Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  The breasts, if Amelie understood correctly, meant the person on her screen was a ban, the child-bearing third sex of the Siva.

  “Greetings,” she told the figure. “I am Amelie Lestroud, Ambassador Plenipotentiary for the Republic of Exilium.”

  “I have been advised,” ban said. “I am Dorost, Keeper of the Keys of Peace. I am tasked by my Intendant to speak with you.”

  They sounded rather spectacularly unenthused with the prospect. Amelie figured ban’s title meant something close to her own Foreign Minister. Talking to strangers was ban’s job.

  “I came here with the understanding that I would be speaking with the Intendant directly,” she noted. She wasn’t entirely surprised to be shoved off onto a minister-level figure—assuming that was what Dorost was, at least—but some respect would be nice.

  “That may still happen,” Dorost conceded. “That is my decision to make, Amelie Lestroud. Convince me that you are worthy of His Greatness’s time, and I will intercede on your behalf.”

  That mouthful of crap didn’t make Amelie any more enthusiastic about making the effort, but no one had ever promised she’d only get to negotiate with people she liked.

  “I see,” she said icily. “And how much of what Commandant Ackahl and I discussed has been passed on to you?”

  “A frontier soldier’s opinions have value, Amelie Lestroud, but this is Aris,” ban replied. “The fate of worlds and stars ride on the Intendant’s words, and he is buried in the work of ruling the Governance.

  “Commandant Ackahl was right to bring you to us, but I must form my own opinions of your claims and positions before I speak to the Intendant.”

  Amelie studied the bureaucrat on her screen. Every Siva she’d seen so far appeared to insist on sitting in a throne on their calls. She couldn’t say too much, she supposed, given that she was taking all of their communications from the Admiral’s seat on Watchtower’s flag deck.

  “Very well,” she conceded. “I represent both the Republic of Exilium and a group of allied powers outside your borders, closer towards the galactic rim. We face an expanding crisis and are looking for allies.

  “This crisis consists of a group of self-replicating terraforming robots. While some of these robots are part of our alliance, a large number have lost the portion of their core protocols that prevented them from modifying worlds with native sentient life.”

  Technically, the core protocols had barred the Matrices from Constructing worlds with any life, but even the Republic couldn’t get themselves worked up over worlds without sentient life. Maybe if the Matrices hadn’t murdered untold billions they’d care, but as it was…

  “We have fought several factions of these genocidal machines and driven them back from the worlds of our allies,” Amelie concluded. “To deal with them on a more-permanent level requires an extended campaign and major resources—a burden more easily carried the larger our group of allies becomes.

  “Your worlds, Keeper of the Keys of Peace, are just as threatened as ours,” she stated. “Without knowing the boundaries of your nation, I can’t guess how far all of your territory is from the expanding edge of the Matrices’ reach, but the system we met you in is less than twenty light-years from where we have fought the genocidal version of the AIs, the ones we call Rogues.

  “For them, that is a handful of days’ travel at most. You have only been spared so far by the fact that they only enter systems in force to begin the terraforming process. The Rogues are almost certainly aware of your presence and are already calculating which of your worlds are most easily transformed.”

  “You think we are afraid of your horror story, Amelie Lestroud?” Dorost asked. “We are the Sivar Governance. Our fleets fear no enemy. These robots do not intimidate me.”

  Amelie concealed a snort. From what her people had told her, the Governance’s fleets were even worse-equipped to fight the Matrices than the Confederacy’s Exiles had been. A single recon node, the smallest of the Matrices’ armed combatants, had fought the equivalent of Ackahl’s battle group to a standstill.

  “Your fleets are not prepared to face this enemy,” she said. “You do not know their strengths or their weaknesses, and your fleets might well find themselves outgunned by an enemy they do not understand—even though I doubt they would be outfought.”

  She had no basis to judge the Sivar military one way or another, but it was an easy concession to make. Even with limited information, Amelie suspected that Ackahl, for example, would fight to the last to hold back a Matrix attack.

  But from the scans of the Commandant’s flagship, she would do so in vain. A single combat platform could wipe out every defender in the Sivar-Prime System.

  “You assume we are unready. That we know nothing of this threat,” the Keeper replied. “Do you think us blind?”

  “I think you look first to the other ends of your star-lanes, never realizing there is another way to travel the stars,” Amelie told ban. “If you know what is coming, you must know you are better to stand with allies than stand alone.”

  “Are we?” Dorost studied her like a hungry hawk, for all that ban’s head more closely resembled an armadillo. “Are you so certain you could help us?”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “We have technology you do not. Knowledge of this enemy that you do not. We gain from standing together, Keeper Dorost. Without us, your entire ‘Governance’ might fall into darkness.”

  “I will consider your words,” ban allowed. “Do you have data to support this?”

  “We have prepared a data packet summarizing the Matrices’ operations in this area and their overall expansion,” Amelie confirmed. “A three-hundred-light-year radius of the galaxy has been…reformatted to their standard, Keeper. If we are to stop them, we must stop them as a group.”

  “Send it,” ban ordered. “I will consider the data alongside your words. I will be in contact.”

  The channel cut and Amelie exhaled.

