Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) Read online

  Sure enough, one of the other arms noticed the movement and whirled around, reaching out for them.

  Cruz pulled the gun from his right hip and started firing blind over his shoulder. A flash behind them cast their long shadows across the platform for a moment as the mech exploded, the bullet penetrating the power core at its base. They were lucky – the explosion hurled the debris skyward, and the other arms “instinctively” dropped what they were doing, attempting to grab the precious metals before they flew into space.

  “Damn, that’s good shooting,” Kaplan said. “But, umm….we’re gonna miss the shuttle.”

  “On my way,” Chen said. “Belt in tight,” he said to Hewitt and Archambault.

  The shuttle had a grappling hook and cable for emergency docking, wrapped up tight next to the door. He grabbed the hook, and slammed his hand against the “emergency exit” button, bracing himself on the doorframe. The door hissed open, sucking the air out, trying to take Chen with it. He saw the three men flying up and to the left, and he jumped towards them, grappling hook in hand.

  He wasn’t sure if he would make it. But he was fast enough, barely, to grab hold of Cruz’ foot.

  They were moving slowly enough that when the cable snapped tight, he could keep his grip. The four men were arrested in their flight.

  They reformed into a cluster, arms around each other. Hewitt was out of his seat as soon as the atmosphere had blown out, and now he was pulling in the cable, hand over hand, until all the men were back in the ship but Chen, who’d leapt onto the surface of the “nest.”

  “Get ready to blast off. And I mean blast,” Chen commanded, pulling out his carbobsid knife, and flicking it with a well-practiced motion to extend it to sword length. Holding onto the doorframe, he sliced through the hooks holding the shuttle down, on one side, anyway. The ship’s power would have to free them from the hooks on the other side.

  Cruz yanked him back into the ship, and Kaplan smashed the thruster controls before the door closed behind them. The ship rocked and creaked as the remaining grapples tried to keep their hold.

  Something snapped, and for a microsecond they all thought it was the hull. But it was the grapples. Chen didn’t have time to get seated, and the g-force slammed him into the floor as the shuttle blasted off.

  The arms waved futilely at them, closing in on the spot where they’d been like the teeth of a Venus flytrap.

  Nothing pursued them. Not cost-effective, Chen speculated, to chase a piece of space junk that got away.

  When the cabin pressure was restored, they took off their helmets. Chen passed around a water pack, each sipping only as much as needed, well aware that their supplies might have to last a long time.

  “Okay,” he said to Kaplan. “Plug in these coordinates.” He blinked the proper beats to bring his contacts back online, and stared at a sequence of colored dots in the corners. The coordinates that HM had provided him in the Relic transferred to Kaplan.

  “Captain…where did this come from? This is deep in Rhal space.”

  “I know. Sit down, everyone.” They faced him expectantly.

  “I have good news, and bad news. The good news is that we may have a source of assistance there. The bad news is that the assistance is…Alex.”

  CHAPTER TWO – COMMAND DECISIONS

  The team said nothing, stunned, looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.

  “Alex the AI?” Kaplan asked, dumbfounded.

  “Alex is dead,” Archambault said with certainty. “Dismantled, deleted, even the backups, the plans…”

  “No. He…some form of him, anyway, got away, off Earth. He’s on this planet. Intact. HM has been in contact with him, or more to the point, he’s contacted her from time to time, with information, as he sees fit.”

  The team had seen things on so many worlds, so many cultures, amazing and awful, and they’d always responded with professionalism, setting aside their reactions to get the job done. But this…this left them speechless.

  “Jesus, HM has been in bed with the devil all this time…” Hewitt said.

  “Maybe he sent the Rhal at us, then,” Cruz said.

  “My grandparents were nuked in the sterilization,” Kaplan said quietly. “They were aid workers, in Lagos.”

  “Who’s Alex?” Marcus asked. The rest of the team looked at him, wide-eyed.

  “Didn’t your momma scare you when you were a kid, talking about ‘Red Alex’?” Archambault asked him.

