Refuge

by Glynn Stewart

  He paused, considering how much of the complex story behind the Matrices to explain.

  “They are not intended to be used on inhabited worlds, but many of the robots involved are malfunctioning,” he finally explained. “We work with some that are not, but the ones here were definitely broken.”

  “If they are terraformers, will they undo the damage they have caused?” Sings asked.

  He couldn’t hear hope in the synthesized voice, but he suspected it was there. The aliens would have to be truly alien for that not to have raised some level of hope.

  “Not in a time frame that will save your people,” Octavio told her. He and his engineers had run the numbers a dozen times. “Your populace must be evacuated.”

  The channel was silent again.

  “So we concluded,” the alien finally said. “While I have not successfully communicated with leaders on the surface, the Mothers who lead our orbital industries have met with me. We will shortly begin the construction of spaceborne colonies…but I fear it will not be enough.”

  Octavio made a note to have Renaud and Das run an analysis of the local industrial platforms. He knew just how immense an undertaking Sings was planning. If they could put part of the local population aboard orbital colonies, he needed to know how much time that would buy them.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “We have an…option. An offer, if your people are willing to consider it.”

  “I would deal with hungry-shadows-of-darker-depths if it would save any of my people,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters told him. “What is your offer?”

  “It is not merely our offer,” he warned her. “Much of the resources involved will come from ships that look the same as those who attacked you. The Rogues who ruined your world have saner siblings, and they wish to help mitigate the Rogues’ crimes.

  “If you are prepared to let us help evacuate, however…”

  It was hard to judge much through a translator and a culture gap, but Octavio suspected that Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters was significantly older and more experienced than he was. She asked few questions as he explained what Exilium and the Matrices were going to try to do, but they were key questions.

  When he was done explaining, she was silent for a good twenty seconds.

  “It must be done,” she said finally. “I will speak with the Mothers of our orbital industries again. It will buy us time if we can move a portion of the population to the void-sea, but we must focus on vastly expanding our capacity to lift the People from the surface.”

  “We also fear that you will come under attack again,” Octavio warned her. “We don’t know much about how the Rogue Matrices think, but from how the Matrices we work with operate, we can probably expect a significantly stronger force to deploy as soon as they can muster it.”

  “And you know no more about their ability to do so than we do,” Sings said. “We cannot spare the capacity to build new guardships. Each of the vessels of the Star-Choirs was multiple orbits of work. I suspect we will not have time to build new ones.”

  “Your weapons are more powerful than either the Matrices or we had anticipated,” Octavio replied. He’d run some rough schematics himself of the possibilities those bomb-lasers enabled. “There are some technological upgrades we can provide that should be within your manufacturing capability. It may be possible for you to construct smaller vessels to deploy your expendable munitions.”

  Sings paused.

  “It may,” she confirmed. “I will consult with my Voices-Over-Voices. Certainly, even what limited stockpiles of munitions we have will more than exceed the capacity of our remaining vessels to carry them.

  “We are repairing our own ships. Can we assist you with repairing your own vessel?”

  “We were equipped for a long-distance survey mission, First-Among-Speakers,” Octavio told her with a smile. “Point us at a metallic asteroid you don’t mind losing and we’ll be fine.”

  “I will see that my Voices send you several suitable candidates,” Sings promised. “We will also provide you with complete breakdowns of our industrial systems. Hopefully, we can assemble some kind of fleet to defend View-Over-Starry-Oceans.”

  “The Matrices will be here shortly, but they cannot help defend you,” he warned her. “They are AIs and cannot go against core protocols that prevent them firing on other Matrices.

  “All they can do is enable the evacuation.”

  “That is more than I hope for,” Sings said. “We have no capacity to travel between the stars ourselves. If you and these Matrices can help us leave Orb-Of-Hearth-Warmth and preserve our people, then we have hope we did not have before.”

  “Their names are a giant mouthful,” Das noted as the senior officers gathered in Octavio’s break-out room. “View-Over-Starry-Oceans?!”

  “It’s a quirk of the translation software,” Africano told the other woman. “Concepts that we don’t have an exact word for get translated into multi-word phrases. We can program in alternative translations, but we need to encounter them first.”

  “Let’s start with the planet and the people, then,” Octavio told the com officer. “View-Over-Starry-Oceans sounds close enough to…hrm.” He thought for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Vista. We’ll call it Vista and the People-Of-Ocean-Sky can go in our records as Vistans. It’s not like we can actually pronounce their language, so the translator will give them back the right terminology anyway.”

  “They call the star Orb-Of-Hearth-Warmth,” Renaud added. “Hearthfire?”

  “Works for me,” Octavio confirmed. “Africano?”

  “Already programming them in,” the officer replied, her fingers flying over her tattoo-comp. “Quite the mess down there.”

  “My impression is that our new friend Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters and her industrialist ‘Mothers’ are going to have to take control,” the Captain said bluntly. It was a hard thing for an ex-rebel to consider, but he didn’t see any other choice for their allies. “From the data we’re getting from the Guardian-Star-Choir, there should be entire intact nations in the undamaged areas of Vista, but fear and panic have collapsed order down there.”

