Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  The priest glanced to the side as the voices rose in urgency. He let out a high, keening noise that sounded like anguish and rage.

  The birds have harpooned us, and will devour us in their rituals. I will not let my blood be spilled in such a blasphemous way, so I have ordered my crew to detonate our weaponry when the lance draws close enough.

  My death is punishment, Jess Tolvern. I disobeyed my god, listened to General Mose Dryz when he told me to take my cargo and attack an Apex harvest ship. And now I must die to atone for my disobedience.

  So that was why he’d targeted the lances instead of Blackbeard. The general had got to Nol Pim first and subverted his religious duty. This message, Tolvern sensed, was the equivalent of a final confession.

  I do not fear death, nor pain. Those of us who love and honor Lyam Kar know that death is the only way to purify our souls. That someday we will be given new life through His mercy as we are reincarnated in a new body.

  The cry of Hroom on the sloop’s bridge had reached a wail. Another Hroom appeared, grabbing the priest and begging him to do something. The priest shook him off with a guttural hoot.

  And when I am reborn, Captain Tolvern, know this. If you are still alive when I am of age, I will track you down and kill you. If the planet of Albion has not yet been consumed in fire and blood, I will see that it is destroyed.

  But I think my god has found another instrument to wield. He has brought in a scourge to cleanse the galaxy of a low and parasitic species. Some day soon, not even a memory of the human race will remain.

  Nol Pim turned and said something to one of his adjutants. His voice was flat. The video ended.

  Capp muttered a low oath. “No offense, mate,” she said to Nyb Pim, “but it’s a good thing that Hroom religion is all nonsense. Hey, Cap’n, do you suppose this so-called Hroom god is the same thing as the devil? Another word for Satan or something? That would explain a few things.”

  Tolvern didn’t respond. She was thinking about Apex and the Hroom priest’s final warning.

  Some day soon, not even a memory of the human race will remain.

  Chapter Five

  Three days after the jump, Admiral Drake ordered his first mate, Henry Manx, Tech Officer Lloyd, and Hillary Koh, the tech specialist given him by the Singaporean battle station, to join him in the war room. After a minute of thought, he also told Sarah Ellison, his communications officer, and Manny Díaz, his pilot, to join them. The mood was somber as they settled into their seats.

  Drake remained standing at the head of the table. “There were plenty of warning signs. It shouldn’t have taken us so long to figure it out.”

  “That’s my fault,” Koh said. “I pushed you. I shouldn’t have.”

  “You told me what I wanted to hear.”

  “Fifty-nine percent,” she said. “Low degree of confidence.”

  “But I ran from the fight in the first place,” he said. “We knew there was a chance the buzzards were bluffing. That there was no trap to spring, they only made it seem that way. We were about to wipe them out, and they needed to get rid of us. We were dumb enough to fall for their trick.”

  “But why was I so sure it led to Singapore?” Koh said. “That part was my doing.”

  “No, the blame is mine,” Drake said. “We’re seventy-seven hours into the system. Nothing matched our charts, but we kept plowing away. Other captains raised objections, Caites most strongly. She knew I was on the wrong track, but I brushed her off. Now where are we?”

  Lloyd cleared his throat. “I assume that question is directed toward me.”

  Drake sat and swiveled his chair to face the tech officer. “No, it was rhetorical, but go ahead.”

  Benjamin Lloyd had the sort of droopy eyelids that made him look sleepy when he was in a good mood, morose when he wasn’t. His mood was definitely in the latter category, and he sounded like he was reading the names of plague victims as he started in on the classification of the system, beginning with the name of the star as it appeared on the charts.

  “There are only four planets in the system,” Lloyd continued, “all rocky inner worlds, ranging from burnt cinders to icy wastes. Nothing with a breathable atmosphere. There are no gas giants, most likely because the small dwarf binary ripped them apart eons ago.”

  “Get to the part we don’t know,” Manx urged.

