The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1)

by Michael Wallace

  And Blackbeard was already operating with weakened shields. Nyb Pim rolled the ship, even as torpedoes kept squirting off in all directions. Faster, lighter missiles followed, and the belly guns filled the gap with shells.

  This at least scattered the Apex formation, forcing the enemy to evade. And that brought relief from the laser fire, with anti-targeting efforts turning aside additional pulses of energy. Blackbeard continued her dramatic deceleration.

  Jane reported damage. It wasn’t as bad as Tolvern had feared.

  “There you go, Smythe. We survived our first encounter.”

  Capp cursed. “Here comes the second.”

  Three more lances appeared, materializing off starboard. They darted in on Blackbeard’s exposed flank. Energy weapons splashed against the shields. Had they appeared port-side, the fight would have been over in an instant, like a lit match held against tissue paper, as Tolvern didn’t have her port guns exposed. The gunnery fired from starboard, and the lances pulled away.

  Unfortunately, all seven of the enemy ships had surrounded Blackbeard. They probed with their weapons, weakening, but not destroying. It was a deliberate attempt to cripple, to take captives.

  Blackbeard shuddered, and Tolvern floated briefly out of her chair before artificial gravity slammed her back into place. Warning lights, Jane’s computer analysis, and shouting over the com from engineering confirmed: the number two engine had gone off like the world’s biggest rocket at the Settlement Day fireworks.

  Amid the shouts, the flashing lights, and the shudders, Tolvern realized something. The lances still hadn’t spotted the human battle station. Even this close, they had no idea it was there. If they had, the aliens wouldn’t be trying to take them captive, they’d be finishing Blackbeard and getting out of range of the station’s guns. Or attacking the base directly. Something.

  “Cap’n, why aren’t they helping us?” Capp asked in a worried voice. “We’re going to die, and they ain’t lifting a finger to help us.”

  “Unknown targeting computers detected,” Smythe said. “The base has got their guns out. Laser arrays, missile batteries, and . . . what the devil is that? It’s big, whatever it is.”

  “About time,” Tolvern muttered. “Five minutes longer and it would be all over but the sacrificial feasting.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Smythe said.

  “What is it now?” Tolvern said.

  Smythe looked up, glanced at Lomelí, whose eyes were wide with terror, then turned to the captain.

  “Captain, they’re not going to shoot at Apex. They’re targeting us.”

  Chapter Nine

  There was nothing to do but keep fighting for their lives and hope they could take out a few enemies before they went down. Then prepare to detonate Blackbeard before they could be boarded by the enemy and eaten. Penetrating Captain Tolvern’s fear and anger and confusion was the horrible realization that she’d made a mistake.

  It was a trap all along. The Dutchman led us right to the Apex base.

  “They’re firing!” someone on the bridge cried.

  Tolvern wasn’t sure who had cried out, let alone who was firing, as she was on the com with Barker, warning him to self-destruct the instant the number one engine went out. She jerked her head up.

  There was the base, lit up like a Christmas tree—if you’d doused the tree with oil and lit it on fire, that was. Bomb clusters and missiles squirted away from its surface. Green energy globules burst out. Only the underside of the station was still dark, the massive array of whatever Smythe had identified staying out of the fight.

  Tolvern closed her eyes and gripped the handrails, bracing for one final flash of light and then . . . well, whatever came after you died.

  They only stayed closed an instant. Then she was back at work, ordering the gunnery to deploy countermeasures, to roll away, to fire back at the attacking lances, which continued to tear apart the remaining armor.

  One of her torpedoes landed a lucky blow, and the wounded lance tried to retreat. But then the base’s firepower joined the battle. And it struck Apex. Hard.

  One of the twisting bomblets caught the wounded lance and blew it apart. Energy globules hit other enemy ships and affixed themselves to their skin. They quickly engulfed the silvery surfaces, and the ships disappeared beneath glowing plasma.

  “We’re still targeted,” Capp said. “But they ain’t shooting at us. Not yet.”

