Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “So, it ran for a hundred years?” Octavio asked.

  “That was the apparently designed intention,” D agreed. “The computer managed to save fuel and power in its thrust calculations and operated for one hundred and eighty years before running out of fuel. The station as we currently see it has been unpowered and without orbital adjustments for just over ninety years.”

  “And it’s still here.” He shook his head. “Your creators built well.”

  “They did. With the sensors available, we should be able to identify the stranger’s ship and exit vector relatively easily. Locating the particular time slot should only take a few…”

  It wasn’t in an AI’s nature to trail off.

  “D?” Octavio asked.

  “We have cracked the security codes on the Validation Center computer cores,” the AI reported. “I have identified the tachyon communication codes and frequencies for the Sentinel Matrices and sent out base-level ping codes.

  “These should trigger automatic responses without attracting attention. Director Siril-ki and I have worked up the codes over the last few weeks.”

  “D, you’re dodging around something,” Octavio pointed out. He knew the AI better than he knew most people at this point.

  “There should be dozens of Sentinel AIs in various degrees of active status,” the AI told him. “I have received ping responses from three.

  “All are in the same system, twelve point six light-years from Assini.”

  Octavio swallowed hard.

  “Find me the vector for that stranger ship,” he told the AI. “And then get me everything you can on the system the Sentinels are in.

  “Because I would bet this battlecruiser that vector leads to that system.”

  37

  Warped space might have become less uncomfortable than it had once been, but there was still little to reduce the unending boredom involved in the process. The more comfortable it had become, the more willing Isaac and his officers had been to commit to longer flights without occasionally dropping out for sanity breaks.

  Two weeks to the target location of the RCM was an “easy” jaunt by that new standard, but it was still two weeks in a vaguely uncomfortable side-reality where nothing could touch you.

  Their biggest limitation was that the tachyon communicators didn’t work while under warp. The ESF didn’t have a standard yet on how long was too long in warp, but Isaac was starting to suspect that it would end up being based on how long a ship was out of communication.

  Looking at his inbox as Vigil and her companions arrived at the rendezvous point outside the RCM’s home base, he was starting to think that two weeks was too long!

  Catalan’s reports from Assini had always made for sobering listening and reading, but this was something else again. They’d suspected that someone had modified the core code of the AI Matrices they could reach—the pattern of failures wasn’t right to be entirely tachyon-punch degradation, though they’d only realized that when able to compare to core code that was punch-degraded—but Isaac had assumed it had been an unknown third party.

  Not a faction of Assini that had knowingly arranged for tens of millions of their siblings to be sent to their deaths. It wasn’t a very Assini thing to do!

  Or was it?

  Isaac sighed as he turned that thought over in his head. Setting up a situation where a robot did all of the killing for you without you raising a finger…yeah, that was very Assini. The solution to every problem was a robot with a gun.

  Even if the job didn’t require a gun, evidence suggested.

  The situation in the Assini System was so far beyond anything Isaac could influence that it was almost irrelevant to the task at hand. If Siril-ki had managed to convince a few dozen Sentinel Matrices to start tachyon-punching their way out to join him, that would have changed the math.

  The punch couldn’t move anything alive—even frozen embryos had a massive loss rate that the Matrices countered with a mind-staggering amount of cloning—but it was the fastest FTL method available to Isaac’s allies. Two hours to travel a light-year would have seen any Sentinels they recruited arrive at Vista in twenty-five days.

  He’d have waited for that. He couldn’t wait for the Sivar ships he didn’t know would be coming or how long they could take—and he was glad he hadn’t.

  It didn’t look like he was ever going to get Sivar battleships now. Holmwood’s report on the developments on Aris made for nerve-wracking reading. Both as the leader of the Republic’s military and as Amelie Lestroud’s husband, he found the news of the Intendant’s latest tantrum terrifying.

  Fortunately, the Admiral could justify sating the husband’s worry today.

