Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  The final hours and days of the last habitable planet in the system would have been a foretaste of hell—a hell that Octavio Catalan had sent Major Chen Zhou into.

  “Major Chen will be landing at what we think was the new system government center shortly,” he continued after a long silence. “There may be some answers there—and we should hear from the expedition to your old shipyard soon as well.”

  “I’ll send my computer techs over to the station,” Siril-ki said slowly. “I don’t know if they’d even have been able to establish new validation links with the Sentinels, but if they did…we may at least find the protocols to allow us to do so.”

  Octavio considered that.

  “Would they still exist?” he asked.

  “They’re capable of self-maintenance though not self-replication,” ki told him. “Without the central Validation Center here, they’d have had to improvise some kind of network amongst themselves.

  “They were capable of that,” ki insisted. “It would have required a minimum number of them, but there should be at least eighty-eight Sentinels left. They may require some repairs and assistance with their cores, but I should be able to provide whatever they need and convince them to join us.”

  He exhaled.

  “Join us?” he asked. “You mean we might be able to bring them back to Exilium with us?”

  “Of course,” ki replied. “That was always part of what I was here for. The Sentinels were older ships than the Escort Matrices but larger and more powerful vessels. We should be able to bring elevens of them back with us.”

  Octavio had very vivid memories of the Escort Matrices, AI warships so badly degraded by using the tachyon punch to follow a near-cee colony ship that they’d been almost animalistic in their tactics…but phenomenally powerful warships representing the heights of Assini technology.

  Eighty-plus bigger and more powerful AI warships? Sane ones, who’d had a tachyon verification system in place for their entire lives?

  It wasn’t necessarily enough to justify the entire expedition, but bringing those home with him would feel a lot better than coming home completely empty-handed.

  “I don’t think I’d drawn that connection,” he admitted aloud. “Let me know if you need anything from us.”

  “Transport to the station and portable power sources,” ki told him. “Which you’ve already arranged for, Commodore. We’ll be fine.”

  Less fine was the view from the shuttles as Major Chen swept over what had been Sina’s largest surviving metropolis. The Assini had never gone in for skyscrapers as humans had. There were only a handful of the arcologies they’d seen on Sia here, but they towered over the rest of the structures like blocky pyramids.

  Few other structures rivaled their height. Assini buildings were wide-based, usually dome-like. Larger buildings ended up looking like pyramids built of domes on top of other domes. The arcologies were the closest the Assini came to the blocks and rectangles still typical of human architecture.

  Age had been no kinder there than on Sia, and there had been no one coming in to clean up in the most easily salvaged areas. Even from the shuttles’ altitude, Octavio could pick out crashed and abandoned vehicles.

  Even Assini corpses were invisible at this altitude, but as the shuttles approached their targets and dipped lower, white shapes that could only be weather-stripped skeletons began to appear.

  “This city had only three or four million people when I left,” Siril-ki’s voice said in his ear. The Assini was remaining locked in ki’s section of the ship—much like Octavio riding his Marines’ cameras from his office.

  “There are new arcologies, but mostly they seemed to have expanded on the ground,” ki continued. “There might have been as many as a hundred million souls here. Automated builders allow things to be built quickly when needed.”

  “And there’s the government center,” Octavio said. It was only a guess, but the structure mirrored the images they’d seen of the original building on Sia. Six broad domes supported a seventh, much sharper, dome that rose into the sky as if announcing its presence.

  “Almost certainly,” Siril-ki confirmed. Ki’s translator had its emotional channels turned off again, Octavio noted. He couldn’t blame ki.

  “What should we be looking for here, Director?” he asked.

  “There would have been a fallback plan,” ki told him. “They had to have realized that Sina could suffer Sia’s fate. If they were clever, it would be clearly present, but…your best bet is the First Administrator’s office.”

  Octavio eyed the structure. If it had been a human facility, he’d have been certain that the official in charge would have had their office at the top of the central tower.

