Sentinel

by Natalie Grey

  Ergix provided backup and negotiation when the people he’d stolen from got uppity, and now he sat at the center of a tidy little shipping empire.

  It was an empire, however, that had once been close to collapsing. A captain, too young and inexperienced to know what he could and couldn’t get away with, had stolen a ship full of ore meant for the Jotun government’s shipyards and their Imperial Fleet had gotten involved.

  The Jotun bastards might look like bags of jelly and they might keep mostly to themselves, but it had turned out to be a mistake to underestimate them. The bags of jelly had fine-tuned the practice of creating power suits for themselves and they also had a fleet of ships that were some of the most advanced in the universe—and Ergix’ damn-fool captain had fled directly back to headquarters with that fleet on his ass.

  Which was where Yennai Corporation had stepped in. Just when Ergix was sure he was done for, a few slim, agile ships had appeared between his base and the Jotun fleet. An encrypted conversation had ensued, and the Jotun fleet had dispersed without so much as a goodbye.

  The Yennai Corporation’s representatives had then offered Ergix and his ships membership. “Surely he could see the benefits of being part of their organization?” they had asked.

  He could.

  The thing was, they didn’t even ask for very much. Ergix sent a relatively minor cut of his income to them, passed along any news he thought was of note, and occasionally handled targets or provided security at their request. They never got in his face about how he ran Get’ruz, either.

  So when they said jump, he jumped—like right now, keeping an eye out for any human ship registered to the former Etheric Empire. He’d staked out the main routes leading away from where they had last been seen, and it hadn’t been long before they had dropped into his lap.

  “Sir.” Helix, his niece and one of the junior communications officers aboard Ergix’s flagship, swung around in her chair. “We’re being hailed by another Yennai-affiliated ship. It asks to be involved in the capture and reports that it is one hour away.”

  Ergix stared at her incredulously. “An hour? It wants us to keep this ship on the line but not capture it for an hour while it gets here? No. Close communications from it and give the information to Jeryx so he can keep an eye out for it. Whoever they are, we don’t need them interfering.”

  “Yes, sir.” She relayed the message and then pulled the earpiece away from her head with a wince. “He wants to speak to you, sir. He says it’s urgent.”

  “No,” Ergix repeated. “I don’t care what he wants. This was an Etheric Empire ship. The only way we’re taking it is with the element of surprise. Keeping it on the hook for an hour is not an option. Shut down communications and focus on the operation.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Request denied,” said the female voice from the Get’ruz. “Communications are hereby terminated.”

  On the bridge of his ship, Fedden slammed his hand down and snarled in fury and desperation.

  He had to be there when they captured the ship. He had to be involved. Tagurn, who was never worried by the people in charge, had been afraid of what this Torcellan might do—and Tagurn’s instincts had helped Fedden steer clear of innumerable bad decisions.

  Fedden was one mistake away from being an example to the rest of Crallus’ organization, and he knew it.

  “Throw everything at this,” he told Tagurn. “I don’t care what safety protocols you have to ignore to get us there in time, just do it.”

  Tagurn, for once, did not argue.

  He knew as well as Fedden did that it was no use surviving the trip if they failed to take the Shinigami.

  “All passengers, please take your seats and brace for impact,” Shinigami announced in an artificially pleasant tone.

  “Impact?” Barnabas strapped himself into the captain’s chair, then glanced at the speakers. “Shinigami—impact?”

  “It’s only wise to be cautious.” She was still using the tone Barnabas remembered from airline stewardesses back on Earth.

  It made his teeth ache. That had been one of the worst things about flying. “Please stop talking like that.”

  In answer, Shinigami sent the ship into a barrel roll. Barnabas closed his eyes as his body pressed against the straps of the harness.

  “Was that really necessary? What about Gar?”

  “Gar is better off if the ship doesn’t get captured,” Shinigami replied breezily. “And yes, it was necessary. They’re not trying to shoot us down, they’re trying to capture the ship.”

  “Oh, really?” Barnabas lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a surprise. A convenient one, I’d say.”

  “Why? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “If what you’re thinking is that this gives us an excellent chance to shoot them all down while they’re focusing on capturing us in one piece, then yes.” Barnabas gave a small satisfied smile. In a direct battle the name of the game was simple—take the other side down.

  Weapons would have been used immediately if their attackers had not wanted to capture them. However, they had not, and they were now at a disadvantage. Shinigami could use weapons and they could not.

  They would break eventually, of course. It would become too costly to keep trying to capture a ship that was taking down their fleet. In the meantime, their tacticians would be occupied by trying to maneuver into position both to capture the ship and avoid missiles, all the while performing the internal calculus of when to abandon their original goal.

  In a space battle distractions like that could easily be deadly, especially when one’s opponent was an AI with faster-than-organic resources.

  “Can I use the flamethrower?” Shinigami asked excitedly.

  “We’re in space, Shinigami.” Barnabas studied the readout. There were seven ships in the formation, all of them reading ‘YCS’ in their designation. ‘Yennai Corporation Ship,’ unless he was very much mistaken.

