The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) by Michael Wallace Read Free Book Online

consuming them. Captain Tolvern herself would be the crowning feast of the victory if she fell into their clutches.
    Blackbeard was still eight hours from the jump point when the lances vanished, only to appear again off starboard. It wasn’t the first time Tolvern had faced that tactic, and she was ready this time. She rolled and scored a light hit with the belly guns, then disrupted the path of the enemy ships with a barrage of torpedoes. Dropped several small mines. This bought her a few minutes, but the lances soon resumed the chase.
    Standing on the bridge with her tense, exhausted crew, Tolvern stared at the viewscreen with growing worry. Reinforcements should have arrived by now.
    Where are those damn warships?  
    Even as this thought came to mind, a ship flashed through the jump point ahead of them. The lances balked; it wasn’t one of theirs. Tolvern ordered Blackbeard onto the offensive. They swung wide. Power was shunted from the warp point engine to the laser batteries.
    One lance jumped away, and the other changed direction to steer clear of the jump point. That brought it across Blackbeard ’s line of fire. The Albion cruiser fired all guns. Tolvern expected the ship to vanish into the void like the other had, jumping away from danger. Instead, it tried to outrun and outmaneuver the larger, swifter Albion cruiser. Tolvern’s attack must have damaged its jump ability.
    The tables had turned. Tolvern overtook the enemy ship and pounded it until its engines broke apart, and the rest of the ship spun away, unable to maneuver. She chased after, eager to capture the first Apex captives alive, but the rest of the ship self-destructed. Tolvern and her crew turned back to study whoever had come through the jump point.
    The ship that had jumped through was an unknown vessel. Not Albion, not New Dutch, Ladino, or even Hroom. Nor was it Apex. It sat near the jump point, immobile, refusing all communications.
    Tolvern had no choice but to approach. She had to jump out of this system, for one. And while she had no idea if the ship was hostile or friendly, this was definitely a case of the devil you don’t know being better than the devil you know.
    What Tolvern learned changed everything.
    And nothing, she thought now, seventeen hours after the jump. She sat alone in the war room, reading the grim news from engineering. So much damage, so far from any friendly base. An unknown system, no inhabitable worlds. No ships or bases of any kind that she could see.
    Tolvern hit her com link. “Lieutenant Capp, bring in our guest. It’s time to get to the bottom of this.”
    #
    Capp appeared moments later, dragging the man into the war room. “Here he is, Cap’n,” she said. “If I was you, I’d twist his bloody arm and make him squeal.”
    Capp may have been an officer and second in command on HMS Blackbeard , but her accent was pure York Town gutter. That accent was endangered now that York Town had been destroyed in the last Hroom war, but she wore a cunning expression common to pickpockets and cutthroats everywhere in the sector. The shaved scalp and the Albion lions tattooed on her right forearm aided the impression, and a Royal Navy uniform did little to dispel it.
    Under other circumstances, Captain Tolvern, the well-bred daughter of a baron’s steward, would have had little in common with a woman like Henny Capp, but war bred strange bedfellows, as the old saying had it. They’d been through rebellion, piracy, war, and many other adventures and misadventures together, and there were few people Tolvern trusted more. Maybe only James Drake, when it came right down to it, but Tolvern’s relationship with Capp was less complicated than with the admiral. The relationship with Drake caused her equal parts pain and pleasure.
    The man Capp had dragged into the war room was a New Dutch captain by the name of Jan Djikstra. He was so tall he could have stood next to a Hroom without looking out of place, and his thin face