Isaac exhaled slowly.
“I trust you, Twenty-Five,” he told the Matrix AI. He wasn’t even dissembling. He wasn’t a priest, so his opinion was out on whether the Matrices had souls, but he knew them to be people—and damn fine people at that.
“But I’d hesitate to ask the Assini to modify your targeting protocols to let you fire on sentient organics, regardless of how much trouble the Sivar have caused. I’m not even sure that the Assini here would do that if we asked.”
“Even without modification, our ships would be able to engage any vessels that attacked yours,” Twenty-Five noted. “We would be neither able to participate in or permit ground bombardment, but we are not under the impression this would be a problem.”
That…made sense, Isaac supposed. The combat platforms had been designed to protect the Construction Matrices from people who might try to attack them or steal them. The protocols the Rogues had lost said they couldn’t Construct inhabited worlds or commit mass murder, not that they couldn’t defend themselves.
“I appreciate your offer,” he told Twenty-Five. “But you’d be more valuable to us all here. And there is another point I must raise.”
Isaac looked around at his allies.
“Our alliance is against the Matrices,” he reminded them. “I want you to be able to protect yourselves if the Sivar become a threat, but Amelie Lestroud is not your ambassador. She’s not your foreign minister.
“She is mine. I am obligated, as Admiral of the ESF, to retrieve her. I cannot, per the terms of our alliances, order this combined fleet into action against the Sivar. And I would not.
“I will be taking the ESF ships to Sivar space with me. That’s all. I ask that the rest of you work to secure your own home systems and to help Twenty-Five keep the Rogue contained. The Exilium Space Fleet needs to go extract our ambassador.
“I won’t ask you to come with me.”
It took him a moment to realized what the deep, booming, echoing whalesong that cut off anyone else speaking was. His translator didn’t provide any words to replace Oohoon’s laughter, because it was laughter. There were no words.
“All of our leaders met Amelie Lestroud, Admiral Lestroud,” the Tohnbohn told him in their slow voice with its underlying song. “All of them. I will accompany you aboard Peacemaker with her battle group. My other vessels will remain here with Twenty-Five.”
“I will discuss with my superiors,” ThreeHeart chirped, “but I will argue with the Grand Speaker that we should also send a battlecruiser group.”
“We owe your Republic dirt and blood and water,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies added. “I will leave the Fifth-Among-Singers and her three battle groups here with Twenty-Five, but my ships and I will come with you.
“Vista would have faced our enemies alone but for the fleet you and Amelie Lestroud sent to our aid. We will leave neither her nor you to face this new enemy without us.”
Isaac bowed his head. He hadn’t even dared hope that they would volunteer to fight with him. He’d only known he couldn’t even ask them, let alone order them.
“I’ll borrow some recon ships if you can spare them, Twenty-Five,” he told the AI. “And I won’t turn down anyone’s help, but we need to make sure that our home bases are protected and the RCM is contained.
“If you are all willing to join up, I suggest we deploy a combined force: two of my battlecruisers and one of everyone else’s, plus their escorts. Five battlecruisers and twenty strike cruisers should be enough to make our point to the Governance while allowing us to secure Skree-Skree and keep the Rogue contained.”
That got acknowledging gestures from around the room, and Isaac exhaled in relief. Even sending ThreeHeart’s other ships back to guard the Skree-Skree System, that would leave eight battlecruisers and their escort to back up Twenty-Five’s siege.
And since he was bringing the most advanced ships with him to Sivar space, five battlecruisers should be more than enough.
39
A full week passed in relative quiet in the guest house on Aris. Amelie knew about the gears now moving to rescue her, but until Isaac’s fleet arrived at Sivar-One, there wouldn’t be any signs of them that the Sivar could see.
The silence from the Keepers and the Intendant was terrifying, though. She didn’t trust the Sivar as far as she could throw their planet at this point, and she had to wonder just what the Intendant was making of the data they’d extracted.
The alert from the Marines was almost a relief.
“Minister, we have multiple armed Sivar at the door,” Sergeant Ryu said urgently into the channel. “They are demanding that you come with them, alone.”
The senior noncom in the platoon Köhl had brought down paused.
“I can take them out,” he noted. “But they’ll have reserves. We can push back?”
“Negative,” Amelie ordered. “Negative, do not start a firefight.”
“Understood,” Ryu replied. “What do we do?”
“Tell them I’ll be right there and I will come alone,” she told the Marine. “No one is going to die for me today, not if I have any say in the matter.”
“Understood. We’ll let them know.”
Amelie shook her head and grabbed the armored underlayer for her ambassador suit. She was going to try to avoid a fight, but she was grimly aware that she might well not have any say in the matter.
“Sir.” Choi was standing inside the door. Amelie hadn’t seen her enter, but she was unsurprised by the Marine’s presence. “We’re ready.”
“You can’t come with me this time, Sergeant,” Amelie told her. “They said alone, and they might well be willing to back that by shooting people. I need you to get with Ryu and Nguyen and Köhl. I don’t think this is going to be the Intendant having changed his mind and wanting to play nice all of a sudden.”
