Dragon Quadrant (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 2)

by Michael Wallace

  The fleet had gone silent since spotting the enemy fleet twelve hours earlier, but Drake needed to speak to his two most important captains before commencing battle.

  “Manx, get me Woodbury and Caites.”

  The two captains appeared side-by-side on the viewscreen moments later. Adam Woodbury was about thirty-five, with a thin mustache and a curly black fringe around his prematurely balding head. Between the hair and the narrowed eyes, he had a vaguely monkish appearance. Woodbury’s ship was HMS Repulse, an Aggressor-class cruiser, and, after Dreadnought and Blackbeard, one of the most powerful ships in the navy.

  He gave a curt nod. “Admiral.”

  Appearing next to him on the split screen was Rutherford’s old protégé, the young Catherine Caites, a year ago a commander of a small torpedo boat, but now one of Drake’s most important officers. Her ship was the older HMS Richmond, rebuilt in the yards with newer armaments and armor, but still not a match for Repulse. But what the ship lacked in combat effectiveness, it made up for in the aggression and intelligence of her commanding officer. Caites was fearless, her crew loyal and tireless.

  “Yes, Admiral?”

  She looked like she was positively vibrating with energy as she stared at him, waiting for him to respond.

  “I’ve prepared the first few moves of combat, which I’m sending over now, and transmitting to the other ships of the fleet. After that, you are on your own. I cannot risk the buzzards anticipating moves as I transmit first to you and then have you pass them along to your subordinates. That means we’ll shortly be operating as three independent forces.

  “Caites will take command of the destroyer screen and the missile frigates,” Drake continued, “and Woodbury will lead the other cruisers and the corvettes. I will personally hold the torpedo boats in reserve under my command. While Caites screens Dreadnought, Woodbury will charge at the refugee fleet on my signal. Don’t worry about the Singaporeans—what they do is of no consequence—but I want those lances in disarray.”

  “Yes, sir,” Woodbury said, looking pleased to be hurled so soon into battle.

  Caites, on the other hand, let a shadow pass over her face that Drake noticed at once. He dismissed Woodbury, but kept the younger captain on the screen.

  “Is there a problem, Caites? Speak frankly.”

  “I’m to act as a screen, sir? And Dreadnought is to be held in reserve?”

  “Woodbury is going to scatter the enemy, and we’re going to pick them off from a distance. But don’t worry, you’ll see some fierce combat. There’s another Apex fleet around here somewhere, and they’re going to materialize shortly.”

  “How do you know that, sir?”

  “Life is cheap for the buzzards—we’ve known that for a long time—and not just the lives of drones, but commanders, too. But more than that, there’s something ritualized in their fighting. Have you ever heard of the Flower Wars?”

  Caites shook her head. “Something from Old Earth?”

  “The Aztecs. The Flower Wars were about capturing prisoners for religious purposes, not seizing enemy territory. The bloodiest Aztec rituals required thousands upon thousands of victims. Prisoners were drugged and marched to the tops of the pyramids, where priests would cut out their still-living hearts. There were so many sacrificial victims that it was said that a cascade of blood would flow all the way to the base of the pyramid.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but what does that have to do with this battle?”

  “General Mose Dryz sent me data on a number of battles with Apex, some dating back several years. I’ve been studying them these past several days. Illuminating.”

  “Sir?”

  “Two things seem to matter to the buzzards. First, capturing the highest number of victims. The most aggressive action comes against planetary targets, where they can harvest victims by the millions. Second, the higher the status of the enemy, the more effort is expended in capturing it. Low status targets may be exterminated, but captains, commanders, governors, kings—never.”

  It was upon studying the general’s records that Drake understood Apex’s casual dismembering of the Hroom Empire. The Hroom had been overwhelmed and resistance was scattered—civil war, defeat at the hands of Albion, and crippling sugar addictions had already devastated their race. The Hroom were useful for securing large numbers of victims, but Apex didn’t find them as valuable as humans. And the Albionish, unbeaten and unbowed, were of higher value than Singaporeans.

