“General, this isn’t a bad thing. Inconvenient in the short term, but good in the long run. Hroom may fight it, but nobody is ever sorry to come out the other side with his body under control and his mind free of the white stuff.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Maybe not fully,” she said, “but I had an uncle who drank himself to death. A good man with a good family, and he threw it away. Would have rather had one more drink than anything else.”
“That’s not what I mean. I need that sugar. It’s the only thing keeping me sane.”
“That’s what they all think. It’s not true.” Tolvern put a hand on his upper arm, but he flinched.
“Don’t touch me!” Again, his hand went to the pocket on his toga. His breathing was heavy. “Captain Tolvern, I—”
He withdrew his hand from his pocket, and stood still. He looked like he wanted to say something else, or maybe didn’t want to say it, but was compelled.
“Go lie down, General,” she said. “You’ll feel better in a couple of days, assuming you survive the battle.”
“I can’t leave my post. I have too much work to do.”
“So do I, and the more we accelerate, the more risky it is to fling me back to my own ship.” Tolvern flapped her uniform. “Besides, I’m melting in here. I need to get back where I can breathe.”
He’d flinched away so violently that it surprised her when he reached out and took her forearm. His fingers were so long that they encircled it completely. His grip was strong, almost painfully tight. His nostrils closed and flared.
“General,” she warned.
“It’s burning out my brain, Jess Tolvern. I can’t fight it much longer. I am losing with every moment.”
“You’re not supposed to fight it off. You’re supposed to endure the antidote until the cravings go away on their own. Lie down, you’ll feel better. Don’t you have a sick bay?”
His voice rose suddenly in pitch and volume. “You don’t understand. If I don’t stop it, we’ll all be destroyed.”
Tolvern forced a calm tone into her voice that she didn’t feel. “General, let go of me. I am an officer in the Royal Navy, and you have put a hand on me.”
Mose Dryz turned his head. “There’s enough for two.” He spoke as if to someone on his com link. No, more like to an invisible presence standing a few feet away. “I’ll give it to Jess Tolvern right now. That will solve one problem.”
He was out of his mind. She wanted to fight back, but the general was over seven feet tall, and strong enough to break her arm with a sharp twist. She had to wait for him to come back around.
You’re an idiot, she told herself. You knew something was off, but you came over anyway.
“Give me whatever it is,” she said, “and I’ll take it back to my ship.”
He eyed her, a strange and intense light gleaming in his eyes. “Yes, you will take it with you.”
Mose Dryz reached into his toga and brought out something in his fist. She couldn’t see its contents, but guessed. The general was controlled, disciplined for an eater; he must ration out his doses.
“Take this, and you’ll be just like me.”
“You know that won’t do anything to me. Sugar is just a sweetener for us.”
“And you need sweetening.”
She held out her free hand. “Fine, hand me the sugar and I’ll eat it for you.”
The gleam intensified. “I’ll feed it to you myself. The first dose is usually forced, Jess Tolvern.” He let out a hooting sound, what passed for a laugh with the Hroom. “I am a slaver. Come to me, little Hroomling. Eat your sugar. It will show you visions of the universe.”
He let go of her arm and seized her throat before she could move. She knew she should be terrified, but cool, deadly calm had settled over her. Mose Dryz had gone insane. You couldn’t argue with the insane, you could only play along long enough to extract yourself.
Eat the sugar, get back to the ship, and see if she could make contact with one of Mose Dryz’s adjutants to tell her that the general needed to be confined.
She stared into his eyes as he lifted the vial toward her mouth. “Go ahead, General. Give me the sugar if that’s what it takes.”
A shadow passed over his face. He was breathing harder than ever. Suddenly he threw her back and shoved the vial into his pocket.
Tolvern staggered, regained her balance. She rubbed at her throat. His grip had been tight, but he hadn’t hurt her. The general took his hand out of the interior pocket, put it back in, then withdrew it again. He was talking to himself in the whistles, hums, and clicking words of his own language.
