Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Fall in, officers,” he ordered calmly. He met Cavan’s gaze levelly for a few extra seconds, until the man dipped his head in understanding.

  Message sent and received. Body language was handy, not least because aliens picked it up only at the loosest level.

  “I look forward to meeting with our host,” he told the lead Skree-Skree officer, allowing the translator device pinned to his collar to repeat his words in their incomprehensible language.

  “Of course!” the alien replied. “The Grand Speaker awaits you in the Hall of Warmth. Come! Come!”

  “The loss of Lastborn concerns us,” the Speaker for Arms told Isaac quietly later, as the meal began.

  Each of the alien races was, thankfully, being served a different meal. The Skree-Skree used various tiers of rot as flavoring in a way that Isaac figured might actually kill humans if not properly managed. They managed several dishes that actually looked quite edible to him, but he wasn’t going to trust a Skree-Skree chef cooking for him without very specific instructions.

  A team of ESF stewards had gone down to the surface in advance to make sure the human food was safe—and while the meat in his spaghetti bolognese definitely wasn’t beef, they’d done a good job with it.

  “Our losses in general concern me,” Isaac admitted. “The Matrices were ready for us in a way we didn’t expect.”

  SongWind—the being in charge of the Skree-Skree military and the Grand Speaker’s niece or some equivalent, Isaac understood—snapped her beak crisply.

  “We are prepared to commit our ships to this alliance, Admiral, but we fear for our children,” SongWind told him. “LastBornVoice faces political challenges as well. There are those who question how much of our newborn fleet we are committing to your command, Admiral.”

  “There are always those who question alliances, Speaker,” Isaac conceded. “There are those who would bring my ships home as well.”

  President Emilia Nyong’o had them very thoroughly politically neutered, but they existed.

  “Now you want us to commit the new battlecruisers to your campaign, your crusade,” the alien said. “When does it end, Admiral? How many ships will be fed to the terrormonsters of war before it is done?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know how many species the Matrices have destroyed, how many worlds have been turned to paradises on the graves of innocents. The Regional Construction Matrix we are hunting is the most immediate threat to us all, but there are others and they need to be stopped.”

  “I don’t disagree,” the Speaker for Arms said. “But many in the First Gathering do. They question sending our ships to battles that must be farther and farther as time goes on. A tunnel can only be dug for so long before the tools break, Admiral, no matter how valuable the destination.”

  “I know.” Isaac glanced along the table to where the Grand Speaker was sitting. The Skree-Skree head of state had lost much of the blue lustre to his feathers, his plumage fading to dull and gray with age.

  LastBornVoice was fully on board with protecting his people, but fighting for the rest of the universe? Isaac knew that was going to be a hard sell for anyone.

  “We need to deal with this RCM,” he told the Speaker for Arms. “The bastard knows us now. It’s being smart, it’s luring us into traps. We need to turn one of those traps on it and end this dance before it’s too late.

  “After that, it will take time for us to identify RCMs that are engaging in genocide,” he admitted. “That will mostly fall on Matrix recon nodes as we try and expand our area of operation and, hopefully, bring other non-Rogue RCMs onto our side.”

  He shook his head.

  “In the long run, having the Matrices out there building habitable worlds is good for all of us,” Isaac admitted. “We just need to stop the ones that are killing people to do it. We won’t need as large a portion of anyone’s fleets when we go after the RCMs that are further away.”

  “You are assuming, of course, that our fleets continue to expand,” SongWind noted. “An expansion I don’t believe your fleet is capable of. At what point, Admiral Lestroud, do you think we will start to complain about fighting your war for you?”

  Isaac forced a chuckle to cover his uncomfortable exhalation. SongWind wasn’t wrong in what she was suggesting, and it was something he struggled with. He was arming allies and uplifting alien races, but it was a careful balance between keeping the Republic safe and turning his allies into his mercenaries…or his sepoys.

