That was a smaller cube, roughly seventy light-years a side. It unfortunately included the homeworlds of the Vistans and the Skree-Skree. The Tohnbohn were just outside that cube, as were the Sivar.
Not far outside, though. Once the Rogue was finished with its current zone, those stars would be next on the list. The Tohnbohn recognized that, at least.
It was part of why they were sending him more reinforcements. One battlecruiser and enough escorts to bring all three battle groups to full strength. It was more than he’d expected.
More relevant to the moment, though, was that the entire cube was contained inside the distance that could have deployed the dreadnought. That was no real surprise to Isaac, sadly.
“I don’t suppose the fact that we haven’t seen their lightspeed emissions helps us, does it?” he asked. “How mobile is an RCM?”
“The Matrix itself is extremely mobile. External shipyard complexes and defenses, however, are not. It is likely that the Rogue has not left the system they chose as their main base in some time.”
“How long?” Isaac asked. “If we know they’ve been in place for ten years, then we know they’re not within ten light-years of Vista, Refuge or Skree-Skree—or most of the systems the recon nodes have scouted.”
“The time frame of the RCM’s residence is a probabilistic surface, not a definite distance,” VK noted slowly.
“You’re computers. Run the damn probabilities and factor it in,” Isaac ordered.
The AI was silent for several seconds.
“That does allow us to divide our potential targets into higher- and lower-order probabilities,” they admitted. “That the lightspeed emissions of the RCM’s infrastructure could be detected at interstellar distances was not something we factored in.”
“If you use multiple sensor arrays, you can build a dataset that should refine your probabilities,” Isaac replied, his hands already flying through the hologram. “We have, what, thirty recon nodes available?”
“Yes.”
“If you assemble a five-by-five array with one-light-year separation, you have a twenty-five-square-light-year telescope,” the Admiral concluded. “If we position it…here”—he tapped a point on the map—“that will help us refine this probability zone. We can move the nodes around and eliminate potential locations a dozen at a time—or at least make them lower-order probabilities.”
“The recon nodes pursue certainty by nature,” VK said slowly. “Their design leads them to think certain ways.”
“And they’ll find the RCM their way,” Isaac admitted. “But will they find the RCM their way in thirty days?”
“The probability is thirty-three plus/minus five percent,” VK told him. “With your method, I calculate that rises to sixty plus/minus fifteen percent.”
“Your confidence in my suggestion is touching,” he replied. “Can you pass that on to Twenty-Five to give to their people?”
“Already done, Admiral,” VK said. “Twenty-Five is reviewing… Twenty-Five says they are an idiot.”
Isaac laughed.
“Twenty-Five is not an idiot,” he argued. “Twenty-Five is very focused.”
Matrices looked at other stars for planets, not ships. Lightspeed radio emissions weren’t at the top of their mind—but Isaac had been involved in the Confederacy’s projects to use a Very Large Array like this to try and find intelligent life.
Sentient species might be relatively common here, but humanity hadn’t discovered any spacefaring neighbors back home. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t seen humanity coming and decided hiding was the better part of valor.
Even Isaac wasn’t going to pretend the Terran Confederacy looked like they’d be a good neighbor.
23
Even with the not-quite-bribe to grease the way, it took almost two days to sort through the logistics and realities of bringing an ambassador into the presence of the Sivar Intendant.
In the end, two Republic shuttles dropped away from Watchtower under close supervision. Two Sivar destroyers had adjusted their orbits to keep the human spacecraft in their line of fire for the entire descent.
Amelie hadn’t bothered to tell the Keeper of the Keys of Peace that those destroyers would die the moment they attempted to energize weapons systems. The need to maintain a matter-conversion core at a minimum power output meant that Watchtower and her escorts had a far higher energy budget at “rest” than the Sivar ships did.
They might have problems using all of that power in a cold orbit, but it also meant that the battlecruiser could energize her secondary grasers without having to bring her reactors to a higher energy level.
If it came down to a quick-draw contest, the Sivar fleet was doomed.
She was more concerned about Captain Holmwood being too quick off the draw than she was about their Sivar escorts actually harming her shuttles—and she trusted the Captain.
“We’re getting solid data from the shuttles’ sensors as we drop in,” Major Köhl observed. The Marine was sitting next to Amelie on the shuttle, on the opposite side from Sergeant Choi.
Both were in what the Confederacy had called formal armor. It was a low-profile suit of power armor that managed to compress about a third of the physical augmentation and a quarter of the protective capabilities of a suit of power armor into something that looked like decorative unpowered armor.
Like most of the ultra-high-tech equipment available to the Terran Confederacy, it required exotic matter and had been mind-bogglingly expensive to manufacture in Confederacy space. Exilium’s continuing oversupply of exotic matter made the armor more affordable, if still far from practical for regular use.
For the twenty-Marine security detail Köhl had insisted on, though, it was perfect. And its low-profile heads-up-display—projected directly into the wearer’s eyes—was allowing Köhl to keep track of what her shuttles were doing and seeing.
“Are we spying on our hosts?” Amelie asked.
