Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  The general didn’t answer, only stared, unblinking.

  “I didn’t think so,” Drake said. “Once we know what we’re facing, I’ll tell you my battle plans, and you can join as you see fit.”

  “I think we know well enough,” Mose Dryz said. “Scans are resolving themselves. The bird people are involved somehow, we can see that already. You’re human, and you’ll have some tricks to play, but the end of this mission has to involve your fleet and their fleet in combat. We Hroom will be in the middle of it, do not worry.”

  “We’ve got it,” Lloyd said from the tech console where he and two other techs had been hard at work for the last twenty minutes. His voice was grim. “Scans of the action. It’s long range, but I think you can see the gist of it.”

  “Put it up,” Drake said. “And send it out. We have no secrets from our Hroom allies.”

  The general glanced to the side, where he was apparently getting the feed. He made a high, almost cooing sound in his throat, like he’d swallowed a songbird. Whatever he was looking at, he didn’t like it. And then the screen cut out, and the results of Lloyd’s long-range scans filled the viewscreen.

  Drake and the rest of the crew stared without speaking. There was no need.

  It was the missing navy cruiser, HMS Blackbeard. And the Singaporean battle station. And an enemy force so vast that the only prudent thing for Dreadnought, the other navy vessels, and the Hroom sloops to do was turn tail and run for their lives.

  Chapter Two

  Ronaldo Carvalho wore a pressure suit, music blaring through his com as he worked with the plasma cutter to hack off segments of paneling. He had already set up a pressure cell—a sort of temporary airlock—and isolated the hoses with asbestos shielding. Now he was cutting off the left half of the door, the one that was preventing the full seal.

  That blasted door had been slightly misaligned for what seemed like forever, although only a couple of weeks had passed since the battle that had destroyed Blackbeard’s companion ship, HMS Swift. During that fight, the buzzards had sliced through the bottom shield, wrecked bombproofs, and left a lot of mangled equipment down here, including the servomechanisms of this airlock door. He was going to cut off the door at the articulation plates, replace the servos, then meld-seal new plates into place. Reconnect the door and check the seal.

  Blackbeard was in motion. They’d fired up the remaining engine and were swinging into position around one of the Kettle’s many moons. Carvalho didn’t know Captain Tolvern’s plan from there. Hopefully, wait for the sentinel battle station to take on the buzzards, then swoop in to finish off the wounded. If the reverse were true, and they were the defense for the station, rather than vice versa, they’d last about thirty seconds.

  Either way, Carvalho needed to fix the leak and preserve access to the away pods. With the bombproofs knocked off, the pods were exposed to the vacuum and couldn’t be reached without first donning a pressure suit. The music was to drown the nerves, but also to blare over the top of the general chatter coming over the com. The back and forth about the pending battle would wreck his concentration.

  He got the door cut off and heaved it to one side, using the mechanical power of his suit. As he turned, he saw a figure banging on the wall of the pressure cell, trying to get his attention. Even through the double doors of the temporary lock, he could see from the shaved scalp and the rigid left arm—immobilized in a cast—that it was Capp.

  He turned off the music and connected to her com. “Hola amor. I am a little busy for a roll in the sack. That is what you want, yes?” he added with a grin.

  “Dammit, I been banging away for ten minutes,” she said in her thick York Town accent. “It’s like trying to get the attention of a dead man.”

  She was only a few feet away, on the other side of the transparent cell, but with the sound patching through from the com link, there was a slight delay from when her lips moved to when the sound came through, and her mouth was out of sync with her voice.

  “This must be your first time in space,” he said. “It is a funny thing about working where there is no atmosphere. All the banging in the world cannot make sound move through a vacuum.”

  She was not amused. “Will you bloody well keep your com link on?”

  “It was on, emergency channel only.”

  “I’ve been calling you direct!”

  “The music was loud.” Carvalho kept working as he talked, disconnecting servos. “What is it? Have the buzzards surrendered already? Turkey dinner to celebrate?”

  “We’re not even in combat yet.”

