Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  She shook her head.

  “We believe that our alliance can stop the Rogue we face today, but that one is only one of several potential threats to your Governance, Intendant,” she noted. And even that was assuming that her people had a remotely accurate guess of the limits of the Sivar’s territory. “And we are a small group of species on one side of the Builders’ expansion.

  “To protect ourselves and others, we must fight them here and elsewhere. We must identify the Matrices hostile to sentient life and stop them. Not just the ones on our borders but everywhere.

  “Bringing your fleets into our alliance and upgrading your technology would increase both the safety of our allies and of your Governance.”

  The Intendant kept his hands on the table as he leaned back slightly, studying her like a cat would study a trapped mouse.

  “Keeper Corstan,” he said levelly, as if he hadn’t just shut the Siva down. “Am I to understand that Minister Lestroud’s ship is in some way superior to ours? Others have told me that it took far longer to reach Aris than Commandant Ackahl’s flotilla did, but that only answers half a question.”

  “The alien ship has no missiles and lacks-long range engagement options against our fleet,” Corstan said, his voice calmer this time. “It has greater acceleration than our own ships and appears to have a far higher power-generation capacity.

  “Some of my Commandants, including Commandant Ackahl, point to evidence that they have extremely powerful energy weapons that could pose a threat to our fleets at close range. Most do not believe that the ship would survive to that range.”

  Amelie smiled thinly.

  “Your Commandants may want to ask themselves why we don’t have missiles,” she pointed out. “As you just noted, our engines are superior to yours. We could build better missiles than you have. But we fight the Matrices, and no missile in our arsenals can penetrate their defenses.

  “You may consider that a free warning, Intendant and Keeper. If one of your battleship task groups were to engage a Matrix combat platform with its current armament, it would be utterly destroyed without notably damaging its opponent.”

  The Sivar around her were suddenly silent. She hadn’t even told them that her own fleet could duplicate the same stunt. The massed fleet of the Sivar Governance could probably damage a Republic battle group…but they wouldn’t be doing it with missiles.

  “And you would provide us with weapons that could fight the Builders?” the Intendant asked.

  “If we were to conclude a mutually satisfactory military alliance, we would work with your engineers to produce an upgrade template that would convert your battleships into warships that could fight the Matrices,” Amelie agreed. “We would retain control of the designs and certain key elements for their manufacture, but we would assist you in upgrading your fleet to face our mutual enemy.”

  “I see.” The Intendant continued to study her, then pulled his hands back into his lap as he leaned backward.

  “And why, if your technology is so advanced, do you need us?” he asked bluntly. “You have already said you have other allies. You have your own nation. It seems I should be fearing your fleets of conquest, not meeting your ambassador.”

  “My nation is over a hundred light-years from here,” Amelie admitted. That should be safe enough—she certainly wasn’t telling the Siva just how small the Republic of Exilium was. “We have other demands on our vessels and our resources. We are challenging the Matrices on several fronts. We cannot commit the resources to win this war on our own, so we are finding and preparing allies to face this enemy at our side.

  “Military allies today are trading partners tomorrow,” she continued. “We expect to stabilize this region of space, throw back the Matrices and establish long-term economic ties that will make everyone involved far wealthier than they would be on their own.

  “But dead people make for poor allies and poor traders. So, we make this alliance and commit what ships we can spare.”

  Everything she said was true. Of course, the resources they could commit to this war were a far higher portion of Exilium’s capacity than she was admitting there.

  The Intendant made a small hand-wave gesture.

  “I see you,” he said formally. “Your intentions are clear and your desires mostly so. Keeper Istila!”

  “Your Greatness.” Istila was still kneeling but at least didn’t have ban’s head on the floor. Ban was clearly not quite as well regarded yet as ban’s colleagues.

  “You will continue discussions with Amelie Lestroud,” he instructed. “Details and realities must be clarified before I make my decision.

