“ID that time for me, Captain,” Octavio ordered. “To within a few months, if we can.”
Even with the gear the Marines were hauling around, that might be hard. Most likely, the construction crews had neatly shut down their gear sometime between two hundred and eighty and two hundred and seventy years ago—when Sina had been destroyed and when someone had raided the evacuation ship yards for supplies.
He wasn’t sure why he was assuming that had been the end of the Assini in their home system, but it felt right. In an extraordinarily unpleasant way, at least.
“This is Chen,” the Major’s voice cut into Octavio’s channel. “We’re approaching the ag platforms, and I see at least one thing that might explain part of the problem.”
“Which is?” Octavio asked.
The feed from Chen’s shuttle appeared in the big holotank. Courtenay had the mess of feeds reorganized to be reasonably clear before Octavio could even reach for his controls. Competent subordinates were a dream.
The agricultural stations had been designed to use natural light and heat from Kora and Assini itself to reduce their power draw. That gave them a very distinct appearance: a flattened dome floating in space, with all of the hardware “underneath” the main dome.
Chen’s shuttle was coming in from “under” one of the domes, and the video feed was of the mechanical infrastructure of the dome.
The incomplete mechanical infrastructure of the dome.
“Her engines weren’t online,” Chen said quietly. “I’m not a space engineer, but I’m guessing that the dome was supposed to be pointed at the sun, and they figured that they could install the engines later.”
“I am a spaceship engineer,” Octavio replied, his voice equally soft. “And I agree. They were focusing on building the food supply first and…making it safe later.”
He stared at the half-built thruster array. It wasn’t even a hugely powerful engine—it couldn’t be, not with how precious and fragile the station’s contents would have been—but it would have sufficed to get the station behind Kora and protect it from the star.
“Do we have close range scans of the top half yet?” he asked.
“Not yet. First of my birds will be swinging over in about ninety seconds. What are you expecting, sir?”
“A lot of radiation-fried crops that have been rotting for three centuries,” Octavio admitted. “Another goddamn solar flare that hit them at the worst possible time. The answers should be on those stations, Major.”
“We’ll go find them, Commodore. EMC isn’t afraid of ghosts.”
“It’s not ghosts I’m afraid of,” Octavio murmured. “Find what you can, Major. We’ll be watching from here.”
The foreperson’s office on the Validation Center was…illuminating. Octavio watched as three of his Marines cut open the access to the spaceborne equivalent of a mobile office trailer. It had an airlock and engines, but all of that was long-dead.
Saws and cutting lasers were the answer instead—at least to start.
“Sir, we’ve got atmosphere on the other side,” one of the Marines reported as they inserted the first probes into the interior. “It’s stale as fuck, but it’s there. We might lose some artifacts if we just tear this open.”
“We’ll bring one of the shuttles in and attach with the boarding airlock,” Belmont replied. “That should at least get equal pressure.”
That didn’t take long, though Octavio wouldn’t have wanted to be the pilot maneuvering the shuttle into the framework of the unbuilt station. Once the boarding airlock attached, though, the mobile office was open in under a second.
Marines stepped through with lights and mag-boots, sweeping the room for answers—and all of their lights stopped on the same thing.
The office had been much less neatly shut down than the construction equipment itself. Several datapads had been tossed against walls, and none of the inevitable office equipment had been moved.
The lights were all focused on the message graffitied across the entire wall of the unit. It was in the Assini script, but the translator was already subtitling it for Octavio and his Marines.
Why try? The star will kill us all!
“Grab those datapads,” Belmont ordered. “Get recordings of the entire place, paperwork, posters, the graffiti…everything.”
“Can we date that graffiti?” Octavio asked.
“Probably,” Belmont admitted. “Marines? Get a sample of that graffiti. See if we can date the pen or the paint or whatever it is.”
One of the cameras slid across to the wall, and Octavio watched as a sample kit was pulled from inside the armor suit. A scraper took a few flakes of paint off and dropped it into the analyzer.
“Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, plus/minus three years,” the Marine reported. “Can’t narrow it down more than that; the paint composition isn’t right for more accuracy.”
“Let’s see what we get from other samples,” Octavio told Belmont. “Let’s get those datapads heading back to Dauntless for Siril-ki’s people. Let’s hope there’s more answers there.”
“I’ll send that shuttle back immediately and we’ll keep sweeping here,” the Marine replied. “I don’t know if we’ll find anything, but this had to have been one of their key projects.”
“Understood. Keep us updated,” Octavio replied. “Chen?”
“I’ve got shuttles cutting into the domes as we speak,” the Marine CO replied. “You were right. I didn’t think I needed to tell you that.”
He closed his eyes.
“Courtenay, drop the visuals from Belmont’s company and bring up Chen’s people,” he ordered. “How bad is this mess?”
He opened his eyes again and wished he hadn’t. There weren’t even rotting crops in the domes. The one that Chen was entering was empty—everything organic in the space had been removed. Presumably to allow some attempt at recycling.