  “It’s the other effects of the binary system that concern us,” Lloyd said with a big sigh. “There are no stable jump points. The companion star passed through within the last eight or ten years and must have carried them off with it.”

  Drake was growing impatient. “If they were carried off, they weren’t stable, were they?”

  “What I mean is that the only jump points left are temporary and eroding. The reason the jump point we passed through looks so similar to Singapore’s is that the gravitational disruption spawned it through quantum effects. To a certain extent, it is the same jump point, or a clone of it.”

  “I have no idea how that works,” Drake said, “except that it cost us three days spent looking for the clone jump point, only to find out that it never existed.”

  “Of course it existed,” Lloyd said. “Still does. It’s just moved to a different system by now. The official scientific term for all of this is quantum weirdness.”

  “May as well be magic, for all the good it does us,” Manx said.

  Lloyd turned his hooded gaze on the first mate. “You can control wormholes with technology—that’s how Apex manages their short-range jumps, and it’s theoretically possible to create an intersystem pair of jump points from scratch. Maybe it is magic, some system of highly advanced technology created by an advanced civilization in a parallel universe that mirrors itself here.”

  “Magic, technology, quantum weirdness,” Drake said. “All you’re saying is that we can’t go back the way we came.”

  Lloyd nodded. “That’s right, sir. By the time we get back to the original jump point, it will have further decayed. I calculate a seventeen percent chance of jumping us back into the Padang System, a seventy-two percent chance of it dumping us in the far void, and an eleven percent chance that we’ll be dismembered to the atomic level.”

  “Eighty-three percent chance of death, more or less,” Drake said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What other options do we have?”

  Lloyd tapped the screen of his hand computer, and a three-dimensional chart of the system appeared above the table. It was littered with jump points. Unfortunately, roughly half were red, and the other half were yellow, including the one they’d come through. Drake searched in vain for a speck of blue.

  “It’s even worse than it looks,” Díaz said. The pilot’s expression was nearly as grim as Lloyd’s. “The way back is closed and the way ahead full of bad choices. We’ve pretty much landed in a cul-de-sac.”

  What chafed Drake, what made him clench his hands so tight his fingernails bit into his palms, was how Apex had tricked him. He’d known the aliens were playing a game, trying to get his mind spinning. High stakes poker is what it was, and Drake had tried to bluff his way through.

  He’d masterfully played his first few hands. He’d come across a force of lances tormenting a refugee fleet from Singapore. Drake divided his forces, with Captain Woodbury slugging it out with the lances, while the admiral, guessing there was a second, hidden Apex force waiting to ambush them, held Dreadnought and several other craft in reserve, including Catherine Caites’s cruiser, HMS Richmond.

  He’d guessed right. Drake and Caites were ready for the ambush, and thrashed the attacking ships. He then rushed to relieve Woodbury, and ran for the jump point that had carried him here, thinking it would take him to the Singapore System. Once there, he hoped to fight a decisive naval battle and destroy the harvester ship feeding on the remnants of the Singaporean people.

  Instead, they found this cul-de-sac, as Díaz put it. Or rather, a cul-de-sac where the road vanishes behind you as you enter. Drake forced hims
elf to be calm and remain hopeful.

  “Someone raised this possibility before we jumped,” he said. “I don’t remember who, but we knew there was a chance Apex was trying to trick us. In that light, it’s not so bad.”

  “Sir?” Manx said.

  “Oh, sure. We knew it might be a trap, and it was. But it could have been worse. We could be in the void, two light years from the nearest system. We could have come through to find the Apex home world and a dozen harvester ships ready to take us prisoner.” Drake smiled. “Compared to being dismembered alive, this doesn’t look so bad.”

  The others exchanged looks.

  “The point is, we have options. I want to explore them now. Let me hear your ideas.”

  “There’s an easy one,” Díaz said. “We jump back. Seventeen percent isn’t good, but it’s better than starving to death here.”