  “Where would that be?” he asked.

  “The top of the central tower,” Siril-ki told him, unknowingly echoing his thoughts. “Tradition would demand it.”

  For all that they were pacifistic herbivores who looked like a child’s multicolored image of a centaur, the Assini had a lot in common with humans sometimes.

  “Top of the tower, huh?” Chen replied after Octavio passed that on. “So, is the Director attaching emotional value to the architecture?”

  “What are you thinking, Major?” he asked.

  “This bird has VTOL capability and the gear to cut into a spaceship hull,” the Marine replied. “Why bother with landing and coming up the stairs when I can cut out all of the middlemen?”

  “Do it,” Octavio ordered. “This place was built after Siril-ki left; ki’s people can’t be too attached. And I’d rather not leave your teams digging around ghosts for longer than I have to.”

  “EMC isn’t afraid of a ghost world, sir,” Chen barked. “But I hear you. I’ll be in the First Administrator’s office in five minutes. Feel free to ride my shoulder in.”

  “I’ve been riding your shuttle so far,” he told her. “It’s damn depressing.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “I’ve seen worse but not on this end of the galaxy.”

  That sent a shiver down Octavio’s spine. There were very few people in Exilium’s military who hadn’t served in the Terran Confederacy’s military—and the Confederacy’s only enemies had been internal.

  The Marines had been on the wrong side of far too many revolts and “riot suppressions” for any of them to have made it out there with clean consciences. Even Octavio hadn’t made it out with a clean conscience.

  “We all saw things back home we hoped to never see out here,” he said quietly. “Our job is to make sure we never do. This wasn’t even people, Major. This was just…entropy.”

  “Well, it still looks like a ghost town of wrecked electronics and dead people, and I don’t much care if it was a solar flare or Fleet EMP bombs that killed them,” Chen said grimly. “Contact in five.”

  Octavio flipped to Chen’s shoulder-cam just in time to watch the shuttle hatch swing open in a flash of plasma jets. The shuttle was now connected to a space that easily rivaled any open-plan office designed by humans.

  “EMC with me!” Chen barked, charging across the hatch. “Shuttle five, break off and orbit the city. Other shuttles, touch down and deploy teams into the main floor. Let’s see what we can find.”

  There was no threat in the massive office. No robots, no traps. Just a wide expanse of black stone flooring that crunched slightly under the power-armored feet of Chen’s Marines. A single desk—and next to that desk, a wall of the same black stone that had a number of paper charts pinned up.

  “Those charts—get me visual,” Chen ordered before Octavio could say anything. Two Marines crossed the space in moments, cameras sweeping the charts.

  “Sondheim—see if we can boot up the computer and dump the local memory,” the Marine continued. “Every scrap of data, everything. I want to know what the old horse had on his desk.”

  “Sir, check out vector ninety-four,” one of the Marines told her. “That’s…that’s not pretty.”

  Octavio saw it at the same mom
ent that Chen did. There was apparently no chair behind the desk—because the piece of furniture had been used to smash through the safety-glass windows. It couldn’t have been easy, but Assini were strong when they chose to be.

  “Get me…” Chen trailed off with a sigh, then repeated herself. “Get a visual down. Let’s confirm what we all know.”

  “Yes, sir,” the closest Marine confirmed, stepping over to the edge of the building and extending an arm out. A camera in the wrist let them look down without leaning a two-hundred-kilogram suit of armor out.

  “Yeah.” The Marine’s voice was a little sick. “Our First Administrator jumped. Right spot, at least…but there wasn’t much left even before time had her way with him.”

  “If he had a lethal rad dose and felt like he was responsible for this…I can see it,” Chen agreed. “Tell me there’s something useful here.”

  “Couple of the charts are plastic,” another Marine injected, her voice excited. “Looks like system maps, Major. With a bunch of detail around one of the gas giants—is that what we’re looking for?”

