The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

“Don’t touch me.” Li jerked loose. “Stand down, both of you. I’m warning you.”

“When the threat has passed, you’ll be released,” Anna said. “Without command, but released. We will find a suitable position for you that will utilize your skills.”

“Computer, open channel. Attention, base—”

Li stopped as he realized that the com link wasn’t responding. He rushed to the door, but it wouldn’t open. Sensing Megat stalking behind him, Li whirled and lunged for the man’s gun. Megat blocked him with his shoulder, then shoved him back toward the center of the room. Li ducked out of the way, stepping clear of his sister, who remained on the couch. So cold, emotionless almost.

He braced himself to grapple with Megat again. The man stayed back, wary. One hand rested on his pistol.

“Go ahead, shoot me,” Li taunted. “You’ll have to kill me sooner or later.”

“No,” Anna said. She came to her feet at last. “Don’t you do it, Megat.”

“I will if I have to,” the man said in a grim tone. “He’s a traitor.”

“Why?” Li demanded. “Because I wanted to hear what the message had to say? You call me a traitor because I didn’t delete it unlistened to? Because I had it translated?”

“It was what you did after that’s treason,” Anna said.

“I did nothing. I told the man who helped me to keep his mouth shut and I came directly here.”

“After responding,” she said.

“Responding? I haven’t done anything of the kind. If you want to know, I was going to suppress it, not that it’s any of your business.”

“We caught your message. We haven’t decoded it yet, but we know. So don’t lie, don’t play us for fools. You sent a response.”

There was heat in her voice, and Li wanted to glance at her, but was afraid to turn his gaze from Megat, who was still poised, ready to lunge. They wanted to take him uninjured, he knew—that was the only reason Megat hadn’t taken him down yet. They didn’t want the commander to look bloodied, to inspire the Openers to come to his aid when he was thrown into a holding cell. The whole sham would continue into a mock court martial, no doubt.

“I don’t know what you think I did, but you’re wrong. Have you heard the incoming message? Do you know what it is?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Jon,” Anna said.

“You don’t, do you?” Li let out a bitter laugh. “So you’re more wrong than you know. It’s a human ship all right.”

“So you think,” she said.

“Will you shut up and let me finish? It’s a human ship—I’ve heard the voice, listened to the transmission, and had it translated. It’s a dialect of English, and we broke it open.”

“What does it say?” Anna couldn’t hide the curiosity in her voice.

“It’s a distress call, more or less. It’s some sort of warship from a human kingdom called Albion, a small collection of planets on the far side of the Hroom Empire. They promised to help the Imperium.”

Megat seemed to relax during this, and Li took a chance to ease his own posture. He turned his attention to his sister and held her gaze.

“You don’t know any of this,” he said, “or you’d never have suspected me of turning into an Opener.”

“And you haven’t answered the message?”

“Of course not. There’s no point. The ship is crippled, weeks away from her fleet, and her captain only wants to find us to get repaired so they can scurry back home. Some vague promise of giving us aid, of course. I have no idea how they got Imperium codes—it might be a trap after all—but it doesn’t matter. They can’t help us, and so I’m not tempted to answer.”

This was not true, of course. Li was highly tempted. He could have easily swung the other way if he’d had slightly more confidence in the contents of the message.

“And so we remain silent,” he added. “I told one of the pair who helped me to keep quiet until the ship was past us, and I was coming back here to summon the other to give her the same orders when you and your friend showed up and threatened me.” Li briefly turned to glare at Megat, who looked troubled. The situation was very nearly back under control. “Now,
sister
, tell me why I shouldn’t have the both of you arrested? You’ve broken about twenty military regulations, any one of which means a court martial. Should I name them?”

Anna sighed and settled back onto the couch. “Sit down, Jon.” She glanced at Megat, who still had his hand on his gun. “Oh, will you stop that, Megat? We made a mistake, that’s obvious enough. My brother wasn’t the instigator.”

“Well?” Li demanded. “What is your excuse?”

“Jon, there
was
a message sent out. About thirty minutes ago. Someone sent a response back at our visitors. Tried to hide their tracks, but we found it. We got into communications and traced it back to you.”