  “If we’re going to do that, we should turn around at once,” Lloyd said. “The jump point is breaking down, and our odds only get worse with every passing day.”

  “I’ve fought battles at seventeen percent chance of victory,” Drake said, “but only because I didn’t believe the numbers and gave myself better odds. It’s harder to argue with the math of an unstable jump point. Seventeen percent is the same as a single roll of the dice where you need it to come up a six.”

  “There are plenty of other jump points in the neighborhood,” Ellison said. She’d scowled at Díaz’s mention of returning, but sounded hardly more confident as she spoke. “Old ones dying every week, new ones popping up nearly as frequently. This fleet can handle six months in deep space. What if we hang out in the system and wait for a more stable one to appear? There’s no rush.”

  “No rush!” Koh said. “How many people will die in six months? Twenty million Singaporeans? Is that an acceptable body count?”

  “Nobody said we have to like it,” Ellison said, “but it’s a damn sight better than jumping through at seventeen percent odds.”

  “Forget Singapore,” Manx said. “If Albion goes six months without its fleet, there won’t be anything left to fight for.”

  “Six months is an outer limit,” she said. “A new jump point might appear tomorrow, for all we know.”

  Lloyd fixed her with his droopy gaze. “Doubtful, Ellison. We’ve identified thirty-seven jump points, and not one of them is stable. I’d say the chance of a stable jump point appearing in six months is one in four, one in five—that’s not much better than our odds going back the way we came. And if one does appear, who knows where it leads?”

  She gave an exaggerated shrug. “Somewhere more productive than here.”

  “You have no evidence of that,” Lloyd said.

  “Fine,” Ellison said. “What’s your brilliant idea? Or are you just here to wag your finger when someone else comes up with something?”

  “Enough bickering,” Drake said. “Give me ideas. Anyone. Manx?”

  “What about all those other jumps?” Manx asked. “Thirty-seven unstable jump points, but how unstable? Are they death, or something better?”

  “The red ones are death,” Lloyd said. “Most of the yellow are unknown, but not promising.”

  “So we take a closer look at the yellows,” Manx said. “Something has got to give us better than seventeen percent. We fly up, we send a probe through, it scans and sends us a subspace back with the results.”

  “It will take time to chart an optimal path to all the yellows,” Díaz said. “And a tour from jump to jump will take forever.”

  “How long are we talking if we visit them all?” Drake asked. “Weeks, right? Months?”

  “Something like that.” The pilot tapped the screen of his hand computer. “A day or two to travel, a day or two with a probe running active scans on the other side. Let’s say three days per, on average.”

  “Twenty yellows,” Lloyd said. “An even two months.”

  “Two months is better than six,” Drake said. “And we might find something suitable on the first or second jump. Still, let’s say we visit half of them before we’re satisfied. That gets us down to a month.”

  “We’re laying down all sorts of guesses,” Díaz said. “Could easily take us longer than three days per jump. I’ll need to run the math, try to plot out an optimal course—that’s a nearly impossible task, with so many variables—and then a lot depends on what’s on the other side, if our probes come back with readable data, that sort of thing. But a month sounds like a good guess. Maybe six weeks.”

  “Too long,” Drake said. “Two weeks is too long, to be honest. For that matter, even if we could jump to Singapore tomorrow, we’ve lost any element of surprise. Our best bet is to find a way out of here, go back to Sentinel 3, and force that anemic commander to hand over his weapon systems.”

  “Um, sir,” Manx said. He gestured at Koh with his eyes.

  Drake hadn’t forgotten about the Singaporean technician, but had let his temper slip, and he regretted his word choice. “Apologies, Koh.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I am well aware of Commander Li’s limitations. And if you want me to testify that you made an attempt at Singapore, talk up your victory among the refugee fleet, I’ll do that, too. So long as our ultimate goal is freeing my home world.”

  “That’s appreciated,” Drake said. “First, we need to get there. I can’t lose a month hanging around here.”