  “At first glance, Apex tactics are complex and difficult to understand,” Drake continued. “But when they’re trying to lure high-value targets, patterns emerge. One pattern is the extended tormenting of low-value targets when it would seem easier to annihilate them.”

  “Exactly what they’re doing here,” Caites said. “So this is a trap?”

  “I believe so. They’re trying to attract a high-value target. And what is Apex’s most valuable enemy in the Dragon Quadrant?”

  “HMS Dreadnought. So they’re trying to catch us,” she added after a moment of thought. “You, specifically. They know we’re in the area, but our cloaking is too good for their long-range sensors. As long as we stay quiet, they can’t find us.”

  “The time has come to end that,” Drake said. “I’m going to send a subspace to Blackbeard, to Peerless, to the general. We’ll bring active sensors online. That will tell the buzzards where we are. In case it’s not clear enough, we’re dropping our cloaks and letting them see what we are and show we want a fight.”

  “If you’re right, and there’s another enemy fleet in the system,” she said, “they’re going to come right at Dreadnought.”

  “At which point you will no longer be held in reserve, Captain Caites.”

  #

  Woodbury’s cruiser force pulled away from Dreadnought a few minutes later. Cloaks came down across the fleet. Tech Officer Lloyd sent subspace messages to Blackbeard, Peerless, and the Hroom general to tell them that a fight was brewing in the Padang System.

  Throckmorton and Lloyd hammered away with active sensors, and soon enough, they found the hidden fleet. It was cloaked a few million miles away, behind a large wandering asteroid, several million miles distant from the system’s belt. The asteroid was more than 150 miles across and shaped like a giant boot, as if the middle part of it had been broken away by an ancient collision. The Apex fleet snugged in tight, jostling each other as they stayed on the far side.

  Albion’s sensors still sniffed them out. Of course, active sensors also gave away the location of the Royal Navy fleet. Almost instantly, the enemy ships broke away from the asteroid and moved in toward the action. They ignored Woodbury’s ships charging to relieve the refugee fleet, and swung toward the admiral’s flagship.

  It was a powerful force: seven more hunter-killer packs, comprising twenty-eight lances and two spears. Against them, the battleship HMS Dreadnought, Caites’s cruiser, four destroyers, three missile frigates, and nine torpedo boats.

  Apart from a few skirmishes, Drake had only seen HMS Dreadnought in action as an enemy, when he’d led a fleet of rebel cruisers against Lord Malthorne. The battleship had seemed almost indestructible from that vantage; even when Vigilant rammed the ship and destroyed itself, the sacrifice had only managed to disable Dreadnought, not destroy it.

  But the battleship had never faced lances. The small, maneuverable ships would never stand up to Dreadnought’s batteries, but they didn’t have to. They could jump in close, unleash their energy weapons, and dance away. But Drake noticed a weakness in the enemy fleet as it approached.

  “They don’t have a capital ship,” Drake told his first mate.

  Manx had been working quietly for the past twenty minutes, so engrossed in his work with the gunnery and the royal marines set up to repel boarders that he didn’t seem to be following the action developing on the screen.

  “No harvester ship,” Manx responded after studying it for a moment. “At least none that we can see, anyway.”

  On
the one hand, Drake was disappointed. He’d been itching to slug it out with one of the powerful enemy vessels since spotting them in the Kettle System. And if Dreadnought were truly a prize for the Apex commanders, why hadn’t they brought their largest ships to assure victory? The behavior didn’t make sense.

  Aliens behave like aliens.

  Humans, on the other hand, were entirely predictable. There was a nervous tension on the bridge, almost a buzzing, like excitement and fear shaken into a cocktail and swallowed too fast. There was a new element to the nerves, the knowledge that a loss meant more than simple death.

  Caites sent a message, urging him to charge at the enemy. He told her to hold. They’d already formed a defensive position, and were perfectly placed to either rush to support Woodbury or call him back to fight off the newcomers.

