Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Since nothing would be done without that, I swear this: I will stand by any force that storms the Citadel after Sonbar is freed.”

  The Kond rose.

  “My siblings,” he addressed the group around him. “I would place our intelligence, our knowledge of the Citadel’s crannies and our eyes inside it, at the service of this effort. I can supply much of that on my own, but I would rather have the approval of our council.”

  One by one, the other members of the Kond’s organization indicated approval, and the Pol turned to look at Amelie.

  “All of our knowledge, sources and available hands will stand.”

  “The Broken Chain will stand,” Silleck said loudly. “More, I will give a name: I am Silleck, daughter of Ondar, son of Koneck, son of Creesteel, last Dynast of the Governance.”

  The last words were a half-shouted declaration.

  “I am the rightful heir to the throne the Intendant has stolen. I will put every warrior, every gun, every marker committed to the cause of my family for three generations into this attack…and I will forswear my family’s right to the throne.

  “I believe that the title could help smooth the transition to a new world, but I am not certain that the Sivar, let alone the Governance, requires another single voice to lead us. So, before you all, I swear this: I will not claim my family’s throne by mere right of blood.”

  Amelie noted that there were loopholes in Silleck’s statement that she could drive a battlecruiser through—not least that Loreck had just as solid a claim as Silleck’s and she hadn’t forsworn her banner’s right to that throne.

  It was…enough. It was the final straw that broke the dam, and others rose, each committing resources to the fight. Somehow, despite all odds, Amelie had done it again. She’d convinced a bunch of hostile rebel factions to listen to her.

  And then the elevator doors opened again…and there was no one else scheduled to be at the meeting.

  52

  Three Sivar stepped off the elevator, and Amelie could feel the tension ripple through the crowd as their clothing sank in. All three were clad in long hooded tunics, familiar even to her as the shipside uniform of the Keys of War.

  Like the Republic’s equivalent, it could act as an emergency spacesuit. Its armor layer was probably more important for the current situation.

  The central figure wore the tunic in the same dark green she’d seen on Sivar Commandants. They even had the gold markings where the hood met the tunic she’d seen on Ackahl. She couldn’t be sure, but Amelie suspected that under the hood, their stranger was a Commandant.

  Which was a problem.

  The Sivar on the Commandant’s right wore the tunic in black and the Sivar on the left wore it in dark red. Amelie assumed those colors had meaning to someone—their wearers, if nothing else—but they meant nothing to her.

  From the way the crowd rippled away from the three figures, everyone there knew what she’d guessed: these were Sivar soldiers. They had no business here…except…

  “If you were here to arrest everyone for treason, you’d have sent more guns,” she said, tuning her translator to project her Sivar words across the entire room. “What do you want, Commandant-Key of War?”

  The central figured chuckled. That was clearly not the response anyone else in the room had been expecting—and then they threw back their hood, allowing Amelie to recognize the Siva.

  “You and I have had this conversation before, I think,” Ackahl told Amelie. “My title is Lord Commandant. The Commandant-Keys of War outrank me. Of course, what is perhaps most relevant to the worthies gathered at this meeting is that while I answer to the Commandant-Key of Aris, the only remaining mobile capital ships in this star system answer to me.”

  “You are no rebel,” Amelie replied. “Why are you here?”

  “I was no rebel,” Ackahl corrected. “Shonin?” She gestured to the Siva on her left, the one in the dark red robe.

  “I am Shonin,” ban introduced banself while lowering ban’s own hood. “I am the First Voice of the Knives of the Keys of War in the Citadel and City. On Aris’s surface, I am bound to obey the orders of the Knives of the Eyes of Sivar, but the task of tracking and removing local sedition falls to me and my Knives.”

  Dark red eyes flashed in ban’s armored skull, the sparkle that Amelie was starting to look for to pick out a smiling Siva.

  “You can only imagine my confusion when my people reported that at least ten percent of the leaders they’d identified were on the move,” ban continued. “Your security was better than I thought any of you were capable of. From the absence of so many of the people I’d identified as likely leaders, either we are missing many factions I know of or we were very wrong as to who was actually in charge.”

  Ban sounded impressed more than angry. Amelie’s own guess was that it was a mix of the two reasons ban had given plus some of the leaders having sent representatives. Plus, of course, the groups most likely known to military intelligence were the exact type of people who wouldn’t have been invited.

  “My other friend will not be introduced or identified,” Ackahl told them. “But I assure you that they are why I am here and will no more betray you than anyone else in this room.”

  “What do you want, Lord Commandant?” Amelie asked.

  “An invitation to this meeting, it appears,” Ackahl replied. “But since it seems my presence is inhibiting conversation, perhaps I should just make my spiel?”

  “There is no one in this room I would remove,” Amelie told the Siva. “But you do seem to be bothering my audience. Say your piece.”

  Ackahl bowed her head in acknowledgment, still standing at the back of the room as she surveyed the rebels.

  “The Keys of War know the price of the Governance better than most of you,” she said. “It has fallen to us again and again to enforce the will of the Intendant on the tributary worlds. Honor requires that we obey…but the actions we take are without honor.