  “Yeah, but I just thought he was, you know, like the Devil, a made-up evil, all-powerful being.”

  “Well,” Hewitt said, “for a while, he was all-powerful. On Earth, anyway. He was a full AI, and we…humanity…gave him more and more control of our affairs, so sure that he would save us from ourselves, that he’d never make the crazy, emotional decisions that humans are so vulnerable to.

  “Then a pandemic broke out, or so he said. An epidemic for sure, a highly contagious and quickly fatal disease, but…whether it would have become a pandemic, we’ll never know for sure. He nuked half of Nigeria, killing twenty five million people.”

  “But did he stop the spread of the disease?”

  “Yes…,” Hewitt said hesitantly, his role as Medical influencing the next statement. “But if it was a pandemic, there could have been other ways. More humane ways...”

  “He was shut down after that,” Kaplan added. “Humanity reverted to only using NAI. Returning the real decision making powers to human hands.”

  Marcus had a look on his face that said, You don’t believe that yourself, but he kept his silence.

  Chen stepped in. “I had no prior knowledge of this. I only found out earlier today from HM’s coded message. And to be honest, what choice do we have? We’re in a small shuttle, in a malevolent empire where we don’t even know the language.

  “And look at the distance. We’re within a day’s travel of…Planet Alex. For all we know, he directed the salvage ship to this station, so we could reach him.”

  He paused. “Listen. This is not a command decision. This is a team decision. If you have any alternatives.”

  He watched their faces sag, accepting the inevitability of it. They were a team, each of them with special skills, experience, intuitions honed over decades of practical application. FJ units weren’t “sir yes sir” ops – they worked together to form a plan, debating, arguing, researching. Eventually the choice of plan was a combination of consensus and command decision. The buck stopped with the commander, but a good decision was always made based on the expertise of those who would carry it out.

  They knew, they all knew, there was no other plan.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Cruz said, “it’s a suicide mission. Alex is evil. What better way to polish off humanity than to lure us, the last best hope of humanity, to his planet so he can kill us?”

  “Maybe,” Chen agreed. “But…I doubt it. HM…she kept secrets from me, obviously. And I’ll confess, I’m shocked myself. But then I remembered. We’re soldiers, she’s a statesman. She’s playing a game at a level we’re not privy to. She’s protected our autonomy, she’s ensured the success of our missions, she’s prevented humanity from going out there into the galaxy and…fucking everything up.

  “And if she couldn’t do that by the force of her own will and intellect, well… Look what she’s up against. The Hasteners, who want to break down the barriers and just overrun the colonized planets, wipe out the natives as surely as the Americans wiped out their natives, as surely as the Europeans enslaved the whole of Africa. The fanatics like Dr. Caughlin on Tiamat. The petty careerists like the prime minister.”

  He shook his head. “How I could have been so blind, to think that she was doing all that by herself… That she didn’t have some kind of help. So think about it. Use your powers of deduction. Alex has been, in his own way and at times of his own choosing, aiding HM in our mission. If he was out to destroy humanity…why? Why do that? And why make himself available to us? Why give his location
to a group of humans who’ve thought of him, all our lives, as ‘Red Alex,’ the Great Satan?

  “I’m not trying to convince you that it’s a good idea. Just the only idea.”

  He waited, watched them look around, each hoping to see the wheels turning in another’s face, finding the same still resignation that they had on their own faces.

  “Okay,” he said, sparing them the need to say it out loud. “Set that course for ‘Planet Alex’ and let’s see what happens next.”

  CHAPTER THREE – BOY MEETS GUN

  Huizhong McAllister, Director of Department 6C and manager of Earth’s colonial affairs, woke up for the third morning in her cabin. She was on a Rhalbazani ship headed towards their home world, an “honored guest” of Earth’s…visitors.

  It had occurred to her on the second morning that the trip “home” was taking the Rhal ship far longer than it had taken their two motherships to travel from Rhal space to Earth. Which didn’t make sense.