  “I was thinking about that. If I vent a little bit of air next to the flamethrower—”

  “No, we are not venting any of our air. This discussion is over.”

  “You are so boring. All right, hold on for a bit.” The last words were broadcast to the whole ship as the Shinigami’s jets rotated to send the ship tumbling end over end away from the enemy fleet.

  Without any clear shot at a lock point for grappling hooks, the enemy ships waited—only to realize their mistake when the Shinigami stopped flipping and shot toward them at high speed.

  “Wheeeee!”

  “Don’t ram them!”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll move!” Shinigami pushed the engines and practically purred in satisfaction. She didn’t exactly have what could be called sensations, but she had learned to interpret the flexing and vibrations within the ship in much the same way an organic life form would interpret feedback from their nervous system.

  Right now, the ship “felt” damned amazing. It was flying at the limits of its capabilities for the first time in ages, and between the thrum of its engines and the dual challenges of evading the enemy fleet and keeping Barnabas and Gar safe Shinigami was thinking that today was shaping up to be a very nice day.

  Plus, she got to shoot things.

  She launched a spread of missiles. The other ship was playing chicken pretty well, holding its course as she barreled toward it, but as soon as the missiles began to close the captain clearly recognized that their options were limited. The ship dove under the Shinigami, only to expose itself to the guns on the undersides of her wings. Three sections of the hull breached and began to vent before the internal airlock doors closed, and the ship spun out of control, unable to avoid one of the guided missiles that had locked onto it.

  “Boom,” Shinigami reported. Three of the other missiles struck home and the enemy fleet began to reorganize hastily. “Everyone hold on. The grappling hooks mean this battle is about ninety-five percent maneuvering.”

  “How do you calculate that?” Barnabas murmure
d. He narrowed his eyes at the screen. “Shinigami, if you are able to get into the center of their fleet and have several of them lock on, you might be able to pull them out of formation and into a collision course.”

  “I like that idea! Everyone keep holding on!”

  Gar’s voice came over the speakers, sounding breathless. “You can assume that I, at least, have not stopped holding on since this began. Barnabas, is there anything I could be doing?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Barnabas knew how upsetting it was to be in the middle of an event like this with no control over how anything unfolded and he felt a pang of sympathy for Gar. “Actually, perhaps you could see if you can find any information on these ships. They’re affiliated with the Yennai Corporation, but exact registration and provenance might give us an idea of who they’re calling in to mess with us.”

  “Right. I’ll do what I can.” He sounded pleased to have a distraction. Then, as several thuds reverberated through the hull, he asked with a deathly calm, “What was that?”

  “Grappling hooks,” Shinigami reported. “Okay, ah…hmm.”

  “I dislike when people dissemble.” Barnabas had a sense he knew what was coming, but he asked anyway. “Shinigami, what are you planning?”

  “Let’s just say it has a high probability of working.”

  “Let’s say more.”

  “No time!”

  “No time? Shinigami!”

  Shinigami opened the engines full-bore and the ship shot above the fray. She released seven full spreads of missiles behind her as she left the plane of battle. Yanked to the ends of their grappling hooks and then freed as the hooks popped away, the Yennai ships swung too close to one another. They tried to avoid collisions, and although some failed and some succeeded, none had the time or maneuverability to get out of the way of Shinigami’s missiles.

  On the bridge, Barnabas watched as the ships blinked off the trackers one after another.

  There was only silence, broken by the beeping of a final proximity tracker that hastily shut off.

  “What was that?”

  “A ship appeared on the radar but then disappeared,” Shinigami told him. “I’m scanning, but nothing is showing up now.”

  Barnabas swore softly. “What do you want to bet they had a ship waiting in the wings and now it’s running home to tell them what it saw?”

  “I should be able to see it, if so.” Shinigami gave a low growl of frustration and brought up the outside view on the screens. “Do either of you see anything you shouldn’t? It could just be designed to avoid scanning metrics and they’re hoping we won’t have eyes on it.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Barnabas told her a moment later.

  “Me either,” Gar reported. “Barnabas, is that supposed to be ‘either’ or ‘neither?’”

  “Either, I believe. I mean, either works. I mean, both terms could be used. You know, I really preferred Latin for ease of communication.”

  “The ship sailed on that one, man,” Shinigami reported. “You need to let it go.”

  “Mmm. Et Yennaiam delenda est.”

  “What?”

  “Ceterum censeo Yennai esse delendam. Before the Third Punic War, Cato the Elder would end all of his speeches in the Roman Senate, no matter his topic, by reminding the other senators that Carthage must be destroyed. Until we have dealt with the Yennai Corporation, we will have a similar focus.”

  “I…see.” Shinigami helpfully fed information from her data banks to Gar, who was presently trying to figure out the spellings of any of the words Barnabas had just used. “Well, then, what’s our next move?”

  “I’m thinking,” Barnabas murmured. “Find us a rarely-traveled route and I’ll get back to you.”

  In the rubble, hugging tight to a large piece of debris, Fedden’s ship tumbled and spun out into space.

