Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I don’t need your lives,” she told them. “I need you to fight with me today. I have friends inside the Citadel, prisoners of the Intendant. I doubt I’m the only one, but we’re the people headed straight for the prisons.

  “We’re not the first wave,” she continued. “We’re going in ahead of the first wave. The Broken Chain and the Kond’s people have a plan for getting us almost the entire way to the prison before the fighting really starts.

  “If you can keep your heads down until I tell you, shoot what I tell you and protect what you aren’t supposed to shoot, we’ll do fine.”

  “For our world, our lives,” Bush-Waving repeated, the rest of the Sonba echoing the statement. “Yours to command.”

  That was going to take some getting used to. She looked over at her original escort.

  “Dos, is everything ready to go?”

  “Should be,” they affirmed. “If all are ready?”

  “Bush-Waving?” Amelie asked.

  Tentacle-like arms emerged from beneath the hair fronds, revealing one of the omnipresent Sivar mag-kinetic rifles.

  “We are ready. Are you armed?”

  Amelie smiled and drew the laser pistol for a moment.

  “I am,” she told him. “Let’s get going. Dos, have them bring the big truck around.”

  Compost left the First and Final Citadel in smallish open-backed trucks. Food supplies entered the Citadel on an entirely different scale, in twenty-meter land trains that would never have been allowed on any Confederacy or Republic road.

  The farm the Kond ran was one of the closest of the agricultural facilities that supplied the Citadel. Amelie had no idea how a helot rebel had ended up controlling the Intendant’s own food supply, but it was damn handy for them.

  She suspected the Intendant’s security had assumed that the precautions around the First and Final Citadel itself would suffice to prevent anyone infiltrating troops in the food supply and that security measures in the kitchens would prevent mass poisoning.

  Today, though…

  The land train holding six of Dos’s people, twenty Sonba terrorists and Amelie was inspected, all right. An armored guard popped up the back of the train, jumped up and looked them over with a perfectly calm gaze.

  “Everything’s fine in here,” he shouted back. “Got that extra box?”

  A second security guard showed up, pulling a long trunk. The two guards lifted the trunk into the land train and popped it open to reveal additional belts of ammunition for the mag-kinetic rifles.

  “You’re cleared through security to level six,” the first guard shouted to the driver—but his gaze was on Amelie. “Take the red gates only.”

  “Understood,” she murmured.

  The two guards jumped out of the land train and closed the gates at the back. The Sonba relaxed, and Bush-Waving dipped a tentacle into the ammunition box.

  “Today, my Sonba friend, we own the security checkpoints,” Amelie told them. “It won’t last. As soon as the violence starts, these guards are with us. Until then, they’re helping us infiltrate as deep as we can.”

  The rebel groups had linked with the tributes running the sewage and water systems, too. Those could be locked down from central command facilities in theory, but right now, the sensors were offline and squads of rebels were infiltrating through the utility tunnels.

  And Amelie’s truck was only the first.

  From her discussions of the plan with the Kond and others, on any given morning, the First and Final Citadel saw as many as two hundred land trains enter through the security gates. They’d only compromised the gates in the outer perimeter and a handful of specific lines through the inner security checkpoints.

  It would be enough to get over five thousand rebel soldiers into the Citadel before anyone knew there was a threat. Another several thousand were infiltrating through the tunnels—and the Citadel’s entire first line of defense was compromised.

  Amelie hadn’t been briefed on everything, but her estimate was that over thirty thousand armed rebels of the various factions were moving across the City and the Citadel. It was a war the Intendant wasn’t expecting and hopefully wasn’t ready for.

  They’d know soon enough.

  61

  Level six was the final level of security before they hit the prison. Each of the checkpoints before that had quietly been under the control of the Broken Chain, but now they were about to hit the last line.

  “Wait, what was that?” Bush-Waving asked.

  Amelie hadn’t heard anything, but from the suddenly fluttering collection of head-fronds in the land train, she was the only one.

  “Explosions. Gunfire,” Dos noted. “Not close. Level two perimeter, maybe.”

  “Shooting wasn’t supposed to start yet,” Amelie noted. “We’re out of time. Level six was always in question, so be ready to move.”

  She drew the laser pistol again, taking a deep breath as she checked its charge. The gun was fully charged and she had a second power cell inside her armor that she’d fired two shots from.

  “Here.” Dos handed her a weapon from the trunk the security guards had left. “Need to leave train behind. Extra gun. You should carry as well.”

  It was a light carbine designed for the smaller Sivar, so she could easily sling it out of the way. A belt of ammo magazines counterbalanced it, holding the carbine in place while she focused on the laser.

  “Thanks.” She hadn’t planned to grab another gun, but since it was there, she’d take it. Thirty shots wasn’t much to overthrow a government with.

  The land train lurched to a stop. They were at the level six security checkpoint…and there was shouting outside.

  Now she could hear the distant gunfire as well. Mag-kinetics were mostly silent until the round broke the sound barrier, but the sonic booms alone were enough to make mass weapons fire audible at a distance.