“So, you’re going to walk into his den unarmed and alone?” Choi demanded.
“It’s our only real chance of getting out of this without a fight,” she replied. “I don’t want to get any of my people killed if I can protect them.”
“Walking into the furnace when the man at the switch tells you to doesn’t protect anyone,” the Marine said. “Dying won’t save us.”
“I don’t plan on dying today,” Amelie said dryly. “I’m still hoping to talk our way out of this mess.”
“Fair. You’ll forgive me if I think the odds of that suck.”
Amelie nodded silently. She didn’t disagree.
Before she could regard the conversation as over and walk out to face her fate, Choi produced the laser pistol Amelie had barely carried despite being given it.
“Speaking of odds that sucked, we tested if this would pass Sivar security,” she said brightly. “It’s Assini tech. Ceramics, batteries, artificial crystals. I was expecting the power source, at least, to ping something.”
“Wait, what?” Amelie demanded.
“I walked into the Intendant’s audience chamber with this in my armor,” the Sergeant confessed. “They never questioned it, never flagged it as a weapon. Take it this time, Minister. Please.”
Amelie took the gun and tucked it into the vest. It might have been concealed by Sergeant Choi’s heavier armor, but she wasn’t turning down a weapon the Sivar might miss.
“All right,” she told the Marine. “Time for me to go, but I have orders for you to give Köhl.”
“Ma’am?”
“The priority is keeping everyone alive,” Amelie insisted. “If they storm the compound, I’m not going to order Marines not to fight, but your priority is to make sure as many of you and as many of the staff are alive when Isaac comes to get us.
“Make sure Lina understands that. No matter what happens to me, your job and hers is to make sure that as many of you as possible are still here when the Fleet comes. You get me, Sergeant Choi?”
“I get you, Minister Lestroud.”
Choi stepped back and gave Amelie a picture-perfect salute.
“Another al
ert from Ryu,” the Marine told the older woman. “I think it’s time for you to go.”
By the time Amelie reached the guest house’s front door, the standoff had grown very pointed. She guessed it had started with her people in full power armor, but that didn’t help her nerves.
Four Exilium Marines, each clad in two meters of powered steel and ceramics instead of the more decorative-but-less-functional formal armor, loomed just outside the door with heavy pulse rifles in their gauntlets. Easily a dozen Sivar faced them. Their armor wasn’t quite as impressive, but that was mostly due to the occupants’ lack of height. It was still a hard shell with a powered internal exoskeleton.
Without testing it, there was no way to know if Sivar power armor stacked up to EMC gear, but Amelie was hoping to not find out. Their weapons, at least, looked cruder to Amelie. From her Marines’ general reactions to Sivar ground troops, though, she guessed that whatever the large “mag-kinetic” guns were, they could at least threaten her Marines.
“I’m here,” she told the Siva. “Stop pretending you can intimidate my Marines and point your guns somewhere else. What do you want?”
“You are to be brought before the Intendant,” the lead guard snapped. “Follow me.”
It wasn’t a request, and Amelie concealed a sigh as she could feel the Marines bristle through their armor.
“EMC,” she barked, snapping all four power armored Marines to attention. “Stand down,” she ordered. “I came here to speak to the Intendant, after all. There is no reason to decline his invitation.”
“You will come alone and unarmed,” the Sivar soldier told her, but some of the sharpness had faded from his tone as he realized that she was the only reason the Marines hadn’t turned him to ash yet.
“I figured,” Amelie replied. She spread her arms. “I am unarmed. I will come alone. Bring me to your Intendant, soldier. I don’t intend to start a war today. Do you?”
Encased in armor, there was no way to tell how the soldier reacted to that—even if Amelie was confident in her ability to read Sivar expression. He gestured for her to follow him and turned around.
“Choi has my orders,” Amelie told the Marines, presuming Ryu was in one of the suits of armor. “I’ll be back.”
“If you can,” the Marine Sergeant muttered, his armor projecting his voice directly to her earbud.
She said nothing. What was there to say?
He was entirely correct.
She was led to the same room she’d met the Intendant in every time. This time, however, the guards lining the walls were in power armor and the Intendant was alone on the top dais.
The Keepers had been relegated to the tables on the lower level, sitting behind her with several other Sivar she didn’t know as she was firmly led to the square of carpet and faced the Intendant calmly.
“Even now, you do not kneel,” he observed. “Your arrogance is your undoing, Minister Amelie Lestroud.”
“If I am ever undone, it will be by many things, but never by not kneeling to a tyrant,” she replied. “I have never knelt and I never will.”
The Intendant laughed.
“You will learn,” he told her, eyes flashing in his armored skull. “I have studied what the Eyes of Sivar have learned of your people from you and your ship. You claim great power, but you are a tiny nation far away from the true heart of your race’s power.
“You are not strong enough to stand before me as an equal,” he continued, his voice calm. “The Governance negotiates only with the strong, and none of your allies qualify…and neither do you.”
“Then we will leave,” she told him. “This visit has been a grand waste of both of our times and I see no reason to continue it.”
