Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Isaac exhaled a long sigh, studying them.

  “You know what I need from you,” he told them. “We came here for ships and help, not to get tied up in rebuilding a hundred-year-old empire into something that can survive.

  “We can help, I think,” he allowed. God knew that the Republic was made up of the Confederacy’s troublemakers and freethinkers. They’d arrived with more political scientists than road-builders. “But help is all we can do. We can’t tell you what seven different cultures will even regard as equitable.

  “I can tell you that slavery and the tribute system won’t work,” he concluded dryly, “but the rest of it you’ll have to sort out on your own. We can help, but it has to be your people making the final decisions.”

  “An advantage, then, of the horrendous tribute system that we must dismantle,” the Kond suggested. “We can gather educated members of all of the races we want to include in this new Governance with ease.

  “We can ask for volunteers from the other worlds, but their leaders will hesitate to come to Aris.”

  “We need to make a gesture to prove that we mean it when we say we will not use force,” Corstan told them. “I think there is a way that also meets the Admiral’s needs. If the Dynast is prepared to sign your alliance, I think we should reduce our forces in every inhabited system to a single battle group—including Aris.

  “That would give us fifteen battleships and ninety cruisers that would need to go somewhere else. To the side of an ally in desperate need of our help seems appropriate, does it not?”

  “I am more than prepared to sign that alliance,” Silleck said. “That was almost presumed, in fact. Would that serve your needs and desires, Admiral, in exchange for your Republic’s help in our transition?”

  “It would,” he allowed. A hundred starships? Refitting them all with warp drives was going to be a nightmare…but he could see ways to make it work. It would take a lot of help from XR-13-9, but that wasn’t new.

  “I will present your offer to my leaders,” he told them. “At the very least, we will keep a force here to protect Aris and an embassy here to keep our promise to act as guarantor.”

  His tattoo-comp buzzed.

  “But that is my timer,” he continued. “I promised Amelie I would fly up with her.”

  “Do not break that promise,” Silleck urged. “Know that our hopes are with you. This world—the entire Governance—owes Minister Amelie Lestroud a greater debt than many of our people yet know.”

  The Siva shook her head.

  “They will know,” she insisted. “But I would rather that knowledge be of a living hero and not of a dead legend.”

  69

  Amelie woke up with her chest still hurting. There was a different tone to the pain, though. It was different in several ways, and a cautiously mindful breath revealed one of them: she wasn’t breathing through a tube anymore.

  There were new sorenesses across her chest, presumably where medical nanites were knitting flesh around surgical sutures. All of it was more dulled now than it had been under Sivar care as well.

  She was pretty sure she was in the hands of doctors who understood human physiology well enough to properly medicate her. If it was Vigil’s doctors, as she’d been promised, they had a complete-enough medical assessment of her, specifically, to make just about anything possible.

  Her eyelids were a bit stiff, but she managed to blink most of the gunk away and slowly open her eyes. The room was dimly lit, but a slow and careful glance confirmed what she’d expected.

  There was a small bed, a shelf of cabinets, and a full array of life-support equipment. She’d seen the private care rooms aboard Vigil before—and she recognized that the chair Isaac had fallen asleep in was extraordinarily uncomfortable for that purpose.

  “Hey, you,” she said as loud as she could. It was mostly a coughing whisper, but it woke him up.

  “You’re awake!” he said with an apparently unforced cheerfulness. “They told me it would be soon, but…it’s been a while, my love.”

  He offered her a glass of water before she could try and cough out a request. She used the first mouthful to wash her mouth out into a tray that her husband also managed to produce without asking.

  “You’re not the first friend I’ve seen wake up from shrapnel in the lung,” he told her questioning gaze as he offered the water again.

  She drank more before she replied, trying to clear the dryness from her throat.

  “Thank you for being here when I woke up,” she said quietly.

