Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “In a full and complete alliance, I might provide the Sivar weapons technology—but I would hesitate to seal that alliance, because of your people’s crimes. My nation knows dictators and slavers, Keeper Rode. We are at this end of the galaxy because we chose to stand against our own.

  “I see no reason to bow to yours.”

  “You cannot challenge the Intendant,” Rode said softly, the harshness suddenly draining from her voice. “Even to fail the Intendant is death. His will is the Governance.”

  “Which is why Istila is Keeper of the Keys of Peace now, not Dorost,” Amelie replied. “Even your senior leaders’ lives hang by the threads of one man’s ego. Why would I ever negotiate with a state that unstable? How could I negotiate with you?

  “Certainly, I could never hand weapons over to a madman.”

  Rode was silent, the shadow of her armor plating allowing her eyes to burn brightly.

  “You are a small nation, far away,” she finally said. “The Governance is dozens of stars; the Commandants wield dozens of warships. You cannot defy the Intendant.”

  Amelie considered her next words very carefully. Rode had told her that the space was secure, which was interesting in and of itself, but she was also digging for something. The ex-revolutionary knew this conversation. It had just taken her a while to realize what was going on.

  “The Intendant has no idea who he is fucking with,” Amelie told Rode. “You are so impressed with your conquests and your fleets that you have no idea how dark the tunnels you’re wandering down are.

  “If your Intendant betrays our trust further, the Governance will burn. I am but one woman, but I speak for the Republic. If the Intendant goes too far, his ego will be no shield against what is to come.”

  The room was silent for a long time, then Rode coughed.

  “That’s probably a good thing,” she conceded. “I think we’re done here, Minister. I have delivered my Intendant’s warning.”

  She bowed her head slightly.

  “I suggest, Minister Lestroud, that you be very careful. We walk on dangerous ground under the eyes of the Fates.”

  Amelie waved her out and stayed in the room, watching as the shutters slowly reopened.

  Under the eyes of the Fates. If those were the same Fates that the Intendant was the voice of, she had words for them.

  On the other hand, unless she was severely mistaken, one of the senior members of the Governance had just tried to sound out if the Republic would back a coup against the current Intendant.

  Voice of the Fates or not, it sounded like the Intendant’s government was far from stable!

  35

  The answer had to be fuel.

  “We’ve spent two days going round and round in circles, trying to work out how to identify our strangers and where they went,” Octavio noted as his people gathered. “I think we need to try a different tack. We need to consider the physical limitations of the ship we’re probably looking at.

  “Siril-ki, D, do we have schematics and specifications for the first-wave colony ships?” he asked. “I have a thought based on how Shezarim was built, but she was newer and more advanced than our stranger would be.”

  “It appears that I have full schematics of the phase-one colony ships in the databank from Shezarim,” D confirmed after several moments. “Siril-ki, do you know of any reason why those would be lacking or incomplete?”

  Ki neighed a laugh. It wasn’t entirely a happy noise, but Octavio didn’t expect happy sounds from his Assini companions right now.

  “Unless there’s something in the new files, that’s all I would have access to,” ki pointed out.

  “Show us, D,” Octavio ordered.

  There were some definite similarities between Shezarim and the holographic ship that appeared in the middle of the conference room, but many differences too. She wasn’t as big, for one, and her engines were proportionally larger.

  “She seems a lot less streamlined than Shezarim,” Renaud said. “I’m guessing she wasn’t intended to go as fast?”

  “Shezarim wasn’t designed to go as fast as we took her,” Siril-ki admitted. “But she was designed for the particle densities of point nine seven cee. Between that streamlining and her armor, she survived near-cee velocities for far longer than we had any right to expect.

  “The colony ships were designed for a peak velocity of point six cee,” she continued. “They would accelerate to that velocity over the course of approximately sixteen of your hours.”

  “Shezarim was capable of significantly greater acceleration and had more efficient engines,” D noted. “The colony ship’s engines and internal compensation systems had lower thrust-to-weight and required a lot of fuel for the voyage.”

  “They couldn’t turn around or adjust course,” Octavio murmured. “That was why they were doomed when they learned about the Matrices…and that’s what we were missing, people. Wherever they came from, they didn’t have the fuel to go back.”

  His staff and Siril-ki looked at him in surprised understanding.

  “Presumably, they didn’t come here with a million colonists and the entire infrastructure for a colony aboard, so they’d have had some fuel left for maneuvering around the system—but they had to refuel here if they were going to get back.

  “So, where did they do that?”

  “Not at the evacuation yards,” Siril-ki noted. “We were lucky in that Shezarim had been fueled before the flare. Our fuel supplies were delivered by tanker from Kora.”

  “There was nothing at the evacuation yards to suggest that the ship left the system from there,” Renaud noted. “If anything, what data we had there suggested that they came back here.”

  “To refuel, if you’re right,” Das agreed, the XO already pulling up data on her own tattoo-comp. “The Assini moved a lot of their cloudscoops into a single cluster, specifically positioned in an orbit where it would never be on the star-ward side of the gas giant.”

