Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2)

by Michael Wallace

  Her instincts warned her something was wrong as soon as she stepped onto the bridge. Capp was tense, Nyb Pim was busy with the nav computer, and Smythe was hunched over his console, muttering to himself. Lomelí stood by his side and looked just as agitated.

  “What are we looking at?” Tolvern asked, settling into her chair. The viewscreen didn’t show anything. “Have they jumped back in again?”

  “The Apex lance is gone, if that’s what you mean,” Capp said. “We bloodied them good, and it seems they’ve had enough. It’s these other buzzards we’ve got to worry about.”

  Capp manipulated the viewscreen. Two of the hunter-killer packs in orbit around Irlus had broken away from the enemy fleet. Had they been alerted by the lance that tried to board Blackbeard, or had they spotted the fighting from a distance? Either way, the aliens were now racing out from the planet.

  Tolvern was not alarmed. “They must be two days’ flight from our position. We’ll grab our quarry and jump out of here long before the buzzards reach us.”

  “Aye, that’s what I thought at first. Show her, Smythe.”

  The viewscreen changed to show a stylized map of the system, with the planets in orbit, the jump points noted, Blackbeard marked in blue, and the last known position of the Apex lance in red. The approaching hunter-killers were also marked in red. Blackbeard had changed its course and was now headed on an intercept path with the incoming hunter-killers.

  “Wait, why did we—”

  Before Tolvern could complete that thought, she saw the yellow spot that indicated Morpho’s position. The fugitives had veered their ship inward and were running toward the hunter-killers. Blackbeard had given chase.

  “They changed course during the battle,” Nyb Pim said. “I turned to follow as soon as we broke free from the enemy. Was that a mistake, sir?”

  “You did the right thing. If you hadn’t, we’d be a couple of hours farther away from Morpho by now. Still, it looks like we can catch them long before the enemy arrives.”

  “True,” Smythe said, “but look where we are when we do.”

  The tech officer shifted the viewscreen forward several hours, simulating the movement of planets and ships. At first glance, it still looked safe, but Smythe wasn’t done.

  “At which point it’s not like we can suddenly reverse our course. Nyb Pim has us turning around here.” Smythe showed Blackbeard making a wide loop. “At which point the hunter-killers will be over here. Now check out where we are five hours after that.”

  Even before he shifted the viewscreen ahead several more hours, Tolvern saw the problem. They would still have a lead on the Apex warships, but the enemy would have closed within range of their short-range jump capability, and that meant Blackbeard would face battle against eight lances before she got out of the system.

  “What the devil is Morpho up to?” Tolvern asked.

  “They’re on the side of the buzzards,” Capp said. “Far as I’m concerned, that settles it once and for all.”

  “I’m still not convinced. Apex sensors are poor, and at this distance they might not notice such a small ship. Especially not if they’re looking hard for us. Megat would know this too.”

  There was something else that was bugging her.

  “Those hunter-killer packs didn’t set out from the planet until we were already boarded,” Tolvern said. “They must not have seen us until it happened. Why didn’t the attacking ship tell them? Two factions again?”

  “Could be that the lance that boarded us was in the system, observing the harvester ship,” Smythe said. “They were close enough to spot us and tried to capture us on their own, looking for glory.”

  “Could be,” she agreed. It was only one explanation, but it answered a few questions, including one about the fugitives’ behavior. “So Megat has figured this out, too. He’s bluffing. Taking us toward the enemy, figuring we’ll turn tail and run. He’ll then slip out of here before he’s discovered.”

  “That’s a bloody risk though, isn’t it?” Capp said. “Going to get themselves killed if they’re wrong.”

  “If they’d continued on their previous course, we’d have captured them anyway,” Tolvern said.

  “Better us than the buzzards. They’re working for Apex, Cap’n. They’ve got to be.”

  “Either way, I’d love to ask those two some hard questions,” Tolvern said. “Ensign Lomelí, get me the gunnery. I want a definitive answer if we can cripple Morpho from this distance.”

