“If the Builders come to the Governance, they will learn the strength of our resolve and the might of our arms. I have full confidence that they would be driven from our worlds.”
Amelie said nothing. She wasn’t certain if the Intendant believed that, but she knew even the limited information she had given the Sivar should have suggested something very different. He was posturing, laying out a base position for negotiation.
She knew the style, even if it was an annoying one.
“It is clear from your discussions with my Keepers, however, that there are vulnerable worlds between my borders and these Matrices,” he told her. “Your allies are in need of our help as much as yours, and we are not unwilling to provide it. It is clear your people, too, understand that it is better to fight an enemy in someone else’s territory.”
That was not how the Republic saw their current efforts, but if it got the Sivar on board, she’d let him think whatever he wanted. She’d even let him think that the Republic would turn a blind eye to his slaves, for a while at least.
“But.” He held up a hand in a very human-like gesture. “For my Commandants to be ordered into the field beyond our borders, to fight and die for the worlds of other races, we must have a reason. An…incentive.
“And it is clear to me that your allies have nothing to offer the Governance. So tell me, Minister Amelie Lestroud, what would your Republic offer for our assistance in defending your dependencies?”
Amelie wished that was an inaccurate descriptor of their nearby allies. The Intendant underestimated them, in her opinion, but she could see the sense of it from his point of view.
“If the Commandants of the Sivar Governance are mercenaries, then yes, we can certainly provide payment,” she replied calmly. “We have already demonstrated, I think, that we possess technologies different from your own and in some cases superior.”
At some point, it would be necessary to make the point that Watchtower could take on multiple Sivar battleships despite being outmassed by even one of them. This wasn’t that point. Not yet.
“My Commandants are not mercenaries,” the Intendant countered. “They follow my commands. But I, Minister Lestroud, must serve the Fates’ purposes. It does not aid either the Governance or myself to send my fleets to fight a war without a reason.”
“Very well, then,” she conceded. She wasn’t surprised that it had come down to straight horse-trading, though the complete and utter silence of the Keepers was a warning sign.
“We are prepared to provide you with industrial manufacturing systems that would allow you to rapidly build space stations larger and more stable than you are currently capable of, as well as the warp-drive technology to unchain your people from the star-lanes,” she told him.
The Matrix-derived manufacturing nodes her freighters were carrying were entirely capable of self-replicating with a little organic guidance—and while she was pitching them as station-builders, they were perfectly capable of building starship hulls.
From the way the Intendant slammed his hands down on the table, he wasn’t making that connection.
“I do not care about your obsolescent space drive or factories to make toys for children,” he snapped. “You claim you have weapons, defenses, war-fighting technologies worth the name. For these and these alone would I consider sending my Commandants to war, Minister Lestroud!”
Amelie faced him levelly.
“We reserve those for true allies, Intendant, not mercenaries,” she told him. “We reserve that assistance and trade for people we can trust.”
“I am the Intendant of the Sivar, the voice of the Fates,” he replied. “I do not lie.”
“That does not mean you can be trusted,” she countered. “How many species does your Governance enslave, Intendant? How many races have you conquered? The Republic does not—will not—trust a slaver.
“That you have concealed this from us all along speaks only to the weaknesses and deceptions of your Governance. I not only question your trustworthiness, Intendant; I question whether your Governance would be worth the investment required to make you a worthy ally.”
She smiled thinly.
“Or if your entire state is better ignored and left to collapse under its own arrogance.”
For the first time while she’d been in the room, the Intendant rose to his feet.
“Seven species have knelt to the voice of the Fates,” he told her. “They recognized the inevitability of the Governance, one way or another, and bound themselves to our fates for all eternity. They are irrelevant to this discussion—as are your so-called allies.
“They are the weak, and the strong rule them. The Governance is strong. I have seen no evidence of the Republic’s strength beyond your own arrogance. I suggest, Minister Lestroud, that you consider your words carefully—and search your resources for an offer worthy of the Governance’s aid!”
He pointed to the door.
“This audience is over. Begone.”
Amelie was suddenly very aware of the soldiers lining the walls, guards she’d almost automatically dismissed as decoration when she’d arrived. Several of them were moving toward her now, clearly intending to physically carry her from the room if she refused to obey the Intendant’s orders.
With a calm smile at the Sivar’s ruler, she turned on her heel and walked back to her Marines. There was no need for indignity or violence here, after all. Not yet.
Amelie’s Marines fell in around her as she exited the audience chamber. She was starting to look for her guide when the Sivar troops followed her out, eight of them silently falling into a diamond formation around her and her people.
“Yes?” she demanded after they stood there silently for several seconds.
“We are to see you back to your quarters,” the lead trooper told her. “This way.”
They gestured. Amelie considered causing trouble…but right now, her quarters was where she needed to be going.
“Very well.”
She gestured for Choi to step in closer as they moved out.
“Eyes open, Sergeant,” she ordered softly. “I think I may have just burned most of our warm welcome.”