  “It’s still there?” Isaac asked.

  “Some of it,” Dauntless’s XO admitted, flipping the scan of the station into the hologram. “It looks like chunks of it fell off, but most of those are still orbiting in tandem with the facility. The cloudscoops themselves are the biggest concern—without someone actively managing thrust to counterbalance, the drag will pull the entire thing down into the gas giant.”

  “My calculations suggest a sixty-five plus/minus three percent probability that the drag effect should have already pulled the entire station into the gas giant,” D interjected. “That leads me to a high-probability conclusion that someone made an effort to stabilize the station over the long term.”

  “There’s no power sources over there,” Das replied. “But if someone had left a computer running with access to the thrusters and a minimal stabilization program…it would still be here even if the computer ran out of power long ago.”

  “And that computer would need sensors, wouldn’t it?” Octavio asked. “People, I think we have another target for Major Chen’s Marines.”

  The Marine leaned past her girlfriend and studied the slowly-falling-apart station in the hologram.

  “Biggest engines are…here and here, right?” she asked, touching the assemblages the Assini had attached to the cloudscoops. “Would they be using the station’s original computers or a secondary installation?”

  “I think our optimal case is that they installed a new computer and sensor array at the engine structure,” Octavio agreed. “There are a lot of small thrusters on the station—drag’s a problem for any cloudscoop, so they would all have had them—so those two big engines were probably intended to handle the entire assembly.”

  “They might have even been added by the strangers rather than part of the original structure,” D suggested. “Medium-order probability, but we wouldn’t be able to tell without much closer examination.”

  “Well, then, let’s get to that closer examination,” Octavio said. “Renaud, we’ll move Dauntless over herself while
sending the strike cruisers and freighters to clear space. The last thing we want is to have enough ships present to risk accidentally disrupting the orbit.”

  He could read the orbital vector charts as well as anyone. Without some kind of intervention, the station only had another thirty years at most. Even his shuttles landing could cost the station years of survival if they weren’t careful.

  Chen was probably getting sick of having Octavio virtually riding on her shoulder, even if he was doing as well as he hoped in keeping out of her hair. His office currently showed him three images: a holographic display of the entire cloudscoop assembly and Dauntless’s position five hundred kilometers away, the view from Chen’s shoulder-camera, and the view from the shuttle’s camera.

  Spaceborne structures only took so much damage from time, but they did take that damage. Close orbit of a gas giant was only technically “space” by most definitions, as well. There was a lot of pitting and scarring on the station the shuttles were approaching, and the cameras highlighted it.

  “There is no way this place would still be here unless something had been working to keep it up,” Chen muttered on her private channel to him. “I know D says thirty percent chance, but chunks of this are inside Kora’s atmosphere. In a geostationary orbit without power? I don’t believe it would last a century.”

  “The evidence disagrees with you, Major,” Octavio pointed out. “Even if our strangers did set up a system, I doubt it lasted three centuries without anyone checking on it, and we haven’t seen any sign of a second visit.”

  “Which is weird enough on its own, right?” the Marine asked. “I mean, they might have come here to try and save people, but it clearly turned into a scavenging expedition, and there’s still a lot in this system to scavenge.”

  “How much time would you want to spend poking around Earth for supplies if it looked like this?” he asked.

  Chen was silent for several seconds as the shuttle dipped toward their target. The more Octavio saw it, the more he wondered if the strangers had added it themselves. It looked like one of the engine assemblages from Shezarim’s sister ship back in the main colony. The Kora colonists might have grabbed it, but they could just as easily have relied on the original thrusters from each cloudscoop.

  “I see your point, sir,” Chen admitted. “Making contact in two minutes.” She paused. “Personal question, sir.”

  Octavio chuckled.

  “Is this really the time, Major?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had much of a chance to sit down with you without Meena in the room, sir,” the Marine admitted. “All of this…the death, the loss, the ghosts. Makes you really aware of your mortality.”

  “I know,” he agreed.

  “I checked. Regs say that Captain Renaud can’t perform a marriage ceremony aboard without special permission—but you could either provide that permission or perform the ceremony yourself. Sir.”

  Octavio paused, taking in the image of the slowly approaching shuttles as he parsed Chen’s request.

  “Are you asking if I’d be willing to perform a wedding ceremony for you and Commander Das?” he asked. “Should you ask the Commander first?”

  “Not much point proposing if I can’t arrange a wedding, is there?” the Marine asked.

  Octavio snorted.

  “If she says yes,” he said pointedly, “I would be delighted to perform the ceremony. Now find me a destination, Major, so we can do so while underway.”

  The shuttles’ boarding airlocks latched onto the station.

  “Oorah, Commodore.”

  36

  Plasma cutters sliced through the hull of the engine assembly, and the Marines charged through on the heels of the collapsing metal. By now, they expected the cutter to take longer than it should have.

