Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “The medical data we extracted suggested the bread should be safe,” the voice told her.

  Accepting the food and water with a small bow to the tree-like alien, she turned to see the speaker. It was another Pol, slightly larger than the gardener who’d helped her escape.

  This one’s fur was paler, dark russet brown instead of black. They were dressed in a better-fitted outfit than Amelie had seen on any non-Sivar in the Governance, one clearly tailored to their body.

  They bowed their torso forward.

  “Minister Amelie Lestroud,” they greeted her. “I am the Kond.”

  “I was told you could help me,” she replied. “But I’ll admit I don’t even know what ‘the Kond’ means.”

  Large square teeth flashed in a laugh.

  “Let us move out of the way of the farmworkers,” they said. “We both have questions that need to be answered, but this compost must also be put to work.”

  Turning, the Kond gave more orders to the big plantoid in that same rapid-fire language.

  “Come with me,” the Kond instructed. “I would offer to get you clean, but I do not believe we have clothes that will fit you.”

  “Give me water and tub and I will clean these myself,” Amelie replied. “Anything to be able to breathe.”

  The teeth flashed again and she realized that that had been a test…and more than one, at that.

  “I think we can arrange that.”

  The armor vest was at least theoretically self-cleaning through various active and passive measures, so Amelie put that on after washing herself and began washing the rest of her clothing. She’d managed to get them most of the way to “probably not going to smell” when there was a knock on the door.

  “Minister? I have some items for you, if that would be acceptable,” the Kond told her.

  She laughed. She wasn’t overly concerned about being seen bottomless by an alien race with unknown gender roles.

  “Come in,” she told them.

  The package in the Kond’s hands proved their earlier statement about clothing a lie. The skirt and top were presumably sized for a Sivar ban—the only other people on the planet with breasts—but she could make them work.

  “There is an electric dryer,” Kond told her. “Your clothes will survive that?”

  “They should,” she agreed, pulling the skirt up around her waist. It was elastic enough to fit a wide variety of sizes, but the Kond had eyeballed her size almost perfectly. Of course, the skirt was probably floor-length on its intended Sivar wearer and only came down to her mid-shin.

  Similarly, the top was probably a near-knee-length tunic for its intended wearer, but the cut was right to work with her armor vest and leave her completely covered. On a hundred-and-fifty-centimeter-tall Sivar, the two garments would probably have looked odd together. On her, they worked perfectly.

  She checked in the mirror and raised an eyebrow.

  “You did not have time to have these made, so you already had them,” she noted. “And they fit and go together perfectly. I’m impressed.”

  The Kond bowed.

  “Officially, I am a tailor,” they told her. “To our masters, I am a favored servant. I served my time as a tribute and found a trade amongst the ex-tributes here. To my people, I am the Kond.”

  “Which means what?” Amelie asked, following the Pol to an industrial-scale laundry. She tossed her clothes in the designated machine and let the Kond punch the commands in for her.

  “I am a member of a noble family on our home world,” the Kond replied. “I would not have been Kond back home. I was a third child and chose to volunteer as tribute to spare another family grief.”

  She grimaced.

  “I’m guessing the tributes don’t get to go back home afterwards,” she noted.

  “For two of the races here, the ten orbits a tribute must serve the Sivar is most of their adult lives,” the Kond noted sadly. “Not all, of course, but the Croni especially…”

  “That bad?” Amelie shivered. Aris orbited in a bit over one point two Terran years.

  “They grow to adulthood in five orbits and live roughly twenty-five on average,” the Kond told her. “There are no medical services for the ex-tributes here. We are…”

  The translator choked on the Sivar word for several seconds before providing the translation of helots.

  “I’m guessing that’s not much of an improvement,” she said dryly. The word the translator chose was just a different type of slave, after all.

  “No,” the Kond agreed. “Some rise above helotry by being of service to the Sivar in broader roles like mine. We mostly live in townships arrayed around the Sivar cities, working farms and industrial sites that the Sivar regard as too dangerous for themselves.”

  “Where do the tributes work, then?” Amelie asked.

  “In factories and sites owned by the Governance,” the Kond replied. “Like the gardeners you saw on the First and Final Citadel. Hundreds of thousands of tributes—potentially millions; even I do not know for certain—work in factories across this star system, Minister Lestroud. They fuel the Sivar Keys of War.”

  “Slaves don’t make for great workers in technical industries,” she noted. “How does that work?”

  “They are very good at catching people who cause problems with production,” the alien said quietly. “And reprisals are visited on entire work shifts…and their families back home.”

  “Fuckers,” Amelie breathed.

  “I would agree. That is why my people sent you to me,” the Kond told her. “I am the senior Pol aristocrat on Sivar. That is not why my people follow me, but it helps. I have raised myself into the vague upper tier of the helots that the Sivar tolerate in the City and running my own business.

  “They trust me.”

  “And you’re running a secret route to evacuate abused tributes from the Citadel, using that trust?” Amelie guessed. An underground railroad.