  The larger force of lances and spears was still closing, thirty minutes away, when Woodbury’s forces closed ranks with the smaller number of enemies feasting among the refugee fleet. Five corvettes and three cruisers came screaming into the action behind a barrage of missiles. The lances scattered, unharmed, but a missile struck a small refugee schooner unlucky enough to be in the way.

  Gases jetted from its hull, and the schooner twisted away, damaged and trying to regain control as it blazed away from the rest of the refugee fleet. A lance raced by on its way to gather with other Apex craft organizing nearby, and let out two pulses of orange fire as it passed the schooner. It was casual, almost like a man swatting mosquitoes while he aims his gun at a larger prey. The fire engulfed the small Singaporean ship, and it vented burning gasses that left a ghostly streak across Dreadnought’s viewscreen as it died.

  Woodbury divided his force in two, with his own Repulse and three corvettes chasing after the lance before it could gain the safety of its companions. Repulse now faced the flaming wreckage of the schooner hurtling in from one side. He had no choice but to target it with his cannon or he’d be hit. The Singaporean vessel burst into pieces.

  Woodbury’s prey jumped to safety before Repulse could target it from closer range, but now the cruiser and its escorting corvettes burst into the pack of lances trying to reform themselves. The navy warships launched torpedoes and veered away. Two torpedoes slammed into a lance that was too slow to evade, and a chasing missile obliterated the wreckage moments later. The other lances came after the rear corvette, and a spear and two more lances sliced up from below, but Repulse dumped a flood of bomblets behind them, driving off pursuers.

  Meanwhile, the other navy force, led by two cruisers, but only one corvette, targeted a spear that had been systematically demolishing one of the larger refugee barges. The spear had continued firing during the initial charge, but now its protective lances were gone, chased off. It rolled away from the barge, which was little more than a corpse squirting gas and debris, and turned its energy weapons at the lead corvette. The corvette returned fire with its laser and launched torpedoes.

  The two cruisers flashed by on either side of the spear, firing their main batteries as they passed. Zealand’s cannons landed a powerful series of punches. Shots cracked along the side of the enemy ship. But it was Formidable that delivered the killing blow. Her cannons ripped a gash in the spear’s stern, and a parting torpedo detonated against the damaged armor plating. There was nothing but debris when Formidable was done with it.

  Several lances chased the fleeing human ships. Unfortunately, the corvette, HMS Flash, couldn’t keep up. The enemy spear had damaged Flash’s engines before its death, and the corvette was now leaking plasma. By the time the other two captains realized and slowed the cruisers to come to Flash’s aid, the corvette had come under heavy fire. Other lances kept jumping in, closing to battle with that impossible speed that gave the enemy such an advantage.

  HMS Flash died in a manner befitting its name, going in a burst of light and several secondary explosions. The pair of cruisers beat a hasty retreat, pursued by several enemies. Woodbury swept around with his ships to give assistance before they could be overwhelmed.

  This was where Drake would have come lumbering in to finish the fight. Some of the enemies had continued forward together with the refugee fleet, but a large force had targeted Woodbury. Dreadnought and her support vessels had more than enough firepower to end it.

  But instead, Drake was facing a massive, hard-charging attack from the second, larger fleet even as Woodbury continued to battle several million miles away. Drake waited until the first lance jumped, then ordered Dreadnought to roll over and dive on the z-axis, like a sperm whale plummeting into the abyss. Change position, outsmart the enemy. The other human ships followed or positioned themselves for attack.

  One by one the other lances and spears jumped into the attack, firing as they surfaced.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tolvern led the others into the driving rain at the edge of the Morpho’s loading bay. Carvalho had turtled the truck before they entered the ship, which left it enclosed and dug into the mud. Sealed against water, it sent tendrils into the earth to keep from washing away, and would remain submerged until the flooding retreated and it could be excavated, but there was no sign of it now, nor of any other vehicle. The water was now knee-deep in the loading bay, and still rising.

  She stared out into the rain, then activated the com. “Where the devil is that truck, Smythe?”

  “Five minutes, I swear to God you’ll have it by then.”

