Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  “Carvalho!” Capp yelled into her com. “Answer me, please!”

  “Hold it together,” Tolvern said. “Do your duty.”

  For a moment, it looked like Capp would break. Her left hand, immobilized in its cast, clenched and unclenched, and the other gripped the armrest as if she’d tear it off. Straining muscles made the lions on her right forearm bulge. She managed a curt nod and turned back to her console, where she gave an order to the pilot. Her voice was strained, but under control.

  Relieved, Tolvern turned to her tech officer. “Smythe, I need that breach sealed.”

  “Barker’s going to cut off the whole engineering bay. He’s running someone down with—oh, hold on.” Smythe sagged back in his chair and let out an explosive sigh. “It’s closed now. The airlock doors swung shut.”

  Almost instantly, Smythe was back over his console, working furiously with his adjutant to deal with other threats.

  Tolvern spared a glance at the viewscreen to see what the enemy was doing. “Carvalho, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Captain, I am here.”

  He sounded exhausted, but uninjured. Capp whipped her head up and let out a string of barely comprehensible oaths. A York Town-style message of endearment for her lover.

  “I could not stop them,” Carvalho said. “But they cannot be far. You should knock those pendejos out of the sky before they get away.”

  “What?”

  “It has rocket assist, but it cannot have gone far, not yet.”

  “What the devil are you babbling about, Carvalho?”

  “Megat and Djikstra, those bastards. They attacked me and stole an away pod.”

  A quick glanced confirmed that Megat was no longer confined in the detention block. Djikstra must have let him out, but why? Tolvern had been suspicious of the Dutch pilot and his implausible story, but he had led them to the Singaporean battle station. Why would he help the captured mutineer? The pair had never met, so far as she knew.

  Now it would seem that the two cowards had rushed to the pods to blast away from the doomed Albion warship in advance of the battle. Wouldn’t do them any good. Maybe they’d escape Apex’s brutality, but then what? Pod four had its own rockets, but those wouldn’t carry them far. Down to the icy moon, she supposed.

  Tolvern ended the call to Carvalho and turned to Capp. “Ignore the pod. If we shoot it down, the buzzards will figure out we’ve got problems on board.”

  Nevertheless, the tech officers soon found the wayward pod, which was shooting toward the icy moon, and brought it up on the screen. The buzzards spotted it too. A pair of long, slender lances broke away from the attack formation to investigate. Whatever Djikstra and Megat thought they’d earn by making a run for it, this wasn’t it. Rather than escaping Apex, they’d be the first to fall into the aliens’ clutches.

  The other six lances, together with a pair of the bulkier spears, kept moving toward Blackbeard. Tolvern ordered Blackbeard to swing around the planet, still accelerating, and she fired off a trio of missiles that raced toward the enemy. The lances made short work of the incoming missiles with lasers, but it delayed pursuit.

  There was no hope of outrunning the enemy, being down an engine, but that didn’t mean Blackbeard was unable to maneuver. Tolvern’s plan was to swing around the moon, then make a run back toward Sentinel 3. By then, the battle station would be in combat, and she hoped to slip in among the incoming and outgoing fire. She could fight in support of the station, looking for opportunities to inflict damage.

  Two of the lances swooped toward the moon and fell in behind Blackbeard. One of them probed at her engines with energy pulses, but Tolvern had reinforced the rear armor, and the shields absorbed most of the damage. The enemy continued to close.

  “Launch the Hunter-IIs.”

  Moments later, the heavier, more maneuverable torpedoes thundered out of the tubes. The range was close enough that they forced the enemy craft to evade. The rest of the hunter-killer pack—two lances and a spear—darted in at an angle.

  Tolvern had anticipated this and was ready with a response. Nyb Pim, her Hroom pilot, had a maneuver preprogrammed. The ship rolled and exposed the main battery, and the three ships scattered. At this range, cannon fire would tear them apart. Unfortunately, it would also leave the weakened side of Blackbeard exposed, so she didn’t order them to fire. Instead, the cruiser hurtled around the moon and launched itself in the direction of the Singaporean battle station.

