Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) (3 page)

She buzzed for the ZaRhal. “Can you tell me why we’re traveling so slowly? Your ships came to Earth from Rhal space in such a short amount of time, and we’ve been in transit for four days now.”

There it was again, that panicked look on the valet’s face, another question for which she hadn’t been given a set of boilerplate answers.

BING!

Her visitor this time was a stern, older man, in uniform. A military uniform, she’d swear to it – he wore a fitted red tunic, with a green sash across it from shoulder to waist, instantly making her think of Christmas. There were three curved gold bars on each padded shoulder, and a chain of office similar to the ArcRhal’s, only not as thick and heavy, that suspended a fat gold medal with that four-petaled flower from the Bible cover engraved into it.

“Director, I am Vai Ranza.” His voice was clipped, authoritative. “We are sorry if our guest is inconvenienced by the travel time to our world. We have endeavored to make you comfortable,” he said, throwing the onus on her.

She decided to gamble. “Oh, I am, and I am so grateful! I just couldn’t help but wonder, is all.”

The Bible had told her that males ran the show around here. Females were mentioned pretty much only as “begatters” of new warriors. And even then the only reason to bother to name them was in their role as trophy wives, a mark of alliance with a stronger family than the one a Vai had been born into. So no doubt females were expected to be compliant, and bat their…well, whatever the equivalent of eyelashes was among the Rhal.

He immediately softened, clearly having prepared himself for an argument.

“I’m just so bored without any entertainment!”

He gave her a shrewd look, and she realized she might have pushed it too far. “You seem to be quite involved in our Book.”

“Oh, it’s so lovely, the letters of your language and the illustrations, and of course I have nothing else to fill my head with…” Now she was glad she didn’t have a notebook that might have incriminated her with signs of intellect.

One of the great historical lessons that HM had taken to heart when creating Department 6C was, “Never be blinded to facts by your certainties.” The Japanese assumed that after Pearl Harbor, the United States would sue for peace and leave them their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The British Empire refused to promote innumerably talented military men into positions of power out of class snobbery – it mattered not if an officer was a genius if he was “not a gentleman.”

After the bombings of the
USS Cole
and the travesty in Mogadishu, Osama bin Laden assumed that the U.S. would never retaliate for 9/11 in the massive, world-altering form that it did.

And on the eve of the Forever War, the United States had sacrificed its best Arabic translators, booting many of them out because they were gay, and therefore “unfit to serve.” Which left the troops on the ground shouting in English at people who had no idea what they were saying, and behaving in a manner that any amateur Orientalist could have told them would incite indignation if not hatred.

Military historians always seek to define a defeated power’s greatest flaw. They will blame supply lines, or lack of support back home, or incompetence in the leadership.

But the enemy’s greatest weakness, if you were keen-eyed enough to exploit it, was their
certainties.
The things they insisted on believing, against all evidence to the contrary, because accepting some other truth would create an existential crisis whose cultural effects would be worse than losing a war.

Vai Ranza might know that she was a powerful political figure on Earth, who was spending considerable time pondering a book she shouldn’t know how to read, but he was also
certain
she was “just a female,” and therefore, it was not possible that she could outsmart him.

And sure enough, he gave her a condescending smile. “I think we can provide you with some entertaining films,” he smiled.

“Thank you so much, Vai Ranza,” she gushed her gratitude.

Sure enough, as soon as he left, a panel in the wall opened, revealing a vid screen. She settled into the couch to watch.

The film started, with the same splashy titles you’d see on an Earth movie. The characters were all LGM, of course, but it didn’t take much computing power to replace one set of Actortars with another. 6C had done it with plenty of Earth movies, for the edification and entertainment of other species.

As the tale unfolded, it confirmed her experience from the colony worlds - stories were the same across the galaxy. Boy gets something, boy loses something, boy gets it back. In romantic cultures, it was boy meets girl, of course. The joke about the old Soviet Socialist Realism stories were that the storyline was always “boy meets tractor” and finds true love in the arms of the Five Year Plan.

In Rhal society, the master narrative was obviously “boy meets gun.” The Rhal would love
Patton
and
Starship Troopers
, she thought with a wry grin, the same way that right-wingers had in the past – that is to say, without grasping the subtext of either film. She wondered if this was what the Rhal public loved, or if this was just some kind of “UFA under Goebbels” regime propaganda, masquerading as entertainment.

She spent the rest of that day and the next absorbing the films that rolled one after the other. There was no way for her to determine if the stories were contemporary or historical, but there were certain things that never varied.

