“Yeah, our paranoid friend doesn’t need to worry about us beating the com drone to the Siva home system,” Holmwood said dryly once the consular party’s senior leaders had gathered for a small meeting. “Assuming the ‘star-lanes’ follow a distinctive pattern, she’s got three star-lanes to pass through to get there, which will apparently take a minimum of thirty-six hours.
“From our perspective, however, it’s more important that the Siva System is nine-point-eight light-years away,” she continued. “That’s on nearly a direct line from Skree-Skree, putting them almost a hundred and thirty light-years from Exilium.
“And fourteen days’ travel for us.”
“The thirty-six-hour figure is garbage,” Faulkner noted, the old bureaucrat rubbing at the edge of his cybernetic eye. “It took them, what, fifty hours to send a message and get a response—with attached battle group!—back here?
“Assuming a near-miraculous turnaround time for any government, that leaves a com drone only taking twenty-four hours to make the trip.”
“The com drones are also much faster than their ships,” Holmwood said with a nod. “Thirty-six hours might be Ackahl’s transit time to the system, but I suspect the drone will be there in twenty at most.”
“So, our tachyon coms are faster, but they move damn quickly from our perspective,” Amelie said. “That suggests mutual value in tech trade.”
“Their speed requires a heavily surveyed initial area,” WK noted. “Given our own difficulties in isolating these star-lanes, even when we know their exact location, I calculate a high probability that finding a new system’s natural star-lanes is a complex and time-consuming process.”
“Internal mobility advantage, but a hell of a barrier for operations outside of known territory,” Holmwood said. “Hell of an engine for a defensive fleet, but that’s not the vibe these people have been giving off.”
“No,” Amelie agreed. “They’ve shown up with the equivalent of three Confederacy battlecruiser task groups to watch us—but part of that is that they refused to leave this system without at least two battleships watching it.”
“I’m not sure it isn’t mostly posturing,” Faulkner suggested. “If they have enough force to do this, they have enough force to make sure that the locals don’t rebel, because it’s hopeless.”
“Overwhelming force minimizes losses,” Holmwood said. “I’ve heard that before.”
Amelie chuckled. It was Isaac’s description of his preferred tactics against people. It didn’t work overly well against Matrices, from what she understood, but humans, at least, tended to surrender when facing ten times their own firepower.
He’d learned it from his mother—and the end of Amelie’s rebellion had included an epic example of the theory as well…when First Admiral Gallant had ambushed Isaac’s single battlecruiser group with the rest of the Confederacy Fleet.
“We’ll coordinate our departure with Ackahl, but we travel on our own time,” Amelie said calmly. “We’re certainly not going to play games about working out how to get through the star-lanes ourselves.”
“We may end up looking weaker than we’d like if we show up over a week after they’re expecting us,” Faulkner pointed out.
“There’s no ‘may,’” Roger,” she admitted. “We will lose face from that, but we can’t avoid it, so we deal with it. Once we trust our new friends, I’ll want them to have an accurate assessment of our abilities. Until then, well…I’d prefer to be overestimated when we’re trying to negotiate, but underestimating us has a value too.”
She smiled.
“And if they think we’re going to be pushovers, they’re going to have some harsh surprises, aren’t they?”
Some of the Vistans had made that mistake when Octavio Catalan had been trying to make peace between their factions so he could rescue them. They’d made the mistake of trying to take the soft-spoken ex-engineer hostage.
It had ended poorly for them. Unfortunately for the Republic, today Octavio Catalan was a long way away.
The Assini who had joined the Republic’s allies had fled a dying star, leaving behind all of their technology and hardware. It was entirely possible that the wreckage of their civilization held another answer to the problem of the Matrices.
Unfortunately, that wreckage was three hundred light-years away.
9
“Emergence in fifteen minutes.”
