The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “Thanks, Cap’n. I always did fancy this big seat.” Capp ran a hand along the armrest. “From prisoner to ensign to lieutenant. And now captain of my own ship. What would my mates make of me now?”

  Tolvern fought down her blush of embarrassment as she jumped to her feet and took her proper place, while Capp settled into the chair she’d just vacated.

  Sixteen months had passed since James Drake had put down Lord Malthorne’s rebellion against the crown and defeated a Hroom suicide fleet. They’d landed marines on Saxony to defeat a rogue general who’d seized control of one of the continents, but once that final gasp of internal conflict was settled, Drake, now at the head of the Admiralty, had turned the navy’s attention to defending the kingdom against Apex and forging an alliance with the battered remnants of the Hroom Empire. He’d taken the massive battleship Dreadnought as his flagship and given Blackbeard, his navy cruiser turned pirate ship turned navy cruiser, to the newly promoted Tolvern.

  Sixteen months. When would Tolvern learn? When would it come naturally? She was too young, too inexperienced. Too in love with the former captain.

  Act confident. Pretend. It’s almost as good as the real thing.

  Tolvern almost believed that as she settled into the chair and studied the data Smythe was manipulating on the larger screen. The tech officer pushed the star chart to one side, shunted off the long-range scans and the scroll of jump calculations, and placed the coded message front and center.

  Immediate disappointment was the result as Tolvern glanced over the stream of random numbers and characters. “It’s gibberish.”

  “It only looks like gibberish to us,” Smythe said.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “We’re working on it. The only thing the Dutchman gave us was the communication protocol. That only tells us how to interpret a stream of data as a message. We don’t know anything else for now, but we’ve got to assume they’ll make it easy to decipher. Like we did.”

  “You might not have noticed, Smythe, but we’re pressed for time here. How long?”

  “Impossible to say. I’ve put Jane on it, too. We’ll give her as many resources as we can.”

  Jane was the onboard computer, a limited-purpose artificial intelligence. It was her cool, aristocratic voice that gave the bad news when the engines were about to blow or the bridge was ready to suffer explosive decompression. Mostly she gave dire warnings about the deteriorating shields when they were under enemy attack.

  “Give me an estimate,” Tolvern said.

  “Three days? Plus or minus, of course.”

  Tolvern grimaced. “I’m so glad I rushed up here for that.”

  “Oh, no. You’ll be glad you did. I don’t know what it says, but there’s plenty I can figure out already.”

  “You should have led with that, Smythe.”

  “Some good, some bad. On the whole, I’d say it’s good news.”

  Capp grunted. “Quit your messing around. You’re as bad as my gran—she was always trying to wind us up with her storytelling, and you’re doing the same.” She snapped her fingers. “Whatever you’ve got, spit it out.”

  “Sorry, sirs.” Smythe’s fingers moved over the console. “I’ve got the location of the signal.”

  Tolvern leaned forward. “Excellent. You’re certain.”

  “Absolutely, it was easy enough to identify its source. Whoever sent it wanted to be found. There was no attempt to disguise the origin.”

  Smythe wiped his hand across his console, and the main viewscreen became a swath of stars. His fingers moved, and suddenly they were looking at a copper-colored gas giant with mottled red and violet spots. The planet boasted numerous moons, some proper little planets in their own right, and others resembling giant rocky potatoes, fifty or a hundred miles in length. The gas giant also had a ring of rock and debris, composed of a broken-up moon or small captured asteroids, as well as glimmering ice.

  “It’s hiding in the ring,” Smythe said.

  “Where?”

  “Not sure. Could be burrowed into one of these asteroids, or it might simply have fantastic cloaking technology. We won’t know until we get closer.”

  “At which point they’ll start shooting, no doubt,” Capp said. “The whole thing is probably a trap.”

  “Plot us a course,” Tolvern told Nyb Pim, before turning back to Smythe. “Keep looking. I want to find this thing.”

  “I’m already working on that, sir,” Lomelí said. The short Ladino woman had been speaking softly, as if to herself. “Problem is I’ve got a blocked sensor array, and engineering won’t retract the ram scoops so I can get it out. I’m talking to Barker right now.”

