The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (20 page)

Again, the man the Singaporeans had fingered as being in charge gestured urgently at the viewscreen. He kept talking, waving his hands about.

“Let the woman sit,” Tolvern said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s worked up about it.”

“She’s gonna pull something,” Capp grumbled.

“Let her try.”

Tolvern checked her com link. It was full of chatter, but nothing rose to a level of urgency. Nobody was shooting at them, apparently, and until that happened, Tolvern could afford to be lenient.

The older man kept gesturing at the screen showing the hydroponic farms as the woman worked the console.

“So he’s cutting tomatoes,” Tolvern said. “What does that matter? Smythe, give him your computer. Let him put in his own words.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Smythe said. “There’s no way to input Chinese characters, only English words, and then they can be translated.”

Tolvern grunted. “So we can communicate in one direction only. Lovely. Suggestions, anyone?”

The man kept talking through this, faster and more urgently with every moment, when suddenly, his words switched to English. “—and she’s going to go all the way, she’s—” He stopped, blinking, then turned, slack-jawed, to the woman at the console, who grinned.

“Blimey!” Capp said.

“I put through the link to your implant,” the woman told the older man. “And to mine and the rest of them.”

The sudden switch to English was shocking, but not so shocking as it would have been if Tolvern hadn’t already heard one of her captives do it. Hopefully, these two would be more cooperative than Jeremy Megat.

“Nifty bit of tech you’ve got there,” Tolvern said. “Now, what the devil is going on? Who is in charge? Is it you?” she asked, pointing to the older man. “What’s your name and rank?”

“Jon Li. Commander of Sentinel 3, tiger rank in the Singapore Imperium.”

“Assuming that’s true,” Tolvern said, still unimpressed with his military demeanor, “I want a general order to stand down. Then we’ll talk, and you can tell me what’s so blasted important about your tomato harvest.”

“I’ve already given the order, so much as I can.”

“He’s speaking in complete, correct sentences,” Smythe said. “Remember how that first guy was struggling? This is all at once.”

“It’s all plugged in together,” the woman at the console said. She was still working, and didn’t look up as she spoke. “What one person learns, the entire network can share with the rest.”

“And who are you?” Tolvern demanded.

“Hillary Koh, tech officer.”

“You’ll have to show me that,” Smythe said. There was envy in his voice. “We’ve got nothing like that in the fleet.”

“Smythe,” Tolvern warned. “You are sharing unauthorized information.”

“Sorry, Captain.”

She turned back to Commander Li. “If you gave the order to stand down, why were you waving your gun around when we entered?”

“I already had it out when you came in. I was going to take out the bullets—we saw you coming, and I wasn’t going to put up a fight. Really, I wasn’t.”

“Oh, you weren’t, were you?”

“I swear it,” Li said. “I don’t have enough crew on my side to fight even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to fight, I never did. Believe me, I wasn’t going to shoot.”

“You could have just dropped the thing and held up your hands.”

“Yes, I should have. I—I froze.”

The woman at the console looked up long enough for Tolvern to see her raised eyebrows and a glance at the other man. What was that? Lack of confidence in their commander, or something else?

“Hillary Koh?” Tolvern asked the other one. “That’s your name? What is your role in this?”

“It was me who sent you the message—the Fibonacci sequence—so you’d know how to find us.”

“And you?” Tolvern asked the man with the gunshot wound to the thigh.

“Engineer Dong Swettenham. I’m the one who deciphered your original message. We’re Openers. We never wanted to fight you—that was a mistake. That was the other side, the Sentry Faction. They’re insane.”

All of this confirmed what she’d already suspected, and she found herself believing their story. Cautiously, of course. Time would tell the truth.

“I’ve got some of your so-called Sentry Faction on my ship,” Tolvern said. “We killed several and took the rest prisoner. The leader is a man named Jeremy Megat, or that’s the name he gave, anyway.”

“Megat isn’t their leader,” Li said, “although he’s certainly one of them. The head of the Sentry Faction is my sister, Anna.”

“So you’ve got a mutiny on your hands, is that it? And your sister is the head of the mutineers?”

