Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Tolvern called the gunnery. “Give the buzzards a broadside.”

  Fifty tons of hot metal exploded into space. Missiles chased after the cannon fire, and slower but deadly Hunter-IIs followed behind. The leading two lances jumped away, as if they’d been expecting this. Another performed evasive maneuvers, but took hits along its flank. It fled the battlefield, chased relentlessly by one of the torpedoes.

  That still left roughly a dozen enemy ships targeting them. They came in from every side, and the ship began to take damage. Blackbeard returned fire, letting loose with everything she had, as if it were a cornered animal ready to fight to the death. She couldn’t stand and slug it out; only moments now, and it would be over.

  Sentinel 3 appeared. There was no warming up, no experimental salvo from the battle station. It hurtled masses of missiles and bombs, and the plasma ejector fired thousands of green globules. Lances and spears fled this way and that to flee the attack. The globules caught one of the lances, affixed to the skin, and expanded to engulf the enemy. The enemy ship exploded in a fiery death. Another took bomb damage and raced in a straight line away from the battle, seemingly unable to change course.

  The other lances jumped. One moment, Blackbeard was about to be overwhelmed by the energy weapons tearing at its damaged shields, and the next it was pulling in next to the Singaporean battle station, largely unharmed. The enemy ships reappeared a few million miles away.

  “That’ll show ’em,” Capp said grimly. “Mess with us and they’ll get a bloody nose. Come back for more and we’ll settle their hash for good.”

  There was more bluster than reality in the first mate’s words. They all knew the grim reality of the situation.

  At first glance it seemed that they’d won a quick and satisfying victory, held their ground and driven away the enemy. Blackbeard had destroyed an enemy ship, and the battle station had destroyed a second. Three others had taken significant damage. Against this, Blackbeard’s shields had taken a few hits, but they’d also bought time to continue their essential repairs.

  Unfortunately, that still left the bulk of the enemy’s fifty-six-ship fleet intact. Among them was the harvester ship, which had yet to engage. The battle station had been revealed, and could not easily hide itself again, and Blackbeard was still unable to withstand a single sustained assault with her weakened shields.

  There was one other small victory gained, Tolvern realized as she studied the looming enemy fleet regrouping beyond the Kettle’s outer moons. The enemy ranks were not unified. It was once again evident in the jostling. They seemed to be forming two ranks, one organized behind the harvester ship—this force numbered about forty ships in all—and a second, smaller force comprising three of the hunter-killer packs.

  “They’re starting to move,” Smythe said. “Not in this direction, though.”

  “Gathering speed, that’s all,” Tolvern said. “They’ll jump right in now that they know we’re stuck next to the sentinel’s guns.”

  She got on the com to the gunnery. “You’re catching all this?” she asked.

  “Aye, Captain,” Barker said. “All batteries loaded and ready to go. If they jump, we’ll be ready for them.”

  “What about torpedoes and missiles? Are they holding up?”

  “Missiles are fine—no shortage there. We’ve got one more volley with the Hunter-IIs, and then we’ll be down to the older models. But the way I figure, there’s no sense in saving them for tomorrow, eh?”

  “Actually, I want you to hold onto the Hunter-IIs. Don’t waste the good stuff—I need it for the next engagement.”

  Barker grunted. “We don’t shoot everything we’ve got, there won’t be a next engagement.”

  “It’s time for our friends to show their hand.”

  “The eliminon battery?” he asked.

  “Right. After that, we’ll break out the Hunter-IIs, but not before.”

  “Understood. Well, let’s pray the damn thing works. If not, those torpedoes will never make it out of the tubes.”

  “Stay on your toes. Expect surprises.” She ended the call, turned to Capp, and told the first mate to pass the message throughout the ship: brace for the eliminon battery.

  Tolvern glanced at the screen. The enemy ships were ready to jump back into the attack. Only moments now. If she was right, they’d arrive en masse.

  The crew on the bridge stayed busy: Capp, speaking with engineering about power requirements for the engines and the lasers, Lomelí, hard at work at the defense grid computer, working on countermeasures, Nyb Pim, calculating where the enemy would appear, and Smythe, running scans.