  “Your presence here is welcome,” he continued, returning his attention to Amelie. “I see productive fates for your discussion with my Keys of Peace. Go forth and know that the Intendant of the Sivar has seen you and heard your words.”

  And if that wasn’t a formal dismissal in any language, Amelie was a crow.

  27

  “The yards haven’t been operational since Shezarim left,” Captain Cameron, commanding officer of the strike cruiser Prospero, told the gathered leadership of Octavio’s expedition. The woman’s voice and image were being relayed by tachyon communicator, allowing a real-time conversation despite the vast distance between Prospero and Dauntless.

  “They were shot to pieces by the Escorts on the way out, and no one even tried to salvage them. It looks like the ships were picked over pretty heavily, though.”

  “Have the Assini techs found anything useful?” Octavio asked, glancing over at Siril-ki.

  “They think they’ve got a vector on our scavengers,” Cameron told them. “My people found at least one interesting thing ourselves, too.”

  “What’s the vector?” Octavio asked. “That was in the computers?”

  “It looks like one of the scavenging expeditions took the most intact ship back to the most distant gas giant, Kora.”

  “One of?” Siril-ki interjected.

  “That’s the interesting thing we confirmed,” Cameron replied. “There were at least three different expeditions that hit the shipyard here. One was only a few months after the first flare, and it looks like they fell back to Sina.

  “The second was twenty years later, after the second flare took out Sina.” The blonde Captain shook her head. “They’re the ones the Assini are certain fell back to Kora. It looks like they were focused on ship parts—like I said, they took the only intact hull back with them.”

  “The third was ten years after that. We don’t have much of a vector, but I can tell that they weren’t using a reactionless drive like the first two expeditions,” Cameron said. “They came in hard, decelerating at a couple thousand gravities. Closer to Shezarim’s drive than the usual reactionless system the Assini use.”

  “So, was that a technologically regressed Assini ship or something else?” Octavio murmured.

  “Like I said, the vector is unclear. We’re talking two hundred and seventy years ago, sir. They seemed to have focused on colony supplies. Siril-ki’s records show that there should have been at least two complete terraformer spikes here. It doesn’t look like the first two groups of scavengers took them, but they’re gone.”

  “That sounds more promising than you might think,” Renaud pointed out. “A big ship with a big engine, grabbing the terraforming spikes? That sounds like a colony ship heading out. If they fell back to Kora, they should have been safe for an extended period.”

  “Long enough to build an evacuation ship and reestablish contact with the Sentinels,” Siril-ki concluded. “Or even, potentially, to build a sustainable artificial ecosystem. The resources existed.”

  “Were the gas giant colonies self-sufficient before?” Octavio asked.

  “No,” ki admitted. “We had two planets to grow food on and a reactionless drive system to lift that food out of the gravity well. Food supplies would have taken serious effort to set up, but the resources existed.”

  Ki was insisting on that rathe
r hard, but Octavio couldn’t deny ki’s hope.

  “What about Irona and Kand?” he asked. “There were colonies there?”

  “The charts from the First Administrator’s office suggests that they deorbited every orbital they could safely manage on a course for Kora,” D cut in, the AI having handled collating the battered papers from the dead city.

  “If it could be moved to Kora, they were moving it to Kora. How much of that process was complete when the flare hit Sina is uncertain,” the AI noted. “Any vessel or station in transit would have been in severe danger in a flare of that magnitude…and the likelihood is that flares of at least that magnitude had occurred multiple times since then.

  “If the Creators did not evacuate, there may not be any left to save.”

  “They had the resources to evacuate,” Octavio replied, glancing at Siril-ki again. It was hard to tell with a dark-blue centaur, but ki looked exhausted. “We have to hope that they did and that we’ll find them.”

  He shook his head.

  “Did we find what we needed to make contact with the Sentinels?” he asked the Assini gently.

  “I’m not sure yet,” ki admitted. “The codes and protocols should be in the data cores we retrieved, but accessing them is not a fast process. D is assisting us, but it will take time.”