  That delay tied back to Octavio’s assessment of where the engine had come from. Shezarim and the other evacuation ships from that fleet had been armored to stand up to potential Matrix attacks and near-cee velocities. The engine towers that had been added to the cloudscoop station were from the half-built colony ships.

  “We’re clear and on board,” a report echoed on the open channel. “No sign of resistance, no sign of power anywhere.”

  “We’re not expecting power, people,” Chen replied. “But somewhere in this hunk of metal is a computer that was telling the engine what to do. We want that computer.”

  “This appears to be one of the secondary engine nacelles from Shezarim’s sister ship,” D inserted into the channel. “I’m dropping waypoints into your system for where the control systems would have been while it was attached to the colony ship.”

  “That’s what I was hoping for, D,” Chen said. “All right, people, we’ve got six blinking lights and four squads. Move in groups, check out the waypoint closest to you.

  “We’ll probably need to boot up computers before we get answers, so I hope you were paying attention when the Assini told you how to do that!”

  Octavio was only getting half of the conversation between Chen and her people, but he really doubted that any of her people had been slacking off when their alien allies had told them what to do with the computers.

  He trusted his Marines more than that. So, he was certain, did Major Chen Zhou.

  Seconds ticked by in silence and he realized Chen had muted the microphone on her link to him as she moved deeper into the station. Everything she said was still being recorded by D, and if the AI thought he needed to know what she said, D would play it for him.

  But it was one fewer concern on her side as the Marines dug deeper into a dead alien space station. The whole place was creepy. Like the stations they’d swept in the main colony, there were no bodies. The strangers had buried the dead in the gas giant, leaving the platform looking like it had never even been occupied.

  Unlike most of the colony stations, there was no atmosphere in the section the Marines were digging through. Octavio was starting to wonder about that when Chen turned a corner and found her team staring into a massive breach.

  He checked the map. One of D’s waypoints had been right in the middle of the wreckage.

  “You seeing this, sir?” she reopened the channel to ask.

  “I am. I’m hoping that particular computer wasn’t the one we needed.”

  “Team two already hit their first waypoint. That computer was removed, so that’s at least one down,” Chen replied. “And I guess this one is down too. We’ll have to jet across. If you get motion-sick, I’d suggest turning the camera off, Commodore.”

  “I’ve done engineering EVAs in worse, Major,” Octavio pointed out. “Carry on.”

  “Commodore,” D interjected. “Major. Before you launch off, a moment of your time. Team three may have located our target.”

  Chen paused, making half-seen hand gestures to hold up her team.

  “Show me,” she ordered.

  A fourth image appeared in Octavio’s hologram. It had been a secondary thrust control center once, a minor computer relay of the type more often used by crew checking their emails than actually working.

  Now the computer hardware from at least two other secondary centers had been added in. Multiple computer cores were wired together in a crude aggregate that Octavio assumed had worked at one point.

  Thick wires ran from the cores into the conduits beneath them that would link to fuel lines and the rest of the machinery required to control the big fusion engine.

  “All right. We have a center point,” Chen noted. “We need to find the sensors and the power. Team three,” she linked to her people. “Start carefully dismantling that mess and packing it up.

  “Everyone else will track the lines to see if we can find the sensors and power supply it was using. We can probably live without that data, but since I’m here, I see no reason not to get it.”

  “Well done, Major,” Octavio murmured. “Let’s hope there’s some answers in there, shall we?”

  Cracking the computers provided surprisingly easy after
that. The Assini computer techs had taught the Marines well, and they had everything up and running in the shuttle on the way back.

  “There’s no security on the cores,” Chen reported as the shuttles began to touch down. “There’s a lot of data in here and my people aren’t data-search experts, but everything is intact and functioning. Better than I expected, to be honest.”

  “Someone was expecting to come back,” Octavio concluded. “Your point stands, Major. Something weird is going on. We’ll have D and the Assini get into the system as soon as you bring it aboard. Let’s not power it down just yet.”

  “We hooked it up to a portable power core. We’ll be fine.”

  “Well done, Major. Once the computers are in the Assini’s hands, you can stand your people down.” He smiled. “I believe there’s a conversation you have to have on your down shift, yes?”

  “We’ll have it in the my little ponies’ hands in ten,” Chen promised. “I’ll be keeping an eye on everything while I arrange that conversation. Don’t break it. I’m not sure I can find another one.”

  “If nothing else, there’s a second engine tower on the cloudscoop station,” Octavio replied.

  He couldn’t dignify Chen’s response by calling it actual words.

  “D, any concerns with the data search?” he asked the AI after the channel with Chen cut.

  “I’ve been doing preliminary surveys via the Marines’ link,” the Matrix told him. “The assistance of Commander Das’s and Director Siril-ki’s people will be essential to make certain we’ve located our target, but I can tell you some details immediately.”

  “Carry on,” Octavio agreed.

  “As we expected, this engine was networked with the other nacelle from the colony ship. They appear to have been added two hundred and seventy years ago, during the strangers’ visit to the colony. They were clearly intended to be a long-term solution, but they also obviously expected to be able to recharge the power core every hundred years at most.”