  “Naveed?” he opened a channel to the flag deck. “Can you get me a tachyon-com channel to Watchtower? I need a live update from someone on the scene of what the hell is going on there.”

  “Yes, sir!” Commander Hashemi replied. “I’ll let you know when I have a link to Captain Holmwood? Or should I hold until I have a channel with Minister Lestroud?”

  Isaac wasn’t really surprised his people were paying enough attention to the briefings to know he’d want to talk to his wife.

  “Get me a link to Amelie,” he confirmed. “I need to know what’s on her mind.”

  He was sitting two light-months from the machine he’d been chasing for two years with a fleet of almost a hundred and fifty warships and a grim, sinking feeling that he needed to be twenty-five light-years away.

  Isaac had known that Amelie was all right, but it was still reassuring to see her face when her holographic image appeared. He couldn’t keep himself from reaching out to touch the image of her face, his fingers inevitably disrupting the image.

  “Admiral. My love,” she greeted him, leaning her head into his hand unconsciously before both of them laughed.

  “Amelie. How are you and your people holding up?” he asked.

  “Two days under house arrest on an alien planet while the math says that nobody can get me out,” she told him. “I’m trying to make friends with our cleaners without getting them in trouble, but the non-Sivar staff here are terrified.”

  “From the reports, I can’t blame them,” Isaac admitted. “Explosive collars? I mean…we recognized the tech for a reason, I suppose.”

  His understanding was that the use of equivalent systems had been restricted to condemned prisoners at penal colonies, but he wasn’t going to pretend they’d never built it.

  “I think they realize we’re potential friends,” Amelie replied. “Whether that percolates back to potential allies for us here, I don’t know. I can’t really justify privacy generators while I’m talking to the maid, after all.”

  “You have one up now?” he asked.

  “I do. I’m not one hundred percent sure that the link to Watchtower is secure, but they aren’t acting like they know I’m in contact with our fleet.”

  “All right.” He shook his head, trying to consider the situation.

  “I’m twenty-five light-years from Sivar-One,” he reminded her. “That’s five weeks. If I was still at Skree-Skree, we’d be just over three and a half weeks away. Even if I head straight for Sivar-Prime, I’m looking at seven weeks before I’m in position to do anything.”

  “You can’t start a war for me, Isaac,” Amelie replied. “You certainly can’t drag our allies into this.”

  “Isaac Lestroud sure as hell cannot start a war to pull his wife, Amelie Lestroud, out of the clutches of the vile alien,” Isaac agreed dryly. “Admiral Lestroud can sure as hell launch an extraction operation to pull Foreign Minister Lestroud out of the hands of a hostile power that has detained our ambassador.

  “Even if you managed to convince me it was my duty to let you die, Emilia would give me my marching orders an hour later,” he continued. “It’s not just personal, Amelie. It’s political.

  “Whether we like them or not, the Sivar exist. Is letting them imprison and murder our ambassador going to help our future relat
ions with the Governance?”

  The call was silent.

  “No,” she conceded. “I’ve got wheels moving here—I think. I’m not sure I need you to show up with a battle fleet just yet, though I’ll admit that I’d rather negotiate from the flag deck of a battlecruiser in the middle of that fleet at this point.

  “The Governance is almost as large a problem as the Rogue Matrices. We need to plan for them in future.”

  “Or we need to deal with them now,” Isaac argued. “You are the Foreign Minister of the Republic. The Ambassador on the scene. If you tell me that you’re going to be fine, that you can extract yourself from this situation without the ESF making a major deployment, I’ll trust you.”

  He shook his head. He didn’t expect her to say that, but if there was anyone who could pull that off it would be Amelie Lestroud.

  “I’ll trust you,” he repeated. “But can you really tell me that?”

  “Isaac, the reports I see say you’re in position to launch a major offensive against the RCM,” she told him. “You can’t walk away from that for me.”

  He met her gaze, letting his silence fill the call now.

