“Where is she?”
Octavio’s attention went back to the wall display and studied the planet for a moment. The planet…its debris ring…and its moon. The moon they’d only ever seen from “above,” having never passed between KB2N13-1 and the planetoid.
“Major Chen,” he said quietly. “How quickly can you get assault shuttles onto that moon once we find the target?”
There was only one place in the star system they could have parked a sublight starship where they wouldn’t have already seen it.
54
“And there she is, right where you figured, sir.”
If the newly married Major Chen was getting sick of having the task force commander riding her shoulder, it didn’t show in her voice as the shuttles crested the horizon of KB2N13-1’s moon. The planetoid was easily a quarter of the size of its “parent”, as large as Luna was to the Earth.
And the ship they were hunting was nestled gently into a crater on the side that forever faced towards the planet.
“Is it designed to be able to take off again?” Chen asked as the shuttles approached.
“No,” Octavio told her. “Like ours, it’s supposed to fold out and become part of the colony infrastructure. The engines can land once. The process is destructive.”
“She isn’t oriented correctly for a proper landing,” Siril-ki added. “The lower gravity seems to have allowed them to land her horizontally.”
“And I guess they decided to use her as an orbital base when they first arrived here,” Octavio said. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have had her at all.”
Though the strangers could have built a new one, he supposed. All evidence suggested they’d built multiple Guardian swarms. In fact…
“Chen, can you get me a sensor drone at these locations?” he asked, dropping coordinates through the data channel. “And hold your shuttles at least a hundred kilometers away until we’ve got that sensor data.”
“Wilco,” the Marine Major replied crisply before cutting to another channel.
“I don’t understand any of this, Commodore,” Siril-ki admitted.
“I know,” he told her. “I’m hoping that the answers are in that ship. It looks like she was intact when she landed, which means she probably held the last survivors of this group.”
“Except she’s silent and the world below is dead,” the Assini Director replied. “It seems any hope of finding more of my people is a lost cause.”
“I know.” Octavio looked at his marked points as the drones flashed out from the shuttles. There were ships there; he knew that. What he needed the drones to establish was whether those ships were a threat.
“There’s enough of you on Exilium to survive,” he reminded ki. “In the long run, you’ll want to move the core of your population to another Constructed World to give you room to grow, but it’s not like there’s many of us on Exilium either.”
“For humans, that would make sense,” Siril-ki told him. “For us…if we are to survive, we need a herd. We are better served joining yours, I think.”
“That’s a discussion for other people at another time,” Octavio admitted. “The Republic will back whatever your people want; you know that. If you want citizenship with us, you’ll get it. If you want a ride to a new planet and help setting up a colony, we can manage that, too.
“The tech databases from Shezarim alone are enough to pay for any assistance you could ask for.”
He chuckled to himself as he removed a word from the sentence while speaking. Shezarim’s databases weren’t enough to pay for any reasonable assistance. They were enough to pay for any assistance whatsoever.
“Drones are on target,” Chen told them as she rejoined the channel. “We’re looking at multiple Guardian drones but I’m not seeing a core Matrix hull. They’re dead, sir. Landed and shut down, and they weren’t designed to land.”
Not all of them were wrecks, per se, but all of them had basically crashed. The vectors suggested that they had been providing aerial cover until they ran out of fuel. Some of them had managed to attempt a powered landing. Others had just fallen out of the sky.
“All right, Major,” Octavio said. “We needed to be sure those ships were dead. Flag one of the more-intact ones for pickup and continue at your discretion.”
“Understood. We’re coming in low and slow in case there are any concealed defenses,” the Marine replied. “Probes don’t suggest anything, though. No power sources at all.”
“She’s a dead ship,” Octavio agreed. “We’ll probably move Dauntless around for an easier pickup but keep your eyes open as you close.”
The reason Dauntless remained on the far side of the moon, after all, was because they knew that ship carried heavy beam weapons.
“Shuttles are on the ground. Go! Go! Go!”
The map on one side of the flag deck display showed that none of Chen’s spacecraft had landed particularly far from the Assini spaceship. They still hadn’t directly boarded the ship, either. The Marines could make a fifty-meter stroll in one-tenth gravity.
“At least this world was never alive,” somebody snarked on the Marine command channel. “Is it a ghost world if it never died?”
“Belay the philosophizing, people,” Chen barked. “Save it for when we don’t have the chance of Assini hunter-killers, please.”
“Oorah,” multiple voices replied.
The Marines were moving quickly in the low gravity, and by the time the brief conversation was over, the lead elements had reached the hull of the ship.
“Hull’s what we expected,” one of the lead Marines reported. “Setting up the cutting gear for entry.”
Nine new icons appeared on Octavio’s display, marking the entryways the Marines were opening for later use. There were airlocks and similar entryways, but if the dead ship had any defenses left, they’d be there.
“Hull will take ninety seconds to penetrate,” Chen told Octavio on their channel. “Anything in particular we should be looking for?”
