Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  The point Marine’s shocked exclamation was fundamentally correct. The air in the room had been set to archival levels of dryness a long time before, and the sentient in the command throne had mummified.

  The Assini had probably been a hundred and seventy centimeters tall at their first set of shoulders. Even shrunken in on themselves after two hundred–plus years, they looked like they were easily three meters from ground to the top of their head.

  They were also very clearly dead.

  The fascinating thing was everything else in the room. The RDGs looked exactly like Octavio had anticipated. They were modular devices designed to be stored in sealed vaults until loaded into probes or other systems. Six of them had been placed somewhat haphazardly around the room, with cables tied into the bridge’s systems.

  “Siril-ki?” Octavio asked slowly. “I didn’t think your people got that big.”

  “Based on Admiral Lestroud, Commodore, I wouldn’t expect your people to have many two-meter-tall giants,” ki replied. “Assini of this individual’s size are rare but certainly exist.”

  Ki paused.

  “They were slightly more common among the Herd Leader Houses before those families stopped being quite as fixated on aristocratic purity,” ki noted. “While it would be an assumption to believe this to be a member of the House of Koth, there is a basis for it.”

  Herd stallions. Octavio had heard of the concept—in Terran horses and similar herbivores, at least. He hadn’t quite made the connection to the concept of Herd Leader for the Assini, since the Assini leaders he’d dealt with had been scientific team leads.

  “There’s no one else here?” Octavio asked. “How did our big friend die?”

  “All I see are some really long-term generators and one massive Assini,” Chen replied. “Wong, what do we have on the big guy?”

  “No entry wounds, no weapons to hand, no visible injuries,” the Marine checking over the Assini reported. “Wait…I’ve got a syringe here and an injection mark.”

  “Scan the syringe. Don’t touch it,” Chen ordered.

  The Marine Major was slowly and steadily sweeping the room, letting Octavio get a sense for it. He’d seen Shezarim’s bridge and knew roughly what to expect of the colony ship command centers.

  This was different. Shezarim’s crew had followed a clear hierarchy, but there’d been little visual sign of it in how the bridge was laid out. That had been twenty-two consoles with nothing to really distinguish the Captain from his bridge crew.

  Octavio suspected that gap between esthetic aspiration and reality had been endemic to the Great Collective.

  This ship, however, had a very clear hierarchy. The bridge had been expanded to allow for two concentric rings of consoles, all facing in toward a raised dais holding the closest thing the centaur-like Assini could manage to a throne.

  There was no question who had been in charge on this ship, and it was the dead alien in the central seat.

  “The syringe contained a mix of medications known to my files,” D reported as the data came in from the Marines. “It’s a suicide drug, originally provided to long-range astronauts in case they missed their return orbital insertions.”

  Octavio nodded slowly. That was roughly what he’d been expecting.

  “Have we seen any other sign of the crew?” he asked.

  “We’re mostly in the working spaces of the ship so far,” Chen replied. “If they all quietly found a spot to sit down and put themselves to sleep, they’d do so in their quarters, I’d guess.”

  “Almost certainly,” Siril-ki agreed after a moment’s thought. “I wouldn’t have thought the bridge was a private-enough place to…”

  “Die,” Octavio finished after ki trailed off. “I suspect our friend was the last survivor. The last to give in to despair—but he set up all of this, too. Chen, is there anything in particular it looks like the generators are set up to power?”

  “I’d guess that whoever rigged this up knew the wiring for this space better than I do,” she replied with a chuckle. “It looks like they’re keeping a bunch of batteries charged and running the entire bridge computer system on standby.”

  “Is there any way we can copy those data cores without talking to the software?” Octavio asked. “It should all be backed up elsewhere, right?”

  “Yes,” Siril-ki confirmed. “With the armor, there should be a limited number of hard connections to the rest of the ship. If we make sure the rest of the data cores are powered off, they should contain everything bridge cores contain.”

  “And we can use the software to unencrypt them later, if it works,” Octavio said. “Okay. Chen, think you can find those access points?”

  “We’ll sweep.”

  “I know exactly where they should be,” Siril-ki told them. “I also know how to work with the software without needing D or one of my people over my shoulder. I need to go down there, Commodore.

  “I think one of my people has to be in that room. I am not sure why…but I am sure of it.”

  Octavio considered the video feed from Major Chen’s shoulder silently for several seconds.

  “Chen, is everything secure down there?”

  “Except for this room, everything mechanical or organic is dead,” the Marine replied. “Ki’ll be safe down here.”

  “All right, Director,” he said with a sigh. “I’m not sure this is a great idea, but…I agree with you. Something tells me that one of you needs to be in that room.”

  55

  Despite sending down his senior Assini—a being who was arguably the current head of state for a species of some five thousand souls—to the abandoned starship, Octavio manfully resisted temptation and remained aboard Dauntless himself.

  The battlecruiser had moved to orbit above the starship, providing an easier flight for the shuttles and a hopefully unnecessary backup for the three strike cruisers still orbiting KB2N13-1.