  The station had vanished from the screen.

  Blackbeard had been docked at Sentinel 3 only a few hours before. During a few tumultuous days, they’d fought off a boarding party, seized the station command module, and joined with the base commander, Jon Li, in battling mutineers who’d tried to suffocate the newcomers rather than allow their base to be discovered.

  And now she saw how Sentinel 3 had successfully remained hidden for eleven long years. Whatever cloaking technology the Singaporeans had, it was masterful. Tolvern knew where Sentinel 3 was—the battle station had shared its exact course—but nothing showed up on the scans, even though the range was short enough that even passive scans could have read the date on a two-shilling coin. Nothing on any spectrum, only a thin film of reflective ice forming the gas giant’s rings.

  Tolvern wasn’t about to hit the Singaporeans with active scans and reveal them to the enemy. Apex’s strength was intercepting communications. Its weakness was detection of the silent and wary.

  Still, the enemy knew the battle station’s rough location. Three of the hunter-killer packs came in at different angles, probing along the ice field. Two more packs wandered the perimeter, clearly uncertain whether the station could move on its own power (it could) and if it had tried to flee (it had not).

  The rest of the massive enemy fleet lurked outside the orbit of the Kettle’s farthest moon, among them the hulking, menacing shape of the harvester ship. Tolvern caught a glimpse into the alien mind as she watched them maneuver.

  Growing up on the edge of the Drake estate, she had once thought of the Hroom as strange, inscrutable. There weren’t Hroom slaves on the farms of her home island of Auckland, but sometimes in town she would see their long, slender bodies striding down the street in front of their masters. Once, one had turned to look at her with his enormous dark eyes, and she’d held her breath until he looked away.

  But her childish impression was wrong. She now knew the Hroom, and Albion itself had generations of experience with both the aliens and with their weakened, but still formidable empire. A Hroom felt fear, love, hatred. You could sit and converse with one and only rarely did you reach a point where no communication or understanding was possible.

  The birdlike Apex, on the other hand, were truly alien in thought, culture, and behavior. Even their species was divided into a higher breeding cast, the so-called queens and princesses, and a vast group of drones: workers, warriors, engineers, pilots, and so on. They existed for one purpose, to consume and exterminate other intelligent races. Beyond that, nobody knew anything. Did they have a home planet? A supreme leader? Why were queens and drones so genetically manipulated as to appear almost as separate species? How had they begun their brutal struggle in the first place?

  But at this exact moment, Tolvern saw directly into their motives, could read them as if she were studying a pack of intelligent wolves that had run down a sick animal on the steppes of Northern Albion. The Apex fleet had its prey cornered and desperate. Plenty of time to complete the kill. The only risk was letting it escape.

  You only think you understand. If they are truly alien, you know nothing.

  “Pilot,” Tolvern told Nyb Pim. “Carry us along the Z-axis.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Aided by the deceptive exposure of the main battery and the still-wandering torpedoes, Blackbeard had gained distance from the pursuing ships. As Nyb Pim set the new course, Tolvern picked a spot near the hidden station, but not on top of it, and ordered the Hroom to take them there.

  Thr
ee of the pursuing lances vanished from the screen, only to reappear directly in front of Blackbeard’s path. They swung wide, positioning themselves so all three ships could fire on Blackbeard at once. Moments later the spear jumped in, too. It took its spot above the other three, rolling over to expose a heavy pulse cannon that could fire from several spots along its spine.

  “Evasive maneuvers?” Nyb Pim asked.

  Tolvern hesitated. Flying right into that formation would be deadly, even if the fire hit Blackbeard along her reinforced deck shields. Tolvern’s plan had been a bluff to force the lances to charge in behind while she swept past Sentinel 3’s hidden position. If Li’s forces opened up with their armaments, a good fraction of the Apex warships would be annihilated before the rest of them could respond. But at this point, she’d never reach the station.