  “We might lose,” he finally told her. “We’d be better off with another year’s worth of construction in the hands of our allies. We’d be better off with Dauntless and Watchtower in our order of battle and the last of the old ships decommissioned to bring more Fortitudes online.

  “We’d be better off with an upgraded Sivar fleet at our side and answers from the Assini. Not knowing what any of that is going to look like, we could push the attack…but I can’t do that with an enemy at my back, measuring the knife.

  “So, if you can’t turn the Sivar into allies or at least complete neutrals, I can’t launch this attack.”

  Leaving an RCM intact was his worst nightmare. He was there, he’d gathered the massed fleets of his allies…but they had to choose what enemy they could deal with.

  “We should have left them be,” Amelie said.

  “Could we have? Really?” Isaac asked. “A multistellar nation on the edge of our area of operations? Ally or enemy, we needed to know. And if they’re not an ally, we need to neutralize them.”

  She bowed her head.

  “I can’t speak to the military situation,” she murmured. “I certainly don’t think this is a battle you can order our allies into. But…”

  He waited.

  “I don’t believe I am going to be able to extract myself and my people without additional assistance from the ESF,” she admitted. “Even if I do, I am unlikely to do so in a way that will see the Sivar neutralized as a threat. The Intendant is apparently a mad god-king and I don’t see a way out of conflict with him.”

  “Then I don’t have a choice, Amelie,” Isaac told her. “You’re right in that I can’t order our allies into this fight. I will consult with our allies and I will make certain that, whatever happens, this RCM doesn’t get away.

  “But once all that is done, I am coming for you. And if the Intendant has half a brain, he’ll have all of our people sent on their way with a damn gift basket before I get there.”

  38

  Isaac was late to his own meeting. As a rule, he did everything within his power to make sure he was never late for anything, but he’d never been late to a meeting he’d called himself—and definitely not to a meeting involving fleet commanders from four different species and a collection of AIs that probably counted as a fifth.

  “Apologies for the delay, everyone,” he told the gathered officers as he stepped into the conference room, quickly taking a seat next to Vice Admiral Giannovi. There were two human flag officers in the room, but Commodore Anthony Helm wasn’t nearly as well known to Isaac or most of the aliens as Giannovi was.

  He’d been one of the handful of officers elevated to flag rank as the ESF had expanded. His file was solid and Giannovi had sworn by the man, but Isaac didn’t know the big black man as well as he’d like.

  The rest of the room was full of holographic projections of his alien subcommanders. Lord of Seven Stars ThreeHeart remained in command of the dramatically expanded Skree-Skree contingent. Similarly, Third-Among-Singers Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies remained in command of a Vistan contingent that had more than doubled in strength.

  Since the Tohnbohn didn’t have ranks, Isaac wasn’t surprised Oohoon was still their contact. He wasn’t entirely convinced that the big shelled alien was actually in command of the Tohnbohn contingent in the same way as the other officers were, but they spoke for the Tohnbohn in these meetings.

  Combat Coordination Matrix ZDX-175-25 was in a similar boat. Command of the Matrix contingent was exercised by a networked gestalt intelligence, not by any individual Matrix, but Twenty-Five was the one who communicated with Isaac for the group.

  “Our understanding is that unfortunate news arrived from Minister Amelie Lestroud,” Oohoon said, the whalesong of their true voice underlying the slow translation of their speech. “The negotiations with our hoped-for new ally do not go well?”

  “That is the crux of the matter, yes,” Isaac confirmed. He kept his gaze level as he looked out at his officers. “As of two days ago, the negotiations with the Sivar Governance have collapsed. Ambassador Lestroud and her staff have been detained on the surface of the Sivar capital.

  “We have every reason to believe that the Sivar will shortly attempt to capture Watchtower.” He shrugged. “They will fail, but we now face a threat where we’d hoped to have an ally or at least a neutral. That requires us to reassess our current tactical and strategic position.”

  A tapped command on his tattoo-comp brought up a floating hologram of the fleet’s entire strength.

