The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “They must have had contact with the Imperium,” Swettenham said, his voice even more tight and excited. “They must already be our allies!”

  “You are an Opener and naive,” Li said. “This is exactly the sort of tactic Apex used to trap us in the first place. The mining ship, the distress call. That’s how the war started, or have you forgotten all of that because you’re so eager to talk to someone?”

  The initial Apex attack had nearly killed Li. He’d been commanding a light carrier, patrolling the outer region of the Dragon Quadrant, when he’d received a distress call. A mining ship was under attack by an unknown craft. Probably pirates. Two war junks had already moved to intercept, and would no doubt have the firepower to chase off the raiders, but Li was ordered to follow up.

  He arrived to find the war junks defeated and several long, needle-shaped craft picking apart the carcasses. It was later determined that the mining ship had been captured and had sent out a fake distress signal to see who would respond. The enemy ships attacked Li’s light carrier. He sent out his three strikers, sacrificing them while he fled for the jump point.

  That was Singapore’s first encounter with Apex, an alien race of bipedal, birdlike creatures that destroyed everything it touched, that took prisoners only so that it could eat them. They had special ships for the purpose, giant harvesters for the ritual torture and consumption of sentient life.

  But in the brutal first phase of the struggle, the Imperium had learned what tactics and weapons could fight the birds. Most important was silence and stealth—Apex could break any communications, but had a hard time finding a heavily cloaked ship. Stay quiet, stay hidden, and you could evade them almost indefinitely.

  Thus, the sentinel battle stations.

  Swettenham was still staring at Li, his face eager, his eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. Eleven years may have erased the man’s memory of the brutal war, the millions lost, two entire colony worlds destroyed, but Li remembered.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re going to suppress this message,” Swettenham said. “I know what the Sentry Faction believes, and I know what those people will do. They’ll destroy this unknown ship before we have a chance to talk to them.”

  “You’re not listening to me. It’s probably a trap.”

  “But what if it’s not? Commander, listen to me! Please, before you kill them all—”

  “Calm down, Swettenham. I never said I was going to attack the ship, I only need to keep this information quiet. At least until the message is translated.”

  “Give me Hillary Koh, then. I need her. I can’t do it on my own.”

  Li didn’t know Koh very well, but doubted she’d cause trouble. If Koh was an Opener, she wasn’t a rabid one. And if she harbored sympathies for the Sentry Faction instead, she kept them equally to herself. There was one question above all that concerned him.

  “Can Hillary Koh be discreet?” he asked.

  “Of course. And when it’s translated, what then?”

  Li turned the question over. He was torn in two directions. When he’d been talking to his sister and Megat, he’d been repelled by their hardline position, by the knowledge that they would kill to keep Sentinel 3 silent and isolated. There was a broken, burned-out docking bay where they and their companions in the Sentry Faction had proven that.

  The first outbreak of factionalism on the ship had occurred only four years into their long vigil. An Opener—they weren’t called by that name in those days—had rigged a scooter with a subspace transmitter, then hacked into the communications array to send the actual message. Convinced the war was over, that Singapore had won, and the battle station was somehow overlooked, the man had planned to run the single-man ship out behind the nearest of the Kettle’s moons and send a subspace to the home planet.

  Giving away their location, of course. Anna had caught wind of the plot, rushed to intercept the rogue pilot before he could escape, and blasted him before he could launch.

  Li had authorized the operation, and had always wondered if he’d done the right thing. They’d killed a man and damaged part of the station. Could he do the same thing now? Hard to say. Swettenham and his sort posed a risk not unlike that of the rogue scooter pilot all those years ago.

  The risk of remaining on mission was a long, lonely death. They would eventually die of old age, and the last few survivors would probably starve to death, too old and feeble to grow their own food, if the oxygen plant didn’t fail and suffocate them all instead. Sentinel 3 would eventually become another derelict, a floating coffin in orbit around a distant, forgotten gas giant.

