Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  The woman in the armor was roughly the same age as Amelie and had spent thirty years in first the Confederacy and then the Exilium Marine Corps. She’d been one of the experts who had trained Exilium’s Presidential Security Detail…and Amelie didn’t believe for one second that her presence on Watchtower was a coincidence.

  The armored Marine stepped out the airlock first, and Amelie heard Choi’s chuckle over her earpiece.

  “Stand back, please.”

  She heard the Marine’s untranslated words through her earpiece, but what she heard through the open shuttle hatch sounded like a mouthful of consonants with a couple of vowels as an afterthought.

  “You’re clear, ma’am,” Choi said after a moment. “Their idea of proper separation for an honor guard and mine are not compatible.”

  Exilium’s foreign minister swallowed her laughter, shaping her face into her full diplomatic mask as she followed her bodyguard off the shuttle.

  Two files of infantry faced each other on either side of a dark green carpet, the intent surprisingly similar to a dozen similar traditions in human history. The similarity was the first surprise.

  The second was the infantry themselves. The Sivar were disproportionately skinny for their height which, combined with the high-backed stone thrones their leaders favored, had given Amelie the impression that they were quite tall.

  All twenty of the soldiers, however, were maybe a hundred and fifty-five centimeters tall. They were still just as gaunt proportionate to their height as she’d expected, but they were easily forty centimeters shorter than she’d anticipated.

  Their armor had been polished until it gleamed under lights that were uncomfortably bright for humans. Black plates covered their limbs and torsos, but helmets were formally slung in their right hands, opposite to the rifles in their left hands.

  “Rifles are mag-kinetics,” Choi’s voice murmured in her ear. “No threat to the armor, and your vest should handle them easily at anything but point blank range. I moved them back a couple of meters to clear a safety zone.”

  “And that’s our host at the end,” Amelie subvocalized back. “Let’s play nice now.”

  She walked forward, past the Marine who fell in behind her with a practiced motion.

  The soldiers were all almost exactly the same height. Istila was actually shorter, maybe a hundred and forty-five centimeters. At an average girth for a human, ban probably qualified as rotund for a Siva.

  “Keeper of the Keys of Peace Istila,” Amelie greeted the Siva with a slight bow of her head. “It is a pleasure to meet you in person.”

  “Foreign Minister Amelie Lestroud,” ban replied with a similar bow. It was smooth enough to be a practiced gesture, suggesting another similarity with humanity.

  The Sivar were starting to weird Amelie out.

  “Will our discussions be here or somewhere more private?” Amelie asked cheerfully.

  “We have arranged a space. Your…bodyguard will need to remain here.”

  “That won’t be acceptable,” Amelie said calmly. “You asked that I only bring one bodyguard, but she is coming with me everywhere.”

  “That wasn’t a request, Minister,” Istila replied, the translation in Amelie’s ear icy.

  “That doesn’t change the acceptability of it,” she replied. “If my bodyguard will not be welcome deeper in the station, I am perfectly prepared to discuss matters here.”

  Just standing there in the shuttle bay was educational, after all. They’d brought out twenty soldiers—the number suggested base-ten math, which lined up with them having the same number of digits as humans—much as humans would have.

  The bay was roughly a hundred meters across, and Watchtower’s shuttle wasn’t the only spacecraft in there. It was the biggest one by a significant margin, the thirty-meter-long vehicle dwarfing the local craft in every dimension.

  The artificial gravity in the bay felt weird as well. Unless Amelie was wrong, she was actually being pushed down against the deck rather than pulled down onto it. It was still probably an exotic matter–based system, she thought, but more than that was outside her skillset.

  Plus, everything she saw—and a good chunk she didn’t see—was being recorded by her plain black business suit and its sensor suite.

  She was perfectly fine to stand there and stare down Istila with a small smile on her lips. If they actually had to negotiate there, that would be a pain in her legs, but she’d do it.

  Istila was silent for only maybe ten seconds before ban realized that ban was making banself look like an idiot.

  “Very well,” ban replied. “Follow me.”

  “Of course,” Amelie agreed, gesturing Choi to her side as they headed deeper into the space station.

  Every step deeper into the structure, after all, gave them a bit more data on their potential ally.

  Istila led them to what Amelie would have called a garden if it were anywhere except a space station. Carefully manicured shrubs and trees in a darker green than Amelie was used to were scattered around a room with actual flowing water running from ceiling to floor.

  In the midst of the greenery there was a single stone throne, the style now very recognizable to Amelie, and a collection of seating cushions.

  Choi moved to the edge of the seating area and settled into place as a looming metallic statue. Amelie was assured that the suits were actually quite comfortable to stand in for long periods, but she still felt more than a little guilty.

  On the other hand, she was not sitting on the floor at Istila’s feet like a child listening to the teacher. She located a reasonably dry-looking tree and leaned herself back against it while gesturing the Keeper to the throne with a wry grin.

  That didn’t go over well. The Sivar weren’t as readable as if they’d been human, but ban’s body language as Istila crossed to the throne suggested potential violence.

