Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Landing the remote now. I believe I have located a connection point and…I am in.”

  Seconds ticked. Octavio was watching the screen as lasers flashed out. His ships weren’t getting hit as hard as they would have been if the Sentinels were fully operational, but it wasn’t looking good.

  Viola was the tip of the triangular formation around Dauntless, and she was getting hammered. Icons said she had taken multiple armor breaches, but all of her systems were intact.

  “Adjust formation to Reno-Three,” Octavio ordered, leaving D and the Joker drone to their task. “Get Viola back behind Dauntless; she’s taken too many hits.”

  For a second, he thought it was too late. Then Desdemona neatly slid across her sister ship, an unfocused blast of energy from her pulse guns hiding the damaged ship as they slid into the new formation.

  Reno was a line abreast with one ship held back to either cover the rear or protect that ship. Desdemona and Cassio fell back to flank Dauntless, and Viola dropped behind the big ship.

  “Bandit One is down,” Courtenay snapped. “Drive field just shut down, she’s venting power and has commenced conversion-core shutdown procedures. Bandit One is out of the fight—I repeat, Bandit One is out of the fight.”

  “Hold focus on Two until we have another Joker drone in play,” Octavio ordered his Captains. “Well done, D, Siril-ki, Winther. Now do it again!”

  It would never have worked twice on an organic enemy or even a fully functional Matrix. The Joker drone relied on not registering as a threat under normal battlefield conditions, but once the first ship shut down, the second wave of drones would have become a priority target.

  Instead, the two Sentinels continued to hammer Octavio’s fleet with every weapon at their disposal. As they crossed the light-second mark, both sides opened up with pulse guns. The Republic version had been heavily upgraded over the years and easily matched the Sentinels’ weapons.

  Thousands of discrete plasma pulses filled the space between the two fleets, and more damage icons flickered across Octavio’s holographic displays. His ships were still in the fight, but none of them were at full fighting form.

  “Retarget on Bandit Three,” he ordered. “We need a breach on both ships. Joker Two is moving on Bandit Two, and Joker Three will deploy in under a minute.”

  “I assess a ninety-plus percent probability that we have a practical breach on Bandit Two,” D told him. “I am maneuvering Joker Two to the target; contact in ten seconds.”

  “We do not have a breach on Three,” Courtenay snapped. “Cassio is reporting critical damage, her main gun is down and she’s suffering power fluctuations in her conver—”

  Matter-conversion cores could be shut down safely, but it was a slow process. Without that process, they had to keep above fifty percent power draw to prevent destabilizing the core and catastrophically expanding the conversion effect.

  Cassio had two of the cores aboard, and Octavio would never know if only one or both had destabilized. Over a hundred of his people died in a single blast of fire as the strike cruiser ceased to exist.

  “I have a link on Bandit Two; I have control,” D reported.

  Octavio didn’t register the slight difference in D’s phrasing until the reason for it became clear. Bandit One had gone into an orderly shutdown on Dauntless’s Matrix’s orders.

  Bandit Two flipped ninety degrees in space and fired three high-frequency grasers at a single meter-wide portion of Bandit Three’s hull.

  “We have a practical breach on Bandit Three. Landing the drone,” D calmly continued as the shooting slowed. A moment passed. Another.

  The shooting stopped.

  “I have control,” D concluded. “Shutting down Two and Three. All Sentinels are under control and shut down.”

  “All ships cease fire,” Octavio snapped. “We have neutralized the Sentinels.”

  He breathed a long sigh, studying the frozen ships.

  “You can fight them remotely?” he demanded.

  “I can fly them remotely,” D noted precisely. “Using the Sentinels’ weapons in a combat situation would be impractical. We will need Siril-ki’s people to go over the hardware and dump their final instructions before I would trust my ability to give orders to the autonomous protocols.”

  “Couldn’t we boot the Matrices back up?” Courtenay asked. “If we reset them to factory settings or something…”

  “The core process of a Matrix AI cannot be restarted once terminated,” D replied. “I can create a bud of my own code that could be loaded onto blank hardware—all of the Republic’s Matrices are buds of my code—but I’m not certain we could load that onto hardware that already held a Matrix. I believe the kernel encryption may still be in place, preventing any modification of the Matrix…even if that Matrix is dead.

  “We would need to replace the core,” the AI concluded. “It would feel…wrong, but it could be done. Like performing a brain transplant.”

  Octavio winced.

  “We need those ships,” he admitted. “Could you fly them back to Exilium in their current state?”

  “Potentially,” D said. “Since we lack the equipment to manufacture or install a new Matrix core, that would be our only option.”

  “Let Siril-ki and Winther know what help you’ll need.” Octavio ordered. “For now…”

  He looked out at the broken orbitals of a dead world.

  “For now, we need to see what we can learn from the wreckage of the people who killed the Assini.”

  51

  Amelie wasn’t convinced that any of the people she’d talked into helping set up her grand convention thought it was a good idea. She was pretty sure that the Kond, if nothing else, didn’t truly believe her about how badly the Governance’s fleet was outmatched.

