“From the terrace here, you can see the entirety of the eastern gardens,” Rode continued after a moment, leading them out into the bright sunlight.
Amelie didn’t think she was exaggerating, either. The exterior entrance to the Halls of Gathering clearly linked to a road that went down the outside of the mountain and several nearby landing pads. Currently, the two Amelie could see were playing host to a pair of sleek atmospheric interceptors.
Rode led them across the road and to the edge of the terrace she’d mentioned. Amelie stood at the edge, feeling the slight electric buzz of an inertial safety field.
From there, the view was exactly what the Keeper had promised. Stone planters along the edge of the terrace held shrubs and flowers in intricately mixed patterns of color, with breaks clearly intended to allow people to do exactly what they were doing.
Twenty meters down the mountain, the first of the terraces held more gardens. Amelie suspected she could see herb and vegetable gardens tucked in amidst the purely decorative greenery as well.
Twenty meters after that, there was another terrace, and then another twenty meters beneath that one. From this one balcony, Amelie could easily see ten or more terraces, each extending fifty or more meters out from the mountainside and full of color.
There probably wasn’t a spot to look at the terraces where they weren’t stunning, but Amelie imagined that they were designed to look best from there—from the place the Intendant and his guests would see them.
“There is a set of stairs over here,” Rode told her after a few moments of awed gazing. “If you’d like the tour of the garden itself, that is?”
“I would,” Amelie replied. “It’s beautiful. I’d like to see it closer up.”
And she wanted to see just who kept all of that up. It looked like a lot of work, and she hadn’t seen that many Sivar who weren’t politicians or soldiers yet. Even if she was wrong about who was doing it, talking to a Sivar gardener would be valuable in and of itself.
Rode spent the tour pointing out particular plants, skimming over the functional ones mixed in with the rest in favor of the purely decorative vegetation. She tried to divert Amelie’s attention away from the more obvious weapons, but there was only so much of that that could be done as they walked through the gardens themselves.
“Why is the Citadel so fortified?” Amelie finally asked after Rode had stalled out in an attempt to ignore a vine-wrapped missile launcher platform.
“As I said, there are those who oppose the Intendant’s wise rule,” Rode reminded her. “We must make certain that the voice of the Fates is safe.”
“That explains guards and aerial patrols,” Amelie said quietly. “Not missile launchers and cannons and concealed arsenals. Those are built to fight wars, Keeper Rode, not stand off assassins.”
“Some of that is tradition,” the Keeper told her. “Most is a precaution in case the Keys of War forget who they serve. It is my task to protect the Intendant against any possible treachery, as well as to maintain the Citadel and serve as the Prince-Key of Aris in his name.”
“So, your authority ends at Aris’s atmosphere, and the other two Keepers control the rest of the Governance?” Amelie asked.
“All of our authorities end at the will of our Intendant,” Rode replied. “We serve him and through him the Governance.”
Amelie nodded and stepped away from the weapons system. She crossed to the edge of the terrace and looked out at the one beneath them. There was a team of gardeners down there, working on a tree that looked like it had some kind of blight.
Out of eight gardeners, only two were Sivar. The other six were split between two other species, both unfamiliar to Amelie. One was a delicately built group of winged beings with four legs and two arms and what looked like a stinger to go with delicate but large wings.
Wings that had been visibly clipped to make sure they didn’t fly away.
The other was the aliens they’d seen on the way down. Close up, they were a stocky race and even shorter than the Sivar. Like the winged gardeners, they had four legs and two arms but lacked the more bug-like features of the other species. They were covered in black fur that couldn’t have been comfortable in the harsh sunlight. More than that couldn’t be distinguished—but the black fur allowed Amelie to pick out the metallic collars Köhl had pointed out on the other aliens earlier.
Slaves.
“Flames,” Rode cursed softly as she stepped up next to Amelie. “They were supposed to bring everyone in. It’s not polite to have gardeners out while touring the garden.”
“I only see two Sivar down there, Keeper,” the Republic’s Foreign Minister said, her voice very calm and formal. “Who are the others?”
Rode was silent for several seconds.
“Most of the staff of the Citadel are not Sivar,” she finally said. “Those appear to be Croni and Pol. They are indentured servants, bound to the service of the Intendant as part of the terms by which their worlds joined the Governance and came under His Greatness’s protection.”
“Indentured servants,” Amelie echoed. “And how are these servants selected?”
“That varies from world to world and is the responsibility of the Prince-Key of Peace of that world,” Rode answered after staring off the mountainside for several long seconds. “They are weak. The Governance is strong, so we extended our protection over them.
“This is the way of the universe, that the strong protect the weak. So your Republic has stretched its ships over your allies near us. You are strong. They are weak.”
“We didn’t require them to send us slaves to maintain our gardens,” Amelie pointed out, keeping her voice as level as she could. Turning off the emotional layers of her translator would be too obvious. Fortunately, she had years of practice at this.
And something told her that Rode wasn’t as okay with what she was describing as her words implied. There was too much staring off blankly into space for that.