  “Maybe it’s that big array,” Smythe call over. “Whatever it is, it’s not something we want to face.”

  “Time to run, Cap’n?” Capp said.

  “No.”

  Only one of the lances had escaped the bombardment, and it tried to flee the suddenly revealed battle station, which carried it toward Blackbeard. By now, Blackbeard’s starboard-side shields were weaker than those on the port-side—had been completely obliterated, in fact—and Tolvern had turned about to keep her weak side away from the action. This brought the main battery into play.

  A few seconds later, the lance came hurtling past, and Blackbeard let loose. The cannons were highly developed kinetic weapons, designed to punch through tyrillium armor that could repel standard energy weapons. They’d been of limited use against the highly maneuverable Apex lances, which could scorch human and Hroom ships from a distance.

  But this lance had come within range and felt the full force of sixteen heavy guns. The cannons fired shot made of cobalt rods to penetrate the shields and explosive shot to tear through the resulting holes and detonate on the interior. The lance took it all. What was left afterward didn’t even rise to the level of confetti.

  They’d destroyed seven lances in a matter of minutes. Well, the Albion cruiser had destroyed one, and the battle station had obliterated the other six in a spectacular display of firepower. And the Singaporeans hadn’t even fired up that unknown battery, but kept it targeted on Blackbeard.

  “Seven lances,” Tolvern said aloud. “Not eight. One of them got away.”

  She asked Jane for an assessment. The news was grim.

  “Number two engine destroyed. Number one engine leaking plasma—emergency shutdown initiated. Port shields, eight percent. Starboard shields, two percent. Deck shields—”

  “All right, I get the point. Capp, call engineering and tell them to keep the number one online. I don’t care about the risks, I need to get out of range of that station. Nyb Pim, take us around the planet. We’ll try to talk to them from there.”

  “What about the missing lance?” Capp asked.

  “I’m taking my chances,” Tolvern said. “I think it made a run for it. These guys in the battle station have us targeted, and that’s what’s got me worked up.”

  “It’s an arsehole move,” Capp said.

  “Not how I’d put it, but yes. Not exactly friendly. Maybe they’ll attack, maybe not, but I have no intention of rolling over and showing our belly in submission if they demand our surrender.”

  “Aye, Cap’n.” She got on the com link.

  But when they tried to get away, they found they were caught in some sort of gravity net that disabled the plasma engine. Before they could find a way to hack loose, a tether crossed the thousands of kilometers between the base and the navy cruiser and affixed itself to the hull. Blackbeard had machinery to cut loose from a boarding attempt, but of course Apex had disabled the machinery in the savage mauling.

  “We need to send someone out,” Tolvern decided. “Do we have anyone out working the hull?”

  “No, sir,” Capp told her. “But Carvalho and some of his mates are suited up, ready to fight the buzzards if they knocked a hole in the ship and tried to come in.”

  “Good, we’ll send him out.”

  “Only, he don’t fancy them spacewalks. Says he feels like he’s falling.”

  Capp would know. She and Carvalho were long-time lovers who had hooked up during Blackbeard’s foray into piracy during the civil war. Some of the crew they’d hired on in slummocky New Dutch and Ladino ports around the
sector had been actual pirates, and a fair number of these had stayed on after the civil war wound down. Half of them were probably suited up in engineering alongside Carvalho, disappointed they hadn’t seen any face-to-face combat with Apex drones.

  “All the same,” Tolvern said, “he’s a man who knows how to get things done. I’m sending him out.”

  #

  Ronaldo Carvalho listened grimly as the head of engineering delivered his orders with a scowl and his silly walrus mustache waggling. What was with that mustache anyway? Didn’t Barker know it was thirty years out of fashion?

  While a second man checked the seals on Carvalho’s suit and noted his life support readings, Barker went over a list of obvious stuff, from how the pulse torch worked to warnings about where to run the tether. The armor was so riddled with holes there was a real chance of kicking a sensor or snapping off some other vital piece of equipment.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Carvalho said.

