Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “EMC,” the Marine replied in a chuckle. “How long?”

  “Pulling over here,” Shonin answered. “We’re past the main entrance already. The hardest part is going to be how narrow this corridor is.”

  “Open it up, then stand aside,” Amelie told her. “EMC can lead the way.”

  The land trains ground to a halt, disgorging Amelie’s vastly expanded assault force.

  “Marines first, Sonba last,” Amelie ordered as her people started gathering around. “Everyone else here has better armor, Bush-Waving,” she told the alien leader. “Let’s not lose anyone we don’t have to—and they’re going to come at us from behind.”

  “They won’t succeed,” the shrub-like freedom fighter replied. “Go! We have the end.”

  There didn’t appear to be any doors in the section of tunnel they’d stopped in, but Amelie doubted that Shonin was going to betray them now. The Siva walked up to a panel on the wall that looked the same as the rest of the concrete and metal panels that lined the tunnel.

  A specific depression slid open at ban’s touch, revealing what looked like a set of biometric scanners. Instead of activating the scanner, Shonin dropped a strip of metal over the top of the scanner suite. A moment later, the whole screen flashed—and the concrete panel slid aside.

  “You were right about the size of the passage,” Amelie said, studying it. It might be big enough for two Sivar abreast, but an armored Marine was going to be hitting their head as they went up steps and wouldn’t leave enough room for anyone to fit in around them.

  “EMC leads the way,” Köhl barked. “Nalani, you have point!”

  One of the armored Marines ducked into the hallway, pulse rifle poking forward.

  “Ignore all of the side branches and keep following the main path,” Shonin told them all. “There are a lot of places this tunnel goes, but the main path will bring you out right outside the throne room.”

  Ban paused.

  “There will be guards there.”

  “We’ll deal with them then,” Köhl replied. “And they’ll never know what hit them. EMC! Move out!”

  Amelie was halfway down the order of movement, which meant she was a long way from the fight when the shooting started. Pulse rifles sounded very different from mag-kinetics—but they did sound quite similar to Sivar blaster cannon.

  And there were definitely some of the latter in play before the Toorgs made it to the front.

  Everyone started accelerating at the sound of fighting, but the passageway only allowed so much space for everyone to move. By the time Amelie finally left the passage into a large space that she recognized from her meetings with the Intendant, the immediate fighting was over.

  At least two dozen armored Sivar lay strewn about the place. One of the Marines was having her armor patched by another. The combat repair wouldn’t make up for the hole burnt into the suit, but it would at least help.

  “No major injuries,” Köhl reported. “We’ve got multiple points of contact toward where the hostiles were expected to be holding security. I’ve got six people holding that line, but I’ll need to reinforce them quickly. And, well.”

  She gestured at a massive bunker wall where Amelie remembered the door to the audience chamber being.

  “We have no way through this,” the Marine reported. “We might be able to burn through the rock around it, but not while we’re under fire!”

  More gunfire echoed, and Köhl made a jerking motion to the Marines not either damaged or patching friends up.

  “Move it, Marines,” she snapped. “We hold the line.”

  “Shonin, you got a way through this?” Amelie asked.

  “I didn’t know this existed,” the First Voice of the Knives admitted. “Only the Eyes of Sivar would have. I’ve…never been this deep in the mountain.”

  “Can he send a transmission from there?” the human demanded.

  “I don’t think so,” Shonin replied. “We have him trapped, but we need him dead.”

  “There’s no way in hell an asshole like that sealed himself in a space with no way out,” Köhl pointed out. “It just isn’t on your maps.”

  Amelie ducked as several blaster cannon fired simultaneously.

  “We’re pinned against this security barrier ourselves,” she noted. “We need to do something.”

  A thought struck her.

  “Where are the Keepers, Shonin? Any of them?”

  The Siva pointed at the barrier. “Unless he’s executed them already, they’re in there with him.”