He laughed again.
“I think not,” he replied. “Your allies have rich worlds, and you have technology that can help us, even if you lack the strength to fully use it. You face an enemy you cannot defeat, and so you came to me.
“And I will help you. Nine worlds have knelt to the Governance, and they are guarded by our fleets. I do not fear the Builders. That you fear them is another sign of your weakness.”
The Intendant, Amelie reflected, was in for a rude awakening sooner or later.
“I will make this offer once, the only remaining chance to save your people from the enemy you fear so badly,” he told her, his translated voice a sleek purr. “Kneel, Amelie Lestroud. Submit your allies and your Republic to the Governance of the Sivar, and our almighty fleets will shield your worlds from the Builders.
“Kneel and submit, and I will guarantee the security of your worlds from the monsters in the dark.”
There was an expectant silence in the room, the audience waiting to hear her response. They might even believe there was a chance she’d accept.
Instead, she laughed. She’d been an actress once and she could laugh on cue—and this was a massive belly laugh, one that was utterly unladylike that she’d learned for a comedy routine in her twenties.
It echoed off the stone walls and the armored soldiers. There was no question of what she was doing, language and cultural barriers be damned.
“Your almighty fleets?” she finally asked. “You don’t get it, do you? Your fleets are obsolescent trash. Your industry is backwards. Your conquests barbaric. A single Matrix warship could shred your fleet. A single Republic battle group could conquer your entire empire.
“You are utterly out of your depth, facing enemies who outclass you completely, and you spit on our aid and betray us? You ask us to surrender to you?”
She met the Intendant’s gaze.
“You have power over me only because I made myself vulnerable—so we could try to help you,” she told him. “We are not your enemies, Intendant of the Sivar. We came here to be your friends, though that was before we learned that you were the mad tyrant king of a slave state.
“Let us go and we will leave. We already have one war. But if you turn on us now, if you betray the trust that brought me here before, unarmed and alone, you start a new war.
“One you cannot win.”
Amelie had no illusions now how this audience was going to end—which meant that her words weren’t for the Intendant. They were for the Sivar in the room, watching her face down their god-king. Everything, from her posture to her verbal attack, was to show them that the Republic was going to destroy them.
“Seize her,” the Intendant commanded. “Your arrogance will be the downfall of your entire alliance,” he told Amelie as armored soldiers grabbed each of her arms.
She let them. They might take her weapon from her, but she suspected she might still get it into a cell with her—and that would be convenient.
“I have only spoken truth,” she told him. “The consequences of your arrogance are going to be fascinating to watch.”
40
The Sivar guards searched Amelie thoroughly once they’d removed her from the audience chamber, holding her at gunpoint to discourage resistance. They identified and took away the communication gear that had let her warn her people what was coming before she learned the Sivar’s next stage.
They even took away her translator earbud and shoulder speaker, which was going to be a problem. She pointed at that particular set of electronics and then at her ears. The guards ignored her, one of them barking an order at her.
Without the translator overlaying it with English, the Sivar language sounded like grinding consonants through a series of jagged rocks. More importantly, she didn’t understand a word of it.
She pointed at the translator gear again, then held up her hands in clear confusion.
Another barked order and she repeated the gesture. There was now a gun directly in her face and she met its holder’s gaze levelly…and pointed at the translator.
One of them finally worked out what was going on and handed her the gear. She reattached it and looked back at the guard.
“Now, what were you asking me to do?” she asked sweetly.
“Remove your ou
ter layers and spread your limbs for the scanner,” the guard barked.
She obeyed. Fortunately, the armor vest was her inner layer, and she wasn’t sure the Sivar knew human anatomy enough to realize that it was intentionally hanging to conceal pockets.
They ran the scanner over her, far more closely and intently than any previous search, but it cleared her. Whatever it was looking for, Assini sidearms didn’t trigger it.
They didn’t give her her suit back before they ushered her out of the room. The armor vest at least had a built-in bra—she hadn’t become one of the most famous actresses of her time by being flat-chested, after all—but it was still a sleeveless block of armor pretending to be clothing.
But she didn’t have much choice unless she wanted to start shooting, so she went along as they led her to a prison section whose warmth and slight sulfur smell told her she was deep inside the mountain, near the lava tubes that fuelled the First and Final Citadel’s geothermal plants.
“Where are my people?”
“Being interned as we speak,” the guard told her. “They will not be imprisoned here. These are the Intendant’s personal cells.”
That was probably a bad sign, but the guards weren’t giving her much choice. She was pushed forward into the cell before the door slammed shut behind her.
Amelie glanced around her prison with scant favor. The bed was going to be too short for her—even Isaac, who was a lot smaller than the popular image of a black man as scary as he could be, couldn’t fit on a Sivar bed—and it was the only furniture.
A bed, a small niche in the wall with what appeared to be a sink and…that was it. Amelie had a moment of concern before she realized that what had looked like a mere stone outcropping was a toilet of the same odd design as the ones in the guest house.
“A luxurious embassy this is not,” she muttered to herself. “Hurry up, Isaac.”
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 25