The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (16 page)

Tolvern hadn’t known what to expect from Smythe’s innovation. A diversion? A weapon that would catch both friend and foe at the same time? The result was beyond her expectations. How many had vanished beneath the foam entirely? Ten or fifteen? Another twenty caught and immobilized? And the entry points blocked entirely.

Several stragglers escaped the blast, but they either threw down their weapons and surrendered or fought on and died in a hailstorm of bullets. It was all over in a hurry.
Blackbeard
’s defenders rose from their positions, slapping hands and shouting. Several broke into a Royal Navy drinking song, and Capp jumped on top of the crates to lead them, half singing, half shouting in a lusty voice.

“Hold your cheers!” Tolvern barked into the com over the general channel. “This isn’t over. I want those prisoners disarmed and out of here. And every one of you back at your posts.”

She reloaded her weapon and waited for the second attack.

#

The wait dragged on and on, and only gradually did it dawn on the captain that there wouldn’t be another attempt. Not now, at least. So she put her crew back to work. Barker’s engineers suited up and began stripping away burned crating to get at the undamaged tyrillium patches. Using the mechanized suits, they carried the heavy plates to the holes torn through the wall by the invaders and fastened them into place. The air filled with the purple arc of plasma welders and an almost citrus smell from the epoxy that would fuse the plates together.

“It’s going to be the ugliest repair you ever saw,” Barker told her. “But they won’t be knocking through the same place twice. I’ve got some of my people behind there, too, looking at whatever ducts and pipes they ripped apart getting in here.”

“I can see them working back there,” she said. “If they don’t hurry up, you’re going to barricade them between the hulls.”

A grin stretched his mustache. “Got to keep ’em motivated. And if that doesn’t work I can slowly withdraw the oxygen.”

“Barker, speaking theoretically, if we could blast our way clear of this base, could we make a run for it?”

“You mean will she hold together?”

“Right, Chief. What shape will the hull be in once you’re done patching?”

He looked at her as if she were nuts. “The only thing holding us together is that the damn base is hugging us so tight. Moment it stops, we fly into a dozen pieces.”

“I want that fixed.”

“Sure, give me a navy dock and a hundred trained men. Two hundred tons of tyrillium, some gun carriages, a new plasma engine—the works. I’ll have her in tip-top shape. Short of that, I don’t know what would do it. The finger of God? It’s going to take a Biblical miracle to get us back in the fight.”

Tolvern let her expression harden, but kept her tone light. “So what you’re saying is that I need to barricade the lot of you down here and slowly withdraw the oxygen.”

Barker’s mustache twitched. “I’ll do what I can.”

Tolvern clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s all I’m asking, merely the impossible done with supernatural speed.”

She turned her attention to the Singaporeans now being cut free from the foam and dragged off to join their comrades. Capp and Carvalho zip-tied their hands behind their backs, then marched them over to stand in front of the captain. Clumps of hardened foam still clung to their bodies, and they carried the bitter tang of fire retardant about them.

Tolvern looked them over as they were lined up in front of her. Roughly twenty in all, an even mix of men and women, every face surly, as if they’d been the ones attacked without provocation instead of being the instigators of the fight. It was a curiously mature group, with the average age appearing somewhere around thirty-five or forty years old.

They looked vaguely Chinese, like from ancient pictures, but on closer inspection there were differences. Time and ethnic drift had blurred some of the Old Earth resemblance. But it was a strong and hearty bunch, no matter their ages.

“This is probably a waste of time,” she said, “but I don’t suppose any of you speak English.”

Blank faces greeted her words.

“Bloody idiots,” Capp muttered.

“If one of you does,” Tolvern continued, “or if you have a com link hooked to a computer that can translate, let me tell you this. We didn’t come here as your enemies. Your miserable treachery aside, I’m willing to forget it all, but it ends now. I want to talk to your commander. Understand? We might still be able to come to an accommodation.”

“Would you like me to try in Ladino?” Carvalho said. “There may have been Ladino traders out here.”

“Sure, why not?”

Not much point in it, but it couldn’t hurt. The Ladino language was a mix of Old Earth Spanish and Portuguese, and even more muddled by the passage of time than English.

