The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (4 page)

Instead, the drones had showed their necks and exposed their breasts, quivering with fear, but prepared to die should she take their lives. Ak Ik ignored them and strolled inside unaccompanied by any drones or soldiers of her own. She expected no opposition, and had yet to receive any.

Ak Ik gestured with her beak. “Open this door.”

“We cannot, Queen Commander,” one of them answered. “It is voice locked by our mistress.”

Ak Ik let out a terrible cry and flew at the one who’d spoken. She grabbed the drone in one talon and hurled it against the wall. There was a loud crack, and the drone lay there, shuddering, squawking in pain. Ak Ik swooped over and stood above the drone with her hooked beak at its throat. The squawking ceased, and the drone merely shuddered.

The queen turned to the other. “Get your mistress. Now.”

#

To Ak Ik’s surprise, Sool Em walked proudly down the hallway, her head bobbing with all the arrogance of a queen commander, not a princess who had just been tricked and defeated by an alien race, said aliens now racing off with valuable intelligence as to Apex technology and tactics. Three more drones flanked the princess, her guards. Her plumage was still bright green, and to Ak Ik’s surprise and rage, she boasted red feathers on her breast.

Sool Em still carried the scent of high rank about her, must have continued to secrete her dominance saliva to keep her drones in line, but it didn’t seem to be having the desired effect on her underlings. The drones surrounding her shivered and keened in terror. They’d smelled and seen Ak Ik and knew what the queen commander was about, even if their mistress did not. How could Sool Em be so blind as to her eminent demise?

“This door is voice locked,” Ak Ik said. Her voice warbled with rage.

The drones cringed at her high pitch. The one she’d cast down remained motionless, only its moving eye showing it was even still alive.

“Yes, it is,” Sool Em said.

“Open it at once.”

“I know what you’re going to do, and I forbid it. You have no right to demand entry.”

“Open this door at once, or I will tear open your breast and feed on your heart.”

Sool Em opened her beak, seeming on the verge of defiance. A bird of her stature in the flock wouldn’t have risen so high without aggression and stubbornness, without pecking her way through rivals—literally in some cases—and wouldn’t take her demotion easily. But her drones weren’t so confident, the brilliance of their mistress’s plumage and the smell of her scent glands notwithstanding.

Sool Em looked around her, seemed to recognize her precarious position, and fluttered her wings. It was an arrogant gesture, but a final one. She cocked her head and squawked for the door to open. It obeyed her voice command.

The two commanders fluttered their way into the nesting chamber, Ak Ik leading. Some of the drones started to follow, but the queen cawed for them to remain in the ship corridor. They didn’t even glance at the princess to see if the order would be countermanded, but retreated with a series of pitiful squawks.

The chamber was warm and humid. Dim red lights gave off heat from above like a collection of tiny suns. The Apex flocks had manipulated their genes hundreds of times in ways both small and large, creating numerous castes and ranks, but some things could not be altered. Eggs only hatched under conditions like those found in the swampy tropical lowlands of the home world.

There were at least two hundred eggs in the chamber, smooth and gray. The fresher ones lay bunched together, while the ones closest to hatching had been moved to one side so that the new chicks wouldn’t peck apart their rivals as they emerged. Ak Ik walked across them, letting her talons crush the eggs as she put her weight down. By the time she got to the other side of the chamber, a trail of yolk and shell and squirming, dying chicks lay across the floor. The smell of them was ripe and delicious, and Ak Ik paused to gobble down a few of the larger chicks that had been on the verge of hatching. They squirmed and squeaked in delicious terror as they went down.

The queen commander carefully watched Sool Em when she came up. The princess and mother of these eggs gave no reaction except for a nervously darting tongue passing in and out of her beak. Inside, she must be screaming with rage, but she showed nothing.

“Your drones are forfeit,” Ak Ik said. “By rights, I could eat them all. And perhaps I will. I may pluck out your royal feathers and reduce you further.”

“I understand your rage, Queen Commander. Mistakes were made.”

Well. This was perhaps not going to be as hard as Ak Ik had thought. She had been prepared to use her saliva, and the dominance of a queen would have forced even a princess to acquiesce. A lesser bird could not take the queen’s saliva without it bending her will to her mistress’s.