  Koh frowned. “You make it sound like a choice, Admiral. Seems Lloyd and Díaz are telling you there’s no other way. A month it is.”

  He shook his head. Something had occurred to him. “There are twenty jump points marked yellow. This fleet has twenty-three ships. I’m going to divide up my forces and hope we’re alone in the system.”

  #

  Reaction was mixed through the fleet. Drake’s cruiser captains weren’t afraid to venture out on their own. Like Blackbeard, which was probably leaving the Samborondón yards by now, Repulse, Richmond, Zealand, and Formidable were ships capable of standing alone in a fight, and strong enough to win it.

  Faced with a hunter-killer pack or two, they should be able to hold on long enough for other ships to swarm in and relieve them. And Drake had put his boldest, most fearless captains at the helm of his cruisers, most notably Catherine Caites, who reminded him of Tolvern, or maybe a younger version of himself.

  The captains of the smaller ships were not so keen to be sent away from the protective guns of the fleet’s capital ships, however. Drake listened to their objections, but didn’t change his mind.

  He paired each of the four corvettes with a destroyer and sent them out. The seven torpedo boats, guarded by two of the missile frigates, made up a single, large task force that departed in a different direction. Finally, Dreadnought departed, flanked by the remaining frigate. If someone was lurking, the battleship would make the juiciest target. Drake didn’t know whether he wanted to discourage that attack, or bring it on.

  Twenty jump points, ten missions at a time. Start with the most likely ten, send through probes, determine what was on the other side and the likelihood of passing through unscathed, then report to Dreadnought via light speed communication, not subspace. Three days per jump point; it would take a maximum of a week to investigate them all. That was the best Drake could do, short of twenty separate missions.

  The largest of his task forces—the torpedo boats and missile frigates—arrived at its jump point first. Dreadnought was still racing toward its target when the first probes came back through. The good news? The jump point was more stable than scans initially indicated; it was almost certain that they could jump through and arrive safely on the other side.

  The bad news was that staying safe once they got through was a different matter. The jump point on the other side was inside the corona of an expanding red giant on the verge of going supernova, if by “on the verge” you meant a thousand years in the future. Still, it was toasty in there. The probe suffered some melted instruments on its way back through.

  “So that�
��s out,” Manx said as they studied the data on Dreadnought’s bridge. “We’ll be cooked if we try.”

  “Have you heard of a shattered sun jump?” Drake asked.

  “Like the one that blocks transit toward Old Earth, right? It’s a jump through a nova, if I remember right.”

  “More or less. Ships have made the jump—it’s possible to shield yourself from the heat. We might be able to pull it off, but the problem is how hard we’re hit going through. We wake up quickly, we’re all right. If it’s a full-on jump concussion, we’re in trouble. Especially the smaller ships. They’ll cook.

  “Still, I might risk it if I had any idea what that system contains,” Drake continued. “The probe didn’t send enough data to tell us if there are more jump points on the other side.”

  “Could be another cul-de-sac,” Manx said. “Doesn’t seem worth the risk.”

  No, it didn’t. Not yet. But drag this situation out a couple more weeks and Drake might find himself desperate enough to try.

  Chapter Six

  Two days after Drake had divided his fleet, Dreadnought stood three quarters of a million miles from another yellow jump point and fired a probe at it. The torpedo-sized object vanished through to the other side.

  There was a function between the size of an object and the velocity required to push it through a jump point. It didn’t scale perfectly, but in general, the smaller the object, the slower it could travel and make it through. Ideally, you’d send something the size of a marble—if someone unpleasant was lurking on the other side, you didn’t want your probes detected—but a probe needed instruments, it needed a subspace transmitter, and it needed a warp point engine to get through. It was a marvel of Albion engineering that they’d engineered the probes as small as a torpedo.

  Meanwhile, there had better not be enemies lurking in this system, because they were sending all sorts of transmissions back and forth. Five jump points investigated so far, and none were good candidates. Two, in fact, had shifted red with the arrival of additional information.