  But the risk of communicating with the outside world was more immediate and obvious. Brutal and short. Apex might kill the low-level functionaries like Dong Swettenham quickly enough, but a different fate awaited the officers.

  If captured, Li would be tortured, then eaten. The Apex queen would peck out his eyeballs, his tongue, his ears, his nose. Then she and her princesses would plunge their beaks into his belly and tear out his intestines.

  He would be alive when they did it.

  Chapter Three

  Ak Ik ruffled her feathers and spread her wings to display her red under plumage. Recognizing the dominance and fertility of a queen commander, the two sentries turned their beaks to show acquiescence and folded their tattered wings inward to show submission. Feathers littered the hallway at their clawed feet.

  These two were drones, permitted a bit of color as sublieutenants of a princess commander, but such was their mistress’s disgrace that their feathers were uniformly gray and brown and had begun to fall off. Bare flesh showed on their necks, and bloody scratches marked where they’d been tearing at themselves. Lack of control turned drones neurotic, and they’d eventually kill themselves.

  Upon entry to the ship, Ak Ik had found similar levels of distress even among the higher-ranked drones, the taller and more aggressive ones that would have attacked her mercilessly under other circumstances for daring to enter without permission.

  Instead, the drones had showed their necks and exposed their breasts, quivering with fear, but prepared to die should she take their lives. Ak Ik ignored them and strolled inside unaccompanied by any drones or soldiers of her own. She expected no opposition, and had yet to receive any.

  Ak Ik gestured with her beak. “Open this door.”

  “We cannot, Queen Commander,” one of them answered. “It is voice locked by our mistress.”

  Ak Ik let out a terrible cry and flew at the one who’d spoken. She grabbed the drone in one talon and hurled it against the wall. There was a loud crack, and the drone lay there, shuddering, squawking in pain. Ak Ik swooped over and stood above the drone with her hooked beak at its throat. The squawking ceased, and the drone merely shuddered.

  The queen turned to the other. “Get your mistress. Now.”

  #

  To Ak Ik’s surprise, Sool Em walked proudly down the hallway, her head bobbing with all the arrogance of a queen commander, not a princess who had just been tricked and defeated by an alien race, said aliens now racing off with valuable intelligence as to Apex technology and tactics. Three more drones flanked the princess, her guards. Her plumage was still bright green, and to Ak Ik’s surprise and rage, she boasted red feathers on her breast.

  Sool Em still carried the scent of high rank about her, must have continued to secrete her dominance saliva to keep her drones in line, but it didn’t seem to be having the desired effect on her underlings. The drones surrounding her shivered and keened in terror. They’d smelled and seen Ak Ik and knew what the queen commander was about, even if their mistress did not. How could Sool Em be so blind as to her eminent demise?

  “This door is voice locked,” Ak Ik said. Her voice warbled with rage.

  The drones cringed at her high pitch. The one she’d cast down remained motionless, only its moving eye showing it was even still alive.

  “Yes, it is,” Sool Em said.

  “Open it at once.”

>   “I know what you’re going to do, and I forbid it. You have no right to demand entry.”

  “Open this door at once, or I will tear open your breast and feed on your heart.”

  Sool Em opened her beak, seeming on the verge of defiance. A bird of her stature in the flock wouldn’t have risen so high without aggression and stubbornness, without pecking her way through rivals—literally in some cases—and wouldn’t take her demotion easily. But her drones weren’t so confident, the brilliance of their mistress’s plumage and the smell of her scent glands notwithstanding.

  Sool Em looked around her, seemed to recognize her precarious position, and fluttered her wings. It was an arrogant gesture, but a final one. She cocked her head and squawked for the door to open. It obeyed her voice command.

  The two commanders fluttered their way into the nesting chamber, Ak Ik leading. Some of the drones started to follow, but the queen cawed for them to remain in the ship corridor. They didn’t even glance at the princess to see if the order would be countermanded, but retreated with a series of pitiful squawks.