  “But the Intendant rules the Governance and we obey. When Minister Lestroud’s fleet arrives, my replacement as Sector Commandant in Sonbar will fight. He will lose.”

  Armor plating clicked gently as Ackahl shook her head.

  “He will lose,” she repeated. “I am certain Amelie Lestroud has told you this, but I ask that you hear it from me, a Lord Commandant of the Keys of War: if we fight Minister Lestroud’s people, we lose.

  “That news will arrive here, and the only non-crippled battleships in the system are mine. We stand guard at the Keerees star-lane, but we will almost certainly be recalled to protect the orbit of Aris once the Intendant feels vulnerable. He will believe he can rely on our batteries to, if nothing else, destroy any force that attacks the Citadel.”

  Somehow, it didn’t surprise Amelie that the Governance’s battleships, like the Confederacy’s battlecruisers but unlike the Republic’s, carried ground-bombardment weapons.

  “We will not do so. There is a limit to how long the Keys of War, starships and Knives alike, can stand aside…but stand aside we will. If you act quickly and decisively, I will place my ships under the command of whatever provisional government you can implement.”

  Amelie studied the third figure for a few seconds as Ackahl finished speaking. She was pretty sure it was Rode, but she wasn’t certain. Between Rode and Silleck, the Dynast had a good chance of being at least the face of that provisional government.

  She was reasonably sure that Silleck knew the Republic wouldn’t stand for a new dictatorship. It was probably as good an offer as anyone was going to get.

  “How do we know if we can trust you?” the Kond demanded.

  “You don’t,” Ackahl replied. “But if you can’t, your entire rebellion is already doomed. If I and First Voice Shonin know your plan and its likely trigger, well…” Armor plating clicked against itself again.

  “We can either trust each other and look to Minister Lestroud to make sure we keep our promises the day after the Intendant falls, or we all give u
p now and force a war our people can only drag out, not win.”

  The room was silent and Ackahl bowed.

  “Regardless of whether you trust me, I can only spend so long here without drawing attention we would all rather avoid, even with the Knives’ cooperation. I wish you luck with your plans.

  “And I wish us all hope for a brighter future.”

  The departure of the three Sivar military officers—or at least what appeared to be officers—left the room to explode into arguments again. Amelie stood at the front of the room, waiting patiently, for at least a minute before she intentionally induced feedback between the sound system and her translator device.

  Once the echo of that faded, she had everyone’s attention again and smiled.

  “The Intendant is doomed and doesn’t even know it yet,” she told them all. “The Governance must change. I have already warned you what the Republic will require as the price for our aid, but beyond that, the decisions are yours.”

  “Perhaps most of those decisions should be made once the Intendant is cast down?” Silleck suggested.

  “I have no idea how common revolutions are in your history,” Amelie replied. “But my people had them as a cultural hobby.”

  She had, after all, been born in France.

  “If you are not ready for victory, infighting will destroy your victory,” she warned them. “You must plan together to launch an attack that will overwhelm the Intendant’s defenses, and you must plan together to have a structure to put in place after that.

  “The Republic will be here soon enough. Twelve days after they take Sonbar, there will be Republic warships in this system. By then, you must have a provisional government that we can negotiate with.

  “Remember that I am in this because I need the Governance’s fleet to fight the Builders,” she said dryly. “And I suspect it might be very helpful in your transition period if a significant chunk of the Keys of War are somewhere else.”

  Rode and Ackahl would be essential to getting the Keys of War to agree to that, but so long as the rebels could keep from massacres and atrocities—Amelie’s hope was only middling for that, but she thought they’d kept the worst out of the room—it was possible.

  And while they might not be able to rebuild the Keys’ battleships to carry grasers and particle cannons quickly, strapping warp rings on them should be doable.

  She hoped.

  She wasn’t an engineer, after all.

  53

  “I am growing very, very weary of looking at dead worlds that should hold my people,” Siril-ki said in a tired voice. Ki’d turned the emotional layers to ki’s translator back on, but all ki had sounded since was tired.

  The view of the still-unnamed planet covered the wall of the conference room as Octavio gathered his senior people again. Dauntless was settled into a loose, high orbit of the planet, just outside the radius of its single moon and well away from the debris field of the battle and planetary industry.

  The three Sentinels had lifted out of that debris field under their own power. D had parked them at one of the planet-moon Lagrange points, both to keep them stable and keep them away from the flotilla.

  They were theoretically disabled and under control, but no one was trusting them just yet. The ghosts of Cassio’s crew were very present in the room, weighing down on Octavio’s shoulders.

  “My team’s analysis of the domes suggests the planet had a population of just over ten million when the Sentinels arrived,” McGill told them. “Every dome was destroyed. Everything with a power source was blasted from orbit with a graser.”

  “The orbital stations weren’t armed,” Renaud continued. “The Guardian Matrices and the attached drone ships were their only defenses, and they were no match for that many Sentinels.”

  “Is searching the ruins likely to do us any good?” Octavio asked. “We don’t even know where to start, and its not like there’s anything intact in orbit.”

