The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1)

by Michael Wallace

  Bits of glass struck him and water rained down from ruptured tanks as he squatted. The ground around him was a mess of burned vegetation, glass, twisted metal, and bloody water.

  “Commander!” Koh came to him, running at a crouch.

  “Head down!”

  Bullets came zinging in their direction, and they returned fire. It was all chaos, with men and women sprinting across the open space and bullets coming from everywhere. He couldn’t tell who was friend and who was enemy, only knew to shoot in any direction from which they were taking incoming fire.

  Smythe called from the command module, warning him to look to his right—the enemy was pressing in from that side, using smoke and fire as cover to advance.

  “Commander, listen to me,” Koh said.

  “Dammit, Koh. I’m trying to stay alive here. Why didn’t you just tell me over the com?”

  “Because they control the com.” Her voice crackled with frustration. “Listen to me, it’s a fake, all of it, all this. We’re not meant to win. Blackbeard—”

  Another fierce battle broke out. A company of Li’s people had advanced almost to the center of the room, but now fell back under heavy fire.

  Koh shook him. “Commander! I intercepted their message. I was listening. Captain Tolvern lied to us.”

  This got Li’s attention at last. He squatted behind the base of the hydroponic tower and reloaded his rifle while he looked her over. There was panic on her face.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tolvern actually used the word ‘diversion.’ That’s what our attack is, a diversion. Look around. Where are all the Albionish? There aren’t any! She lied, Commander. They’ve abandoned us.”

  Yes, he could see it now. The big Ladino—what was his name, Carvalho?—was to have rushed in with his reserve force. Taking advantage of the chaos, the blood spilled by Li’s forces, Carvalho would charge across the farm to the service tunnels on the other side, and from there assault Anna’s stronghold.

  “They left us,” Koh said. “Got us out of the way so they could run.”

  “But Smythe is still in the command module—he’s been coming on to give instructions. Capp is here somewhere, too.”

  Li looked around, but didn’t see the Albion lieutenant at first. A knot of fear clenched in his stomach, but then Capp came on the com, shouting to one of the companies to move into a different position.

  Li turned back to Koh. “You see!”

  Uncertainty flickered in the woman’s eyes. “I don’t know. I only know we’re not supposed to win. We’re being used as bait.”

  That part seemed clear enough the longer things went on without seeing Carvalho’s forces. What were they doing? They must have found a way to get behind Anna’s lines—it was the only thing that made sense. By why not tell him the truth? Suddenly, he knew why.

  “Tolvern doesn’t trust us,” he said.

  “We’re dying here. What more proof does she need that we’re on her side?”

  “Except my sister knew about the other attack, she anticipated it. Later, she hacked into my com link, which you and Swettenham swore was secure. We’ve got traitors in our midst, Sentry Faction sympathizers. They’re feeding Anna information. Tolvern lied to us so that my sister would concentrate her forces here.”

  “So it is a trap,” Koh said. “Your sister massed her forces here, and we’re going to die if we keep fighting without reinforcements.”

  “Possibly,” he conceded.

  “We have to pull back. Tell them, they’ll listen to you. Get on the com and call the general retreat.”

  A figure came striding through the smoke, waving one arm and shouting. The other arm thrust out at an awkward angle, held in place by a cast. It was Capp, urging them deeper into the farms. Men and women stood up all around Li, ready to follow the young woman’s orders, even if it carried them into the meat grinder. Capp herself was exposed, ready to lead the charge.

  Li could throw the attack into chaos by ordering a retreat. Fall back to lick their wounds, demand that Captain Tolvern tell him the truth, force the Blackbeard crew to take their share of the casualties. A few days ago, he might have done it.

  Li rose to his feet. “No. Here we make our stand.”

  #

  Tolvern reached the oxygen plant without opposition. Her company of five had met up with a second team, who’d also faced no enemies. Carvalho unleashed his hand cannon at the door that led into the oxygen plant, and it crumpled like wet cardboard.

