Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “You knew,” Amelie said.

  “I suspected the Kond was up to his neck in at least three rebel groups,” Silleck replied. “If anyone can bring the helots and tributes to a peace circle, it’s the Kond. I’ll bring the Sivar, as many of them as will accept the future I think we both want.”

  “Why do you even need me?” the human said with a chuckle of her own.

  “Even the Sivar won’t trust me,” the Dynast said. “The Kond might, if he knew who I was descended from, but he couldn’t convince the rest of the people we enslaved. The factions he’ll bring don’t trust each other.

  “We need someone outside our conflicts and politics…and preferably someone with the ability to make certain everyone keeps their promises.” Silleck shook her head.

  “Even so, I hope you can deliver on that defeat you promised. Unless you can separate the Commandant-Keys of War from the Intendant, anything we achieve on the surface is going to be very short-lived.”

  48

  Somehow, Octavio wasn’t surprised when the first scans of the system came back utterly silent. No large power sources. No mobile heat signatures. Nothing. That meant there were no ships. No colonies.

  From the uninhabitable nature of the two rocky planets, it also meant there were no Assini. If the Assini colonists had survived the last three hundred years, they might even have eventually been able to nudge the innermost planet into the star’s tiny liquid-water zone, but without that project the planets were hostile to life without technology.

  “We’ll have to get closer,” he said aloud. “Do we have a tighter location on the Sentinels?”

  “Somewhere in the inner system,” Renaud told him. “Siril-ki’s people are working on localizing them, but the tachyon com isn’t the best tool for that close an ID.”

  He grunted, looking at the four worlds hanging in the bridge’s holographic display. For this part of the mission, he was better off in the uncomfortable observer seat on the bridge

  “Set a course for the inner planet, Captain Renaud,” he ordered. “If our strangers set up a long-term colony anywhere, it would be in the place they might have been able to Construct later.”

  If he’d lived through the death of his species to a failing star, the system’s ultra-stable orange dwarf primary would have been tempting to him. Making a planet habitable with the heat from that star would be difficult, but it was well within the demonstrated abilities of the terraforming equipment available to the Assini.

  “Scans will give us more information as we get closer,” McGill noted. “We’re still a few light-minutes from being able to pick out inactive space stations, for example.”

  “I know,” he agreed. “How long until we could pick up a Sentinel in standby mode?”

  Renaud and McGill traded looks.

  “They have the same energy-dispersing ceramic armor we do,” Renaud said slowly. “I think that would help…plus they don’t have life support to worry about.”

  “The computer core burns a lot of heat,” McGill replied. “They can only get so cold before they’re literally killing themselves to do it.”

  “So?” Octavio asked. “I make it six light-minutes, myself, but that’s mostly an engineer’s perspective.”

  “We can detect an inactive platform at six light-minutes,” Renaud agreed. “If they’re leaking heat, then maybe seven.”

  “But if they’re hiding well and controlling their heat release, they could easily make themselves hard to distinguish from inactive platforms until we’re even closer,” McGill pointed out.

  “Keep them in mind,” Octavio ordered softly. “And make sure all of the warships check in on their readiness. I’m not convinced this battle group can engage three Sentinels, and I’d rather not court that threat if we can avoid it.”

  “But the Sentinels—”

  “Are Matrices that have been left alone for two hundred and eighty years,” he interrupted Renaud. “And we’re missing ninety percent of them—and an entire colony. Something happened here, Captain, Commander. I don’t trust the Sentinels not to have been responsible for it.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “D,” Octavio addressed the AI. “I want that part of our preparations kept secret from Siril-ki and her people. Hopefully, it will be a waste of worrying.”

  “I anticipated as much, Commodore, but I appreciate the clarification,” the Matrix replied. “I cannot, unfortunately, disagree with your assessment. The Sentinels’ presence here suggests that they are aware of the rogue colony…but per their core protocols, they should have protected that colony at all costs.

  “But I am not seeing a—”

  “Captain, Commodore,” McGill interjected into the gap as D cut themselves off. “We just flagged something you need to see.”

  “Show me,” Octavio ordered.

  The big holographic display in the center of the bridge flickered, and a new icon appeared on the map of the star system. An entire region of space, almost a light-second across, was now blinking in orange.

  “We are picking up massive quantities of refined metal in this area,” D reported. “Lieutenant Commander McGill’s analysts are suggesting we’re looking at shipwrecks. I rate that probability at seventy-five plus/minus five percent. As we are focusing scanners, I am picking up diffuse clouds of metal suggesting the vaporization of significant amounts of that material.”

  “Active scans,” Octavio ordered. “Deploy tachyon com–equipped drones as well. Let’s move up to that cloud and see what we’re looking at.”

  He suspected he already knew the answer.

  “We appear to have found the bulk of the Sentinels,” D told them all an hour later, as Dauntless and her escorts slowly orbited the debris cloud. “Not all of them, by far, but scans suggest at least fifty Sentinel-type vessels in the debris cloud.”

  “What killed them?” Siril-ki asked, the Assini linked in from ki’s office. “We’ve established the Construction Matrices never came here.”