  “Show me,” Octavio ordered. “But yes, that’s almost certainly what we’re here for.”

  The First Administrator of the Assini had smashed his window and jumped almost three hundred years before. But if his charts led the Republic’s expedition to survivors, he might have saved what was left of his people.

  22

  Ten ships erupted into the Skree-Skree System in brilliant blasts of Cherenkov radiation, and Isaac concealed a sigh of relief from Vigil’s flag bridge. His reinforcements were exactly on time—and he’d been feeling Dante’s absence for the last few days.

  His last report said that Scrutiny and her battle group had left Refuge alongside the three Vistan battlecruisers he’d been promised. That was arguably pushing his orders from the Republic, but the two new Vigilance-class battlecruisers had arrived shortly afterward.

  The Vistans had plenty of ships to protect their own system. Dante would see her final tour of duty at Refuge before the ship was sent home to finally be decommissioned.

  Isaac knew that Vice Admiral Anderson knew that was what was coming. Everyone did, really. There was no point to hanging on to an experimental ship that had been rebuilt from a broken keel multiple times, not when they had the Fortitudes to crew.

  He’d heard murmurs that the Senate had other plans for Dante than scrap metal, but no one had discussed them with him yet.

  “Contact Vice Admiral Wu,” Isaac ordered. “Let’s see how we’re doing.”

  Tachyon communicators were useful, but there was still a layer of human subconsciousness that added immediacy to knowing that the person you were talking to was there, in this star system.

  Vice Admiral Charity Wu appeared on his chair-arm screen, the small Asian woman smiling as usual.

  “Admiral Lestroud, it’s good to see you,” she told him. “Even if it’s from a few light-minutes away still.”

  “It’s good to see you, Admiral Wu,” he agreed. “And your ships even more so. What’s your status?”

  “Fortitude and Resilience are ready for combat in all respects,” Wu said crisply. “Unfortunately, Tybalt had an engineering failure en route. Yorick and Cordelia are showing unexpected signs of wear as well.”

  “Define engineering failure, Admiral,” Isaac said slowly. He’d have been told if the ship was lost and, hopefully at least, if anyone had died. But that suggested something significant.

  “Power conduits to her main gun fractured in a test firing while we were in regular space,” she told him. “That’s not supposed to happen, so we’re digging into it. She needs a shipyard before she’ll be combat-ready.

  “Yorick and Cordelia just need the chance to strip down and replace a number of the sensors and systems on their outer hull. We’re seeing more equipment failures in general than I’d like, sir.”

  Isaac grimaced.

  “We’re engaging in rapid implementation of hyper-automated production systems,” he said quietly, a string of technobabble that he at least understood. Unlike some of the details that came up when Dr. Reinhardt, his R&D head, started talking with Minister Shankara Linton, the Republic’s head of orbital industry.

  “That means we’re going to have problems,” he continued. “Flag everything that was defective and we’ll send the list back to Linton and EP-01.”

  EP-01 was Exilium Production Matrix One. Like the K-sequence AIs that helped run Isaac’s warships, they were a child matrix from D. Unlike the K-sequence AIs, the EP-sequence AIs were incapable of violence. They were exactly what the name implied: massive computers that ran automated production systems in close cooperation with human observers and forepersons.

  “The sheer speed we’re working with means we’re going to have problems, I suppose,” Wu conceded. “I’d rather not have a strike cruiser’s main weapon suddenly seize up on me, though!”

  “That’s why we test and exercise,” he reminded her. “We can fix that. I’ll check with the Skree-Skree, but we should be able to get Tybalt in for the repairs in short order.

  “We’re not going anywhere until the Vistans show up, and they’re still thirty days away,” he continued. Even if he’d made the decision to ask for reinforcements from Refuge before they’d headed to Skree-Skree, they wouldn’t be here yet.

  “I understand we should have Skree-Skree battlecruisers shortly, too?” Wu asked.

