Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “These Dynasts are also enemies of the Intendant?” Amelie replied. “Sivar enemies, I assume?”

  “Yes. The Intendants and the Eyes of Sivar overthrew the First and Final Dynasty three generations ago, but a minor branch of the family survived and went into hiding.

  “Now they plot a return to power.” The Kond shivered. “Make no mistake, Minister Lestroud, the structure of tribute and helot? The Dynasts built that. They are not my friends.”

  “But they share your enemies,” Amelie replied. She’d had this conversation a lot in the Confederacy. She sighed.

  “Tell me truthfully, Kond. You told me there were more action-ready organizations than yours. How many other rebels lurk among the tributes and the helots that you have not invited to this meeting of yours?”

  The alien aristocrat studied her with dark eyes.

  “The organization I represent is one of the helots and the servants,” he finally conceded. “We have our claws among the tributes, but many of the tributes are already working for their homeworlds. They don’t trust long-term helots and we don’t trust them.

  “Even among the helots, there are the more violent groups that I do not associate with.”

  “Are we talking a dozen groups? A hundred? Five hundred hands or ten thousand?” Amelie demanded.

  The Kond’s unreadable gaze stayed focused on her.

  “I am not certain,” he admitted. “There are perhaps thirty groups I know of among the helots and the tributes here in the City. Many pay their fealty off-world, and few rival my organization’s numbers or power.”

  “But they have guns and explosives where you have spies and smugglers, yes?” Amelie asked. “They have asked you for intelligence that you have refused to provide?”

  “That is correct,” he said. “What do you want, Minister Lestroud?”

  “I want you to bring them all to that meeting, Kond,” she told him. “I want you to use your organization’s connections and reputation to put everyone in one room. It’s not the best way to do this, but I’m running out of time.”

  Her math said she had less than twenty days before Isaac hit Sonbar—Sivar-One.

  “I cannot do that,” the Kond protested. “My partners—”

  “Then do not tell your partners,” Amelie replied. “Put everyone in one room, Kond, and so long as we keep them from killing each other, the worst that happens is you know you share a goal.”

  He sniffled.

  “I know these people,” he noted. “I am not as confident as you that we can keep them from killing each other.”

  “Get them to the meeting, Kond,” she told him. “I have something none of you have. A few things, really, but two are critical:

  “Firstly, I am not part of any of your factions. I can stand as arbiter and guarantor to an alliance against the Intendant.”

  “And the other?”

  “I speak for the only people who can defeat the Sivar fleet in space.”

  The Kond was silent.

  “I don’t think you can give me what I need, Kond,” Amelie said quietly. “Not on your own. The rebels need to be ready for when the Intendant’s position wavers at the fall of Sonbar. All of them. Can your organization storm and seize the First and Final Citadel alone?”

  “I am not certain all of the helot and tribute organizations combined could do that,” he replied. “If I listen to you, you will doom us all.”

  “And that’s why I also need to talk to this Dynast and the Sivar rebels,” she told him. “You need to get everyone to that meeting, Kond, and you need to give me a ride into the City. I’m guessing you know where I can find this symbol.”

  Her finger stabbed at the cloth, and the Kond’s gaze followed her gesture.

  “You are mad,” he finally said. “A lead digger driving ever closer to the river bottom. I should never have listened to you.”

  “You need to listen to me,” Amelie snapped. “Has doing things the way you have changed anything, Kond? You must have saved a few people along the way, I’m sure—but you haven’t even saved enough that the Sivar are looking for escapees in the trucks leaving the Citadel.

  “I can’t save your people myself,” she continued. “But I can help you help each other. I can bring the Republic to your door to break the Sivar fleets and stand as an external guarantor to your promises and alliances.

  “But you said yourself that your organization can’t do this. That all of the helot organizations can’t do this—and I suspect if the Sivar organizations could do it, they would have.” She spread her hands.

  “Together, with the Republic as an inciting factor, you can achieve what you never would have managed on your own. But you need to take a chance, Kond. Are you willing to? Can you?”

  The Kond sniffed the air in silence for a moment, then bowed his big head.

  “We will take my vehicle,” he told her. “I cannot guarantee your safety once I drop you off. We’ll have to set a time for pickup, but between those…I cannot protect you. Even the local Sivar guards may grab you.”

  “That’s the risk I have to take,” Amelie agreed. “It’s part of my job.”

  The Kond snorted.

  “What is your job, again?” he asked.

  “At this point? Turning the Governance into a nation we are prepared to ally with.”

  46

  The Kond’s personal vehicle was a smaller version of the six-wheeled truck that had brought Amelie down from the mountain. On the exterior, it was clearly a work vehicle. On the inside, it was significantly more comfortable, with soft seats and highly effective climate control.

  “It would never do for a helot to appear wealthy or comfortable,” the Kond told her as they drove into the City. Other vehicles around them looked closer to the kind of personal and luxury vehicles Amelie would have expected in a human city.

  “You can do well, but only quietly,” Amelie concluded aloud. “And only among helots, I assume?”

  “My little business services many Sivar, but we are servants only,” he agreed. “I invest in other businesses as well, but…” He sniffed. “As you say, they are either among helots or have Sivar faces that officially own and run them.”