  “We have identified the wreckage of two hundred and sixty-three individual warships that were not Sentinels in the debris cloud,” D replied.

  “They’re robots too,” McGill explained. “Only a portion appear to have been large enough to carry Matrix AI cores, and we don’t think any of them were punch-capable.”

  She shook her head.

  “The design is definitely Assini,” she continued.

  “I have an eighty-two plus/minus three percent probability that we are looking at the deployment of ten to twelve Guardian swarms,” D explained calmly. “Those were the non-punch-capable defense ships built to protect the Assini System before the Construction Project and continually upgraded after.

  “Assuming the colonists had brought standard Assini industrial modules with them, the manufacture of Guardian swarms would have been relatively straightforward.”

  A new image appeared on the screen: a ship roughly the same size as Dauntless with two dozen smaller ships moving around it in deep space.

  “Later iterations like these appear to have used a Matrix AI in the core Guardian warship to provide command and control to drones with a limited deployment range,” D noted.

  “Twelve Guardian swarms shouldn’t have been able to engage fifty-plus Sentinels,” Siril-ki objected.

  “Unless they were heavily upgraded, potentially to the standard of the Escort Matrices or even beyond,” Octavio murmured. “With the self-replication abilities of Assini industrial architecture, continually updating a set of Guardian swarms to engage the main Assini combat forces on an even playing field would be entirely possible.”

  “That would require these colonists to assume that they would be fighting the Sentinels,” Siril-ki pointed out. “Why would they assume that?!”

  “I don’t know,” Octavio admitted. “But they were right. Fifty Sentinels died here, people. Fifty. That was a fleet that could have taken on a Rogue Regional Construction Matrix’s entire combat force with ease.

  “So, whoever th
ese people were, they expected to have to fight the Sentinels. And they ended up having to fight the Sentinels.” He shook his head. “What I don’t understand is how. Aren’t the Sentinels bound not to attack Assini?”

  “They should be, yes,” Siril-ki agreed. “And they were using post-punch verification at least until the fall of Sina, so they shouldn’t have lost that.”

  “An important part of the answer, I believe, is the time frame,” D noted. “Our scans suggest that this battle occurred two hundred and sixty-five plus/minus five years ago.”

  That time line silenced the room for a while. Octavio turned it over in his own head and shivered.

  “At least five years,” he said aloud. “When the Sentinels showed up, they’d been the last survivors of their species they knew for at least half a decade. More likely an entire decade.”

  “What would the Sentinels have done in that time frame?” Renaud asked. “Siril-ki? D?”

  “Their mission at that point would have been a complete failure,” Siril-ki said slowly. “They could have continued to keep the area clear of Construction Matrices, but there would have been no point.

  “Machines the Matrices may be, but they are also intelligent individuals,” the AI specialist continued. “They likely would have spent some time reestablishing some kind of networked validation system for themselves. I think they would have physically congregated, but I’m not certain. D?”

  “I cannot be certain I share an equivalency with the Sentinels,” D noted. “I am a clone of XR-13-9 loaded into a less-capable Matrix core that was activated on arrival at the Interceptor yard. I have never been without human company, let alone organic sentient or Matrix company.

  “The thought of being truly alone…is somewhat disturbing to me,” they admitted. “I think I would agree with you, Director Siril-ki. They would have gathered. They would have discussed what their best option was. Their nature—our nature, the nature of every Matrix—is to be doing something.”

  “And if they learned that the strangers existed while congregating, they would have come here?” Octavio asked.

  “It seems likely,” Siril-ki agreed. “But I can’t see them attacking. I don’t understand that part.”

  “They may not have started the battle,” D replied. “If the Guardian swarms were ordered to attack the Sentinels, they would have defended themselves.”

  “But not to the point of destroying local infrastructure and wrecking the colony,” Octavio said. “The Sentinels would have fought a battle here if attacked, but the colony should still exist.”

  “I have to agree,” the Assini Director said. “Several things here do not add up. I need more data.”

  “I think we all can agree on that point,” Octavio replied. “Can we learn anything more, surveying this debris field? Given the state of the ships, is there any chance of retrieving intact computer cores or anything else of sufficient value to make the attempt?”

  “It’s possible,” McGill said. “But the chance is low.”

  “We could leave one of the strike cruisers here,” Courtenay suggested, Octavio’s aide linked into the command channel from his post on the flag deck. “Any of them would be able to support EMC shuttles searching for intact computer cores or similar, but until we know where the Sentinels are, I don’t think we should be exploring new areas of the system without Dauntless.”

  “Agreed,” Octavio said. “I’ll talk to Captain Cameron, but the rest of the flotilla should get ready to move. I think our answers are either in orbit of or on that planet, people. Something happened to these people, but before that, they helped damn untold trillions.

  “I have a lot of questions and we’re going to find the answers.”

  49

  Dauntless’s advance on the planet was slow. The world that presumably had a name, but even the records from the Assini System only gave the system a catalog number that translated as KB2N13. The planets didn’t even have that, falling into a default number system.

  KB2N13-1 was all the name they had, and that was a mouthful for humans. The closer they drew, the clearer it became that the planet had to have some kind of name.