  “I hope that it remains our war,” he pointed out. “And I would add that this RCM is a threat to your worlds, not ours. Exilium is almost a hundred light-years away. If we left you all to your own devices, well, we’ve given you enough technology that you should be able to deal with the Rogue yourself.

  “We’re fighting for you here. And we plan to ask you to do the same for people we haven’t met yet in the future. I hope that it never becomes just my war.” Isaac shook his head.

  “If it becomes just my war, I’ve done something very wrong.”

  SongWind clicked her beak in amusement.

  “You recognize that, at least,” she told him. “We swore to fight by your side, Admiral, and we will. You’ll get the battlecruisers and their escorts this time. But once this RCM is defeated and our world is safe, we will need to keep more of these ships for our own purposes.”

  A shiver ran down his spine. He didn’t even know what other purposes the Skree-Skree could want warships for. There were three Constructed Worlds within easy colonizing distance of their system that they wouldn’t need to fight anyone for.

  “I hope that we will leave behind us a group of races and systems in sufficient communication that you won’t have many purposes for them,” Isaac told her.

  She chirped laughter at him.

  “So do I, Admiral Isaac. But I am the Speaker for Arms for the Skree-Skree people. I must be aware of all possibilities, not merely the ones I hope for.”

  “So must I,” he reminded her. “This campaign, this crusade as so many people call it, against the Matrices…it is only my secondary mission. The first and foremost mission that I am called to is to defend the Republic of Exilium.

  “But the Republic is a long way from here and I have left people I trust to keep it safe.” He smiled. “We make ourselves safest by protecting everyone, I think. It’s a better way forward.

  “For all of us.”

  “You humans are fascinating,” SongWind told him. “So lacking in consensus of clan and tunnel, and yet so hopeful. Such optimists.”

  “Not all of us,” Isaac admitted. “But I have to hope, Speaker. I am charged to wield the Republic’s Sword. I have no choice but to hope it is never drawn lightly.”

  14

  “There’s nothing left for us to send, Admiral,” Rear Admiral Sri Spannagel told Isaac. The androgynously plump officer he’d left in command of Exilium’s Home Fleet looked drained. “The two Fortitudes and their battle groups are on their way, but you signed off on the Senate’s mandates, sir.”

  “I know,” Isaac sighed. “And there’s reasons for it. I don’t suppose Dr. Reinhardt has managed to come up with a way for us to cut our crewing requirements by another fifty percent?”

  Spannagel shook their head.

  “There’s a limit to how far we can cut things, sir,” they reminded him. “Just the Marine contingents alone are a personnel problem at this point. We could get the recruits, but…”

  “But the Republic needs most of those hands at home, building the Republic,” the Admiral completed.

  Spannagel was entirely correct, too. Isaac had worked with the Senate shortly after the last election to lay out the new hull strengths and required deployments of the ESF. Nine battlecruisers, each with a four-strike-cruiser battle group and with eight strike cruisers left over for the Home Fleet.

  The strike cruiser number was still theoretical in many ways. That was part of why Watchtower only had two of the lighter modern ships with her and the Ho
me Fleet still had a notable number of ships that could only make a hundred and twenty-eight times the speed of light.

  And per the same mandate that authorized those fifty-three warships, Isaac was required to hold sixteen strike cruisers and two battlecruisers at Exilium, barring a direct threat to the home system. A separate order required that a battle group be held at Refuge as well, which took up a third battlecruiser—the fourth and final Vigilance-class ship in ESF service, Scrutiny.

  There had been two more Vigilance-class ships until recently, but with the activation of the Fortitudes, those ships’ crews had been transferred to the new ships and the ships themselves deeded to the Vistans.

  “I need Scrutiny,” Isaac finally said.

  “It’s your fleet, sir,” Spannagel reminded him. “But you agreed with the Senate that we needed a battlecruiser at Refuge, which means…”

  “I have to send Dante back to Refuge if I want Scrutiny,” Isaac concluded. “I’ll talk to Vice Admiral Anderson and the First-Among-Singers. If the Vistans will break free more ships, that gives us options.”