Lieutenant Commander Yonina Daniel had served Octavio Catalan as helm and navigation officer aboard Scorpion when they’d rescued the Vistans. She was a tall, heavyset woman with piercing green eyes—green eyes that were focused on Dauntless’s control panels. She wasn’t just helming the battlecruiser itself. For a journey of the length Dauntless and the special expeditionary force around her had taken, all nine ships were slaved to the battlecruiser’s control.
Octavio Catalan, now a Commodore in the Exilium Space Fleet and in charge of said expeditionary force, remained silent, watching Captain Aisha Renaud run her ship.
Like Daniel, Renaud had followed him from the wreckage of the warp cruiser Scorpion. Dark-haired and competent, she’d received command of the new-built battlecruiser the moment it had left the yards, the first ship built after Watchtower.
Octavio was still an engineer by nature, however high he’d risen. He’d pored over the designs for the new Fortitude-class ships, and the pale engineer with the short black afro agreed that the new ships were better than the weird transitional ship he’d ended up with.
But they’d spent over a year in space aboard Dauntless and he had grown to love every inch of his flagship like he’d loved his old warp cruiser.
Dauntless was still Aisha Renaud’s ship and he waited for the dark-skinned woman to give her orders.
“Any major concerns, Lieutenant Commander?” Renaud finally asked. “This isn’t a warp cradle holding the entire Exile Fleet, but it’s certainly a stretch for all of us.”
The warp bubbles were designed to be separate, but they’d made the voyage in month-long chunks. Allowing the ships to actually talk to each other had been a critical piece in making sure Octavio’s crews stayed sane.
Technically, Dauntless had encompassed her four strike cruisers and four freighters inside her warp bubble. It was quite a stretch and not one that the system was designed to manage. They’d done it by synchronizing nine warp drives to create a single bubble that was no wider or faster than a regular warp bubble but was enough longer to absorb the entire flotilla.
“Synchronizations are stable,” Daniel replied. “I’ve reviewed the Commodore’s data from when the warp cradle failed. I’ve been watching for those spikes the entire trip.”
Octavio concealed a smile. When Exile Fleet had first been dumped on this end of the galaxy, he’d volunteered to lead the contingent of engineers that had operated the warp cradle, a massive device that had taken the entire contingent of sublight ships into a grav-warp bubble.
It had been one of the most boring six months of his life in many ways, but he’d never done any engineering projects quite as different since. Not least since Isaac Lestroud had insisted on giving him a ship after that.
“I’ll advise Siril-ki and ki’s people,” he suggested softly. “I imagine they’ll want to be somewhere they can see everything when we arrive.”
Siril-ki was the leader of the Assini survivors and ki’d insisted on accompanying the expedition back to ki’s home system. Ki had fled with the rest of the refugees three hundred years earlier.
Octavio doubted that the obsession with seeing the Assini System was healthy for the alien AI specialist turned effective head of state, but he wasn’t an Assini psychologist. Siril-ki had brought one of those along, so he hoped the mental health of his passengers was well in hand.
“Inform me when we’re at two minutes,” he told Renaud. “I’ll be on the observation deck with our Assini passengers, I think.”
“I’ll make sure you’re fully updated,” D interjected and Octavio smiled softly.
/> Unlike the newer battlecruisers and the older ships that had been refitted, Dauntless didn’t carry a K-sequence AI. The original offshoot of XR-13-9, XR-13-9-D, had insisted on accompanying the mission to the Assini home world.
Octavio was glad to have them. Even if he was quite sure the K-sequence AIs were, well, more human.
The Assini were large, centaur-like creatures with a broad horizontal torso with four legs and a secondary torso and shoulders with two arms. They had sharp-looking beaks and birdlike heads but were covered in short, soft fur.
Siril-ki was a “ki,” a female/neuter in human parlance—humanity had tried using she/they as a translation for a while before the people working with ki had given up and used the Assini pronoun. Octavio wasn’t sure if that gender role, poorly translated as it was, had any relationship to the Assini’s actual physical sex. The aliens had, so far as humanity could tell, no distinguishing visible characteristics between their sexes.