  “They’re leaving the yards shortly, but they’ll complete their working-up in another ten days. We won’t move before that, for the same reason I’m glad we found the problem with Tybalt’s zetta-laser in transit.”

  Most of his fleet was equipped with high-frequency grasers, but the brand-new strike cruisers and battlecruisers in Wu’s task force were armed with the same weapon the Escort Matrices had almost killed Shezarim with.

  The zettahertz lasers were terrifyingly powerful, and now Isaac had ten ships armed with them. The upgraded heavy particle cannon on his battlecruisers remained superior, but the edge was getting thinner—which was why each of the Fortitude-class battlecruisers carried two heavy particle cannon.

  “That gives us a month, give or take, to work up with the Tohnbohn and Vistan forces already here,” Isaac noted. “We’ll get Tybalt fixed and we’ll be ready.”

  “Ready for what, sir?” We asked.

  He smiled.

  “Sooner or later, Vice Admiral Wu, the recon nodes are going to find us that damn Regional Construction Matrix. And this time, the mechanical bastard is not getting away from us!”

  “We have an update from the recon nodes, Admiral Lestroud,” VK’s calm voice told Isaac as he settled into his office.

  “Any good news?” Isaac asked, pouring himself a coffee and considering the black liquid.

  “We have now surveyed twenty-seven systems around the line the RCM’s nodes drew us along,” VK replied. “Minor Rogue forces were identified in four of those systems, including two in-progress Constructions of apparently uninhabited planets.”

  “Constructed Worlds are always useful to locate,” Isaac allowed. It was easy to grow cavalier about their access to worlds that were basically paradises to humans. The terraforming Matrices, Rogue and not, had been very effective at their job.

  Approximately forty percent of all stars appeared to have had a planet the Matrices could Construct…and if they could Construct a world, they did. The three-hundred-light-year radius around Assini that the Matrices were present in had to contain thousands of paradises now.

  The hundred-light-year zone between Exilium and Skree-Skree contained over a hundred completed or in-progress Constructed Worlds. They were at the edge of the Matrices’ operation zone and there were dozens of paradises available.

  “None of the Constructions included even Sub-Regional Matrices,” VK noted. “There were also, since you asked, four previously Constructed Worlds and one world under Construction from non-Rogue nodes in the same twenty-seven systems.”

  “Have we m
ade contact with those non-Rogue Matrices?” Isaac asked.

  “XR-13-9 has an ongoing link with most Regional Matrices in the region,” VK confirmed. “As of our last update, they are sounding out the closest ones—including the one responsible for the encountered node—about an alliance dealing with the Rogues.”

  Isaac shook his head. The Matrices he’d dealt with had been horrified by the destruction of sentient species in the process of Construction but had been unable to do anything about it. They’d been stuck in a loop of conflicting core protocols until humanity came along.

  Hopefully, XR-13-9 would be able to convince the others that they had to act. Somehow, Isaac suspected that would be a slow process unless the Assini started flinging override codes around.

  Overriding sentient computers just seemed vaguely morally wrong to him. He’d take it over killing the Rogues if it became an option, but he didn’t want to do it to AIs that really just wanted to be left alone to do their work and not harm anyone.

  “I think we need to pull further back,” Isaac finally said aloud. “We’ve been scouting around the corridor they led us along, but they wouldn’t have led us anywhere near their RCM. Does our estimate of the construction timeline of the dreadnought give us a maximum distance?”

  VK activated the holoprojectors in the office and brought up the regional map.

  “That was being calculated into our sweep,” they confirmed. “Given the capabilities of the tachyon punch, however, the radius is easily a hundred light-years.”

  That radius lit up on the map, but it was almost useless. It reached almost the entire distance to Exilium one way and past the Sivar Governance in another.

  “And the RCM wouldn’t have gone that far, right?” Isaac asked.

  “Core protocols require completion of the Construction of a region before the RCM could move on to a new region,” VK said. “They should stay inside this area.”