Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “We might be able to do an end run through the autonomous processes,” Siril-ki suggested. “But that is a theory at most. The code as retrieved gives us some places to start, and Koth-Shezar’s historical files give us some answers we did not have.

  “Unfortunately, I am not certain we have learned or will learn anything else of value here.”

  Octavio nodded slowly. If nothing else, they at least had worked out a way to break into the autonomous processes there.

  “Four days,” he finally said aloud. “We’ll spend another four days here and see if we can pull anything out of the Koth facilities. Barring us finding any signs of anything else of value, we and the Sentinels will set our course back to Exilium.

  “Further research can be done by Matrix units that don’t take a year to get here. We’ve found something of potential value, but I think we need to consider getting all of us home.”

  There had been real value to bringing the Assini to their home system, both in terms of closure for the horse-like aliens and in terms of their insight as to what was going on, but he figured they’d reached the end of it.

  It was time to go home.

  “I don’t see any reason to stay here,” Siril-ki agreed. “With your permission, Commodore, I’d like to forward all of the code to XR-13-9. It is possible that a Construction Matrix may see aspects to this that the organics who designed them do not.”

  He could see why she was asking. It was possible XR-13-9 could use that code to make all kinds of terrifying modifications to themselves. Somehow, he didn’t see that happening.

  So far as he knew, D was an exact copy of XR-13-9’s personality, and the human-aligned Matrix seemed content with who they were.

  “Do it,” he ordered. “Make sure the Republic has it, too. If we come up with any answers along the way home, they may make all the difference when they bring the Rogue down.”

  Or the next Rogue. Or the one after that. If nothing else, the Assini’s and Koth’s mistakes left them lots of opportunity to learn the best way to take down Rogue Matrices.

  67

  Vigil screamed into the Sivar-Prime System like an avenging angel. Isaac was half-expecting to come into a full-fledged ongoing civil war, so his fleet came out of warped space at full battle stations and loaded for bear.

  It was rather anticlimactic in the end. There were four more battleships than his last report, but all of them were clustered around the star-lanes. There were, in fact, no warships orbiting Aris.

  “That doesn’t look right at all,” Connor noted. “I have multiple battleships at each of the star-lane fortification clusters, but not even a cruiser in orbit.”

  “Fortresses?” Isaac asked.

  “Present but power signatures are very low. I suspect they may have been evacuated. This looks…nothing at all like I was expecting,” the ops officer reported.

  “All ships are to maintain combat formation and battle stations,” Isaac ordered. “Watch for those battleships maneuvering. We can take nine of theirs, but I want to know what’s going on before we start shooting.”

  “Our course, sir?” Connor asked.

  “Aris,” Isaac replied. “We’re here to retrieve our people and potentially burn out a cancer. Both of those are on Aris.”

  “Sir!” Naveed Hashemi interrupted. “We’re getting a tachyon-com update from General Zamarano. She’s received multiple com drones from Aris in Sonbar while we’ve been in warp. The situation has dramatically changed.”

  “How dramatic is dramatically?” Isaac asked.

  “The Intendant is dead. Minister Lestroud killed him,” Hashemi said in a stunned voice.

  “That’s…dramatic,” Isaac conceded, shaking his head. “How the hell did she manage that?”

  “I don’t know,” his com officer admitted. “Zamarano reports that there appears to be an interim government in place under a ‘Dynast Silleck’, who is basically begging us to talk before we open fire.”

  Isaac snorted.

  “The situation was weird enough that they were going to get that,” he admitted. “Amelie made friends, did she?”

  “It appears there may have been some kind of alliance between Sivar and non-Sivar rebel factions, as well as dissident elements in the Governance itself,” Hashemi told him. She was clearly still going through the data from Sonbar as she was explaining things.

  No one in Sivar had a tachyon com to update them yet. No one in Sivar even knew they were here yet.

  “I’ll forward you the reports, sir, but it looks like Amelie launched a revolt against the Intendant…and pulled it off.”

  That finally sank in, and Isaac had to just pause for a moment and take in just what Amelie Lestroud had accomplished.

  “The last report I had was that she was in a prison cell,” he noted softly. “From there, she managed to assemble an alliance of rebel factions from species that may well hate each other and overthrow a tyrant?”

  There were days he suspected he was the junior partner of his marriage. The rest of the time, he knew that any legend of his was going to be forever following in the trail of Amelie Lestroud.

  He’d definitely married up.

  “Wait. Sir.” Hashemi’s vague awed tone collapsed into concern. “Minister Lestroud was shot!”

  Isaac was suddenly laser-focused on the reports in front of him.

  “How bad?” he asked flatly.

  “Bad. She was alive at last report, but it was touch-and-go, and everything we’re getting from Sonbar is days out of date.”

  “Understood.” Isaac traded a look with Connor, then made up his mind. There were times the personal had to yield to the important, but this was not one of them.

  “Fleet will advance for Aris orbit at maximum acceleration,” he ordered calmly. “Vigil will push to full emergency power. The Sivar don’t know human anatomy or have the right medical facilities aboard to treat severe injuries.

  “Vigil does.”