Li narrowed his eyes. “Neither of you work in communications. How would you do that?”

“Neither does anyone else. Not really. They’ve been transferred elsewhere since there’s no one to communicate with, and all passive listening is automated.”

“So how did you get into the system?”

“The same way we turned off your com link and locked you into your room.”

“In other words, you’ve hacked your way through the base. Broken through protected systems, made us less secure in an emergency.”

“It was necessary,” she said.

“And you call
me
the traitor.”

“Anyway, we’re not the only ones, obviously. The originator of the outgoing message got in somehow, assuming you’re telling the truth.” Anna nodded darkly. “We’ll find out if you’re lying.”

“You know I’m not.”

“Then who did it?”

Li thought of Swettenham and his boast that he’d been a level one communications engineer. He’d be skilled enough to get into the system, especially if he had a programmer like Koh helping him. Was Li even sure that Koh herself hadn’t been the one to build the extra security layers that protected the communications equipment? She might have coded a back door.

Li faced threats from both sides. He’d been fighting a losing battle against factionalism for all these years, and now it had come to a boil, thanks to the message from HMS
Blackbeard
. The Sentry Faction and the Openers had each made a move. Which was more serious, the breach of the communications systems by the Openers, or the Sentry Faction physically attempting to remove him from command? And which was a bigger threat to the base?

Li made a decision. “Keep your gun, Megat.”

“Was there any question of that?” the man said.

Li ignored him. “You will stay armed at all times. I’ll open the armory and distribute weapons to a handful of others. There are people who have proven willing to undermine our security.”

“Openers,” Anna said. “The bastards.”

“Call them what you want, they cannot be allowed to continue.”

Anna remained lounging on the couch. “What is your plan?”

“I’m sick of your insolence. Stand up when you address me. I’m going to forget this incident, and chalk it up to an overzealous desire to protect this base, but we’re tightening discipline here, and that starts with the two of you.”

“What is your plan,
Commander
?” she asked.

Her tone was still short of respectful, but she rose obediently to her feet. There was something almost akin to relief in her expression, and Megat no longer looked hostile.

“I told you, Engineer Li,” he said to his sister. “We are and will continue to operate in silence. This Albion warship has nothing to offer us, and will not be engaged. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir.” Her tone was sharp.

“Megat?” Li demanded.

“Understood, sir. And agreed.”

“I don’t ask your agreement, only your compliance. Now, we will find and arrest those who have disobeyed orders and attempted unauthorized communication with an outside party.”

“Yes, sir!” they both answered in unison.

No sign of rebellion now. Apparently, all they wanted was a leader, a high priest for their religion of eternal vigilance in defense of the home world. Not that Li trusted them; their loyalty had returned too quickly, and would disappear again with the wrong word from his mouth.

Li nodded curtly at their response. Inside, he was still in turmoil, not only from the factionalism that had taken hold of the base, but from the Albion message itself.

We are aware of the fate of your people, and wish to help the survivors any way we can.
 

Chapter Six

Captain Tolvern hurried onto the bridge after receiving Tech Officer Smythe’s message on the com. Lieutenant Capp and Pilot Nyb Pim followed her, the latter ducking to get through the human-size doorway.

A return message. Salvation and redemption. Information blinked on the viewscreen, which Smythe was manipulating from his console. Seen from the right angle, Smythe was the picture of masculinity, with a square jaw and broad shoulders. He looked like a captain or the son of an Albion duke, but he was all tech geek when hunched over his console.

His junior tech officer was a quiet young woman named Lomelí, short and unimpressive to look at, but nevertheless one of the hardest workers in the entire crew. She worked the defense grid computer when not helping Smythe. Now she was bent over her own console on the other side of the tech station.

“What have we got?” Tolvern said, hurrying to take her seat while trying to make out the information scrolling across the screen.

In her excitement, she plopped into her old seat in the first mate’s chair. Capp had followed her in, and now snickered and moved as if to take Tolvern’s place in the captain’s chair.

