Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  The laws of physics were hard to break. He was thirty days from Sivar-One, his destination when he’d entered warp. Forty-plus from here.

  Hopefully, the Sivar could at least manage to feed her. It was going to be a long wait.

  The Sivar had left her tablet and her translator gear. Without the secondary communicator they had taken, it couldn’t reach Watchtower—though Amelie wasn’t sure it could have reached through the mountain anyway.

  The battery life for both was long enough that she probably wasn’t going to find herself miming at her guards. She took a moment to switch them into power-conserving mode while making sure that her tablet clock was up.

  She might not be able to know what was going on, but she would at least know how long it took.

  That was how she knew how long it was before anyone came—roughly four hours.

  Footsteps in the corridor attracted her attention a moment before she heard a door opening. It wasn’t her door, but as she heard it close again, she realized that there was an airlock-style security barrier to keep her locked in. The outer door had presumably been open when they walked her in.

  The inner door to her cell retreated into the ceiling, and a Croni walked in carrying a tray.

  The winged alien ignored her, placing the tray into a slot in the wall that turned it into a shelf.

  “Wait,” she said in Sivar. The alien ignored her.

  “Please,” she said…this time in the alien’s own language. She and her people had been paying attention to the cleaners as they came through the guest house. She didn’t have much of a Croni vocabulary in her translator, but she had some.

  “What happened to my friends?”

  The alien was staring at her with large black eyes that now looked very wide.

  “No,” they finally responded, in Sivar. “No talk.” They paused. “Too dangerous,” they finished in Croni.

  “Please?” Amelie repeated.

  The Croni backed away, their hands raised defensively in front of themselves.

  “Some are dead. The rest are prisoners,” they whispered in Croni. “Ask no more. No talk!” they concluded in Sivar. “Leave be!”

  She let the slave go, watching as it backed into the space sealed by the double door. She knew…well, she’d confirmed what she’d already expected. The Sivar had stormed the guesthouse and the Marines had, eventually, surrendered.

  The door slid closed and she turned her attention to the meal. It was plain enough, but the vegetables were another answer to her question. She recognized the sauce and mix as the result of one of the easy-prep packages they’d brought down from Watchtower with them.

  Feeding her the food she’d brought was a good way to make sure she could eat it, she supposed. There was only so much of it, though.

  Sighing, she realized there were no utensils. Nothing they’d served her was really designed to be eaten with her hands, but she’d make it work.

  Amelie refused to give the Intendant the pleasure of watching her starve.

  Ten more hours and a second meal passed before anyone but the slave bringing her food came to visit her. The second slave was even less talkative than the first, refusing to engage.

  The third arrival was unexpected. Two armored guards led the way, sweeping through the security double door and checking her cell for surprises.

  They had the same scanner as everyone else, though, which meant they missed the laser. Again. Amelie was starting to think the Republic needed to make a lot more of the little weapons.

  The silent guards withdrew and Keeper Rode walked in. The security doors closed behind her and she regarded Amelie with a quizzical look.

  “I do believe your people are mad,” she finally said. “Your soldiers’ armor is impressive.”

  Amelie snorted.

  “Don’t let my Marines hear you call them soldiers,” she told the alien. The translator probably couldn’t handle that distinction, but it was important to her people. “They get snippy.”

  “Many of them are dead,” Rode replied. “I am unconcerned about their irritation. Your civilians surrendered peacefully and fourteen of your soldiers lived. All wounded.”

  Amelie closed her eyes and sighed. She’d known the Marines weren’t going to be good at following orders to lay down their arms to preserve their lives, but that meant almost half of Köhl’s detachment had died defending that stupid guest house.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she admitted.

  “I thought you would like to know,” Rode said. “By our traditions, that seems odd, but you are not Sivar. And many among our people would have wanted to know, regardless of traditions.”

  “But not your Intendant.”

  “No,” Rode conceded softly. “Not the Intendant. But I am not here for the Intendant.”

  “Why are you here?” Amelie demanded. “To mock me? To taunt the monkey in a cage?”

  “What is a monkey?” Rode asked, then shook her entire upper torso. Natural armor plating clacked against itself in an impressive clatter. “Irrelevant. I am not here to mock you.”

  She held out her hand, revealing a holographic projector. An image of Watchtower and the rest of the consular flotilla appeared.

  “The delay in the Intendant calling you back was to allow the Commandants time to plan their operation against your ships,” the Keeper of the Citadel noted. “They were certain they had the measure of your weapons and defenses from their scans.”

  “How many ships did you lose?” Amelie breathed.

  “Ten, including both battleships committed to the attack,” Rode said flatly. “Even with the survivors we retrieved from the wrecks, over ten thousand dead.”

  She tapped a command and the hologram starting playing. Even at the relatively tiny scale, Amelie could pick out the storm of missiles as they descended on Holmwood’s ship.

  Not least because of the explosions as Watchtower’s defenses engaged. The three warships leapt into motion, trying to usher the freighters to safety.