“Symbology, at least on the first pass,” he told her. “We don’t even know who these people were. Whatever symbols, flags, names…if it’s an identifying symbol, send it to Siril-ki.”
“Between D and I, we should be able to work out who these people are at that point,” the Assini confirmed. “I hope there are answers somewhere on this ship, Major, Commodore.”
“If there are, I’m guessing they’re in the command center,” Chen replied. “The maps put the hole we’re cutting here less than a hundred meters from the bridge. I’m expecting to have to force or cut doors all the way there, but we should be there in less than fifteen minutes.”
“And then perhaps we will find some answers on what turns my people into monsters,” Siril-ki said.
A few seconds of silence later, the plasma cutters completed their task. A circular panel of the ceramic that armored every spaceship Octavio had seen in several years fell outward.
“We’re in,” Chen reported as her Marines began to enter the breach. Single troopers led the way, guns sweeping the empty hallways of the ship.
Chen followed her Marines in, her own camera and light sweeping through the relatively plain corridor they’d cut their way into.
“Map says this way,” she told her people. “Kender, you’re on point. Scans still aren’t showing power sources, so we should be clear.”
“You’ve found leftover security drones hiding power sources before,” Octavio warned.
“And we’re watching for them,” Chen replied. “First door, sealed. Wait!”
Her barked command stopped her Marines as they prepared to force the door.
“The symbol, let me get a look at it for the boss.”
The lights and cameras focused on the symbol painted in the middle of the door. To Octavio, it looked like a unicorn with a crown on the horn.
Except, of course, that the unicorn in question was based on an Assini, not a Terran horse.
“No,” Siril-ki whispered. “That’s im
possible.”
“Siril-ki?” Octavio asked.
“I know the symbol, Major Chen can continue,” the Director ordered, ki’s voice suddenly perfectly calm.
“Can you explain as the Major moves in?” Octavio asked.
“D, can you record this, please?” Siril-ki requested. “The data is in your databanks, and we’ll probably need you to fill in some holes. I only know as much as I do because of a hobby many of my colleagues regarded as vaguely perverse.”
The Assini paused, collecting ki’s thoughts.
“The government of the Assini as you know it was the Great Collective,” ki explained. “The First Administrator was an elected position who held executive power as you understand it, but they were limited in their use of that power. Most decisions were made by day-to-day instant electronic voting and consensus among the population.
“At the end of any given day, I would receive informational packets organized by the government and several private entities. Over the course of the next day, I would be notified on my computer as votes were called, and I would vote on the items in the informational packets.
“This would be five or six times in an eleven-day,” ki noted. “Direct democracy is, I believe, the term in your systems. In even a single star system, this required FTL communication, but it was born in the era of electronic communication networks.
“We are herd creatures and consensus-builders by nature, so it worked for us. It had worked for us for six elevens of eleven years when Shezarim fled the flare.”
Ki was silent for a few moments.
“But that was not always how we ruled ourselves, and the Great Collective did not come to encompass all Assini without violence. We had already embraced pacifism as a culture by then in the main, but not entirely.
“The Great Collective expanded peacefully initially. It grew out of previous trading and informational agreements almost informally, until over two-thirds of our people were either formally or effectively part of the Great Collective. The remainder were in an active alliance against its expansion.
“An alliance led by the House of Koth and Herd Leader Koth-Dasan-ni,” Siril-ki concluded, then gestured at the screen. “That, Commodore Catalan, is the symbol of the House of Koth. The last of the Imperial Houses, the old monarchs that led herds to war against each other.
“The Collective and the Houses fielded war machines against each other, the early iterations of what became the Matrix hunter-killer drones.” Ki stared blankly into space. “By the end of the war, the House of Koth had consumed its allies, overtaking their governments and leaders to force them to support the war beyond all reasonable levels.”
“That was a thousand years ago,” Octavio noted. “Seven hundred years before the flares. I’m guessing they lost in the end?”
“They did,” Siril-ki confirmed. “Koth-Shezar-dai died in battle, leading the last of the crewed war machines our people ever built in a breakout attempt rather than surrender. With his death, the Koth’s empire shattered and the war ended.
“The House of Koth is dead history, dead for elevens of eleven years before we fled our world. What is this?”
“D?” Octavio asked.
“Director Siril-ki summarizes what Assini histories call the Last War quite well,” the AI noted. “It lasted twenty-two years in human time and ended, as ki noted, in the death of the last known heir of the Koth line.
“The databases do note a continuing suggestion—humans would call it a conspiracy theory—that Koth-Shezar-dai’s breakout and death were a distraction that allowed the House of Koth to smuggle his child and a vast amount of wealth out of their fortresses.
“I cannot find any practical evidence to support this, but the theory was enduring. There appear to have always been elements in the Collective that looked to it as humans have looked to the Arthurian myth, a dream of the return of the rightful king who would make all things right.”