  The chamber was warm and humid. Dim red lights gave off heat from above like a collection of tiny suns. The Apex flocks had manipulated their genes hundreds of times in ways both small and large, creating numerous castes and ranks, but some things could not be altered. Eggs only hatched under conditions like those found in the swampy tropical lowlands of the home world.

  There were at least two hundred eggs in the chamber, smooth and gray. The fresher ones lay bunched together, while the ones closest to hatching had been moved to one side so that the new chicks wouldn’t peck apart their rivals as they emerged. Ak Ik walked across them, letting her talons crush the eggs as she put her weight down. By the time she got to the other side of the chamber, a trail of yolk and shell and squirming, dying chicks lay across the floor. The smell of them was ripe and delicious, and Ak Ik paused to gobble down a few of the larger chicks that had been on the verge of hatching. They squirmed and squeaked in delicious terror as they went down.

  The queen commander carefully watched Sool Em when she came up. The princess and mother of these eggs gave no reaction except for a nervously darting tongue passing in and out of her beak. Inside, she must be screaming with rage, but she showed nothing.

  “Your drones are forfeit,” Ak Ik said. “By rights, I could eat them all. And perhaps I will. I may pluck out your royal feathers and reduce you further.”

  “I understand your rage, Queen Commander. Mistakes were made.”

  Well. This was perhaps not going to be as hard as Ak Ik had thought. She had been prepared to use her saliva, and the dominance of a queen would have forced even a princess to acquiesce. A lesser bird could not take the queen’s saliva without it bending her will to her mistress’s.

  “Mistakes?” Ak Ik gave a derisive caw. “You lost three lances and let the primary warship escape. And through a trick, a subterfuge. Deception is our provenance, our strength, and you behaved as foolishly as a Hroom.”

  “You are mostly correct, Queen Commander.”

  Ak Ik’s head feathers ruffled in surprise. “Mostly?”

  “Yes, mostly.”

  Ak Ik screeched angrily. She stomped across the room, crushing more eggs and gulping down the chicks that came gushing out. She would reduce this cursed brood until there were only a few dozen of the gray, stone-like eggs left, then go back and pluck Sool Em’s princess feathers. Finally, a dark warning about killing every last chick and drone in Sool Em’s flock of ships. Ten thousand drones would be destroyed if Sool Em persisted in her defiance. It would serve as a warning to the other princess commanders in the flock.

  But suddenly, Ak Ik stopped. There, at the back of the nesting chamber, was an egg. Half the size of the gray ones, it was a shiny blue with tiny yellow speckles. Ak Ik looked around her and saw two more of the small speckled eggs.

  The queen commander turned back to Sool Em, her feathers shaking with rage. “You really cannot be serious. You dare?”

  “I dare. It is time to take my place among the queens.”

  Ak Ik launched herself into the air. She hurtled into the princess’s chest, and the two commanders rolled on the ground, squawking and tearing at each other’s feathers with claw and beak, heedless of the eggs that they were crushing beneath them.

  Sool Em was smaller, and should have given way, her strength and loss of status weakening her, but she fought on ferociously. A shiver of fear prickled the queen’s under feathers as the struggle continued. She felt the age in her wings, in her claws. But soon enough the younger bird began to give way. When the battle came near the three blue eggs, Sool Em gasped.

  “No, Queen Commander.”

  “I’ll crush them. Then I’ll tear out your heart and eat it, too.”

  “No! I demand the right to explain.”

  With a final squawk and batting wings, the younger bird got herself free. She moved swiftly to block the queen from crushing the three speckled eggs.

  The battle had left Ak Ik exhausted, shivering, and she had to pause to collect herself. Air whistled through the nostril holes on her beak. But soon enough, the feeling passed, replaced by a fresh surge of rage.

  “You have dared to lay royal eggs,” she told her daughter. “Do you call yourself a queen? That you will have your own princesses? That you will contend for the flock? By what right?”

  “By the right of victory, Queen Commander.”

  This brought derisive flapping of the queen’s wings. “Victory? You lost your lances, the humans escaped. You took no prisoners and devoured no enemies.”