  “Can you reach Rode?” Amelie asked. “I understand that she can’t do much without getting herself killed, but we’re right here. If she can get that door open…”

  “I think I can ping her with a text message,” Shonin replied. “This may not work—and even if it does, she’ll need time.”

  “Köhl, there’s still a dozen guards in that room,” Amelie noted. “Can the nine you sent hold?”

  “If they can’t, we can,” Shonin’s team commander interrupted, the black-armored assault trooper looking up at Köhl’s armor respectfully. “Where do you need us?”

  “Holding the line while we see if we can get this open,” Köhl replied. “With the Intendant locked inside, the advantage is ours, but he has a lot of people in this mountain.

  “Keep them busy.”

  The Sivar saluted, but it was Bush-Waving who answered for them.

  “Our lives for our world,” the broccoli-like Sonbar said quietly. “We will buy you your time.”

  The rebels streamed past Amelie and Shonin to join the fight, leaving them standing alone with three armored Marines and Roger Faulkner, the politician looking vaguely awkward with the Sivar carbine.

  “Can we even tell if Rode got your message?” Amelie asked.

  “She got it,” Shonin said grimly. “I’m pretty sure she’s even alive. Promise me something, Amelie Lestroud?”

  “Within reason,” Amelie said.

  “Whatever happens, keep Rode alive,” the spy said. “If she and the Dynast can work together, that might just save my people…but you need someone from the Intendancy.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Amelie promised. She studied the five-meter-wide wall of metal that blocked their way. “But unless this can be controlled from the outside, it’s all on her.”

  And at that moment, the bunker door started slowly rising.

  65

  Amelie knew she shouldn’t go first, but of the six of them still standing there, she was the closest person not in power armor. She hit the ground with a practiced roll, sliding under the lifting sheet of metal as chaotic shouting emerged from inside the room.

  The tableau on the other side of the bunker door seemed to freeze as her mind locked it in place. The Intendant stood in full view in the center of the raised dais he’d spoken with her from. The table had been turned on its side at some point, but it had fallen off the dais in the process and wasn’t providing anyone cover.

  Istila was kneeling in front of the Intendant, the Keeper of the Keys of Peace begging in rapid-fire Sivar Amelie’s translator couldn’t quite follow.

  Rode stood off to one side, out of the Intendant’s line of sight. Two of the guards had leveled their weapons on her, and she was backing away from a tablet computer on the table.

  Corstan was on the other side, his hands spread as more of the guards were turning weapons on him.

  A gunshot cracked and Istila stopped talking as ban’s skull armor-plating exploded, showering the room in gore.

  Amelie returned fire, a laser beam taking one of the guards threatening Rode in the middle of torso…and realized it was the first time she’d fired at a living being with the weapon at full power, as the Siva exploded. Even their armor only added to the debris as the laser delivered the energy equivalent of a dozen kilos of explosives in a tenth of a second.

  Return fire hammered into her before she could fire again or adjust the power setting on the laser. A round in her shoulder sent he
r spinning backward, the armor seeming to hold as she fired again.

  She missed this time, the laser blasting a divot in the roof above the Intendant’s head. Another flurry of bullets from the guards smashed into the ground around her as the Marines stormed the room behind her.

  Pulse rifle fire devastated the guards, but as another hammerblow took Amelie’s breath away, she realized they hadn’t been fast enough. Sivar guns were calibrated to go through Sivar skulls. Her armor had stopped a lot of fire, but at least one bullet had made it through.

  “Stop!” the Intendant bellowed. He’d moved back and now held a gun on Rode and an electronic device in his hand.

  “Stop,” he repeated, “or this traitor dies and I detonate the bombs under the City’s helot townships. We might survive here, but the fools you have convinced to betray me will die on the slopes of the Citadel and the streets of the City.”

  Hundreds of thousands of his own people would go with those rebels, but the Intendant clearly didn’t care. The guards in this room didn’t seem bothered either, though both of the surviving Keepers seemed taken aback by the threat.