  “Our current fleet consists of one hundred and forty-eight combat platforms, accompanied by forty freighters,” he noted. “Thirty-nine of those ships are capital ships. Against any mobile force that the Rogue can deploy, I would not question our victory.

  “I include in that calculation, people, the knowledge that the Rogue possesses at least four of their new dreadnoughts.”

  Another command wiped the fleet in favor of the latest intelligence on the Rogue’s system.

  “Against this?” He hesitated, then shook his head. “We knew when we set out from Skree-Skree that this was risky. Now we have a closer look at the defenses. The Rogue has as many Matrix combat units in that system as we have in our fleet.

  “Plus three dreadnoughts. Plus massive orbital fortifications. Plus the Rogue’s own hull, which at least matches a dreadnought in firepower.”

  The room and the holographic attendees were silent and Isaac looked around.

  “You’ve all done the math,” he conceded. “You wouldn’t deserve your commands if you hadn’t. Does anyone in this room think we have a better-than-even chance of victory here?”

  He waited.

  “Or that if we are victorious, this fleet will be anything but a spent force?” he continued. He waited again.

  “No,” ThreeHeart finally chirped at him. “But this machine tried to kill my planet. What else can we do?”

  “I don’t know,” Isaac agreed. “That’s why we’re here…except that now there is a knife pointed at our backs. We don’t know if the Sivar Governance can find new star-lanes fast enough to reach our territory—but we also don’t know they can’t.

  “The last thing we can afford is for the Skree-Skree or Bohon Systems to come under attack while we have the majority of your fleets here—or even after we’ve all willingly sacrificed our lives on the altar of destroying the Rogue.”

  He couldn’t read Skree-Skree body language, let alone Tohnbohn, but he hoped that point struck home.

  “Refuge is relatively safe. The Republic is unreachable for them, but Skree-Skree and Bohon are potentially at risk.”

  Bohon had two battlecruisers with full escort groups there to protect the Tohnbohn home system. Skree-Skree only had half a dozen strike cruisers.

  “I cannot ask you to leave your systems defense
less in the face of a new-found threat,” Isaac told them. “If I thought we could fight the Rogue and we’d all go home, I’d be standing here insisting we launch the attack. Finish off the Rogue, then deal with the Sivar.”

  “But you fear we might not be able to defeat the Sivar after fighting the Rogue,” Oohoon concluded. “The probabilities suggest you are correct. This was to be the meeting to plan the strike against the Rogue. What do you suggest now?”

  “Firstly, Lord of Seven Stars ThreeHeart, you must consult with your government,” Isaac told the bird-rat hybrid who commanded two of his battlecruisers. “In their place, I’d call both your capital ships home, but I won’t speak for your government. Oohoon, I’d suggest you talk to your people as well, though Bohon is better defended.”

  He shook his head.

  “The Republic has an ambassador plenipotentiary in the hands of a hostile power,” he said quietly. “I have no choice but to move against the Sivar Governance. Since I cannot justify moving against the Rogue first, I have no choice but to leave this system unattacked.

  “Twenty-Five.”

  “How would you have us assist you, Admiral?” the Matrix’s holographic avatar—an intentionally stylized figure that looked like an Assini wearing the armor of a historical human knight—asked.

  “Can you interdict the system?” Isaac asked. “Make certain that anything less than the Rogue’s full force doesn’t leave and that we know where the Rogue goes if it leaves?”

  “Our tachyon-punch drives are now approximately eleven percent more efficient than those available to the Rogue, and our long-range passive tachyon scanners are now approximately twenty-six percent more efficient than those available to the Rogue,” Twenty-Five told him. “We can get inside their command-and-control loop and intercept any force that attempts to leave.”

  “You can besiege the system,” Isaac concluded. “I need you to do that.”

  “It would require all of our combat platforms and the majority of our lesser units,” Twenty-Five warned. “We would not be able to contribute significant firepower to your movement against the Sivar.”