  “Do you? You don’t look like you’ve got it, you look like you’re barely paying attention.”

  “Because you’re wasting my time with all of this trivial stuff. Do you think I am slow because I speak with an accent?”

  “Shut up and listen, will you?” Barker said. “The mag clamps should work so long as you keep away from that gash in the deck shield. You’ll want to steer left of the number three tube, as well, and as for the main battery . . .”

  Carvalho grunted as Barker droned on. Pompous Royal Navy geezer. These Albion fellows with their stiff necks and their way of looking down on a man with the wrong breeding or from the wrong place. He just wanted to get it over with.

  “Now let’s talk about how long you’ve got to get this done,” Barker said.

  Listen, pendejo, you think I’m going too slow, you crawl out there yourself. Or better yet, shut your hole and let me get started.

  Instead of voicing this thought, he said, “I will move as fast as I can, Chief, but I have got to do it safe, right? Don’t want to lose my grip on the ship if these Chinos give us a tug with their tether.”

  But he’d misjudged where Barker was going.

  “You weren’t listening to anything I said, were you? What I’m saying is that you’ve got time. Don’t rush it. The base has neutralized the thrust from our plasma engine, but we’re pushing with auxiliary power, and they can’t haul us in too fast or they’ll yank themselves out of that nice little hiding place they’ve made for themselves. I want to send a piece of that tether down to the lab, and you’re going to cut it off for me.”

  Carvalho couldn’t help staring. “You want a piece of their rope?”

  “It’s not a bloody rope, you fool, it’s a self-healing carbon nanotube tether. There’s something weird about it.”

  “In other words, a fancy rope. Sure, I will cut you a piece.” Carvalho patted his “utility” knife, which bore a striking resemblance to a long, curved dagger.

  “Look, you can’t just hack off a piece. What do you think is going to happen?”

  Carvalho considered. “Well, I suppose with them pulling in one direction and us pulling in the other, if I cut it, the whole thing will vanish at about five hundred times the speed of a cracking whip. If I am holding onto the end, I’ll go with it. I’d probably let go, terrified, and then I’d float away in some random direction, curious about how long my oxygen would last.”

  Barker grunted. “I guess you do understand.”

  “You are far too literal, my friend,” Carvalho said, slapping him on the shoulder with one gloved hand. “But why cannot it be cut say, two feet above the ship? The rest whips away, and I will pry off the end and bring in what is left.”

  “I’m pretty sure it has fused with the tyrillium, if Smythe’s readings are correct. Anyway, you don’t want to touch the thing. Use this instead.”

  Barker brought out a length of what looked like a short, squat piece of pipe, except that it opened in the center like the vacuum canisters they used to shuttle mail packets around on Carvalho’s home world of Nuevo Tejás.

  Carvalho eyed it doubtfully. “And that is going to do the job?”

  “Haven’t you used this before? It’s for cutting off pieces of tyrillium for testing in the lab.”

  Carvalho took it and turned it over in his hand. “Oh, yeah. Seen it, never used it.”

  “It’s easy enough to operate, just don’t get your hand caught inside if you know what’s good for you.”

  Barker spent a minute showing Carvalho how to use it, and for once, the Ladino was glad to hear it spelled out in detail. Up until the chief started repeating himself.

  “We are wasting time,” Carvalho said. “I want to get out there.”

  “Again, there’s no rush. You have an hour. Maybe a little longer. Tell me if you need more time, and I’ll let you know how we’re holding up.”

  An hour sounded like plenty, Carvalho thought as he entered the airlock a few minutes later. But when the outer doors opened, and he stared into the vacuum, he froze in place. There it was, the endless void, the stars, bright and immobile against the sky. He couldn’t get over how they sat like sharp pinpricks of light no matter how many times he looked at them—they didn’t look like the glittering stars one saw from the surface of a planet, shimmering through an atmosphere.

  Barker’s voice came over the com. “You’re still tethered to the airlock. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, it is all good,” he lied. “I am getting my bearings is all.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll leave you to your work. I’m here if you need me.”

