Crusade (Exile Book 3) Read online

  “Your guests are here, Admiral,” one of the Marine guards told him.

  “Send them all in,” he ordered.

  Vice Admiral Lauretta Giannovi was first. She’d hitched her wagon to his rising star in the military of the Terran Confederacy a long time before. When he’d risen to command a battle group in his mother’s fleet, Lauretta Giannovi had commanded his battlecruiser flagship.

  She’d followed him into rebellion and remained the second-ranked officer of the Exilium Space Fleet. She was a tall and dark-skinned woman, pale only in comparison to him, and they traded nods as she took her seat across from him.

  Giannovi was the only other human in the room. The senior Republic officer after Isaac himself, she acted as the sub-commander for the Republic contingent while he commanded the entire fleet.

  He knew Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies relatively well. The Vistan had served as gunnery officer on the flagship of Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters, the leader of their defensive militia, when the Matrices had arrived to Construct their world.

  He’d skyrocketed in rank since then, an inevitable consequence of being competent in an explosively expanding military facing a battle for the very existence of their species.

  Swimmer looked like a large, squat frog, with massive expanses of darker skin along his neck and head that acted as sonar receivers. He had both gills and mouths on either side of his neck as well, and his breathing through his gills created an echoing series of chirps that allowed him to “see” the world. The bulbous eyes on the top of a Vistan’s head were all but useless.

  Lord of Seven Stars ThreeHeart followed the Vistan. The two aliens were both roughly the same height, barely a hundred and sixty centimeters tall, but ThreeHeart was both skinnier and more hunched over than the amphibious Vistan. The Skree-Skree looked very rodent-like to human eyes, with a long tail and a body that permanently leaned forward.

  Of course, where a rodent would have had fur, a Skree-Skree had light blue feathers and a beak instead of a muzzle. The rapid-fire chirping of their language was almost as impossible for a human to understand as the two-mouthed speech of a Vistan.

  Last, as Isaac had come to expect, was Oohoon. The Tohnbohn was a large creature, nearly the size of the horse-like Assini whose pacifism kept them a long way from this mission, wrapped in a heavy shell. They had eight stubby legs emerging from the bottom of the shell that moved them along, and four long and delicate arms that could emerge from anywhere around the shell.

  Similarly, they had four “heads” that were really just stalks with two eyes on them. The Tohnbohn’s mouth and vocal organs were concealed and protected inside the shell, the echo helping create an almost whalesong-esque tone to their language.

  Oohoon started speaking, and it took a moment for the computerized translator in Isaac’s ear to catch up with the soft, slow song.

  “Will Twenty-Five be joining us?”

  “I have linked in, Eminence Oohoon,” ZDX-175-25’s mechanized voice sounded in the room. The Tohnbohn had a translator inside their shell that would be giving them a translated version of Twenty-Five’s words.

  “My remotes are currently busy engaging in analysis of the Rogue dreadnought,” Twenty-Five continued. “I believe that was a higher priority that having a physical presence at this meeting.”

  ThreeHeart’s rapid-fired chirps and squeaks answered.

  “I agree. Rescue of our injured and assessment of that vessel are highest priority,” the Skree-Skree fleet commander noted when the translator caught up. “I am concerned that such a ship may be on its way to my own world to complete what they once began!”

  “I’m concerned that ships like it are headed to all of our worlds,” Isaac admitted, which struck all of the others silent. “VK, Twenty-Five. How many of these things might our Rogue have built?”

  “It is difficult to be certain,” Twenty-Five replied. “This vessel is in neither our databanks nor the databanks from Shezarim.”

  Shezarim had been the Assini evacuation ship that Isaac and his people had ended up rescuing. So far as anyone could tell, the five thousand or so Assini on that ship were the last survivors of their race—a scouting expedition had been sent to their home system, but Shezarim had barely escaped ahead of a world-killing solar flare.