  Lomelí called down. To the relief of everyone on the bridge, Barker was back in the saddle, albeit unsteady with the reins after taking painkillers for the splitting jump concussion, and more curmudgeonly than ever.

  “That’s a negative, sir,” Lomelí reported after the consultation. “Barker said it’s like shooting a mosquito. We probably won’t hit it from this range, and if we do there will be nothing left.”

  “So it’s a mosquito now, is it? Last time it was a sparrow.” Tolvern turned to Smythe. “Are we cloaked?”

  “Yes, sir. But as long as we keep on this course, Apex can hold us in their sights.”

  “Then it’s time to change course. Forget about Megat and Djikstra—we’re going to jump out of here.”

  “Back to the Hroom general, Cap’n?” Capp asked.

  “No, Lieutenant. We’re too far gone for that. And we need repairs more urgently than ever. Let the general do his business among the Hroom. We’re going to take this broken-down piece of junk to the yards and see if we can turn her into a Royal Navy warship. Pilot, chart us a course for Samborondón.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Let me get this straight,” Captain Tolvern said a few days later as she walked across the sweltering tarmac. “The name of the planet is Samborondón. The name of the island is also Samborondón, and so is the name of the city.”

  “Yes, that is right,” Rodriguez said. “The port, too.”

  “So I’ve brought my ship to Samborondón Port in Samborondón City on Samborondón Island, the Planet of Samborondón.”

  “Someone liked the name.”

  “And I suppose the name of the system is also Samborondón?”

  “Who has time for that?” Rodriguez said. “We just call it Sam.”

  It would have been funnier if he’d said it deadpan, but he couldn’t resist a wink at Capp, who returned a toothy smile. Tolvern sighed, and Carvalho just shook his head.

  It was a reunion of old friends. Tolvern, Capp, and Carvalho, plus Hubert Rodriguez, their old friend from San Pablo, who now ran a shipyard on Samborondón. He’d grown a thick mustache, but he was just as slender as always, just as grease stained.

  Blackbeard sat on the tarmac across from them. Scarred and pitted, it looked remarkably similar to the last time they’d used Rodriguez’s services. Since then, it had fought numerous battles, been battered, repaired, battered again, and patched up. This time was as bad as ever, and Tolvern sometimes had the impression that her ship was held together with band-aids on top of duct tape, all patched together with chewing gum and super glue.

  Hull integrity had been shaky enough to make Tolvern nervous about ordering the ship down through the thick cloud cover of Samborondón. Barker assured her that Blackbeard wasn’t going to break apart in the atmosphere, but Jane offered worrying commentary whenever Tolvern queried the individual systems.

  Samborondón was a wet world, with only ten percent of the surface land mass, and that broken into hundreds of islands, the largest of which was only fifty thousand square miles or so. Nevertheless, between the gravity and the climate, it seemed like perfect Hroom territory, which made it curious that many of the larger islands were unoccupied.

  Apparently, a short, but brutal ice age had buried many of them under expanding ice sheets and cooled others to the point where they’d been abandoned by the heat-loving Hroom. The final blow came when the ice sheets melted completely and without warning, drowning other islands. All of this had happened hundreds of years before contact with Al
bion, so for once, human sugar and human warships could not be blamed for the collapse.

  There were still millions of Hroom on the planet, but the empress had designated three islands as human resettlement zones. Tens of thousands of Singaporean refugees had crowded into the existing Ladino ports and trading posts, and the economy seemed booming, but tenuous.

  “I never thought I’d see you old pirates again,” Rodriguez said.

  “Pirates?” Tolvern said. “We’re no pirates, we’re Royal Navy. Look at these uniforms—even Carvalho is wearing the red and black.”

  “You’re somewhere between eight and twenty jumps from Albion space,” Rodriguez said, “depending on whether you’re being chased by angry Hroom death cultists or slinking through undetected. You’re as much a pirate out here as anyone.”

  Tolvern wiped the sweat from her brow. “The weather’s pretty much the same, though. The Hroom love their heat and humidity, don’t they?”