  Even watching the video at speed, it was clear that Captain Holmwood had refused to fire back initially. She’d completely ignored the local fortresses, pure missile platforms that had flung hundreds of missiles at her.

  It was only when the two battleships and their escorts had made their final lunge to cover the assault transports’ approach to the freighters that Holmwood stopped playing nice. The battleships survived better than Amelie had expected, the first one taking multiple direct hits from the secondary turrets on the three Republic warships and even surviving a direct hit from Watchtower’s main gun.

  The hit still stopped her dead in space, allowing Holmwood to bake the ship with heavy pulse gun fire. Lasers and pulse guns had ravaged the second battleship, crippling both ships and sending them reeling from the fight.

  The escorts had continued to face Watchtower’s fire when they refused to break off, still attempting to deliver the boarding ships behind a hail of missile and laser fire.

  Only when over half of the escorts had been destroyed did they finally run.

  “All of your ships escaped,” Rode said calmly. “I’d like to blame your Captain—I knew people on those ships—but I can’t. She did her duty.”

  “You know where the blame lies,” Amelie pointed out. “I didn’t order that attack. My people defended themselves.”

  “One does not blame the Fates or their voice for what comes to pass,” the Siva replied.

  “Really.” Amelie studied the alien. The armor plating left the Sivar with unexpressive faces, leaving much of her reading of them to eyes and body language. It wasn’t quite a guess, but it wasn’t a lot better.

  “You’re not here because you believe that,” she told Rode. “You didn’t come here to tell me my people died and you aren’t here to commit suicide by prisoner or arrange for me to be shot attempting to escape.

  “You just watched one of my capital ships punch through two of yours and are beginning to realize just how fucked your Governance is,”
she continued. “I can’t help you there anymore. I suppose if your Intendant was going to release all of my people and put us on a ship to Sivar-One, we could talk down the storm that’s coming.

  “But your people started this war—and it’s going to be a war, Keeper Rode. You threw me in a cell, killed my people and attacked my ships. The Republic will not forget and the Republic will not forgive, not unless your people change.”

  “We do not change. The strong endure. The strong rule.”

  Rode’s words were fatalistic.

  “And if the Sivar are no longer the strong, what happens?” Amelie asked.

  “It has never been the case,” Rode replied. “Tribes fell. Nations fell. All became Sivar. All are bound by the voice of the Fates.”

  “And when the Governance is broken and the Republic’s fleets are at your door, who falls?” Amelie asked again. “Who are the Sivar if they are no longer slavemasters?”

  “I don’t know,” the Keeper of the Citadel told her. She produced something from inside her toga-like garment—a piece of cloth with a symbol on it. Dropping that cloth on the floor, she nodded to Amelie.

  “I don’t know and my Intendant has no intention of finding out,” she continued. She nodded to the cloth. “If you ever find yourself in the City, though, look for that sign. That is how you will find the people who do wonder who we are if we are no longer slavemasters.”

  Rode turned and left, leaving Amelie staring at a closing door in surprise. Shaking her head, she picked up the cloth. It was a neatly embroidered thing, a handkerchief, she supposed.

  The symbol on it was clear enough: it was a broken chain on a star. She could see a dozen ways that it could be subtly concealed in a larger image, a hidden sign for…what? A group of rebels? An underground railroad?

  She was in a cell at the heart of the First and Final Citadel. She wasn’t going to end up in “the City”—presumably the metropolis at the base of the mountain anytime soon.

  Amelie was still staring at the image, trying to work out what Rode was trying to suggest, when the doors to her cell calmly slid open.

  41

  Amelie stood and stared at the door in shock for at least ten seconds before starting to think about the situation. The double security door clearly needed to be overridden from somewhere to open both doors.

  It was quite possible that she was being set up, with every intention of her being “shot while attempting to escape.” Except that there was no point to that. If the Intendant wanted her dead, he’d order her death and that would be the end of it.

  The only audience he could be performing for was the Republic…and he had to realize that there was no scenario he could fake up that would make her death acceptable.

  Which meant someone wanted her to escape. If nothing else, they wanted to see how far she’d get and what she’d do.

  Watching the doors for several more seconds to see if they suddenly closed, Amelie then briskly strode forward like she’d been officially released.

  There had, it turned out, been a guard outside her door. The Siva was on the ground, curled into the fetal position and unconscious. The ground around the alien was a mess of vomit.

  The guard was probably going to be fine—they appeared to still be breathing, and she doubted that Rode had fatally poisoned her own people—but Amelie couldn’t just walk by, either. She took a moment to kneel by the unconscious figure and carefully adjust them. The recovery position was reliant on human anatomy, but the concept of “keep the airway clear and position them to make sure the airway stays clear in case of further vomit” seemed pretty universally equivalent.

  She took the opportunity to steal the guard’s personal computer. Bulkier than her thumb-sized holographic tablet, it was a book-sized device that could collapse down to a stick a centimeter wide and fifteen high.

