The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (17 page)

“Go ahead, let’s give your theory a try.”

Smythe stopped in front of one of the cells. “Capp thinks this fellow is the leader—the other captives seemed to defer to him—and she threw him in his own cell. The rest are crammed in six or seven to a room.”

Tolvern peered in through the small window. A strong-looking man sat on a cot, his hands still fastened behind his back. He was glaring at the wall. She checked her sidearm.

“This one looks like trouble,” she said. “Grab an extra zip tie in case we need to clip his ankles, too.”

Smythe went to the cabinet at the head of the cell block and patted a pocket of his jumpsuit when he returned. “Got it.”

“Keep wary,” she warned as she lifted her palm to the reader. When Smythe looked ready, she slapped the reader and stepped inside.

Her warning proved prescient. The instant the door opened, the prisoner sprang to his feet and charged at her with his head lowered.

Chapter Twelve

The prisoner had kept his hands behind his back, but that was a feint, and they weren’t restrained. Somehow he’d got his hands free, and he grabbed for her throat with one hand and her gun with the other. He was quick and strong, and if Tolvern had stumbled into the room blind, he’d have had her.

But she’d been tense, ready. She drove her knee into his gut, and he fell back with a grunt. Before he could recover, she had the gun out and pistol-whipped him across the temple. He went down hard, and Smythe jumped on top of him while Tolvern holstered her gun. Together, they wrestled him onto the cot, shoved him face down with knees in his back, and attached the spare zip tie Smythe had grabbed from the head of the cell block. They got his hands bound just as he seemed to recover his wits. He tried to thrash free, but got nowhere.

Tolvern’s heart was pounding, her face flushed as she took a step back. “You idiot, you think that’s the first time someone has tried to jump me?”

He shouted something back in Chinese.

Smythe picked up his computer and turned it over as if checking it for blemishes. He was breathing hard.

“Forget this jerk,” he said. “I’m sure we can find someone more cooperative.”

“This is a negotiation as much as an interrogation. He’s either their leader, or he’s not.”

But was he? Tolvern looked him over, taking in his dark, angry gaze as he stared at her hard enough to drill holes in her head. The plastic cuffs lay on the floor, chewed in two. He must be flexible to have tucked his legs up and got his arms in front of him.

There was a camera to watch the room, but that only helped if someone was monitoring the feed. And the truth was, studying prisoners was not currently the best use of resources.

“Translate a message,” Tolvern said. “Let’s see if he understands something simple, first. How about: we’re not here to fight you, we’re enemies of Apex.”

“I don’t think it’s going to translate ‘Apex,’” Smythe said.

“Okay, then pick some other words. The enemy birds, or something.”

Smythe tapped at his computer. “I have a suspicion that this is going to translate funny. That we’re here to fight the ‘war chickens’ or something.”

“War chickens, battle buzzards. The turkeys of terror. Close enough. He’ll get it.”

She took the console from Smythe when he’d finished and held it in front of the man’s face to show him the Chinese characters. He looked away with a disinterested sneer.

Tolvern’s face went hot. “You’ll look at this, or I’ll work you over, so help me.”

He still wouldn’t do it.

She slapped his face. When he looked up, shock and outrage burning in his eyes, she shoved the computer screen in front of him. He still wouldn’t look.

“Smythe, call Carvalho. Tell him to bring his knife.”

This time there was real heat in her voice, and maybe it was only the tone, but the man finally looked. His eyes moved across the characters, then he shook his head.

“What does that mean?” Tolvern asked. “Does he not agree, or does he not understand?”

And then the man spoke. “I understand.”

She looked down at him in shock. “What did you say?”

“I say that I understand your words and I can be speaking back to you.”

His pronunciation was perfectly correct, and even more strangely, he was speaking with her own accent. Tolvern had been born and raised on the small island of Auckland, in the Zealand Islands, and there was a sing-song quality to its accent that she’d recognize anywhere. Somehow, this man was using it.

Yet there was something slightly off in his word choice.
I can be speaking back to you.
 

“How did you do that?” she demanded.