“Glorious battle” was clearly more important than economizing. The films were full of “Star Wars” sized battleships, stuffed with soldiers, wasting enormous resources so that the soldiery could land on a planet and attain “glory.” It wasn’t as if the Rhal didn’t have the technology to do it “Earth-style,” to build stroidfarms and JIT-facs to fab up drones and robots to do the brutal work of conquest. They just seemed to…
prefer
massive casualty rates, on both sides.

Their militaristic “seed spreading” religion was always emphasized before each battle scene. Every soon-to-be-conquered race was a caricature of stupidity, laziness, greed, lust…physical features were no doubt exaggerated, she thought, just as early 20
th
century films had given black people ludicrous wide-eyed expressions of fear and idiocy, and Nazi propaganda had created posters full of menacing, gnarly, potato-nosed Jews.

But she took mental notes anyway, making a game of reverse-engineering what a race might really look like without the propaganda that made them all appear like a galaxy full of Jar Jar Binks types, ugly idiots deserving of conquest.

Aside from the pure military adventure flicks, there were stories of intrigue. Most of those plots revolved around plots to unseat the Emperor, or the RhalVai as he was called here. Of course they always ended with the evil counselor/renegade/usurper getting executed, and the RhalVai’s legitimacy reinforced, and some heroic young ensign getting promoted and rewarded with the dead man’s property. Heroic young ensigns were in fact the stock in trade of all these movies, and she couldn’t help but think of “Nation’s Pride,” the film within a film in “Inglourious Basterds.”

She started getting the sense that the movies were “edited for television” – at least, for her television. There always seemed to be missing scenes at the end of each film. The execution of the bad guy was never shown, and at the end of the war movies, it was as if some plunder scenes, clearly anticipated by the soldiers and foreshadowed in the plot, had been omitted. Why?

In bed after the second day of her Rhal film festival, she pondered what she’d learned. Rhal society was highly militaristic, misogynist, regimented. Whatever Vai Kotta had spouted about peace love and understanding, it was clear that the Rhal hadn’t come to Earth to “help.”

But the history of this culture, from the movies and Bible, was that of an overwhelming force smashing everything in its path. Why, then, had they come to Earth with open arms, offers of help and friendship? Why was Earth’s encounter with the Rhal so different?

There was no book, no movie, that could explain that.

FJ One was on edge as they braked into an orbit around “Planet Alex.” General Chen knew that the team wouldn’t be surprised if a rocket launched from the surface to blow them all up, but then, that was the risk of the job with any new planet.

On a normal mission to size up a potential colony world, they’d fab up an observation station, snag some water from a comet or a polar cap, send probes around the globe, and settle in for a long period of evaluation and analysis.

That was out of the question, as time was of the essence here.

He gathered them together. “Engineering, what have you got?”

Kaplan brought up a hologram in the center of the cabin. “The planet’s got full sized ice caps, and a variable climate. We’ve stayed stationary over a full revolution, scanned the whole planet at nighttime, and seen no signs of advanced civilization. The closest thing is a pre-Columbian level of light in a equatorial city here…”

He zoomed in. “It’s in a valley, more like a bowl, surrounded on three sides by sharp mountains resembling the Grand Tetons back home.”

The map showed a river, about two miles across at its widest point, that flowed into the tallest mountain, and then out again on the other side as a waterfall.

The picture tilted to show the falls, as high as Angel Falls on Earth, but there was only a thin trickle of water dropping to the valley.

“So,” Cruz speculated, “there’s some kind of reservoir or underground river inside the mountain, because otherwise those falls would be roaring.”

Kaplan nodded, zooming in further. “The trickle falls into a small man-made reservoir at the bottom, which drains to a canal system in the city.”

The reservoir was nearly dry, and sat between the falls and a great stone edifice that could only be a temple. The temple was the terminus of seven broad avenues, forming a fan shape in the bowl of the valley. Each avenue had a canal running through the center, and there were seven smaller avenues in an arch across the “fan,” stone bridges crossing the canals in the main avenues. All the canals were nearly dry.

Six of the seven canals ended at the city limits, but the great central canal flowed out of the city for several miles, into a fertile delta like that of the Nile. Or would, if there was any water.

Kaplan went on. “The readings off this mountain with the waterfall are warmer than the others, but it’s not volcanic or post-volcanic in shape. It’s unusual for a formation that has this altitude and so much water running through it to be this warm.”

“In other words,” Archambault speculated, “the kind of place where a super-intelligent AI would run up a big power bill, which it would pay for with some kind of hydroelectric system.”

