliterated the remnants.

Mose Dryz escaped in a damaged sloop. He avoided patrols of Albion destroyers, minefields, and active sensors digging into every nook and cranny of the system, looking for him. Somehow, he reached the jump point undetected. From there, he remembered jumping, something about an unknown ship harpooning him, and then he woke up strapped to a cold metal table.

A giant bird in brilliant plumage stood over him. Two smaller, drab-colored birds pried his mouth open, and the big one dripped saliva into it.

Mose Dryz didn’t know where he was or who these aliens were, but he was terrified, and tried to spit it out. Some of it went down his throat, and the large bird—he knew her now as Ak Ik, the queen commander of an Apex flock—had him sent back to his ship. The birds had left his crew stunned and in a torpor, and when they came back around, they knew nothing of what had happened to their commander.

Mose Dryz tried to tell them what had happened, but something held his tongue. Instead, when someone offered that it was an unusual jump concussion, he let them persist with that belief.

Soon, he was working for the aliens, although he didn’t realize at first why he was making so many strange decisions. When a fleet of lances attacked the far side of the empire, the empress ordered him to leave the Albion frontier with his fleet and fight them off. Normally one to charge into battle, Mose Dryz felt curiously reticent and took his time moving his ships from system to system.

By the time the general’s forces arrived, the lances had destroyed several mining colonies and launched a surprise attack on the fleet guarding the Singapore-side of the empire. Mose Dryz’s eight sloops may or may not have turned the tide of the battle, but he’d arrived too late and had no choice but to withdraw.

The empress called him back and angrily denounced him on the floor of the senate. But with Albion agitating to resume hostilities, a growing Apex menace to their rear, and a death cult promising to redeem the Hroom race by unleashing a holocaust on their human enemies, she was forced to leave him in command. Any new ships coming out of the struggling Hroom shipyards joined his fleet, and he was soon ready to sail off, stronger than ever.