Rodriguez sat down at a computer terminal. “I’ve got your damage report. You’ll have my crew working full out, and it still looks like you’re going to be stuck on Samborondón a while.”
“I’ll turn over my boatswains and engineering crew,” she said. “That should speed things up.”
“A little,” Rodriguez said. “Can’t charge you any less, though. Your boys will be working for free if they do.”
“They earn navy wages. That’s enough. Anyway, we’ve got other business on Samborondón,” Tolvern added. “Starting with a search for a pair of fugitives we think might be on their way here. I’m hoping you can help us find them.”
She told him about Megat and Djikstra, only hesitating before she shared her worry that the pair was working for Apex. There was no reason to keep it a secret, though, so she decided to explain it all. Keep humans and Hroom alike looking for the fugitives. In the end, the only thing she concealed was the part that concerned the sentinel battle station. Here, she spoke in vague terms only.
“You really think they’ve turned?” Rodriguez asked.
“It must have happened to Djikstra first, before we met him. He was already working for the buzzards. Then, when we were distracted by the battle, Djikstra told Megat some story about breaking free and making a run for it. Apex picked them up, did the same thing to Megat, and sent them on their way.”
“So let me get this straight. The birds have put something in their brains to control them?” Rodriguez looked skeptical. “How, exactly?”
“Some sort of spit or snot.”
He glanced at each of them in turn. “You can’t be serious. Mind control snot?”
“Our science officer calls it a brain altering excretion,” Tolvern said, “and points to analogues in the animal kingdom. But yeah, mind control snot is more or less what we’re talking about. It happened to one of our other crew, too, a gunnery assistant named Boykin, hit in the face while we were fighting off an Apex boarding party.”
“A buzzard sneezed on her?”
“More like spit,” Carvalho said. “The bird was trying to hit me instead, but I ducked out of the way, and it struck Boykin in the face.”
“She took sick not long after that,” Tolvern said. “Pale, sweating, vomiting. Cried out in her sleep and hit her head against the wall. She was calmer after that, and I thought she was getting better. When the doctor came in to examine her, she tried to convince him she was fine, but when I refused to release her from quarantine, she killed a guard and tried to fight her way to the bridge.
“Boykin was shot and killed before she could reach me,” Tolvern continued. “My science officer dissected her brain and found strange growths, like small tumors, and other areas that had atrophied.”
“Diós mío,” Rodriguez said. “It is bloody mind control snot, isn’t it?”
Capp nodded. “That’s what we been telling you all along.”
“Brockett thinks it’s an outgrowth of the buzzards’ natural flock-controlling mechanism,” Tolvern said. “They’re like wasps or termites, with queens and warriors and so on. The higher castes control the lower ones with secretions, and they’ve adapted it to work in human brains.”
Rodriguez listened to this with a look of horrified fascination. “The birds could do this to all of us, couldn’t they? Turn us into zombies, make us their slaves?”
“I don’t think that’s their goal,” Tolvern said. “They breed their own slaves, an entire drone army of warriors and workers. The only use they have for us is to exterminate us to prove we are an inferior species.”
“Then why are they doing it?”
“Temporary spies, saboteurs, and the like. Sow panic in the ranks. Maybe they just enjoy it, like they enjoy hunting and killing.”
Capp spoke up. “But it don’t seem like they got it perfect yet. The victims get all sick and sweaty, and it’s obvious if you know what you’re looking for.”
“Not yet, but they will,” Tolvern said. “I’ll bet they infected the brains of the Hroom long ago. It would explain how they penetrated so far into empire territory with so little opposition.”
“They wouldn’t need to do that, really,” Rodriguez said. “Only give the Hroom sugar and they will do anything to get another fix of the drug.”
“If Megat and Djikstra come to Samborondón, I want to know about it. We thought this was their most likely destination, and we’re almost certainly ahead of them now.”
“I can help you there. By Hroom decree, human ships must land in one of three designated ports, and it will most likely be this one. This is the biggest, the most heavily armed, and with the best port facilities. Whether they’re here to hide or to spread the mind-control . . . um, whatever it is—I can find them.”
“They’re flying a ship called Morpho. I’ll have Smythe send you the specs.”
“Good.”
“Meanwhile, the three of us are heading into town to look for new crew,” Tolvern said.
“You’ll find plenty of men and women willing to work. A lot of Singaporeans with spacefaring experience—it’s where I get most of my own workers these days. I know a guy who can set you up, in fact.”
“Of course you do,” Tolvern said. “How much will it cost me?”
“Nah, my contact will pay the fee. He’s legit. Well, as legit as they come around here. How many do you need?”
“I’m down sixteen.”
“Out of what, a crew of eighty-nine?” Rodriguez asked.
Tolvern was surprised he remembered. “It’s ninety-four these days. We took on five more to operate and maintain the belly guns you installed for us in San Pablo.”
“And you’re short sixteen?” Rodriguez asked. “Mostly skilled workers, no? That might take a few days to find the right people.”
“The ‘right people’ are the ones I already lost. I’d give anything to have them back, and not whatever substitutes you scrape up for me.”