“I encountered that in my studies,” Siril-ki agreed. “That is part of why studying the Last War was regarded as somewhat perverse. I needed to understand the wars our people had fought to help program combat AI that would fight for us in ways we’d find acceptable.
“I had forgotten the myth that the House of Koth had survived,” ki admitted. “It was always such ridiculous herd-shit.”
“But we’re looking at someone who either was that remnant or was stealing its image,” Octavio noted. “Could they have been…” He paused, looking at the icon frozen in a side image while the Marines continued forward.
“Could they have been planning to use the destruction of the colony expeditions, combined with a claimed ‘secret super-weapon’ to disable the Construction Matrices, to reassert control over the Assini?” he asked.
“I would like to think that wouldn’t have worked,” Siril-ki said, but ki’s objection was tired. “But the truth is that they likely could have forced a situation where all of the colonies joined the herd of the House of Koth.
“And since our star was dying…”
“I assess a sixty plus/minus fifteen percent chance that another fifty to a hundred years without the flare would have led to the creation of Assini colonies that had conceded to the House of Koth and their control of the Construction Matrices,” D concluded. “Their plan was not without merit…only utterly without morals or concern for life of any kind.”
“You heard all of that, Major Chen?” Octavio asked.
“With one ear, sir,” the Marine replied. “We’ve found the bridge. It’s fully encased in another layer of armor. Looks like someone adjusted the plans to create a secure internal command center that might even include quarters for a small number of people.”
“Or a single Herd Leader?” Octavio suggested.
“We’re cutting our way in,” she told him. “We’ll know soon enough. If it is this House of Koth…can I shoot them?”
“They’re already dead, Major,” Octavio replied. “And if they’re not…we need them.”
He shook his head.
“Even if they are evil monsters.”
D and the Siril-ki’s assessment of the plan the House of Koth had been working from made a twisted, sickening, sense—but the only term he could use for it was evil.
Major Chen was not the first person through the breach into the armored command deck. Octavio knew she was no happier with waiting outside the shell to see what her people encountered than he was with waiting, but there was no world in which a twenty-fourth-century Marine CO could lead from the front.
“We’re clear,” the point man announced. “I’m picking up a couple of small power sources, but nothing sufficient to run weapons, let alone hunter-killers.”
“Why didn’t we pick them up before?” Chen asked
“They’re really small and inside an entire layer of energy-absorbing armor,” the Marine replied. “D, can you see this from my suit?”
“Yes,” the AI confirmed. “Commodore, Major, it appears that there is a separate power source inside the command deck to run its computers on an emergency basis. They’re in standby but they are online.”
That was new.
“Is that likely to do us any good?” Octavio asked. “Or is it a threat?”
“We’ve been accessing inactive data cores previously,” D told him. “The degradation from lack of power is minor, but it is present. If these cores have been continuously powered, they represent the most-intact database available to us since recovering Shezarim.”
“That’s promising,” the Commodore noted. “Have your people be careful, Major. I know that’s not a necessary order, but…it sounds like there might just be something alive in there.”
“The problem and opportunity combined here are that active cores have active security software, not merely passive encryption,” D continued. “That is a problem because that software can actively scramble the data cores if we make a mistake. It is an opportunity, as the software can unencrypt those cores if we give it the right codes.”
“Low,” Siril-ki interjected. “On the other hand, I have several tools that might be able to convince the computer that I do. Is the Matrix online?”
“Negative,” D replied. “The Matrix was in its own armored shell, detached from the command deck, and it is very definitely powerless. I estimate a ninety-three plus/minus seven percent chance that the Matrix shut down in a manner that would prevent reactivation of the core processes.”
“Chen?” Octavio shook his head. None of the people he was talking to could see him except D, and D could read his body language if he was controlling himself. “Find that power source.”
“Scans suggest we’re looking at a set of radioactive decay generators set up… Wait, what?” Chen trailed off.
“Major?” Octavio demanded
“They’re set up in the bridge,” she told him. “From these scans, they’re not built in.”
“Are they a threat to your Marines?” he asked.
She scoffed.
“Anything energetic enough to do more than ping our armor’s sensors is being trapped and used by the electrical generation systems,” she told him. “We’ll be fine. It just looks like somebody hauled them up from the colony supplies they stole from Assini.”
“That’s fascinating,” Octavio murmured. Assini RDGs had a thousand-year estimated useful life. They’d originally been designed to sustain interstellar probes in the void between stars, after all.
“My people are moving in; I’ll have visual momentarily,” Chen told him.
“And how far behind them are you?” Octavio asked, watching though the camera feed as her people forced open what appeared to be the last layer of security doors around the ship’s bridge.
“About half a step,” Chen confirmed cheerfully as her point man plunged into the room on the other side of the doors.
“Zeus pateras,” the Marine swore. “That is one big horse.”
Chen was through the door half a second later, and Octavio got his own look at the very dead Assini in the center of the sublight starship’s bridge.
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 35