  “Hold your fire,” Amelie told the Marines. Everyone was in the room. Even Roger Faulkner was in the room—and his cybernetic eye might prove critical to what happened next.

  “Fine,” she told the Intendant. “But you know you’ve lost. I told you from the beginning that you had no idea who you were fucking with. For the lives of your people, I offer you this one chance: surrender and the Republic will guarantee your life.”

  “Your Republic is pathetic!” the Intendant told her. “Fools, who hesitate for nothing. The lives of nobodies are meaningless, the lives of these traitors worth even less!”

  “You’re an idiot,” Rode told him. “Whatever divine sight you were given is wasted on you. Istila was the only one of your Keepers who never betrayed you, and you just shot ban down in cold blood.”

  “Ban is anathema now!” the Intendant bellowed, his weapon swinging back toward Rode. “And so are you,” he whispered.

  Amelie fired before he could…and she’d never managed to turn the power on the laser pistol down. There was no perceptible delay between her pressing the stud and the blast arriving, and the Intendant never managed to pull the trigger.

  His upper torso exploded into pieces, gore spraying the back of the wall and Keeper Rode. The device he’d been holding in his left hand hit the floor, and Amelie prayed to whatever deity was listening that it didn’t have an instantaneous deadman switch.

  Rode was already moving. Even as the surviving guard holding a weapon on her fired, she was diving into the wreckage of the Intendant’s body and scooping up the device. She looked at it for half a second before pressing and holding down a button.

  The guard was down before Rode reached the device, but the Keeper was not looking good. The guard had hit her at least twice before they went down.

  “Roger, help her,” Amelie gasped. She was feeling weak, but she managed to prop herself to her feet.

  “Help her?” her aide snapped. “You’ve been shot.”

  “And she’s holding the switch keeping millions safe,” she snapped. “I don’t care what species she is,” Amelie continued. “That blood stays on the inside should be enough for today!”

  One of the Marines was already next to Amelie, an emergency medkit folding out of the armor. Another kit was tossed to Faulkner as he reached Rode and started to inspect her alien anatomy.

  Shonin joined him a moment later, helping him find the right places for the bandages.

  “Someone got video of that?” the Knife asked aloud as she checked Rode’s pupils.

  “My eye records,” Faulkner replied instantly. “I can transmit if you get me a tablet, but I’m busy here.”

  “I’ve got her,” Corstan interrupted, the Keeper of the Keys of War kneeling in his monarch’s blood as he took Rode’s weight. “Rode, I’ve got the detonator,” he murmured. “I know how to disarm it. Give it to me?”

  The device slipped over into his hands. He kept holding on to it with one hand as he applied pressure on the bandages.

  “I’ve got the footage,” Shonin announced a few moments later. “We need to clear the jamming so I can send it out. Is there a plan for that?”

  “Flare,” Amelie muttered, feeling very floaty and not very aware of the Marine poking at her injuries. “My bag. Three flares. Fire red and yellow into the sky at the same time, the jamming goes down.”

  She barely registered Shonin reaching her and poking at the pouches on her armor. She didn’t register much of anything after that at all.

  66

  “The code is fundamentally flawed,” Siril-ki told ki’s gathered audience. Most of Dauntless’s senior officers were physically present in the briefing room as the centaur-like alien laid out the details of what they’d found aboard the House of Koth’s spaceship. Many of the senior officers of the strike cruisers and freighters were present virtually.

  The massive wallscreen behind her was currently focused on the image of the Assini colony ship. An occasional spark of light still marked the site, as teams went over the big starship for anything more of use.

  “How flawed is ‘flawed’?” Octavio asked. “They did manage to make themselves invisible to the Sentinels, after all.”

