The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1)

by Michael Wallace

  Koh claimed she’d nearly cut the Sentry Faction out of the loop, but Tolvern wasn’t taking risks. The translation software employed by these people was so sophisticated that she could see scenarios in which Commander Li’s sister bluffed her way into giving dangerous orders to the crew of Blackbeard. What if she could mimic Capp’s York Town accent, or even speak like a Hroom? Tolvern had no intention of returning to Blackbeard to find Megat and the other prisoners freed and in command of her ship.

  Once the thought entered Tolvern’s mind, she couldn’t shake it. She got back on the com to give instructions along these lines, just in case. Under no scenario were the prisoners to be freed. Any strange or unusual orders must come directly from her mouth, with Jane authenticating her voice.

  “Can you bring up a base schematic?” Tolvern asked Koh. “Smythe, send her the positions of where Carvalho has his people. I need you to mark secure, unknown, and hostile regions of the base. And I want this map confidential, you understand?”

  The base schematic came up. Smythe had been plugging in his translation software, and both English and Chinese were now used to indicate the various parts of the base. Well, something that contained a passing resemblance to English. There was “potency skillful” again, “element control,” and “suppression of fullness,” plus a few new ones, the most important of which was the quite accurately named “oxygen cleaning plant.”

  “Give me a second, I’ll fix the bad translation,” Smythe said.

  “Later. There are more urgent things, and I can figure it out for now.”

  The colors on the schematic looked promising. The outer, thinner ring with its batteries and defensive structures was in blue—friendly territory—as were the radial arms to the thicker inner ring. From there, the command module was blue, as was the hexagonal eliminon battery on the underside of the base and most of the storage facilities and base living quarters. But a vast swath of the inner ring was yellow—unknown or uncontrolled—as well as numerous auxiliary structures, some of them half the size of Blackbeard.

  And then, the red zones. The large, globular farms in the center—“alimentary natural” on the schematic—looked the most impressive, but the corridor running from there into the oxygen plant was red, as was the oxygen plant itself. The power plant was also red, and the nearby water and recycling plant was yellow, but only because its status could not be confirmed as in enemy hands. Koh assured him that it would flip red shortly.

  “So we’ve got the command module and weapons,” Tolvern said, “and they have all the life-support systems.”

  “Plus the armory,” Commander Li said, highlighting a small red zone near the farms.

  Tolvern studied how it was connected to the rest of the base. “We could take it from here.” She pointed. “Or here, but I’m guessing it’s too late, and they’ve already emptied it of weapons. We have plenty of guns on Blackbeard to arm your people, but it will mean a firefight.”

  “We can take ’em, no problem,” Capp said. She’d rolled up her sleeves to show off her lion tattoos. “We’ll wipe them out, just like we did those blokes in the engineering bay.”

  “That was our turf, this is theirs. I expect more of a fight this time.” Nevertheless, Tolvern was considering. Move sooner, rather than later, and they’d have a better chance. “How would you do it, Capp?”

  “Give me a couple dozen men, give Carvalho a couple dozen more, and we’ll hit them from two sides. Through them tunnels into the farms—Smythe, show them.”

  When the tech officer highlighted the approaches to the farms, it did seem to show easy access from the blue sections of the base.

  “We don’t need the food,” Tolvern said, “we need power and oxygen.”

  “These ducts here lead to the recycling plant, right?” Capp asked.

  Commander Li nodded. “Yes, that’s right. The farms generate lots of waste material and water, and that’s how we carry it out.”

  “Get into the farms, and we get into the ducts and then to the rest of it,” Capp said. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  The two Singaporean engineers had a quick conversation in Chinese, with Koh eventually arguing down Swettenham, who seemed more cautious. She looked over.

  “It would be easy enough to knock a hole in the pipe and let engineering figure out how to patch it up later,” Koh said. “It would be pretty foul down there once you got in, of course—that’s some nasty slop we’re sending to the recycling plant. But you’d have an open passageway, that much is true.”