  “The humans destroyed my lances—it is true. But I will have my revenge.”

  Ak Ik looked at the hallway outside the nesting chamber, where the princess’s drones huddled in a pitiful gray mass. “Your drones are demoralized. You cannot secrete enough power to keep them in line. If I ordered them to, they would tear you apart themselves, that is how little remains after your loss.”

  “I placed an egg in their nest.”

  “What? Where?”

  “The human nest. I placed an egg.”

  Ak Ik drew back, startled at the claim.

  By this, Sool Em didn’t mean a physical egg, of course. She meant some scheme or trick. A betrayal set in motion, to be hatched in the future. Ak Ik guessed at what the princess was implying, but cocked her head suspiciously.

  “What kind of an egg?”

  “Come, Queen Commander. I will show you.”

  Ak Ik looked at the three princess eggs, sure that this was a lie to protect them. Sool Em could lay as many drone eggs as she liked—they were nothing. They’d hatch as sterile members of the flock meant to do the bidding of their commanders, to live and die at their whim. Genetically programmed over the generations to grow quickly, to accept the secretions of their masters, each was an attenuated clone of their mother, a queen, a princess, or—if the will of the Greater Flock ever anointed a supreme commander—an empress. It was the ambition of every fertile bird to rise to that position.

  Even laying drone eggs cost Sool Em, of course. With status, with regular feasting on the flesh of sentient beings, she could lay as many as eight eggs a day. Three of those would be given to her queen as tribute. By avoiding too many costly battles, a princess could build her full army of ten thousand drones in five standard rotations.

  But to lay princess eggs meant that Sool Em was calling herself a queen. She must have stolen or bartered a drone from another commander and secreted hormones to turn it male so that she could lay princess eggs. And raising her own princesses was only the start. A princess was permitted ten thousand drones, a queen a hundred thousand. And specialized workers: scientists, miners, harvesters, engineers, lesser and greater battle drones. She could raise fifty princesses to serve beneath her, each with their own ten thousand. Each giving eggs as tribute.

  Under any circumstances, it was a breathtaking step for a princess to break from her queen, and usually resulted in the death of the asp
irant at the talons of her enraged mother—Ak Ik in this case—or from other queens quick to pounce on the young queen ascendant.

  But given Sool Em’s loss in battle and the ragged state of her drones, laying these princess eggs was insanity. Why would she attempt such a thing? Had she taken an injury to the brain? Was there a flaw in her genetics that had somehow slipped past the computers meant to screen for such things? This was no aspirant queen. She was barely even a princess.

  Only the brightness of Sool Em’s plumage and the confident bob to her head made her mother pause. She believed, that much was real.

  “Very well,” Ak Ik said. “Show me. It is only a precursor to your death. I will make it humiliating and painful. And I will destroy your eggs. No trace of your genetic material will survive.”

  Sool Em squawked in response. It sounded a note of agreement, as well as confidence.

  Drones scurried out of the way as the queen and princess left the nesting chamber and entered the corridor outside. Ak Ik cocked her head to study the feathers shed by her daughter’s weakening drones. Then she clacked her beak impatiently.

  “I haven’t lost control,” Sool Em said. “My scent is weak because of what I have accomplished. It cost me strength to lay my egg in the human nest. This way, my queen.”

  Ak Ik followed, and the two birds waddled through the twisting tunnels that led deeper into the ship. “You use that metaphor without explaining what it is. Have you broken more of their communications? That is hardly a victory worth reporting. We own their subspace frequencies, we have their channels decoded.”

  “Nothing so trivial.” Sool Em flapped. “A true brood parasite, Queen Commander. You will see.”

  They entered the onboard lab. Technicians manipulated joysticks with their dexterous tongues and flipped switches with their claws. Others squawked voice commands to computers. Unlike the guards, the technicians still carried most of their plumage, with only a handful showing missing feathers. Sool Em’s status had not decayed so far here.