“Mistakes?” Ak Ik gave a derisive caw. “You lost three lances and let the primary warship escape. And through a trick, a subterfuge. Deception is
our
provenance,
our
strength, and you behaved as foolishly as a Hroom.”

“You are mostly correct, Queen Commander.”

Ak Ik’s head feathers ruffled in surprise. “Mostly?”

“Yes, mostly.”

Ak Ik screeched angrily. She stomped across the room, crushing more eggs and gulping down the chicks that came gushing out. She would reduce this cursed brood until there were only a few dozen of the gray, stone-like eggs left, then go back and pluck Sool Em’s princess feathers. Finally, a dark warning about killing every last chick and drone in Sool Em’s flock of ships. Ten thousand drones would be destroyed if Sool Em persisted in her defiance. It would serve as a warning to the other princess commanders in the flock.

But suddenly, Ak Ik stopped. There, at the back of the nesting chamber, was an egg. Half the size of the gray ones, it was a shiny blue with tiny yellow speckles. Ak Ik looked around her and saw two more of the small speckled eggs.

The queen commander turned back to Sool Em, her feathers shaking with rage. “You really cannot be serious. You dare?”

“I dare. It is time to take my place among the queens.”

Ak Ik launched herself into the air. She hurtled into the princess’s chest, and the two commanders rolled on the ground, squawking and tearing at each other’s feathers with claw and beak, heedless of the eggs that they were crushing beneath them.

Sool Em was smaller, and should have given way, her strength and loss of status weakening her, but she fought on ferociously. A shiver of fear prickled the queen’s under feathers as the struggle continued. She felt the age in her wings, in her claws. But soon enough the younger bird began to give way. When the battle came near the three blue eggs, Sool Em gasped.

“No, Queen Commander.”

“I’ll crush them. Then I’ll tear out your heart and eat it, too.”

“No! I demand the right to explain.”

With a final squawk and batting wings, the younger bird got herself free. She moved swiftly to block the queen from crushing the three speckled eggs.

The battle had left Ak Ik exhausted, shivering, and she had to pause to collect herself. Air whistled through the nostril holes on her beak. But soon enough, the feeling passed, replaced by a fresh surge of rage.

“You have dared to lay royal eggs,” she told her daughter. “Do you call yourself a queen? That you will have your own princesses? That you will contend for the flock? By what right?”

“By the right of victory, Queen Commander.”

This brought derisive flapping of the queen’s wings. “Victory? You lost your lances, the humans escaped. You took no prisoners and devoured no enemies.”

“The humans destroyed my lances—it is true. But I will have my revenge.”

Ak Ik looked at the hallway outside the nesting chamber, where the princess’s drones huddled in a pitiful gray mass. “Your drones are demoralized. You cannot secrete enough power to keep them in line. If I ordered them to, they would tear you apart themselves, that is how little remains after your loss.”  

“I placed an egg in their nest.”

“What? Where?”

“The human nest. I placed an egg.”

Ak Ik drew back, startled at the claim.

By this, Sool Em didn’t mean a physical egg, of course. She meant some scheme or trick. A betrayal set in motion, to be hatched in the future. Ak Ik guessed at what the princess was implying, but cocked her head suspiciously.

“What kind of an egg?”

“Come, Queen Commander. I will show you.”

Ak Ik looked at the three princess eggs, sure that this was a lie to protect them. Sool Em could lay as many drone eggs as she liked—they were nothing. They’d hatch as sterile members of the flock meant to do the bidding of their commanders, to live and die at their whim. Genetically programmed over the generations to grow quickly, to accept the secretions of their masters, each was an attenuated clone of their mother, a queen, a princess, or—if the will of the Greater Flock ever anointed a supreme commander—an empress. It was the ambition of every fertile bird to rise to that position.

Even laying drone eggs cost Sool Em, of course. With status, with regular feasting on the flesh of sentient beings, she could lay as many as eight eggs a day. Three of those would be given to her queen as tribute. By avoiding too many costly battles, a princess could build her full army of ten thousand drones in five standard rotations.