  “Even including their logistics support, it looks like the Star-Choirs have less then fifty thousand people left,” Renaud pointed out. “That’s not much to take control of a planet with.”

  “They’ve also got the orbitals and the only way out,” Octavio said. “And my impression is that Sings herself is made of iron. She’s going to save her people, no matter what it takes.”

  “What about us?” Renaud asked.

  “Right now, we’re in Commander Tran’s gentle hands,” the Captain replied, gesturing to the chief engineer. He, after all, had no business getting his hands dirty in Engineering anymore. “Are we in good-enough shape to go hunting raw material for replacement parts?”

  “We won’t be moving quickly, but we can move fast enough for that,” the engineer confirmed. “I mean, I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that we’re screwed if we try and face off against another fleet like that.”

  “We shouldn’t have survived, let alone won,” Octavio agreed. “But we did, so now we’re going to try and keep these people alive.”

  “Hell of a task, sir,” Renaud said quietly. “And it doesn’t even look like there’s a government for us to negotiate with.”

  “If the job were easy, it wouldn’t have called for veterans of the Exile Fleet,” the Captain said firmly. “This ship, these people? Some of us have been with the old man since the Battle of Conestoga. That’s most of a decade, and we’ve had Admiral Lestroud’s back the whole way.”

  He shook his head.

  “Admiral Lestroud and President Lestroud have tasked us with keeping these people safe until they can be evacuated. We can’t protect them from the hellstorm their world is about to become, but we most definitely can find ways to make sure the Matrices don’t try and finish the job.”

  Octavio smiled. He was confident in his ability to co
mmand a starship—and just the fact that Vista was intact enough for them to evacuate suggested that he was better than he’d sometimes feared at that job.

  The solution to this problem, however, was going to be an engineering one.

  “So, while Lieutenant Commander Daniel is getting us to the rock Lieutenant Commander Tran is going to chop up to fix us, I want everyone else looking at what we’ve got. Look at our tech databases, our fabrication suite, our weapons systems…and look at what the Vistans are giving us on all of what they have.

  “We’ve got some impressive big siblings heading our way, but they’re still six months away. If the Matrices get here before Admiral Lestroud does, we will hold the Hearthfire System.

  “Am I clear?”

  10

  Once, Amelie Lestroud had been the darling of the entertainment industry of every human star system, shuttled from world to world to take up the most audacious of roles, ranging from the beautiful love interest to the hard-bitten fleet commander.

  That mobility had allowed her to put together her revolution, and it had been the life she’d been used to. It was strange to now be so thoroughly tied to one place—and such a tiny place at that! Four million people barely counted as a large city by Confederacy standards. A colony’s first wave of colonization was usually smaller than that, but with dozens of worlds to draw on for recruits, it was a rare colony that wasn’t over four million in its capital city alone after five years.

  Exilium wasn’t going to draw new recruits. They’d been flung seventy thousand light-years through a one-way wormhole with no way home. They were there to stay, and no one was joining them.

  That was part of what made the Vistans so important to her. Another sentient species as allies would help the Republic she’d helped birth feel less alone out there. The Matrices were alive and people, but it wasn’t quite the same.

  If nothing else, the Matrices were usually spaceships.

  “Enter,” she said in response to her door chime ringing. She’d already allowed herself to be distracted away from the task at hand by her maudlin thoughts and the view of Starhaven.

  Her office was on the top floor of one of the two towers dedicated to the Republic’s government. From there, she could see everything as easily as she could from her official residence.

  That would be a solid legacy to leave to whomever took over the job from her.

  The slim, dark-skinned woman who entered her office was high on the list of potential candidates for that. Emilia Nyong’o’s only official qualification for her current role was that she’d been able to convince twenty-four of Exilium’s forty Senators to elect her to the position.

  The theory—and the successful practice, so far—had been that the Prime Minister could deliver a reliable majority in the Senate and work with the President to keep things running smoothly. The Republic of Exilium had a clear split between the executive powers of the President and the legislative leadership of the Prime Minister.

  “Emilia,” Amelie greeted the other woman. “What’s up?”

  Nyong’o shook her head at Amelie and put the bottle and two glasses she was holding in her left hand on the President’s desk.

  “We’re long out of champagne from Champagne, but we’ve started to make a solid sparkling wine of our own,” she said as she poured two glasses half-full of the golden liquid.

  “To the revolution,” she continued, passing Amelie one glass.

  Amelie raised her own glass in the toast and checked the date. September 28, 2391.

  Four years to the day from when Amelie Lestroud had been elected President of the ill-fated survivors of her revolution against the First Admiral of the Confederacy.

  She took a sip and sighed, offering the glass up for a second toast.

  “To a bunch of idiot revolutionaries a long damn way from home,” she said.

  Nyong’o laughed and clinked the glasses.

  “I can drink to that. It’s why I’m here,” she admitted, taking a seat.