Carvalho rattled off something that came with the speed of a machine gun, one long word to Tolvern’s ears. More blank looks.

“Guess that settles that,” Capp said. “We’ll lock this lot up and get to work.”

“Send Smythe to the cell block,” Tolvern said. “See if he can get them to talk, and record their words. Then we can let Jane have a stab at it. The computer should have samples of Chinese in the database.”

The congestion in the engineering bay didn’t ease for long after Carvalho marched the prisoners out. More crew were arriving every minute. Capp handpicked several to join her security detail to guard against another attack, while Barker put the rest to work on repairs.

Tolvern had other matters on her mind by the time she left the engineering bay. The corridors outside were deserted. A strange thrumming noise came through the ducts, and the artificial gravity wasn’t working properly. She practically bounced between one set of airlocks, gravity at ten or twenty percent, while in the next, her limbs felt like they’d been turned to cement. Every breath was a struggle until she got out.

The science lab doors were repeatedly sliding open and shut as she passed. Tolvern had seen this sort of thing before, and figured they must have become misaligned after the ship took a hit. A safety feature designed to protect stray fingers forced them open every time they were on the verge of sealing. At which point they’d attempt to close again.

Tolvern had been on her way to the bridge to consult with Jane and study the damage and readiness reports, but those doors were going to drive her crazy. She reached out to disable them and glanced inside. A familiar figure in a white lab coat hunched over a piece of equipment, muttering to himself.

“Brockett, what the devil are you doing in here?”

The science officer looked up from his microscope and blinked myopically. “It’s definitely organic. Not epoxy and not a freeze-dried fluid leak from the ship.”

Tolvern flipped open the control next to the doors and pressed the button to keep them open. “Wasn’t that driving you crazy?”

He put on his glasses and peered at her. “Wasn’t what?”

“The opening and closing and . . . never mind that. Why aren’t you down in the bay? Smythe is down there running diagnostics, something you’re qualified to do too.”

“Does he need my help?”

“Of course he needs your help! What do you think we’re doing here? There’s too much to do without screwing around up here with your experiments. Put that huge brain of yours to work and keep our ship from flying apart.”

Brockett gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “I’m not studying space barnacles in here, Captain. It’s this freeze-dried substance Carvalho scraped from the ship.”

“Whatever that gunk is, it can wait. They’ll be scraping freeze-dried science officer if we don’t do something.”

“Even if the ‘gunk’ is an excretion from an Apex queen?”

Tolvern was already turning back to the corridor, but now she stopped and stared at him.

“That’s right.” Brockett nodded. “You remember we have studied two different varieties of Apex. Closely related, perhaps of the same origin, but genetically modified over time. They say there are other varieties—all manner of drone birds of various sizes and abilities. A whole caste system within the colonies.”

“And?”

“But for the sake of argument, let’s say there are two basic types. There’s the kind with the plumage—the queens, much rarer—and the sterile drones. The drone is the offspring of the queen, but undergoes further genetic manipulation either in the egg or shortly after birth. That’s where you get the sterile warrior and worker caste.”

“Fascinating stuff, but what the devil does it have to do with the space snot?”

“I’ve run it through the sequencer. The Apex analogy to DNA—a complex protein with genetic material encapsulated—is clearly present in the sample Carvalho collected from the hull. It’s an excretion, some sort of mucus-like substance from a specialized gland.”

“You’re saying an Apex queen sneezed on
Blackbeard
’s hull?”

“If by ‘sneezed’ you mean mixed its saliva with a protective gel and an artificial epoxy and fired it against our ship, then yes. She ‘sneezed’ on us, sir. I don’t know why.”

Tolvern took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But suffice it to say there’s a damn good reason.”

“One may assume so, yes.”

“Have you touched the snot in any way with your bare hands?”

“No, sir. The substance has not come into contact with the air, either.”

“Good. Incinerate it.”

“But, sir—”

“You’ve studied a sample, you must know what it is down to the molecular level. Maybe there’s more to learn, maybe not, but we don’t know what this is, and I won’t risk it. Whatever reason this queen had for flinging her snot at us, you can bet it’s something nasty.”