The Assini leader was young for ki’s people, and he was told that was visible in the lustrousness of ki’s blue-black fur. Despite ki’s youth, ki’d been one of the last survivors of Director Reletan-dai’s staff, which had left ki in charge of the refugees the Director had led into a desperate flight.
“Commodore Catalan,” ki greeted him as he stepped into ki’s office. “Is it time?”
“We’ll exit the warp bubble into the Assini System in eight minutes,” he confirmed. “D is helping set up the observation deck so that you’ll be able to see as much as we can manage. There will be space for all of your people.”
“I appreciate your help setting that up, Commodore,” ki told him. “I know it has been centuries, but it feels like I left home less than two years ago. I—all of us, I think—must see Assini as it is.
“I will have my people gather. I would be delighted if you would join us.”
He bowed.
“I would be honored, Director Siril-ki,” he told ki. “I’ll meet you there?”
“As you wish.”
The observation deck was covered by heavy metal shutters during warp travel and combat—and the battlecruiser’s actual armor layer was underneath the open space that could look out into the stars. There was only so much you could do with shutters and transparent aluminum to armor a space, so the ESF—like the Confederacy before it—hadn’t bothered.
There were small trees and potted plants scattered around the space, making it more of a gathering place or meditation spot than a usable spot for astronomy. The transparent screens on the windows could be used to zoom in on areas and otherwise allow for amateur astronomy, but the observation deck was a luxury.
Humans needed to see the stars they traveled with their own two eyes.
Today Octavio was the only human in the space. Twenty-three Assini shared the space with him, fur ranging from Siril-ki’s blue-black to a dull orange on one of the junior researchers.
“Emergence in ten seconds,” Daniel’s voice said in his ear. “Moment of truth.”
It was easy to tell when a ship exited warped space. Being aboard a modern Exilium warp ship was a thousand times more comfortable than serving aboard Scorpion in the old days had been, but no living thing liked warped space.
It ended and the psychosomatic-but-still-quite-real symptoms of that dislike faded. Octavio blinked and yawned to pop his ears while the shutters swung open on the worlds his passengers had left behind.
He’d seen the images of the Assini System as the Assini had left it. Once, the star system had swarmed with life. Lacking an FTL system that could carry living people between stars, the Assini had developed their own system further than any human-inhabited system.
Ships had plied trading lanes between the homeworld, the terraformed colony orbiting farther out, and the swarms of colonies on and orbiting the gas giants’ moons. An unstable star had been the death knell for Siril-ki’s people, and the view he had now was very different.
Even from this far out, just past the orbit of the fifth planet, the star looked angry. The observation deck’s windows were automatically zooming in on the planets, and none of the five worlds between him and the star had the typical blues and greens of a habitable world.
The three innermost worlds clearly never had. One might have had a Venus-like atmosphere at one point, but all three were now simply balls of ash, surfaces burned by either proximity to the sun or repeated solar flares.
The two farthest out looked almost leprous. Zoomed in as the image of the two worlds the Assini had called home was, he could see where there had once been vast oceans and what might have been continent-spanning forests and plains.
All of that was gone now, lost in various shades of brown and gray. The worlds were long dead. A high-pitched keening began to echo around him as his guests followed his mental steps and looked at their homes.
They’d known. Octavio knew that they’d seen at least some of the results before they’d fled the Assini System. They’d known at least one of their worlds had been wrecked. To see it, though…to see dead worlds and empty space where you’d once seen a living, breathing system…
He understood their grief. It hit him and it wasn’t even his home.
Forcing himself past it, he focused on the gas giants. Assini had three of them, none quite as large as Sol’s Jupiter but all large enough to have colonizable moons and minable debris clusters. If there was any surviving presence here, it was almost certainly there.