  Less than a quarter of Cassio’s crew had been retrieved. That was going to wear on Octavio in future, just as the crew of Scorpion who hadn’t survived the ship’s crippling in defense of the Vistans’ homeworld wore on him.

  For now, he had to hope that there was something useful aboard the abandoned starship or in the wrecked settlements on the surface. All their insanely long-distance mission to the Assini home system had bought so far was a lot of depressing knowledge about the fate of the Matrices’ builders and the loss of a strike cruiser to leftover robot warships.

  “Director Siril-ki has joined us in the bridge,” Chen’s voice told him, interrupting his morose reverie. “With ki and D’s aid, I believe we’ve cut off all connections to the rest of the ship. The bridge systems are now completely isolated from the rest of the ship.”

  “With your permission, I would like to boot up the system,” Siril-ki told Octavio.

  “It’s your people’s ship, Siril-ki,” he replied. “Whatever nightmare we find in here is yours more than mine.” He shivered. “Do what you need to do.”

  He watched through Chen’s shoulder-camera as the space-suited Assini settled in at a console near the central dais, attaching cables from one of the generators ki’d brought, and initiated the wake-up cycle.

  “It was on a basic power-saving standby,” Siril-ki reported. “I’m impressed they managed to get that to hold up this long, even with the decay generators.”

  Octavio could see the screen lighting up by the Assini. Unless he was very mistaken, it was asking for a password.

  “I wonder,” he murmured.

  “Commodore?” Siril-ki asked.

  “Do you have any codes you were planning on trying?” he replied.

  “I doubt any authorizations I have would work on this ship,” ki told him. “I have some hardware I was about to link in that will help me work around the security software.”

  “Try giving it Shezarim’s command codes,” Octavio suggested. “One wrong authentication won’t lose us the data, will it?”

  “It won’t, but I don’t s
ee the point,” ki replied.

  “Humor me, Siril-ki,” he asked.

  The sound of ki not quite grinding ki’s beak against itself was the equivalent to a long, exasperated sigh from a human…but Siril-ki leaned back over the console and plugged in the codes she’d inherited from Reletan-dai—who’d inherited them in turn from Shezarim’s long-dead original commander.

  “Wait…that worked?” ki said aloud. “Hold on…that seems to have triggered something else.”

  The batteries, it appeared, were hooked up to holoprojectors positioned around the room. The image of a large Assini now appeared in the dimly lit bridge, hanging in front of the command chair.

  “If you are seeing this message,” the image began, “you are a descendant of the crew and passengers of the evacuation ship Shezarim and have used their access codes to bring the ship’s computers out of standby.

  “I have done everything within my power to make sure these computers are still here and able to receive those codes.” The Assini shook their entire upper torso, an even more emphatic version of a human headshake.

  “My name is Koth-Aran-dai,” he introduced himself. “I hope and pray that all I have done will enable this message to reach the last survivors of my species. We dismissed Shezarim’s flight when it occurred, but now that flight is our only hope.”

  Octavio knew the dai suffice meant that Koth-Aran-dai was male—Assini biology did not lend itself to external sex identification, and their culture called for five different gradations of gender.

  “The Koth, if you have forgotten that piece of history, marks me as one of the Houses of the Herd Leaders,” Koth-Aran-dai continued. “Of the House of Koth, in particular.

  “Assuming that this message is being shown where I recorded it, you stand in the command center of the starship Koth-Shezar, on the moon Kothil, orbiting the world Kothan in the Koth System. I do not pretend my line has any concept of humility.”

  Octavio had to conceal a snort of amusement. Even at the end—and the positioning and clothing Koth-Aran-dai wore in the recording suggested it had been recorded very shortly before he’d injected himself with the syringe on his command chair—the Assini had still had some level of self-aware humor.

  “If we had humility, we might not have broken the herd as badly as we did,” Koth-Aran-dai continued softly. “We are not responsible for our star betraying our people…but as I stand here at the end of all I swore to protect, I cannot deny that we are responsible for the failure of so many things that could have saved us.

  “So, let this be my confession, in the hope that the last survivors of our species have somehow made it here and are watching this recording.”

  He straightened and looked directly at the camera—a posture that had the hologram appearing to look his own corpse in the eye.

  “I am the last scion of the House of Koth. I was the prince who was intended to be the king who saved us all,” he said calmly. “My father and his father and all who came before them set into motion the events that damned us all.

  “The House of Koth lost power but we hid our wealth. In the time of the Great Collective, wealth and control of information seemed the only keys of power. It took us too long to learn that myth was a key as well—and the myth that had risen around the last of the Houses was a powerful weapon.

  “So many saw the weaknesses of the Great Collective and hoped for the return of the rightful Herd Leaders. We used that. We recruited factions and leaders and scientists and built our power in the shadows.

  “But to convince the Collective to undo itself and restore our supposed rightful power to us, we needed a grand crisis,” Koth-Aran-dai told them. Octavio felt his heart sink as the long-dead prince confirmed his worst fears about the failures of the Construction Matrices.