Finally, he withdrew another vial, this one slightly smaller. He bit off the end, tilted his head back and poured the small quantity of sugar into his mouth.
“No, it can’t be,” he said, before he was babbling again in his own tongue. He looked at her. “It’s not working, Jess Tolvern. I feel nothing. God of Death, I am undone.”
He seemed in such misery that she’d already forgotten the violent way he’d seized her, and felt only sorry for him, knowing what he must be going through.
“Will you send me back to my ship now?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And when I fly into battle, will you follow me?”
“Someone will follow you. It may not be me.”
“You must endure,” she said gently. “This will pass.”
“No, Jess Tolvern, it won’t pass. If only I could explain. If only you understood.”
#
“You got a soft spot for the Hroom,” Capp said when the captain was back on the bridge of her own ship. “And I don’t just mean this bloke.” She hooked her thumb at Nyb Pim, who glanced briefly from his terminal before resuming his work.
Yes, she did. It went back to Hot Barsa, when she saw the vast scale of the suffering on Lord Malthorne’s sugar plantations. He’d enslaved Hroom to produce sugar, which he’d used to enslave more Hroom, making it necessary to up his sugar production. And so on.
But her sympathy only extended so far.
“I’m not that soft,” she said. She touched her neck where the general had grabbed her. He could have snapped her neck. “If Mose Dryz is down and suffering, I feel bad for him, sure. But I’m not keen on putting a cultist in charge of his forces, either.”
“Yeah, them bloody cultists destroyed York Town,” Capp said. “They’ll pay for it someday.”
“Right now, we’ve got to work with them.”
“Don’t make sense him grabbing you like that. The general seems pretty controlled most of the time, don’t he?”
“I should ask Carvalho if he remembers anything like that happening on Hot Barsa. We saw plenty of meltdowns from the newly inoculated, that’s for sure. But I don’t remember anyone thinking he was a human slaver.”
“Whole thing sounds like one of them—what do you call ’em?—a metaphor.” Capp tapped at her console. “He was trying to make it seem like you was a baby Hroom getting his sugar, like he was making some kinda point.”
“I don’t know,” Tolvern said doubtfully. “He was pretty far gone. Not really capable of complex philosophical arguments, if you know what I mean.”
“Well something don’t fit.”
Tolvern studied the viewscreen to make sure the general’s sloops continued with her toward the Kettle. They maintained formation and followed her lead. Maybe he was feeling better, as the sugar antidote worked its magic.
Captain McGowan, rot his soul, kept his powerful task force back near the jump point. She imagined him in his quarters, reading a book and smoking a pipe, unconcerned about other developments.
Capp and the others may make the occasional comment about the death cultists—comments ranging from suspicious to outright hostile—but they reserved their true vitriol for McGowan. Nothing raised one’s ire like a backstabber. Except perhaps cowardice. McGowan stood accused of both.
“Captain,” Smythe said, “the buzzards have changed tac
tics.”
“Bring the Kettle up on the big screen.”
Apex hunter-killer packs had been scouting the gas giant’s ice ring for the past day, looking for Sentinel 3. Sometimes, one of the packs had swooped at a spot in the ring, and Tolvern held her breath, sure that the Singaporeans had been discovered. But either the aliens were chasing their own tails or they were trying to bluff the battle station into revealing itself. Nothing came of these charges.
Now, instead of sniffing at the ring, they were blasting it with energy pulses. Tolvern laughed.
“What are they doing? Hoping for a lucky shot?”
“Don’t seem like that’s going to work,” Capp said.
“Let them try,” Tolvern said. “It’s like flying over a forest at thirty thousand feet and hoping to shoot a deer hiding beneath the canopy.”
“This particular forest is a quarter of a million miles in diameter,” Smythe said. “It might take them a while.” He tapped at his console. “But I’m not sure that’s what they’re going for.”