  And after what she’d achieved on that planet, Amelie’s husband had no intention of letting her die down there.

  There was a storm over the Citadel as Isaac’s shuttle plummeted downward. Wind, rain, thunder, if it could be imagined for weather, it seemed to be battering the EMC assault craft.

  “We have a solid radio beacon from ground control,” the pilot reported. “It’s been a while since I have had groundside quite this cooperative.”

  “They might think we’ll shoot them if they cause any trouble,” Isaac replied. “They might not even be wrong.”

  The young woman snorted, but her attention was on bringing the spacecraft toward the hangar the locals had picked out. A dozen similar shuttles orbited above the storm, and Vigil had the First and Final Citadel’s anti-air defenses locked in from orbit.

  The Dynast was aware of all of that but had made no attempt to discourage their safety measures. The storm was the only thing trying to discourage anyone.

  “Hang on,” the pilot instructed. Isaac obeyed—and still nearly lost his stomach as the shuttle went almost on its side to dodge around a final brutal gust of wind and tuck neatly into the hangar.

  “Okay.” The young woman wiped sweat from her brow. “The plan is to get the Minister back up to Vigil ASAP, correct?”

  “Yes,” Isaac confirmed. “Should we wait for the storm to weaken?”

  The pilot was almost as dark-skinned as he was, which made her blanch at the idea very visible.

  “I’d prefer to, yes,” she allowed levelly. “But if the President Emeritus needs an emergency evac, I’m pretty sure getting out of the storm will be easier than flying into it.”

  “Good soldier, Lieutenant,” Isaac replied with a grin. “Hopefully, I won’t have to hold you to that.”

  But he would if he needed to—and he knew she’d do it.

  “Sort out fueling with the locals,” he ordered. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

  Major Baumann hadn’t even asked Isaac if he was going to want an escort. The back half
of the shuttle was full of EMC Marines in full power armor, and there was no way he was exiting the ship first.

  By the time he left the shuttle, ten armored Marines had already preceded him. The main security meeting them was also EMC Marines, though. There were also a quartet of very large creatures that looked like walking trees—with even bigger guns—and a mixed group of Sivar and Sonba.

  “Major Köhl, Mr. Faulkner,” he greeted the two humans at the center of the group, one unarmed and one unhelmeted. “I’ll admit I was expecting to meet with someone from the local authorities.”

  “The Dynast and the Keepers would beg a moment of your time before you return to orbit,” Faulkner confirmed. “But they understood you’d want to see Amelie before anything else.”

  “She’s as safe and stable as our doctors can make her,” a black-uniformed Sivar standing a step behind the two humans told him. “But we simply don’t know your physiology enough to want to risk surgery.”

  “And I have one medic who never trained as a surgeon,” Köhl told him. “She’ll be stable enough if we keep her down here, but she needs surgery to remove bullet fragments from her chest cavity.”

  Isaac winced.

  “Why did she do that to herself?” he muttered aloud.

  “Because someone had to stop the Intendant shooting his own government,” the Sivar explained. “My name is Shonin,” ban introduced banself when he looked at ban askance. “At the Dynast’s request, I now run security for Aris for the caretaker government.”

  Caretaker government was a promising description, if people kept to that.

  “It seems you owe my wife a great debt,” Isaac told her. “I need to see her. Before I talk to anyone else or we even continue this conversation.

  “I need to see Amelie.”

  She was asleep. Isaac wasn’t sure why he’d expected her to be awake; he knew that the best thing for her current state was rest.

  But he wasn’t used to seeing Amelie helpless. From the moment they’d made contact via dead drops and tentative connections behind masks and code names, she’d been moving. First a revolutionary, convincing the hesitant and combative to work together to fight the Confederacy.

  Then a prisoner, then a head of state, then an ambassador.

  And now, apparently a revolutionary again.

  The chair next to the bed wasn’t really sized for humans, but it worked for him to pull up next to her.

  Without the energy that filled her when she moved and spoke, she lost some of the spark and beauty that kept her drawing eyes at past fifty. He didn’t care, though. She was still gorgeous to him, even though the stillness ate at his heart.

  He was holding her hand before he even consciously reached for her. She squeezed back and one eye delicately opened to look at him.

  “Isaac,” she murmured. “You here or is it the drugs?”

  “I’m here,” he told her. The Sivar could only get so close with medication for humans. Hallucinations were probably the least of the side effects.

  “That’s what the last two of you said,” she pointed out sleepily. “In unison. It was weird.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me at all,” Isaac replied. “I don’t do choruses and I don’t have a twin.”

  “Okay, so that’s probably you.” She squeezed his hand. “Still hurts despite everything. Why didn’t anyone tell me getting shot was this bad?”

  “Because you were never supposed to get shot,” he told her. “We’re here. Vigil’s here, with her doctors. I’ve got a medical transfer team setting up in the next room. We’ll move you up to orbit, get you fixed up.

  “You’re going to be fine, my love.”

  She coughed indelicately. There was blood on her chest cover, he realized. From the coughing.