  But when it was down, the captain hesitated. Bad idea to charge in shooting. The place would be packed with tanks holding pure oxygen. One bad shot and they’d be finished.

  “Hold your fire!” Tolvern ordered. “No shooting.”

  They charged. There was only one man inside, and he didn’t even have his weapon handy. By the time he’d recovered from the blast and rushed to grab his shotgun, Carvalho was springing at him. He grabbed the man with one hand, drew his knife with the other, and the mutineer lay dead on the floor before he had a chance to cry out.

  One of the other teams called on the com. They’d moved toward the power plant, and finally come up against determined opposition. If Tolvern had forces to spare, could she send them at once?

  “Give me five minutes, and we’ll be there.”

  First, she needed to get the oxygen turned back on. She located the instrument panel and called the command module for help. Smythe answered, and she explained what she was looking at. He talked her through it, and they soon got the systems reconnected to the command module. Turning it back on proved trickier. Unfortunately, Hillary Koh, Dong Swettenham, and any other Singaporean who might have helped had been sent away as part of the diversionary attack.

  Tolvern checked in on the other action while she waited for Smythe. “Capp, talk to me. You there?”

  “Aye, Cap’n. Here and still alive. Barely.” Her voice was strained, and gunfire filled the channel with static. “We ain’t been able to push forward none. Keep trying, keep getting knocked back.”

  “Don’t be a hero down there, it’s a diversion. Hold the line. Take defensive positions.”

  “Can’t do that, Cap’n. Bloody Sentry faction knows something. They been falling back. I’m worried they found out about you. If I don’t keep fighting, you’ll have them breathing down your neck.”

  It did sound that way, especially as word came through from the other Blackbeard crew that opposition was stiffening at the power plant. The enemy was rushing new fighters into the battle, and they had to be coming from somewhere.

  Tolvern got back on with her first mate. “I think you’re right, Capp. Keep pushing. One of us has got to break through.”

  “Aye, Cap’n. I’d rather die here than face them buzzards, anyway.” Capp cut the line.

  Tolvern still didn’t have the oxygen production back online, but the equipment was in their control, and there was nothing more to be done. Not from here. She left Carvalho and two others to guard it against counterattack, then took the other seven to join the push toward the power plant.

  By the time she arrived, the battle was in full swing.

  #

  Li’s forces clawed their way across the farms, inch by bloody inch. Bodies lay everywhere. No way to tell how many were Openers and how many were Sentry Faction. Even when he saw their faces staring blankly up at the air vents far overhead, he often couldn’t recall which side this man or that woman had fallen on.

  Eleven years of peaceful struggle, of jockeying between the two factions, of a crew divided over this one issue. Then suddenly, it erupted into civil war, a bloody conflict that left so many dead. Li recognized every face he saw. Every dead body struck him like a knife in the side.

  Once he’d made his decision, Koh didn’t try to talk him out of it. Instead, she fought like a lion by his side. She shouted at her comrades to press forward every time it looked like they would falter. The other side fell back, their gunfire dying, even as fires broke out everywhere, filling
the air with smoke and burning up precious oxygen. The vents tried to suck it away, but was there any oxygen left to replace it?

  And then suddenly the fight was over. The enemy was either in full retreat or throwing down their arms to surrender.

  “We have her!” Capp yelled from somewhere to his left.

  That could only mean Li’s sister. He sloshed through the water that was now ankle-deep in the room from ruptured tanks and fire suppression systems. He trod over tomatoes, crushed rice plants, and kicked aside other vegetation. The hydroponic farm that had kept over five hundred crew alive for year after year was a wreck, the carefully tended crops and machinery alike destroyed.

  “Anna,” he said, coming through the smoke to find Capp and two others holding a prisoner with her hands behind her back. He was angry, frustrated, and relieved, all at once.

  “Nah, this ain’t the one you want,” Capp said. She nodded toward the ground. “That’s the leader, that’s who I was talking about.”

