Crusade (Exile Book 3) Read online

  More stations hung around them, but those kilometer-wide anchors alone probably represented a massive industrial capacity. Small ships danced around the planet and the rest of the system, too.

  “Scans suggest cloudscoop operations on the inner gas giant and mining operations in the asteroid belt,” WK reported. “Commander Riker notes an interesting lack, however.”

  “Which is?” Amelie prodded.

  “There are no large shipyards in the system,” the AI told her. “Most of the apparently civilian shipping could have been built here, but there is nothing here that would allow for the construction of large vessels such as the recon nodes detected.”

  “I’m not seeing any warships yet,” she pointed out. “I’m not disregarding the recon nodes’ data just yet.”

  “I don’t think anyone is,” Faulkner murmured. “But if the recon nodes were reporting seven-hundred-meter warships, I think they saw seven-hundred-meter warships. If we don’t see them here, that suggests the same thing as the lack of shipyards.”

  “The ships weren’t from here,” Amelie agreed.

  “Tactical and I have confirmed a ship-basing facility on the habitable planet’s moon,” WK noted, flashing a new set of icons on that planetoid. “It appears to be home to a small force of gunships notably larger than our shuttles.”

  “Show me,” she ordered.

  It was a series of extremely long-range images, but the telescopes and scanners in play were very good. She could read the military iconography on the display by now and she nodded slowly as the details filled in.

  There was no way they could estimate the ships’ capabilities, but they were twelve meters wide by fifty meters long and clearly designed to launch from a low-gravity base.

  “Numbers?” she asked. It wasn’t really her job to account for that, but it was useful for her to know.

  “Thirty visible, hangars and accessways suggest at least that many again concealed,” WK said. “Certainty of at least sixty, fifty percent probability of one hundred twenty.”

  “When will we see them seeing us?” Faulkner asked, the aide watching the hologram with a somewhat horrified fascination.

  “We emerged five light-minutes from the planet. Light from our arrival will reach them in two minutes. We will see their response in seven.”

  “Has Holmwood deployed recon drones yet?” Amelie asked.

  “No, Minister. The doctrine she’s operating under says to conceal as much of our abilities as possible,” WK reminded her.

  “Fair. But still…the recon nodes reported at least two big ships. Where are they?”

  Her tablet buzzed. The military people on the ship had their personal computers tattooed into their left forearms, but she’d never quite gone that far. Tablet covered a vast variety of options, even with Exilium’s limited consumer industry, but Amelie’s own was roughly the size of her thumb, a stick she could put down on any surface to project a holographic keyboard and screen. It would respond to voice commands in carry mode but was most useful when you were sitting down somewhere.

  “That’s Captain Holmwood,” she said without checking. No one else would be trying to contact her right now. “WK, get me that holo-link to the bridge, please.”

  Her hologram of the star system shifted slightly to make space for a holographic image of Watchtower’s command dais and the plumply petite uniformed woman sitting in it.

  “Your Eminence,” Holmwood greeted her.

  “We’ve been over this, Captain,” Amelie replied. “Minister will do when you don’t think you can use my name.”

  The smaller and younger woman nodded.

  “Minister, then,” Holmwood said. “We have completed our initial scans of the system, and the warships detected by the recon nodes are either absent or hiding. Either way, we don’t believe they were built here.”

  “Which means they came from somewhere else and may have left for there,” Amelie concluded. “Do you think they’re hiding?”

  “If they detected the recon nodes and have any idea what the Matrices are, I can’t see them having stripped the system of defenses,” the ESF Captain told her. “The recon nodes saw the ships sortie towards them, so we can assume they were detected.”

  “So, they’re playing clever buggers.” Amelie shook her head. “Pull all of the communications data you can get from the local networks and dump it to my people. We need time and raw data to build a translator.”

  “Do you want us to move in closer?” Holmwood asked, probably the question she’d commed about in the first place.

  “No,” Amelie decided aloud. “Let’s maintain our current separation from the planet. Any chance they can sneak up on us?”

  “Not without tachyon-punching or something else I don’t know about, Minister,” the Captain replied. “Even then, they’d have to get damn close to be a threat, and nothing I’m seeing suggests that kind of tech level.”

  “We’re only seeing civilian tech and a planetary defense force,” Amelie pointed out. “Keep your eyes open and keep me informed, but for now, we wait and try to process a translation protocol.”

  “Understood, Minister Lestroud!”

  When the alert jerked Amelie from her sleep, her computer stubbornly insisted it had been eight hours since they’d arrived in the system and four hours since she’d gone to sleep. She was quite sure that was wrong, because there was no way she’d been asleep for more than maybe two minutes.

  Regardless of how awake she felt, duty called. The advantage of having WK aboard was that she didn’t need to put on enough clothes to talk to a human to get updated, either.

  “WK, what’s going on?” she asked. “That’s a battle stations alert.”

  “Yes, Minister,” the AI confirmed. “May I take control of your quarters’ display?”

  “Do it,” she ordered, pulling clothes out of the closet to dress as rapidly as she could. The Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Exilium needed to be composed and unruffled, no matter what.