  The ship had carried a full database of everything the Assini had developed since unleashing the Matrices on the galaxy. It was that database that had seen Isaac’s ships and the Matrices upgraded—and that had underwritten the construction of the new battlecruisers currently on their way from Exilium.

  “But it is based on the hull structure in our databanks for the Regional Construction Matrix,” VK said. “That requires eighteen months to construct. Presuming they are using a somewhat upgraded combat platform AI rather than a full RCM, and that the vessel is lacking the internal storage and shipyards of an RCM, the weapons and engines could take another eight to ten months.”

  “So, they started building these after we kicked their asses at Vista,” Isaac concluded. “That explains why they didn’t come back before the evacuation was done.”

  “The number of these dreadnoughts available to the Matrix is limited but unknown,” Twenty-Five concluded. “Standard protocols would indicate that a minimum of three be constructed—one to carry out the first counterstrike and two to provide the doubled-strength follow-up if that failed.”

  “Except we were lured into a trap,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies said. “We once again forgot that our enemy, while mechanical, is intelligent.”

  “The situation is more complicated than that, Third-Among-Singers,” Isaac replied. “All of our intelligence was quite certain that the Regional Construction Matrix was here. The data lined up and our initial scouts saw the dreadnought, which was built to appear to be an RCM.”

  He shook his head.

  “For our intelligence to bring us here with the level of certainty we had, I think our enemy has been leading us on this chase for at least six months. Perhaps a year. We know they will protect the Regional Matrix at any price.

  “Everything they have done for the last year led up to this. I don’t know if they expected the dreadnought to win or if they expected us to think we’d killed the Regional Matrix when we took it down. In either case, they’ve been setting us up for a while.”

  “We will need to review all of our thoughts and divinations for that time,” Oohoon stated. “Our enemy is clever. The fault does not rest on us, Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies.”

  Isaac waved a hand at the holographic presentation. Swimmer couldn’t see it, but there was also a speaker in the room, creating the right series of chirps for the Vistan to get the same three-dimensional image as the rest of the sub-commanders.

  “Oohoon touches on a key point,” he admitted. “We need to reassess our assumptions and re-scout systems we’ve previously ignored. That will take time and deployment of lighter ships.”

  “Most of that should be carried out by our recon nodes,” Twenty-Five offered. “Our ships are much faster than the rest of the alliance’s.”

  “They’d also kill any of the rest of us who came along,” Giannovi muttered. “But Twenty-Five is right, Admiral. That’s a task for the recon nodes. What do we do with the rest of the fleet?”

  Isaac tapped a command, swapping out the astrographic map with a listing of the damage reports.

  “Spring Dream is probably the least damaged ship in the fleet,” he noted, highlighting the Vistan battlecruiser flagship. “Left to her own devices, she could be back up to full capacity in two or three weeks.”

  Vigil was only a few days behind her. Macbeth, on the other hand, was going to have to be towed into warp.

  “We need to rest and repair, and many of our ships are not in a state to carry out their own repairs,” he continued.

  “The yards we have assembled in Skree-Skree are due to complete their battlecruisers in a few days,” ThreeHeart squeaked. “If we bring the fleet there, those yards can see to our repairs as quickly
as possible.”

  Short of scattering the fleet to half a dozen systems, some of them months of travel away, Isaac saw no better option. He was glad the Skree-Skree had suggested it himself, though. That meant Isaac wasn’t asking the aliens to take on the task of repairing the entire fleet.

  “If your people are willing, that is the optimal solution,” he agreed. “We have further reinforcements already on the way from Exilium and Vista. Oohoon—I will need to make contact with the Great Ones and see if they can spare more ships.

  “We missed our enemy. The next time we find them, they’ll have more of these dreadnoughts with them,” he concluded grimly. “We need to be ready for that.”

  The four Fortitude-class battlecruisers on their way from Exilium would go a long way toward that. They were the culmination of everything Isaac’s one-eyed wizard of a tech genius could pull out of the Matrix and Assini files.