  “I said I would be here until you did.” He leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “Though I should probably go fetch a doctor, they’re probably aware you’re awake and just giving us privacy.”

  “Brief me?” she asked.

  He laughed softly.

  “After the doctor,” he said firmly. “I love you and I understand completely…but I’m going to let the doc tell me it’s okay before I bring you up to speed.”

  The examination was even less comfortable than Amelie had expected, with much of her skin screaming in protest at being prodded, but Dr. Nakajima seemed content.

  “There are artificial sheaths around your lungs right now,” the chubby young doctor told her. He was being very careful, Amelie noted, to make sure that the water glass by her elbow was staying full and that there was always a fresh ration bar to hand.

  Accelerated regeneration was hard on the body, and the body compensated by gobbling up every calorie in sight. She wasn’t sure how many of the ration bars she’d eaten while he’d been examining her—but she suspected Dr. Nakajima did know.

  “That sounds uncomfortable,” she told him.

  “Understandable,” he agreed. “They’ll act as a framework for your own cells to grow onto and then be metabolized by your body. It’s a clever design, one that works well with the accelerated regen.

  “Other than your lungs, most of the damage was relatively minor except for being inside you,” he continued. “The regen process has taken care of almost all of that already, but you’ll feel sore for a few days.

  “I would strongly recommend bed rest and extra food for at least forty-eight hours.”

  “Can Isaac brief me?” Amelie asked, glancing at where her husband was doing his best not to hover over a man who was technically his subordinate.

  “The Admiral can bring you up to date, but I strictly forbid you from doing any work—and I include ‘simple phone calls,’ Ambassador—until those forty-eight hours are up. Fair?”

  “Fair,” she allowed. “I just need to know what’s going on.”

  “It’s been eighteen days since you were shot,” Nakajima pointed out. “I would be stunned if you did not feel that way, ma’am. Like I said, the Admiral can brief you, but you are to watch your energy levels and remain on bed rest.

  “Understood? I can limit your visiting hours if needed.”

  The threat was quite clear, and she smiled at the younger man.

  “I’ll be good, I promise.”

  Amelie got herself propped up in her bed and was eyeing the latest of the bars Nakajima had left with her when Isaac knocked again.

  It wasn’t that she wasn’t hungry. It was that there were only so many of the things she could eat in a row.

  “Come in!” she instructed. She wasn’t sure why it was taking so long until she looked up and saw that a nurse was holding the door open for her Admiral husband—because Isaac’s hands were full with an overflowing tray of food.

  “I asked the officers’ mess and Parminder to put together a care package,” he told her as he and the nurse managed to set the tray up on her lap.

  He grinned at the stack of hot food and freshly baked pastries.

  “I thought they’d overdone it,” he admitted, “but then Parminder reminded me of how much I ate the one time I ended up on accelerated regen.”

  That had been a much-younger Isaac Lestroud—Commander Gallant then, as Amelie understood it. Parminder Singh had been her
husband’s steward for a long time. He’d been a key figure in the covert communication network that had finally put them in touch with each other before the revolution, too.

  She grabbed a bowl of steaming soup and leaned back against the pillows.

  “Okay, so, you’ve assuaged the doctor’s concern about my appetite and healing process,” she told Isaac. “Now spill. Brief me.”

  “The Governance is tentatively under control,” he said. “The Rogue hasn’t budged from their system. The Senate is threatening to explicitly define an ex-President as sufficiently military for them to award you the Medal of Valor.”

  “Bullshit,” she snapped, wincing as her chest pulled.

  “I love you and that was an amazing stunt, but I’m going to hold the line on that one,” Isaac agreed. “We have a few other things we can hang on you without putting the Medal of Valor on you.” He snorted. “Not that your Marines are avoiding them.”

  “That I can live with and agree to,” Amelie said. “But if they try and hang anything on me, they can stuff it. I did my job.”

  “Your job,” Isaac echoed with an arched eyebrow. “Overthrowing governments is now your job, is it?”