  “They’re telling the driver the gate is closed,” Bush-Waving told her, the Sonba having realized that her hearing wasn’t as good as theirs. “We’re to pull into a holding zone and stand by for inspection.

  “No further vehicles passing through until the security situation is…”

  “Bush-Waving?” Amelie asked, but she’d heard why the conversation had stopped. The gunfire was much closer.

  “Go,” she barked.

  The land train was set up with safety features so it could be opened from the inside. It took only a few seconds for Dos to sling the door open and charge out with their blaster cannon.

  By then, the firefight was over. Half a dozen Sivar were dead on the ground—including their driver. Four of the bodies were even in light power armor, something the guards weren’t supposed to be equipped with.

  The ones that were still standing were clearly waiting for them, however, and pointed their weapons away.

  “Broken Chain,” one of them shouted. “These guys came down from higher up when the shooting started, and started giving commands.”

  Amelie stepped over to the nearest body and rolled it over. There was a new insignia blazoned on the chest of the power armor, directly beneath where the collarbone would be on a human: a single stylized Eye.

  “Eyes of Sivar, I’m guessing?” she said aloud. The Broken Chain soldier walked over and looked.

  “They didn’t even ID themselves,” he told her. “That’s Eyes armor, though. If even four of them came down, they realized there’s a problem. There’ll be more. A lot more.”

  “How many checkpoints at level six?” Amelie asked.

  “Four. This one covers a quarter of the mountain.”

  “They can also get out through the three others and through the mountain,” she pointed out. “Get us through, then barricade the checkpoint and abandon it. You can’t hold against what’s going to roll down the mountain soon enough, and you can slow them down just as easily without dying for it.”

  Two of the Sivar were already clearing the way through for the land train.

  “You’re
probably right,” the Broken Chain soldier replied. “But I have remote explosives, and that seems like the best of both worlds to me.”

  Amelie snorted.

  “I’m not going to tell you not to blow up the Eyes of Sivar,” she said. “But there’s a lot of people on this mountain you might regret killing.”

  “Maybe,” he allowed. “But I made my peace with that before I came out for duty this morning. The Intendant must fall.”

  “Your world, soldier,” Amelie replied. “We have our own mission.”

  The gate was now clear.

  “And Fates willing, we’ll all be here tomorrow,” the soldier agreed. “Every checkpoint in from here already had Eyes of Sivar on station. This is far as we can get you, and the shooting may have drawn attention.

  “You need to move.”

  Amelie threw him a salute—textbook-perfect, thanks to the military training she’d undergone for her movie roles long before, not that the Siva would know—and jumped into the passenger seat of the land train.

  Dos was at the controls, already bringing the vehicle online.

  “You can drive this?”

  “Yes,” the Toorg confirmed.

  “Bush-Waving?”

  “Everyone is back aboard,” the Sonba confirmed. “We are ready to jump out on your command.”

  “We’re past the last friendly faces, but please try not to shoot anyone who isn’t armed,” she told them.

  “That has been reiterated before. We understand.”

  “All right.” Amelie turned back to her tree companion. “Drive, Dos.”

  Amelie had never expected to get into the prison itself without a fight. Not only was it buried inside the mountain, but it had its own exterior access for vehicles and supplies—and those supplies weren’t coming from the Kond’s farm.

  They’d considered trying to steal one of the right land trains, but in the end, they didn’t have time. Amelie had also figured that was getting too clever.

  Without their driver, there was no way they were pulling it off, anyway. She and Dos sat in the land train’s front cabin as they headed toward the gateway into the mountain, and for a single moment of laughable “brilliance”, she considered trying to ram the doors open with the land train.

  Then she remembered the doors were designed to withstand nukes.

  “Can you twist the train so we arrive container doors first?” she asked Dos.

  The alien froze in contemplation for a moment.

  “I believe so,” they finally said. “Bush-Waving? Please have your people hold on to something.”

  The Sonba didn’t even have time to ask what was going on before Dos’s arms were in motion. Amelie wasn’t familiar enough with the controls of a Sivar land train to know what Dos was doing, but the results were obvious.

  The train jackknifed. For a moment they were skidding across the ground toward the gate and the suddenly horrified-looking guards in a V shape. Then Dos slammed the reversed engine cabin into forward for several seconds before flipping the vehicle into reverse.

  If the land train had a warranty, they’d probably just voided it, and Dos was still driving the vehicle, watching through their rear-view cameras as they hurtled the entire twenty-meter long vehicle toward the door into the mountain.

  “Bush-Waving?” Amelie said into their radio. “Fire.”

  The door to the back of the land train crashed open while the vehicle continued to hurtle toward the door, and the Sonba closest to the back of the land train followed her commands.

  The Sivar guards never stood a chance. There might have been half a dozen shots from the defenders. There definitely wasn’t a full dozen.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Amelie chanted as the land train ground to a halt, kicking open her own side door and following the Sonba out. Every member of the team had at least some of the security override codes they’d been given, but only she had all of them. She had to be with the strike team to unlock doors.

  Each code had a limited lifetime once it had been used. Cybersecurity specialists inside the Citadel would already be at work, killing codes as the rebels used them.

