Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  It was a crap chance. Her rusty infiltration training told her that, but she didn’t have much choice. Hidden behind the planters for now, she crouched over to the stone safety wall and looked out.

  Like most of the mountain she’d seen so far, the side of the mountain beneath her was a sheer face, carved by explosives and lasers to give the terrace below more space. Leaning against the protective barrier, she felt the slight buzz of an inertial safety field. That would try to stop her falling over, but if she actually jumped, it should also reduce gravity enough to let her land safely.

  It was at least a fifteen-meter drop and the back of her mind was gibbering at the thought. The Republic’s safety fields would have been calibrated to make sure anyone who managed to completely fall over would land safely.

  She didn’t know if the Sivar were quite so generous, but, once again, she didn’t have much choice. She could hear a vehicle slamming to a halt behind her, presumably a patrol checking in on the alarm from the lock and finding a door blasted open by an energy weapon unknown to the Sivar.

  She jumped.

  Static electricity shot over her body, an unimaginably uncomfortable case of full-body pins and needles that was a side effect of the inertial safety field. She’d been told it could be reduced, but she wasn’t surprised the Sivar hadn’t.

  Amelie fell fifteen meters and hit the ground like she’d jumped down a tenth of that distance. She rolled forward to absorb the momentum, ending up in the middle of a set of decorative bushes.

  This being the First and Final Citadel’s gardens, of course, those bushes concealed a secondary SAM launcher. It wasn’t one of the massive multi-missile racks that crowned the mountain, but the weapon would make a handy mess of anything that sneaked past those.

  Fortunately for her, the installation didn’t have sensors of its own—or at least, not ones that would detect a human on foot hiding behind the missile.

  She took a moment to regain her breath and spotted one of the Sivar patrolling along the edge of the fence. She couldn’t be sure if the safety field had pinged an alarm of its own—quite possibly—or if they were just checking the edge to be certain.

  Either way, the guard didn’t appear to see anything to raise their suspicion. They kept moving, and Amelie exhaled a long sigh.

  The inertial safety fields made parkouring down the side of the mountain a possibility, but if the fields had alarms, someone was going to notice the pattern sooner or later.

  For now, though, she needed to get more distance from her prison. Taking a moment to make sure that there was no one watching from above, she surveyed the terrace and drew a mental map of her route to the edge.

  Then she ran. She might have spent the last few years behind a desk, but her acting had required a high level of athleticism, and her protective detail had refused to let her get out of shape as President of Exilium. Habits died hard and she was in solid shape for anyone, let alone a fifty-plus politician.

  She vaulted several of the lower planters, trying to keep taller plants between her and the edge where she knew the patrol was still looking for her.

  This time, she only gave herself a few seconds to look at what was on the terrace below. This one looked like it was actually a food garden for the Citadel’s kitchens, but it was empty of anyone she could see from above.

  She jumped again, swallowing the beginnings of a scream as the pins and needles rippled over her skin. The landing was harder this time, but she still managed to avoid most of the impact by rolling forward behind a stand of some kind of grain tall enough to hide her from view.

  There, gasping for breath, she realized the grain had hidden someone from her view. A stocky four-legged alien with fur so black as to be almost purple looked at her. A Pol, she thought they’d been told.

  “You are trouble,” the alien told her in calm Sivar. “Should you not be in a cell?”

  “You know who I am?” she asked, raising herself to her knees and making sure she had a hand on the laser pistol inside her vest.

  “The strange alien who challenges the Intendant and keeps trying to speak to the slaves around her, even when it is unwise?” the Pol replied, their tone almost amused. She was relatively sure the alien was speaking Sivar without a translator. It probably made sense to make the staff learn your language if you were a slaving despot, she supposed.

  “I know you. I am…not sure I can help you, if you are running down the mountain to escape the Sivar, but you are fascinating.”

  “Can anyone help me?” Amelie asked, glancing back up the mountain. “My people have been imprisoned, my ship driven from the system. I have somewhere to go if I can get to the City, but that contact is using me against the Intendant.”

  The Pol blinked large yellow eyes at her and bared broad, sharp teeth in a lazy smile.

  “That explains your lack of cell, yes,” they noted. “I am but a gardener. I grow vegetables and am treated better than many by our masters, but I am quite restricted.”

  They considered her, looking her up and down.

  “I can get you off the mountain,” he finally told her. “It is not without risk, but I can see you delivered to the Kond. If anyone can help you, it will be the Kond. From there, if he wills it, you can be taken into the City.”

  “The Kond?” Amelie asked, then shook her head. “I will gladly meet anyone who can help,” she told the Pol. “I need to get my people out.”

  She was grimly certain that the Intendant wouldn’t surrender and that Isaac’s fleet couldn’t capture the First and Final Citadel. They’d have to destroy it from orbit, which meant she wanted to get her people—and as many of the slaves as possible—out of the damn mountain.

  “Then I can deliver you to the Kond,” the gardener told her. “You look about the right size; this should work.”

  “What’s the right size?” Amelie asked slowly.