  “Lomelí,” Tolvern said, “tell Li we’re ready.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Before Blackbeard had pulled away from the battle station, Tolvern and Li had worked out a few simple signals. They had to assume Apex could intercept any communications, and couldn’t risk sending direct transmissions, but the warship captain and the base commander needed a way to pass information. A series of one-time only messages.

  Lomelí sent one of these messages now, starting with chaff fired from the rear. It flashed on Tolvern’s console, looking like hundreds of small bombs or exploding pieces of debris designed to thwart enemy ordnance. Exactly four point five seconds later, Lomelí launched chaff from the bow.

  To the enemy, it would look like Blackbeard was expecting an immediate attack—which she was—but the reason and timing of the chaff meant something else. A signal to Li to fire up the eliminon battery.

  “Smythe,” Tolvern said, “bring down the gravity.”

  He hit a button, and suddenly they were all floating. Belatedly, she grabbed for the restraints and got herself clamped in. The others had strapped themselves down already.

  Normally, the loss of artificial gravity was serious business. It not only kept you walking around in one gravity, as your planet-adapted body demanded, but the artificial gravity coordinated with the inertia engine to keep you from splattering against the wall or ceiling every time the ship pulled a violent maneuver. Blackbeard had come to a complete halt a few hundred miles from the sentinel battle station. It was a sitting duck, as the old saying had it, but sitting still was the only thing that would keep them alive once the eliminon battery fired up.

  Assuming the thing even works.

  Who really knew? It might fail to operate at all, for one thing. Even Li admitted that Sentinel 3 had never used it in battle. And if it had been used—by one of the other sentinels, for example—Apex might have since designed ways to defeat it.

  The first two hunter-killer packs jumped, and three more packs jumped moments later. Twenty-five Apex ships in all. This was the entirety of the smaller force Tolvern had identified earlier. No ships from the larger force had jumped. Interesting.

  The bridge was quiet as they waited for the ships to reappear. Tolvern’s arms floated above her armrests, and she had the sudden impression that she was upside down, that the entire universe had flipped over, that all her life she’d been walking on the ceiling and looking up at the floor.

  The enemy ships reappeared. Clusters of lances to port, starboard, below and above. And the heavier spears closing in from the front and rear.

  Blackbeard fired her main guns. She rolled, and people on the bridge cried out as they were spun around like clothes in a dryer. She fired again. Weapons discharged in all directions. Everything except torpedoes. Those were held in reserve.

  Tolvern felt lightheaded as the ship settled, and now she felt improbably that she was lying on her side, that the universe had shifted sideways.

  “Come on, Li!” she shouted in frustration as enemy fire laid into them.

  Blackbeard was shuddering, emergency lights flashing all over the place. Jane warned ominously of failing systems and dying shields. Where the devil was that eliminon battery?

  Li had to have seen the signal. It was too obvious, and it was exactly what they’d discussed. A burst of chaff, a pause of exactly four point five second
s, and then another burst. He’d warned her to have the artificial gravity turned off. But nothing had happened. It must have failed.

  And then a giant fist slammed her into her seat. Where moments earlier she’d been thrown against the restraints as the ship turned to position its weapons, now she was shoved down. Her limbs were lead, and it felt as though a man was sitting on her shoulders, another man on her legs, and two more on her chest. Every breath was labored, as if a giant vise had caught her lungs and were relentlessly tightening.

  Men and women across the bridge slumped in their chairs and across their consoles. Nyb Pim gave a high moan and struggled to hold up his head, which seemed too heavy for his neck to support.

  It was the eliminon battery. Tolvern had been skeptical when Commander Li explained how it worked. Capturing gravitational waves emitted by the gas giant, it channeled them into a sphere surrounding the battle station. Anything within that sphere would be caught in the crushing grip of six Gs. If you already had your ship calibrated to match Albion’s .98 G surface, you could make it seven.

  There was no skepticism now. Tolvern felt every pound of additional pressure on her body. Her pulse thudded in her temples, which felt like they would split and let her brains ooze out. When she turned, it felt like her head would snap off and fall to the floor.