Tolvern glanced at the viewscreen. A second man had joined the one cutting down the tomato plants. Together, they hacked at the hanging plants growing up the column, and not very skillfully. Stems laden with blossoms fell in heaps to the ground.

“What’s going on in there?” she asked. “Something to do with your mutiny?”

“That’s my sister’s doing,” Li said. “Destroying our farms to prove that she’s serious about maintaining our isolation.”

Tolvern laughed at the naivete of the action. “Your isolation is gone. We know you’re here, Apex knows you’re here. What I see is pointless destruction and nothing more.”

“That seems obvious enough,” Li said, “unless you’re a fanatic. After eleven years of isolation, most of my crew are fanatics. It’s a religion now, and you can’t argue religion with people.”

“Present company included?” Tolvern asked. “Are Koh and Swettenham fanatics, too?”

“We’re realists,” Koh said, her tone sharp. “It’s not religion, it’s common sense.”

“I don’t care tuppence for your farms,” Tolvern said. “
Blackbeard
carries food supplies for a long haul into deep space, and in a pinch can fabricate proteins, fats, and simple carbohydrates—the kind of food that keeps you alive and running to the toilet every twenty minutes. They’ll last both ship and station long enough to get
Blackbeard
fixed up while we wait for resupply from the navy.”

“It’s not about the food,” Li said. “That’s just a message. It’s my sister showing that she’s willing to destroy it all.”

“Let her have her message. We won’t run out of food or water or—”

“Or oxygen?”

Tolvern stopped and stared. Her own damaged oxygen plant had never stopped gnawing at the back of her mind.

“That’s right,” Li continued. “We’ve scanned your ship, and you’re leaking air. If you don’t share our atmosphere, you’re going to suffocate. And I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news on that front. It’s not just the farms that the mutineers have taken control of.”

Chapter Fifteen

Captain Tolvern decided that the trio of Li, Koh, and Swettenham posed little danger, so she sent Carvalho and most of the rest off to continue securing as much of the base as she could. She kept Capp and Smythe with her in the command module, and sent for a medic to treat Swettenham’s leg wound. One soon arrived from
Blackbeard
, and the injury proved superficial.

For a stretch, it seemed as though the base would be taken without a serious fight. Scattered resistance broke out every few minutes, but most of the Singaporeans were either flocking to surrender en masse or retreating to less accessible parts of the base: the power plant, the farms, and the water, septic, and recycling center.

And of course, falling back to the oxygen plant and atmospheric recycling system. To get to the plant, you had to pass through the farms in the center of the base. There were several access points to the farms, and Tolvern ordered Carvalho to take them, but the enemy had already organized resistance. Carvalho fell back under heavy fire. He asked for twenty more fighters; Tolvern didn’t have them, and wouldn’t until they’d consolidated their control elsewhere in the base.

Meanwhile, Li familiarized Captain Tolvern with the command module while he explained the political situation on the sentinel battle station and in the Imperium as a whole. Singapore had fought a brief, brutal war with Apex about a dozen years earlier. It started when the birdlike aliens captured two million settlers on a colony planet two jumps from the home world, and if they hadn’t stopped to ritually slaughter and devour their captives, would have made it to the home world, as well.

As it was, Singapore threw up a hasty defense and fought the enemy to a stalemate. After Apex withdrew, Singapore built the sentinel battle stations, eleven in all, hidden along the space lanes leading to jump points into the home system. Apex’s strength was communication, its weakness detection. Sentinel 3 bristled with armaments, including the new and fearsome eliminon battery, which had remained untested when the battle station was put in place and ordered into silence.

“At least never tested against the enemy,” Li said.

“With eleven battle stations, I’m sure they’ve been tested by now,” Tolvern said. “And found wanting.”

“We expected the birds to return within a few months, maybe a year or two at the most,” Li said, “but year after year went by without combat. I don’t know where they went, or why they didn’t come through the system.”

Tolvern didn’t say anything. It was a weak excuse to justify years of inaction.

“What else could I do?” Li said. “I had my orders.”

“I’ve never seen orders that asked a man to be an idiot for the cause.”

“You’re right, of course.” He shook his head. “I know what you must think.”