But to lay princess eggs meant that Sool Em was calling herself a queen. She must have stolen or bartered a drone from another commander and secreted hormones to turn it male so that she could lay princess eggs. And raising her own princesses was only the start. A princess was permitted ten thousand drones, a queen a hundred thousand. And specialized workers: scientists, miners, harvesters, engineers, lesser and greater battle drones. She could raise fifty princesses to serve beneath her, each with their own ten thousand. Each giving eggs as tribute.

Under any circumstances, it was a breathtaking step for a princess to break from her queen, and usually resulted in the death of the aspirant at the talons of her enraged mother—Ak Ik in this case—or from other queens quick to pounce on the young queen ascendant.

But given Sool Em’s loss in battle and the ragged state of her drones, laying these princess eggs was insanity. Why would she attempt such a thing? Had she taken an injury to the brain? Was there a flaw in her genetics that had somehow slipped past the computers meant to screen for such things? This was no aspirant queen. She was barely even a princess.

Only the brightness of Sool Em’s plumage and the confident bob to her head made her mother pause. She believed, that much was real.

“Very well,” Ak Ik said. “Show me. It is only a precursor to your death. I will make it humiliating and painful. And I will destroy your eggs. No trace of your genetic material will survive.”

Sool Em squawked in response. It sounded a note of agreement, as well as confidence.

Drones scurried out of the way as the queen and princess left the nesting chamber and entered the corridor outside. Ak Ik cocked her head to study the feathers shed by her daughter’s weakening drones. Then she clacked her beak impatiently.

“I haven’t lost control,” Sool Em said. “My scent is weak because of what I have accomplished. It cost me strength to lay my egg in the human nest. This way, my queen.”

Ak Ik followed, and the two birds waddled through the twisting tunnels that led deeper into the ship. “You use that metaphor without explaining what it is. Have you broken more of their communications? That is hardly a victory worth reporting. We own their subspace frequencies, we have their channels decoded.”

“Nothing so trivial.” Sool Em flapped. “A true brood parasite, Queen Commander. You will see.”

They entered the onboard lab. Technicians manipulated joysticks with their dexterous tongues and flipped switches with their claws. Others squawked voice commands to computers. Unlike the guards, the technicians still carried most of their plumage, with only a handful showing missing feathers. Sool Em’s status had not decayed so far here.

The technicians stopped what they were doing and fluttered in alarm to see the queen in all her brilliant plumage. Their eyes stared and their tongues clicked nervously. Ak Ik flapped her wings to spread her scent, and they chittered when it reached their nostrils.

How easy to end this charade. Let her dominant scent take its effect and turn these drones against their mother and toward their grandmother. Ak Ik would set them against each other and return to her own command ship, leaving Sool Em and her brood dead. She would give Sool Em’s remaining warships to another princess. Take her mining colonies and slave broods for her own.

But something caught the queen commander’s eye before she could give this further thought: five bubbling tissue canisters on the far side of the chamber. She strode across the room to see. The first canister held the brain and nervous system of a Hroom, the second an Apex brain—a drone’s, naturally. Like many of Ak Ik’s daughters, Sool Em shared the Apex obsession with genetic manipulation of the species itself.

The final three canisters held human brains and spinal columns. To Ak Ik’s shock, the instrument panels showed a gray triangle, which meant they were still alive. She cocked her head and turned to Sool Em.

“How is this possible?”

“Delicate extraction, Queen Commander. Very delicate. We captured humans and experimented until we succeeded.”

“That has been tried before. Dozens of times, hundreds. The humans always died.”

“It took many attempts,” Sool Em said. “Some time ago, when you were fighting the Albion forces, I captured a fleet of refugees. That gave me many specimens.”

“I never heard of this.”

“It is my right to keep my own prisoners, Queen Commander. To devour them or experiment on them as I see fit. We ate their captains, and kept the rest for the laboratories.”

“Go on,” Ak Ik said. She was intrigued, and a stirring of excitement tingled to her wingtips. “How did you take so many captives? The humans fight to the death or kill themselves. They know what awaits them when they fall into our hands. To capture so many in a human fleet is nearly impossible.”