  “You understand more than I expected,” the Pol said. “But…I do not have the ability to rescue your people. I have a network of informants and allies scattered through the tribute- and helot-run facilities in the City and the Citadel, but we lack weapons or soldiers.”

  “I imagine there are other rebels who do have those?” she asked.

  The Kond winced.

  “If I thought we could overthrow the Sivar, I could identify a hundred weak points to strike at,” they noted. “That I refuse to do so makes me no friends. I know of other, more active groups among the helots. But their resistance and their violence never end well.”

  “Kond, in less than thirty days, the Republic fleet is going to arrive in Sivar space,” Amelie told them. “The Sivar have no idea what is coming or how badly they are outclassed. They are going to be handed what I suspect will be their worst military defeat in a very long time. From there, the Republic will proceed here.

  “We can defeat the Republic’s space defenses, but we don’t have the ability to take even the First and Final Citadel by storm, let alone the planet.”

  “The system you first visited, I assume?” the Kond asked. “That would be Sonbar. I have several people from there. Their people, the Sonba, will suffer for your victory.”

  “Everyone will suffer if there is an extended war,” Amelie agreed. “But I was released by a Sivar, Kond. The Intendant will be made vulnerable by defeat. Working together, we might be able to bring him down without the Republic destroying the Citadel with fire from on high.”

  The Kond closed their eyes.

  “We have seen that fire,” they told her. “I am not certain I would wish it upon my enemies, let alone on a fortress full of my friends.”

  “It is our last choice, but it may be our only option.”

  “You would have us fight for you?” they asked.

  “I would have you fight for yourselves,” Amelie replied. “The Republic can help, but those ships are only here to rescue me and my staff. If I tell them to support a rebellion, to support independen
ce for the races the Sivar have conquered, they will.

  “But we can’t free you. We can only help you free yourselves.”

  The Kond looked at her in silence for a long time as the laundry machines whirred away around them.

  “I cannot make that decision on my own,” they finally allowed. “There are others you must speak to.”

  “And?” she asked.

  “I will make that conversation happen,” the Kond promised. “Be patient for now. Here, you are safe.”

  44

  “As of the last contact we had with the surface, Amelie had been detained at a meeting with the Intendant, and Sivar ground troops were storming the manor they gave us as an embassy.”

  Holmwood’s image stood utterly straight, the woman staring at a wall behind Isaac’s head as if she was expecting to be torn to pieces for her failure.

  Isaac couldn’t say he wasn’t tempted, but it would have been pointless. If nothing else, there were still light-years and light-years between Watchtower and Vigil. Holmwood’s battlecruiser was in deep, deep space, roughly halfway between Sivar-One and Sivar-Prime.

  “And your own situation, Captain?” he asked gently.

  “We were attacked by two Sivar battleships and sixteen escorts of various sizes, supported by an estimated forty-five battle stations,” Holmwood reported. “Only fifteen of the stations were in our line of sight; the remainder were providing over-the-horizon missile support.”

  Isaac nodded.

  “You extracted the support ships and your warships, Captain,” he reminded her. “How bad was the damage?”

  “Both of the freighters took multiple hits from Sivar laser weaponry,” the Captain admitted. “Seventy-two civilians dead, as many wounded. We managed to keep the missiles off of them, but if the battleships had turned their heavier beams on the transports, we would have been lost.”

  “You retreated under fire in good order, Captain Holmwood,” Isaac told her. “There was no way you could have extracted Minister Lestroud at that point.”

  “I could have taken their entire damn fleet!” Holmwood snapped.

  Isaac waited for several seconds until she sighed.

  “My reports already tell me what those ‘heavier beams’ on the battleships did to Watchtower,” he reminded her. “Several disabled LPC turrets, fifty-two dead. My understanding is that the damage is repairable in space?”

  “It is,” she confirmed. “And I can tell those beams are short-ranged by our standards. They ambushed us at twenty thousand kilometers, sir. It should have been a massacre.”

  “It very nearly was, Captain Holmwood,” he told her. “A continued engagement at that range would have been. I agree that there wouldn’t have been any Sivar ships left when the dust settled, but your battlecruiser is worth more to me than any number of dead Sivar ships.

  “Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m impressed that you managed to extract everyone with as little lethal force as you used,” he continued. Watchtower had basically taken the two battleships’ best shot and then baked the exterior of both ships with close-range pulse-gun fire.

  She probably couldn’t have destroyed them with those tertiary guns, but she had crippled them in a single pass. That—and the destruction of half those battleships’ escorts—had bought her the respect to extract her fleet.

  “I’ll admit I’m mostly concerned about the Intendant’s final message,” Isaac concluded. “He had to know you were clear at that point, right?”

  “I think his officers were still expecting us to break for the star-lanes,” Holmwood admitted. “I’m not sure he did. The last two battleships in the system were guarding the star-lane to Sivar-Six. They couldn’t catch us.

  “And he sent his ultimatum.” That iron-stiff posture trembled—with rage, Isaac hoped. “If we want the Sivar to protect us, we have to surrender and become part of the Governance. The Republic might be able to dodge out through sheer distance, but the Skree-Skree, the Vistans, the Tohnbohn…he expects all of them to kneel.”

