They found four jump points in the system. The one they’d just come through was located among the rocky inner worlds. Another was so close to the star that they’d be sweating by the time they approached. It matched no known signature, but appeared quite stable. Another was a wobbly, unstable jump way out past the icy planetoids on the edge of the system. The tech officers estimated its age as less than two years and its eventual decay sometime in the next six months. Perhaps sooner.
It might lead nowhere, or it might drop them inside the gravity well of a neutron star. They could send a probe, but as unstable as it was, even if they did jump safely through, they might find that it was a one-way trip.
The final jump point fell in an empty region a few million miles outside the orbit of the system’s largest gas giant, a massive brown dwarf with several large, almost planet-size moons. Where did the jump point lead? His tech officers were studying the data coming back from scans, but Drake had low expectation of successfully identifying it until Koh let out a burst of excited Chinese.
“This signature matches!” she said. “Admiral, look at the database from Sentinel 3.”
She sent over the information. No charts existed of this system, but there was a ream of data from the Singapore home world. And one of the outgoing jump points from Singapore itself was a match for this one—not identical, but the database was a decade out of date, and even the most stable jump points changed with time.
“How sure are we?” Drake asked. “Give me numbers.”
“Seventy-eight percent confidence,” Lloyd said. “Not a certainty by any stretch. Nearly one in four chance that it leads somewhere else.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Koh said after another burst of Chinese, this time spat out like so many curse words. “It has to be the same jump point, it has to.”
“Hold on,” Lloyd said. “Refined data coming in from the latest scan.” He hesitated. “Make that only fifty-nine percent. And a lower degree of confidence in the assessment.”
Koh looked more uncertain now. Drake didn’t like the odds, either. That was barely above fifty-fifty. He wanted a few minutes to consider the options, but events conspired against him.
The tech officers had been hammering away with active sensors, looking for another hidden fleet. And Lloyd shouted a new discovery. Ahead of them, snugged in near a pair of wandering asteroids in loose orbit around each other, came something with a dull heat signature and emitting radiation. At first glance it was a massive ship, three times the size of Dreadnought. The Apex mother ship?
No, it was a derelict, a wreck. And not a ship at all, but a battle station. A sentinel battle station, to be specific. Broken in pieces, destroyed in battle. Koh clenched her fists when it became clear what they were looking at. She dropped her head.
“Commander Li told me there were eleven sentinels,” Drake said. “Each one placed at a critical position to protect the home system. I guess that answers the question about our jump point.”
Koh lifted her head. “So it is Singapore on the other side.”
“Most likely, yes.”
Her tone was mixed bitterness and hope. “You know what that means, Admiral, what we have to do. Surely, you must.”
“It means that Apex is trying to herd us toward Singapore,” he said.
“No, it means . . .” Her eyes widened slightly.
“Exactly. They’ve as good as invited the fleet through. Opened a channel for us, invited us to leave, but only to here. And what do we find when we get here? Convenient, isn’t it?
“And what will we get if we jump through to Singapore?” he continued. “A welcoming party, no doubt. We know there’s at least one harvester ship in orbit around Singapore, together with a large enemy fleet. There are two fleets behind us, and most likely a third. Their strategy seems obvious. Push us through to Singapore and smash us between the hammer and the anvil.”
“Or, it could be the opportunity to free my planet and save my people.”
“Without the rest of our forces?”
Her brow knit together and she chewed at a lip as she studied the screen and the data scrolling across it. This time she had no answer for him. Expressions across the bridge showed the same story. Doubts and fear spread from one face to the other.
“So we have no choice,” Manx said. “We can’t go back, and we can’t go forward. We have to stay here and fight it out. Shall I send a message to the other ships?”
“We do have a choice,” Drake said. “We have several. Apex plays tricks, and they’ve got our heads spinning now. Where is the trap, where are they pushing us? This could be a trick to keep us in the system while they bring their final fleet into play. Well, humans can play tricks, too. And if this is a poker game, we can call their bluff.
“The enemy won’t be guarding the other side of that jump point,” he continued. “This whole battle has developed too quickly, and until recently, the buzzards were trying to destroy us, not push us through. Apex may not be facing a civil war, but it’s full of factions. We’ll use that against them.”
“What are you saying, sir?” Manx asked.
“Give orders to the fleet. We jump through to Singapore. We catch them before they’re ready.”
It was a gamble, a risk with the naval resources of the Kingdom of Albion. If he guessed wrong, he’d lose his fleet and his life, but more importantly, Albion would be stripped of her defenses. Nothing would hold Apex back.
But war was always a roll of the dice, a spin of the wheel. Life itself was a gamble in this uncertain universe filled with hostile, expanding civilizations. Many of history’s most important battles had turned on a bold gambit, a wrong decision, or a bit of luck. If humanity thought that by taking to the stars they would change not just the odds, but the nature of the game, they were wrong. They’d fought out their age-old struggles on Earth only to emerge into a cosmos filled with the same violent conflicts.
Human civilization was still young in the universe. Would it continue to grow, or would the human race be devoured by an even more aggressive, hostile species? On the other end of that jump point lay the answer to his question.
Drake ordered his forces toward the jump, determined to take his fleet through and find out.
-end-
Thank you for reading Dragon Quadrant. The trilogy concludes with book #3, Shattered Sun. You can buy it right here.
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From the Author:
If you are enjoying this trilogy after reading The Starship Blackbeard Series, welcome, and thank you for continuing with the story. If The Sentinel Trilogy is your first introduction to my universe, I hope you’ll take a look at the earlier four-book series, beginning with Starship Blackbeard.
Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2) Page 22