  “I figured. Otherwise, we would be dead.” He turned toward the door, more serious now. “Capp, I am working. Conditions are less than ideal for concentration, as you can imagine. Why are you not on the bridge?”

  “Barker needs you in the gunnery. They got a Hunter-II jammed in the tube, and they want you to wrestle it into place.”

  “Why me? I cannot lift a five-thousand-pound torpedo by myself. Are there no other powersuits in the gunnery?” Carvalho stopped, remembering something. “Oh, that must be tube six. It has a damaged loading belt and can only hold the smaller size armaments. I don’t know if Barker realizes that. Call him and check. He needs to take it out and put in a Mark-IV. If that does not work, I will go there as soon as I am done.”

  “Is this really more important?”

  He glanced down the passageway to the away pods, currently accessible only by passing through vacuum. “Yes, it is critical.”

  Capp was silent for a moment, and when Carvalho glanced back, her mouth was moving in conversation with someone else. She connected back to his com. “Leave the pressure cell, spray-foam it to complete the seal. That should cut off any residual oxygen loss.”

  “Who says that? Engineering? I’m not leaving here until the captain tells me herself.”

  “I’m an officer, and you’re not. And if you don’t do it, I’m gonna kick your arse.”

  Carvalho didn’t even look up from his work this time. “Hah! You should have thought about that before you started shagging me, amor.”

  “Luv,” she said, her voice false-patient in a way that told him she was serious. “We got twenty, maybe thirty minutes before them buzzards start shooting. I’m not going to have you down here working when we’re in battle. For one thing, it’s all hands on deck—”

  “My hands are plenty busy, Capp.”

  “And for another, there’s no armor left down here. The first shot and you’re dead.”

  “All the more reason to get this airlock fixed.”

  “It’s not going to bloody well hold because you threw on a couple of patches. Did you hear me? There’s no armor down here. We moved every scrap of it to other parts of the ship.”

  “I know, Capp. I did a lot of that work myself.” He got the last of the new servos installed, then straightened up and looked back through the pressure cell. “If I don’t get this door back in place, we lose the away pods. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “Carvalho,” she said slowly. “Luv. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I ain’t taking my chances in one of them balloons. We go down, we go down shooting, not waiting to be scooped up by the buzzards because we had to abandon ship.”

  “Anything could happen,” Carvalho said. “Apex cannot scan very well. The rocket pods have their own propulsion. We climb into the same pod, you and I, plus others—the captain, the pilot, maybe Barker and Smythe. Then we jet toward one of the moons. Maybe we suffocate, but maybe we are rescued in time. There are three days of oxygen and water on board.”

  “The hell with that. Only makes it that much easier for the buzzards to get us.” Capp drew her firearm. “This is my plan. And this.” She fished a grenade out of the pocket of her uniform. “This is the last thing I’ll do, right? Pull the pin and hold on.”

  They were talking about the same thing, he realized. Only Carvalho was hoping to escape and hide, while Capp planned to go down in a blaze of glory.
Either way, neither meant to be taken by Apex, to be tortured and eaten alive in one of their bizarre rituals.

  Capp was fooling herself, he thought. Every crew thought the same thing. Nobody ever thought he’d be taken alive. Apex fought these battles in part to take prisoners; they knew how to stop people from killing themselves, he was sure of it.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said, perhaps optimistically. “That’s all I need. Then I will take your grenade. If the ship is disabled and boarded, we will meet in the engineering bay, yes? Prevent them from boarding if we can.”

  “And if we can’t?” she asked.

  “Then we will have a quick discussion,” he said playfully, as if the discussion was about which one would be on top the next time they made love. “Grenades or away pod.”

  Capp put away the grenade with her good hand and rubbed her buzzed scalp. Then she broke out in a grin. “Alright, you big lug. The engineering bay it is. Meanwhile, don’t be an idiot.”

  “When have I ever?”

  “Pretty much always. Tolvern is calling me back to the bridge. Gotta go, luv.” She winked, then turned and was gone.