“Yes, sir. I understand. And I suppose we could scrape off some more if we decide we need it.”

“When you find a tick on your body, you crush it, Brockett, you don’t leave it there sucking your blood. We’re going to scorch it off the hull.”

Tolvern reached for her com link to speak to engineering. Smythe answered. She told him what she wanted done.

“I’ll pass that to the chief,” he said, “but I was just about to call you, anyway. I’ve cracked the Chinese thing.”

“The Chinese thing?” Tolvern blinked, unsure she’d heard correctly. “Wait, you have? You can talk to them? It’s been ten minutes!”

“Yup, I got it. Figured it out on my own.” The tech officer sounded pleased, almost smug.

“So I should tell Brockett to clean out his desk—we’ve got a new genius on board.” Brockett looked up with a scowl when she said his name. She waved him back to his work. “Or is this a trick?”

“A bit of a trick, a bit of genius. Meet me in the cell block. I’m ready to give it a try.”

Brockett had already disposed of the sample when she ended the call, forcing it and the entire glass vial into the incinerator to be broken down to the atomic level and recycled.

“I really hate to leave my work here,” he began reluctantly, “but if you say Smythe needs my help . . .”

“Hold on. Is there anything new to learn from the existing data?”

“Maybe, maybe not. It will be hard to tell if I’m not in the lab.”

“Fine, keep at it. New knowledge about Apex is the only thing that trumps emergency repairs.”

Reentering the corridor, Tolvern braced herself for more funny business with the gravity, but that had been stabilized. The strange clanking noise was louder, however, like some pipe was about to burst and vent corrosive chemicals. Tolvern cocked her head. A muffled voice reached her ear from behind the wall, followed by more clanking. An echoed curse. Ah, it was just the sound of someone deep in the ducts, banging around.

She found her tech officer at the head of the cell block, messing around with his hand computer. A strange, singsong tone of a foreign language emerged from the device, and Smythe tried to repeat it, with hilarious results. He sounded like a man at the bottom of a well, pinching his nose and trying to sing purposefully off-key.

“It’s like music,” Smythe said excitedly when she approached. “You have to say the word
and
the note for it to make sense. Listen to these two words.” He looked at his computer and said something unintelligible.

“This is your plan? You’re going to learn Old Earth Chinese?”

“No, I’m just curious. Hey, I wonder if Jane could speak it. She has a full database of Chinese.”

“Even if she could, that Chinese is five hundred years old. And these people were from a small Chinese colony, not even the main country. Jane’s Chinese will sound like Old Church English would to us. At best. Totally incomprehensible.”

“Worse than that,” he said cheerfully. “Apparently, what we call Chinese wasn’t even one language in those days. People with one dialect couldn’t understand people with another. They were roughly as close as English is to Dutch.”

“So are you just wasting my time here, or what?”

“Look,” Smythe said, holding out his computer for her to look at the screen.

It was filled with what looked like scribbles. She had read enough about Earth to recognize it as Chinese letters, but otherwise, it may as well have been a transcript of a Hroom whistle language for all she could decipher.

“The thing is, written Chinese isn’t phonetic,” Smythe said. “That’s why the different dialects were considered the same language. The symbols stood for ideas, not letters. There are thousands of different characters if you want to write properly.”

“How did anyone learn to read?”

“Not easily, I’m guessing. Anyway, the point is, you could get two people together from different places and times and they might not be able to understand each other’s speech, but the writing was the same. And look,” he added, “I can write something in English, and the computer will spit out the Chinese letters.”

“It’s still been five hundred years, Smythe. I can’t read Old Earth English, can you?”

“Captain, no. That’s not how it works. Because the writing doesn’t match the speech—at
all
, it’s not phonetic in any way—there’s no reason for the writing to have changed. I’ll bet you anything that they write exactly the same as they did before the Great Migration.”

Ah, now she got it. Write it in Chinese, and they’d understand. That didn’t mean these people would cooperate, but they had a way to communicate. Tolvern gestured at the cell block.