  “I estimate a minimum of one week to fully break the encryption and security protocols,” D added. “I am more capable in many ways than the Matrices they expected to be attempting the breach, but the security designers did anticipate the use of AI Matrices to get through their security.”

  “Keep working on that,” Octavio ordered. “Otherwise, it sounds like our next destination is Kora. We’ll spend a few more days here at Sina and see if we can find anything else, but…”

  “All we are finding of my people is dead worlds,” Siril-ki said softly. “A smaller ambition might have saved us, but our grand ambitions doomed us.”

  Ki shook ki’s long head, more of a shiver than anything else.

  “Even our evacuation plan was far too grand in the end,” ki whispered. “We could never focus on the problem at hand without some grand solution to fix everything. And it damned us.”

  28

  Isaac watched the first Skree-Skree battlecruisers cut through their trials on his flag deck hologram with interest. The two ships were basically late-generation Vigilance-class ships, with higher-frequency grasers than the older ships that were on their way from Refuge.

  The ships were a dream. The Skree-Skree engineers had taken the designs the humans had given them and added their own touches. Not every change they’d made had been an improvement, and none of the changes were game-changing, but he knew his engineers were already taking notes.

  As he was considering that, however, Glorious Heart missed the next turn in her maneuvering sequence. The massive battlecruiser continued on her course at full acceleration, only avoiding a collision because the strike cruiser Observant Star’s crew had been watching for problems.

  The ships were a dream. The crews were a mix of a cadre drawn from the earlier strike cruisers and half-trained new recruits. There was only so much anyone could do with that mix, and Isaac wasn’t overly impressed with Skree-Skree training methods in the first place.

  “We’re going to have a problem.”

  Vice Admiral Giannovi stood next to him on Vigil’s bridge, watching the same hologram. She’d transferred her flag to Fortitude to act as the commander of the human contingent of the fleet, but she remained his right-hand woman.

  “They’re rough,” he agreed. “But ThreeHeart’s strike cruiser crews worked up faster than we expected. They started rough too. So did we.”

  He smirked.

  “I remember a warp cruiser a while ago that should never have gone into battle,” he pointed out.

  “That was different,” Giannovi objected. “That was a skilled crew letting themselves go because no one figured the First Admiral’s kid was going to get sent into a fight.”

  “Little you knew then, I suppose,” Isaac said with a chuckle. “Any concerns with our force?”

  “I’ll be happier when Scrutiny is here,” she admitted. “And not just because she’s coming with three Vistan battlecruisers. Four battlecruisers sounds so much better than three—and fourteen sounds so much better than six too.”

  He snorted, but she was right.

  The Republic had given up Dante but gained Resilience, Fortitude and, when she arrived, Scrutiny. The Tohnbohn had put up a third battlecruiser, which would arrive alongside the Vistans’ three new ships, and the Skree-Skree were lending him their two.

  Fourteen battlecruisers with full or even extended escort groups. Fifty-four strike cruisers. Plus the Matrix contingent, which no one was ever entirely sure what the strength of would be.

  “Another week for the reinforcements,” he said aloud. “Twenty-Five is making noises about their new ships, too. If I’m reading between their lines right, XR-13-9 just launched an entire new round of combat platforms and we’re looking at a fifty percent or more increase to his combat platform strength.”

  Isaac wasn’t entirely sure how many combat platforms XR-13-9 had. Until the Assini had provided a code update to allow them to fight their genocidal siblings, XR-13-9 hadn’t had much use for them.

  He didn’t think he had all of XR-13-9’s combat platforms in the allied fleet—but he suspected he had a similar percentage of the Matrices’ ships as he had of the Republic’s fleet. He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that he had half or even three-quarters of Twenty-Five’s siblings attached to his fleet.