Smythe pulled the view out to show the entire gas giant, a roiling, copper-colored world, its atmosphere filled with giant, Albion-size storms in gold and burnt orange. The ring itself was thin, ethereal, almost invisible. Smythe and Lomelí changed filters and enhanced the view until the planet faded and the ice ring became a field of milky-white diamonds. Or rather, rings, plural. Mostly ice, some rock.
The enemy fire didn’t look so random with a new filter in place. Instead, it became apparent that Apex was spacing its fire at even intervals around the ring. The energy weapons vaporized ice and rock, leaving a thin, empty slice in the ring when they’d passed. The ships then moved on to burn another hole. Other ships circled the ring, scanning instead of burning.
“They’re sure hammering away,” Smythe said. “We can feel it all the way out here, could practically turn off the sensors and put a cup against the hull and hear all the banging.”
“So sound travels through space in your universe, does it?” Capp said. “A little muffled, or what?”
Smythe gave her a look. “That’s one of your metaphors, Capp. You know that sensors have nothing to do with sound, right? It’s not bloody sonar.”
“I ain’t an idiot. You got a point?”
“The point is, it’s not a very sophisticated scanning technology, but it seems like they have a strategy to make it work.”
“Don’t mean it’s a good one. Them Chinese know what they’re doing. We couldn’t even find ’em ourselves, remember?”
Tolvern let the pair bicker for a few more minutes, then cut them off. “Smythe, what can we do with our own sensors?”
“Like Capp said, we can’t find the battle station from out here. I wouldn’t think we’d want to. If we shine a light on them, the buzzards will pick it up, too.”
“That’s not what I mean. What happens when we hit the enemy ships with active sensors? I know that gives away whatever stealth we may have ourselves, but it makes a lot of noise. We can make it hard for Apex to hear.”
Smythe’s eyes lit up. “You know what would be even better? If we get the Hroom to join us. If each of those sloops picks an enemy ship, we can make that much more noise.”
“Excellent,” Tolvern said. “Get me the general.”
The Hroom sloops were much closer now, with the general’s flagship only a few tens of thousands of miles away, and there was barely a delay before a familiar Hroom face filled the viewscreen. It wasn’t the general, but Dela Zam, the high priestess. Capp muttered an oath.
“I need to see the general,” Tolvern said.
“He is off duty.”
“Put me through to his com link, please.”
“He is ill and not seeing anyone.”
“How about Lenol Tyn?”
“The colonel is not in command, I am.”
Tolvern stared, disbelieving. “And this is the general’s own wish? What he wanted? For you to be in charge of his fleet?”
“This is the order he gave.”
“That’s not the same thing. Was he compelled to hand over command or did he do it willingly?”
The priestess didn’t respond to the question. That was answer enough.
“Tell me this, at least,” Tolvern said. “Will you release him when he recovers from his sugar addiction?”
“That is no business of yours, human. But since you are no doubt burning with curiosity—this being one of the dominant urges suffered by your race, second only to greed and avarice—”
“Greed and avarice mean the same thing.”
“Acquisitiveness, the need to take from others, to hoard.” Dela Zam tossed her head dismissively. “But since you need to know, apparently, in order to go confidently into battle, then yes, I will put Mose Dryz back in command once he recovers. I covenanted to serve the general until such time as he breaks with the humans. His wish is that I obey your orders, and this I will do zealously.”
“I have no doubt about the zealous part. Is that why you gave him the sugar antidote?”
“I did it to save his soul. The god of death had marked him for damnation. He must first free his body before he can free his mind.”
“You took him from command at the moment I need him the most.”
“This was not my desire, nor my expectation. Mose Dryz is a measured man who took regular sugar rations. I thought he would recover quickly.”
“And it would have hurt you to wait a few days?”
“What do you want, Jess Tolvern?”
Tolvern explained about using the active sensors to baffle the Apex search.
