Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  If this were a more traditional military force, he’d have had a staff and spent his time on the flag deck. But this was more on the order of an archeological expedition that happened to be carried by a group of warships. He had one staff officer, Commander Timon Courtenay, but that worthy was run off his feet just keeping the scientists from getting under the spacers’ feet.

  The hologram shifted and moved in. The area laid out by the newer nav beacons was still dead, but it was clear that someone had come in after the initial chaos and cleared a safe zone. The beacons had been supposed to mark the safe area where ships could travel.

  It hadn’t been a very large zone and most of the lower levels were long gone. They could park the flotilla in the remaining geostationary piece safely, but the gap certainly hadn’t been large enough for the kind of travel necessary to support a government or major civilian population. Sia hadn’t been completely written off after the flare…but Octavio was starting to suspect it had been abandoned.

  “Let’s get some of the Marines moving to check out the newer stations,” he told Renaud. “And then see if we can map ourselves a route to the primary target. Do we have our maps reconciled with the current state of the surface yet?”

  “I’ve got a team working on that in CIC,” McGill told him. “We should be able to localize the Validation Center shortly.”

  To counter the degradation effect of the tachyon punch, the Assini had started using their tachyon communicators to validate the code of an AI Matrix after every jump. While there were a lot of questions around how the Construction Matrices had gone wrong, they knew that part of what had broken the Escorts had been a corrupted upload from the facility supposed to keep them sane.

  It seemed like a good place to start looking.

  Octavio’s hands itched to be doing something, whether that was dismantling a warp drive or organizing a starship crew. Instead, he sat on his hands in the observer station on Dauntless’s bridge and watched Major Chen Zhou organize her first boarding company.

  There was an entire battalion of Marines spread across his expedition, and Octavio had insisted that Chen command the force. The young Marine officer had led the boarding parties onto Shezarim and knew more about the kind of traps the Assini’s rogue robotic warriors could unleash than anyone—and that included the Assini.

  Arranging for her promotion and transfer aboard Dauntless had also allowed her to continue her relationship with the battlecruiser’s XO. Fire-forged friendships went a long way—and so could fire-forged lovers. That bond had value to the man in charge of making sure they all came home alive.

  For her own part, Commander Das was focusing her attention on her own tasks and only occasionally glancing at the updates on the Marine force’s status.

  “This is Orbital Target Alpha,” Chen barked at her people. “Our taxi drivers have flagged it as the single largest structure that was still operational after the flare that drove the Assini out. That has both benefits and drawbacks to us.”

  Octavio ran through the Marines’ org chart as he listened in on Chen’s briefing. The Major wasn’t commanding the boarding; that would be the Captain of her Second Company. Chen was going down with the force landing in Sia’s capital city in an hour.

  “The benefit is that these guys were here after the flare,” Chen explained. “They knew what happened on the surface and had data on what happened then. Plus, that makes for clear evidence that somebody survived the flare. Our best clues of what happened next are probably here.”

  And the greatest dangers were probably on the surface, Octavio reflected. Evidence suggested that the Assini had indulged in robotic peacekeepers instead of organic police, enabled by the near-complete pacifism of their population.

  If any of those robots were still running, they weren’t going to be friendly to anyone.

  “The main drawback is that we have a stack of override codes that should get us through most Assini military and police security barriers, but those codes were valid when the flare happened. So, they probably won’t work on the station, and you’re going to have to brute-force your way through a lot of shit.

  “Your objective is the computer cores. Once we’ve located them, an Assini team will board behind you to access and extract their data. Captain Belmont!”

  “Sir!”

  “Whether it’s safe for the computer specialists to board is your call,” Chen told him. “Don’t hesitate to hold them back. We have time, people. Anything that happened here happened hundreds of years ago. Nothing we do can change this planet’s fate. Let’s not take unnecessary risks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Octavio closed the display and looked over at Renaud.

  “That time could run out faster than we’d like,” the battlecruiser Captain murmured.

  “Chen’s people know what Admiral Lestroud ran into,” he told her. “Even if things start going badly back home, we’re fourteen months away, Aisha. If there’s an answer or a weapon against the Matrices here… we’re better off taking the time and finding it.”

  “I know.” Renaud shook her head, glancing back at the display showing the burnt-out orbital infrastructure of a dead world. “I can’t say being here isn’t a drain, though.”

  “I know,” he agreed. “But we’ll take the time we need, Captain. No more, no less.”

  The first wave of shuttles broke clear of Dauntless, impulse thrusters flinging them away from the battlecruiser with ease. They descended on the broken hulk of the Assini space station with easy grace.

  A second series of images were added to the main hologram on the bridge, showing the view from the lead troopers on the station. Plasma cutters flashed and the Marines charged into the station.

  “What are the odds that there’s anything hostile on the station?” he asked Siril-ki over the com.

  “I’d like to say zero,” the Assini replied. “But there shouldn’t have been hunter-killer drones on Shezarim. Our robotic progeny continue to surprise us.”

  “And rarely in good ways,” Octavio murmured.