  “Your Great Voice,” Oohoon replied, their words slow as always. “She also said she might have more allies for us soon.”

  That could only be Amelie Lestroud, Isaac knew. The former President of Exilium had been the leader of the rebellion that had ended in the humans being exiled out there. She’d been the ambassador to both the Skree-Skree and the Oohoon.

  It was a job that made sure no one tried to go to the old boss to override the new boss—and one that Isaac had approved of for personal reasons. It was, after all, generally a good thing to have your wife with you instead of six months’ travel away!

  “That is what she hopes,” he agreed. “We won’t know for sure until Amelie makes contact. We only know that we have found another new species. We don’t know what they’re like just yet.”

  Having his wife nearby was good. So was having a supremely competent partner who could forge interstellar multispecies treaties and bring new allies into the fight.

  It just meant that sometimes he had to let her go do things even he thought were insanely dangerous!

  4

  Amelie Lestroud knew perfectly well that she had no place on the bridge of a battlecruiser anywhere near a potential conflict. She also knew perfectly well that Captain Chantel Holmwood would never have dreamed of throwing her tall blonde ex-President out of anywhere on the ship.

  Holmwood was a perfectly competent officer, one of the unlucky destroyer Captains who’d come on their seventy-thousand-light-year voyage after being declared a risk in the wake of Amelie’s revolution. Faced, however, with her boss’s wife, her former President, her nation’s current Ambassador Plenipotentiary and her nation’s Foreign Minister, well…

  Amelie had chosen to take her august personage, which contained all of those ranks and titles, to an observation deck and avoid overwhelming the woman in charge of her transport. It was bad enough, in her studied opinion, that President Emilia Nyong’o had insisted that the Foreign Minister travel aboard a battlecruiser!

  Watchtower had the misfortune of being already half-built when the technological windfalls of Exilium’s alliances had arrived. Some upgrades had been shoehorned in as she was built, but she’d never gone in for the full refits of her older sisters and hadn’t been built from the ground up like her younger sisters.

  She was probably the closest thing left to the original Vigilance-class designs, though she at least had the AI core that the “export” battlecruisers lacked.

  “WK,” Amelie called Watchtower’s K-sequence AI aloud as she looked at the armored paneling that closed the observation deck from the disturbing view of the warp. “Can you mirror the main bridge hologram down here for me? I’d appreciate a running update on the situation as well, if you can spare the cycles.”

  WK, at least, had a little bit less of the hero worship most of her husband’s fleet had for her.

  “Of course,” the AI confirmed instantly. The observation deck was mostly empty space by design, with a transparent roof to look out into the deep when the shutters could be safely opened. The holoprojectors that Amelie had noted as she came in were more than capable of duplicating the main tactical display.

  “Maintaining updates for you won’t be a problem, Minister Lestroud.”

  “Thank you,” she told the computer, glancing over at her companion as he shook his head.

  The stocky man had a good thirty years on her, which meant that he was creeping near the end of his first century. Ten years earlier, Roger Faulkner had been a senior minister in the government of the Terran Confederacy, serving First Admiral Adrienne Gallant. He’d been a key part of her plan for an orderly transition of power.

  His betrayal had resulted in him being beaten to the edge of death before Gallant had intervened personally to save his life—and then packed him off to the far end of the galaxy. He limped and one of his eyes was an obvious cybernetic replacement, but he was still damn useful.

  “Still feels weird to have one of them aboard our ship,” Faulkner told her. “Even four years ago, I’m not sure any of us would have trusted the Matrices that much.”

  “We know a lot more about them now than we did four years ago,” Amelie pointed out as she studied the holographic display. “Hell, the Matrices we work with know more about themselves than they did four years ago. And the K-sequence AIs aren’t…really Matrices.”

  Faulkner waved off her point.