  Fortunately for her sanity, it was unlocked. Unfortunately, her translator couldn’t read text for her without a scanner attachment that the guards had broken.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d missed the permanently installed military tattoo-comps. She’d only ever had a fake one for movie roles, which meant she’d been reliant on attachments the Sivar had taken.

  The Sivar text was beyond her, but the iconography wasn’t, and the map software icon was on the screen the device was open to. It still took her a few seconds to get it open and orient herself, but she managed it.

  Using the software’s navigation software was out of the question, but she could at least pick the most direct route toward the outside of the mountain. Holding the tablet in her left hand, she finally drew the laser pistol Köhl and Choi had insisted she take.

  This might end up with her dead or back in the cell, but she’d be damned if she was going down without a fight!

  The corridors around the Intendant’s personal prison were surprisingly empty. There was a second security checkpoint on the way out, but Amelie almost missed it. She was between the two heavy security doors before she even realized they were there, and dashed forward to find another pair of guards, both in the same state of illness as the one outside her cell.

  She was pretty sure Keeper Rode was to blame for the sudden lack of security between her and the outside of the First and Final Citadel—and she was also reasonably sure that these security guards worked for the Keeper.

  They would probably follow the Intendant’s orders over Rode’s, however, and almost certainly hadn’t signed up to be food-poisoned into unconsciousness. Even her apparent ally there was making Amelie nervous.

  It didn’t help that the only thing she really had to go on was “get into the City and look for this symbol.”

  Getting to the outside of the mountain was the first step, though, and while she was rusty, Amelie had once trained in infiltration tactics with some of the best. While her official training with Confederacy Special Forces had been limited and targeted at looking good rather than actually working, several of those soldiers had ended up in her rebellion and had given her real training.

  This was, of course, about the worst possible circumstance to be doing it under. She was inside a structure that she’d never scouted, relying on a map she hadn’t validated, in hostile territory and with no idea how good her hiding places were going to be anywhere along the way.

  Plus, just briskly walking forward like she belonged there wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She was thirty centimeters taller than any Sivar she’d met, and her head looked completely different.

  Caution and good hearing got her to the closest exit on her map. That took her over an hour of painstaking, nerve-wracking travel, listening at doors and corners as she moved forward.

  Her care meant that she was aware of the armored guard standing at the doorway before she walked into their line of sight. A careful peek around the corner laid out the situation and her problem.

  There was one Siva standing next to the closed door. They held a weapon lazily, the short rifle hung on a strap from their shoulder. For all the slack in their posture, there was no way that Amelie could reach the door without them having plenty of time to react.

  She steeled herself and took a deep breath. Despite everything, she’d made it through her revolt and into leadership of Exilium and her role as ambassador without ever actually firing a shot at another sentient being in anger.

  There didn’t seem to be another option here. Shooting the guard would almost certainly raise a million alarms—though Rode’s poisoning the other guards obviously hadn’t. The Keeper had apparently missed this one, and Amelie had to wonder if she’d gone a different way than Rode had expected.

  It was probably for the best if she had, even if this was something of a problem. Breathing slowly to calm her nerves, she checked the charge on the laser pistol. It wouldn’t need full power to kill a man in light armor. Thirty percent should do it.

  She was procrastinating and she knew it. Enough people had already died that it seemed silly to hesitate and yet…

  The door pop
ped open and a voice barked in Sivar. The guard snapped to attention, stepping back as a pair of other guards came through with a train of Croni slaves carrying cleaning equipment.

  Amelie snorted mentally. If she hadn’t just been procrastinating about moving, she’d have gone through the door right into a cluster of guards and slaves.

  The discussion continued in Sivar, but she was too far away for her translator to pick it up. If the guards and slaves came her way, she was going to be in serious trouble. She’d mentally mapped a couple of hiding spots to fall back to, but she wasn’t sure she had time to get to them.

  Then, to her surprise, the guard closed the door behind the last Croni, activated a locking mechanism, and the entire group set off down a different corridor. The door was now locked…but unguarded.

  And Amelie Lestroud had much less hesitation about shooting a lock.

  It wasn’t until she was outside the mountain, on one of the roads that circled the First and Final Citadel and led down to the City, that Amelie realized the dual flaw with her plan.

  First, she had no idea where to go. Following the road and sneaking around every one of its fortified checkpoints and defensive positions was an almost-certain recipe for getting caught. There was no way Rode had cleared a path down the outside of the mountain, the most fortified set of security barriers on the planet.

  She might have cleared a path through the mountain itself, potentially marked by the symbol she’d shown Amelie, but that brought up the second problem with shooting out the lock:

  It was almost certainly alarmed. She could hear shouting voices through the door she’d left propped open, and those were probably the very guards she’d watched pass a few minutes before.

  Staying where she was wasn’t an option, so Amelie took a moment to be certain there was no traffic on the road and then dashed across. At least the other side had the same planters and decorative shrubbery as had been outside the Halls of Gathering. She had a basic hiding place and she could hope that her biometrics were sufficiently different from what the guards’ scanners were calibrated for to give her a chance.