Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  The lances and spears that had participated in the bizarre swooping movements milled about for a few minutes, but soon rearranged themselves into packs.

  The harvester ship faced them. The mouth of the thing opened again, and out came a spear. It flew away smartly and took position at the head of the hunter-killer pack that had been lacking a command ship.

  Tolvern was confused. Was the whole thing a repair job, and the harvester ship had slapped a couple of patches on and sent the spear out again? How had they done it so fast? And why had the spear tried to escape?

  “It’s a different ship that came out,” Smythe said. “Longer and narrower. Different engines.”

  He brought it up on the viewscreen, but Tolvern couldn’t see a difference. “I’ll take your word for it. So it seems the harvester carries a spare command ship or two.”

  “That spear was running for its life,” Capp said. “Didn’t want to be brought in. Bet they’re all dead.”

  “Whatever happened, they’re organized now,” Tolvern said. “And moving. They seem to have got whatever it was out of their system. Smythe, get ready to signal the sentinel to move again.”

  “The buzzards are going to be on to us,” Smythe said. “They’ll see the same missile bays open, the same response from the battle station, and they’ll know what it means.”

  Tolvern had thought of that already, but she had a bigger concern. “And it gives away other signals, too. They’ll realize we’re using physical cues for all of our communications. I’d rather have them thinking we had some secret new high-tech system in place that they can’t crack. Well, there’s nothing to be done for it.”

  But that didn’t mean she’d tip her hand too quickly. Better to wait until the last minute before giving orders to engage.

  What about that bizarre behavior, all the swooping and darting around? What if it meant something, like a difference of opinion? One side wanted to attack at once, the other to wait for reinforcements. They’d played a game of outer space chicken until the action got out of hand. Now, they were pissed off and ready to finish off the humans.

  At first it looked like Apex would simply repeat their charge toward the Kettle. But once the entire enemy fleet was in motion, they swung around and moved away from the planet.

  “The buzzards are retreating,” Capp said.

  No, not retreating. Not for good. Plotting a course that would unite them with the new Apex forces to form a super-fleet comprised of two harvester ships and dozens of lances and spears. But that gave them the twenty hours of breathing room she’d been craving. Well, eighteen hours at this point, but she’d take it.

  And sleep. God, I could use some rest.

  But the news soon proved even better than that. What seemed at first like a direct flight from the Kettle to rendezvous with the newcomers soon became something else. The closer fleet flew instead toward a blue-green gas giant about half the size of the Kettle. This was roughly in the direction of the second Apex force, but not exactly.

  A few minutes after that, the newcomers farther out began to decelerate. Eighteen hours was recalculated as twenty-two, then thirty-one, then fifty. Were they possibly coming to a complete stop? No, they were turning around!

  By the time Tolvern stumbled off the bridge toward her cabin, her adrenaline circling the drain, it seemed as though the enemy had called off the entire attack. Both alien fleets were flying away, possibly even jumping out of the system.

  It can’t be that easy, can it?

  Chapter Seven

  Drake waited outside the airlocks for the visitors to emerge from the docking bay. Admiral Malthorne had never waited here for his guests; he’d made them trudge down the hallway, take the lift up, and approach him on the bridge, where he sat like an emperor on his throne.

  The battleship still carried Malthorne’s touches, even down here. No cheap plastic runners along the walls, no simple recessed lights, but delicate fixtures lined with bronze. The rampant lions on the airlock doors weren’t molded plastic, they were carved wood and gilded. There had once been an eagle claw on a shield placed below the lions, but Drake had ordered it cut off.

  The arrogance of it took Drake’s breath away. The claw and shield was Malthorne’s family crest, and after King Bartholomew’s death during the atomic bombardment of York Town, the admiral had seized the throne and gone about fixing that ugly crest to everything he touched. A usurper trying to prove his legitimacy.

  Well, the admiral was dead now, executed for high treason. Whenever Drake felt too young, too inexperienced, too inadequate, he thought about Lord Malthorne’s treachery, and he didn’t worry quite as much about his competence.

