The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (23 page)

A long pause. “No, Jon. I won’t be a refugee. I’ll follow my orders to the end.”

“Your orders are to stand down. Do you hear me?”

“And if that means I have to suffocate my own brother, so be it.”

And with that, she was gone. There was a deadened quality to that final sentence that sent a chill down his spine. She was serious, it was no idle threat.

Li had barely started walking again, when Hillary Koh came on the com link.

“Commander, where did you go?”

Koh’s tone was high and nervous, the opposite of Anna’s. She had been calm all along, even when he’d come to her in the detention cell. Even when they’d blown down the doors and charged into the command module to take it from the mutineers and bullets had been flying. But not now.

“I’m only about fifty feet away. I was going to check the . . . what is it?”

“It’s Apex, sir. They’ve jumped back into the system and are headed this way. A whole lot of lances. Some spears, too. And that’s not all.” She swallowed audibly. “They’ve brought a harvester ship.”

#

Tolvern put the question to Barker in the war room. Barker nodded his acknowledgment, rubbed his mustache, and stared off to one side muttering to himself, thinking aloud. She wanted to shake him, force the answer. The others joined Tolvern in waiting silently for the chief engineer’s assessment.

Nyb Pim watched through his large, liquid eyes, his long, slender fingers folded in front of him. Smythe kept busy with his hand computer, but kept giving side-glances to the chief.

Capp, her left arm bound and immobilized, grimaced. More than the pain, the aggravation of being kept out of battle seemed to be eating at her. Even with bone regrowth stimulators, the broken collarbone would take several days to fully heal.

“We have a chance,” Barker said at last.

“Give me odds,” Tolvern said.

“Odds? Hah. I’m not even sure where to start.” A final tug on his mustache. “The ship hull is good, and we’ve stopped the leaks. It’s only a question of if the oxygen holds out. Smythe?”

The tech officer looked up. “We’ve solved the CO2 problem—that’s the real killer. Right now, the biggest problem is that we’re sharing the O2 with the battle station. We cut that down and”—his fingers moved over the console—“we’ll last between ten and fourteen days before we suffocate.”

“Assuming we stop sharing,” Tolvern said.

“That’s right, sir.”

“That might be long enough to be relieved by Albion forces,” Tolvern said. “Hard to say. Or to patch up the oxygen plant completely—maybe you’ll come up with a miracle fix.”

“We’d do that?” Capp said. “Cut loose and save our own hides? It’s a weasel move.”

“Weasel move doesn’t begin to cover it,” Tolvern said. “If we run for it, we leave Li to fight the buzzards on his own. His sister may or may not join before it’s too late. Either way, they’re worse off without us there.

“The point is, from our perspective, we buy time. Apex goes after Sentinel 3 first—if we’re lucky—while we run off and hide somewhere in the system. They’ve got poor sensors—we might get away with it.”

“Meanwhile, all them Chinese blokes are dead,” Capp said. “Eaten alive, probably.”

“We’re weighing our options,” Tolvern said. “That’s all.”

“The captain is right,” Barker put in gruffly. “We stick around, maybe we suffocate, maybe we get eaten. Either way, it’s grim.”

Capp thrust out her chin. “We got a chance! I figure we always got a chance.”

“Smythe, you’ve been hitting the buzzards with the active sensor array?” Tolvern asked.

The tech officer looked up. “Yes, Captain. Not much point in trying to stay hidden at this point.”

“Show us the scans of the enemy fleet.”

“You’re not going to like what you see.”

The war room display was only a fifth the size of the main viewscreen on the bridge, which spared them some of the shock. It was alarming enough, and the four of them stared for a long moment without speaking. Smythe moved the view and zoomed in on the enemy formations, one after another.

A typical hunter-killer pack was four lances. Occasionally, they’d travel with a bulkier command ship, heavily armed, if not quite as maneuverable as the lances. These, the navy called spears. When there were more than three or four hunter-killer packs, they might be accompanied by a harvester ship, if there was an enemy they wished to capture alive.

This fleet boasted eleven hunter-killer packs, each with four lances and a spear, spread across a half million miles of space. In the middle of them, one of the enormous harvester ships. Bigger than HMS
Dreadnought
, the mightiest ship in the navy, and longer than the entirety of the sentinel battle station.  