  “I’m bloody melting out here,” Capp grumbled. She’d finally got out of her cast, and kept stretching and flexing her left arm as if it were a newly installed piece of equipment and she were learning its controls. “Do you think we could get off this blasted tarmac before my boots melt and my toenails catch fire?”

  Rodriguez gave Blackbeard an appraising look. A lorry had come out to haul the ship into the largest hangar and was now fixing it with clamps and hooks. The yards weren’t as well developed as his old place on San Pablo, but from the cranes and tractors busy on the far side, it seemed that he had a good start.

  “I assume we can trust each other at this point,” he said. “That I won’t steal your ship and you won’t steal my services?”

  “As much as anyone can be trusted out here,” Tolvern said.

  “And how about payment? Are you hauling silver?”

  “No silver. Albion credit this time around.”

  “Which might not be worth much if the buzzards eat your home world,” he said.

  “At which point silver won’t do you much good either, will it?”

  Rodriguez gave a wry smile. “No, I don’t suppose it would. If Albion falls we’re in trouble out here too, and that makes us all royalists, I suppose.” He nodded. “Credit works. You’ve got enough of it?”

  “Assuming you’ll charge me the same as last time.”

  “Afraid the rates have gone up a bit,” he said.

  She grunted. “They weren’t exactly bargain prices before.”

  “You know how it goes. Labor is cheap enough—the Singaporeans work hard, and they’re desperate for wages—but it’s hard getting supplies this deep into empire territory, what with the Hroom fighting Apex, fighting humans, fighting each other. And there’s more demand for our services than ever.”

  “Meaning pirates and smugglers always have money?”

  “That they do.” Rodriguez gave an apologetic shrug that looked like it was concealing a delighted grin. “Anyway, I won’t cheat you. Don’t want to lose the Royal Navy’s custom. Never know when one of your big ships will come wandering in needing a quick repair.”

  “There will be a contract,” Tolvern said. It was not a question.

  “Of course. Your obligations and mine, spelled out in plain language.”

  Tolvern, Capp, and Carvalho fell in behind him as he led them toward his offices. They got a better view of the construction work going on at the yards. New pads, new warehouses and hangars. Plenty of people out working, in spite of the heat.

  “You’ve certainly landed on your feet,” Tolvern said. “You must have come out of San Pablo with some coin.”

  “I left just in time. It’s all ruins now.”

  So much left unsaid in that simple exchange. Most of the coin, as she’d put it, had been from work Tolvern and Drake sent him, to repair ships during Albion’s civil war. Rodriguez should have given her a discount based on how much money she’d shoveled into his pockets already. On the other hand, Malthorne’s forces had bombarded the Hroom continent with atomic weapons, which left the entire planet’s economy in ruins, including the human settlements’.

  Tolvern had been on the other side of the conflict from Malthorne, of course, but Royal Navy forces were still responsible for the devastation. She guessed she’d better pay the going rate.

  The yards were built on reclaimed territory from the high forests, as was the entire city of Samborondón. Looming mountain peaks encircled the city. Every time they cleared trees or graded land, they discovered ruined temples, baths, palaces, and other buildings from the long-vanished Hroom city, buried and preserved in mud from the periodic flooding. The trees here had massive trunks, with roots that dug hundreds of feet into the ground to keep from washing away when the waters rose.

  “I’m pretty sure this was a Hroom spaceyard at one point,” Rodriguez said. “The land is aligned too perfectly, and there aren’t any of the temple complexes that we’ve uncovered elsewhere. There are so many shrines and temples everywhere else that I think Samborondón was a holy city for them.”

  A dark look came over Carvalho’s face. He crossed himself and said something in Ladino, which brought a chuckle from Rodriguez.

  “Don’t be so superstitious, my friend. What does it matter which god?”

  “If you had nearly been sacrificed to the god of death, you would not be so relaxed,” Carvalho said.

  Tolvern pointed at a tan stone spire that was obviously not human in origin. “What’s that, then?”

  The building in question was about a hundred feet tall. It had a bulbous, irregular look to it, like a child’s sand tower at the beach, one handful of wet sand placed on top of the other and allowed to dry.