  Nonetheless, they’d managed to get access to the top floor of a large apartment building in the City, one that very nearly approached arcology status. The space appeared to normally serve as some sort of sports facility, a readily accessed gym and playing field.

  The room that the Kond’s people had turned into a presentation space resembled nothing so much as a tennis court before they’d come in with their hanging curtains and similar paraphernalia.

  One of the biggest security risks and advantages of the building was that it wasn’t a helot apartment building. The tower was home to lower-middle-class Sivar, the kinds of people any government genteelly ignored as individuals and desperately relied on the support of as a demographic.

  And, unless Amelie was very wrong, the Kond owned at least half of the building with Silleck as one of his partners. The top floor was “closed for maintenance” and any helots or tributes making their way up were obviously the maintenance crew to fix whatever was broken.

  She was one of the first to arrive, with the Kond himself, and studied the preparations with a critical eye.

  “Security?” she asked the Pol aristocrat, realizing that most of the people she’d seen were unarmed.

  “Ten of my people, ten of the Dynast’s,” he replied. “All carrying stunners. They should be safe for everyone here, but I hope we don’t have to shoot anyone.”

  Amelie was going to have to look up what the Sivar had for stunners. She knew her Republic had some ranged nonlethal weapons, but she didn’t know how they worked, and she doubted they would be safe for seven different species without calibration.

  “You trust Silleck?” she asked, careful to keep her voice low so no one else could hear her.

  “That Siva and I are neck-deep in a lot of money together,” the Kond replied. “None of it illegal, though the sheer amount of money coming out of the helot side would certainly draw some questioning eyes if we weren’t as good at hiding it.”

  The Pol shook himself.

  “I knew the Dynast existed. I did not know that she was the Dynast, though I suspected she was tied up in at least one of the rebellions.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Amelie murmured, gesturing toward the elevator a
s the Kond looked at her strangely.

  Silleck and her promised ten guards had shown up. They were all dressed in mismatched street clothes, but Amelie could guess what the intentionally lumpy lines of the apparently cheap clothing hid. There was body armor under the Sivar’s clothing, to go with the stunners they now openly removed from bags and slung over their shoulders as Silleck approach Amelie and the Kond.

  “Asselis,” she murmured, bowing over her hands.

  “No names tonight, I think,” the Kond replied, returning the gesture of respect. “There are people here I don’t trust to do anything except measure my back for a knife, let alone yours.”

  “And I have invited people I trust even less,” the Dynast replied. “I am rarely so glad my people have armor on their skulls.”

  “Everyone is supposed to come unarmed,” Amelie objected.

  “And I expected everyone to honor the appearance of that, at least,” the Kond agreed. “The truth, of course, will be messier. I cannot search everyone who arrives, after all.”

  The elevators disgorged another group of Sivar. This group looked around at the aliens surrounding them, and one of them started to go for a concealed weapon of some kind. Sharp words stopped them—words Amelie noted her translator didn’t pick up.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  “Sondine,” Silleck replied. “Not quite a crime syndicate, not quite freedom fighters. They’re from Aris’s western continent.”

  “They’re scum,” the Kond growled.

  “And the Green Stalks of Light are mass murderers,” Silleck countered, indicating a group of Sonba with their broccoli-like heads.

  “That’s—”

  “My point exactly,” the Dynast smoothly cut the Pol off. “Everyone here can be described in both horrific and generous terms. But if we want to achieve our goals, we need to work together.”

  “I’ll be surprised if we make it to the introductions without blood,” the Kond muttered.

  “I hope so,” Silleck replied. “You are, after all, the host. You speak first…and your people have to clean up the blood if it goes wrong!”

  By the time Kond Asselis walked up to the front of the sport court, there were at least a hundred and fifty people in the space. Amelie was keeping track as they came in and noted eight different species and at least twenty-seven different factions.

  Sivar were a solid plurality with sixty of them in the space. They weren’t the majority, at least, but Amelie had her concerns about what that would mean for the future. It made sense on Aris, where the Sivar were still ninety-five percent of the population, but if the people in this room decided that they were the new rulers of the Governance, it would still be misrepresentative overall.

  If the Kond had hoped his visibility would quiet the crowd, his hope was dashed. The conversation turned to shouted questions at the six-limbed alien, and he waited in silence for the first wave of them to pass before grunting and picking up a megaphone.

  “Shut up,” he ordered. That got him enough quiet to at least start speaking. “I doubt even a majority of the people in this room know who I am. So far tonight, the inclination has been to avoid names as well, so that’s going to stay that way.

  “There are people here, both of my race and others, that I would call siblings. There are people here, mostly Sivar but not all, who I know regard me as an enemy or at least a problem.”

  He bared his square front teeth.

  “None of that matters today. What matters today is that we share enemies: the Intendant of the Governance and the Eyes of Sivar who support him. I have reason to believe that the Intendant is about to be struck a near-crippling blow, a defeat that will weaken his position.