  “The number two is leaking plasma,” Tolvern said, anticipating Barker’s argument. “We need every bit of hydrogen we can scoop.”

  “It won’t take long,” Smythe said. “Half a day, tops.” He glanced up at the viewscreen and the gas giant and its glowing spots. “Maybe less, if it’s on the near side of the planet.”

  “We’re only at four percent light speed and barely accelerating,” Nyb Pim said. His long Hroom fingers moved over his own console. “If lances appear, we can’t outrun them, not even in a short sprint. Losing hydrogen slows us down and exposes us to additional risk.”

  “He’s right,” Tolvern said. “Barker won’t give up the hydrogen scoops, not even for half a day. Pilot, how soon can you get us there?”

  “Sixteen hours if we maintain acceleration,” Nyb Pim said.

  “So in half a day we’ll be nearly there already. And if we can’t accelerate?”

  The Hroom made a humming noise deep in his throat. “I do not know.”

  “That’s not really helpful,” she said.

  “Give us six hours with the sensor array,” Smythe said. “Surely Barker can give us that much.”

  “I do hate flying in blind,” Tolvern said. “Put engineering on the main channel.” She waited a moment before activating her com link. “Barker, are you on?”

  “Here, Captain,” came his gruff voice. Dwight Barker was over sixty, and should probably be retired, but was still one of the best gunners in the fleet, as well as Blackbeard’s chief engineer. He could be patronizing with the younger members of the crew—essentially, all of them—when he felt they were meddling with his work.

  “Can you retract the ram scoops for me? Smythe needs six hours.”

  “I can’t give him six minutes. The scoops are damaged—I pull them in, I might not get them out again. Like I told that girl—”

  Tolvern interrupted. “That girl is a Royal Navy tech officer, Barker.”

  “Which doesn’t change the laws of physics, Captain. I’m not moving those scoops for God or king, and I’m certainly not yanking them in for Tech Officer Lomelí.”

  “Damn it, Barker, I need a better explanation than that.”

  “We’re going to lose engine number two, Captain. Only a question of time, but I’d say twenty hours. Could be twelve. Hard to say. I can run her as hot or cold as I like until then, but then she goes. When that happens, we’ll vent her along the bottom shield. Anywhere else and we’ll boil like a lobster in its shell.”

  “And what does that mean for our present course?”

  “Ask your pilot, he’ll have a better answer than I can give you.”

  Tolvern turned to Nyb Pim. The tip of the pilot’s tongue poked through his thin, nearly nonexistent lips as he looked down at his computer with his eyes glossy and distant. The Hroom had an implanted nav chip, and it must be churning now to make his calculations.

  “New estimate,” Nyb Pim said. “If Barker vents the number two engine, we will arrive sometime between thirty and nine hundred hours from present.”

  “Thirty and nine hundred hours? Are you serious? You’re saying the back blast will slow us down that much?”

  “By some unknown factor, yes,” the pilot said. “And possibly to a near standstill.”

  “So we’ll have to reaccelerate on one engine. Nine
hundred?” Tolvern asked. “Are you sure?”

  “My calculations account for possible damage to engine number one when the other engine is destroyed,” Nyb Pim said. “That is what Chief Barker has warned me is possible.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Barker said over the com. “That’s accurate enough. Might not happen, but pretty damn likely. We’ll need to shut her down and carry out repairs.”

  Between thirty and nine hundred hours. Thirty, she could handle. Nine hundred was five weeks. Even if she could spare five weeks of coasting through the void, the oxygen plant wouldn’t last that long, not with the damage it had sustained. They’d suffocate out here in the void. Tolvern made her decision.

  “The ram scoops stay open. We’ll go in blind.”

  Capp drew in her breath. Others on the bridge exchanged glances.

  Barker’s gruff voice came back. “I don’t like that, either. I need to know if these guys are gunning to knock us out of the sky.”

  “You can’t have it both ways, Chief. Either you get your ram scoops or the tech officers get their active sensor array.”

  “But what if these Chinese types start shooting at us?” Capp asked.

  “If they do that, we’re dead anyway,” Tolvern said.