  “Surviving was my job. Overthrowing the Intendant was convenient and seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “Fair enough,” he allowed. “Silleck is now officially at the top of the heap, but she’s basically using the three Keepers as the other parts of a four-sided governing council. She also made the Kond her new Keeper of the Keys of Peace, which seems to be working.”

  “She kept Rode and Corstan?”

  “And helped keep the existing military and civilian authorities happy by doing so,” Isaac confirmed. “Right now, the Governance—excluding Sonbar, which is well on its way to content permanent independence—is restless but has accepted the authority of the caretaker government.

  “For our part, we’re delivering a massive dump of social-science databases and have some of our best sociologists on the tachyon com with the new government,” he said. “A team is being pulled together to make the trip out to help on a more hands-on basis, but it’s a long flight. A hundred and fifteen light-years takes most of six months, and Silleck has committed to standing down after fourteen months.”

  “If she manages that, she might go down as a damn hero,” Amelie muttered.

  “We are here to enforce her promises,” Isaac pointed out. “I suspect she’ll aim for some kind of popular mandate, either by election or by asking a referendum to restore the Dynasty under specific terms.

  “If she goes for the latter, we’ll make sure it’s a constitutional monarchy,” he promised. “But that might be the best option for Aris. And the rest of the Governance, well…” he shrugged. “They may not care who rules here. The terms of that relationship will need to be negotiated. We’ll provide mediators, but that has to be a conversation now—even with the purely Sivar colonies.”

  “Messy but doable,” Amelie said. “My job, I guess.”

  “Your people, at least,” he replied, squeezing her hand as she put the empty soup bowl down and carefully selected one of the croissants. Singh knew exactly how she liked the pastries from her home country.

  “What about the alliance?” she asked.

  “I signed it three days ago,” Isaac admitted. “I thought it should be Roger, but everyone insisted. The Sivar Governance is now officially a member of our little club…but so is the Sonba High Grove.

  “Of course, the Sivar have a fleet.” He shook his head. “They’ve asked me to take a large chunk of it elsewhere. Everyone seems to feel that the negotiations with the colonies and conquests will go more evenly without the Sivar having the biggest club in the region.

  “They’re giving me fifteen battleships and almost a hundred cruisers, well over half their fleet.”

  Amelie considered that while inhaling a large mug of hot chocolate that was almost too rich for her.

  “I thought their ships were useless,” she asked.

  “Their missiles are useless, their ships lack warp drives, and their energy weapons are short-ranged—but those lasers are worth something, at least” he concluded. “There are Matrix transports punching their way over from Exilium as we speak. The system one star-lane from here, Koras, is going to become our refit yard.

  “We’ll strap warp drives to them and reshape their exterior hulls to get two-fifty-six ships out of them. The lasers stay the same and we refit the launchers to fire Matrix reactionless-drive weapons.”

  He shrugged.

  “We know the Construction Matrices’ defenses won’t blink at a few hundred missiles, but stacking their weapons with our own Matrix fleet’s missiles, we can test to see if they blink at a few hundred thousand.”

  “Does that change the math enough?” she asked. “You don’t have that many more of our ships, and if their main firepower is only potentially useful…”

  Isaac looked away.

  “There’s only so much time,” he admitted. “We won’t even have them all. The Rogue knows we prepped for an attack and abandoned it now. Thirteen-Nine calculates that we can’t give them more than maybe twenty weeks to get ready.

  “First refit yards will be online in a week. It’s a six-week flight from here to the Rogue’s system, assuming they don’t try and run before then. Twelve weeks of refits gives us all fifteen battleships and thirty of the cruisers. We pick up a few more strike cruisers from our allies, but it’s a mostly a wash after we secure the Sivar and Sonbar Systems as we’ve promised those governments.”

  “You went in last time with a fifty/fifty chance,” she said quietly, pausing in the middle of a sandwich to talk. “How much better are these odds?”