  Tagurn’s quick thinking had saved them again, hiding them in the natural movement of the debris field among other similarly-registered ships. Fedden had seen the Shinigami pause as it was flying away and knew it was looking for the hint of movement it would have seen on its tracking system.

  It left, however, and Fedden stared at their own tracking system and struggled to breathe.

  This was a nightmare. They had appeared too late, or so he had thought, and he’d had visions of his painful death playing behind his eyes until he saw the absolute destruction wreaked by the Shinigami.

  Thank every god he’d ever heard of that they hadn’t made it to the battle. If the captain of the Get’ruz had waited for them…

  “We can’t do this alone,” Fedden declared finally. “We need more ships.”

  “And a trap,” Tagurn agreed. “You can’t take this ship on without stacking the deck, Fedden. And I think I have a plan.”

  14

  “I…think…” Gar pushed a piece forward on the chess board and grimaced. “Is that a legal move?”

  “Not only is it a legal move, you’re only four moves from—”

  “Shinigami.” Barnabas glared.

  “What? We’re teaching him. It’s a collaborative effort.”

  “You mean, I’m teaching him and you’re hamstringing me.”

  “It’s only fair. You know more about chess than he does. Theoretically. Your style of play disputes that, though. Yeah, I said that.”

  “I swear, when I find some way to punish AIs…” Barnabas made his move and closed his eyes. Between habit and his desire to win, it was taking great self-control not to scan Gar’s mind—or whisper suggestions, much the same way he would speak to an Ubuara.

  Would it work? Only experimentation could tell.

  That would be unethical, he told himself.

  Gar made the move Barnabas had been hoping for anyway. It was a tempting move, sliding a bishop out to put Barnabas’ king in check. However, it also allowed Barnabas to slide a rook down the center of the board and put Gar’s king in checkmate.

  Gar, to his credit, laughed as soon as Barnabas began to move the rook.

  “I didn’t look far enough ahead.”

  “It’s easy to get caught up in the moment,” Barnabas admitted. “Chess has been surprisingly…engaging.”

  Shinigami snickered. “He means infuriating, because he always loses.”

  “I do not always lose.”

  “More than fifty percent of the time.”

  “That is true, but only by a very small margin.”

  Gar, sensing that things might be getting dangerous, stood hastily. “I’m going to go, um…clean my room. Thank you for the game, Barnabas. I enjoyed it. I would be happy to play again sometime.”

  He swept out of the room before any chairs could be thrown and Barnabas smiled as the door hissed shut.

  “He knows we’re joking, surely?”

  “Joking, shmoking. Most people don’t think, ‘eh, if I break a bone, I break a bone.’ They try to avoid it, much like Gar tries to avoid you when you’re about to start throwing chairs.”

  “How do these people pass the time, I wonder? Anyway, I only threw the chair that one time because you were launching books at me.”

  “A more sensible alternative would have been to use the chair as a shield.”

  “Mmm. I’ll remember that for next time.” Barnabas went over to stare out of the window from the entertainment room.

  “Another game?” Shinigami reset the board hopefully. She had a new strategy she’d been dying to test.

  She had to admit that if it weren’t for the organic element the game wouldn’t have been any fun. She could analyze probabilities, but every so often Barnabas strung together a highly unlikely series of moves that seemed to occur to him out of nowhere. It kept Shinigami on her toes, as Bethany Anne would have said.

  She would never have told him she just liked the game, however. That was the sort of thing he would take as a compliment, and he already had a big head.

  He was so lost in thought right now that she had to repeat her question, and he shook himself as he looked
at the speakers.

  “I apologize, I was woolgathering. Not just now, I don’t think. We need to figure out where we’re going. I notice you’ve been taking us in the direction of the last known port of the Get’ruz.” Shinigami and Gar had provided a detailed report of the shipping corporation’s fleet.

  “Yes. Would you like me to take us there faster?”

  “I had something else in mind.” Barnabas settled into one of the chairs by the window and smiled when Shinigami projected her avatar in one of the chairs opposite. “You’re getting better at that.”

  The figure shrugged. Her arm lay along the back of the chair and one knee was crossed over the other. As Barnabas watched, she brushed her hair back over her shoulders.

  “I hadn’t realized how often humans made useless movements,” Shinigami remarked after showing off each of her recent additions. “None of you can sit still. Some of you are better at it than others, of course. You’re pretty good at it, actually. But all of you are in motion most of the time.”

  “Such are the perils of having a central nervous system.” Barnabas smiled. “And I had an idea about our next destination. It will be somewhat like finding a needle in a haystack, of course…”

  “I’m intrigued.”

  “Ah, and here I was thinking you would finish my sentence. We caught the tail end of two communications when they went into formation to attack us. One was broad-wave, and they followed it up with what was clearly a conversation. But the other was sent in a specific direction where, as far as I can tell, there is nothing.”

  “You’re thinking a secret base?”

  “Possibly. Or maybe a communications hub.” Barnabas smiled. “What do you want to bet Yennai Corporation has its own buoys to send and boost signals? And with our hook into Crallus’ communications, we have at least an educated guess of where we might find one of those.”