  “There’s a fragmented bullet in my left lung, Isaac,” she told him, her voice very quiet. “Hit the back of my armor and stayed inside. I’m breathing through a fucking tube that you can’t see under the blankets.”

  “The transfer team is being briefed on all of that,” he said, hoping he wasn’t wrong. “We can handle that. We’ve done worse. The people on Vigil are the best human trauma doctors for at least a hundred light-years.”

  She smiled. It was a sad, wan thing, but it was there.

  “That’s a shit joke and you know it, Isaac,” she told him. “Promise me…”

  “Anything.”

  “Talk to Silleck,” she demanded. “But then…can you be with me when they move me? I…I know I need to sleep for it, but I’ll sleep better if I know you’re there.”

  “I’ll be there,” he promised. “We should never have been apart. I’ll be there.”

  “Silly man,” she said. “Love you…but we both married duty as well as each other, didn’t…”

  Her eyes closed. She was asleep again.

  Isaac squeezed her hand, gently laying it next to her side.

  He’d go talk to the Dynast, but he’d be back. They weren’t doing anything with Amelie without him there now.

  68

  When Shonin took Isaac to meet the current leaders of the planet, he was expecting to find them in some kind of opulent throne room—possibly still covered in the blood of the predecessor they’d killed to take power.

  Instead, he was escorted into a large but otherwise plain office with three Sivar in it—a male and two females—and a black-furred alien that looked like a distant cousin of the Assini but run through a “mole” filter instead of a “horse” filter.

  “I am Silleck,” one of the two females introduced herself, bowing slightly across the table. “By bloodline, the technically rightful Dynast of Aris. This is Rode, Keeper of the Citadel”—she gestured to the other female Sivar—“and Corstan, Keeper of the Keys of War.” She gestured to the male.

  “Lastly, this is Kond Asselis, the Keeper of the Keys of Peace,” Silleck concluded, gesturing to the non-Sivar. “Right now, the Kond represents the only non-Sivar member of the caretaker government, but that will change.”

  “I know Amelie gave you certain minimum acceptable terms for the structure of your new government,” Isaac noted. “She isn’t currently in a state to enforce them, but I want to be clear: the Republic backs every promise and commitment that Amelie Lestroud made.”

  He’d confirmed that with President Emilia Nyong’o while they’d been rushing to the planet. The President had had more time to prepare for that potential situation and had even got Senate sign-off.

  “A lot of promises were made by a lot of people to get us this far,” Silleck replied. “Amelie committed the Republic to act as a neutral arbiter to make sure those promises were kept.”

  “So far, everyone has been willing to wait and see,” the Kond interjected. “Between us, we’ve managed to keep the atrocities to a minimum, though there is the fear of reprisal from the Keys of War.”

  “We need some of the soldiers and police here to keep order,” Corstan replied. “Moving the ships away and standing down the fortresses has left Aris vulnerable.”

  “But the presence of the Republic suggests a countermeasure there,” the Dynast smoothly cut in to what was clearly a continuing argument. “If Admiral Lestroud can commit to leave at least some ships here to secure Aris, then we can be far less worried about our immediate security.”

  “Has the rest of the Governance acknowledged your authority?” Isaac asked. “Are you able to negotiate on their behalf?”

  “They have, though that is unstable and depends on what course our caretaker government follows,” the Kond noted. “A lot of rebel factions on the homeworlds are ready to try and throw the occupiers out, but we would prefer a peaceful transition.”

  “Despite what Corstan occasionally opines, we are aware that if the Governance is to survive, we must have an offer for the other races that is worth it,” Silleck said. “I have committed that I will stand as Dynast for no more than one orbit.”

  An Aris orbit was about fourteen months, from the data Isaac had seen.
/>   “And what happens then?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” Keeper Rode admitted. “We need to establish a new structure here on Aris and a new relationship with the other worlds and races.”

  “Sonbar is currently under Republic control, and we may use our negotiations with the government you have helped set up as our template,” the Kond said. “Which, I suppose, brings us to the point that we wanted to speak to you about.”

  “Amelie is being transported up to my flagship within the hour and I am going with her,” Isaac replied. “I would suggest that you make your point quickly.”

  The four leaders exchanged glances. The Kond was still an outsider, Isaac could tell—but the Sivar Dynast was almost as much of one. The two Sivar Keepers had clearly been working together for a long time.

  The balance between those tensions looked positive to him. They might actually have a chance.

  “We do not have a Fates-abandoned concept of how to build an equal government for seven races, eight worlds, and sixty billion souls,” Silleck said flatly. “That is assuming that the Sonba never rejoin us. They would bring us to eight races, nine worlds and even more people.”

  The Sonba seemed quite content to not have Sivar overlords, from the last reports Isaac had seen. They seemed to focus on “groves”, a sort of extended family, and had built their society from that. In some ways, their default mode was both extremely equal and extremely hierarchical.

  “I understand your problem, I think,” he allowed. “What do you want from us?”

  “Help,” Silleck said plainly. “Teachers, social scientists, diplomats…whatever title you want to call them, we need people who have an idea of how to build that equitable society. I have promised that in one orbit, I will have an answer.

  “But we don’t even know where to begin.”