  And that, as the Skree-Skree Speaker for Arms had warned, would end any pretense that the allied fleet was a human formation. If the Vistans had as many battlecruisers present as he did, well…

  It was a good thing neither First-Among-Singers Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters or her Great High Mother was likely to insist that Isaac surrender command to a Vistan officer. They respected him, even when his fleet was rapidly becoming the second-largest navy of their tentative alliance.

  “Feels weird to realize the Vistans will shortly have more warships than us in total,” Isaac admitted. “They already have more civilian shipping.”

  Most of that shipping was the evacuation transports built to move people from Vista to Refuge. Those ships were just as fast as Isaac’s warships and had been built to serve multiple purposes. He suspected that they’d be forming the core of the civilian economy for the Vistans and their neighbors for a long time.

  Even three years later, there were still millions of people in the Hearthfire System, in orbital habitats that had been moved a long way away from the planet itself. Hundreds of the massive transports, each able to carry a hundred thousand people, had once plied their way back and forth between the two systems.

  Evacuating a system was an immense proposition. It was only recently that any of that shipbuilding capacity could be turned to building anything else—but the Vistans weren’t going to need any civilian ships anytime soon.

  Not with those immense transports sitting there, begging for a use.

  Instead, they were laying keels for their own fleet. All too aware of the Matrix threat, the Vistans were about to start building battlecruisers four at a time.

  They probably weren’t going to stay at four at a time.

  “In many ways, this is even more their war than ours, I think,” Spannagel reminded him. “We fought the Matrices and won. They lost ninety percent of their population.”

  Isaac nodded. And despite that, the amphibious aliens still had a billion people and could afford to put a lot more people in uniform than he could. His fifty-three ships and their Marines and support staff called for the Exilium Space Fleet to have about fifty thousand personnel—over a full percentage point of the humans out there.

  He couldn’t recruit more…which meant he couldn’t have more ships. There just were no hands to crew them with.

  “I’ll talk to Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters,” he repeated. “That dreadnought the Matrices threw at us has me worried. A fleet of those…well, we’d need something to match them.

  “And I don’t think battlecruisers will cut it at that point!”

  His conversation with Sings was both more and less worrying.

  “Of course,” the old Vistan said after he told her his request. “We have the two ships you promised us on their way. Knowing they’re coming, we can easily free up three here. They’ll be the first-generation Vigilances, but we know what lurks in the dark waters, Admiral.”

  “Part of the problem is that we don’t really,” Isaac warned her. “It’s possible the RCM is closer to you than us. That’s why we’re peppering the entire region with Matrix scouts.”

  “That is war, unfortunately,” Sings told him. “I would rather never have fought one, but what happened to Vista cannot be repeated.”

  “I know.” He shook his head, knowing that the speakers on the other end would make the right chirps for Sings to “see” him via her echolocation. “Three more battlecruisers will make you the single largest contingent in the fleet,” he reminded her.

  “You’ll have four to our five,” Sings replied. “And your Fortitude-class ships are easily worth two of the Vigilances, as I am constantly reminded by my politicians.”

  “I must protect Exilium,” Isaac said quietly. “But the decision was never mine. You know that.”

  “And we don’t have enough exotic-matter production of our own to maintain a fleet of Fortitudes, let alone build them,” Sings admitted.

  The fact that the Republic was building better battlecruisers for themselves than they were willing to sell their allies was a sore point, Isaac knew. On the other hand, Exilium also contained the only exotic-matter mass-production facility available to the allies.

  If no one else was willing to capture multiple black holes to build a factory with, then Exilium would remain the main source of the negative-mass material necessary to fuel most of their modern technology.