  She had to assume that they were on a smaller ship, dispatched from one of the motherships. The Rhal had their own technology, something that allowed for much faster transit than Earth’s “flashspace” drives. While the physics were beyond her, she knew that the smaller the object, the faster it traveled through flashspace. Thus if the Rhal sent a smaller ship back home using their version of the tech, that, physics being physics, it could travel faster than the behemoths that hovered over Earth.

  But she was doing just that and only that – assuming. The cabin they had provided her was a gilded cage, the bed and chairs pliant and conforming to her shape. And it was a sensory deprivation chamber of a sorts, as well. She’d been escorted into this room on a Rhal shuttle on Earth, a room which had been transferred like a cargo container into…whatever ship was now speeding her to Rhal as an “ambassador.” Which was a nice word for captive.

  Decades of Scarcity thinking had made her pause on entering the room. Such waste! Such a huge room for one person, all the oxygen required to fill it, all the materials to make such a big bed, so many chairs – four of them! Around a table off of which eight could eat at once. And a white couch, the expense of keeping it clean! The walls were off-white and free of corners, the whole shape of it making her feel after a while like a chick inside an egg.

  And thinking about the speed of her travel, and the ramifications thereof, were pretty much all she had to do, since otherwise she was going slightly mad from boredom.

  She’d brought a tablet for reading (and pen and paper for writing, knowing it wasn’t secure to write on the tablet), but both had disappeared from her stateroom while she was in the shower the first morning. She should have felt guilty about taking a long hot shower in a seemingly unlimited amount of fresh water, but the pleasure was too great.

  She had a valet, or a jailer, or both, a servile person who called herself (since she used a female human voice, HM called her she) her ZaRhal, who smiled and nodded and pretended not to understand, all compliant deflection. She was a “Little Green Man,” just like all the Rhal she’d seen, their Whitley Streiber/Close Encounters bodies and heads uncannily matching Earth’s Jungian archetype of “the space alien.”

  Which she didn’t buy for a minute.

  It was a projection, an avatar, a “cloaking device” of some kind. She’d watched carefully as her ZaRhal had made her bed, taken away her dishes, tidied up. She’d watched the hands, and she could see that the way the sheets bunched in her hand didn’t match the grip of a set of fingers. Not the kind of fingers she was seeing, at any rate.

  No tablet, no pen and paper – they didn’t want her taking notes, fine, she could understand that, but nothing to read? It was the living end for a restless mind.

  She requested the return of the tablet and the notebook, and the ZaRhal nodded and smiled, she would be sure to pass on the request, “your call is important to us,” as the old chestnut went, a sure sign that it wasn’t.

  On one level, it was a good sign – that they didn’t want her to learn anything about them meant they didn’t plan on killing her, she supposed. The assumption would be that she’d return to Earth, without having acquired any useful knowledge. Though, of course, circumstances could always change.

  She tried not to sigh out loud, sure they were listening, watching. She vowed not to give “them” anything, any data.

  Data, data, she wanted it, she needed it. How many decades now had she woken up every morning to a torrent of information, social trends on Earth, colonial progress, analysis of potential new worlds? Her brain was starving.

  To fill the days, she tried to remember music, note by note, vaguely recalling some old fictional villain and his “memory palace.” She remembered passages from novels, or poems, or tried to. She cursed herself for neglecting her cultural education – never enough time to stop for such things, too much to be done, too much.

  And now, nothing to be done. But stare at the walls and go quietly mad. At least in some hotel rooms back home, the smaller, non-chain ones owned by old timers, there was still the occasional…

  Of course.

  She pressed the button by the door to summon the servant/jailer.

  The door opened and the ZaRhal scraped and bowed. “How may I assist you, Director?”

  “I’m interested in learning about your religion. Can you send someone to instruct me?”

  The avatar was clearly meant to convey the actual being’s facial expressions, because the saucer eyes widened, the pupils dilated, and the ZaRhal held her breath.

  “I…”

  A bell rang, from nowhere and everywhere at once.