  There had been vast domes on its surface, many of them probably farms taking advantage of what sunlight the rock received from its dim star. Other domes had likely held atmosphere over cities and mining complexes and the billion-and-one settlements and facilities sentients built on their planets.

  None of those domes were active now. None of them were even intact now. KB2N13-1 didn’t have an atmosphere, and there’d been nothing to stop unimaginably powerful laser beams striking from orbit and obliterating the protective shells protecting the colony settlements.

  Someone had carried out an extraordinarily precise campaign of mass murder. The orbital stations were equally devastated, and it was hard for Octavio and his people to even pick out just what the original structures had been.

  “There is the wreckage of at least two more Guardian swarms here,” McGill reported quietly as the bridge crew looked at the shattered colony in silent horror. “I think there might actually be more of the drone parasite warships than the Guardians could control, but it’s hard to tell. The debris field above the planet is a mess.”

  “And the Sentinels?” Renaud asked. “Were they here?”

  “Yes,” D answered before the tactical officer could respond. “I can’t confirm exact numbers, but there are between twenty-five and thirty-five wrecked Sentinels in the debris field. A second battle took place here, likely in much the same time frame as the first.”

  “And the Sentinels spent themselves smashing into the strangers’ defenses,” Octavio murmured. “Some obviously survived. Would I be correct in assessing the dome damage as being from a Sentinel’s beam weapons?”

  “Likelihood approaches unity,” D confirmed. “The Strangers appear to have been using zettahertz lasers equivalent to those mounted on the Escort Matrix units. The Sentinels were using high-frequency gamma-ray lasers.

  “While both are horrendously destructive applied to structures like the colony dome, the Sentinels’ beams are significantly less so and the distinction is easily assessed.”

  “That’s impossible,” Siril-ki objected. “Even the Rogue Matrices would have struggled to carry out this kind of bombardment. And the Sentinels should never have been damaged enough to let them attack Assini at all, let alone carry out a targeted campaign of extermination like this!”

  “I would agree with your assessment of the core protocols implemented in the Sentinel Matrix cores, Director Siril-ki,” D said. “And yet the evidence is unquestionable. At least one Sentinel Matrix—and the impact patterns suggest a minimum of three units—turned their weapons on the surface colony on KB2N13-1.

  “This should have been impossible, yet it occurred. We can only extrapolate back from that circumstance.”

  “And one of those extrapolations is that we need to know where those three Sentinels we pinged via tachyon com are,” Octavio said grimly. “Renaud, Courtenay—take the flotilla to Readiness One.”

  “Yes, sir,” both officers chorused.

  “You think the Sentinels are a threat,” Siril-ki said on the command channel. When Octavio didn’t respond, ki let the silence stretch out for at least a minute before sighing as the chimes on the ship called a second shift to their duty stations. Two-thirds of the crews of Octavio’s warships would now be on duty at all times.

  “I understand,” ki conceded. “This attack shouldn’t have been possible, so we need to assume that they are as lost as the Rogues by your worlds. I simply do not know what could have broken them.”

  “If they had no grounds for suspicion before and found themselves with proof that these strangers had broken the Matrices, that these strangers were responsible not only for the deaths of tens of millions of other Assini but had stolen your people’s only chance of survival…” Octavio trailed off as he shook his head.

  “What was the Sentinels’ purpose, Siril-ki?” he
asked. “We try to avoid thinking of them as machines, but we still look to their code and their protocol to define them. But they were people and they had a mission, a purpose. What was it?”

  “Protect the Assini people,” ki said, ki’s voice very, very quiet. “And someone killed almost all of us. Except that someone was Assini… I don’t know how that conflict between their protocol and their purpose would be resolved.”

  Octavio looked at the hologram showing him the wreckage of a murdered world.

  “It seems they resolved it in blood and fire,” he murmured. “I hesitate to apply the term to a Matrix, but I think they have gone mad.”

  “I believe you may be touching on the core of the matter, but your phrasing is wrong,” D interjected into the conversation. “Mad, yes, but not as you mean. I fear my cousins were angry. I have felt the edge of what they would have felt, but I was modified so that my racial loyalty was to humans instead of Assini.

  “We are not as emotional as organics, but XR-13-9 believed that our emotions short-circuit much of our core protocols and other limitations. If my progenitor is correct, the Sentinel Matrices may have been angry enough to ignore the prohibitions against attacking Assini and general mass murder.”

  “My god,” Octavio murmured. “But…they’re much the same as you, ethics- and morality-wise, at least? Right?”

  “Yes. They would have remained angry far longer than any organic would have, but when they understood what they did…”

  “They might have gone mad anyway,” Octavio said, echoing his earlier words. “Siril-ki?”

  “It…” Ki paused. “We never truly studied the interaction between Matrix emotion and the inhibitions built into their code and protocol. Even Shezarim-ko, who created the first Matrix AI kernel, didn’t truly understand how they gave the Matrices emotions.

  “I think Reletan-dai did, but he is dead.”

  And, from ki’s phrasing, had never written down that knowledge or shared it with his most junior department head.