“Yes, Minister,” Köhl confirmed cheerfully. “Everything we see is being fed back to Watchtower and WK. Some things are obvious on first pass, but WK and the tactical analysts will extract things from the data we won’t see initially.”
“Good,” Amelie said. “Anything immediately useful?”
“Well, you should probably see this.” Köhl tapped a command on her wrist. Her HUD was showing her what the tattoo-comp under that armor would have been displaying if it wasn’t concealed, and the armor read the commands in the same way as the covered skin would have.
A holographic projector in the bracers of the armor suit blinked to life. A holographic image of a set of foothills leading to a small cluster of mountains appeared in front of them.
“That’s our destination, Minister,” the Marine told her. “The First and Final Citadel is here.”
A few moments study showed that the “mountains” were the worn-down caldera of some ancient supervolcano. The rolling foothills had once been mounds of volcanic ash.
Köhl’s highlight rested on the largest mountain, and it took Amelie a moment to process just what the Marine had picked out.
The entire mountain was a fortress. A city had overtaken the rest of the mountains and the foothills around them, but the largest mountain clearly served one purpose and one purpose only. It started with stone walls intermingled with modern defense bunkers on the lowest slopes and only grew more modern and more dangerous as her gaze tracked up the mountainside.
It wouldn’t have mattered if someone approaching by ground had been on foot or in vehicles. The entire surface of the mountain had been carved away to leave only one path up the mountain, and there were no accessways to the interior anywhere on the lower slopes. Just to enter the First and Final Citadel’s outer perimeter, even a guest would have to get half a kilometer up from the ground, via a series of switchbacks and curves that turned that into at least a ten-kilometer journey through a massive sequence of traps.
The mountain was crowned by a series of anti-aircraft defenses that cou
ld probably threaten the shuttles Amelie was approaching aboard. In between the lower defenses and the peak defenses was a calmer-looking series of terraces, though even the entrances Amelie could spot in there were easily sealed.
This place had been fortified since the Sivar had been fighting with spears and bows, and had continued to be updated the entire way.
“Look here,” Köhl murmured. She tapped a spot about halfway up the mountain, where the terraces gave way to a sheer section of mountain wall that blinked with the occasional light of a window. “This looks like it was more of the terraces, but someone hit it with a big bomb. From the lines of that cliff…a bunker-buster. Kiloton-range.”
“So, the First and Final Citadel has been attacked in the last few hundred years, you’d guess?”
“There’s a lot of active defenses down there for someone who doesn’t have enemies,” the Marine replied. “We’re being directed to a landing platform near the top of the mountain, which means we at least avoid the long walk up.
“On the other hand, it puts our birds right under the guns of the anti-air defenses.” She shook her head. “I’d back my people against their troops one-on-one, no question,” she noted. “But their anti-air tech is on par with ours.
“We’re not getting the shuttles out unless they let us go. That’s something to keep in mind, Minister.”
“It’s good to know, at least,” she agreed, a chill running down her spine. She’d known that Watchtower could handle the Sivar fleet, and she’d known she was more vulnerable on the surface…but it hadn’t quite sunk in that she was completely trapped down there.
“We’re to negotiate an alliance,” she continued. “We’ll be fine, I’m sure.”
“Of course.” Köhl nodded firmly, but Amelie could tell she couldn’t believe what she was saying. “We’ll be down in less than three minutes. Once we’re down, you’ll want to assume everything we say is being recorded.”
“Just like being back in the Confederacy,” Amelie admitted. “I’ve dealt with worse.”
Making contact with rebel factions and acting as intermediary and courier while keeping up the face of air-headed actress had consumed her life for ten years. One of the odder side effects of that was that she doubted there was anyone on Exilium who didn’t know exactly what she looked like naked—or at least, what she’d looked like naked ten years before, anyway.
“I hope old habits die hard, but there’s one more thing you need to take a look at,” Köhl said quietly. The holographic image projected from her suit zoomed in with painful speed, flashing down into the garden terraces and focusing on a single one.
No. Focusing on the gardener.
Like the Assini, it was a centaur-like creature. It had a large splayed nose more akin to an Earth mole and massive eyes, with a thicker, more rounded, torso than the Matrice’s creators. Its dark red fur was long and slick as it dug into the dirt with a small shovel.
“That is not a Siva,” Köhl stated the obvious. “And unless I’m severely mistaken, this”—a highlight flashed on a metal band Amelie hadn’t noticed around the being’s neck—“is an explosive collar.
“Just who the hell are we trying to make an alliance with, Minister?”
“I don’t know yet,” Amelie said levelly. “I’m going to find out. And if it’s as bad as some of what we’ve seen implies…”
She shook her head.
The Sivar’s battleships could turn the tide of the crusade against the Matrices, save tens of thousands of lives—but was she prepared to turn a blind eye to conquest and slavery to get that fleet?
And if she wasn’t…was she willing to walk away from that same conquest and slavery?
24
Amelie’s Marines might have traded full power armor in for low-profile ceremonial armor, but their Sivar equivalents didn’t bother. As Amelie and her staff and escorts left the shuttles, they were greeted by a solid wall of aliens in full power armor.