  Another hunter-killer pack jumped into place right in front of the first. Dismayed, Tolvern thought that this was an escalation of the firepower arrayed against her, but the positioning was odd. Why jump in front? Why not above or below to double the strength positioned against the Albion warship? Or even jump in along the flanks, to herd Blackbeard toward the waiting enemies?

  “What do we do, Cap’n?” Capp asked desperately.

  “Forward guns!” Tolvern cried. “No evasive maneuvers. Take us right at them.”

  There was a lot of hard swallowing at this, but no argument as everyone moved to execute the captain’s orders. The gunnery fired missiles and torpedoes as a side dish to the cannon fire. Countermeasures spewed out the back of the ship, clumps of fifty or a hundred tiny bomblets dropped behind like a fleeing octopus squirting ink. More lances had given chase, and now fought through this impromptu minefield.

  The enemy ahead opened fire. The bridge shuddered. The computer chimed in helpfully to warn of shield damage. There wasn’t much leeway for the battered, patched-up navy cruiser, and the alarming numbers Jane shared sounded like damage reports from the end of a battle, not its beginning.

  Blackbeard swung down at the last minute like a diving whale. She rolled as she did, and let off a blast from the main batteries, followed by a pair of missiles. It was such an obvious evasive maneuver that the enemy should have had no problems avoiding all of the cannon fire as well as immediately giving pursuit.

  Instead, the lances scattered. One group ducked away, and the other took the brunt of Blackbeard’s broadside. Cannon fire tore one of them in two, and another took a blow to the engines and limped away, pursued by one of the missiles, which locked onto its heat signature.

  A cheer went up from the bridge as Blackbeard slipped through the net. They’d bought a few more minutes, that was all, and the enemy was already recovering as Tolvern ordered them to swing around and approach the hidden battle station from another angle.

  “How did you do that?” Smythe asked from the tech console. “That was a maneuver worthy of James Drake. Only I never thought it would work.”

  “There’s something wrong with their fleet,” she said. “They’re in disarray.”

  Capp stared at her. “Yes, but how did you know?” The first mate sounded even more awed than Smythe.

  “It takes a flawed command structure to recognize one. We had to fight mutineers and seize control of Commander Li’s battle station just to get our ship repaired. He’s so well hidden that I’ll bet there are people on Sentinel 3 even now who are trying to persuade him to let us dangle in the wind and fight Apex on our own.”

  Not to mention the away pod that squirted free just as Blackbeard was going into battle. By now Apex would have captured the pod. Megat and Djikstra were either dead or wishing they were dead.

  Understanding dawned on a few faces, but the Hroom were literal minded, and Nyb Pim looked up from the nav computer to study her. “I still do not understand, Captain.”

  “That second pack jumped in badly,” Tolvern said. “Maybe it was a mistake, maybe they never meant to come in so close. But then they didn’t get out of the way. Instead, it looked like they were trying to fight us first. Steal the glory in what looked like an easy battle. We took advantage of their disarray.”

  Capp pointed at the viewscreen. “All that’s fine, but what are we gonna do about that?”

  The lances were accelerating, and it looked like they were going to jump again. Tolvern’s maneuver had carried Blackbeard far away from the planet’s icy ring and the battle station’s powerful guns. Tolvern needed to buy a few more minutes. She could change direction, but Apex proved adept at anticipating course corrections and might very well jump in front of her again.

  “Do you have that randomized evasive maneuver?” she asked Nyb Pim. “Execute it now.”

  This produced a zig-zag pattern that took them twice to starboard, three times up, and once to port. More enemy ships came cruising in from the far orbital position they’d taken around the gas giant. For the moment, Blackbeard was leading them on a merry chase, but the net was closing in again.

  Tolvern feinted toward the Kettle, briefly considered risking a dive into the gas giant’s atmosphere, then spotted a gap back toward the ring. Nyb Pim confirmed with the nav computer that they could reach the last known position of the sentinel battle station before they were caught. He’d better be right. Half the enemy fleet was closing fast, now approaching from all sides. Three hunter-killer packs looked ready to jump in for closer combat.