  The sound of the fighting lower on the mountain was getting louder. The attack was now escalating to all-out war, and she was left hoping that Commandant Ackahl kept her word.

  The Siva in the security office had been on the ball, she realized as Dos smashed the door open for her. They’d slammed in a security lock on the bunker door when Dos had jackknifed the land train.

  Unfortunately for the Citadel’s guardians, her override codes worked—this time. The bunker doors slowly ground open.

  “Move!” she barked. “Tunnel is eighty meters long and designed to be a defensive chokepoint. We need to get to the other side before anyone gets in place to hold it.”

  Bush-Waving was already moving. Someone was in the chokepoint, Amelie realized as gunfire echoed into the enclosed space.

  One of Dos’s fellows was close to the entrance and had their blaster cannon ready. Bullets were replied to with balls of plasma, and the shooting was over by the time Amelie reached the door.

  The Sonba had been listening. There was a team already halfway down the tunnel, past most of the twists and retractable barricades. As she ran after them, she had a moment of wishing they’d kept the truck.

  Fortunately, she was a lot faster than the Sonba and reached the end of the tunnel right behind the lead team. There was an underground parking pool there, currently containing neatly parked vehicles and a pair of land trains.

  “Everything’s empty, no life signs. Prison access is over here,” Bush-Waving told her. “Stand back. Our lives for yours!”

  An explosive charge blew the door open, and four Sonba led the way. They were expecting to run into fire…but nothing answered them except a calm voice.

  “I would really rather not be shot today, if you’d be so kind,” the Siva said loudly. “Is Lestroud there?”

  62

  Shonin, First Voice of the Knives of the Keys of War, looked utterly unbothered by the fact that ban stood amidst several dead compatriots. Two other Sivar in all-encompassing black power armor stood by the door, holding heavy mag-kinetic rifles that made the cause of the deaths obvious.

  “I apologize for the mess, Minister Lestroud,” ban greeted Amelie as the Sonba escorted her in. “The Eyes of Sivar run this particular facility, and their soldiers are surprisingly difficult to bribe.”

  “Who is in control here?” Amelie asked.

  “Unfortunately, still them,” Shonin admitted. “I now control the overall security systems and have locked out the usual command center, but there’s still several dozen of the Eyes’ troops patrolling the cells.

  “I can tell you where to find your people, but honestly? Most of the people in these cells are on your side,” ban continued. “They’re mostly Sivar, but there are some key helot figures down here as well. A lot of them are supposed to be dead. It’s been an educational few minutes.”

  “I’m here for my people,” Amelie replied. “The Sonba are here for everyone else. Nobody stays in the Citadel’s prisons today.”

  “I thought so,” Shonin said with a smile. “Kronk? Can you show the Sonba to the truck we brought with us?”

  One of the black-armored Knives removed themselves from the wall and stepped out into the garage.

  “What’s in the truck?” Amelie asked carefully.

  “There are still a dozen of your Marines in these cells,” Shonin told her. “It seemed to me that providing them with the weapons they are accustomed to might be useful.”

  Ban continued to type as ban spoke.

  “Your people are all in block K,” ban noted. “That’s the far end of the prison. Not quite as secure as the Intendant’s personal cells where he kept you, but other than that…probably the most secure cells on the planet.

  “Until today.”

  “Give us directions and we’ll go get them.”

  Shonin laughed and picked up a carbine simil
ar to the one Amelie had slung.

  “Minister Lestroud, I did not come this far to just send you on your way,” ban replied. “Most of your people didn’t make it into their power armor when the Knives of the Eyes stormed your embassy.

  “I managed to secure twelve suits. None of my people can use them, but I believe they are fully charged and I believe we have secured the correct weapons. I need your Marines, Minister Lestroud. Their armor is better than anything else on the planet—I don’t think any other force on this planet can make it into the Intendant’s throne room.

  “So, either I find a way to blow off the top of a mountain that is both the religious and governmental center of my people, or I use your people as the tip of the spear.”

  Ban held out a hand to Amelie. Ban had clearly researched the gesture somewhere. Ban didn’t quite have it right, but it was clear what ban intended.

  “They’ll do it if you tell them to,” ban noted. “I’ll be right behind them, but I need your Marines and I need your power armor to end this.”

  “What, is everyone going to lay down their arms once he’s dead?” Amelie asked, ignoring the hand for a moment.

  “Enough will,” ban agreed. “Enough more will hesitate that we can remove the Eyes and their Knives. The City is already mostly in rebel hands, a cold standoff between helots and soldiers that don’t understand why they were ordered to hold their positions and not fight back.

  “Right now, they’re listening to their Commandants. Before the wax melts, the Eyes are going to break into the military network and the Intendant is going to order them into battle. He needs to be dead before he can give that order.”

  “And you need my Marines.”

  “I’ll take the rest of your people and your friends here, too,” Shonin said with a clacking laugh. “But I have a Knives special assault team ready to go the moment I give the order. Right now, though, they’d charge into the best troops and security the Eyes have and both sides will have our power armor. It will be a massacre.”