  “I know,” he agreed. “I don’t pretend to understand the lecture of just what D did to create the new cores for them, but I accept that they’re different and loyal. Still weird to have the ship talk to me.”

  Amelie snorted.

  “How about being important enough that we’re dedicating an entire battlecruiser to hauling you around?” she asked. “That one is taking some getting used to.”

  The automation level of the new ships, most obviously presented by WK itself, meant that the Exilium Space Fleet could maintain almost three times the ships they’d once planned for. That was still only eight battlecruisers and thirty-two strike cruisers, but that was a hell of a fleet.

  That one of those eight ships was acting as Amelie Lestroud’s personal chariot wasn’t something she was entirely comfortable with. The display she was studying showed that she’d won at least half the argument, though.

  Only two of the four ships accompanying Watchtower were strike cruisers. The other two were freighters, hauling both supplies and munitions for the three warships and a carefully curated selection of tech and machinery for potential gifts for their hopefully new allies.

  “We will exit warped space in just over one minute, Minister,” WK informed her. “Do you need a link to Captain Holmwood?”

  Amelie chuckled softly.

  “I suspect, WK, that it will be very obvious when I need a link to the good Captain,” she told the AI. “For now, it’s bad enough that I’m eavesdropping. I have no intention of getting in her way.”

  “Understood, Minister.”

  The Republic of Exilium’s Foreign Minister chuckled and picked her drink up as she watched the timer tick down. She remembered what warp travel had been like before the advances of Lyle Reinhardt and the research and development infrastructure they’d built in Exilium. She’d barely been able to force herself to eat and drink in warp then—and there’d been a six-month trip to Exilium after they’d been kicked through the wormhole to this end of the galaxy.

  The new drives were much smoother. The Confederacy had never seen a need to focus on them—but Adrienne Gallant had made sure that the Exiles didn’t have the Confederacy’s wormhole technology. She’d handed the Exiles everything else, from black research projects to brutally honest internal histories of Gallant’s coup, but she’d seen the Confederacy’s wormhole technology neatly excised from it all.

  There were days Amelie hated Adrienne Gallant for that over anything else. A wormhole generator would have allowed Exilium to get aid to the Vistan refugees in hours, not months. The platforms the Confederacy had used to tie their star systems together had been able to generate wormholes across hundreds of light-years.

 
; Instead, they were limited to warp drives that could move them at two hundred and fifty-six times the speed of light—and Amelie had to be grateful for them.

  The alternative, after all, was what the Assini had done: tachyon punch–equipped AI ships and massive sublight vessels. That hadn’t ended well for that people, either. Less than five thousand of them survived, a tiny colony on an isolated island on Exilium.

  Even now, the Assini’s impact loomed large on the galaxy. Those five thousand people might be few and terrified, but they had been some of the most elite researchers the race possessed and they were determined to help undo the damage they’d caused.

  “Warp exit,” WK’s melodious voice announced. “Updating tactical display as we pick up information.”

  The AI paused and the hologram solidified in front of Amelie.

  “Initial reports from the recon nodes appear unchanged,” they continued. “No planets are missing or have changed orbits, which suggests the Matrices haven’t made it here yet.”

  Amelie concealed a wince. The K-sequence AIs’ sense of humor…left much to be desired.

  The system wouldn’t have required much work on the part of the Construction Matrices. A large rocky world, probably twice the size of Earth, was right in the middle of the liquid-water zone. Its axial tilt looked like it would give them vicious seasons, but the planet was otherwise habitable.

  Two more rocks were closer to the F-sequence star, and a fourth orbited at the edge of the system, outside three small gas giants and an average asteroid belt.

  The habitable planet was the focus of Amelie’s attention and Watchtower’s sensors. She was looking for what the Matrix recon nodes had reported…and there it was.

  Six large stations orbited around the planet’s equator, each almost twice Watchtower’s half-kilometer length. As more data came in, it was clear that each of the six stations was linked to a space elevator attached to the surface.