There was nothing. No energy signatures. No fireflies of active engines. No splotches of green to suggest an emergency planetary Construction project applied to a moon.
“We had two entire worlds to grow food on, Commodore Catalan,” Siril-ki said quietly. He turned to look at ki.
Ki was almost frozen in place. Ki’d torn ki’s attention away from the display above them, but tension had locked ki into position. That would fade—it was a fear reaction in a species that had never been predators—but it didn’t look comfortable at all.
“I don’t follow,” he admitted.
“Our space platforms, even the colonies on the gas giant moons…none of them were self-sufficient,” ki told him. “Food, water…much of that was expected to come from Sia or Sina.”
Octavio shivered.
“Wouldn’t they have been able to rig up something?” he asked. “That kind of location has a lot of intelligent people.”
“I had hoped,” Siril-ki admitted. “My worst fear is that we perhaps did not lure all of the Escorts out after Shezarim.”
The half-built near-cee colony ship the Assini refugees had fled on had been supposed to also act as a carrier for a fleet of AI warships, mostly to protect it from the Assini’s previous generation of AI warships.
One of the flares had driven them mad, and the Escorts had followed Shezarim for three hundred years before they’d met the Republic of Exilium and its allies. If they’d stayed in Assini long enough to wipe out everyone here…
“We’ll find out,” he promised ki. “Whatever happened here, we’ll find out.”
“We must find the answer to the Construction Matrices first,” Siril-ke said firmly. “I would like to know how my people died and if it could have been prevented, but first we must stop the monster we unleashed on the galaxy.”
Octavio nodded.
The Construction Matrices, like the Escort Matrices, had gone mad. They’d assumed for the longest time that it had been due to the continual degradation of the tachyon punch, but when they’d finally been able to compare the code of the damaged AIs to the original code in Shezarim’s databanks, the truth had become obvious.
Many of the AIs out by Exilium had been driven mad by degradation, but the Escort Matrices and the Construction Matrices near Assini had not been. Someone had actively and intentionally corrupted their code.
Octavio was going to find those people. They’d killed untold trillions over the last three hundred years, and there was no way they hadn’t known what they were doing.
Someone had to
pay for that—and someone also had to make sure it stopped.
10
Orbit of Sia was even more depressing than anywhere else in the star system. Dauntless’s scanners were picking out the wreckage of dozens of ships and space stations.
“Just finding a clear spot to park us is going to be an endeavor, Commodore,” Renaud told him. “Sia’s orbitals were very heavily industrialized, and without someone to enforce traffic control, well…”
“I have the utmost faith in your crew,” Octavio replied, watching the battlecruiser slowly edge into a gap in the debris. “What are we looking at, Captain?”
“The leftovers of a planet that makes Earth look like a pre-tech backwater,” Renaud told him. “Lieutenant Commander McGill is trying to classify it all.”
Dauntless’s Captain shook her head and gestured to the hologram in front of the two of them on the battlecruiser’s bridge. Darina McGill was the tactical officer and was clearly still digging into the wreckage with her scanners, as more data icons were appearing in the debris field as Octavio looked.
“It looks like almost all of it went offline around the same time,” she continued. “McGill is seeing a lot of radiation damage. Electromagnetic-pulse burnout, collisions.” Renaud shook her head.
“So, a lot of the chaos from the original solar flare is still intact,” Octavio said. “That’s…not a great sign.”
“Wait, what’s that?” Renaud asked as a new group of icons appeared. “McGill?”
“I’m flagging what looks like inactive navigation beacons,” the tactical officer told her. “They’re cold now, but they were definitely installed after the initial flare, and it looks like there’s a small portion of facilities here that are newer. There was a way through, if nothing else.”
“Daniel, put us over that section,” Dauntless’s Captain ordered. “McGill, get me a closer look at it.”
Octavio waited. Renaud had just given the same orders he would have, so there was definitely no point getting involved in her crew.
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 7