“That was my impression, Minister,” the Marine confirmed. “Here.”
Amelie hadn’t been carrying the laser pistol Köhl had given her. Since she knew she was going to be disarmed, what was the point?
Apparently, Choi didn’t necessarily agree. The gun she was handing over was a more standard chemical-powered slugthrower, but it slipped into the same compartment in the body armor as the laser had.
“Just in case,” the Marine told her.
The guards didn’t seem to have noticed the exchange, though Amelie was sure they must have. They just didn’t seem to care. Most likely, they figured the small hand weapon was no threat to their body armor.
They might even be right for the slugthrower. They’d have been wrong for the laser pistol, and Amelie resolved not to leave it behind next time.
The route the soldiers led them seemed much shorter than the route their previous civilian guide had followed, and they arrived back at the house and its garden sooner than she expected.
“Everyone inside,” the lead guard barked, gesturing at the Marines on the exterior of the stone building. “You are no longer permitted outside the building; we will be providing exterior security now.”
“Sergeant?” one of the Marines asked Choi.
“That was not a request,” the soldier replied, their gun unerringly focused on the human Marine.
That armored figure proceeded to utterly ignore the Sivar soldier as he waited respectfully for Choi to respond.
“We play nice, Private,” the Marine finally ordered. “Move everyone inside.”
There was a moment more of stillness as the two groups of soldiers glared at each other, then the Marines followed Choi’s command, falling back into the house.
The diamond formation split off as they reached the door, leaving Amelie to be ushered
into the building. The lead guard stood by the door as she passed through it and leveled a helmeted gaze on her as she passed through.
“You and all of your people are now restricted to the building,” the soldier told her grimly. “His Greatness’s orders. Anyone leaving without permission will be fired on.”
Any pretense at diplomacy appeared to now be dead.
Coming here had definitely been a mistake.
34
The guest house would have been large for a personal residence, but it wasn’t large enough for finding any of her people to be difficult. Amelie had Köhl and Faulkner in a room within minutes of being all but kicked into the building.
“There’s no point in playing nice now,” she told them. “Köhl, privacy generator?”
The Marine produced the device, which resembled an upside-down spider. Each antenna emitted jamming radiation on a different frequency, overloading any electronic bugs in the space; while the central piece was a white-noise generator.
“Can we sweep the building for bugs now?” Köhl asked. “Just leaving them here has been making my neck itch.”
“Do it,” Amelie ordered. “If the Intendant wants to house-arrest us, I don’t see a reason to keep being polite. Do we still have a link to Watchtower?”
“We do,” Faulkner confirmed. “I don’t think the Sivar realize that Watchtower has a live link to the rest of our fleet. They may be assuming that our coms are limited by drones, like theirs.”
“That’s an advantage I won’t turn down,” she admitted. “I’ll need to talk to Captain Holmwood as soon as we’re done here.”
“Can she extract us?” Köhl asked.
“You’re the expert,” Amelie replied. “My understanding from her is that while she can’t necessarily fight their entire fleet, she can stand off most of their arsenal long enough to get out. The Citadel itself is the obstacle.”
The Marine officer winced.
“Fair,” she conceded, then shook her head. “We’ve got less than ten percent of my people down here, but the shuttles left aboard Watchtower and her escorts aren’t designed for heavy ground assault. They’re armed, but this mountain…”
She shook her head.
“The Marines need orbital fire support from Watchtower to neutralize the defenses, and that would risk us down here. Plus, Watchtower doesn’t carry bombardment munitions. Her engineers could fabricate them in twenty-four hours or so, but…”
“But unless they can build something far more precise than our regular arsenal, they can’t clear enough of a path to extract us,” Amelie concluded. “I’ll double-check that with Holmwood, but it looks like our only real option is to play along with the Sivar for now and hope that the Intendant doesn’t want to start a war.”
The Republic didn’t need another war, but Amelie wasn’t sure she’d be able to talk her husband or President Nyong’o out of coming for her.
“It was a damn mistake to come here,” she admitted aloud for the first time. “These people were never going to be useful allies.”
“Not in their current state, anyway,” Faulkner conceded. “On the other hand, they were the first multistellar state we’d seen since leaving home. It would have been irresponsible for us not to come here.”
“Your old colors are showing, Roger,” Amelie told her aide with a snort. The Confederacy had never hesitated to arrange regime changes on its member worlds when they’d grown troublesome.
“Maybe,” he conceded. “But I’m not the person in the room who organized the revolution against the last fascist state we all knew.”
“Find me twenty rebel factions to get lined up and moving in the same direction, and I could cause trouble,” she replied. “But otherwise, I’m just one woman.”
The conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door. One of the Marines stuck her head in a moment later.
“Sirs? We’ve got a party at the door and we’re not quite sure what to do with them.”
“What kind of party?” Köhl demanded before Amelie could ask.