“Thanks, Cap’n. I always did fancy this big seat.” Capp ran a hand along the armrest. “From prisoner to ensign to lieutenant. And now captain of my own ship. What would my mates make of me now?”

Tolvern fought down her blush of embarrassment as she jumped to her feet and took her proper place, while Capp settled into the chair she’d just vacated.

Sixteen months had passed since James Drake had put down Lord Malthorne’s rebellion against the crown and defeated a Hroom suicide fleet. They’d landed marines on Saxony to defeat a rogue general who’d seized control of one of the continents, but once that final gasp of internal conflict was settled, Drake, now at the head of the Admiralty, had turned the navy’s attention to defending the kingdom against Apex and forging an alliance with the battered remnants of the Hroom Empire. He’d taken the massive battleship
Dreadnought
as his flagship and given
Blackbeard
, his navy cruiser turned pirate ship turned navy cruiser, to the newly promoted Tolvern.

Sixteen months. When would Tolvern learn? When would it come naturally? She was too young, too inexperienced. Too in love with the former captain.

Act confident. Pretend. It’s almost as good as the real thing.
 

Tolvern almost believed that as she settled into the chair and studied the data Smythe was manipulating on the larger screen. The tech officer pushed the star chart to one side, shunted off the long-range scans and the scroll of jump calculations, and placed the coded message front and center.

Immediate disappointment was the result as Tolvern glanced over the stream of random numbers and characters. “It’s gibberish.”

“It only
looks
like gibberish to us,” Smythe said.

“Is there a difference?”

“We’re working on it. The only thing the Dutchman gave us was the communication protocol. That only tells us how to interpret a stream of data as a message. We don’t know anything else for now, but we’ve got to assume they’ll make it easy to decipher. Like we did.”

“You might not have noticed, Smythe, but we’re pressed for time here. How long?”

“Impossible to say. I’ve put Jane on it, too. We’ll give her as many resources as we can.”

Jane was the onboard computer, a limited-purpose artificial intelligence. It was her cool, aristocratic voice that gave the bad news when the engines were about to blow or the bridge was ready to suffer explosive decompression. Mostly she gave dire warnings about the deteriorating shields when they were under enemy attack.

“Give me an estimate,” Tolvern said.

“Three days? Plus or minus, of course.”

Tolvern grimaced. “I’m so glad I rushed up here for that.”

“Oh, no. You’ll be glad you did. I don’t know what it says, but there’s plenty I can figure out already.”

“You should have led with that, Smythe.”

“Some good, some bad. On the whole, I’d say it’s good news.”

Capp grunted. “Quit your messing around. You’re as bad as my gran—she was always trying to wind us up with her storytelling, and you’re doing the same.” She snapped her fingers. “Whatever you’ve got, spit it out.”

“Sorry, sirs.” Smythe’s fingers moved over the console. “I’ve got the location of the signal.”

Tolvern leaned forward. “Excellent. You’re certain.”

“Absolutely, it was easy enough to identify its source. Whoever sent it wanted to be found. There was no attempt to disguise the origin.”

Smythe wiped his hand across his console, and the main viewscreen became a swath of stars. His fingers moved, and suddenly they were looking at a copper-colored gas giant with mottled red and violet spots. The planet boasted numerous moons, some proper little planets in their own right, and others resembling giant rocky potatoes, fifty or a hundred miles in length. The gas giant also had a ring of rock and debris, composed of a broken-up moon or small captured asteroids, as well as glimmering ice.

“It’s hiding in the ring,” Smythe said.

“Where?”

“Not sure. Could be burrowed into one of these asteroids, or it might simply have fantastic cloaking technology. We won’t know until we get closer.”

“At which point they’ll start shooting, no doubt,” Capp said. “The whole thing is probably a trap.”

“Plot us a course,” Tolvern told Nyb Pim, before turning back to Smythe. “Keep looking. I want to find this thing.”

“I’m already working on that, sir,” Lomelí said. The short Ladino woman had been speaking softly, as if to herself. “Problem is I’ve got a blocked sensor array, and engineering won’t retract the ram scoops so I can get it out. I’m talking to Barker right now.”