  “That is also Hroom, but more modern. Never a temple, but some kind of living space. It’s my office—you’ll see why.”

  Rodriguez led them to the base of the tower, which looked out of place among the human-built tarmac, warehouses, control towers, and massive open hangars. The thing was eroded, ancient looking, but utterly smooth on the exterior, with only two visible windows and no entrances other than the main one at the bottom, which was enclosed by a thick metal door that was obviously human in origin.

  It was blessedly cool inside, and the three Albion crew sighed in relief. Capp had unbuttoned her jacket on the tarmac and now flapped the sweat-soaked undershirt beneath, panting like a dog.

  A narrow spiral staircase climbed the tower, and they followed Rodriguez up. Rooms opened at every landing, with men and women working at computers inside. Cables and water pipes climbed and burrowed through the walls, looking ugly in contrast with the alien architecture of the building itself.

  “I don’t see any air ducts,” Tolvern said. “How do you keep it so cool?”

  “That is not my work,” Rodriguez said. “Whoever built this place knew what they were doing. It’s insulated by the stone, and there’s a water reservoir and natural air flow that eject waste heat through a funnel in the top. It’s really quite ingenious.”

  The tower tapered gradually as it reached the top, and the final room was small in comparison with the ones below. This held a computer, a desk scattered with papers, and a window cut in the wall, which was still several feet thick, even at this height. The window bent to follow the curve of the wall.

  “I regret installing this window every hot season, but it’s great now.”

  “This is the cool season?” Capp asked incredulously as Tolvern stepped up to take a look out the window.

  “There are three seasons here. Cool, hot, and rainy. This is the end of the cool and the start of the rainy season. Rainy is the worst. The toads have already started to come out.”

  Capp and Carvalho both asked about the toads at the same time, but Tolvern didn’t hear the response, as she was too busy taking in the view. The mountains were immense, frowning from a great height, and white caps crowned the highest peaks. Given the heat, it seemed impossible that it could snow, even at the tops of the mountains. How high were those peaks, anyway?

&nb
sp; Muddy rivers and streams striated the green valley floor, and Samborondón was mostly built in the high ground along their banks. The forest was dense in some places, cleared for farming in others, and fresh muddy gashes to the north of the spaceyard showed where both city and agriculture were spreading.

  It was more of an overgrown jungle town than a large city, but from the scattered Hroom towers and the hill-like mounds that looked suspiciously like temples reclaimed by the jungle, it had apparently once been much larger. Given the age of the Hroom Empire, the wars internal and external, and the ice age that had wiped out civilization on the planet, Tolvern wouldn’t be surprised if this valley had fallen into ruins several times, only to be rebuilt each time civilization staggered back to its feet.

  Was this the start of another rebuilding effort, or a false dawn ahead of a final collapse? The war with Apex would answer that question.

  “Anyway,” Rodriguez continued, “when it starts to rain, you get yourself inside right away.”

  Carvalho peered over Tolvern’s shoulder. “It’s raining right now. Your people are not going inside, they are still working.”

  Rodriguez glanced out. “This little drizzle? I’m talking about real buckets. They call it a deluge.”

  “How heavy are we talking?” Carvalho asked.

  “You’ll know it when it comes. Did you see the funny looking vehicles when you came in? No? We’ve got smaller ones that can handle a few feet of water, and the larger ones can go fully amphibious. There are times when the roads are so far underwater that you need a boat more than a truck. Anyway, I have a defense perimeter around the yards, which gives us a safety buffer.”

  “A defense perimeter against flooding?” Tolvern asked, confused.

  “Toads, Cap’n,” Capp said. “Weren’t you listening?”

  Toads? That didn’t sound very threatening, but after her experience on Hot Barsa, Tolvern was hardly a skeptic when it came to hostile native wildlife. Giant turtles, crocodiles with horny beaks, mosquito-like creatures the size of sparrows—whatever a “toad” was in this context, she was sure it wasn’t a small brown amphibian you could hold in the palm of your hand.