He looked up at her with a toothy, predatory smile. “Everything we know about you already. Captain Jess Tolvern of HMS
Blackbeard
. We know these and others.”

Again, with the disturbing version of her own accent, coupled with strange grammar. “Smythe, what’s going on here?”

The tech officer didn’t look nearly as disturbed as she felt. “It’s your message. He must have learned from it somehow.”

“There wasn’t enough there to learn English. And he’s completely fluent.”

“Not completely,” Smythe said. “The good accent makes the word choice seem even stranger. Makes him sound like an idiot.”

A flash of anger from the prisoner. “You wait and see. Will be better soon.”

Tolvern drew in her breath, still unsettled. Something occurred to her.

“He’s learning from us as we talk. That’s what’s going on. He picked up the basics from my transmission, stole my accent, and now he’s perfecting his English with every sentence. I don’t know how, but he’s got some sort of accelerated learning thing going on.”

“It must be a com chip,” Smythe said. “An implant like Nyb Pim’s nav chip, except instead of handling advanced mathematical calculations, it’s connected to the language centers of the brain. Do you think we should, um, go into the hallway to talk?”

Tolvern shook her head. “You know what, I don’t care. Even if he does sound like me, it doesn’t matter. He’s got plenty of English as it is. In fact, I’ll bet Capp and Carvalho chattered the whole way up here. They gave him enough to work with.”

“Then what do we do?” Smythe said.

“We assume he understands everything and conduct the interrogation accordingly. If he gets more fluent as we go, so much the better.” She grunted. “Thank God he didn’t pick up Capp’s accent instead of mine. Imagine if we get into the base and they’re all talking like York Town drunks and pickpockets.”

“When you reach the base, it will be as prisoners,” the Singaporean said. His brow furrowed. “No, as . . . as . . .”

“No, we won’t,” Tolvern said. “We’ll come in on equal terms or as conquerors. Your choice.”

“Never.”

“What do you want with us? Why did you attack?”

“You led the war chickens to us.”

“War chickens!” she said. “That was a joke, you idiot.
Apex
. That’s the word you’re looking for.”

“Because of you. That makes you an enemy. Apex used you for . . .”

Again, he trailed off. Didn’t have all the words yet, did he, the cocky fool?

“You do know that your civilization is in ruins, right?” Tolvern said. “The survivors are fleeing by the millions, and we’ve been taking them in. I came out here to help.”

“Your ship is full of holes. It would not survive a fight. You cannot help.”

“This is one ship of a whole fleet. We have new tactics, new weapons. We’re working with the Hroom now. We only want to share what we have, use your resources to knock the buzzards out of the sector. Maybe wipe them out for good.”

“Fight here, with our people, not in your own systems.”

“Apex knows where you are, and they won’t rest until they wipe you out. Your battle station is compromised.”

“We were hidden before you came.”

“Stupidly,” she said. “Build a fortress and keep it hidden while your home world is destroyed? That makes no sense.”

He didn’t answer, so she pressed on.

“You’re blocking our transmissions. We tried to tell you of our peaceful intentions, but you were preventing us from doing so. Why?”

“We only demand your surrender. Nothing else matters.”

“You didn’t demand a damn thing. You tethered us and tried to board. And how did that work out for you, anyway?”

“A temporary problem,” the man said. “You’re caught and you can’t get away. We’ll come again.”

“And we’ll knock you back in the dirt when you do. How many of your men and women are dead or prisoners because of your stupid attack?”

“It doesn’t matter. We have more crew than you.”

“Not if you lose them at a ten to one ratio. It’s only a question of time until you can’t even defend your own base.”

“We will see.”

His English was improving moment by moment, the strange elements to his sentence structure vanishing, with less searching for words.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

She didn’t expect him to answer, but he defiantly met her gaze. “Jeremy Megat.”

“An English first name and a Chinese last name. Did you know that on Earth, Singapore was part of the British Empire? Albion was settled by the Anglosphere: Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and some Americans. Our ancestors were allies before. They could be allies again.”

“Megat is a Malay name, not Chinese,” he answered. “It was a mixed colony of people. And your people were colonizers on Earth. Exploiters of Malay and Chinese alike. They wanted us only as labor for their empire.”