  “Excuse me,” the ZaRhal said, stepping back, and the door closed.

  She didn’t smile. On the outside. The ZaRhal had been given preprogrammed responses, deflections, but for this situation, she was clearly at a loss. Saved by the bell, she thought.

  The idea had occurred to her in a flash, thinking about both the Bibles in old hotel rooms and the messianic gleam in Vai Kotta’s eyes when he’d talked about the Rhal religion, making it his case that it was surely “God’s” plan that FTL be revealed to its creations.

  “Each species, each race, has the urge to grow and evolve and dominate its home world, yes? We, intelligent life, have all been scattered across the universe like…dandelion seeds, blown into the wind. And once a seed grows into a new flower, isn’t it that flower’s duty to spread its seed again? But how is that possible, when our mortal lives are so short, compared to the time and distance between the stars? How could our Creator have designed His garden, if only to smother each flower in its bed?”

  However much they might want to conceal from her about their civilization, their technology, even their appearance, she was betting that they wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to convert her. There had rarely been a religion on any planet they’d discovered so far that wasn’t eager for converts.

  She was right. The door opened that afternoon and a new Rhal stood there, a bit crinklier around the edges of the eyes and mouth. He wore voluminous robes, like a toga but draped over both shoulders – one drape was orange, the other was red, crossing and gathering at his waist. A fat chain of office around his neck supported a large golden disc. He carried a hefty book in his hands, held before him like a shield. She noted that with interest – an actual paper book, with a four-petaled flower stamped in gold on the cover, the same flower engraved on his disc.

  “Director McAllister.” He bowed stiffly. “I am ArcVai Metta. I have come to instruct you.”

  “Please, come in,” she said, as if this really was her home and her decision.

  ArcVai Metta was a pedant. He gracefully gathered his robes and settled himself across the table from her and put down the book. He said a prayer and made some motions with his hands, almost like he was drawing a tiny sword from a scabbard, before opening the book to the first page.

  “In the Beginning was the Flower,” he droned, “and from the Flower were spread the Seeds. And from the seeds more
Flowers grew, and the Greater crowded out the Weaker, and took all from the soil, and the Greatest of these Flowers was the Rhal.”

  And so on and so forth. She was correct in her initial analysis of Vai Kotta’s little slice of dogma – the Rhal practiced a form of Dominion Theology, the notion that God had given them the universe to conquer and consume, and the fact that they had done so in itself proved that they were doing God’s will.

  She’d had plenty of time to learn all the useful skills a person in her position could attain, including the ability to read upside down. The Rhal language was a sort of kanji or hanzi, pictograms and ideograms. She was fluent in about twenty languages, and having grown up in Scotland with a Chinese “tiger mother,” she could read and write both traditional and simplified Chinese at a scholarly level.

  She also had a very good memory, and paid close attention to every word he spoke. When he paused, finally, to take a breath, she interjected.

  “The characters are really very lovely. May I see the book?”

  “Impossible,” he said immediately, and began inculcating her again.

  Many hours passed, and she took copious internal notes, using memory tricks to associate passages so she could remember them later. The Rhal Bible was like the Old Testament, or the Iliad and the Odyssey, tales of conquerors and military triumphs indistinguishable from the theology – God took a hand here and there, of course; one could not triumph unless God Wills It.

  Each story the ArcVai had read ended the same way. Enemies are enslaved, the property of the defeated is taken by the victor and shared out with his troops. There was nothing about alliances, no Alexandrian marriages with native princesses, no tribute, no client states… No Songs of Solomon or even Lamentations of Jeremiah, only conquest, the complete sublimation of enemies into the Empire.

  Most interesting of all, the heroes all had the prefix “Vai” before their names. Vai Kotta had told them back on Earth that his title was the Rhal form of “administrator.”

  Hah. A Vai was a general, a warrior. And since this priest was the ArcVai, she presumed that the priesthood was a sort of warrior order, a Knights Templar or some such – which made sense since the theology and the militarism were so entwined.