  “Slop don’t bug me none,” Capp said. “Me and Carvalho have waded through worse, and I’ll bet we find plenty of blokes to join us if it gives ’em a chance to do some fighting. You want to come along, Cap’n? You can do all the shouting and pointing, and we’ll do the shooting and killing. What do you think?”

  “I can’t leave here, slop or no slop. Not with a subspace out to the Admiralty and Blackbeard being held together with epoxy and wishful thinking.”

  Tolvern glanced at Li, who was watching her intently, clearly willing to let her take charge. She had to be in command, and it didn’t seem there was anyone else to do it. That meant staying in the command module, at least for now.

  “I want thirty of your crew,” she told him. “They’ll go into the farms with my people and secure it after it’s taken. There are too many approaches, and it will be tough to guard them all. I can’t have Lieutenant Capp cut off from behind.”

  “Of course, Captain Tolvern. My crew is your crew.”

  Yes, Li was perfectly happy for Tolvern to take charge. And no doubt let her take the blame when things fell apart.

  #

  Mostly as a feint, Tolvern tried to contact Anna Li, head of the so-called Sentry Faction. Nothing but mutineers, really. Tolvern could negotiate a surrender if she were lucky, or at least waste the woman’s time while Capp and Carvalho got their forces organized and on the move.

  But the Sentry Faction didn’t answer calls. Security cameras showed armed mutineers taking control of the tunnels leading from the farm, one by one, before the enemy finally shut down the feed against Koh and Swettenham’s attempts to keep it live. Capp’s forces moved into position earlier than expected, and after a brief but fierce firefight that left two Blackbeard crew wounded and three mutineers dead, kept a direct passage open to the farms.

  Unfortunately, the element of surprise was lost. Capp made a move against the farms, trying to take advantage of her initiative, but the enemy repelled her. She gathered more forces and tried again.

  Nyb Pim called the command module from Blackbeard during the subsequent skirmishes. “We have a subspace from the Admiralty, Captain. I have not read it yet.”

  “Send it through,” Tolvern said.

  Message received. Apex approaching. Reinforcements coming. Stay alive. AJD.

  AJD – Admiral James Drake. Tolvern’s former commanding officer. Her heart quickened to read it, to know he was aware of her plight. Beyond that, the message was nearly in code, so brief she practically had to decipher it to extract any useful information.

  Drake, like Tolvern, had assumed that the buzzards would intercept the heavily coded subspace messages. How they did it, nobody knew, but time and again they’d proven to have prescient knowledge. The Singaporeans were aware of the same vulnerability.

  Apex may have the message, but they didn’t know the mind of James Drake like Tolvern did. She parsed each sentence to unpack its meaning.

  Apex approaching.

  The enemy was sending another force to attack the sentinel battle station, and somehow the Royal Navy knew, all the way to Drake himself.

  Reinforcements coming.

  Not “arriving,” not “on the way,” but “coming.” Was there a difference? Tolvern’s assessment was more uncertain on this score. Did it mean that Drake himself was coming? She assumed he was fifty or a hundred light years distant, at the helm of his flagship, the mighty battleship HMS Dreadnought, accompanied by a powerful force o
f cruisers, corvettes, and missile frigates. How many jumps until he arrived? Too many to make a difference. Far, far too many.

  Stay alive.

  It seemed simple enough, but again, she was left guessing. Was that nothing but “good luck!” or was he admitting his worry for her, his personal feelings coming through? No, she decided, it was neither of those things. Drake was telling her to run if she could, urging her to live to fight another day, even if Sentinel 3 were destroyed. Keep Blackbeard and her crew alive until Drake could join the fight.

  “Send this response,” Tolvern told her pilot.

  “Is a response necessary or helpful?”

  “Yes, Nyb Pim, I think it is. We’re in a psychological war as much as anything.”

  “I do not understand, but go ahead with the message, sir.”

  Tolvern considered carefully. It was important to get the words just right.