  Assini and Matrix tech didn’t require it in the same quantities—they’d only ever used it for artificial gravity—though Isaac suspected that XR-13-9 had duplicated the Exile facility without telling anyone.

  The Vistans were starting to use particle accelerators to produce a limited amount of their own exotic matter, but that was a slow process. They were almost to the point where they didn’t need regular resupply from Exilium to keep their fleet online—but far from the point where they could build ships without buying EM from the Republic.

  Of course, that hadn’t been a big-enough advantage for the Senate to let Isaac sell the Vistans—let alone the Tohnbohn or Skree-Skree—the Fortitude designs.

  “Once we’ve brought this Regional Matrix down, we can consider how we go forward,” Isaac told the alien. “We’ve been chasing this one damn AI for years. It’s not a good sign for managing to clear the galaxy of the things.”

  “This one knew we were out for vengeance,” Sings replied. “Its cousins will hopefully not be as forewarned. But trust me, Admiral Lestroud. Even if Exilium must lessen their effort, I and my Great High Mother will see this task complete.”

  Isaac chuckled.

  “If Amelie succeeds in bringing the Sivar on board, we might finally have enough players that I’ll start feeling comfortable,” he noted. “Everything we’re seeing there suggests a multi-system polity with a significant fleet. Updating their tech should give us a huge boost in numbers.”

  “And yet you sound uncertain,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters noted. The Vistan was getting far too good at picking out human tone. From what Isaac understood, Sings could understand English just fine without the translator at this point, too.

  Human ears and brains just couldn’t handle a language being spoken by two mouths and a set of gills. Vistans could understand humans with practice, though.

  “They remind me too much of home,” Isaac admitted. “But I trust Amelie. She’ll know what the right thing to do is.”

  “Everything I have heard of and from your mate leads me to agree,” Sings told him. “Even if your people had never fought for ours, I think Amelie Lestroud could have convinced us to join this war.

  “Dark waters will not drag her down. She will find her way.”

  “I know,” Isaac said, forcing a smile.

  And he did know that. Nothing in the galaxy was going to stop his wife.

  So, why was he so afraid for her?

  15

  “Warped-space emergence in twelve hours. I r
epeat, warped-space emergence in twelve hours.”

  The alert echoed through Watchtower, and Amelie breathed an open sigh of relief. The battlecruiser’s crew assured her that the new warp drives were much gentler than the old ones—and her experience with the cradle used to move the Exile Fleet agreed with them—but she still couldn’t get used to the experience.

  She might have tried to conceal the reaction in different company, but the being on the other end of her tachyon communicator did not care about human expressions—and WK was aware of everything she did on the ship, regardless of her company.

  “Apologies for the interruption,” Amelie told Recon and Security Matrix KCX-DG-12. The AI was the core intelligence of one of the cruiser-scale ships that were supposed to act as backup for the smaller recon nodes.

  Right now, DG-12 was acting as the coordinator for the dozen or so recon nodes trying to scout out the Sivar as discreetly as possible.

  “This unit’s understanding is that the process of warp travel is difficult for organics,” DG-12 replied. “Notification of its imminent end is valuable data.”

  DG-12 was also not nearly as practiced at dealing with people as many of the Matrices Amelie was used to. WK wasn’t human either, but she could almost feel the battlecruiser’s AI cringe at their cousin’s stiff speech.

  “Your scouts have visited the systems connected to Sivar-One by the star-lanes?” she asked. “or at least, what we think are connected to Sivar-One.”

  “The systems now designated Sivar-Two, Sivar-Three, Sivar-Four, and Sivar-Five do appear to be linked to Sivar-One,” the Matrix confirmed. “Sivar-Two was the system that Commandant Ackahl passed through. One of the nodes successfully traced the Sivar fleet to a second star-lane, leading to a system now designated Sivar-Six.

  “From there, she connected to Sivar-Prime, the homeworld.”

  “What was in those systems?” Amelie asked, feeling like she was pulling teeth.