  And there was Anna, lying on her side with her eyes glazed, staring without seeing. Her face had a few scratches from glass or other debris, and a superficial cut ran down her right temple, but otherwise, she looked fine except for that stare. Whatever wound she had, whatever had finished her off, was not immediately apparent.

  My sister, dead.

  Li gaped, unable to move. Koh came and touched his arm. Then Capp came next to him, brow scrunched and lips drawn together.

  “Yeah, I forgot who she was for a moment.” Capp cleared her throat and shifted from one foot to the other, as if uncomfortable with the whole thing. “I’m sorry. But, you know. Well . . .”

  “She had her chance to stop it and could have at any time. But she didn’t.” Li managed to shake his head. “Anna’s death is on her own shoulders.”

  #

  Tolvern got word that the battle had ended in the farm. Anna Li, the leader of the Sentry Faction, had fallen in the fighting, and with that, the opposition had evaporated. One of the surrendering fighters agreed to send a message through to the holdouts in the power plant. Meanwhile, Smythe finally got the oxygen plant back online.

  It was all over.

  Except that nobody told the die-hards in the power plant. Or rather, nobody could convince them. There were only about ten defenders in all, but every time Tolvern’s larger force tried to fight its way inside, gunfire drove them back out.

  Tolvern called for a limited retreat. For several minutes, they stayed in the corridor, crouched next to large pipes that ran along one wall, waiting for someone to negotiate a surrender. A few minutes after receiving word from the farms, three armed Singaporeans came running down the corridor from the lift. They were wheezing and bleeding from cuts and superficial gunshot wounds.

  They took one look at the Blackbeard crew, threw down their weapons, and surrendered. Moments later, Carvalho called urgently from the oxygen plant. Several more Sentry Faction holdouts had arrived and were trying to shoot their way in. Tolvern sent two companies to relieve him. Word soon came that her forces had either killed or captured this latest group. More news came of skirmishes throughout the base as Capp’s forces consolidated control.

  Soon, only the power plant holdouts remained. But they refused to surrender, even after several attempts to negotiate. Tolvern was exhausted, frustrated, and angry. She needed to act calmly, but she felt the steady drip of time.

  Blackbeard came back around to dock. Smythe went on board to scan the Kettle System: the enemy fleet was still headed toward them, and no Albion reinforcements had appeared. Neither was there another subspace from the Admiralty. Eight hours until the enemy arrived.

  Carvalho soon arrived armed with shaped charges. “Shall I blow it?”

  “We’ll give them one last chance to surrender,” Tolvern said, “and then blast our way in and kill whoever is left.”

  “The sooner the better,” he said. “We need to get back on Blackbeard before it is too late.”

  “It was too late the moment we flew into the system,” she said. “Shields smashed up and a leaking engine about to blow.”

  “Blackbeard still has her weapons. Let’s die on our own ship instead of this floating coffin.” Carvalho gave a solemn nod. “Also, please stay away from that harvester ship. That is not how I would choose to go.”

  Commander Li came on the com. He sounded exhausted, beaten. “It’s no good, Captain. I spoke to the ringleader. He would rather die than surrender and live in dishonor.”

  It was the most inane thing Tolvern had ever heard. What honor was there in staking out a position that would have them fighting against allies while their sworn enemy—Apex—closed in for the kill? Commander Li had been right. The Sentry Faction was a group of fanatics.

  Li continued. “I would suggest that we keep negotiating, but”—a pause—“but a scan of the power plant shows they may have opened the containment field. They may be attempting to flood the base with radiation.”

  That was it. Tolvern closed the channel and ordered her forces to the ready. Seconds later, Carvalho and two others had charges against the doors. They blew them open, and more than thirty Blackbeard crew charged inside.

  Tolvern swung her gun around as she got inside the control room, but saw no enemies. Banks of electronics sat undamaged on either side of the room, monitoring electric current, water flow, and valves. No signs of sabotage or even defenders. If she hadn’t been assured there was no way out of the plant except the doors they’d just knocked down, she’d have guessed that the mutineers had fled. But the people who’d been so recently shooting at her must be around somewhere.