  “Reinforcements arrived. Captain McCreery’s vessel and task force. More forces requested urgently. Enemy has not yet appeared.”

  “I am perplexed, Captain,” Nyb Pim said. “Captain McCreery was killed by the Hroom in the Battle of Red Haven.”

  “Yes, of course. And we have no reinforcements, obviously.”

  “Why would you send a deceptive message? Won’t the admiral be confused?”

  Tolvern sighed, exasperated by the Hroom inability to dissemble, or even understand dissembling unless she spelled it out. It was like explaining a joke or a pun to a young child.

  “Drake won’t be confused for long,” she told him. “He knows we couldn’t have received the reinforcements by now, but just in case, I’m mentioning McCreery, who died a few years ago. The entire message is for the enemy. They will intercept it and draw conclusions.”

  “I see. You wish them to think we are stronger than we are.”

  “Now you’re getting it. Maybe they hesitate, maybe they wait until they can assemble a bigger force. It buys us time.”

  “You are very clever, Captain,” Nyb Pim said. “Yes, anyone would fall for this trick.”

  Any Hroom, maybe. Humans had won numerous battles against the empire before the current truce and alliance thanks to a Hroom inability to understand deception. Unfortunately, Apex had proven themselves master deceivers. Tolvern doubted it would work on the buzzards.

  She looked at that last instruction again. Stay alive.

  Then she glanced at Commander Li. A weak leader, but a good man. These people had held out all these years, ever vigilant against the alien race that had now surrounded their home world and was consuming its people. And Tolvern was being told by her old friend and captain, a man she’d known since she was a girl and the daughter of his father’s steward, to toss the Singaporeans aside to save her own hide.

  No, James. If that’s what you mean, I won’t do it. I won’t be abandoning these people to their doom.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Commander Li watched the battle unfold on the command module viewscreen. Separation between the two sides of the battle station was almost complete, with Koh and Swettenham wresting control of cameras and communication up to the farms, but with everything going black beyond that point.

  The fiery young woman named Capp with the buzzed scalp and the tattoos of rampant lions on her forearm led the attackers, which numbered some sixty in all, including nearly two dozen Singaporeans. Capp’s force split in two as they approached the farms. No hesitation or fumbling, it just happened.

  These people were professionals, Li sensed, well-drilled in the kind of fighting that was now unfolding. They took and reinforced positions, knew how to drive off opposition, and used everything from flash grenades to shaped charges to gas canisters to clear tunnels. It was no wonder that in every encounter so far, they’d delivered far more casualties than they’d suffered. Under Capp’s direction, the Singaporeans drafted into the force seemed more organized, more self-assured.

  “We’re not trained in this sort of combat,” Koh told Li in Chinese, as if reading his thoughts. “Megat was a fool to attempt a boarding.”

  “Fortunately for us,” Li said.

  “But if Apex ever tries to take the battle station, we’d be lucky to have Albionish to help us fight.”

  “By the time Apex is on Sentinel 3, the fight will be over.”

  “All the same, I’d rather have these people on our side, mounting the defense. This Tolvern is a leader.”

  And you are not, Commander. Are you?

  It didn’t even need to be said aloud. That was obvious from the way Koh, Swettenham, and many other Openers had responded to Captain Tolvern. The contrast with his own timid leadership style was stark, and there’d never been any talk of leaving Commander Li in command of his own battle station once the foreigners had arrived.

  “I see what you’re doing, Jon,” a familiar voice said into Li’s com link. “Do you honestly believe you can take the farms with brute force?”

  He looked around, but nobody else in the command module seemed to hear Anna’s voice coming through. He touched his ear and cut the link.

  Tolvern gave him a sharp look. “Something wrong, Commander?”

  “My sister called, got through on the com link somehow. Says she knows what we’re doing.”

  “No surprise she knows.” Tolvern didn’t look or sound concerned. “No way to hide it at this point. Curious how she got through, though. So much for complete separation, Koh. The mutineers still have access to our communications.”