  “I’d forgotten about the anniversary myself,” Amelie replied. The Republic recognized the day they’d landed on Exilium as a national holiday, but that was it. The slew of other critical dates between the revolution and then had been less positive.

  They had, after all, all been dates when Adrienne Gallant had discovered ways to screw them over.

  “What’s going on in the Senate?” Amelie continued, considering Nyong’o’s words.

  “They’ve approved the funding for the acceleration of the new-generation warships and everything else to do with the Vista expedition,” the Prime Minister told her. “But there’s some ugly codicils that got tucked into it.”

  “They realize I don’t need their permission for this, right?” Amelie replied.

  “I know that, and they know that,” the other woman agreed. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t make your life hell. Everyone is on board with this expeditionary force, Amelie. It’s what comes after that the Senate wants to have a say in.”

  Amelie made a go on gesture.

  “Key members wanted me to warn you that they will try to cut the mission off, hard, if they think we’re getting in too deep. I don’t think there’s a Senator that doesn’t want to help these Vistans, but they’re a long way from here, and our resources are stretched thin as it is.”

  There were ways the Senate could do that, Amelie knew. She’d made sure they were in the constitution—if nothing else, as Nyong’o had pointed out, she was only going to be President for another year.

  “I know that,” Amelie told her. “But we can’t stand by and watch a billion people die.”

  “And we won’t,” Nyong’o agreed. “The vote to support the mission was unanimous, Amelie. But if the mission consumes too many resources or goes too long, they’re going to start trying to legislate away your authority over it and the funding that can be spent on it.”

  “They’ll need a majority for that.”

  “And I don’t think they’ll get it…so long as you are President.”

  And there was the crux of the matter. By the time the one-twenty-eight ships of the first wave expeditionary force made it back to Exilium, Amelie’s term as President would be almost up.

  “We’re not reopening the constitution before the first President’s term is over,” Amelie told Nyong’o. “We set that term limit for a reason and I stand by it.”

  “Right now, the field for replacing you is still wide open,” her Prime Minister replied. “I’ll be honest: even if you’re in my job, you could probably keep the Expeditionary Force going.”

  Amelie snorted.

  “You and I both know that if I run for Senate, I become Prime Minister whether I want to or not,” she noted. “And we also both know that if I serve as Prime Minister after being President, I’ll end up still running the country.

  “And then we get to the point where if Amelie Lestroud is the manager of the Starhaven Steakhouse, the manager of the Starhaven Steakhouse is the actual ruler of the Republic.

  “I will not permit that to happen.”

  “Then you better make damn sure your successor both understands the goals of the Expeditionary Force and commands the respect of the Senate!”

  Amelie studied Nyong’o for a moment and laughed.

  “You realize I can immediately think of a candidate who fits both of those, right?”

  From the horrified expression Emilia Nyong’o leveled at her, that thought hadn’t occurred to her.

  11

  They’d never expected the Republic to need a shipyard as quickly as it had. The modules that the Confederacy had included in their “deluxe colony setup” package—the benefit of Isaac’s being the First Admiral’s son, if also a rebel—had included a lot of industrial space platforms, but not a dedicated shipyard.

  In the aftermath of the first expedition against the Rogues, though, Isaac had come home with two battlecruisers literally welded together to form one ship. With only destroyers to protect the Republic, h
e and Linton had decided that something was needed.

  Now a shuttle carried the Admiral toward the platform they’d built, and he couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe. They’d started with a foundry intended to roll steel plates, a lot of loose girders and a few dozen small work shuttles.

  That crude beginning, with some help from the Matrices, had turned the wreckage of Vigil and Dante into a working battlecruiser. Dante, still commanded by Captain Margaret Anderson, now hung in a polar orbit above Exilium.

  The yards had seen every ship in the Exilium Space Fleet since. First, they’d added warp rings to the ships without them, then they’d rebuilt the missile cruisers, and then they’d gone back and updated all of the warp rings to the one-twenty-eight standard.

  “There she is,” Commodore Lauretta Giannovi told Isaac as she watched over his shoulder. Still dark compared to many of Exilium’s residents, his old flag Captain was pale compared to him.

  Vigil had been her command, and the decision to rebuild the wreckage as Dante had shunted her into a staff role.

  The ship she was pointing out, however, was a new Vigil. Bigger than the older ship, she came in at just under half a kilometer long. Like most warp-drive ships, she looked like an arrow with a ring in front of the fletching, but the “arrowhead” was longer and thicker proportionally than on most ships.

  Like her predecessor, she was built around a spinal particle cannon—though the new weapon was orders of magnitude more powerful. Like Dante, she carried Matrix-style gamma ray lasers. Like her newly refitted lesser siblings, she had lighter particle cannons mounted in turrets and rows of pulse guns.

  With the help of the Matrices, humanity had built a production facility for exotic matter in the outer edges of the Exilium System. The robots had been confused by the Republic’s request for assistance in capturing four microsingularities…right up until the first mass-production quantities of exotic matter rolled out of the facility.