  The command module reported no elevated radiation levels in the plant, but the containment field had definitely been breached. Tolvern’s forces pushed out of the control room and toward the plant itself, a rather standard nuclear reactor that supplied all of Sentinel 3’s power needs.

  They didn’t find the defenders until they reached the containment field. There, on the far side of a semitransparent, shimmering wall that separated the plant from the radiation inside, lay the bodies of nearly a dozen Singaporeans. They’d passed through the containment field and subjected themselves to lethal doses of radiation. And done so voluntarily. In the end, they’d apparently decided it was better to die than surrender and be forced to admit their mistake.

  Tolvern and Carvalho stood back a pace for several seconds without speaking. The dead men and women lay on the floor, all in a line, as if they’d come in, carefully taken their places, and waited. Others of Tolvern’s crew moved through the corridors and auxiliary rooms, looking for anyone who might still be hiding. They found no one.

  Carvalho spoke first. “There is one thing you can say, Captain. These people believed in their cause. I do not know whether to respect them or to pity them for defending it to the death.”

  “Come on, we can’t stand here gawking. We have our own cause to defend to the death.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ak Ik opened her wings to show her colors as eleven princesses fluttered into the perch that served as the command center for the ship. The other birds flapped their wings, bobbed their necks, and strutted back and forth to show their feathers. They boasted brilliant displays of gold and green and red.

  The drones in the perch cowered as the princesses bobbed and weaved, squawking and boasting while the queen commander herself waited with her wings open, but otherwise not participating in the display.

  The brightest colors among the princesses belonged to Sool Em, her plumage almost rivaling Ak Ik’s own splendor. Only a few days had passed since Sool Em’s humiliation and near death, when Ak Ik had crushed so many of her drone eggs and threatened to destroy her princess eggs as well. Those eggs were now at the end of their incubation period, and if Ak Ik permitted them to hatch, Sool Em would be a queen commander. Would split away with her ships and form a rival flock. Eventually, the two queens—mother and daughter—would come into brutal conflict.

  But first, this glor
ious battle against the human battle station and the wounded warship that had taken refuge behind its formidable guns. The queen commander’s fleet was only two hours from entering combat. Ak Ik could barely contain her excitement, and a loud caw came from her beak.

  This stopped the flapping, head-bobbing dance of her princesses. They shuffled and fluttered as they folded their wings, then lined up in front of the queen commander.

  The drones tittered nervously and returned to their work. They used beaks to peck at keyboards, squawked voice commands, and manipulated joysticks with claws and tongues. The crew on the perch of Ak Ik’s harvester ship had absorbed so many secretions over the years that they’d lost any ability to act independently. The chemicals secreted in the queen commander’s saliva had forged such deep channels in their brains that when given orders, they would carry them out intelligently, but with a single-minded purpose, unable to bend or deviate.

  “At least one of you will die during this battle,” Ak Ik told her daughters. “The humans will try to kill you first—it may be that you fall to the enemy guns. The princess or princesses whose spear ships fall will die with their drones. But if our prey does not deliver a mortal wound to at least one of your number, I will kill the weakest of you myself.”

  The queen commander lifted one claw and flexed it to show its tearing power. The princesses watched her with cocked heads.

  “The weakest will die, will feed the others, and I will raise another princess to take her place. Thus will the flock be strengthened, our power to destroy the weaker species of the galaxy unchallenged. Let none of my daughters show cowardice today, lest she be the one to fall.”

  They squawked their assent.

  “Should we emerge victorious,” Ak Ik continued, “my daughter Sool Em shall be made a queen. It was she who secreted the chemicals into the brain of the human, she who forced the battle station to reveal itself, and she will be given any captives taken from the warship. We will consume the so-called Singapore humans together, while sending a select number of Albion humans back to their fleet to open the path to our ultimate conquest of their kingdom.”