The Sentinel (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

came gushing out. She would reduce this cursed brood until there were only a few dozen of the gray, stone-like eggs left, then go back and pluck Sool Em’s princess feathers. Finally, a dark warning about killing every last chick and drone in Sool Em’s flock of ships. Ten thousand drones would be destroyed if Sool Em persisted in her defiance. It would serve as a warning to the other princess commanders in the flock.
    But suddenly, Ak Ik stopped. There, at the back of the nesting chamber, was an egg. Half the size of the gray ones, it was a shiny blue with tiny yellow speckles. Ak Ik looked around her and saw two more of the small speckled eggs.
    The queen commander turned back to Sool Em, her feathers shaking with rage. “You really cannot be serious. You dare?”
    “I dare. It is time to take my place among the queens.”
    Ak Ik launched herself into the air. She hurtled into the princess’s chest, and the two commanders rolled on the ground, squawking and tearing at each other’s feathers with claw and beak, heedless of the eggs that they were crushing beneath them.
    Sool Em was smaller, and should have given way, her strength and loss of status weakening her, but she fought on ferociously. A shiver of fear prickled the queen’s under feathers as the struggle continued. She felt the age in her wings, in her claws. But soon enough the younger bird began to give way. When the battle came near the three blue eggs, Sool Em gasped.
    “No, Queen Commander.”
    “I’ll crush them. Then I’ll tear out your heart and eat it, too.”
    “No! I demand the right to explain.”
    With a final squawk and batting wings, the younger bird got herself free. She moved swiftly to block the queen from crushing the three speckled eggs.
    The battle had left Ak Ik exhausted, shivering, and she had to pause to collect herself. Air whistled through the nostril holes on her beak. But soon enough, the feeling passed, replaced by a fresh surge of rage.
    “You have dared to lay royal eggs,” she told her daughter. “Do you call yourself a queen? That you will have your own princesses? That you will contend for the flock? By what right?”
    “By the right of victory, Queen Commander.”
    This brought derisive flapping of the queen’s wings. “Victory? You lost your lances, the humans escaped. You took no prisoners and devoured no enemies.”
    “The humans destroyed my lances—it is true. But I will have my revenge.”
    Ak Ik looked at the hallway outside the nesting chamber, where the princess’s drones huddled in a pitiful gray mass. “Your drones are demoralized. You cannot secrete enough power to keep them in line. If I ordered them to, they would tear you apart themselves, that is how little remains after your loss.”  
    “I placed an egg in their nest.”
    “What? Where?”
    “The human nest. I placed an egg.”
    Ak Ik drew back, startled at the claim.
    By this, Sool Em didn’t mean a physical egg, of course. She meant some scheme or trick. A betrayal set in motion, to be hatched in the future. Ak Ik guessed at what the princess was implying, but cocked her head suspiciously.
    “What kind of an egg?”
    “Come, Queen Commander. I will show you.”
    Ak Ik looked at the three princess eggs, sure that this was a lie to protect them. Sool Em could lay as many drone eggs as she liked—they were nothing. They’d hatch as sterile members of the flock meant to do the bidding of their commanders, to live and die at their whim. Genetically programmed over the generations to grow quickly, to accept the secretions of their masters, each was an attenuated clone of their mother, a queen, a princess, or—if the will of the Greater Flock ever anointed a supreme commander—an empress. It was the ambition of every fertile bird to rise to that position.
    Even laying drone eggs cost Sool Em, of course. With status, with regular feasting on the flesh of sentient beings, she could lay as many as eight eggs a day. Three of those would be