  “That’s not happening, you know that, right?” Isaac asked softly. “We’re still three weeks out, further than I’d like, but we’ll be in Sivar space long before the Intendant can find star-lane routes back to anyone’s home systems.

  “And even if he did, we’ve sent reinforcements back. He can’t win this, Captain Holmwood.”

  “But he might kill the President Emeritus.”

  That was the risk that Isaac was refusing to admit to himself.

  “He might,” he finally conceded. “And extracting her from Aris is going to be hell, no matter what happens. With her held captive in the First and Final Citadel, he has a trump card and he knows it.

  “But we cannot let that trump card be enough,” he continued. “We’ll punch out their forces at Sivar-One and tear through their computers. We’ll learn everything there is to know about the Governance and the people they’ve conquered.

  “The Intendant will fall, Captain Holmwood. If he’s smart, he’ll realize he can’t win after we kick his people’s collective ass in Sivar-One and make a play for peace.” Isaac sighed. “That he holds Amelie means we might just give him that peace, at least for now while we deal with the local Rogues.

  “But we cannot refrain from action now. We’ll do everything within our power to save Amelie, but we have to neutralize this threat.”

  “I never should have let her go down,” Holmwood declared. “We knew it wasn’t safe, that we were giving up control of her safety and security to an unknown.”

  “And without doing that, she couldn’t have done her job,” Isaac said. “It was her call, her decision—and without knowing that the Intendant was going to go this far, it seemed the right call then.

  “This is not your fault, Captain Holmwood,” he told her firmly. “You followed her orders and supported her legitimate decisions. Unfortunately, it seems our potential ally is a dictator and conqueror of the worst kind.

  “We might have turned a blind eye to focus on the Matrices, but now he’s left us no choice. You and your ships will meet us at the rendezvous point one light-month outside Sivar-One, where we will plan our seizure of that system as a demonstration to the Intendant.”

  Isaac knew exactly how terrifying his cold smile could be, but today, it was exactly what Chantel Holmwood needed to see.

  “Either he will give us back my wife or I will shatter his fleets, liberate his slaves and bring his fancifully named fortress down around his ears,” Isaac concluded calmly.

  “And everything I have seen suggests I’d be doing the galaxy a favor.”

  45

  If Amelie understood the situation of the upper tier of the Sivar’s not-truly-free helot class, the farm had a Sivar partner who acted as the paper owner. Most likely, the Siva in question collected a portion of the profits and never even visited the location.

  Everyone she saw on the farmstead was a helot. They were mostly Pol—the Kond appeared to be the actual financier behind the business—but she saw Croni, the tentacled broccoli Sonba, and the treelike aliens she’d learned were called Toorg.

  It was a large commercial operation, one of several that used the massive amounts of compost produced by a facility the size of the First and Final Citadel to produce food crops that most likely went right back to the Citadel.

  There were at least three hundred people living on the farm, working its fields and machines and mills. Hiding Amelie among them was apparently straightforward, not least because she didn’t see any Sivar in the days before the Kond returned.

  She didn’t even see him arrive. Her hosts had asked her to stay in the main dormitory, well out of sight from anyone who visited the place. It was boring as all hell, but it was safe and she’d met enough Pol now to realize that the Kond was male.

  The Kond ended up meeting her in a small office this time instead of the laundromat. She was sticking to Sivar clothing based on the selection he’d left h
er. It fit relatively well, covered her armor, and didn’t draw quite as much attention as a Terran-style suit unlike anything else on the planet.

  There were enough different aliens on the farm that even a human went unnoticed by anyone who didn’t know who she was.

  “I appreciate your patience, Minister Lestroud,” the Kond told her as he gestured her to a seat. “Making contact with my partners is difficult, and I must keep up my business and speak with my Sivar partners…who cannot be permitted to guess anything has changed.”

  “I am familiar with the dance, Kond,” she replied. She’d done the same thing once. “The time to think has been valuable. Have your ‘partners’ agreed to meet with me?”

  “They have,” he confirmed. “It will take a few days, and some are only sending representatives. Not everyone is on Sivar and communicating off-world is difficult at best.”

  “You are sneaking messages into Sivar com drones, I presume?” Amelie asked. “Since there are no non-Sivar ships.”

  The mole-like alien wrinkled his nose at her.

  “You know that question is not safe for me to answer,” he said. “You will need to remain here for a while longer. It is a safe place to keep you.”

  “But is it an effective place for me to be?” Amelie replied. Pol body language was still new to her, but she suspected that surprised the Kond. “Do you know this symbol?”

  She dropped the cloth that Rode had given her on the table. The Kond stared at it for several seconds, then lowered his head with an audible sniff.

  “Yes. It is not as hopeful as you might think. It was chosen as an irony, as something the Intendants would never believe was associated with the Dynasts.”

  “The Dynasts,” Amelie echoed. “That is not a term I have heard before.”

  The Kond paused, then settled himself more firmly in his chair with another sniff.

  “You will dig until you find what you desire, yes?” he asked. “I can respect that, but you dig into wars and lies that may put my people at risk.”