  “You’ll fit in my compost bags,” the Pol gardener said cheerfully.

  42

  “We have no response from the Sentinels,” Siril-ki reported to a subdued crowd the next morning. “We definitely have a connection, but we have received no response to our attempt to communicate.”

  Octavio had put three holograms up in the middle of the conference, and he was currently studying the closest one to him: the schematic of an Assini-designed Sentinel Matrix’s combat hull.

  A Construction Matrix combat platform was over a kilometer long, a multi-claw shape with each prong armed with gamma-ray lasers. The Escorts had been spindle-shaped ships of roughly the same size with multiple high-powered lasers positioned along their hull.

  The Sentinels were the intermediate design. They were a more rounded shape than the combat platforms but retained a bifurcated form resembling a sailing catamaran. Most of their arsenal was high-frequency grasers like Dauntless’s own secondaries, but each of the main spikes contained the first zettahertz lasers the Assini had built.

  They were also five kilometers long, bristling with pulse guns and lasers along their entire length. The Sentinel had been designed to engage a Regional Construction Matrix and all of its defenders in groups of eleven at most.

  Bringing eighty of them home would have made the whole trip worth it. Instead, there appeared to only be three left…and those three seemed to be brain-dead.

  “Is there any way to establish why they’re not answering?” Octavio asked the Assini. “Are we looking at intact beacons in wrecked ships or nonfunctional Matrices or…are they just ignoring our call?”

  “It is almost impossible to tell at this distance,” Siril-ki noted. “Without any ability to examine the ships or use secondary lightspeed communications, we are limited to their voluntary responses or basic involuntary system protocols.

  “Currently, we are only able to engage with the latter. That has allowed us to confirm their location but not their status. All of your suggested possibilities are potentially valid.

  “Given that we are the first Assini to attempt to make contact wi
th the Sentinels in multiple elevens of eleven years, I would not expect them to ignore us,” ki admitted. “I was expecting an immediate, if confused, response.”

  “Is it possible there’s some kind of technical issue interfering with the communication?” Renaud asked.

  Octavio shook his head before Siril-ki could respond.

  “If we’re getting the involuntary ping, we should be able to communicate with the Matrix,” he told his flag captain. “There’s only one tachyon communicator aboard a Matrix starship and it’s basically attached to the Matrix core.”

  “As Commodore Catalan says, yes,” Siril-ki confirmed. “If the Matrices are intact, they are aware that we are calling them.”

  “So, either they’re ignoring us…or the Matrices are dead but the ships remain,” Octavio concluded. “Neither of those is a great result.”

  He shook his head.

  “Especially given where they are.”

  He tapped a command on his tattoo-comp, vanishing the image of the Sentinel and bringing up the local astrographic chart.

  “All three of the Sentinels we’ve been able to locate are here,” he told his people. “It’s an M-sequence orange dwarf with a mass of just under a quarter of Sol’s. It wasn’t flagged for development by the Construction Matrices because the odds of there being a useful planet were low.

  “Theoretically, there is no reason the Sentinels should be there…except that it’s also directly along the vector our strange ship left Assini on.”

  The line was already on the hologram. Everyone could have drawn the same conclusion as to what the data had shown, even if only half the people in the room had already known the answer.

  “We don’t have a lot of detail on the system,” he continued. “At twelve point six light-years away, it would be a twenty-one-year flight for the interstellar colony ship we believe they were using as a transport. That would line up with an expedition being sent back after they learned of the fall of Sina via tachyon communicator.”

  “Or, potentially, after losing contact with whoever they were talking to in the Assini System,” Renaud suggested. “It seems reasonably likely that they could have lost all contact here when Sina fell.”

  “So they sent a ship,” Das noted. “And then what? Before they even get here, everybody dies?”

  “Basically,” Octavio said grimly. “They might have been a rescue expedition. They might have been an invasion army. They could easily have been both! We’ll never know now.

  “What we do know was that there was an Assini colony, despite even the Assini not knowing that,” he reminded them. Another command focused on the orange dwarf system.

  “The system is close enough that the Assini databases have a pretty solid idea of what’s there,” he continued. “It’s not much. A pair of gas giants, one almost big enough to rival the star for mass, and two midsized rocks in close-in orbits. Neither is close enough to be in the liquid-water zone…but one is close enough that the Construction Matrices could have kicked it there.”

  “That would have been detected from Assini, wouldn’t it?” Renaud asked.

  “Yes,” Octavio confirmed. “So, they didn’t do it before the flares, but it may have been part of their long-term plan. May. We don’t know what these people were after.”

  “We know they may have contributed to the deaths of elevens of eleven million of my people,” Siril-ki said grimly. “If they knew to avoid the Matrices…”

  “We don’t know enough to judge them yet,” Octavio replied. “What we do know is that without a full set of Construction Matrix terraformers, there’s no way they could have transformed that world.

  “But. With the two terraformers they took from here they could have established a significant habitable zone on almost any planet. Those are extraordinarily powerful devices.”