  Behind Smythe came the sound of shouting and Nyb Pim’s high voice calling for something. It sounded like chaos on the bridge, and her heart caught in her throat. She wanted to demand an update, but there was no sense in that; all she would do was distract them from whatever urgent business had them occupied. Get back to Blackbeard, then worry.

  When Smythe was gone, there was nothing left to do but stare into the rain and wait for Rodriguez to send a truck. A strange green light penetrated the cloud cover, illuminating a sky that had been almost black when they’d discovered Morpho. The air rumbled as if with distant artillery, and crackles of electric energy sparked overhead. A thunderclap split the sky, and they threw themselves down. Tolvern came up spitting muddy water.

  “That ain’t no thunder,” Capp said.

  Tolvern didn’t answer. She was staring face-to-face with a pair of giant, bulbous eyes that emerged from the water just beyond the loading bay. Before she could lift her gun or shout a warning, the toad’s tongue lashed out and wrapped around her neck. It yanked her from her feet and dragged her toward its mouth, which yawned cave-like in front of her. The toad had a bony ridge instead of teeth, and she’d seen what it was capable of. Strong enough to mash the bones of another toad, it would crush her to pulp.

  I’m going to die, a calm part of her mind said as a smell like fish guts washed over her. Eaten by a giant toad.

  Gunfire erupted all around her. The tongue held on, pulling her underwater as the toad dove away from the attack, but it spasmed, and then she was free. She kicked her feet and her head broke the surface, and then O’Keefe grabbed one arm, Oglethorpe the other, and Capp her hair. They dragged her back into the loading bay. The water was to her thighs as she rose shakily to her feet.

  “Bloody hell,” Tolvern said, a quaver in her voice. Her legs felt like soggy bits of yarn. “Stay back from the edge. Hand cannons, those who have them. One of those things shows itself, you give it to him.”

  The floor shifted beneath them, and three of them fell.

  Carvalho was one of them, and he shook the water from his gun as he got back up. “The ship is sinking in the mud. We have to swim for it.”

  He was right, and though it didn’t seem likely that the mud was deep enough to swallow Morpho entirely, the water was rising more rapidly now. O’Keefe was the shortest, and the water was nearly at her chest. She held her rifle over her head and nervously eyed the water beyond the loading bay.

  “We won’t swim ten feet before a toad eats every last one of us,” Ortiz said.

  “We can’t stay here,�
�� O’Keefe said. “We’ll drown.”

  “Either way, we’re dead,” Ortiz said. “Blast you all, I should have taken my chances in the city.”

  Capp glared at him. “The only thing I bloody well know is that the whiner is always the first to go. That’s the bleeding universe telling you to shut yer gob.”

  “Enough of this,” Tolvern said. “Oglethorpe, you can swim with that bad shoulder?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Give me your gun. Quickly now, no arguments. The rest of you, follow me.”

  But as they headed toward the edge of the ship, prepared to dive into the water, a welcome sight greeted their eyes. A pair of headlights appeared, mixing with the strange green light overhead to create an eerie tableau, where the rain looked like shimmering, translucent curtains of emerald.

  The headlights belonged to Rodriguez’s truck. Unlike the semi-amphibious vehicle that Carvalho had brought into the city, this one had fully converted into its aquatic form, a lumbering shape that was half-bus, half-boat. It bristled with spikes, but at first glance, the precaution looked unnecessary; it was far too large for a toad to swallow. But as it pulled closer, Tolvern saw that several of the spikes were bent; something must have tried. A man sat up top, behind a turreted machine gun protected with a gun shield.

  The truck swung, motors heaving, and bumped against the side of the partially submerged spacecraft. A door swung open on top of the vehicle, and someone shouted for them to get inside. They scrambled up top, then lowered themselves inside one by one. Tolvern was the last, and hadn’t yet closed the hatch before the truck was motoring away.

  There were several other men and women in the back of the vehicle, as wet and bedraggled as Tolvern and her crew. She sent the others back and squeezed up front, where she was surprised to discover Rodriguez himself driving the truck. He hunched over the wheel, squinting out the window through the driving rain, and grunted a greeting as she settled into the seat next to him.