  “Without us, you’re fucked,” she told empty air. “Without you, we’re potentially inconvenienced.

  “Now, how do I make you realize that?”

  17

  Dauntless and her flotilla spent an extra two days at Sia, sifting through the wreckage of the Validation Center and a handful of other locations Siril-ki flagged, but the metal plaques were the only real clue they found.

  “Whoever was scavenging the planet was following the same logic we are,” Captain Renaud concluded as their ships slipped free from the safe zone they’d found. “Military installations appear to have been stripped clean. About the only thing that’s helped is that we keep finding more of those plaques.”

  “My people have very similar monuments to the dead as yours,” Siril-ki confirmed. “They would have removed the bodies where they could, but survival would have been the priority. Sina would not have gone untouched by the flare that destroyed Sia.”

  “But the source of the plaques says that Sina survived,” Octavio pointed out. “Survived sufficiently to either refurbish or build interplanetary ships to get here.”

  He’d been an engineer and he could do the math. Nothing that had been in open space near the two inhabited planets when the flare had hit had been usable. Even the orbitals protected by Sia had been wrecked.

  Orbitals and spacecraft on the “lucky” side of Sina should have been okay, and the flare shouldn’t have been enough to do more than cause a massive planet-wide EMP. The Assini’s second world would have lost their electronics, but most of the people would have survived.

  “It will only take us a few hours to get there,” Renaud told the other two in Octavio’s office. It wasn’t that small a room, but the presence of the Assini made it feel cramped. “What are we expecting to find there?”

  Siril-ki closed ki’s eyes.

  “More death,” ki admitted. “We have localized the source of the metal in the memorials. I can direct you to a specific refinery facility on Sina’s largest continent that we can presume was still operat
ional after the flare, but we’d already know if there were still people there.”

  “We’re following a trail of breadcrumbs at best,” Octavio said. “If we were any closer to home, I’d suggest that this was a waste of time. But we’re not, so we may as well keep looking. What do you expect to find, Siril-ki?”

  “Shezarim was not the only ship my people had that was capable of interstellar travel,” ki told him. “We took her because she was nearly complete, but there were elevens like her under construction.”

  Ki flexed ki’s hands, drawing Octavio’s attention once again to the asymmetrical number of digits. Five digits on the right hand, six on the left. The Assini were an odd race, one that he wasn’t sure would ever have evolved on Earth…but then, Sia had never been Earth.

  “Were any completable?” Renaud asked.

  “They all would have been, given the time and resources,” Octavio said. “They could have taken the parts from several to build a single ship.” He sighed. “They would have needed to go somewhere safe—but there were systems near here that the Sentinels had cleared, weren’t there?”

  “Reletan-dai didn’t trust the Sentinels after the Escorts went mad,” Siril-ki admitted. “Plus…we knew at least some of the ships were destroyed by the Escorts. We should send a ship to investigate, though. There will be no answers to the madness of the Matrices there, but there could be a sign showing my people escaped.”

  “Assuming, of course, that Reletan-dai wasn’t right to fear the Sentinels,” Octavio half-whispered. “But that is a worry for later. Renaud?”

  “Sir?”

  “Send Prospero to check out the colony ship staging zone,” he ordered. “They were out past the gas giants?”

  “Yes,” Siril-ki confirmed. “May I transfer some of my people over to your strike cruiser? They will have the access codes in case anything is still intact.”

  “Do it,” Octavio said. “The rest of us are heading to Sina. We’ll see what Major Chen makes of your refinery, Director Siril-ki. Maybe we’ll find some more answers there.”

  The only real answer they had so far, after all, was that the flare that had sent Shezarim fleeing the system had killed every Assini on their homeworld.

  Prospero detached from the rest of the flotilla when they made turnover. She kept accelerating as Dauntless and the others began to slow into Sina orbit. The strike cruiser, with her six Assini supernumeraries, would hopefully have more luck than they’d had on Sia.

  Sina, on the other hand, looked…much as its mother world had. Disturbingly so, in fact.

  “It looks like they started sweeping out the wrecked stations from the first flare and never finished,” McGill reported. “They’d been kicking stuff out of orbit and clearing space and building new stations, but they never finished the job.”

  Octavio didn’t have to ask why they’d never finished the job. He already had close-up images of some of the larger stations on his tattoo-comp, and he could see. He couldn’t tell the difference between the stations that had died in the first flare and the ones that had died later.

  “Can we tell how much later?” he asked, coughing past an unexpected lump in his throat.

  “Not really, from the space stations,” McGill admitted. “Once we’ve put EMC boots on the ground, the shuttles can do a lot more of the detailed work than we can.”

  She paused, studying the iconography.

  “I mean, the good news is that there’s still life down there,” she noted. “But I’m not seeing any power signatures or anything suggesting intelligent civilization at all.”

  “There may be survivors without technology?” Renaud suggested, Octavio’s flag captain throwing a cautious glance at the cameras passing the image of the bridge to Siril-ki.

  “It’s possible,” McGill hedged. “These scans would miss small-scale infrastructure, water-wheels, that kind of thing. But we’re talking full regression, the kind that…well…the kind that doesn’t happen in a technological society,” she admitted. “Despite the stereotypes, there’s always someone who knows how to make the tools to make the tools.