  “The Rogue knows we’re coming now,” he told her. “They haven’t even tried to push the blockade, and the only reason I can see for that is if they’re augmenting their defenses. Even with the Sivar, the odds might only be fifty/fifty again.

  “At best.”

  Amelie put the sandwich down as she closed her eyes.

  “Can we do anything else?” she asked.

  “We’ve neutralized, we believe, every set of constructors this Rogue has out there,” Isaac told her. “But if we leave it be, it will turn that entire star system into warships and constructor spikes. Every scrap of ore that can be refined will become a Matrix combat unit.

  “XR-13-9 can match that, sort of, but they have to have to deal with an overriding drive to construct new worlds,” he continued. “Without being under existential threat, XR-13-9 can’t stop terraforming planets. It’s not in their base nature.”

  “But you have a plan?” Amelie asked.

  “You didn’t get Octavio’s final reports,” Isaac said. “He found out who broke the Construction Matrices. He found out why…and he found out how. They were a bunch of rogue Assini, and they thought they could make the Construction Matrices safe again.”

  “We have their code?” she demanded, stiffening up. That cost her a coughing fit so bad, she dropped her sandwich.

  “We’re pushing this too hard, love,” he told her. “We need to take a break.”

  “You don’t get to tell me we have the code that broke the Matrices and then take a break, Isaac Lestroud,” she told him as she sipped water to ease her throat.

  “We have the code that was supposed to fix them, but it won’t work,” he said with a sigh. “I’ve been talking to XR-13-9 directly, though, and he and the Assini think they’ve found a derived method that will.

  “I just need to make that giant mechanical bastard blink.”

  Amelie exhaled slowly as she considered.

  “Hence a few hundred thousand missiles, I take it?” she asked.

  “Exactly. If I pull this off, not only is this Rogue done, but we have a strategy that should work on them all,” Isaac told her. “If this works, we might even be able to launch portions of it through the network that links the Regional Construction Matrices and fix half of them in one move.


  “We might just end this war in one attack, my love.”

  “I understand,” Amelie said, taking Isaac’s hand. “But you know what that means, right?”

  He looked at her in confusion.

  “If this is the end and you’re putting your own sexy black butt out there to make it happen, I’m coming with you.”

  Isaac was going to argue. Amelie knew that.

  She also knew that when it was over, she was going to be there when they brought down the Rogue that had almost killed the Vistans and had killed at least six other species.

  70

  Vigil was the fourth battlecruiser to emerge into the Rogue’s system, the last of the Republic heavy ships to emerge from warped space. Four Vistan ships, two Tohnbohn ships and two Skree-Skree ships followed the Republic flagship.

  Nineteen weeks of training and exercises since Amelie had begun her recovery had seen the entire fleet moving like a well-oiled machine. The entire process took under five seconds, an absolute necessity as they’d picked an emergence point inside weapons range of the middle perimeter of fortresses around the Regional Construction Matrix.

  They completely bypassed the outermost defenses, a loose circuit of mostly missile platforms almost five million kilometers out from the gas giant the Rogue had anchored their operations on.

  The middle network was “only” a million kilometers out, which meant that it could pose a real threat to the fleet if they tried to bypass it—plus, training or not, Isaac wasn’t entirely confident that his fleet was up to the precision warp maneuvering necessary to do so.

  Four light-seconds was about as close as he wanted to get to a super-Jovian gas giant in warped space. That meant his fleet was emerging within one light-second of the middle defenses—but while it wasn’t really possible to surprise an AI, their weapons needed time to power up as much as anyone else’s.

  Time Isaac’s fleet didn’t give them.

  Fourteen heavy particle cannon tore into the closest fortresses, with seventy heavy lasers and over twice that in light particle cannon hitting the stations farther away. By the time the last strike cruiser emerged, five seconds after Fortitude had led the way, every station within half a million kilometers was wreckage.