  The fact that there were Sivar that the Kond could get to help him maintain that illusion was promising. Money—or whatever passed for currency or influence in a given culture—papered over many sins for most species.

  But if the Sivar were truly lost beyond any hope of Amelie working with them, she suspected that the Kond would have had a far harder time keeping up his little empire.

  “Here,” the Pol told her as he pulled the truck around a small open-air plaza and into an alleyway parking spot. “Walk carefully, Minister Lestroud,” he told her. “This is a Sivar entertainment district. Tributes and helots are only allowed in the alleys and kitchens.

  “The tables are served by robots and Sivar. They do not want to see aliens here, though many helots work in these businesses.”

  “That’s typical,” Amelie replied. “Thank you.”

  “I won’t be picking you up,” he told her. “Someone else will do so, but they’ll be in this vehicle. They’ll pick you up here in seven hours.”

  “Thank you,” she repeated. “Is there anywhere in particular I should look for the symbol?”

  “The back doors all have the symbol of the restaurant on them,” the Kond told her. “My understanding is that several of this particular plaza’s businesses are owned by the Dynast. You should be able to make contact here.

  “If you can’t, you can wander further afield if you want, but your contact seemed to think they’d be easy enough to find,” he continued. “I’d suggest waiting in the alley until we come back for you if you can’t find your contacts. It would be safer.”

  “Go, Kond,” she told him. “I’ll be here in seven hours or I’ll send a message to arrange a different time for pickup. I don’t suppose you have a tablet you can give me?”

  “Helots are not permitted mobile comm
unications devices like your tablet,” he replied. “Most will assume you to be a helot or tribute unless given reason to believe otherwise, but I cannot be found with them. This vehicle cannot contain anything that would produce signals that would draw attention, so I don’t have any with me.

  “If you conclude any alliance with the Dynast, perhaps they can provide you something.” He paused, then sniffed again.

  “May your digging be fruitful.”

  Before she could respond to that, he closed the door and turned the truck back on. A moment later, Amelie Lestroud was alone in the back alley behind a row of restaurants she couldn’t be seen in.

  It was time to get to work.

  Amelie started by taking a slow walk along the alley. Her goal was twofold: first, to take at least a quick look at each of the restaurant logos to see if any of them obviously held the symbol she’d been given; and second, to see the limits of what counted as alley.

  She expected it to be relatively obvious where the areas the helots were allowed were and she was right. There was a blue line painted on the ground and walls at the end, but it was almost unnecessary.

  It was very clear that the area on one side of that line had been maintained to be gorgeous…and the area on the other side had been maintained to be functional.

  Interestingly, it looked like there was a reasonably continuous corridor of helot-allowed roads and pathways leading both deeper into the City and out toward the suburbs. There were probably places where non-helots would have to pass through that were better maintained, but it formed a maintenance corridor through an area where non-Sivar were clearly not allowed.

  Slaves and near-slaves made for much cheaper labor than free Sivar. It was clear that the business owners weren’t going to give up that cost savings just for the illusion of living in a city that wasn’t being run on the backs of alien slaves.

  The plaza that the Kond had dropped her off behind had six restaurants in the alleyway she had started in, and none of them obviously had a broken-chain image in their logos.

  Three of the six, however, had stars in their logos. One of those stars was a perfect match for the one in the symbol Amelie was carrying, and on closer examination, the position of the letters of the name was a perfect match for the pieces of the broken chain.

  No matter what happened next, she had to take a risk. Otherwise, everything she was setting out to do was for nothing.

  Folding the cloth with the symbol into her hand, she rapped hard on the door. No one answered for a minute, so she raised her hand to knock again.

  The door popped open before she could strike it, a tall-for-their-race Siva standing in the doorway, glaring up at her.

  “What the hell do you want?” the Siva demanded. When they saw her, however, she could tell that they knew something. Most of the Sivar who’d seen her had clearly written her off as an alien helot without any further thought. This one clearly knew she was something else entirely.

  She let the cloth unfold to hang from her hand, the symbol clearly visible to the Siva in the door.

  “My apologies, I’m lost, and I was hoping you could help me find these people?” she asked softly, gesturing with the cloth.

  “This is a restaurant, not a helot charity!” the Siva snapped at her, projecting their voice loudly so it could be heard by anyone in the alley. “Be off with you, begone, we have nothing for you!”

  As they yelled, however, they pushed the door further open and gestured her inside with their free hand. She ducked under their arm—her arm, Amelie thought, the stranger lacked the facial horns of male Sivar—and the door slammed shut behind her.

  “I know what you are,” the Siva hissed. “But you’re all supposed to be dead or captured. Where did you get that symbol?”

  “I suspect that telling you that could get a lot of people killed,” Amelie replied. “I’m looking for sanctuary—but more than that, I need to talk to your leaders.”

  “I run security for a restaurant,” her new acquaintance pointed out. “Do you mean my manager?”

  “No,” Amelie said. Another risk might be needed there. She wasn’t sure it was the right call, but it was the weapon she had to hand.

  “I mean the Dynast.”