  The orbitals hadn’t even survived the battle. The Sentinels had been far less careful on their aiming than was normal for Matrices and had wrecked everything. Anything that had survived had been destroyed with neat precision.

  The stations in the orbit of Assini’s planets had been wrecked by nature. Many had been intact to one degree or another. KB2N13-1’s orbitals had been very precisely destroyed by a very angry intelligence.

  All that was left was a debris field. The only chunks large enough to be worth investigating appeared to be pieces of the Matrix warships that had died defending and attacking the planet.

  The surface damage, on the other hand, had been both less and more thorough in many ways. No organics could survive on KB2N13-1’s surface without power and life support, and the Sentinels had blasted every power source they detected with high-power energy weapons.

  They hadn’t leveled what had survived after that. They hadn’t needed to.

  “Maybe,” McGill said. “The ruins are more likely to have something of value than the wreckage up here, but I can’t imagine that the kinds of military bases and government headquarters we’re looking for didn’t have power sources.”

  “And it is very clear that the Sentinels blasted every single one of those they could find,” Renaud concluded.

  “I just can’t believe that the Sentinels did this,” Siril-ki told them. “It’s so far against their programming, their personalities… It’s all theoretical to you all, but realize that I have spoken with Sentinel Matrices. I knew them as people, not merely a combat computer from three hundred years ago.”

  “People who learned that someone set into motion the annihilation of everything they were sworn to protect,” Octavio said gently. “I’m not sure that humans or Assini would have handled what happened better.”

  “The question I want to understand is just who the hell were these people?” Renaud asked as Siril-ki closed ki’s eyes and leaned back again. “Any ideas, Director?”

  “None,” ki whispered. “No Assini should have done this. Our ways, our people, our culture…we were raised to be part of the herd, to avoid violence. We had our criminals, our failures, I can’t pretend otherwise…but an entire secret colony of people who knew what had been done to the Construction Matrices?”

  “Worst of all, from what I understand, to do what they did, they needed Shezarim-ko’s key to the Matrix core encryptions,” Octavio noted quietly. “Reletan-dai told me that with that key, he could have fixed the Escorts even after they broke. But without it, he couldn’t edit a Matrix once it came online.”

  That was apparently too much for Siril-ki. Ki folded over onto the table, ki’s hands folding over ki’s eyes as ki moaned.

  “Shezarim-ko was the founder of the entire construction and colonization program,” D reminded the humans. “If they were a traitor of this scale, then the entire program may have been a trap from the beginning.”

  “The counterargument is that we know the Construction Matrices launched with the protocols to preserve sentient life,” Octavio pointed out. “Not only in that Siril-ki and others had copies of the code of those Matrices, but we have XR-13-9 and the other Matrices like you to prove it.”

  “I assess a seventy plus/minus seven percent likelihood of an external party, likely the group behind this colony, using a specialty AI ship to deliver the edited code to the closest Construction Matrices,” D said. “To make that kind of edit requires physical access to the Matrix core itself, much as we required access to the Sentinels’ systems to override their autonomous protocols.”

  “But the Construction Matrices wouldn’t have recognized it as a threat,” Renaud said slowly. “But why would we have some Rogues that seem to be pure tachyon-punch degradation and some that were edited?”

  “Because at least one wave of the second-generation Regional Construction Matrices was built before the edit was applied,” Octavio realized aloud. “Possibly more. They wouldn’t have needed to make the edit until the colony ships were about to launch.”

  “So, some
of my people actively murdered hundreds of millions of their siblings?” Siril-ki demanded.

  “We already knew that,” the Commodore said grimly. “Now I want to know who and I want to know why—and I want to know if it can be undone.”

  That was the first time he’d even said that aloud, and it got even Siril-ki’s head off the table.

  “Undone, sir?” Renaud asked.

  “If the code was implemented with Shezarim-ko’s encryption key, then a reversal of the code should be possible,” he pointed out. “A ‘reset to factory settings,’ if you will. If we can turn the Rogues back to what they’re supposed to be, suddenly they stop being a genocidal horror and become damn handy neighbors.”

  Everyone was looking at him like he’d grown a second head.

  “You would need the encryption key, the original intended template, and the exact code used to make the changes,” Siril-ki said slowly. “I have the template. From the samples retrieved before my people’s fall, I believe I could reverse-engineer the code…but I don’t have Shezarim-ko’s key.”

  “Someone in this star system almost certainly did,” Octavio said. “They probably thought they could even override the Sentinels, but you all underestimated just how powerful their emotions could be.”

  “I think there’s two things that might help us, sir,” McGill told them all, the tactical officer looking thoughtful. “They both point to the same thing, really.”

  “And they are, Commander?” Octavio asked.

  “Our scans suggest that the final bombardment was carried out by at least ten ships,” she said. “I think at least seven of the Sentinel wrecks and one of the Guardian swarms are newer than the rest. I don’t know which ones, but the data suggests that someone came along when this was all over and wrecked most of the Sentinels.

  “Which leads to my second question, sir,” McGill noted. “We followed a colony ship from Assini. A massive reaction-drive vessel capable of carrying millions of colonists or thousands of active crew.