  “You asked for this meeting, Keeper,” Amelie pointed out. “Are you empowered to negotiate on behalf of the Sivar Governance? Can you speak to alliances and technology exchanges, or is this merely a formality?”

  “I am empowered to decide if you are worth the Intendant’s time,” Istila told her. “He is the ruler of entire worlds, the righteous master of ten thousand suns. He is the voice of the Fates in this mortal time.

  “Who are you to demand that he meet with you?”

  “I demand nothing,” Amelie said calmly. “I ask to meet with someone who is prepared to negotiate with the Republic of Exilium. I ask if the Governance wishes to stand alone against the enemy that is coming.

  “The Republic has no need to stand between you and the Rogue Matrices,” she told ban. “I am a long way from home, Keeper Istila. Together, we could face the Rogues and make your worlds and others safe.

  “I have much that I can offer the Governance, but I see no reason to discuss details of any kind until I am speaking with someone with the power to bind the Governance.”

  “The Governance is bound only by fate,” Istila replied. “If you seek to enslave and trap the Governance, you will fail. Only the Intendant can guide our future.”

  Amelie waited silently. She had to assume the Siva wanted something from this meeting, but she would be damned if she’d jump through the alien’s hoops.

  “And just what can you offer?” Istila finally asked. “Your ships are slow and obsolescent compared to the grandeur of the Commandants’ fleets. You bring us warnings of a threat we already know of. I have seen no sign of worth from your people, Minister Amelie Lestroud. No reason to bring you before the Intendant.”

  Someone, it seemed, had seen the report on how long it had taken Watchtower to make it to Sivar-Prime—but not the reports on Watchtower maneuvering around Sivar-Prime or the warning shots they’d fired in Sivar-One.

  “We would not be sitting in this room, with a major figure of the Intendant’s government in orbit to meet me, if you believed that,” Amelie countered. “I suspect your Commandants are all too aware of the true balance of pow
er between our ships. You should ask them about that.”

  The Sivar military might not be able to identify particle cannons or gamma-ray lasers, but they would be able to tell that the matter-conversion power cores on Watchtower and her escorts were producing a lot more power than any power plant they had.

  The Intendant had probably seen those exact reports. They were probably why the last Keeper of the Keys of Peace was apparently dead. That suggested another layer to the track that Amelie was on, and she leaned into it, physically and verbally.

  “I also note that it seems your predecessor was removed for not properly updating your Intendant on interactions with us,” she said. “I do not have the impression that your Intendant is likely to accept that I wasn’t worth his time.

  “So, we are here for some kind of pretense, a formality…or is this an attempt to get some kind of bribe?”

  She doubted it was the latter, but in her experience, the accusation helped open up a path to the actual heart of the matter.

  “A Keeper sits before the highest throne and keeps the Intendant’s trust,” Istila said slowly. “For us to accept a bribe is punishable by death.”

  So far as Amelie could tell, that was also true of dragging their feet on telling the Intendant something. The core of government for the Sivar had to be one hell of a mess.

  “Then what do you want, Keeper Istila?” Amelie asked. “If you could negotiate the alliance I want, this meeting might not be a waste of time, but you can’t.”

  She shoved off from her tree.

  “I came as requested,” she told ban. “But I don’t know why. Do you have a proposal or a question, Keeper? One I have not already answered? Or should I return to my ship?”

  Amelie would not be entirely surprised, at this point, if her returning to her ship in anger would result in another new Keeper of the Keys of Peace calling her.

  “We must see value in this relationship, Minister Amelie Lestroud,” Istila told her. The Siva seemed unbothered by her threat to leave. Perhaps ban’s position was more secure than ban’s predecessor’s.

  “Currently, we see nothing to separate you from the other petitioners who come before the prince of ten thousand suns. You have starships that are strange to us, but strange does not mean useful. You perhaps know more about the Builders than we do, but the Builders are a distant threat, not an immediate one.

  “If you would petition the Intendant in person, a sample must be given of what value you bring.”

  Translation: the Siva was totally asking for a bribe, but it was one to give ban’s leader to prove ban’s value, not one to keep for ban’s self.

  Amelie smiled.

  “That, Keeper Istila, is the first useful thing you or your predecessor had said to me,” she told the Siva. “I have patience for formalities when needed, but this is a matter between states and between species. I do not know your structures or your ceremonies and I do not care.”

  She would have cared about their ceremonies and government structure if she didn’t have the very strong impression that caring wouldn’t help her. It very much seemed like the Sivar would accept forcefulness and brutal honesty over concern for their traditions and ceremony.

  That was fine. She’d done traditions and ceremony and culture with the Skree-Skree and the Tohnbohn. That had been educational, useful, even occasionally fun.

  If the Sivar wanted a battering ram, she could do that.

  Pulling out her tablet, Amelie opened a file that had been prepared in case of a similar request.

  “Our scans suggest that your shuttlecraft are using a miniaturized form of the large fusion engines used on your large spacecraft,” she told Istila. An image appeared above the thumb-sized computer, a hologram of the engine in question.

  “It’s effective, but it’s too large for craft that are too small and too inefficient for craft that are too big,” she continued. “It forces you into either small craft of a very specific set of sizes or larger spacecraft entirely.”