  “Even assuming that the flares caused them to write off high tech entirely, there’s so much that they’d be able to accomplish with just gasoline motors.”

  “You are being too optimistic,” Siril-ki injected, the flatness of ki’s translated tone suggesting ki’d turned off the emotional layers to the software. “Look more closely at your scan data.

  “You’re not looking at forests and animal life. You’re looking at bacteria, algae, fungi…minor-order life, life that would survive massive radiation blasts.

  “You’re not looking at a world that survived, Commander McGill. You’re looking at a world that hasn’t quite died yet.” The keening that came over the radio was harsh to human ears. “You’re looking at where my people died.”

  “We know,” Octavio cut in. “But there’s a chance some made it out and the only answers are here. We have to go down there, Siril-ki.”

  “Of course we do,” ki agreed in the flat tone of a mechanical translation. “Our answers are there if they are anywhere. Find them, Commodore Catalan.”

  Shuttles flashed into space again as Octavio watched. This time, it looked like Chen was leading the team heading to the orbitals, and delegating the expeditions to the surface to her subordinates.

  Octavio had no intention of micromanaging the Marines. He was still riding on Chen’s virtual shoulder, but he’d retreated to his office to do so in privacy. On Sia, they’d had hopes that the Validation Center would have some answers to their bigger questions.

  On Sina, all they were doing was scraping for clues, hoping to find an answer to stopping the Matrices hidden in the wreckage of a dead world.

  “All right, people,” Chen barked as the shuttle docked. “Scans suggest that this was the last station the centaurs built before things ended the second time. I’m not seeing any signs that anyone scavenged this place, and they put a lot of effort into building it.

  “Let’s find out why, shall we? EMC! Move out!”

  Octavio brought up the scans of the station they were boarding to see what Chen was talking about. The station was definitely newer than the others and… Wait. It had tachyon transmitters.

  “Renaud, did we notice the tachyon transmitters on Target Alpha and no one mentioned them to me?” he asked over a private channel.

  There was a long pause.

  “I’m looking right at it, sir,” she said slowly. “Am I blind?”

  Octavio adjusted his image slightly and added highlights before sending it back.

  “Yup, blind,” Renaud confirmed. “We did our initial analysis from a different angle, sir, and it was a lot less obvious from there. Why would they have tachyon coms?”

  “They were talking to the Sentinels,” Octavio told her. “Or trying to, anyway. I think we’re looking at a replacement Validation Center.”

  “If we are, sir, they may well have hardened aspects of it,” she pointed out. “And if they were remotely suspicious about what happened to the Escorts…those aspects may have included security.”

  “Are we picking up power signs?” he asked.

  “No…wait…fuck! Get me Chen!”

  18

  Octavio’s over-the-shoulder-camera view of what Chen Zhou was seeing didn’t show him the displays inside the marine’s helmet by default. It only took three commands for him to link into the tactical control network for the Marines—a network that was already starting to flash red warning signs.

  “We have power signatures moving inside the station,” Chen barked. “Shipboard is reporting a high likelihood of intact Assini defense systems. Fall back on your primary entry points and reinforce. Do not engage alone.”

  The red icons were, thankfully, “remote” contacts—ones that the Marines hadn’t collided head-on with.

  “Assume we’re facing something comparable to the hunter-killers on Shezarim,” Chen continued. Octavio was hearing what his Marine CO
was saying but not the responses. “Highly mobile, heavily armored, equipped with high-power lasers.

  “Set your pulse rifles for minimum dispersion, maximum power. Don’t fire randomly on those settings, either. We kind of need this place intact.”

  The red icons were following the Marines as they fell back. None of them had burst through walls and opened fire yet, but they were definitely pursuing.

  “Siril-ki,” Octavion said. “What are my Marines looking at? Chen’s figuring something like the hunter-killers.”

  “She’s right,” the Assini replied swiftly. “They’re remotes with minimal onboard intelligence, but that station never had a full AI Matrix aboard. They might be a bit smarter than the ones on Shezarim simply because they weren’t expected to have a Matrix for control.”

  “Do you have any codes that can shut them down?”

  “I’m sending a shutdown order already,” Siril-ki told him. Ki shook ki’s head. “No response. They’re not recognizing the code—it’s probably obsolete and they may have degraded past the point where they’d obey any stand-down code.”

  “How much power can they have?” Octavio asked.

  “Enough,” the Assini said grimly. “They’ll have been in standby mode. They might only have power for one shot apiece, but the power reserves for a single shot from their weaponry will allow them to move for hours.

  “Now they’re active, we could just withdraw an—”

  “CONTACT!”

  For a moment, Octavio wondered why he was hearing someone’s report to Chen…and then he realized the Marine had been shouting herself.

  A panel in the roof of the space the Marines had set up the onboard HQ in had swung open and three of the drones dropped out. As they did, the red icons on the Marine perimeter moved in.

  Chen was far from helpless. She’d made the same adjustments to her own weapon that she’d ordered her people to and she shot one of the drones before it even hit the ground.