  That was a relief. Last thing he needed was Barker looking over his shoulder the whole time, giving instructions step by step. No, no, the left foot. The LEFT!

  Carvalho chuckled, and this steadied his nerves. He took a deep breath, willed his pounding heart to stop trying to hammer its way through his chest, and reached to untether the suit. Almost too late he remembered to activate the mag boots first. He muttered an oath in Ladino, the one about dogs and cats doing unnatural things to each other.

  “What’s that?” Barker asked.

  “Talking to myself. I will stop now.”

  And by “stop,” he meant turn off the outgoing com so nobody else could hear him cursing to himself or crying for his mama.

  Mag boots activated, he untethered and clomped out of the airlock. The Kettle lay to his right. It ate up a quarter of the sky, a coppery, glowing ball, but wasn’t the most impressive object in view. Even more dramatic was the ice field that swept from horizon to horizon like a rainbow of diamonds, bisecting the wider, but less bright Milky Way to form a giant, glowing cross. The ice field reflected against the surface of HMS Blackbeard, which looked midnight blue beneath its light, except where the more orange light of the planet pooled in the holes formed in the pitted tyrillium armor.

  Blackbeard was a Punisher-class cruiser, 489 feet from her engines to the tip of her deck gun, and in the docks looked like a long, sleek predator of the deep.

  Now she was a mess. Carvalho hadn’t seen a surface so pockmarked since the faces of the whores of San Pablo. He made his way slowly over the surface of Blackbeard, an eye out for the gashes and other obstacles Barker had warned him about. The canister floated on a cord next to his utility belt, reminding him of his purpose.

  It felt as though the ship were lying motionless, but that was all illusion because there was nothing close enough to measure himself against. In reality, the Chinos were dragging the ship toward their base. Better them than Apex, he supposed, but if he were the captain, he’d fire a couple of missiles down their gullet to let them know not to mess with the Royal Navy.

  Carvalho made his way midway down the hull, where he came upon a streak of black shadow that emerged next to a damaged torpedo tube. The shadow stretched like a thin, never-ending string from the ship hull toward the gleaming swath of ice crystals arcing overhead. It was wider up close than it appeared from a distance, but was still no thicker than a pencil. Impressive feat, hauling i
n a five-hundred-foot warship, struggling like the universe’s largest fish on a line, without snapping.

  Capp’s voice came through the com. “You all right, luv?”

  After several minutes of hearing nothing but his own breathing and the soothing murmur of his life support systems, her rough York accent jolted him.

  He flicked on his com so she could hear him. “I was until you startled me. Now I am floating free. I think I have damaged my thrusters—dammit, no way to get back home. Nice going, Capp, now I am going to die.”

  “Don’t be an arse,” she said cheerfully. “Barker told me not to bug you, but you’ve been out twenty minutes already and those Chinese fellows are still reeling us in. So if you wouldn’t mind getting to it already, we’d be appreciative down here.”

  Had it been twenty minutes already? These grav boots made slow going.

  “I am fine.”

  “I’m sure you are, luv. Once you finish wetting yourself inside that suit.”

  “Hardly. If you want to know the truth, I am admiring the view.”

  “Get us out of here, and I’ll show you a view that will make you forget the stars.”

  “Is this an open channel?” he asked.

  “I hope so! Make ’em all jealous. Tolvern is sending me off shift for some sleep as soon as we’re cut loose. But I don’t feel like sleeping. You know what I’m talking about, my bandido.”

  Carvalho grinned. The woman was insatiable. Well, it was good motivation to stop wasting time and get this dumb thing over with.

  He reached the tether. Even up close, it was as black as background space, only visible from the lack of stars in a straight line out from the ship. He turned on his helmet light, but even this didn’t penetrate the strange substance. He wanted to grab the thing, feel if it was soft or hard as steel, but Barker’s last words had been a firm warning. They didn’t know what it was, and he might just grab it to find out he no longer had fingers on that hand.