  Carvalho kept the music off as he continued working. “I love that woman,” he said to himself.

  What a strange thing to realize at the moment one was about to die. They’d been together for a couple of years now, fraternizing illicitly before the mutiny and civil war changed everything. Neither had been faithful to the other—faithfulness wasn’t a requirement of their relationship then, and was unlikely to become one in the future—but at some point he’d stopped thinking of Henny Capp as merely a lean, willing body to bunk up with when nobody was looking. Not anymore. She was his woman, and he was her man. She let him know in multiple ways that he was hers, and she would have her possessions well cared for.

  Carvalho finished sealing the new plates and hoisted the door into place. The door weighed over five hundred pounds, and the power-assist in the suit whirred into action to aid his muscles as he eased it into place. He held the door up with one hand and fumbled at his belt for the proper tool with the other.

  Fifteen minutes? Not likely.

  How long since Capp left? So hard to tell when he was deep in his work. It might have been five minutes, it might have been thirty. Either way, he didn’t have long until the battle started.

  Movement caught his eye, a figure on the other side of the pressure cell. Bloody hell, didn’t Capp have work to do?

  “Diós mío,” he said into the com. “Will you stop worrying? I will be fine. And the captain needs you on the bridge, yes?”

  She didn’t answer, and when Carvalho spared a glance, he was surprised to see two figures, not one. They were waving urgently. He had an electric screwdriver in one hand and didn’t want the door to shift, so he merely shook his head and kept on working. He didn’t care if it was the chief or even the captain herself, he couldn’t stop working now.

  “Whatever it is, whoever you are, it can wait,” he muttered irritably over the engineering channel, figuring it had to be someone who’d also been working on repairs.

  At last he got the door in place and the leads reconnected. He fished out his hand computer and flipped it on. A light flickered above the door. Red, then yellow, then . . . more yellow. Dammit.

  It should be blinking blue if the blasted thing were connected properly. Something was wrong. Should he manually test it, potentially damaging the doors if they were misaligned, or unplug the door and try again? Or maybe the computer could report something useful from the door’s self-diagnostics. A quick glance showed that the slow air leak was gone, at least.

  Barker would be fuming in the gunnery when he arrived. Carvalho had blown off Capp, ignored demands for help, and kept flogging away at this system only to see his efforts fail.

  Carvalho looked back at the two people who’d been trying to get his attention. They wore pressure suits, the kind without power-assist. He couldn’t tell who they were through the double doors of the cell and the clear masks over their helmets. One of them had an electric screwdriver and was trying to disconnect the pressure cell from the wall.

  “What the devil? It’s not the pressure cell that is damaged, you idiots, it’s the airlock. You will breach the cell if you don’t . . .”

  Moving swiftly, angry now, Carvalho pocketed his computer and palmed open the door on his side. The man stopped working and waited as Carvalho sealed the outer door behind him. Before it sealed, air rushed through. The fool had breached the outer wall of the pressure cell, and a bunch of air had been sucked into the vacuum and lost.

  The inner door opened on the pressure cell, and Carvalho yanked off his helmet. “You idiots. Do you realize . . .”

  Something was wrong. There was something off in their posture. The taller of the pair slumped, as if having difficulty holding himself up. The other man clenched the screwdriver in his right hand like it was a weapon.

  Carvalho recognized their faces through their helmets. The man with the screwdriver, the one who’d been breaking into the pressure cell, was Jeremy Megat, the captured mutineer from the battle station. He’d tried to seize Blackbeard before being taken prisoner, and now he was out of detention. When the hell had that happened?

  The other man was Jan Djikstra, the New Dutch pilot who’d told Captain Tolvern how to contact the battle station in the first place. Djikstra was pale and sweating behind his faceplate and looked as though he were on the verge of throwing up.

  Carvalho was already moving as he recognized the danger, but not fast enough. Megat punched with the screwdriver, and the butt end struck him on the temple. Carvalho went down. The man stomped at his face, but Carvalho’s instincts took over, and he rolled away. The kick missed his head.