  “Alone, none of us would have the strength to take advantage of that weakness. Together, we might. I’m not here to sell you on that tonight, though. I’m here to introduce the sentient who is here, whose people are about to shake the nation we are part of—willingly or otherwise!—to its foundation.”

  He bared his teeth again.

  “But since I don’t expect all of you to trust me, I’m going to be joined by someone many of the rest of you will trust.” He gestured Silleck up to join him.

  “Like my companion here, not all of you will know me,” Silleck told them. “But enough of you do to understand why I’m standing here. Most of those are also wondering why I am standing next to a Pol, a helot.

  “As he said, we are about to be handed an unprecedented opportunity. Not since the Intendants and the Eyes of Sivar overthrew the First and Final Dynasty has the Governance faced a real defeat. Shortly, they will, if nothing else, find themselves in a real war.”

  She clattered her armor plates.

  “We must stand together to make this the Intendancy’s final moment of weakness, and we must stand together to look to the future. Together. Not as Sivar and helots but as equals. There are a thousand challenges to get past to get to that point, but that is where we have to aim.

  “But even together, we cannot challenge the infrastructure and forces of an intact, unbroken Intendant. So, allow us to introduce the person who is giving us any hope at all.”

  Amelie walked up to stand between the two aliens.

  “This is Amelie Lestroud, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Exilium and the representative of an alliance of powers beyond the Sonbar star-lanes,” the Kond told everyone. “She came here to negotiate an alliance with the Governance against a greater threat.

  “Instead, our Intendant betrayed her, killed many of her guardians and imprisoned her. My organization liberated her to stand before you today, and I beg that you listen to her words.”

  “She speaks for an alliance that is far more powerful than the Governance,” Silleck continued. “If we don’t listen to her, everyone we represent here will suffer—first by the will of the Intendant, and then as members of the Governance in the unwinnable war that will follow.”

  “Thank you,” Amelie said quietly, gesturing for her allies to leave her alone. They both hesitated before leaving the front of the room and joining the rest of the audience.

  “That introduction covers most of what you need to know about me,” she told the crowd, feeling the memories of similar meetings in the past. All of those crowds had been human, at least, but there’d probably been just as little trust among those gathered.

  “I stand here as the representative of an outside power. I know very few of you and have made no commitments to anyone. Tonight, my intent is to stand as a witness to your promises and oaths to each other—a witness who will have the power to enforce those promises.

  “Anyone who betrays the alliance we hope to forge tonight will have to face not merely the organizations in this room but the resources of the Republic of Exilium. Already, your Governance has met my ships in battle. Two of your capital ships, supported by the forts of Aris and ambushing us at close range, attacked one of mine.

  “My ship escaped with the civilian transports she was escorting. The two Governance battleships were crippled. With surprise, a perfect striking position and a two-to-one advantage, the Commandants failed.

  “That is the power I represent, the power I am prepared to commit as guarantor and arbiter of your promises to each other.”

  She smiled.

  “But as my friends introducing me noted, you cannot face a fully intact Intendancy. In twelve days, however, a battle fleet of the Republic will enter the Sonbar System. Unless the forces there surrender, the Commandants’ forces there will be destroyed and Sonbar will no longer be a Governance System.

  “The Intendant will need to deploy ships and warriors outwards, both to try and retake Sonbar and to protect Aris from the blow he knows will land here. The First and Final Citadel will be vulnerable.

  “If you pool the knowledge, numbers and weapons represented in this room—if you act together—the Intendant will fall.”

  The room was silent. Amelie wasn’t sure what kind of response she was expecting, but it hadn’
t been that.

  “Nothing?” she finally asked. “You plan for nothing, then?”

  “What do you get out of this?” one of the nearer Sonba asked.

  “I came here looking for allies,” Amelie replied. “We face a far greater threat than the Governance on the other side of our borders. Some of your people know them as the Builders, but they are self-replicating AI starships dedicated to transforming worlds to the standards of their creators.

  “Unfortunately, too many of them don’t check if those worlds are inhabited before initiating the process—and several will aggressively destroy resistance to them transforming worlds. One of the latter is quite close to your borders. And these Builders, the Matrices, are not bound by the star-lanes that limit the Governance.

  “The Governance as it currently exists would make a poor ally for us at best. Since the Intendant has actively betrayed us and imprisoned my people, we have no intention of allying with him.

  “If a new government were formed, aided by the people who freed the prisoners the Intendant holds from the Republic and committed to certain basics standards of freedom and equality, we would be glad to forge an alliance with them.

  “That alliance would come along with industrial and technology assistance, to upgrade both civilian and military industries to allow you to stand at our sides against the Matrices.”

  If a bribe was needed, she could offer that. If honesty was needed, she could do that, too.

  “I have friends and people sworn to my service in the prisons of the Citadel,” she continued. “I want you to help me free them. Everything beyond that, really, is up to you.”

  The Sonba laughed, a liquid burbling sound.

  “It seems that your people are already en route to liberate my world,” they noted. “I will hold my beliefs and my sword until I hear the news of that, but…” They paused, then shook their fronds in what Amelie hoped was a nod.