  “That there were Construction Matrices out by you with intact preservation protocols was a good surprise,” ki told him. “Otherwise…no. Most of our surprises have been unpleasant.”

  “I’d have expected you to stop building robot warships to fight your last generation of robot warships at some point,” he admitted.

  “What other option did we have?” ki asked. “We had to protect ourselves, and only the tiniest handful of our people could even work on the combat AIs, let alone consider actual fighting.”

  Siril-ki shivered at the thought.

  “I understand the hypocrisy,” ki admitted. “But that makes it no less true.”

  “Initial entry is clear,” Captain Belmont reported. “No defenses, no robots…no bodies.”

  Octavio skimmed through the data on his tattoo-comp. The bridge observer chair had some functions, but he was better off using his implanted computer and linking it to the bridge systems.

  “Looks like it was evacuated,” he noted.

  “That’s what we’re seeing as well,” Renaud confirmed. “The Marines are sweeping further in. Anything unexpected, Belmont?”

  “Everything’s unexpected, sir,” the Marine officer replied. “So far, everything has been pretty clean. We’ve even checked some supply cabinets. Empty.”

  “That’s both a good sign and damned inconvenient,” Octavio said. “It’s a good sign since it means they were in good-enough shape to abandon the place in an orderly fashion, but it’s a bad sign because if they took the cleaning supplies…they probably took the computer cores.”

  “Open plains,” Siril-ki muttered. “Almost certainly, Commodore. Production of those cores would have required significant resources in the absence of Sia’s industry. The retrieval of intact useful cores…”

  “Hopefully, there’ll still be something to say where they went,” the human Commodore replied. “You may as well keep searching, Captain Belmont,” he to
ld the Marine. “Even if the cores are gone, that tells us something.”

  “We’re going to step up the pace,” Belmont replied. “Sensor sweeps are showing no life signs, no energy signatures. We’ll keep it to the Marines for now, but we should have this place searched in short order.”

  Nodding in response, Octavio muted the channel and turned his attention to Renaud.

  “That leaves Chen’s mission for a hope of answers,” he said softly. “If not…”

  “There is an entire star system for us to search for clues,” Siril-ki noted. “If there are answers here, we will find them, Commodore. It is only a question of time.”

  Octavio grunted. Recycling would keep his fleet’s supplies going for a while but not forever.

  “Our time is not infinite,” he said.

  “There are other places I know to look,” the Assini promised. “It will not need to be.”

  11

  There was only so much information that could be added to the main display and keep the hologram useful. As Major Chen’s force dropped toward Sia’s surface, the live feed from Captain Belmont’s company shrank back to a map-based presentation of where the Marines were.

  Octavio wasn’t expecting much from Belmont’s landing now. If the Assini survivors had stripped the station at all, they’d almost certainly taken the data cores they’d needed to locate the post-flare base of operations for Siril-ki’s people.

  Instead, he linked his tattoo-comp into the observer chair’s systems and activated a “bird on the shoulder” view from the camera on the side of Major Chen’s helmet.

  “I don’t think I need to tell you all not to be nervous,” Chen barked. “But I’m seeing some nervous-looking biometrics on my feed. Do I need to remind you all who we are?”

  A tiny icon popped up on the camera, a nonverbal acknowledgement from the Marine that Octavio was listening to and watching.

  “No, sir!” the Marines chorused back.

  “All right. Then who are we?” Chen snapped.

  “E! M! C!” came the chorused chant.

  “And who ain’t scared of the ghosts of no dead world?”

  “E! M! C!” the Marines repeated, though the tenor suggested that there might be some of them still scared of the ghosts of a dead world.

  “Who are the swords in the night, the archers on the wall, when humanity is at the end of all known space?”

  “E! M! C!” This time, the tenor was solidifying. The Exilium Marine Corps knew their role, if nothing else.

  “And when a bunch of archeologists have to check out a dead world to find out who killed them, who goes first?”

  “E! M! C!” The last of the nervous tenor was gone. Chen knew her people, all right.

  “That’s right,” she snapped. “Strap in and lock down. We’re hitting atmo in thirty seconds, and everything I’ve seen says this is going to be one hell of a ride!”

  Octavio double-checked for himself. Half of Sia’s atmosphere had been baked while the other half was left to normal night-time temperatures. It might have been three hundred years since that particular flare, but the weather patterns suggested that the planet had been baked by a few since then.

  The storms on the planet were hell. The temperatures weren’t much better, and it looked like just about everything on the planet was long dead.

  For all that, spectrography suggested that the air on Sia was probably breathable by humans. There hadn’t been any plant life to produce oxygen for a while, but there also hadn’t been much around to use it up.

  “Shuttles are in atmo,” McGill reported. “Pilots are reporting some pretty brutal turbulence, as expected. Nothing they can’t handle. Landing in six minutes.”

  A few commands brought up the shuttle’s exterior cameras as the heat shields retracted. The view was not pretty. The continent that the shuttles were flying over had been heavily populated once, a carefully managed mix of broad-based arcologies, a small handful of individual estates, and manicured parks and plains.