“Well, I think they’re the cleaners…but they’re not Sivar.”
The six beings on the front step, under the guidance of a Sivar staffer and watched by the quartet of Sivar soldiers guarding the door, appeared to be the race that Rode had called Croni. They were delicately built tall aliens with four legs and visibly clipped large wings.
“You do not have permission to bar us from our own ground,” the staffer snapped when Amelie appeared.
“Get over it,” she suggested. “Either I am an ambassador and this is my ground, or I am a prisoner and you aren’t willing to bleed for that.”
They’d have to disarm her Marines to manage that, and they’d find out just how effective the low-profile power armor and light pulse rifles the Marines had brought down with them were in that case.
“What is this?” she demanded, gesturing at the Croni.
“Cleaning workers,” the staffer replied. “Workers of the right tier for that work.”
Someone, it seemed, was bitter about having to scrub toilets for the last couple of weeks.
“They may enter,” Amelie said with a glance at the aliens. They were almost butterfly-esque in coloration. She wished she could read their body language. “Your guards may not. You will be searched if you wish to enter.”
The Siva drew banself up to ban’s full hundred and fifty-two centimeters of height.
“You would not dare!”
“This morning, I would have said your Intendant would not dare impose house arrest on us,” Amelie said sweetly. “You can send the Croni in alone or you can be searched. Your choice.”
“There will be consequences for this,” the Siva muttered as ban submitted to the search. A Marine swept ban away as the doors closed, leaving Amelie and two Marines alone with the Croni.
“Do you understand the Sivar language?” Amelie asked them, using the translator to speak in that tongue. “I can program a new language into this device, but I would need data.”
The Croni looked at each other, clearly unsure what to do.
“We…clean,” one finally said in halting Sivar. “We understand orders. Not speak.”
She waited for a moment for any of them to speak again, but then bowed her head.
“I understand,” she allowed. “I will not cause you trouble. Just know that so long as I am in charge, you are safe inside these walls.”
That seemed to get through, but it wasn’t much. The Croni split into groups of two to take on their cleaning project…but one of them drooped a wing onto her shoulder in what she suspected was a gesture of acknowledgement.
“And just what was that?” Faulkner asked softly from behind her.
She turned around and jerked her gaze toward the ceiling, reminding him that they were outside the privacy field and being bugged.
“Acknowledging the staff,” she said lightly. “It never hurts.”
And maybe, just maybe, the effort would get passed down the line to the rebels she knew had to exist somewhere.
Amelie had barely made it out of the entrance hallway when she heard another set of knocking. Not waiting to see if the Marines called her back, she turned around in time to see the Marines open the door and find Keeper Rode standing there.
The Keeper walked into the room like she owned it—which, arguably, she did—but also left her guards outside.
“I need to speak to Lestroud,” she barked.
“And I need to search you before you go one step further into the building,” the Marine replied. “After that, it’s up to the Minister.”
“I am the Keeper of the First and Final Citadel,” Rode snapped, then stopped and chuckled. “Even if I was armed, guardian, I guarantee you I would miss a target I was touching.”
“Search her anyway,” Amelie ordered as she stepped into Rode’s line of sight. “No exceptions, I think.”
“As you wish,” the Siva replied. “The insult will not be forgotten.”
�
�We weren’t the ones that started with the insults and deceptions,” Amelie said cheerfully as the soldiers ran a scanning wand over the Siva.
“She’s clear.”
“Say your piece, Keeper,” Amelie told Rode as the Marines stepped clear.
“We must speak in private,” the Keeper replied. “There is an office there.” She pointed. “It is large enough for us and several of your guardians.”
Amelie snorted. “Sergeant Nguyen? Can I borrow one of your Marines?”
“Zahn, go with the Minister,” the Sergeant replied instantly.
Amelie gestured for Rode to lead the way. The Keeper was clearly familiar with the layout of the guest house, probably more than she was.
They stepped into the bare stone room, and Rode glanced around it with faint disdain.
“The last time I was in here, they’d decorated,” she told Amelie. “Guardian, grab the chairs, please.”
The Marine glanced at Amelie, who nodded assent. Her own attention was focused on the Keeper. Rode was fiddling with one of the stones on the wall—a stone that suddenly slipped out to reveal a very modern-looking control panel.
A few seconds later, shutters closed over the inside of the window and a faint ringing sensation settled into Amelie’s teeth.
“These guest houses were built to serve many purposes,” Rode told her. “Sometimes, secure discussions were part of those services, and the systems are maintained.”
She gestured Amelie to a chair.
“The Intendant offered you everything you asked for,” she continued flatly. “Fleets, starships, support…you came prepared to give us weapons and starships for that aid, but when all that you asked for was offered, you refused.
“Who do you think you are?”
“I think I am the ambassador plenipotentiary for a star nation that is built on a code of morals as well as a code of laws,” Amelie replied. “Codes that, so far as I can tell, your people are entirely lacking.
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 22