  At least when meeting with other humans. WK wasn’t, as she understood it, continuously consciously aware of everything going on in the ship—but there was certainly no way to pretend that the AI wasn’t fully aware of just how fragile the masks humanity’s officers and leaders put on were.

  The wall display lit up, adding a wonderful distorting light effect to her clothes selection as she dressed.

  “When the locals became aware of our presence, they launched sixty gunships from the moon base,” WK laid out. “Those gunships never left orbit of the planet. Currently, Captain Holmwood estimates that they are no threat to your escort even if they were to sortie against us in numbers.

  “Twenty-one minutes and thirty-two seconds ago, several sensor anomalies were flagged in the asteroid belt. Commander Riker, as officer of the watch, ordered a more detailed analysis, including directed active sensors.”

  Watchtower’s tactical officer had to have been feeling nervous if he’d ordered that. Blasting a chunk of the locals’ space with high-powered radar wasn’t exactly a friendly gesture, after all.

  “By the time we had feedback from the active sensors, it was clear what we were looking at, and Commander Riker woke up Captain Holmwood, who triggered the battle stations alert when our contacts moved out.”

  The display was zooming in on the contacts as WK spoke, highlighting eighteen ships heading toward Watchtower.

  Two were the big ships that had sortied against the recon nodes. Seven hundred meters long and three hundred meters wide, they looked like nothing so much as a dagger with two curved blades.

  Six were smaller ships, closer to the strike cruisers Exilium was now building. Those were built along a similar design to the bigger ships but lacking the forked forward half. The single-bladed curved-dagger design was also applied to the ten smallest ships, each slightly smaller than the destroyers the Terran Confederacy had built.

  Practice at picking out Isaac’s formations helped her ID that there were two groups in
the fleet heading her way. One of the big ships had four mid-sized escorts and six smaller escorts, while the other had two mid-sized and four small escorts.

  She tugged her jacket into place over her blouse and shook her head.

  “Any coms from them yet? A first-contact package or anything of the sort?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” WK told her. “They left the asteroid belt and are accelerating in our direction. If we don’t maneuver to evade or engage, they will reach our standard weapons range in about an hour and forty-five minutes.”

  They were slower to accelerate than Amelie’s ships. Even her freighters could dance circles around the local warships if she gave the word.

  “Captain Holmwood is asking me to check if you’re awake,” the AI asked. “May I connect her?”

  “Give me ten seconds to get out of my bedroom, WK,” Amelie told them with a chuckle. She was as unruffled as she could be, but her bedroom was most definitely not.

  “Connect her once I’m in the office,” she continued as she opened the door to her room.

  It was time to really get to work.

  5

  “Minister Lestroud, I think we are rapidly approaching the point where this becomes a political decision,” Captain Holmwood said the moment Amelie opened a channel from her office. The Captain clearly subscribed to the same theory on letting people see her out of sorts as Amelie did and was in full combat uniform despite having also been woken in the middle of the night.

  “What is the situation looking like, Captain?” Amelie asked.

  “We don’t know what they’re armed with, but their acceleration is below what we’d expect for any ship that could go toe-to-toe with a Vigilance or our two Romeos,” Holmwood noted. “If it comes down to it, I’m comfortable with our ability to at least cover our own retreat.

  “However, my understanding is that if we open fire, we’ve already failed the mission. I still hesitate to let them get the first shot—and running away isn’t going to help our future prospects.”

  “We don’t have a translation protocol yet,” Amelie told the officer. “There’s less civilian communication than I’d have expected for the scale of the system’s industry. WK tells me we’re looking at around a hundred minutes to contact?”

  “Until we’re likely to hit, yes,” Holmwood confirm. “Our particle cannon might be able to make an impact at longer range, but I’m assuming they have comparable defenses to the Confederacy prior to our Exile.”

  That was probably a generous assumption, but Amelie was only so familiar with weapons technology.

  “I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to talk to them in the next hour and a half,” she told the Captain. “But I think the best way to make sure we’re at least moving in that direction is for us to make the first move.”

  “You want us to send over our first-contact package?” Holmwood asked. “It’s been updated with the Matrices’ help, but it’s still…”

  “Not perfect,” Amelie agreed. “But if they have a half a brain, that package is pretty clearly an attempt to communicate. I’m not going to have you shoot at these people if I can possibly avoid it, but we need to talk to them.”

  She shook her head.

  “Without some form of back-and-forth, we have no basis to assume they’re on anything except an attack run, and I won’t order you to take the first hit, Captain. There aren’t enough of us humans out here for that.”

  There were small contingents from humanity’s various allied races aboard Watchtower, but it would be the battlecruiser’s human crew that would bear the brunt of any fighting.

  “We’ll send the transmission immediately, Minister,” Holmwood promised. “Would you care to join us on the bridge? The next hour or so are going to very much be your show.”

  Amelie had to agree. She didn’t have much of a place on the bridge of a warship, but talking to these people was her job. The best place to do that and to see the results of her efforts was from the battlecruiser’s bridge.

  “I’ll be there as quickly as I can,” she told Holmwood. “Keep me informed.”