Captain Tolvern studied her counterpart. Li seemed like a smart, honest man put in a difficult position. Eleven years of isolation. Tolvern had been on deep space cruises that had lasted eleven
weeks
, and those were long, hard slogs if you couldn’t put into port once in a while. Even six-month tours of deep space were not unheard of for navy missions—the Admiralty periodically sent a long expedition to probe the lawless systems that blocked contact with Old Earth—but the crew enduring them still enjoyed communication with the fleet via subspace messages, and usually knew how long they would be out.

Li had none of those advantages. An undefined mission, an uncertain fate. Half his crew seemed to have gone insane, including some who were his supposed allies. But still. The man had surrendered his base without a whimper, and had yet to contradict a single one of Tolvern’s orders; she’d got more pushback from Koh and Swettenham than from the base commander.

The truth was, Jon Li was relieved to be relieved. From duty, that was. She could see it on his face and hear it in his voice. Relieved not to be making life and death decisions, but mostly relieved not to answer the one question that seemed to have plagued him for more than a decade: Should he obey his original orders, even when the people who’d issued them had apparently vanished from the universe?

“What about Singapore?” Li asked. “What’s happening on the home world?”

Tolvern wasn’t ready to answer that question. Instead, she said, “I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if you’d tried to communicate with the Imperium.”

“We’d have been discovered. And then attacked.”

“And what is the problem with that? You are a
battle
station, are you not? Not a ‘sentry’ station or a ‘comfort’ station or a ‘wait-and-see-what-happens’ station. Your duty is to battle the enemy, is it not?”

“Of course we were going to fight . . . eventually. Our first battle was to be a surprise attack, an overwhelming victory. You saw what we did to Apex when they didn’t expect us.”

“You defeated a handful of lances. A skirmish, it means nothing.” Tolvern shook her head. “So you’d have given up your location. You might have been killed. But you’d have made an accounting of yourselves, maybe wiped out enough Apex ships to buy Singapore more time. Years, maybe even generations if you hit the buzzards hard enough. Time to prepare, to build your fleet and make alliances with other humans and aliens in the sector.” Tolvern paused to let her words sink in. “You didn’t, and now your civilization lies in ruins.”

At this, Koh and Swettenham turned quickly. They’d been sitting with Smythe, helping him learn and interface with the battle station consoles, but obviously listening with one ear.

“What news of Singapore?” Koh asked, her voice strained. “You know everything, don’t you?”

“Captain Tolvern,” Commander Li said quietly, “what has happened? Why are there refugees? Who is leading the Imperium?”

“There is no such thing as the Imperium,” Tolvern said. Her stomach felt heavy, the news as bitter in her mouth as raw garlic. “Not anymore. Your colonies are gone, your fleet destroyed down to the last ship.”

“Oh, my God,” Li said.

“A few hundred thousand Singaporeans escaped, maybe as many as a million, and are fleeing through the Hroom worlds, trying to reach safety, but no more will escape the planet. It is surrounded by a large Apex fleet.”

“And is there a . . . a harvester ship in orbit around Singapore?” Li asked.

“Yes. And it has been busy.”

Koh let out a small cry. She buried her head in her hands. The woman had seemed the strongest of the three Singaporeans, but now her body shook as she wept. Swettenham had turned gray, and he looked stunned, like a man who’d stood too close to a cannon as it fired and been left addled in the brain.

“But what about the sentinels?” Li asked, his voice catching again. “They were to have stopped the enemy. The eliminon batteries . . . they were new, the enemy knew nothing about them.”

“Apex tactics also evolve. I don’t know what happened—we’ve only got refugees to tell us, and no ex-military personnel that I know of—but if the sentinels fought, it wasn’t enough. They couldn’t keep Apex from your home world.”

“And you’re sure?” There was a desperate nature to the question. “Singapore is gone, all gone? You’re absolutely sure?”

Koh lifted her head. Tears streaked her face. Her eyes widened, almost begging the Albion captain to give good news. But Tolvern had none to give.

“There were over a hundred million people on your world,” Tolvern said gently. “Maybe half of them were still alive after the atomic bombardment. And now they’re harvesting the survivors.”