  He didn’t feel nervous about his visitors until Manx told him through the com that they’d been snared and brought inside. Suddenly, he felt the urge to retire to his chambers, pour a snifter of brandy and settle his nerves.

  The door swung open, and there she was. Captain Jess Tolvern, looking trim and alert. Her eyes were lively and intelligent, her mouth in a half smile that was almost mocking. He’d known her most of his life, since he would ride to her house as a young man, asking for her father, the steward of the estate, but things were different now. He wanted to take her slender, girlish figure in his arms.

  Tolvern had long been a friend and a confidant, but nothing had been the same since that moment between them at the end of the war. Capp had passed Drake a bit of winking gossip, and suddenly his views of Tolvern had shifted wildly, like an arrow aimed at one target that hits another. Tolvern was apparently in love with him. And, he discovered, somewhat shocked, he harbored romantic feelings for her, in turn. It had not been the time or the place to move on those feelings, but they were acknowledged on both sides.

  Now, staring at her lovely face for the first time in months, he wondered. Did she still feel that way? She was now captain of his old starship and doing a damn fine job at it, too. Ambition had probably swept away foolish romantic notions.

  There was a wiry middle-aged man with her. Time and genetic drift had changed the look somewhat, but the man, with his slightly angled eyes and low, drooping eyelids, was clearly a descendant of the Chinese people from Old Earth. A year ago, his appearance would have looked strange to Drake, but not anymore.

  “This is Jon Li of the Singapore Imperium,” Tolvern said. “Commander of Sentinel 3 and our new ally.”

  “And how have you been communicating?” Drake asked her.

  He meant what human language, not how they’d done so without radio or subspace, although these questions had also occurred to him. Simple language concerns were the big question. The Singaporean refugees he’d met spoke some greatly altered dialect of Chinese, and the fleet had communicated with them through a combination of pidgin Dutch and translation software that allowed written Chinese, which could still be read by the refugees.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” Li said in perfect English. “Captain Tolvern has told me all about you.”

  Drake’s eyes widened in surprise. “You speak English. And with an Auckland accent, by God.”

  “I didn’t learn it the hard way, through study and practice. A technological cheat, you could say.”

  “Our new friends have all sorts of tricks they’re willing to teach us,” Tolvern said. “You probably saw some of them from a distance.”

  “I’d love to take a closer look,” he said. “Use some of your technology to defeat Apex.”

  “Everything we have is yours,” Li said. “With conditions, of course.”

  Drake gave the man a wary look, then glanced at Tolvern, who raised an eyebrow. Conditions? Albion didn’t share its technology, as a general rule. Even giving the Hroom the sugar antidote to save their crippled civilization had come with a good deal of struggle and soul searching.

  What exactly did Li want? Drake couldn’t give them weapon systems; those invariably found their way into unfriendly hands, usually via greedy Ladinos or New Dutch, although there was no shortage of unscrupulous
merchants within the Albion kingdom itself. And to what purpose would Li want them? The Singaporeans were a dying remnant literally being consumed by their enemy.

  He was inclined to say no, but what about that plasma weapon? Drake was itching to get his hands on it. And there was also that trick that had disabled the enemy vessels long enough for Blackbeard and the station to pick them off one by one. What the devil was that, and how could he put it to use? Drake would bend the rules if it meant gaining an advantage against the buzzards.

  But this was not the time or place to negotiate.

  “Let’s go to the bridge,” he said. “We’ll talk there.”

  He carefully watched Li’s expression as they took the lift and made their way down the corridor past smartly dressed navy officers and enlisted personnel. The fleet had been picking its way carefully through the outer systems for months, and had yet to get caught in the sort of fight that had destroyed HMS Swift and left HMS Blackbeard battered. His forces could use a good battle, to be honest—the fleet wasn’t for decorative purposes, after all—but he’d needed to get out here, closer to the enemy. In any event, he could tell from the way Li was looking about that the navy was making a good impression so far.