  A fifty percent reinforcement would give the AI eighteen ships instead of the twelve survivors of the battle with the dreadnought, and Isaac was perfectly willing to regard the combat platforms as being in the same category as his battlecruisers. They lacked the particle cannon that made the primary armament of the human-designed ships but made up for it with more lasers.

  And all of Twenty-Five’s ships were fully upgraded with zetta-lasers. His allies might look the same as his enemies, but they were far more dangerous.

  “Sir, we just got a coms request from Twenty-Five,” Isaac’s coms officer, Naveed Hashemi, interjected quietly as she stepped over to join them. “He wants to speak to you alone, Admiral Lestroud.”

  “That might be good news,” Giannovi said. “I need to transfer back to Fortitude once these trials are done. Do you need anything before I go, sir?”

  “Tell Singh that you enjoyed lunch,” Isaac replied. His long-suffering steward had been with him since he’d been promoted to command the old Vigil back in the Confederacy’s service. The man took incredible care of Isaac and deserved his praise.

  “Otherwise…” He paused thoughtfully. “Don’t leave until I’ve finished speaking to Twenty-Five,” he finally told her. “I can’t imagine the call will take that long, but I have the feeling we’ll want to talk afterward.”

  “You’re the Admiral, Admiral,” she agreed with a grin.

  His office was only a few steps away. Those steps might make the difference between life and death in battle, which was why the flag deck had the ability to provide a reasonably secure privacy shield around the Admiral’s seat, but his office was still the best place for a private call.

  Taking his seat, Isaac poured himself a coffee and nodded silently to VK.

  “Commander Hashemi is standing by to connect Twenty-Five,” the AI told him. “Do you want me to privacy-seal your conversation?”

  Not only would that seal Isaac’s office, but it would mean that VK wouldn’t have access to the recording themselves.

  “Yes,” he decided. “Just in case. Have Naveed put them through.”

  “Understood. Sealing your office now.”

  There was a moment of silence and then a machine-translated voice spoke from the air. Like most of the Matrices, Combat Coordination Matrix ZDX-175-25 had chosen a particular voice and accent to recurrently use.

  It made the
AIs easier to tell apart, though Isaac knew it was an affectation at most—and one that could easily be used against their human allies.

  “Greetings, Admiral Isaac Lestroud. This is ZDX-175-25.”

  “Greetings, Twenty-Five,” Isaac replied. “This call is as secure as we can make it.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure that would stop our actual enemies, but it will at least prevent inadvertent eavesdroppers.”

  “You underestimate the encryption protocols your teams and the K-sequence AIs have assembled,” Twenty-Five told him. “Even I would have problems breaking through them without preparation, and I have access to the encryption protocols themselves, if not the distinct keys.”

  “Fair enough. What did you need, Twenty-Five?” Isaac asked.

  “I wanted to provide you with two updates, Admiral Lestroud, one of which will hopefully affect your response to the other,” the AI Matrix said.

  “Firstly, we have found the Rogue RCM.”

  Twenty-Five dropped that bombshell so matter-of-factly, it took Isaac a moment to process what they had just said.

  “You’re sure?” he finally asked. “Not another dreadnought? Not another trap?”

  “It has been demonstrated that one hundred percent certainty in this matter is beyond our grasp,” Twenty-Five replied. “Thanks to your suggestion, we were able to cut our scouting operations by over seventy percent. We did find one system where a dreadnought appears to be attempting to pretend to be the RCM, but it was definitely a false positive.”

  “You’re sure?” Isaac said.

  “It was exactly positioned along what would have been our scouting route without your suggestion,” the Matrix noted. “It lacked the assembled infrastructure that XR-13-9 has in our base system…and our long-distance scans suggested that it had been in place for less than six months.

  “The system we believe has the highest probability of containing the RCM has a full setup of infrastructure that appears on our long-range scanners. Scouting runs from some distance suggest a similar setup to that in place around XR-13-9…and the presence of four vessels of sufficient size to be either RCMs or Matrix dreadnoughts.”