“But you expect compensation from them,” Rode replied. “Your trade deals and sales. You did not give them warships.”
“We did exactly that,” Amelie said with a chuckle. “Warships, weapons technology, industrial modules…all things we would give the Governance, too, if you sign on to the alliance. The Rogue Matrices are a critical threat to the survival of all sentient life. The more powerful our allies against them are, the safer we all are.”
Rode was silent for several seconds.
“This is all we know,” she finally said. “The strong lead. The weak submit or are made to submit. It is not merely gardeners, Minister Lestroud.”
“I did not think it was,” Amelie replied. “They are barred from space, yes? Allowed to leave their worlds only to serve as your slaves and janissaries?”
“That was the deal to keep them safe,” Rode confirmed. “A deal made only more important by the news you bring us. We protect the weak. We will fight these Builders to keep them safe.”
Amelie heard Rode’s unspoken addition: that doing so would call for far larger tributes from the conquered worlds.
Faced with an unavoidable presence, Rode had admitted what the Sivar had been hiding from her. Now Amelie knew exactly what kind of empire she’d made her proposal of alliance to.
And she was going to have to decide just what to do about that.
31
From a distance, the collection of stations and orbitals hung around Kora, Assini’s third and smallest gas giant, looked promising. There was a lot of metal positioned in carefully synchronized orbits. Closer examination showed everything from residential habitats to massive greenhouse platforms that should have been enough to feed ten or twenty million people at least.
But Octavio’s people hadn’t picked up any energy signatures from those stations until they were close enough to see them. That was all the warning he really needed to make the true state of those stations and facilities a horrific non-surprise.
“We’ve got a few systems running on radioactive decay
generators,” McGill reported to the ship commanders and Octavio. “It looks like some of their high-priority, low-power systems were hooked up to RDGs to make sure they kept operating, but…”
“Everything else is dead,” Siril-ki concluded. The emotional component of ki’s translator was still turned off, leaving only a cold flatness to ki’s tone. “Can you identify if it was evacuated or…”
“Not from outside,” McGill admitted. “I can tell you that more of the stations look like they got hit with radiation pulses than I’d have expected, but that could just be ones that were in transit when flares hit.
“This far out, everything should have been safe—and with the tachyon communicators, they should have been able to set up an early warning system to let them move everything behind the gas giant.”
“Assuming they had time,” Octavio murmured. “Or that the system didn’t get hit by one flare and disabled before the next one hit. A lot of things could have gone wrong.”
He studied the dark stations in the flag deck’s main hologram and shivered.
“Or they could have built ships like the one that took the terraformers from the shipyards,” he noted. “And evacuated everybody. Shezarim was designed to carry three million people. They should still have been able to duplicate her technology.”
“Maybe,” Siril-ki replied. “Vast resources were committed to that evacuation program. I do not know if some of those resources could have been duplicated, especially given the losses my people suffered.”
“There’s enough here to have sustained tens of millions,” Renaud pointed out. “Forever, basically. All they would have needed was hydrogen and basic hydrocarbons, both of which are available from Kora or the planet’s moons.”
“There’s enough food and life-support production here to support as many people as these stations could hold,” Octavio agreed. “This should have been fully self-sustaining and safe.”
A cold tremor ran down his spine.
“McGill, would we be able to detect weapon damage now?” he asked.
“We would,” she confirmed. “That would be far more obvious than damage from the flares. We haven’t found any yet, so any use of weapons was limited at worst. They weren’t attacked, Commodore.”
He nodded slowly.
“I don’t see any choice, then,” he told the command channel. “Chen?”
“Sir?”
“How ready are your people?”
“Suited up and boarding shuttles as we speak,” the Marine replied. “My only question is where I’m sending them. There’s a lot of individual stations over there, and I’m not seeing anything from here to help me decide what to investigate.”
“McGill? Have we seen any signs of a tachyon communication center?” Octavio asked. They were still hoping to find another Validation Center. Two sets of data would be worth more than one, even if each set was inevitably degraded from the original.
“It looks like there were still a few smaller tachyon coms, but nothing I’d call a major center,” the tactical officer admitted. “There definitely isn’t a Validation Center, though…”
“Commander?” Renaud asked after her subordinate trailed off.
“Take a look at this.”
The command channel they were talking on was only primarily audio. Octavio was sitting on the flag deck. Renaud and McGill were on the bridge. Siril-ki was in ki’s office and Chen Zhou was apparently in power armor, coordinating her Marines.
It was easy enough for Octavio to transfer the data from the command channel to the big display on the flag deck, zooming in on a particular platform.
A particular half-built platform. Time and debris had done the structure few favors, but Octavio could see the shell of what the station would have been. There was still nonfunctional construction equipment attached to it, even.
“That has roughly the same structure as the Validation Center on Sina,” McGill pointed out. “They were building one. They stopped.”