  “Not necessarily,” Nyb Pim said. “If it is a stationary base, we could evade. But we have to know where they’re at. It would seem to me that what we need—”

  “Listen to me, all of you,” Tolvern said. “Our only hope is that they help us. We’re going to lose an engine in less than a day. When that happens, we’re dead in the water.”

  “Someone might find us,” Capp said. “That’s possible, right?”

  “Who?”

  “A merchant?” Smythe said. “Navy patrol?”

  “Out here? Not a chance. And not in time. We’re crippled, losing water and oxygen and plasma. If we wait around, we die. If we send out a subspace, it gets picked up by Apex. They come, they disable us—that would be easy enough given our current state. Then they eat us.” Tolvern’s frustration was coming out, her voice rising in volume. “The buzzards might be in the system already, for all we know.”

  “Um, Captain,” Capp said. She looked meek, almost like she wanted to raise her hand for permission to speak. “The incoming signal could have come from Apex, right?”

  “I know that, Capp! It probably is. It’s probably a damn trap. What the hell are we supposed to do about it?” Nobody answered, and she addressed engineering again. “Barker, I want all hands in the gunnery when we come in. If someone starts shooting at us, we’re going to bloody some noses before we go down.”

  #

  Six hours later, Tolvern was in her quarters, trying, but failing to fall asleep. This was James Drake’s old room. Back when she was first mate, she’d imagined herself in here many times, sharing a bed with the captain. What a ridiculous fantasy that had been. Captain Drake—now Admiral Drake—was too much of an officer to ever fraternize with a fellow crew member.

  She knew Drake had interest—he’d expressed as much in a vulnerable moment after Lord Malthorne’s defeat—but there was no way to act on it. Maybe someday, far in the future, when one or both had retired from the navy. When would that be? Never?

  The cabin had seemed huge when Drake was in it, but she’d adjusted to the space. The sleeping area felt cramped when she folded away the bed to convert it into a living room. A nook on one side gave the illusion of additional space, and she retreated into it to read, meditate, or listen to music while staring through the viewport at the stars. A tiny kitchen, an even smaller bathroom. The bathroom, at least, was one thing she never took for granted. Private showers were a luxury she alone enjoyed.

  And it was quiet in here. If only she could sleep. Four hours until she was back on shift, and she’d rather not stumble exhausted into her seat.

  The door chimed, and she sat up, surprised. “Who is it?”

  “Tech Officer Smythe, sir. You’re on emergency calls only, and I couldn’t get through.”

  Sighing, she slipped into her jumpsuit and zipped up. She palmed open the door to find Smythe standing there, licking his lips nervously. He dropped his hands, then seemed to feel this was even more awkward, and clasped them in front of him.

  “It’s either an emergency, or it’s not,” she said irritably. “If it was an emergency, you should have called. If it’s not, why the devil are you waking me up at this hour?”

  “You were asleep, sir? You don’t look—”

  “That’s beside the point. Come on, spit it out.”

  “We’ve taken a hard look at the message, sir. It can’t be decoded.”

  “You mean you can’t, or that there is nothing to decode?”

  “Nothing to decode. A brief spurt of numbers, a Fibonacci sequence. It’s just a message to let us know they’re out there.”

  “How strange,” Tolvern said. “Why not a message? Even ‘hello, we’re friendly’ or, ‘go away, you idiots’ would be obvious.”

  “Capp thinks it’s a trap.”

  “Of course she does.”

  “So does everyone else,” Smythe said. “How do we even know it’s human? Any alien race that has mastered space travel will know about a Fibonacci sequence.”

  “Look, Smythe, if it were Apex, don’t you think they’d be smart enough not to act suspicious? To give us the ‘we’re friendly’ message?”

  “Good point, sir.”

  Tolvern turned over other possibilities. “What if it’s not a base at all, what if the message is automated? Whatever sent it might be uninhabited. Like the supply dumps dropped by the Royal Navy. We put ours on the charts. The Singaporeans are more paranoid, and they’ve been compromised. The supply dumps are hidden, but programmed to send a brief message when they receive a signal using Singaporean communication protocol, like what Djikstra shared with us. That helps you find the supply dump. But no humans are involved.”

