Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

dipped her beak to his face. She came up with an eyeball. The man screamed again. The queen kept pecking away, the man kept screaming, and the general thought he would faint. She left the human before he was dead, moving on to a Hroom, from whom she casually tore flesh from his thighs. She shoved her bill up under another human’s rib cage, came out with his heart, and swallowed it. At least that poor fool was dead.
    Mose Dryz refused to look away. The next time he wavered, the next time his hand seemed to move of its own volition toward the sugar that would send him swooning so hard he’d fall into a bottomless pit, he would remember this moment. Remember the horror, the evil that these birds represented.
    The guards paced the edge, squawking anxiously. Other birds circled overhead, cawing, begging. The queen ate slowly, deliberately. At last she cleaned her beak on a stone, though it was still bloody when she returned her unblinking gaze to the general.
    Your people are defeated, General. Soon, the humans will be, too. Both races will join the Krax, the Zylif, and the others we have consumed. The cave-dwellers of the binary stars, the amphibious race that dared us to chase them to the depths of their home world. Species more aggressive than the humans, and civilizations older than the Hroom.  
    “Civilization?” he asked. “Do you know that word?”
    Civilization is the collection of flocks, tribes, and nations that make up an expansionary species.  
    “Is that what it means to you?”
    What else would it mean?  
    Mose Dryz hummed. “You have no word for civilization in your language, do you?” He swung his arm wide, a gesture of demonstration that was the same for humans and Hroom alike. “You found a small, unoccupied world and you’re here long enough to strip it of resources, but you won’t build anything.”
    We will build lances, spears, and harvesters. We grow drone armies and increase in status and power.  
    “Where are your temples, your palaces, your great cities?”
    The work of lesser races.  
    “Your music, art, culture, beauty?”
    Beauty is the destruction of your gods, the death of your princesses and queens. I will eat your empress myself. I will see the last Hroom dismembered in front of me.  
    “Go ahead, then. Start with the empress’s general. You captured me, you spat in my face. My brain is yours to control, isn’t it? Yet I stand here defying you. What are you waiting for, Queen Commander? Prove yourself by eating me, if you dare.”
    She fixed Mose Dryz with a sharp, predatory gaze. He sensed her anger that he was unbroken, felt her burning temptation to prove her dominance by tearing out his throat and eating his heart. He silently urged her to do it, to end his madness. Lenol Tyn would fly away at the head of the general’s fleet, collecting more sloops to use in the war.
    There is no glory to be gained in eating a Hroom drone. That is all you are, General. There are billions of Hroom, and you do not resist. I have more glorious prey in mind.  
    She spread her left wing. A small pouch was secured there by a plastic strap that wrapped around the joint where the wing met the body. She ducked her beak and pulled out a plastic vial from the pouch, not much larger than the glass ones Mose Dryz carried with him. Only this contained a thick, creamy liquid, not grains of sugar.
    She dropped it into his hand. He wanted to hurl it away, but his hand moved of its own volition and slipped it in among the sugar vials.
    “What is it?”
    My name is Ak Ik, queen commander, and I will have my glory. I will rise from queen to empress and lead the Greater Flock to an age of triumph and conquest. But first I must devour the human commander. Then, my ascendance shall be complete.  
    You will carry this serum to Admiral James Drake and force him to drink it.
     
     

Chapter Four
    Tolvern stared at the viewscreen. The Hroom commander stared back, unblinking. He was a priest, a cultist. The