  “Yes, Minister.”

  “Any response or change in their approach profile?” Amelie asked as she entered the bridge.

  “Nothing yet, Minister,” Commander Alex Heathers reported. The communications officer’s console was closest to the door she’d entered through and the redheaded woman and her team were buried in their consoles. “No major progress on the translation, either. We’re at least six or seven hours away from being able to talk to anyone.”

  “It could be worse, I suppose,” Holmwood muttered as Amelie reached the command dais. There were several observer chairs scattered across the bridge, but one was right next to the Captain’s seat.

  “The system could have been wiped out by the Matrices between the recon and our arrival?” Amelie asked. “That would definitely count.”

  The Captain winced.

  “Or they could be a serious threat to us,” Holmwood noted. “We’ve got a pretty solid scan on their energy signatures now. Power plants are fusion across the board. No conversion cores, so they have nowhere near our power budgets. Definitely no warp ring, which raises the question of where they came from and how they got here.”

  “Each of those ships out-masses Watchtower by, what, fifty percent?” Amelie asked. “I know we have the tech edge, Captain, but quantity has a quality all its own, doesn’t it?”

  “And Mercutio alone produces more power than both of their battle groups,” Holmwood pointed out. “Power generation isn’t everything, sure, but it means I can be confident we have more powerful weapons across the board. If the Matrices can’t hit me with their missiles, I’m not worried about these guys’ birds.”

  “Fair,” Amelie conceded. The Captain was the expert, after all. She might feel that Holmwood was being overly optimistic, but the woman seemed to have reasons for her assessment.

  “They received the first-contact package ten minutes ago,” Holmwood said. “I’d have expected them to do something by now.”

  “Unfortunately, I have to agree with you on breaking off,” Amelie replied. “Moving away would give them more time, but it could easily be taken as a sign of weakness.” She sighed. “It’s your discretion, Captain. I suggest we send the first-contact protocol again.”

  “Understood.” Holmwood gestured to Heathers, then turned her attention back to the big holodisplay as the com officer set to work. “If they keep coming, I need to do something, Minister,” she murmured.

  “I don’t expect us to take their best hit and smile,” Amelie responded. “We have time, Captain.” She shook her head, looking at the oncoming set of warships. They were in the locals’ territory, so she could understand paranoia, but she was at least trying to talk to them.

  “Spend some of that time working up a plan for warning shots,” she finally told the Captain. “I don’t want to kill anyone—if it comes down to that, we get out of Dodge ASAP—but I want a plan for getting them to back off while being clear we don’t want to fight them.”

  “That’s…not an easy set of parameters,” Holmwood answered slowly. “But I think we can do it.”

  “I leave it in your hands, Captain,” Amelie said. “And I hope that these people talk to us before it becomes necessary. It’s their system, yes, but since we aren’t being aggressive, you’d think they’d at least talk to us.”

  The ESF Captain scoffed softly.

  “Would we?” Holmwood asked.

  Watching the local defense fleet accelerate toward them, Amelie had to admit that the Matrices’ influence in their prior first contacts had spoiled them. With both the Vistans and the Skree-Skree, the Republic’s ships had arrived while the Matrices were trying to transform their homeworlds.

  The Tohnbohn were steady and methodical by nature. If someone wanted to talk to them, they were going to wait and see what they had to say—and while the Matrices might not have been in the Tohnbohn’s system yet, the big shelled aliens
had known about the machines, and potential allies had been met with joy.

  These people had to be at least aware of the Matrices—if you had interstellar travel, you almost certainly had good enough telescopes to see planets being moved into place and having their atmosphere changed.

  “Contacts are at five light-seconds and closing,” Riker reported.

  The tension on Watchtower’s bridge could have been cut with a knife.

  “Send the first-contact package again,” Amelie ordered. “Perhaps third time will be the charm. If it isn’t…” She shook her head.

  “Captain, you are cleared to fire your warning shots at the one-million-kilometer mark,” she told Holmwood.

  “If the locals cross the seven-hundred-thousand-kilometer mark without making contact or adjusting from an attack course, get the hell out of here,” she continued. “Do whatever is necessary to cover the safe retreat of the transports.”

  “Understood, Minister,” Holmwood replied.

  This might be Amelie Lestroud’s mission, but Captain Holmwood commanded their little flotilla. If the delegation’s ships were in danger, Amelie was no longer in command and she knew it.

  To her surprise, she didn’t think they were in danger. Someone over there was playing games.

  “WK, if they had missiles based on what we’ve seen of their drive tech, what would their effective range be?” she asked.

  “Assuming similar design protocols to the Terran Confederacy, their missiles would have a range in this geometry of just over two million kilometers.” The AI paused. “They would be no threat to us.”

  “But they wouldn’t know that,” Amelie concluded. “If they were planning on firing first, Captain, they’d have already opened fire. The idiots are playing chicken. Dominance games.”

  It was almost…human.

  “Two minutes before they cross the one-million-kilometer mark,” Holmwood said. “If they want to play dominance games, how do we play? Would obliterating one of their battleships end the game?”