  She looked at the viewscreen. Sentinel 3’s ultimate weapon had caught the Apex ships in a crushing embrace. Those farther out were still maneuvering, but the ones closer in were either held in place or hurtling on whatever trajectory they’d been following before the battle station fired up its weapon.

  “Cap’n,” Capp said. Blood trickled from one nostril and her mouth hung open. “Order fire?”

  “Yes.” Somehow, Tolvern activated the com. “Barker. Give ’em hell.”

  The phrase “ultimate weapon” wasn’t just hyperbole. Bringing the eliminon battery online brought down the station’s ability to fire other weapons. The battle station was within a protective shell that shielded its inhabitants, but anything outside was affected by the gravitational waves, which spread equally across the affected region. Until it turned off the weapon, it fell on Blackbeard to do any fighting.

  Eight Hunter-II torpedoes squirted out of the tubes. Rockets firing, they struggled to overcome the gravitational waves, and accelerated slowly. Each torpedo targeted a single ship. Three were unable to overtake the ships they were chasing, and Tolvern saw at once that the lances would slip out of the gravity cone and escape. A fourth torpedo slammed into the side of a lance, but the explosive was a duds and only partially detonated. The lance was wounded, but not destroyed.

  The other four torpedoes, however, found their mark. One exploded inside the engines of a lance and left nothing but microscopic wreckage. Two more struck disabling blows that sent lances spinning, crippled, from the battlefield.

  The final torpedo struck a lance along the stern and broke it in two like a banana cut down the middle. These larger pieces flew apart an instant later. The alien ship had been flying directly at Blackbeard when the torpedo struck it, and bits of debris struck them. Tolvern kept the presence of mind to take a quick look, hoping to snare an engine or undamaged weapon. No engine, but she caught a glimpse of shattered bodies and torn off wings. Apex would have approved of the carnage.

  Tolvern had destroyed four enemy ships in an instant, but she was upset and cursed her luck. They could have wiped out a third of the attack wave with a single volley. Instead, fully half of her torpedoes had failed to damage easy targets.

  It took a moment for her sluggish mind to recognize that an opportunity still presented itself. More than a dozen enemy ships remained within the sphere cast by the eliminon battery. All were dead still, having jumped into place and never regained momentum. One of these was a command ship, a so-called spear, which lay straight ahead.

  Not one of them had recovered. Why weren’t they moving? Yes, they had to cope with their own artificial gravity on top of the bone-crushing amounts radiating out from the sentinel battle station, but surely someone would have the presence of mind to put the foot, or rather, talon on the gas and accelerate in a straight line to get them out of the way. A thought came unbidden.

  They’re birds.

  The wheels were still turning, creaking from one thought to the next, and Tolvern slowly worked it out. Feathers, claws—as tall as an ostrich, but with beaks that her science officer said could manipulate objects much like a parrot’s. And wings.

  Those wings were capable of flight. Not racing around like a pigeon or a hawk, but short, turkey-like bursts.

  The Apex home world must be lower gravity than Earth or Albion or the typical Hroom world if such a large animal could fly. What did they have their artificial gravity set to? Maybe it was only .5 G. What felt like a crushing weight to humans, crippling to a Hroom, might even kill the buzzards.

  All these ships might be filled with dead enemies. She could capture one intact. Learn all their secrets.

  Tolvern’s head was pounding, and she couldn’t get excited about the idea while she was trying to remain conscious, though she recognized what a critical breakthrough that would present. But before she could work out a strategy for seizing one of the ships, the spear ahead of them began to move slowly. Someone was still alive on board.

  “Take it out,” she ordered.

  Capp passed the orders to the gunnery while Tolvern tried to get Nyb Pim alert enough to interface with the nav computer. He moved sluggishly, but complied.

  Blackbeard eased into motion. The inertia engine was off, and movement that was too aggressive would kill them. Even the modest acceleration Nyb Pim ordered was enough additional strain that spots flashed in Tolvern’s vision. Lomelí threw up over the defense grid computer, and Smythe had to go help her.