Tolvern had seen a harvester ship in action two months earlier. One of the massive vessels, protected by lances, had attacked a Hroom mining colony, fighting off desperate attacks by sloops of war and Albion warships, while they methodically captured tens of thousands of Hroom miners. The miners’ fate was terrifying and horrific.

During the hottest action of the battle,
Blackbeard
and
Swift
had penetrated the shield of lances to launch an attack on the harvester. It sat still, awaiting them, and nobody knew if it had the ability to fight, and if so, with what. Tolvern hadn’t intended to find out. She would hit it with every weapon in the arsenal. At a million miles she launched a barrage of missiles.

But before the Royal Navy vessels could draw within range of the main guns, a pack of lances drove them off. The harvester launched countermeasures, but two of the missiles got through, scoring a pair of hits side by side. Satisfying, but there was little damage. The end result was that Tolvern still had no idea what kind of punishment the harvester could either absorb or inflict.

“Smythe, bring the view in on that harvester,” Tolvern said. “Fill the screen, if you can.”

Moments later, the harvester stretched from one end of the war room’s viewscreen to the other. It was an ugly thing, nearly as fat as it was long. Covered in warty extrusions, hundreds of them, with a fat, toad-like snout. Yes, the whole thing looked like a monstrous toad that would open its mouth and swallow its prey whole.

Capp cursed. Nyb Pim made a Hroom sound deep in his throat. Barker made a human one in his.

There, the upper snout, two missing warts, replaced with a shiny, reflective material. Something had knocked them out.

“We’ve seen this one before,” Smythe said.

“Confirm, please,” Tolvern said.

Smythe worked the console. “The damage is in the right position to match our missile strikes.”

“Unfortunately, that’s as close as we’ve ever got,” Tolvern said. “Sure wish we knew its capabilities. What kind of armaments does it have? How many drones does it carry? Seems to disgorge an unlimited amount,
swallow
an unlimited number of victims, too.”

“I spoke to the Hroom envoy after the battle,” Nyb Pim said. “They have already lost six worlds to Apex and countless small bases and colonies.”

“And have they ever fought off a harvester?”

“I do not believe so, Captain. You may read my complete report of the meeting in the Navy Archives. The empire forces believe that the bubbles or bulges on the surface of the harvester are cryogenic storage tanks. It travels with its army frozen.”

“Like we do with Royal Marines,” Tolvern said, “although I figure the buzzards pack them tighter.”

“Each harvester carries thousands of smaller drones,” Nyb Pim said, “and hundreds of the larger ones they send to the surface to collect victims.”

“Makes sense from a design perspective,” Smythe said. “Put them on the outside of the hull, where they’re easier to cool.”

“It may also travel with its ‘harvest,’” Nyb Pim continued, “carrying its cargo elsewhere for ritual slaughter and consumption. Or so the empire generals believe.”

“So we either destroyed a few of their drones when we launched those missiles,” Tolvern said, “or we killed a few doomed Hroom.”

“A quick, easy death is preferable to what awaited them on the other side, Captain,” Nyb Pim said.

“If them buzzards stuffed thousands of Hroom into their ship,” Capp said, “don’t figure they’ll have much trouble holding all the Chinese on the battle station.”

“With plenty of room left for
Blackbeard
’s crew,” Tolvern said. “Turn it off, Smythe. I can’t stand looking at the ugly thing a moment longer.”

When the view had cut out, she looked at the other four. “So now we know what we’re facing. Our broken-down, crippled-up ship against forty-four lances, eleven spears, and a harvester ship.”

“Took only four lances to kill
Swift,
and they nearly did us in, too,” Barker said. “Can’t say I like the odds.”

“We have the sentinel battle station this time,” Tolvern said.

“We have
half
a battle station,” he corrected.

“So you think we should patch up the best we can and run?” she asked.

“No, I think we fight. To the death. But I have no intention of seeing the inside of that harvester, if you know what I mean.”

“Me, neither,” Capp said. “But I still say we go down fighting. We’re no cowards, right, Smythe?”