  “Maybe,” Smythe said. “Would they have supplies enough to save us? I guess so—some emergency goods, tools, and the like.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  Tolvern wasn’t either.

  “You came up to tell me we have nothing, which is exactly what I already knew. That wasn’t a good reason to wake me up, Smythe. Assuming I’d been asleep, which I wasn’t, and now am unlikely to be.”

  “That’s not why I came, actually. I have an idea.”

  “A good one, or a crappy one?” She suppressed a yawn. “Sorry, Smythe, I’m tired. Go on.”

  “We’re coming up on a gas giant. Not our target planet, but it’s big and has a lot of mass. It so happens that it’s on the correct side of the star, and only slightly below us on the z-axis. A small deviation and we can slingshot around the planet.”

  “And pick up how much speed?”

  “Not enough to offset the change in course. But we won’t lose any time, either. Pretty much a wash.”

  “So what’s the point?” Tolvern asked.

  “The point is we’ll flip our backside outward when we go around. The rear sensor array could take a quick look at whatever is orbiting our target planet.”

  “Ah.”

  “Only we need to make a decision as soon as possible. It’s kind of a ticking clock, if you know what I mean.”

  Finally, she understood why he’d wakened her. “Make it happen. And next time, Smythe, if there’s a ticking clock, you might lead with that, don’t you think?”

  #

  Tolvern was back on the bridge a few hours later. In something approaching a miracle, she’d drifted off to sleep and held it for a good hour and a half before chimes and the low glow of blue-green light woke her.

  She’d been dreaming of the jungles of Hot Barsa again. It was there that she’d become a leader. Her experiences assaulting Lord Malthorne’s sugar plantations and raising a rebellion of Hroom slaves had seemed at first to have nothing to do with captaining a Royal Navy cruiser, but she hadn’t lacked for spacefaring knowledge, she’d lacked leadership and confiden
ce. The fight on Hot Barsa had given her that. If only she could hang onto her ship.

  Now she was yawning furiously and drinking from an oversize mug of black tea. She needed another gallon of the stuff to do the trick. Of course, soon enough the bruised red gas giant they were hurtling toward would provide plenty of stimulation.

  “How are we doing, Pilot?” she asked.

  “Holding course,” Nyb Pim said.

  “Engineering is whining again, Cap’n,” Capp said, touching her ear. “They don’t like the pull of that gas bag, say we’re gonna struggle with artificial gravity when we go around.”

  The captain could believe it. The floor had been vibrating since the jump. It was nothing, really, barely perceptible, but when artificial gravity’s steady, insistent pull wavered at all, it was noted with alarm. Enough to jolt you awake at night, making you think you’d taken a torpedo.

  The lights dimmed, and the shudder amplified.

  “Is that the planet already?” Capp asked nervously.

  “No, that’s me stealing power,” Smythe said from the tech station. “We only have a few seconds with the active scanners, so we’ve got to crank it up to full. If anyone is paying attention, they’re going to hear a loud ringing noise.”

  Four percent light speed didn’t sound fast for a ship of Blackbeard’s power. She could easily top ten percent, fast enough to nibble at relativistic effects and mess up the clocks on a long haul. But four percent was still 7,500 miles a second. The viewscreen was zoomed way, way in to amplify the tiny red light that was the approaching gas giant, but soon enough, the amplification turned off.

  The planet raced toward them. First a speck of glowing sand, then a marble, then an egg. And suddenly, it was devouring the entire screen, a giant sphere of turbulent purple and red, with hundreds of swirling storms and a gravity well that would suck them down and mash them to jelly if given the chance.

  The gas giant was ninety thousand miles in diameter. At their speed, they whipped around it in a flash. It was all over in twelve seconds. Then they were flinging back into space, slightly faster, but slightly farther from their destination.

  Twelve seconds where Smythe and Lomelí had hunched over their consoles like a pair of shamans reading the entrails of a chicken, assuming that chicken had been dissected to the molecular level and examined from half a billion miles away. Hopefully, the chicken was in the right part of its orbit when the shamans took a look.