  The guard stared at Amelie for several long seconds, then laughed. Her armored jaw clicked in a sound that was rather disturbing to human ears.

  “I am Isseel,” she told Amelie. “Your presence here already dooms me if you work for the Intendant. If they know that symbol enough to identify this restaurant, I have already been marked for anathema and merely haven’t learned it yet.

  “Come,” Isseel instructed.

  They stepped farther into the restaurant, where a Sonba in a white tunic that covered most of their skin stuck their broccoli-like head out of the kitchen. “Isseel, we—”

  “Not right now, Canba,” the security head replied. “Talk to Dost if you need someone evicted, but if it’s supplies you need, you know that’s not my job.”

  It was hard to pick out a Sonba’s tentacled eyes amidst the less-mobile fronds of their head, but Amelie was grimly certain the alien was studying her closely for a moment.

  “All right.” The Sonba disappeared back into the kitchen.

  “Staff,” Isseel said in a tone that every manager across the galaxy would recognize. “I can’t order anything for them, but they come to me instead of Sohstell.” She shook her armored head.

  “Of course, Sohstell treats the helots like work animals,” she muttered under her breath. “Because no work animal had ever kicked its rider to death.”

  Amelie was quite sure she was being tested and simply maintained a genteel silence as Isseel led her up to the second floor of the restaurant. That turned out to be made up of several private rooms.

  To her surprise, she was led to one looking out over the plaza with floor-to-ceiling windows. From there she could see the entire Sivar crowd wandering through an open pedestrian area surrounded by boutiques and cafes that would have fit in perfectly on Exilium.

  Of course, the crowd on Exilium would have been taller.

  “The windows are one-way,” Isseel told her. “You’ll have complete privacy.”

  She gestured Amelie to a seat.

  “Please, wait here,” she instructed. “I can’t bring the person you seek here, but I can bring someone who can at least talk to them for you.”

  “It’s somewhere to start,” Amelie agreed. “I could very easily be a trap, after all.”

  “That would require some effort, Minister Amelie Lestroud,” a new voice told her as another Siva entered the room. “Thank you, Isseel. Please go kick Sohstell and tell ban that if ban doesn’t stop plucking the helot staff’s skullplates, I can replace my purchaser far more easily than I can replace my chef.”

  Amelie had to blink as she processed the metaphor. The Sivar had plates that hung down around their neck from the plating on their skulls. Those could be grabbed and pulled. She doubted it would cause much movement, but it was probably very annoying.

  Sohstell, it seemed, had a gift for pissing the staff off.

  The speaker gestured Isseel out of the room and closed the door behind banself. Ban stood by the door for several moments after that, studying Amelie.

  “You know who I am,” Amelie concluded. “You were told I was coming?”

  “Indeed. Which was quite a risk,” ban noted. “Every cell leader in the City was told to watch for you, using a channel we reserved for critical emergencies. Each time it is used, we risk exposing our organization.”

  “Someone thought it was worth it,” Amelie said.

  “Indeed.” Ban crossed to the table and took a seat. “My name is Loreck. I own this restaurant and I work for the Broken Chain.”

  “You serve the Dynast,” she concluded.

  Loreck winced, a gesture that manifested in Sivar as a clack of armor plating.

  “Be more sparing with that title, please,” ban asked. “We hope that the Intendant does not know
that the Broken Chain exists, let alone what the Broken Chain serves.”

  “I’ve yet to meet whatever the Intendant uses for internal security, thank God,” Amelie noted, “but I wonder how realistic that hope is.”

  “The Knives of the Eyes do not truly work for the Intendant,” Loreck said, ban’s voice very quiet. “But your assessment of their role and their skill is roughly correct. They watch our worlds for sedition and heresy.”

  “Alone?” she asked.

  “No. They lean on the Knives of the Keys of War,” Loreck explained. “You know so little about us. I question your value.”

  Amelie smiled thinly.

  “How many battleships did the Commandants send against my escort?” she asked softly. “I doubt your Broken Chain is unaware of how that ended.”

  “My own information is limited,” Loreck admitted. “But my understanding is that the ships in question remain in orbit…because they cannot leave. And that, Minister Lestroud, is why I believe the Broken Chain was called to protect you.”

  “Protection isn’t enough,” Amelie replied. “I need to speak to…” She cut herself off and paused thoughtfully. “Your leader,” she finally concluded.

  Not using the Dynast’s title was a small-enough concession, she supposed.

  “So I heard,” Loreck conceded. “My instructions were to see you kept safe. A bargaining chip for the Broken Chain if your people prove as mighty as you claim.”

  “You can attempt to acquire a bargaining chip, Loreck, at the price of a potential ally,” she told ban. “I did not arrive at your door alone, and another ally waits to carry me away in a few hours. I have no desire to make them wait.”

  She was suddenly very aware of the weight of her armor vest and the laser pistol it contained. She didn’t want to shoot her way out to meet the Kond, but she would.

  “You are a determined one, aren’t you?” Loreck asked. “You understand, yes, that contacting my leaders risks this cell? And everyone who works in the restaurant? You are not, I suspect, as uncaring about the helots as my more stupid compatriots.”