The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “This is probably a waste of time,” she said, “but I don’t suppose any of you speak English.”

  Blank faces greeted her words.

  “Bloody idiots,” Capp muttered.

  “If one of you does,” Tolvern continued, “or if you have a com link hooked to a computer that can translate, let me tell you this. We didn’t come here as your enemies. Your miserable treachery aside, I’m willing to forget it all, but it ends now. I want to talk to your commander. Understand? We might still be able to come to an accommodation.”

  “Would you like me to try in Ladino?” Carvalho said. “There may have been Ladino traders out here.”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Not much point in it, but it couldn’t hurt. The Ladino language was a mix of Old Earth Spanish and Portuguese, and even more muddled by the passage of time than English.

  Carvalho rattled off something that came with the speed of a machine gun, one long word to Tolvern’s ears. More blank looks.

  “Guess that settles that,” Capp said. “We’ll lock this lot up and get to work.”

  “Send Smythe to the cell block,” Tolvern said. “See if he can get them to talk, and record their words. Then we can let Jane have a stab at it. The computer should have samples of Chinese in the database.”

  The congestion in the engineering bay didn’t ease for long after Carvalho marched the prisoners out. More crew were arriving every minute. Capp handpicked several to join her security detail to guard against another attack, while Barker put the rest to work on repairs.

  Tolvern had other matters on her mind by the time she left the engineering bay. The corridors outside were deserted. A strange thrumming noise came through the ducts, and the artificial gravity wasn’t working properly. She practically bounced between one set of airlocks, gravity at ten or twenty percent, while in the next, her limbs felt like they’d been turned to cement. Every breath was a struggle until she got out.

  The science lab doors were repeatedly sliding open and shut as she passed. Tolvern had seen this sort of thing before, and figured they must have become misaligned after the ship took a hit. A safety feature designed to protect stray fingers forced them open every time they were on the verge of sealing. At which point they’d attempt to close again.

  Tolvern had been on her way to the bridge to consult with Jane and study the damage and readiness reports, but those doors were going to drive her crazy. She reached out to disable them and glanced inside. A familiar figure in a white lab coat hunched over a piece of equipment, muttering to himself.

  “Brockett, what the devil are you doing in here?”

  The science officer looked up from his microscope and blinked myopically. “It’s definitely organic. Not epoxy and not a freeze-dried fluid leak from the ship.”

  Tolvern flipped open the control next to the doors and pressed the button to keep them open. “Wasn’t that driving you crazy?”

  He put on his glasses and peered at her. “Wasn’t what?”

  “The opening and closing and . . . never mind that. Why aren’t you down in the bay? Smythe is down there running diagnostics, something you’re qualified to do too.”

  “Does he need my help?”

  “Of course he needs your help! What do you think we’re doing here? There’s too much to do without screwing around up here with your experiments. Put that huge brain of yours to work and keep our ship from flying apart.”

  Brockett gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “I’m not studying space barnacles in here, Captain. It’s this freeze-dried substance Carvalho scraped from the ship.”

  “Whatever that gunk is, it can wait. They’ll be scraping freeze-dried science officer if we don’t do something.”

  “Even if the ‘gunk’ is an excretion from an Apex queen?”

  Tolvern was already turning back to the corridor, but now she stopped and stared at him.

  “That’s right.” Brockett nodded. “You remember we have studied two different varieties of Apex. Closely related, perhaps of the same origin, but genetically modified over time. They say there are other varieties—all manner of drone birds of various sizes and abilities. A whole caste system within the colonies.”

  “And?”

  “But for the sake of argument, let’s say there are two basic types. There’s the kind with the plumage—the queens, much rarer—and the sterile drones. The drone is the offspring of the queen, but undergoes further genetic manipulation either in the egg or shortly after birth. That’s where you get the sterile warrior and worker caste.”

  “Fascinating stuff, but what the devil does it have to do with the space snot?”

  “I’ve run it through the sequencer. The Apex analogy to DNA—a complex protein with genetic material encapsulated—is clearly present in the sample Carvalho collected from the hull. It’s an excretion, some sort of mucus-like substance from a specialized gland.”

  “You’re saying an Apex queen sneezed on Blackbeard’s hull?”

  “If by ‘sneezed’ you mean mixed its saliva with a protective gel and an artificial epoxy and fired it against our ship, then yes. She ‘sneezed’ on us, sir. I don’t know why.”

  Tolvern took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But suffice it to say there’s a damn good reason.”

  “One may assume so, yes.”

  “Have you touched the snot in any way with your bare hands?”

  “No, sir. The substance has not come into contact with the air, either.”

  “Good. Incinerate it.”

  “But, sir—”

  “You’ve studied a sample, you must know what it is down to the molecular level. Maybe there’s more to learn, maybe not, but we don’t know what this is, and I won’t risk it. Whatever reason this queen had for flinging her snot at us, you can bet it’s something nasty.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand. And I suppose we could scrape off some more if we decide we need it.”

  “When you find a tick on your body, you crush it, Brockett, you don’t leave it there sucking your blood. We’re going to scorch it off the hull.”

  Tolvern reached for her com link to speak to engineering. Smythe answered. She told him what she wanted done.