“All right. That gives me two targets for your Marines, Major,” Octavio said quietly. “The first one is that Validation Center. If there’s any data cores or dropped datapads or anything to tell us why they stopped, I want them.
“Most of the rest of your Marines can basically pick random targets throughout the colony, but I want at least three squads on the hydroponics platforms.” The Commodore looked at those with a dark eye.
“Food was their major problem, and they found a functional and nearly elegant solution,” he continued. “Those ag stations should have sustained this colony. For it to be this dark, either they evacuated or they ran out of food.
“If they’d evacuated, they’d almost certainly have finished the tachyon com station. So, what the hell happened to the ag stations?”
It was easy to forget, sitting in the flag deck and watching icons flit across his screen, just how much energy was involved in moving even a single shuttle-load of Marines around that easily. Creating thrust was one thing—allowing human beings to survive thousands of gravities of it was even more power-intensive.
But that was a challenge humanity had mastered a long time before, and Major Chen’s Marines were unlikely to be more aware of that power need than Octavio was.
It was on his mind right now, though, because he was thinking about Shezarim. They had evidence that there had been at least one more ship of a similar design and scale, using massive fusion engines instead of the Assini’s elegant and efficient reactionless engines.
Shezarim had suffered from a fuel-capacity problem. Fully fuelled, she could accelerate up to her maximum speed and decelerate down once before needing to refuel. Interceptor, the Exilium- and Matrix-designed ship that had caught Shezarim, had carried more delta-v in less space.
The Assini reactionless engine was sufficiently more effective than reaction engines at most purposes that the centaurs didn’t have an equivalent to Exilium’s hyper-efficient impulse thrusters.
But those drives had a hard speed limit, so Shezarim had mounted fusion rockets. The ship that had taken the terraformers from the evacuation project yards had too.
“Well, that’s not a great sign for the evacuation theory.” Commander Courtenay was one of the tiny handful of other people on the flag deck.
Octavio hadn’t brought a full flag staff and hadn’t really felt the lack of one. His command was small enough and tight-knit enough that he could talk to all nine of his Captains directly.
If he’d expected to wage a war, he might have chosen differently. For an archeological expedition, he was more likely to be sending his strike cruisers off alone than coordinating a combat formation.
“What did you find, Commander?” Octavio asked.
Courtenay tapped a few commands at his console and zoomed the main display in on something. Given his own thoughts, Octavio recognized it immediately and swallowed a curse.
“That’s the ship they pulled from the evac yards, right?” he asked.
“Yeah. And it looks like they barely touched it,” his aide confirmed. “I mean, they peeled it open here and here”—cuts in the side of the ship flickered on the hologram—“but that’s it. Might have gutted her for key systems, but she was never turned into a functioning ship…and I’m not seeing any shipyards out here that could have built an equivalent, either.”
“Dammit,” Octavio muttered. “We knew we were looking for a dead world, but I had hoped we’d find somebody.”
Courtenay was silent. The big hologram was mirroring his screen and he was…looking more closely at those cuts?
“Commander?”
“I might have to regret my phrasing, sir,” Courtenay replied. “I said she was gutted, and that might be more accurate than I thought. Those cuts, sir? That’s weapons fire. They’re surgical and controlled and clearly intended to allow access to her systems, but I think that was a zetta-laser.”
“That’s not unreasonable,” Octavio pointed out. “Her hull would have been tough—I’m surprised they cut it open at
all, given that her armor would have been the most valuable part—”
“Sir, there are no spaceship weapons in this colony,” his aide interrupted. “No Guardian Matrices. No defensive platforms. Not even a high guard cutter. They had no warships left.”
“So, someone else cut open the ship that was their only hope of getting out of here?” the Commodore asked. “That’s…problematic.”
“Yes. Can I get Chen to redirect one of her Marine teams?” Courtenay asked.
“It’s up to her,” Octavio replied. “But you can ask. Either way, that ship goes on the list. Something weird is going on here.”
Octavio’s attention was drawn back to the Marines as the first wave of shuttles reached the half-built Validation Center station. Camera feeds from the exteriors of the spacecraft showed chunks of the facility lit up in brilliant lights from the shuttles.
“I’m not seeing much intact here,” Belmont reported. “It doesn’t look like they’d finished more than the shells. There’s no equipment here except the construction gear.”
“Is there a foreperson’s office?” Chen asked. “Someone had to be in charge on site. That would have the data we want.”
“We’re sweeping,” the junior Marine confirmed. “I’m going to drop Marines towards some of the construction gear, see what’s in their cockpits. The station itself is a bust.”
Octavio brought up a display of shoulder-camera views from Belmont’s Marines as they moved out. The station had been around two hundred meters across, which left a lot of spots for things to be missed…but he agreed with the Marine Captain’s assessment.
There might be something useful in the construction setup that had been building the station, but the station itself was too incomplete to have anything of value. They’d been working on the shell when they’d shut down.
“Well, no one is finding any bodies,” Belmont reported after a few minutes. “Everything appears to have been neatly shut down and abandoned, all around the same time.”
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 20