  “Okay, Li,” Tolvern said as Blackbeard attempted to repeat its run up along the inside of the planet’s icy ring. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Commander Li had taken her on a tour of the battle station before her departure to show her his weapon systems. Chief among them was the eliminon battery. It had seemed so simple that Tolvern had almost laughed it off. Technologically, it was a marvel, true, but how would it possibly work as a weapon of war? The other armaments were more impressive at first glance, especially the plasma ejector. She’d already seen the ejector in action and was itching to get her hands on it so she could carry it back to the Admiralty.

  But the more she thought about the eliminon battery, the more genius it seemed. Expose the enemy’s weakness and hammer it. Blackbeard would be caught as well, but Li assured her the humans would survive.

  What about Hroom? Would they survive, too? Sure, Li had said. Of course they would. Well, probably.

  Tolvern cast a glance at Nyb Pim. She’d explained the risks to him, asked him to pass them along to the other three Hroom in the crew. The pilot did not seem overly concerned. Compared to the rather obvious risk of having your warship explode under enemy fire, or having giant birds peck out your guts with their beaks, the hypothetical risk of the eliminon battery was easy to handle.

  “We’re coming along the inside of the ring now,” Nyb Pim said.

  “Take us past the station. Smythe, turn on the active sensors when we cross its path. I want confirmation our friends are still there.”

  “We’ll have to bring them online now,” Smythe said. “If the buzzards see us looking, they’ll know we don’t dare communicate directly with the station.”

  “This calls for some deception,” she said. “Scan the system. Make it look like we’re searching for those supposed reinforcements. We can take a peek at Singapore while we’re at it.”

  “Aye, that’s a good idea.” A few seconds passed, then Smythe exclaimed, “Captain! It’s real. They’re really here!”

  Smythe’s scans had turned up something else. There, on the viewscreen, was Blackbeard’s salvation.

  Chapter Four

  Tolvern’s first emotion was elation. Smythe’s scan had revealed a Royal Navy task force. More than that, half the firepower of the fleet: the battleship Dreadnought and an escort of four heavy cruisers, nine torpedo boats, and a dozen corvettes, missile frigates, and destroyers.

  Drake, you crafty bastard. You were coming all along.

  It was that subspace message he’d sent. She’d misread it, thought he was trying to fool Apex into thinking he was on his way with reinforc
ements. But it was a mind game on top of a mind game, and it had fooled Tolvern, too.

  “Bring up a map of the system,” she ordered.

  Smythe obeyed, and her hopes deflated.

  His mouth formed a thin line. “Thirty-seven hours, sir.”

  “Thirty-seven.” Her voice sounded hollow in her ears.

  Dreadnought alone might have turned the battle. Tolvern had gone up against the monstrous ship in the Third Battle of Barsa. Even when the fight had turned against the enemy, Dreadnought had seemed invincible, taking blow after blow. Her guns blasted ships out of the sky and were on the verge of annihilating Blackbeard as well when Drake’s old friend and confidant, Captain Rutherford, rammed his ship into Dreadnought’s upper decks. There was nothing left of Rutherford or his cruiser after he hit, but the blow had disabled the battleship and allowed it to be captured.

  Tolvern was sure the arriving fleet, coupled with Drake’s brilliant mind, would help her fight off Apex and deliver a blow that would make the aliens think twice about attacking Albion again. If only Drake’s forces weren’t thirty-seven hours from the action.

  The viewscreen shifted. “Here’s Sentinel 3,” Smythe said.

  The battle station was a black smear against the icy ring that curved up and away from them. They were within the protective range of its guns already.

  “Bring us about,” Tolvern ordered. “It’s our turn to deliver the pain.”

  She braced herself as the ship made a violent maneuver. Time to find out if Barker’s repairs would hold, or if they’d be smeared like bloody jam against the far wall. The ship shuddered as Capp and Nyb Pim hooked them back around, but held.

  Blackbeard sliced through the icy ring. Broad, but extremely thin, the ring buffeted the hull with ice particles. The ship shuddered again—that was the engine reversing thrust, not the ice—and swung wide to present her main guns. Lances sliced toward them, their energy weapons pulsing fire.