  “I’ll pass that to the chief,” he said, “but I was just about to call you, anyway. I’ve cracked the Chinese thing.”

  “The Chinese thing?” Tolvern blinked, unsure she’d heard correctly. “Wait, you have? You can talk to them? It’s been ten minutes!”

  “Yup, I got it. Figured it out on my own.” The tech officer sounded pleased, almost smug.

  “So I should tell Brockett to clean out his desk—we’ve got a new genius on board.” Brockett looked up with a scowl when she said his name. She waved him back to his work. “Or is this a trick?”

  “A bit of a trick, a bit of genius. Meet me in the cell block. I’m ready to give it a try.”

  Brockett had already disposed of the sample when she ended the call, forcing it and the entire glass vial into the incinerator to be broken down to the atomic level and recycled.

  “I really hate to leave my work here,” he began reluctantly, “but if you say Smythe needs my help . . .”

  “Hold on. Is there anything new to learn from the existing data?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. It will be hard to tell if I’m not in the lab.”

  “Fine, keep at it. New knowledge about Apex is the only thing that trumps emergency repairs.”

  Reentering the corridor, Tolvern braced herself for more funny business with the gravity, but that had been stabilized. The strange clanking noise was louder, however, like some pipe was about to burst and vent corrosive chemicals. Tolvern cocked her head. A muffled voice reached her ear from behind the wall, followed by more clanking. An echoed curse. Ah, it was just the sound of someone deep in the ducts, banging around.

  She found her tech officer at the head of the cell block, messing around with his hand computer. A strange, singsong tone of a foreign language emerged from the device, and Smy
the tried to repeat it, with hilarious results. He sounded like a man at the bottom of a well, pinching his nose and trying to sing purposefully off-key.

  “It’s like music,” Smythe said excitedly when she approached. “You have to say the word and the note for it to make sense. Listen to these two words.” He looked at his computer and said something unintelligible.

  “This is your plan? You’re going to learn Old Earth Chinese?”

  “No, I’m just curious. Hey, I wonder if Jane could speak it. She has a full database of Chinese.”

  “Even if she could, that Chinese is five hundred years old. And these people were from a small Chinese colony, not even the main country. Jane’s Chinese will sound like Old Church English would to us. At best. Totally incomprehensible.”

  “Worse than that,” he said cheerfully. “Apparently, what we call Chinese wasn’t even one language in those days. People with one dialect couldn’t understand people with another. They were roughly as close as English is to Dutch.”

  “So are you just wasting my time here, or what?”

  “Look,” Smythe said, holding out his computer for her to look at the screen.

  It was filled with what looked like scribbles. She had read enough about Earth to recognize it as Chinese letters, but otherwise, it may as well have been a transcript of a Hroom whistle language for all she could decipher.

  “The thing is, written Chinese isn’t phonetic,” Smythe said. “That’s why the different dialects were considered the same language. The symbols stood for ideas, not letters. There are thousands of different characters if you want to write properly.”

  “How did anyone learn to read?”

  “Not easily, I’m guessing. Anyway, the point is, you could get two people together from different places and times and they might not be able to understand each other’s speech, but the writing was the same. And look,” he added, “I can write something in English, and the computer will spit out the Chinese letters.”

  “It’s still been five hundred years, Smythe. I can’t read Old Earth English, can you?”

  “Captain, no. That’s not how it works. Because the writing doesn’t match the speech—at all, it’s not phonetic in any way—there’s no reason for the writing to have changed. I’ll bet you anything that they write exactly the same as they did before the Great Migration.”

  Ah, now she got it. Write it in Chinese, and they’d understand. That didn’t mean these people would cooperate, but they had a way to communicate. Tolvern gestured at the cell block.

  “Go ahead, let’s give your theory a try.”

  Smythe stopped in front of one of the cells. “Capp thinks this fellow is the leader—the other captives seemed to defer to him—and she threw him in his own cell. The rest are crammed in six or seven to a room.”

  Tolvern peered in through the small window. A strong-looking man sat on a cot, his hands still fastened behind his back. He was glaring at the wall. She checked her sidearm.

  “This one looks like trouble,” she said. “Grab an extra zip tie in case we need to clip his ankles, too.”

  Smythe went to the cabinet at the head of the cell block and patted a pocket of his jumpsuit when he returned. “Got it.”

  “Keep wary,” she warned as she lifted her palm to the reader. When Smythe looked ready, she slapped the reader and stepped inside.

  Her warning proved prescient. The instant the door opened, the prisoner sprang to his feet and charged at her with his head lowered.

  Chapter Twelve

  The prisoner had kept his hands behind his back, but that was a feint, and they weren’t restrained. Somehow he’d got his hands free, and he grabbed for her throat with one hand and her gun with the other. He was quick and strong, and if Tolvern had stumbled into the room blind, he’d have had her.

  But she’d been tense, ready. She drove her knee into his gut, and he fell back with a grunt. Before he could recover, she had the gun out and pistol-whipped him across the temple. He went down hard, and Smythe jumped on top of him while Tolvern holstered her gun. Together, they wrestled him onto the cot, shoved him face down with knees in his back, and attached the spare zip tie Smythe had grabbed from the head of the cell block. They got his hands bound just as he seemed to recover his wits. He tried to thrash free, but got nowhere.