Tolvern didn’t know the history, but it didn’t matter. It was hundreds of years ago, and carrying those grudges into space was ridiculous. She was getting nowhere, and had to figure out how to reach someone more reasonable than Megat.

“Who is your commander, and how can I talk to him?”

Megat didn’t answer.

“Who sent us the message?” she pressed. “The Fibonacci sequence?”

A twinge in his expression. “Nobody sent a message. Our base is a silent sentinel. It does not send messages.”

You fool, I can see you’re lying. It’s all over your face. Someone sent that message, and you know it.
 

Instead of voicing this aloud, she said, “I want to talk to your commander. If he tells me to my face that he wants nothing to do with Albion, that he wants to sit here rotting away, then we’ll leave.”

“You won’t leave. We are taking your ship and seizing your crew.” Megat smiled. “That is only a question of time, as you say.”

#

Tolvern returned to the bridge to discover it empty. Smythe and Lomelí were down in engineering, as was Capp, and even the pilot was out, down in the gunnery, using his nav chip to help recalibrate guns that had been knocked off their carriages. A tech had come in and stripped open several consoles, leaving exposed wires and hardware boards. Strips of cut cable lay across the floor.

The viewscreen showed the gas giant off starboard, around which both they and the battle station were slowly orbiting. A vast, swirling eye lingered below them, a storm that could have swallowed the entire planet of Albion whole. Other moons and asteroids reflected glints of the distant sun, and icy rings encircled the planet in a swath that arced from top to bottom on the viewscreen.

She changed the view to port. Now the Singaporean battle station dominated the screen.

Megat’s so called “silent sentinel” was a series of interconnected rings, with unidentified globules on the interior and two hexagonal structures stacked on top of each other on the exterior, glowing a cool blue like backlit sapphires. Turn off the filter that was cutting out the sun, and that light would disappear. The entire structure would look like background space, melting into whatever it was viewed against. And the illusion wasn’t purely visual; there was spectacular cloaking technology that hid them from passive and active scanning, too. The Admiralty would love to get its hands on that tech.

The station was large, maybe three times the diameter of
Blackbeard
, bow to stern. Plenty of living space in those globules, and maybe in the hexagons, too, although that was where the main weapons had appeared, bristling, to wipe out the Apex lances in a spectacular display of firepower.

But unlike Royal Navy fortresses, which were dug into captured asteroids or small moons, the whole structure was artificial, and frankly, looked fragile. No doubt that was illusory, but it seemed to rely on secrecy and overwhelming firepower, not defense. Sure looked like it could use a navy task force to keep the buzzards at arm’s length.

Why were they so unwilling to accept help? It didn’t make sense.

And then there was that message she’d received. The Fibonacci sequence. It was almost like the Singaporeans were trying to lure
Blackbeard
in all along, trying to snare her for their own purposes. Strip her for parts and crew, apparently. Except was that worth blowing her secrecy? Because Apex had also learned the location of the battle station, as it turned out.

“You’re schizophrenic, my friend,” she said, as if the battle station were a person standing in front of her. “You don’t know what you want, do you?”

Barker called from the engineering bay. “I still need a couple of days, Captain. But I can keep us from explosive decompression, that’s something. Do you want me to send someone out to do some cutting?”

“I’d rather not tip our hand until we’re ready.”

“Not talking about the tether or the gravity net. But we’ve got these hoses sticking out of us—so long as they’re attached, we’re at risk of more boarders. If I cut ’em off, that gives me more crew to work with. No need for a bunch of our best workers to stand around holding rifles and picking their noses.”

“Hold on, let me take a look.”

Tolvern, still alone on the bridge, manipulated the display. There was no way to get a view of what
Blackbeard
looked like gripped in the battle station’s embrace without sending out a sensor probe, which she didn’t want to do. But she brought several cameras in for a tighter view and could see a stretch of the hull, at least.

Three large tubes plunged into
Blackbeard
, snaking over from one of the globules attached to the station’s outermost ring. It looked parasitic, like the station was a giant creature attaching a trio of proboscises to drain its prey of fluids.