  They came onto the bridge and Li’s eyes widened, even as Tolvern scowled as she took in the remnants of Lord Malthorne’s gold-plated decorating style. The crew on the bridge stared at the Singaporean commander with open curiosity.

  Li stopped in front of the viewscreen and gaped. Sentinel 3 loomed across the screen, with the gas giant behind it. Blackbeard lay tethered to the side, chewed up in the fighting, but probably in better shape than it had been a few days earlier. Tolvern would have used any break in the action to complete emergency repairs.

  “I haven’t seen the station from this angle for eleven years,” Li said. “It seems so fragile from here.”

  Drake wouldn’t have put it in those terms. It may not look as secure as one of the orbital fortresses Albion put into orbit around its planets, dug deep into captured asteroids, but the battle station bristled with weapons, and it was a massive thing, the diameter as wide as HMS Dreadnought was long. Blackbeard looked like a toy in comparison.

  “Lieutenant Manx,” Drake told his first mate. “Show our guest the firepower of this fleet.”

  Manx led Li to the defense grid computer, where he brought up schematics of the cannons, torpedo tubes, and missile batteries. Manx also showed Li the other ships of the fleet, telling a little bit of their capabilities and weaknesses.

  Li asked sharp questions. He wondered why there were no carrier-type craft. The role of small fighting craft was carried out in the Royal Navy by torpedo boats, Manx explained, which were admittedly not ideal for fighting Apex. They were ships meant to stop commerce raiders, but especially to mob and destroy Hroom sloops of war.

  “In other words, your forces are designed to fight a different enemy than the one you now face,” Li said.

  “We’ve made adjustments,” Manx said stiffly, “but there’s more to be done, admittedly.”

  Drake led Tolvern out of earshot. “Li seems competent enough. He’s asking good questions.”

  “He is a smart man, that’s not his weakness. It’s command, or lack of it. Li struggles to hold his crew together. Eleven years of isolation did a number on him. On them all. Some of them went nuts.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘nuts’?”

  “I mean behavior that cannot be interpreted as anything other than madness.”

  Tolvern laid out her initial encounter with the sentinel battle station. Her arrival had set off a mutiny of those who wanted to keep the station hidden and would destroy Blackbeard to do it. They’d planned to kill some of Blackbeard’s crew and force the rest into service. Even the arrival of the enemy fleet hadn’t changed the mutineers’ opinions; if anything, it had hardened their fanaticism.

  Drake stopped her when she got to the part about Megat and Djikstra escaping.

  “The Dutch pilot ran off with the leader of the mutiny? That’s disturbing.”

  “I know, sir. I wish I’d blasted them out of the sky when I had the chance, but I can’t imagine they’ll do us any harm now.”

  Drake wasn’t so sure of that. He told her to go on.

  Tolvern told him about the strange maneuvering and apparent squabbling among the Apex ships, which was something Drake’s fleet had also noticed. Sentinel 3 had noted it as well. Tolvern and Li had discussed it after she’d docked her ship to the battle station for repairs.

  Drake and Tolvern walked toward the defense grid computer, where Li and Manx continued their discussion.

  “Can I get a look at the Hroom ships?” Li asked.

  Manx had been switching the view on the main screen to show the various warships, and now he focused on the six mottled green sloops of war. Mose Dryz kept his forces aloof and insisted that if and when the time came to fight he would follow his own counsel. Frustrating. The Hroom were capable fighters, but their tactics could be terrible. Having them fight on their own was like having a finely made sword that had lost its edge.

  Li asked Manx a few questions about the Hroom’s capabilities, then turned to Admiral Drake. “It’s an impressive fleet from top to bottom,” he said. “I wish we’d had Albion on our side a dozen years ago. The Hroom, too.”

  “Albion and the empire were at each other’s throat twelve years ago,” Drake said. “We’re still at each other’s throat, depending on which faction you’re talking about.”