  A new hologram replaced the first one, this one a technical diagram.

  “This is a design for a heterodyned ion thruster,” she told ban. “It has a hard limit on how much thrust it can produce, which can limit acceleration, but it is approximately four thousand times as efficient as your current thrusters and is a fifth of the size.

  “It would provide your shuttles with vastly more range at a cost of a portion of their acceleration. It would also allow you to build a greater variety of shuttles.”

  It was also a distinctly civilian technology, one that wouldn’t provide enough power to accelerate warships or missiles. It was a distant cousin to the impulse microthrusters that propelled Exilium’s warships that was actually superior in some ways.

  Just not in the ways that made impulse thrusters the engine of choice for warships and missiles.

  “I will have my people transmit it to yours,” she told Istila. “Translating our designs into something your systems can use might be difficult, but we can assist if needed.”

  “That is a generous offer,” the Keeper said, ban’s eyes studying the diagram in a way that suggest that ban definitely had enough engineering background to make sense of it. “The other path, I must note, raises the bird that you offered a military alliance.”

  “And if we agree to a military alliance, the Republic will be willing to sell you weapons technology,” Amelie cheerfully told ban. “Until then, however, I am not permitted to trade weapons tech.”

  That was an outright lie. There was no way she was handing the Sivar better guns until she knew far more about them, so part of it was true.

  Her mandate might allow her to trade weapons to the Sivar—but she definitely wasn’t going to.

  21

  The armored exterior of the radiation protection vault resisted Captain Belmont and his Marines for longer than Octavio would have expected. Whatever the Assini had shielded the station’s last-ditch fallback position with, it stood up to cutting tools for over an hour.

  On the other side, they found the answer to one of the questions that had been bugging Octavio since the Marines had stepped aboard the station: where were the bodies?

  They were there.

  “I’m seeing at least thirty, forty, corpses in this hallway,” the Marine officer reported as he made his way into the space. “Air readings are weird too. The rest of the station was at the same oxygen levels as the Constructed Worlds. This place…it’s shifting now that we’ve opened it up, but it looks like it was down around one or two percent.”

  “They’d have asphyxiated,” Octavio said, then realized he sounded like an idiot. “Wait. Did they asphyxiate themselves?”

  “That would be my guess, but I’m figuring there’s a command center in here with some answers,” Belmont replied. “I’ve got two medics scanning the corpses to see what their status is, but…”

  The Marine was probably making the same guess as Octavio.

  “It would make things go faster if the medics can take samples,” the Marine said after a moment. “May I ask Siril-ki for permission?”

  “Ask,” Octavio confirmed. “Don’t push. These are her people.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  The Marines moved farther into the vault, finding much the same as they went. No one there had died violently. They’d lain down, out of the way along the walls, and gone to sleep.

  Then they’d never woken up. Someone had set the oxygen levels inside the vault to slowly slide down, leading the already-irradiated station crew to fall asleep and then calmly suffocate.

  As mass murder went, it was disturbingly efficient. Watching the cameras, Octavio was grimly certain he knew exactly what had happened. There were too many Assini in the vault for it to have been an accident.

  “Found the command center,” Belmont noted. The Marine’s voice was even more clipped than usual. “Take a look, Commodore, but it isn’t pretty.”

  Calling the space a command center was probably doing it favors it didn
’t deserve. It was a tiny room with half a dozen control panels, providing the senior station crew with access to the sensors and control of the survival vault’s systems.

  The command center also had the only sign of violence they’d seen in the vault. Several Assini had clearly tried to break through the door when they’d realized what had happened, but without Belmont’s power armor, they’d failed.

  Inside was worse. There had been five Assini in the room…and one pistol. Everyone else inside the vault had suffocated. These five had committed suicide.

  The one holding the pistol had taken a moment to write a neatly lettered note that they’d pinned to the console. The carbon dioxide–filled air in the space had preserved it across the centuries and it was still perfectly legible.

  It took the computer a moment to process the text, and Octavio closed his eyes against the sick feeling that ran through him.

  Flare was too powerful. Sina is dead. We are dead. All the vault bought us was a painful death instead of an instant one. All I can give my people is peace.

  If anyone reads this, witness the futility of our arrogance. We who would have shaped a galaxy but could not control our own sun.

  Witness and learn.

  Please.

  “The biopsies confirmed it,” Siril-ki said quietly on the channel a few minutes later. “The shielding wasn’t enough to prevent every one of my people aboard the station from receiving a lethal dose of radiation.

  “The commander’s action was murder, and yet…I can’t see any other course they could have taken.”

  “It was also two hundred and seventy-eight years ago,” Octavio pointed out softly. “It… We can’t judge that. We have a pretty good idea of what they saw. I can’t judge them.”

  By the time the station commander had activated the program to slowly suffocate their crew, they’d have known that the entire planet had been blanketed by a lethal dose of radiation. There was no one to “gently” murder those billions.

  The lucky would have died quickly. The truly unlucky might have been resistant enough to survive the radiation poisoning…but if anyone off of Sina had survived, they wouldn’t have known to come for them.