  Koh scowled. “I’ll soon fix that.”

  “Hmm, I wonder. No, hold off for now. She can only hurt herself by talking. Li, open the channel back up. Keep your sister going if you can.”

  He did so, but Anna didn’t answer. He prodded a few times, but she had vanished.

  Meanwhile, Capp and the big, bronzed-skinned one they called Carvalho took position in two separate tunnels approaching the farms, each with about thirty men and women in all. The Sentry Faction had sealed heavy blast doors against the attackers, which Swettenham and Koh tried to open from their consoles with no success. With the blast doors closed, it wouldn’t be as simple as Li knocking his way into the command module had been.

  But the Royal Navy crew had brought some firepower. In each tunnel, two crew with hand cannons probed the defenses, launching bombs that exploded against the doors. Blast after blast rocked the corridor, while the others kept their distance. It looked ineffective, and when at last the bombardment stopped, two men ran up to the respective doors and placed charges. Li said he doubted the explosives would be any more effective than the hand cannons.

  Tolvern sat watching calmly, her arms crossed. “The hand cannons weren’t to destroy the doors—that would be impossible—they were to rupture the pressure seal. The doors will come off, watch.”

  Two perfectly timed explosions followed moments later, and there went the blast doors. Tolvern’s assault crew charged into the farms from both corridors, firing into them as they entered. Return gunfire erupted, but it seemed feeble. Somewhat optimistically, one of the trio of Koh, Swettenham, and Smythe flipped the color of the farm from red to yellow on the schematic, which they maintained on a small side screen. The impression was that the territory controlled by the opposing faction had instantly shrunk by half.

  They didn’t control the cameras in the large open space, but several of the Blackbeard crew wore body cameras, and a chaotic scene reached the command module, jerking from here to there, as gunfire erupted on all sides. English and Chinese voices shouted and cursed. The air filled with shredded plants, and water poured down from ruptured hydroponic tanks. A body camera blinked out, then a second.

  “Cap’n!” Capp’s voice shouted through the chaos. “The bastards are hitting us from above. We’re getting murdered!”

  Li cursed. Anna’s people must have climbed the hydroponic towers and knocked the plants off to take a perch on the conveyor belts that hauled the crops up to the artificial light and cycled them back down again.

  “Fal
l back,” Tolvern ordered. Her voice was tense. “Get out of there.”

  Screaming, gunfire, chaos. The assault team came pouring out of the farms as quickly as they’d entered. Several were limping, others carried wounded comrades. They returned fire and took fire as they retreated.

  “I warned you, Jon,” Anna said across Li’s com link. “You should have listened.”

  #

  The aftermath was ugly. Eleven of the attackers had fallen in the battle, including four Singaporeans. Li knew every one of the dead personally. Could have named their playing tactics in Go, their favorite foods, shared the details of family back home. In eleven years, you had a long time to get to know people.

  Eighteen other attackers had suffered wounds. One of the wounded was Tolvern’s own Lieutenant Capp, who’d suffered a broken collarbone when one of the hydroponic towers fell on her. The woman was the muscle behind Blackbeard’s assaults, and even though Tolvern didn’t reflect the loss on her face, she must have felt it keenly. Whatever happened here, Capp wouldn’t be leading the attacks.

  As the Blackbeard crew braced for a counterattack while seeing to the wounded, Anna kept materializing on Li’s com link to taunt him.

  “She’s just trying to get into your head,” Tolvern said when Li told her what his sister was doing. “She wouldn’t bother if she had the upper hand.”

  “It was a disaster. Anna was waiting for us. Maybe we should try to negotiate again.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” Tolvern turned to the tech officers. “Koh, cut that woman off. We’ve heard enough. Make sure she doesn’t have a link to anyone on our side of the base. In fact, make sure none of their people can reach any of our people.”

  But Anna got one last message through before Koh cut the line. “I’ve shut down your oxygen, brother. We still have ours. Get ready to suffocate.”

  “She’s cut our oxygen, sir,” Li said.