A couple of the others showed pathetic attempts at a later wave of crops, ones that had failed to be harvested in time to make a difference.
“I know, Commodore,” Chen said before he could speak. “We need dates. We’ll get them, but…”
“Take samples of the dome material as well,” he ordered. “That should let us date the flares more accurately, too.”
“Understood.” She was silent for several seconds. “Sir, I’ve got people elsewhere in the colony stations, too. Should I be warning them?”
“Yes. We don’t know how these people died in the end, but it couldn’t have been pretty,” Octavio admitted. “Pacifists or not, starvation may have changed all the rules in the end.”
“Probably,” Chen admitted. “What do we do?”
“Timelines, Major,” he told her. “Because the one we got from the Validation Center leaves me asking some ugly questions. According to that graffiti, they abandoned the station at least two years before someone raided the Shezarim yard.
“So, either they pulled a miracle out of their asses—without repurposing the one half-built ship they already had—or it wasn’t these people who took those terraforming spikes.
“In which case, who did?”
32
Octavio turned out to be wrong on one key point: no matter where the Marines went in the mix of colony platforms, they didn’t find any dead Assini. There were no signs that the stations had been shut down neatly or that any kind of coordinated burial had taken place, but there were no bodies.
“Someone removed the dead,” Chen told a gathered meeting later. “Given some of the trails and debris of that process, I can tell you that it fits into the timeline. I’m not quite sure what timeline I’m looking at, but I can tell you that someone cleaned up the dead and when.”
Octavio looked over at Siril-ki. The Director was the only Assini in the room, and ki was…drooping. There was no better word for the way the centaur-like alien had rested ki’s entire torso on the table in front of ki, ki’s face buried in ki’s hands and ki’s fur disheveled and worn.
“Who would have done that?” Octavio asked ki.
“They would have tried to honor the dead at first,” ki whispered. “But in the face of mass starvation, they wouldn’t have been able to keep up. If someone came later…respect for the dead is a key pillar of our faith, our culture.
“Like with the memorials on Sia, they would at least have tried.”
“All of which, like Chen said, fits our timeline,” Octavio admitted. “Chen? Can you and D lay it out for everyone?”
“It is not a pleasant sequence of events,” D noted, the AI’s tones gentle. “We now have access to various databases from both Kora and Sina. None are complete and we haven’t penetrated the secure files from the Sina Validation Center station, but we know roughly what the Assini were doing until the end.”
The room stilled, the half-dozen humans and one Assini listening to the AI carefully. Octavio very carefully did not note that Dauntless’s XO, Commander Meena Das, had positioned herself next to Major Chen and was holding her lover’s hand tightly under the table.
He didn’t often envy his subordinates their relationships, but he could see the appeal at this particular moment.
“Three hundred and one years ago, plus/minus six months, the first solar flare rendered Sia uninhabitable and killed the entire population of the original Assini homeworld.
“Over the following twenty-one years, the survivors on Sina concentrated as much of their resources at Kora as possible. They never completed their project, as they were expecting another century or so before a flare large enough to do to Sina what was done to Sia.
“There were four flares of equivalent magnitude to the original in that time period, and all inflicted critical infrastructure damage across the star system, undermining the Kora colony project significantly. They were, nonetheless, survivable.
“Two hundred and eighty years ago, plus/minus six months, a new flare of an unexpected order of magnitude hit. Sina was rendered functionally uninhabitable and the majority of the population was killed.”
Octavio turned his attention to Siril-ki. Ki was basically collapsed on the table. This cold timeline was harsh enough for the humans—and he appreciated D not giving the numbers of dead that came along with each of his timestamps—but this had been ki’s home.
“The Kora colony installations became the last surviving bastion of the Assini people. They planned an evacuation project, hence retrieving Shezarim’s sister ship, but their focus was on their immediate survival.
“They started building the agriculture platforms immediately. Using natural sunlight helped get the crops in a harvestable state sooner, and they calculated that even a flare of the scale that hit Sina would be insufficient to destroy the crops.
“The flare that hit two hundred and seventy-six years ago was sufficiently stronger to do so. It destroyed their entire growing crop and burned out much of the infrastructure needed to support future crops.
“With the loss of infrastructure they’d already suffered, the agriculture platforms had taken longer to complete than planned and were all but irreplaceable. Attempts were made to ration food supplies and plant new crops, but the intact ag facilities were far too few to feed the entire population.
“Worse, some of the records suggest a radiation-mutated blight managed to take hold in a significant percentage of their remaining crops. Food riots ensued. Order broke down. Computerized record-keeping on life support and suchlike continued for approximately six months after the final official records, but the last automated systems shut down two hundred and seventy-four years ago.
“At that point in time, there would have been no surviving Assini colonists.”
The complete silence hung in the room like a fog for a while after that before Octavio cleared his throat.
“But if that was the end of the story, we’d have found the wreckage of riots and starvation in the stations,” he noted. “And we didn’t. So, there’s one more piece to the timeline, yes?”