  All of that was dead now. The arcologies were slumping from a lack of maintenance, only their sheer scale and required structural redundancies keeping them intact. The estates were ruins, spared being eaten by plant life only because the plant life itself was dead.

  The parks were in no better shape. Hundreds of square kilometers of dead vegetation still remained. Whatever new birth or decay that death would normally have spawned had been killed by further flares.

  The entire planet had been radiation-baked. Octavio was sure something had survived—life was stubborn—but the flares would be getting worse, not better.

  At some point in the next few thousand years, the star would finally nova and eat the Assini homeworld. Until then, the planet would suffer this state of not-quite-death.

  Like the wreckage in orbit, it was damn depressing.

  “Approaching target location,” Chen’s pilot reported. “Scans are showing some impressive communications infrastructure. All offline now.”

  “All offline since the first flare, most likely,” Siril-ki said. “The facility wasn’t hardened as your people would do it. Any threat would have been stopped by the Guardian fleet before it reached Sia.”

  The Guardians. Octavio concealed a shake of his head. Most people would have stopped after one generation of AI warships—or at least, after one of the generations went crazy.

  The Guardians had actually been the first, the pre-Matrix artificial intelligences intended to protect Assini against whatever threats lurked in the dark. The Construction Matrices had been an entirely new revolution in AI, though the Guardians had been upgraded to match.

  Then the Sentinel fleets had been built, intended to kill Construction Matrices considered too close to the Assini homeworld. They hadn’t been built in time to prevent tens of millions of Assini colonists being murdered by the machines meant to build their new homes for them.

  The Escort and Construction Matrices had gone mad and turned on the Assini, but so far as Octavio knew, the Guardian and Sentinel Matrices had served their purposes without fault.

  The Guardian AIs had died here. None of them had been equipped with tachyon punches and most of them had orbited Sia.

  A small but significant chunk of the debris orbiting the planet was dead AI warships. That felt…appropriate for all the problems the Assini’s AIs had caused.

  “Sensors agree with the Director,” McGill confirmed. “The communications network around the Validation Center was fried by the first flare.” He paused. “There are intact landing pads. Major Chen’s people are moving in.”

  The view from Chen’s helmet had been muted as she gave orders, but Octavio was following them anyway. It was hard to miss the deployment of the shuttles as they swept in around their target.

  The Validation Center might have died a long time before, but it had still been one of the central structures of the Assini military. There were a lot of landing pads and similar around the facility, and the shuttles had no trouble finding places to land.

  It was a surprisingly small complex at that. Four large radio dishes had been mounted on artificial hillocks at the corners of the facility, but time and the flares had turned all four to skeletal memories.

  Most of the surface installation was made of bunker-like structures. The larger pieces of the installation had been communications tech. Octavio recognized several pieces of what had been one of the largest tachyon communicators he’d ever seen.

  “If there’s any answers here, they’re underground,” Siril-ki noted. “We might be pacifists, but we’re also paranoid. There will be robot security. I doubt it’s still active, but…”

  “Did your briefing cover the security, Major?” Octavio asked.

  “Mostly that it should be long dead,” Chen replied, using hand signals to order her people out of the shuttle. “But yeah. Turrets and mobile robots, mostly laser-equipped. Should be on par with the Escorts’ hunter-killers at worst.”

  “Just keep an eye out, Major,” h
e told her. “Whole place may be dead, but it’s making me feel damned creeped out.”

  “I hear you,” Chen agreed.

  The camera tracked with her as she exited the shuttle, turning around to survey the entire facility.

  “Flat and square,” she noted. “Siril-ki, did everything your people build look like this?”

  “Not everything, but efficiency was often a priority,” the Assini replied. “Especially for military affairs. There was never much money for the AI fleets, even after the Construction Matrices started wrecking worlds.”

  The Assini had weird priorities. Octavio didn’t get them, but…that was the problem with working with aliens. To be a space-traveling civilization with starships and such, you needed to have a lot in common with other such civilizations.

  The remainder, though…that left a lot of space for misunderstanding, confusion and chaos.

  “Wait, take a look at this, sir,” Chen noted. She knelt at the edge of the landing pad and brushed aside some dust. “That’s a landing pattern for something that was too big for the pad and using way too powerful an engine.”

  “What would someone be landing on a shuttle pad that would fit that criteria?” he asked.

  “Interplanetary transport,” the Marine suggested. “A big-ass shuttle, basically.” She started transmitting a collection of calculations and analysis back to Dauntless. “They blasted out of here with enough force to break orbit and head for Sina. I’d say that our post-flare people came back here.”

  “They’d have seen the Escorts attack the colony ship project and pursue us out of the system,” Siril-ki half-whispered. “This would have been a place to investigate.”

  “Wait one,” Chen said, interrupted Octavio before he could speak. “One of my teams is at the entrance to one of the bunkers and you need to see this.”

  A few seconds later, an image appeared next to the feed from her camera.

  The door to the bunker was sealed. Someone had used some kind of spray cement to fill the entire entryway, blocking access with anything short of explosives—though given that every bunker led to the same underground complex, it wasn’t that much of an obstacle.