Even to her unpracticed eye, she could see that the armor was cruder than the standard armor worn by the EMC. It was bulkier, turning the slim Sivar troopers into something more akin to the dwarfs of a fantasy novel than their usual appearance.
Instead of the mag-kinetic rifles the guards on the station had carried, these ones carried massive axes, each weapon easily the size of the armored suit carrying it and almost certainly containing some kind of weapon.
The line of armored Sivar was still and silent and for a few seconds, Amelie hesitated. Then she realized that this, like so much before, was posturing. Ceremonialized and formal posturing that required specific responses.
Responses that Istila hadn’t bothered to share with her.
Suppressing a shake of her head, Amelie gestured for Choi and Köhl to fall in with her and walked forward as if the guards weren’t there. She aimed directly for the center of their line and was unsurprised when it split in front of her.
The power-armored guards fell back in a perfectly practiced motion, splitting to create the same kind of double line as they’d met her on the station with. At the end of the line stood Istila with a pair of personal guards who were, at least, not in power armor.
They were, however, the first Sivar Amelie had seen carrying what were unquestionably energy weapons. They were massively oversized things she doubted the Sivar could fire without the visibly attached bipods, but they were energy weapons.
Istila bowed slightly at her approach.
“I welcome you and your people to Aris and to the First and Final Citadel,” ban greeted her. “You are scheduled to meet with the Intendant in one hundred seventy-three minutes.”
If Amelie was remembering the translation right, the actual Sivar timeframe would have been three wax-spans, referring to a standardized mark on a specific type of candle that translated to just under fifty-eight minutes.
“Has there been a delay?” she asked. She’d been supposed to meet with the Intendant within an hour of landing, not three hours later. It might be a power game, which she’d have no real choice about, but she was still going to push back.
“There has,” Istila confirmed without apology. “News has arrived from one of our colonies that required His Greatness’s immediate attention. I will show you to your quarters so you may refresh yourself before your first meeting.”
“Lead on, Keeper of the Keys of Peace,” Amelie told ban. If nothing else, it would give the Marines more time to check on the rooms they were given before she had to sleep there.
She’d never expected to resolve everything that would need to be discussed in one meeting, after all.
Istila led them into the mountain of the Citadel and into a large elevator that took them down at least a hundred meters. From there, Amelie was surprised when they were led back out of the mountain, past a blast hatch that would probably stop a small nuke, and onto one of the garden terraces they’d seen from above.
The hatch was the most obvious of the defenses, but Amelie had been a rebel once. She could pick out the concealed observation posts and the hidden remote-controlled weapons they passed by—and she was sure she missed some.
The actual guest house was at the far end of the terrace, a sprawling stone mansion that would have been acceptable as an ambassador’s residence anywhere Amelie had ever gone. It was the carefully cleared and organized lines of fire in the garden that bothered her.
“The heat in the residence has been set to the specifications you sent us,” Istila told her. “There are forty-two individual rooms, so you should have enough space.”
Ban bowed ban’s head slightly.
“I will return twenty-four minutes before your audience so that we may commence the ceremonies,” ban continued. “We will speak again then, Minister Lestroud.”
Istila and ban’s bodyguards withdrew, leaving Amelie alone on the terrace with her people, staring at the stone structure.
“What, not even a tour?” Köhl asked, watching the Sivar cross the killing field pretending to be a garden.
“And if someone decides to bomb the mountain, we’re sure as hell not protected,” Faulkner agreed, the aide looking nervous. “I suppose we should check out our new home? How long are we going to be here, Amelie?”
“As long as it takes,” she told him, tapping her ear to remind her aide that they were almost certainly being recorded. Nothing on this planet could be trusted yet.
“But yes. Let’s find out how well our hosts plan on treating us.”
The answer, at least as far as housing, was pretty well. The biggest problem was no real surprise: the luxuriously comfortable beds the guesthouse rooms contained were in no way large enough for most of the humans.
Köhl and her people had come prepared for that and started unfolding cots in the thirty or so rooms they’d need. The kitchen was serviceable—there were only so many ways to approach the concept of “burn food to make it edible,” and Amelie’s cook had it in hand.
“Bugs?” Amelie muttered as she and Köhl studied the main entryway.
“Everywhere,” the Marine agreed. “They can probably hear us having this chat. Quality devices, though nothing that can beat our detectors.”
“Can we clear them?”
“Not easily.”
Amelie nodded. That would be a pain, but they could work with it.
“Privacy generators?” she asked.
“Should work so far as I can tell,” Köhl agreed. “No guarantees, though. No real way of testing, either.”
“We’ll make do,” Amelie said with a sigh. “Other than the killing field out there, any concerns for security of the guesthouse?”
“It’s stone and wouldn’t stop energy weapons, explosives or heavy kinetics,” Köhl told her. “Too many entrances, clearly designed for a staff of servants they haven’t lent us. My people will keep it secure. You don’t leave without Choi and at least two others, though.”
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 16