“Don’t look at me,” the tech officer said. “I’m absolutely a coward. But yeah, it’s a weasel move. I don’t care for running, either.”

Tolvern nodded. “Then it’s settled. We stay and fight. How long do we have?”

“Until we suffocate?” Smythe asked. “Or until the buzzards show up? If we keep sharing our O2 with the battle station, a day, maybe a little more.”

“And Apex?” she asked.

He consulted his computer. “The buzzards arrive in fifteen hours. Seems like that’s our top priority.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “We can’t fight Apex while holding our breath. We can’t fire our batteries while we worry about being invaded by mutineers. We need to put down the rebels,
that’s
our top priority.” Tolvern nodded, more confident in her assessment. “Battle station first, Apex second.”

Chapter Seventeen

Commander Li was snatching a few minutes of sleep when Tolvern woke him up on the com link and told him to meet her in the final approach to the farms. He was to order Koh to join them at the meeting. Exhausted, he called Koh while pulling on his uniform.

“Any idea what this is about?” she asked. Her yawn came across the com, and it was clear she’d also been asleep.

“Something about retaking the station. You’ll come?”

“Of course. Give me five minutes.”

“Good, Tolvern said ten. That will give us a chance to talk before Tolvern shows up.”

By the time he met Koh near the farm, he’d had a chance to think it through. It was surely a good sign that the captain wanted to meet him here to discuss another action against Anna. It meant the Albionish were sticking around for the fight. He’d been worried they’d cut loose and run.

There was no sign of the captain yet, so Li told Koh what he was thinking.

“They still might run,” she said. “Some of the things Smythe has said makes me think it’s a possibility, that they’re thinking about it. Planning contingencies, anyway.”

“Not if we don’t let them. Until we turn off the gravity net—”

Koh laughed. “You still think we’re holding them by force? Once Smythe got into the system, he saw to all of that. The net is only holding them there for their own good while they complete their repairs. The moment they want to leave,
Blackbeard
is gone.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

“You’re not in charge anymore,” she said. “None of us are. You answer to Tolvern. I answer to Smythe. Capp and Carvalho can order our crew to kill and be killed, and if the captain says so, Barker will be directing our guns against Apex.”

Li thought she was right, but what about the eliminon battery? That had to be kept in the hands of the battle station. They were the only ones who know how it worked, both tactically and practically. It was their secret weapon, their
ultimate
weapon, and its use at an incorrect moment would render it ineffective.

He didn’t have a chance to voice these concerns, however, before Captain Tolvern arrived, accompanied by Lieutenant Capp. The latter was immobilized in a cast that kept her left arm extended to protect her collarbone. Her eyebrows were furrowed and her lips drawn, as if she were still suffering some discomfort. She was a hard one; anyone else would have been doped up in the sick bay, content to stay out of the action while she healed.

“No doubt you’ve guessed why I’ve called you here,” Tolvern said.

Li nodded toward the battered, blackened blast doors, put back into place by Anna’s forces and almost surely reinforced from the other side.

“You want to make another attempt on the farms.”

“I don’t
want
to do any such thing, but I have no choice. Apex will be here in twelve hours. We can’t be fighting them and battling a mutiny at the same time. So unless you think you can talk your sister into surrendering, we have to fight. And this time we have to win.”

“I talked to her. She won’t budge. It’s not a point of logic anymore.”

“I doubt it ever was,” Tolvern said. “So we’ll hit them hard from both corridors. I’ve got better armaments this time around, better tailored to the fight. We’ll knock these doors down, no problem, and then we’ll go in prepared. If they get on top of the hydroponics equipment again, we’ll take them out.”

“We’ll suffer casualties.”

“I know we will. Hopefully, we’ll be able to rehabilitate a few of the mutineers once the fighting is over,” she said, “and use them to plug the gaps in your crew. I’ve already identified several from the prisoners we’re holding on
Blackbeard
.”

“What do you need from me?”

“I want every possible person mobilized and armed. You’ve got roughly three hundred loyal men and women on this station. I need every last one of them—yourself included—in these two tunnels, armed, and ready to go.”

“What about me?” Koh asked. “Shouldn’t I be in the command module?”