  “The Hroom are prickly—we never managed to enlist their help either.”

  “They’re in serious trouble now. Not much choice if they don’t want to be wiped out.” Drake shook his head. “But if we ever do pull out of this, I expect we’ll be back to fighting each other.”

  “At least it’s possible to work with the Hroom,” Li said. “They may not be human, but they’re close enough to understand.”

  “That’s what I always thought, too,” Tolvern said.

  “Tell me about this wonder tech you’ve got,” Drake said.

  He thought Li might balk, force the conditions he’d bluntly mentioned outside the docking bay before speaking a word. But he told about the battle station’s cloaking abilities, the impressive plasma ejector, and finally, the eliminon battery. Drake had watched the enemy ships become completely disabled, but he’d had no idea how it had been done. The answer was not what he’d expected.

  “So you defeated them with gravity?”

  “Yes, essentially artificial gravity channeled from the Kettle—the gas giant, I mean. Singapore had the technology already—we used it in mining operations in our own asteroid belt. It was more useful for larger operations than a typical anti-grav and inertia engine system. And then once, when we caught one of the birds alive—”

  “You caught one?” Tolvern said sharply.

  “It didn’t live long. Some of that was the gravity. We suffocated it without knowing. Our scientists believe their home world is a low gravity planet with roughly .5 standard Gs. That explains how they’re human-size, but can still fly. Singapore is within the normal range of human-habitable planets, 1.1 Gs, and we keep our ships and stations calibrated to that level. The birds struggle in that gravity. Crank it up even more, and they collapse, they can’t fly their ships. Humans, on the other hand, can handle a few extra gravities, no problem.”

  “Assuming you don’t mind the blood draining from your head,” Tolvern said.

  “It’s an ingenious idea,” Drake said. “We don’t have the tech, though, even if we’d thought of it ourselves.”

  Other officers had gathered around Commander Li while he was talking, curious as to what the man had to say. Drake hadn’t begrudged them the chance to eavesdrop, but now he needed privacy.

  “Will you join me in the war room, Commander? Captain?”

  Tolvern and Li followed him. Once inside the war room, Li looked around, taking in the ostentatious decorating style of Admiral Malthorne. He walked to
the oak bookshelf and pulled off a volume, and his eyes widened.

  “The Art of War. Sun Tzu.”

  “Old Earth civilization lives on wherever her children take root,” Drake said.

  He had been on the verge of disavowing the decorating style, but now he thought better of it. Li was obviously impressed. Drake took a seat at one end of the table and gestured for the other two to take their seats on either side of him, Tolvern to his right and Li to his left.

  “We have taken in thousands of refugees from your world,” Drake said, “and we have no interest in this sector except to fight Apex as far from home as possible. No designs on your resources, no desire to oppress your people or interfere in any way. We are not and never will be enemies. But I will be blunt, Commander. We need your technology. Whatever you share will never be used against you.”

  Li tented his hands and looked at the viewscreen on the table, which showed HMS Repulse, the powerful Aggressor-class cruiser that would be a battle-axe in Drake’s hand in the upcoming fight.

  “Our tech is hard earned. Foolish to hand it over for nothing. And risky.”

  “Maybe so,” Tolvern said, “but in a crisis like this, all of us must take risks.”

  Drake hid a frown. He didn’t like the “all” part of that statement. He wished he’d briefed her on his strategy before they entered the war room. He couldn’t afford to give over his own military secrets, not because he was worried about how Li would use them, but because the Singaporean civilization was already destroyed. Anything he handed over could make its way into the enemy’s hands.

  Li nodded at Repulse. “It’s an impressive ship, Admiral. Like Captain Tolvern’s, only in somewhat better condition.”

  “Blackbeard was in fighting trim when I handed her over,” Drake said with a smile. “I’m afraid Captain Tolvern doesn’t always treat her possessions with the respect they deserve.”