“You are at war, Captain. Surely this is not a first for you.”
Of course not, but she felt every loss keenly. Nine had died in the fight in the engineering bay, two more fell when the Apex boarding craft smashed through the hull, and two others had vanished, presumably hauled off by the buzzards to face torture and death. One other crew, a low-level gunner, had died of the trips after that brutal jump. Finally, Boykin and the guard she’d murdered in her attempted escape. This was on top of the deaths she’d suffered at Sentinel 3, but she’d raided Commander Li’s crew to fill in the gaps. Now she’d be filling them in yet again.
“I have one other question before I start work,” Rodriguez said. “You know me, Tolvern, I am no coward. I have lived for years among pirates and thieves and had more close brushes with death than I can count. I was on San Pablo when Lord Malthorne’s forces attacked it with nuclear weapons, and I didn’t run.”
“What is your question?” she asked.
“What will you do if Apex tracks you to Samborondón?”
“Get into orbit as fast as I can. I’m not fighting them planetside, that’s for sure. After that, if I have help and the odds are favorable, I fight.”
“And if you don’t like the odds?” He studied her face, and she guessed this was not mere curiosity.
“Then we run like hell.”
A brief nod. “Good. Then I have a final condition before I sign your contract.”
“Yes?”
“If Apex comes, you will take me with you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Admiral Drake studied the woman sitting on the other side of the war room table as she worked her console. From this angle, Hillary Koh looked Ladino, with her black hair and the tint to her skin, but the impression vanished when she looked up, showing the unusual bone structure and that Chinese turn to her eyes and eyelids. Not pretty, really, but interesting to look at, as he’d found most of the Singaporeans.
Commander Li had made the same comment in reverse, although the Singaporeans’ interest in the range of hair c
olors among the Albion crew was dwarfed by their fascination with the Hroom. The tall, long-limbed aliens were as exotic to the Singaporeans as animals at a zoo, something Drake found amusing. He’d been around Hroom all his life.
“This is your code, isn’t it?” Drake asked after Koh had studied the console for a few minutes.
“I won’t deny it.”
“Who put you up to this?”
“Nobody.”
Drake fixed her with a hard gaze, but didn’t speak. Most people wilted under that stare, unable to leave the space silent, but Koh didn’t respond. After a moment, she looked down at the console.
“You know it was wrong,” he pressed. “That’s why you kept your work hidden.”
“Not at all. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone back in to fiddle with it. That’s what tipped you off, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean, fiddle?”
“I noticed a flaw in my code and fixed it. I saved an instruction by making this function recursive. It doesn’t look like much, but that line executes about fifteen hundred times a second. I sped the whole thing up with that one tweak.”
“Koh, I’m losing my patience. You’d better explain what this is about.”
“It’s exactly what it looks like. I’m not trying to hide anything.”
“You inserted code into the defense grid computer. I don’t care how many bloody times it executes, I care what it’s doing. Ellison tells me you were siphoning off hundreds of gigabytes of data.”
“Like I said, I wasn’t trying to hide anything. If I had been, you’d have never known.”
“If you’re not hiding anything, then why won’t you tell me exactly what you’re up to? Why did you hack into a secure system? Why do you need all that data?”
“First of all, it’s not remotely secure,” Koh said. “You may think it is, but it’s not. Smythe interfaced with the sentinel computers and gave me all the protocols necessary to get into Blackbeard’s defense grid computer. Once I knew that, it didn’t take much guesswork to bluff my way past Dreadnought’s security. It operates on the same principles. No need to ask permission.”
“You didn’t ask anyone, you ‘bluffed’ your way in.” Drake nodded. “Right.”
“Anyway,” Koh said in a false-patient voice, as if explaining something to a small child, “I’m obviously collecting data so I can find out exactly how your systems work. You’ve got a lot of moving parts, and I want to know how they interact. How do the batteries work together, how do you keep from knocking down your own ordnance with countermeasures? How do the Youd mines work? Why don’t they target your own ships? That sort of thing.”
“Why not ask?”
“I did! Manx told me it was none of my business.”
“He did have instructions to keep you out of the system,” Drake said, thinking. “Perhaps he was overzealous in obeying my orders.”
“He wouldn’t tell me anything. Why not?”
“Because you’re not a navy officer. You’re an observer, brought along as a courtesy to Commander Li.”
“Who has promised to show you all of our weapon systems, right down to the eliminon battery. Why does the sharing go in only one direction?”
Because one of us still has a fleet. One of us still has a home world. And one of us does not.
Drake didn’t say this aloud. For one, it was cruel to remind her that Apex was devouring the survivors on her planet. He’d nearly lost his own home world of Albion to a Hroom death fleet trying to irradiate the planet as a sacrifice to their god of death, and the horror of such a fate was still fresh on his mind. It gave him sympathy for her loss.
For another, Drake’s fleet was ostensibly on a mission to destroy the Apex harvester ship and any other forces in orbit around Singapore. Once he’d freed Singapore, the two nations would theoretically be on equal footing. The reality, of course, was that the remnant population on the planet would be no assistance whatsoever in the war. Singapore’s cities lay in ruins, the survivors reduced to subsistence levels, hiding in forests, deserts, and mountains as the buzzards hunted them to extinction.