  Carvalho was not some scrawny kid who’d spent more time tucked under a broken-down truck than in the open air. He’d brawled and wenched his way through the roughest ports, fought Hroom and Royal Navy marines with firearms and hand-to-hand. If he could get to his feet, he’d destroy these two.

  He rolled up against Djikstra, who’d seemed on the verge of collapse moments earlier. The Dutch captain kicked him with a heavy boot, and pain exploded in his head. Djikstra drew back for another kick, and Carvalho couldn’t so much as lift his arms to shield his face.

  But the blow never came. The two attackers left him on the floor, entered the pressure lock, and

  forced the other door open. Air rushed past. Djikstra and Megat disappeared down the corridor toward the away pods.

  Carvalho struggled to his knees. His head was clearing, and what was left was terror. The pressure cell was open on one side, breached on the other. The bombproofs shielding the pods had been destroyed, and now air came rushing past, sucked into the vacuum. Blackbeard’s oxygen plant was damaged, and if he didn’t stop the breach at once, the whole crew might suffocate.

  The only hope was the airlock. It was ahead of him, the doors open, the light on top still blinking yellow, saying his repair hadn’t worked, that the doors wouldn’t close. His efforts, far from preserving the ability to reach the pods, had left the engineering bay exposed to the vacuum.

  Carvalho reached for his computer. The rushing air tried to suck it out of his hand.

  “Carvalho!” a voice shouted in his ear. It was Capp. “What the devil are you doing down there? We’ve got a bloody airlock breach, is what it’s saying.”

  He didn’t answer. Fingers shaking, he thumbed across the screen, looking for the manual override. A voice was shouting over Capp to put Carvalho on the general channel, and then chatter exploded in his ear. People shouting about incoming ships, others crying out about the breach. Captain Tolvern herself, shouting above the chatter, demanding answers for the breach.

  Behind it all, Carvalho heard Jane’s cool computer voice make an announcement. “Pod four launched. Unauthorized trajectory. Unknown destination.”

  Carvalho found the screen. He touched the big blue button and looked desperately past the breached pressure cell
at the airlock doors. They hesitated, as if stuck in their course, then eased shut. The light above the door flashed yellow three times, then blue. Then it went out altogether.

  He sank down to the floor, chest heaving, exhausted and overcome with relief. Chatter continued in his ear. Fear and worry over the breach gave way to panic over the enemy ships swooping toward them.

  It would seem that the danger had only just begun.

  Chapter Three

  Captain Tolvern thought she might have to physically hold her first mate in her seat. Capp was in a panic and kept calling down to the engineering bay, trying to reach Carvalho. Something had happened down there, and air was rushing out through a breach in the away pods and jetting into space through the gaps opened by the destroyed bombproofs.

  Carvalho wasn’t answering. Most likely, he’d been sucked into the void. He’d been trying to repair a broken airlock door, and it must have suffered a catastrophic failure. He’d lost his pressure cell, the doors had blown off, and gasses had vented explosively into the void. One of the away pods had even broken free in the catastrophe, as Jane had helpfully advised. The ship was in danger if they couldn’t get the breach sealed.

  Meanwhile, two hunter-killer packs had broken off from the main attack and were coming at Blackbeard. The rest of the enemy ships swarmed toward Sentinel 3. The battle station had yet to fire its weapons, but it would see action first.

  The gray-green surface of the third and largest moon of the gas giant stretched below them, visible through the left half of the viewscreen. It was as large as a small planet, with one-fifth standard gravity, and a skin of ice stretched taut over the surface. Long dark streaks tattooed the ice where plumes of liquid had blasted through the crust from underlying volcanic activity and then landed atop the permanent pack.

  Blackbeard hugged the moon, only a few tens of miles above the surface. Apex ships struggled inside gravity wells, which seemed to disrupt their ability to spontaneously jump. Tolvern would have rather gone into the atmosphere of the Kettle itself, but in their current condition, the buffeting, hurricane-force winds would tear them apart.