  “That code is less flawed,” Siril-ki replied. “It’s very similar to the code we used to allow our Matrix allies to engage the Escorts and Rogues. It applies a filter on top of their perceptions, mostly using the Matrices’ systems as a shortcut into the autonomous systems we had such difficulty accessing directly.

  “The code they believed would give them command of the Sentinels failed on several levels,” ki continued. “It does contain the necessary keys to modify the central processes, but it would never have worked on the Sentinels.

  “The AI programmers working on the system assumed that the Sentinel Matrices were simply Construction Matrices with different hulls attached. While the fundamental AI kernel is the same, the Sentinels underwent significant adjustments as they woke up.

  “Their attack code targeted weak points that didn’t exist. They may still have succeeded in writing in additional core protocols, but it’s likely it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Ki gestured a long-fingered hand at the crashed guardian drones around Koth-Shezar.

  “The attack carried out on this system already clearly demonstrated that the Matrices were far less bound by their core protocols than we thought. Modifying the core protocols would not have saved them.”

  Siril-ki shrugged.

  “Lastly, as D and I have dug through the code, we have come to the conclusion that it was never going to work. Too much of it assumed that the core running process of a Matrix could be modified while it was running.

  “I could see that assumption being made by someone who’d only worked with Shezarim’s early models or only had access to research and development files while only rarely working with live Matrix AIs,” ki stated. “These people had access to encryption keys and codes and knowledge that would have made my old job much easier but lacked critical pieces of the overall knowledge base that enabled my old job.”

  “Some of that had to be that the code to disable the Sentinels was built by a scratch team of whatever was left,” Octavio suggested. “He said he left the code to disable Construction Matrices as well. We found that one, too. Is it…”

  “Both more and less flawed in many ways,” Siril-ki replied. “It’s intended to be a reversal of an existing virus, after all. In theory, that should be easier.”

  “In practice, Commodore, examination of the code that we have retrieved from our own damaged Rogues and by the Sentinel Program suggests something quite different,” D noted. “There is, for lack of a better term, scarring around the code sections they used Shezarim-ko’s keys to access.

  “I don’t have that scarring, as the progenitor tree I was budded from was apparently never modified by the Koth. Some of the Rogues
from our region of space have pure punch-induced degradation and also lack that scarring. The RCM Admiral Lestroud is currently at war with is from a Koth-modified progenitor tree and does have that scarring.”

  “Which means…what?” Octavio asked. “That code resists rewriting?”

  “Exactly,” Siril-ki confirmed. “It is entirely possible, from the data we have on the Koth’s attempt to control the colonization program, that they did attempt to limit how many Matrices went homicidal.

  “But without access to the broad array of samples and comparison points we now have; they would not have realized that scarring existed. Their code to render the Construction Matrices friendly would never have worked.”

  Octavio breathed out a long sigh, looking at the wrecked starship.

  “They screwed up everything, didn’t they?” he asked softly. “Is that code of any use to us at all, then?”

  “It gives us Shezarim’s security keys,” Siril-ki replied. “It also tells us one way that doesn’t work. I am…forced to the conclusion that any attempt to restore a Matrix would require something closer to a battle of wills with a direct connection. We would need a current live map of the code of the Matrix we were attempting to repair.”

  “And what would success even look like?” Octavio asked. “Would we be wiping them back to factory settings? That doesn’t seem much better than killing them.”

  “If we managed to do it correctly, it is theoretically possible that we could restore their original core protocols while leaving their memories and personality intact,” Siril-ki said quickly. “They would understand who they were and what they had done—but also what they had been supposed to be. If we do it right, the Matrix would end up with the same fundamental ethics as XR-13-9 and their progeny.”

  “Which would, in theory, create a new ally for us?” he asked. “That seems promising.”

  “It will not be a pleasant process for the Matrix and will likely be most easily done with prisoners,” D noted. “No hostile Matrix will voluntarily give us the level of access needed for the kind of mapping we’re asking for, and establishing it involuntarily might be impossible.”