“Correct, Commodore Catalan,” D replied. “We have, obviously, no confirmation of this sequence of events from Assini records, which makes our time frames more uncertain.
“Approximately four years after the cessation of automatic record-keeping aboard the stations we have examined, several of them saw their life-support systems rebooted. Someone—and someone familiar with Assini technology—boarded the stations and turned the life support back on to make their task easier.
“The stations that saw their life-support systems rebooted are lacking in many critical elements and systems required for their proper function,” D continued. “Power cores have been removed. Computer systems stripped. In general, the larger stations appear to have been very thoroughly scavenged.
“We assess a high probability that these scavengers accessed the computer systems, much as we have, and learned of the terraforming spikes at the evacuation project yards. They then proceeded from Kora to the yards, took the spikes, and left the Assini System.”
That hung in the air.
“Where did they come from?” Siril-ki demanded, raising ki’s beak to stare around the room. “Who robbed my people’s graves?”
“I don’t know,” D admitted.
“We do know they buried the dead,” Chen pointed out. “They came here from somewhere else and tore apart stations for parts and supplies they could easily transport…but they took the time to bury the dead.”
“Short of asking for our Matrix allies to try and set up an absolutely immense telescope at the two-hundred-and-seventy-light-year mark to try and see what happened, we’re limited to speculation and analysis,” Octavio said. “But what makes the most sense with everything we’re seeing is that our scavengers were Assini.
“But they weren’t from here.”
“That’s impossible. There was nowhere else,” Siril-ki objected. “The whole point of Shezarim’s mission was that there was no one—nowhere—else. The Sentinels had made systems safe for us to colonize, but the first wave of colonists and colony ships had already been launched and lost.”
“Is it possible that one of those ships survived?” Das asked. “That they didn’t collide with the Construction Matrices?”
“Every one of them was headed to a Constructed World and had a tachyon communicator,” Siril-ki replied. “We knew the fate of every ship.”
“You had the technology to build the colony ships in massive numbers,” Renaud said slowly. “Could someone have built an extra ship? One that didn’t officially exist and went somewhere not on the records?”
“It would be possible, yes. But why would someone leave in secret? Why would they have gone somewhere without a Constructed World…unless…”
Everyone in the room followed Siril-ki’s thought and fell silent with ki.
“Unless they were aware that the Construction Matrices would turn on their creators,” D finished for ki. “Unless the people on that ship were the reason the Matrices went mad.”
“We already believed that someone had directly modified the Construction Matrices,” Octavio said. “If they were setting up the deaths of millions, then removing themselves from the main Assini population to somewhere safe would make sense.
“They couldn’t send a reaction-drive ship back and forth, but automated tachyon-punch supply ships wouldn’t draw attention the same way as a giant rocket,” he continued. “And then when everything went to shit here, they sent a ship back. Whether it was to try to help or try to conquer…who knows.
“But they came here. And they left here. And these mass-murdering fucking monsters know how to recode a Matrix core, people,” Octavio ground out. “They have our answers. They might, much as I want to grind them into dust and ash, be able to help us stop the Construction Matrices.
“So, I need to know where they are. We know when they were here. We know they were riding an interstellar ship, probably a first-generation Assini reaction-drive colony ship with additional weapons.
“Find me their vector, people. Because I
very much want to tie these people to a wall and leave them to Siril-ki.”
Pacifist or not, he suspected that ki’d break several of ki’s own laws of war in that circumstance…and he wouldn’t blame ki for a moment.
33
Despite a lack of further meetings with the Keepers, Amelie’s second meeting with the Intendant took almost as long to arrange as the first. At least this time, she only had to walk through a ritualized shower rather than the full descent down to the lava tubes that powered the First and Final Citadel.
She was led into the same conference room–style audience chamber, once again leaving her guards at the door as she advanced to the carpet put there for people to kneel…and remained standing.
This time, the Intendant didn’t even get the respectful nod. Amelie was starting to think she’d made a mistake by coming here in the first place. She was alone in front of the raised table this time, with all three of the Intendant’s Keepers joining him on the table.
“You stand before the Intendant,” the ruler of the Sivar intoned as he looked down at her.
He was lucky, she reflected, that the dais was as raised as it was. She was enough taller than the Intendant to leave him with bare centimeters of height advantage.
“I do,” she replied shortly. “I have spoken with your Keepers, Intendant. We have spoken of worlds and history and technology. We have not spoken of alliances or terms, and I’ll admit I expected to have further discussions with them before you and I met again.”
“It is not the place of the Keepers of the Governance to discuss terms,” the Intendant told her. “Their role was to learn for me, and they have done it. I now know more about the Builders than I ever did before—and about your Republic as well.”
He gestured widely.
“I sit at the heart of the First and Final Citadel, which sits at the heart of the Sivar Governance,” he said calmly. “I am more aware of the might of my Commandants than any other being in this world. With all that we have learned from you, I once again have faith in the strength of my fleets.
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 21