  He looked around his crew, smiling as he spotted that Meena Das had acquired a ring on her left hand over the last day or so. Chen, it seemed, moved quickly once she’d set her mind to something.

  “We’ve spent weeks in Assini,” he reminded them all. “It hasn’t been entirely wasted, we’ve learned a lot…but I don’t think we’ve learned anything that is going to help the Republic as much as taking a battlecruiser group home would.

  “We’ve learned the fate of Siril-ki’s people and it isn’t pretty,” he continued, gesturing to the Assini. “We may have found a clue as to how all of this started, and we may have found some of the Sentinel Matrices.

  “Three Sentinels won’t change the balance of power back home, but they’d help,” he said. “More than that, we know Matrices. Three of them lost on their own, thinking their creators and their siblings alike are all dead or mad? They don’t deserve that—and we can help them.

  “Those clues, that chance to help those Sentinels? They all lead us to this system. If we’re going to learn anything here, we need to investigate that star.”

  Octavio smiled. Twelve-point-six light-years would take his fleet eighteen days to travel—and it wasn’t even in the direction of home. He would be adding a minimum of sixty days to his trip, with no guarantee that it would be worth it.

  “So, that’s what we’re going to do,” he told his people. “And we’ll see what we can find.”

  At the end of the day, it was his call and his call alone. His little flotilla was already a year from home. It was unlikely that the Republic was going to fall because he’d arrived in a year and three months instead of a year.

  Of course, if it did… Well, that was why he had new reasons to dye his hair of late.

  43

  Compost, regardless of the world it is on or the plants it is made of or its destination, stinks. The bags used to haul vegetable scraps and the inedible portions of the garden plants out of the First and Final Citadel’s gardens were no exception.

  The Pol gardener never gave Amelie a name, but they helped her squeeze into an empty compost bag of roughly the right size for her and set up an air hose to the outside of the open-backed transport truck they were loading.

  The air hose was necessary, as they proceeded to load the other twenty sacks of compost in the shed onto the truck around and on top of her. There wasn’t enough mass on top of her to keep her from being able to breathe, but even with the hose, she was worrying about suffocating.

  The truck was a six-wheeled vehicle that made its way down the mountain in a recurring reminder that working vehicles the galaxy over apparently had their shock absorbers removed when they reported for duty.

  The First and Final Citadel’s roads were well maintained, but even the tiniest bump or crack shifted the weight above Amelie. She wasn’t entirely sure the setup was safe, and she had to wonder who the Pol normally smuggled out.

  There was no way that the truck had come with the spot the gardener had tucked her air hose into originally. She wasn’t the first person who’d been secretly removed from the Intendant’s capital.

  Security checkpoints were their own heart attack. She lost count after fifteen, each at least a five-minute pause while she could feel the vibrations of guards poking at the vehicle. A straight drive down the intentionally looping road out of the Citadel was probably sixty kilometers or so. That would have called for an hour, maybe an hour and a half, of careful driving by the truck driver.

  Instead, it was over three hours before the sudden paucity of checkpoints and increase in road bumps suggested they might finally be clear of the Citadel. Three hours that Amelie could only regard as a precursor to hell itself.

  She’d set herself up to at least be able to check the time on her tablet, but by the time four hours had passed, she almost wished she hadn’t. There was no water in the bag with her. No food. She had an air hose and that was it.

  That was when the truck stopped. Voices spoke near the wheel well in a rapid-fire language she didn’t understand—and then everything started vibrating as the bags of compost began to be removed.

  It took Amelie a moment to realize that it wasn’t a r
andom process or the orderly removal of everything starting at the top she’d expected, either. Someone was quite specifically removing the bags above her.

  Then hands grabbed the bag she was in and started to pull her roughly upward—only for commands to get barked in that unfamiliar language. After that, she was more gently lifted out.

  “Minister Lestroud, can you hear me?” a voice asked in halting Sivar. “I don’t speak your language. I hope you understand me.”

  “I can hear you,” she replied.

  “Do you have a way out or do we need to cut the bag open?” the voice asked.

  “I can get out if you put me upright,” she told the stranger.

  “Very well.” The voice barked orders in that strange language again. The people holding her felt around the bag for a second, locating her head the only way they could, and then put her feet on the ground.

  With a bit of effort, Amelie reached the tag the gardener had pointed out to her and yanked on it. The “loose thread” easily pulled away in her hand, unravelling a line across the top of the bag that let the sealed top fall away. A moment later, the entire stinking bag collapsed around her feet.

  She’d done grosser things for her movies, but those had been with the promise of immediate hot showers afterwards and generally hadn’t lasted four hours.

  The being holding her was of a species unknown to her, a shuffling creature easily two and a half meters tall that looked more like a tree than anything else. A half-second’s examination revealed that the solid-trunk appearance of their torso and legs was actually a garment, a long tunic cut of a fabric that matched their bark-like skin and rested on the ground around their feet.

  Two large arms with at least a dozen fingers apiece were still holding her up, with a second set of arms protruding from the alien’s back swinging forward with a bottle of water and a chunk of bread.