  They came up behind the spear and let loose with the deck gun. The larger enemy ship had stronger shields to go along with more powerful weaponry, and didn’t immediately yield to the kinetic fire pouring out of Blackbeard. Tolvern waited until the rear shield lay battered and fractured into pieces, then hit it with the laser. The shield absorbed some of the energy, but was soon melting off like hot cheese. One more hit with the deck gun and the spear blew apart.

  Blackbeard swung toward another enemy ship, a lance. It didn’t move, and Tolvern let loose with the main cannons. A single broadside tore gaping holes all along the ship, and it broke into numerous pieces.

  The next opportunity came seconds later, as a lance flashed by off port. It had just entered the gravitational sphere when the battle station activated the eliminon battery, and hadn’t altered its course since then. Blackbeard hit it with cannon fire. When it emerged from the far side of the sphere, it was still racing toward the Kettle. Its engines sputtered, trying to move, but Blackbeard had raked it over. It was unable to alter its trajectory and soon plummeted into the crushing gas atmosphere of the planet.

  The gunnery loaded fresh missiles and sent a pair toward each of the last two remaining ships. They died without a fight. By now, the others had either drifted outside the gravity sphere around the battle station or managed to limp away. In both cases, they fled for their lives.

  Throughout this entire struggle, the bulk of the Apex forces had remained at a distance, seemingly content to observe. A Hroom fleet would have charged in to the rescue, making an all-or-nothing bid to overwhelm the enemy with firepower. A human fleet might have approached cautiously or aggressively, depending on the commanding officer, but most certainly would have attempted to fight in support of its allies.

  Apex seemed unconcerned about the heavy losses. In fact, Tolvern was getting the sense that they simply didn’t care about death or destruction suffered even by their own side, willing to sacrifice any number of ships for unknown reasons.

  The crushing gravity vanished. It didn’t dissipate, it simply was no longer there. With the artificial gravity off, it was especially disconcerting as Tolvern felt weightless again. Someone vomited loudly—probably Lomel�
� again. Tolvern’s stomach flopped twice, and then was still.

  The sentinel battle station started firing again the moment the eliminon battery turned off. It chased down a fleeing lance with green globules from its plasma ejector, destroying it, and wounded two others with missiles.

  “Give me gravity!” Tolvern ordered.

  The ship’s systems kicked back on. She meant to chase the fleeing enemies, but they were already safely away. To go after them now would take her far from the battle station’s protective firepower.

  Instead, she looked warily at the scans, wondering what the enemy would try next. The tattered remnants of the attack wave flew back toward the harvester ship and the rest of the fleet, badly mauled in the struggle. Thirteen lances destroyed, plus a spear. Several other ships wounded. The enemy force remained formidable, but it no longer looked invincible. It certainly didn’t appear to be spoiling for another skirmish.

  From the cheering on the bridge, you’d have thought the entire war had been won. The defense grid and tech console crews came together to slap hands and clap each other on the back. Capp kissed the solemn Hroom pilot right on the mouth, then grinned at his startled look before coming to try the same with the captain.

  “Please,” Tolvern said as Capp came in puckered up. “Let’s maintain some dignity, shall we?”

  “Ah, you ain’t gonna be all stiff like that now that you’re in charge, are you?”

  Stiff, no. Somewhat formal, yes. Nobody would have planted a sloppy kiss on Captain Drake’s mouth, after all. But she couldn’t keep the grin off her face, and she certainly didn’t feel like a victorious naval captain. She was too giddy with relief.

  “Smythe, give me a fresh scan. What is that harvester ship doing?”

  “Come on, Cap’n,” Capp pressed as Smythe moved to comply. “I thought we was going to die, and I’ll wager you did, too. Ain’t we allowed a little bit of fun after all that?”

  “We are allowed, and we did have some fun. Now let’s figure out how to stay alive.”

  “They can’t touch us in here,” Smythe said, far too confidently. “That eliminon battery will drive them off. So we stay here and neutralize any long-range attacks. From this distance, our countermeasures can handle anything they throw at us.”