  Tolvern’s heart was pounding, her face flushed as she took a step back. “You idiot, you think that’s the first time someone has tried to jump me?”

  He shouted something back in Chinese.

  Smythe picked up his computer and turned it over as if checking it for blemishes. He was breathing hard.

  “Forget this jerk,” he said. “I’m sure we can find someone more cooperative.”

  “This is a negotiation as much as an interrogation. He’s either their leader, or he’s not.”

  But was he? Tolvern looked him over, taking in his dark, angry gaze as he stared at her hard enough to drill holes in her head. The plastic cuffs lay on the floor, chewed in two. He must be flexible to have tucked his legs up and got his arms in front of him.

  There was a camera to watch the room, but that only helped if someone was monitoring the feed. And the truth was, studying prisoners was not currently the best use of resources.

  “Translate a message,” Tolvern said. “Let’s see if he understands something simple, first. How about: we’re not here to fight you, we’re enemies of Apex.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to translate ‘Apex,’” Smythe said.

  “Okay, then pick some other words. The enemy birds, or something.”

  Smythe tapped at his computer. “I have a suspicion that this is going to translate funny. That we’re here to fight the ‘war chickens’ or something.”

  “War chickens, battle buzzards. The turkeys of terror. Close enough. He’ll get it.”

  She took the console from Smythe when he’d finished and held it in front of the man’s face to show him the Chinese characters. He looked away with a disinterested sneer.

  Tolvern’s face went hot. “You’ll look at this, or I’ll work you over, so help me.”

  He still wouldn’t do it.

  She slapped his face. When he looked up, shock and outrage burning in his eyes, she shoved the computer screen in front of him. He still wouldn’t look.

  “Smythe, call Carvalho. Tell him to bring his knife.”

  This time there was real heat in her voice, and maybe it was only the tone, but the man finally looked. His eyes moved across the characters, then he shook his head.

  “What does that mean?” Tolvern asked. “Does he not agree, or does he not understand?”

  And then the man spoke. “I understand.”

  She looked down at him in shock. “What did you say?”

  “I say that I understand your words and I can be speaking back to you.”

  His pronunciation was perfectly correct, and even more strangely, he was speaking with her own accent. Tolvern had been born and raised on the small island of Auckland, in the Zealand Islands, and there was a sing-song quality to its accent that she’d recognize anywhere. Somehow, this man was using it.

  Yet there was something slightly off in his word choice. I can be speaking back to you.

  “How did you do that?” she demanded.

  He looked up at her with a toothy, predatory smile. “Everything we know about you already. Captain Jess Tolvern of HMS Blackbeard. We know these and others.”

  Again, with the disturbing version of her own accent, coupled with strange grammar. “Smythe, what’s going on here?”

  The tech officer didn’t look nearly as disturbed as she felt. “It’s your message. He must have learned from it somehow.”

  “There wasn’t enough there to learn English. And he’s completely fluent.”

  “Not completely,” Smythe said. “The good accent makes the word choice seem even stranger. Makes him sound like an idiot.”

  A flash of anger from the prisoner. “You wait and see. Will be better soo
n.”

  Tolvern drew in her breath, still unsettled. Something occurred to her.

  “He’s learning from us as we talk. That’s what’s going on. He picked up the basics from my transmission, stole my accent, and now he’s perfecting his English with every sentence. I don’t know how, but he’s got some sort of accelerated learning thing going on.”

  “It must be a com chip,” Smythe said. “An implant like Nyb Pim’s nav chip, except instead of handling advanced mathematical calculations, it’s connected to the language centers of the brain. Do you think we should, um, go into the hallway to talk?”

  Tolvern shook her head. “You know what, I don’t care. Even if he does sound like me, it doesn’t matter. He’s got plenty of English as it is. In fact, I’ll bet Capp and Carvalho chattered the whole way up here. They gave him enough to work with.”

  “Then what do we do?” Smythe said.

  “We assume he understands everything and conduct the interrogation accordingly. If he gets more fluent as we go, so much the better.” She grunted. “Thank God he didn’t pick up Capp’s accent instead of mine. Imagine if we get into the base and they’re all talking like York Town drunks and pickpockets.”

  “When you reach the base, it will be as prisoners,” the Singaporean said. His brow furrowed. “No, as . . . as . . .”

  “No, we won’t,” Tolvern said. “We’ll come in on equal terms or as conquerors. Your choice.”

  “Never.”

  “What do you want with us? Why did you attack?”

  “You led the war chickens to us.”

  “War chickens!” she said. “That was a joke, you idiot. Apex. That’s the word you’re looking for.”

  “Because of you. That makes you an enemy. Apex used you for . . .”

  Again, he trailed off. Didn’t have all the words yet, did he, the cocky fool?

  “You do know that your civilization is in ruins, right?” Tolvern said. “The survivors are fleeing by the millions, and we’ve been taking them in. I came out here to help.”

  “Your ship is full of holes. It would not survive a fight. You cannot help.”