  “Shezarim-ko planned it all. They had the plan, they had the AIs, they had the code to turn those AIs against our enemies. The first phases of the plan went perfectly, but to control the destruction of the colony waves sufficiently to create a crisis without an absolute massacre…”

  Koth-Aran-dai shook his entire torso again.

  “My father claimed it was a mistake,” he said flatly. “But he was very young then. He might have been lied to. He might well have lied to me. I cannot help but fear that the massacre was the point and that our ‘grand rescue’ was to be clearing the way for the evacuation ships of the second colony project.

  “We could have made a compromise even then, I think, claiming our ability to fool or disable the Construction Matrices was a secret weapon. We could have made ourselves the rulers of all Assini who left our home system in exchange for their safety.

  “But our star betrayed us all,” Koth-Aran-dai concluded simply. “I was born here on Kothan. I never saw Assini until after the flares. We saw the first flare wipe out our homeworld and saw Shezarim flee and we…”

  He sighed.

  “We hesitated,” he confessed. “With the technology and resources we had here, we could have sent this ship with the resources to bring most of Shezarim’s sisters online. What we lacked was the construction spikes, but some of those had been built. Given time, we could even have commandeered nearby Construction Matrices.

  “We needed to clear a way through the Sentinels to do that, so we would have needed the full cooperation of the remaining government in Assini. We would have needed to confess our crimes and forge an alliance to save our species over everyone’s pride.”

  Koth-Aran-dai slumped, bowing his head.

  “We did not convince ourselves that was necessary until it was too late,” he confessed. “In the destruction of Sina, I saw the annihilation of our species. I forced my father to fit out Koth-Shezar for a mission of mercy.

  “We had the cryo-pods and every other system to rescue five million people from Assini. We would increase the population of our colony here by fifty percent and save our species. It was a mission that could not be argued with, and I would not be denied.

  “We set out forty years ago,” he concluded. “And halfway to Assini, the star killed everyone.”

  He paused, clearly considering what to say next.

  “We still had to complete the flight,” he said. “Koth-Shezar couldn’t be turned around without refueling, so we went back to our home system. We buried the dead at Kora and we scavenged everything of value we could fit on this ship.

  “I left Koth with eleven elevens of eleven elevens of Assini. By the time we left Assini, we’d lost a full eleven of eleven elevens to suicide or the accidents of a herd without hope.

  “Those of us who had not lost the hope of fresh waters knew that what we were bringing home would be enough to at least make Kothan partially habitable, the beginning of a new start for our people.

  “It would be a slow process however, so my father decided to try and bring in the Construction Matrices that we could control. He needed them to get through the Sentinels…so he told the Sentinels everything.”

  Octavio inhaled sharply.

  “Thanks to Shezarim-ko, we had the ability to edit even the Sentinels’ code,” Koth-Aran-dai said quietly. “We could modify their core protocols, though we couldn’t modify the working core processes that define their personalities.

  “The message my father sent included code that rewrote the Sentinels’ core protocols to obey him. We…we did not know that strong-enough emotion could overcome all of the bindings and limitations built into them.

  “I think Shezarim-ko did,” Koth-Aran-dai admitted. “My father didn’t. He tried to control the Sentinels, and they turned on him with a homicidal rage like I have never even conceived of in a creation of our people.”

  The recording was silent for long enough that Octavio thought it had frozen.

  “We were halfway home when the rest of the House of the Koth was wiped from existence,” he said quietly. “I lost half my people within eleven days. By the time I’d even convinced myself not to end everything, I had less than eleven elevens of people.

  “
We had the code to build weapons against the surviving Sentinels. We had Guardian swarms attached to the ship to protect us, and we believed our code would succeed where my father’s failed.

  “But since my father’s failure damned eleven million souls, I wrote a backup,” he concluded. “Our code failed, just as my father’s had…but my backup erased this ship from their sensors. They could not see us, so they concluded they had destroyed us.

  “Three Sentinels survive as I record this. They are ignoring the drones that are orbiting my ship, because they don’t see my ship. They will, sooner or later, lose the rage that drives them. I do not think they will survive that any better than my people have survived their rage.”

  He was silent again, leaning on his hands.

  “My people are gone now,” he said finally. “There weren’t enough of us left to refuel and fly the ship again. They have all gone to their rest of their own will. If any of them had chosen to fight, I might have. But I am alone and I cannot preserve a species on my own.

  “But I have a sensor trace that tells me that Shezarim continues to fly outward at near the speed of light, hopefully safe from the Matrices that pursue her. And I can hope that her crew one day comes back here and learns the truth.

  “If you do, understand that the code I speak of is in this ship’s computers,” Koth-Aran-dai told them. “I don’t know why it failed on the Sentinels, but I am leaving you everything to be able to force a Construction Matrix to obey you.

  “That alone should make the worlds they have built safe for you,” he concluded. “It is the final gift I can give the survivors of my race. The only legacy I can offer except to understand why everything failed.

  “I am the last of the House of Koth, and today I go to my final rest of my own will,” he stated calmly. “May my confession enable knowledge and my gift enable peace.

  “Spirits of the ancient herds know my family failed to do either.”

  56