“Far too much scheming,” Dela Zam said. “Humans and Apex are alike in this way. But yes, I will do this thing. It will be transparent to the enemy—they will know at once what you are doing, if they do not already.”
“That doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we make enough noise.”
“Understood.”
The line went dead. The bridge seemed to exhale.
“No wonder they keep the heat cranked up,” Tolvern said. “Dela Zam walks into the room and the temp immediately drops ten degrees.”
#
Twenty-two sloops of war joined Blackbeard in shouting with their active sensors at the ships of the enemy fleet. At first, the lances continued their methodical work on the ring, but within fifteen minutes, the searchers began to drift, and shortly thereafter, the ones vaporizing icy cuts in the ring stopped, too.
The harvester drifted toward the ring. This made the lances jostle, and the four spears moved away, as if in fear. Tolvern watched intently, hoping she was about to witness another struggle for dominance. Anything to disrupt the enemy. Maybe it would even break into a shooting fight.
No such luck. Instead, the harvester seemed to be making a final attempt to provoke Commander Li into a fight, but the sentinel stayed silent and hidden. The enemy fleet finally pulled out to the Kettle’s outer moons.
There they organized and swung into flight. They soon took a course that would intercept Blackbeard and the Hroom fleet.
“Looks like we got what we asked for,” Capp said. “Hurrah for us, eh, Cap’n?”
Twenty-eight lances, four spears, and a harvester ship. There was no way Tolvern had the muscle to fight them all. Not without McGowan or the battle station to back her up.
“Someone tell me how long we’ve got,” Tolvern said.
It was a relatively straightforward calculation based on current trajectories and acceleration, and Jane, the ship’s AI, was the first to respond. She sounded almost cheerful as she gave the bad news.
“Eleven hours and forty-seven minutes until intercept.”
Capp looked glum. “What do you suppose I taste like to the buzzards? Beef or pork?”
“Beer-marinated bacon,” Tolvern said. “Is that an actual dish? If not, it should be.”
“You think it’s funny, but look here.” Capp held up her left forearm. “I got the bloody Albion lions tattooed on my arm. They’re going
to take one look at this and think I’m someone important.”
“You are someone important, Capp,” Tolvern said. “You’re the woman I’m going to finger as the captain of HMS Blackbeard when they take us prisoner.”
“Is this one of those jokes you tell when they put a noose around your neck? Or do you have something you’re cooking up?”
“A little bit of both.”
“So you got a plan for real?” Capp asked.
“I hope so,” Tolvern said. “Get that cultist back on the line. It’s time to dust off an old Hroom trick.”
Chapter Ten
Admiral Drake jumped into the Kettle System expecting to see his forces already gathered at the battle station. With luck, Tolvern or McGowan (or possibly both) would be on Sentinel 3, stripping its weapon systems.
Not likely, though. Almost certainly Commander Li would require a report from Hillary Koh about Dreadnought’s attempts to liberate Singapore before he turned over his tech. Drake hadn’t yet come close to fighting the harvester ship devouring the Singaporean home world, but he’d fought a major naval engagement against the buzzards harassing a refugee fleet.
Add in the struggle against the leviathan and the need to make a fresh attempt to reach Singapore, and he hoped Koh would give a favorable report. She had indicated as much, even though she’d often disagreed with his decisions during the past several weeks.
With or without Koh’s endorsement, Drake could prove his intentions. The bulk of Albion firepower would be in this system, together with thirty sloops under the general, itself a massive commitment from the bleeding, prostrate Hroom empire.
But the first scans of the system painted a dismal picture. A large fleet of lances and spears flew out from the Kettle, where the signature of energy weapons indicated a battle had recently occurred. There were over thirty ships in all, including a harvester.
Lloyd’s scans found Blackbeard next. It was moving on a collision course with the enemy. McGowan was in the system, too, but his cruiser, Repulse, and all of her support vessels loitered near a jump point far from the developing action. What the devil was McGowan doing? And where was the general’s fleet?
Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) Page 8