Any value Singapore had was in Sentinel 3’s weapon systems and those of whatever other battle stations might still be hidden in the sector. Drake intended to take command of them, just as he hoped to direct any surviving Hroom fleets. Only Albion had the strength to take the fight to Apex, and if the others wanted to survive, they must join forces with the Royal Navy.
And that meant join in a subservient position. There could only be one commanding officer. It couldn’t be General Mose Dryz, and it couldn’t be Commander Li. That left Admiral Drake. That was reality, not arrogance on Drake’s part.
“I don’t think you’re working for the enemy,” he began at last.
“Absolutely not.”
“But I can’t have you larding up our network with extraneous code, either.”
Irritation roughened the edges of Koh’s voice. “Now you’re attacking my technical skills. The code is lean, and once I fix this function—”
“No. You won’t fix it. Ellison is going to lock you out and reduce your clearance.”
“What?” Koh rose in a huff.
“That is not a challenge, either. If I catch you trying to hack your way in again, I’ll have you thrown in the brig.” Drake waited for her sputtered protests to die out. “But I’ll instruct Ellison to answer your questions. You can’t dig into the code or mess around in the network, but you can see any high-level technical specifications that you’d like.”
“Hmm.” Koh settled back into her chair. “You could use my skills, you know.”
“I’m sure I could. Will you take a loyalty oath?”
“What’s that? Salute your lion flag and pledge fealty to King What’s-his-name?”
“Something along those lines, yes.”
She shook her head. “No. My loyalty is to my people, to the Singapore Imperium, and that will never change.”
“Then you’ll have to be satisfied with what I give you. For now. Later, maybe we’ll talk.” Drake stood, indicating that the meeting was over. “I’m giving you a second chance, Koh. But I’m warning you, don’t pull another stunt like this.”
#
The fleet picked its way carefully through the Dragon Quadrant for the next ten days, jumping three times on its way toward Singapore. They dropped probes, left a few Youd mines around jump points, and carefully scanned each system as they entered before barreling ahead.
Drake’s goal was to reach Singapore undamaged and undetected. He wanted one fight, and one fight only. Break the siege if he could, but if not, battle just hard enough to show Commander Li that he was serious. Then return to the sentinel base and get his hands on Li’s weapons systems.
By then, he expected to be reunited with Tolvern and Mose Dryz. From there, an aggressive charge at Apex at the head of a massive fleet that would hunt down the enemy and force a decisive naval battle.
All was quiet until they jumped into what the charts called the Padang System. It was crowded with hundreds of ships, and it looked like Drake’s fleet had stumbled into a killing field. Only gradually did the truth come out.
It was a killing field, but not a recent one. The ships were derelicts, gutted and wrecked, flotsam. There were passenger ships, Singaporean war junks, cargo vessels, and destroyed Apex warships. The biggest clusters of wreckage hung around the jump points, but there was also a broad belt in an elliptical orbit that ran from the gas giants to the innermost world of the system.
“Someone had better clean this up,” Drake noted as scans continued to add to the number of known wrecks, “or a star leviathan will discover this banquet and make the system impassable for a hundred years.”
Or maybe longer. A star leviathan would gobble up this debris, feeding on unexploded ordnance and fissile material, then, when sated, lay eggs. The hatchlings would menace the system for generations before they were ready to venture into the deep void.
“On the other hand,”
Manx said, “it should be easy enough to pick our way through this mess without being spotted. There’s plenty of cover.”
That was true, and Drake also took the opportunity to harpoon a wrecked war junk and haul it in. Koh protested, saying he had no right to strip Singaporean technology without permission, but he ignored her. The war junk had a curving hull, with wing-like protrusions that provided thrust and maneuverability, and even as a wreck it was graceful in appearance, a thing of beauty. Drake was sorry to order the ship dismembered and hauled into Dreadnought for closer inspection.
Later the next day, Koh joined the admiral in Dreadnought’s massive engineering bay, where they went over the pieces. She’d dropped her objections, and showed him the engines and weapon systems, explaining how they worked. The result was disappointing. There was an interesting tyrillium compound in the ship’s armor that he ordered sent to the lab, but no plasma ejector or eliminon battery. Only standard lasers, missiles, and the like.
“This ship is from the first war,” Koh explained as she ran her hand over the pitted hull of the war junk, now being cut into pieces by grunting, sweating navy boatswains swarming over her surface like ants dismembering a dead lizard. “We hadn’t developed our big weapons yet.”
Not that those big weapons had stopped Apex in the end. Singapore had driven off the enemy, remained on full war footing for years while the economy threw every possible resource at building a new fleet and the sentinel battle stations, and yet the human civilization had been completely overthrown.
But the Imperium had put up a good fight. Tech Officer Lloyd identified the wreckage of fourteen war junks among the derelicts, plus numerous military support craft. And that was just the evidence of fighting in this system alone, and those ships that hadn’t fallen into the sun or been atomized in a fiery explosion.
When he was alone in his quarters, Drake worried.
Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2) Page 14