“Look over there,” Cruz said. “See where the tree growth is newer? That’s where the river used to be naturally. It’s been diverted, a few decades ago at least.”

Kaplan raised an eyebrow. “Since when are you a forestry major?”

Cruz winked. “You know I like the Great Outdoors.”

The others laughed when Kaplan blushed at his former lover’s joke.

“So,” Chen said, “let’s say Alex is here. And he diverted that massive river, and blasted out the middle of the mountain, and created a power system.”

They looked at each other, amazed at the possibility of such a technical achievement.

“We’ll land here,” he said, pointing at a spot behind a low ridge just outside the city. “We’ll want to scope out the population, see if it’s hostile, and…if it knows anything about Alex.”

Hewitt furrowed his brow. “You mean, the population may be aware that Alex is there? Or that Alex has set himself up near a population center?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Archambault said. “We should get intel from the population, see what they know about Alex. Use standard introductory protocols.”

They landed the ship and packed up for a preliminary reconnaissance. They dressed in black microfiber clothing for camouflage, partly disassembled their guns and strapped the pieces across their backpacks, and concealed their sheathed carbobsid knives in shoulder harnesses. They packed the standard shiny and mildly impressive objects to hand out as gifts, including the variant food gifts (most species love chocolate).

“Marcus,” Chen said gently but firmly. “I need you to stay here. You’re not qualified for this kind of expedition.”

“I know, sir,” he said, surprising the General. “I’ll monitor you from here. I can fly this ship, so I can evac you, if you need, you know, a
deus ex machina
to save you from the
machinae deus
…”

“And a Latin scholar to boot,” Chen smiled. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

They crept up to the ridge and took a look at the city. The people were simian-humanoid, close enough for Hewitt to crack a “Planet of the Apes” joke when he’d fabbed up masks and gloves to match their appearance.

It looked like some kind of festival was in progress. The natives were all garbed in bright colored tunics and trousers, and most people wore a flamboyant cloak. There were marching “bands” on every avenue, whose music consisted of banging together varying kinds and sizes of rocks, each section responsible for the beat or the rhythm. The sound was thunderous, and despite the distance between each lane, they were all in sync – even the effect of the echo off the high mountains around them.

“It’s the local Mardi Gras,” Hewitt speculated.

“It’s the ultimate drum circle,” Cruz agreed.

Masked up, they approached the edge of the city. There were no walls, no guard towers, nothing to indicate that war ever came here. The houses on the outskirts were brick and mud, all deserted for the festival. There were smaller canals out here, made of brick, stinky and full of sewage and garbage revealed by the low water level. The bridges across the main canals were wooden and rickety.

They found some clothes hanging out to dry and took them, leaving some trinkets as payment. They walked towards the city center, weaving back and forth through the side streets, avoiding the avenues.

Out here in the poor area, they were a tangled warren, but as the avenues converged and they got closer to the temple, the streets became more orderly. And the houses got larger, finer, made of stone and then eventually of concrete and marble, approaching High Roman Empire in their magnificence. The canals here were stone, and the bridges were ornate, with bas-reliefs carved into the sides. On the ends of the bridges stood two statues, one on each side, presumably of noble citizens.

“Same old story everywhere,” Archambault muttered. “The rich get richer…”

The one constant from poor to rich zones were the lampposts. They were all the same black metal, with an unlit lamp on top, completely anachronistic among the wood and stone buildings. The lamps ran down all the major avenues, and the seven significant cross streets.

They watched the festival from a side street long enough to be able to mimic the dances, well enough, anyway to get into the crowd. Years of hands-on anthropology and sociology were paying off yet again for FJ One.

The poor were relegated to the back of the line streaming towards the temple, which enabled FJ One, already dressed in the poor’s clothes, to remain at the very back, unobtrusive, and unnoticed.

The crowd got denser, as they squeezed together near the temple. It was a ziggurat mimicking the shape of the mountain behind it. Even from a distance, the team could see the priests on the stairs to the temple, clad in brilliant gold – they were the only ones wearing that color.

The high priest held his hands up for silence and began to speak, his voice magnified by an unseen source. The team looked at each other. It wasn’t a natural sound projection.

His gestures and voice were indicative of what 6C had classified as “dynamic leadership.” Which could mean anything from messianic to totalitarian to revolutionary, but definitely the tones and gestures associated across the galaxy with “true believers,” the ones who have all the answers already, and may the local god help anyone who disagrees.

Some of his statements were met with cheers, others with boos (clearly aimed at the Other, whoever that might be around here), and then, as he reached a crescendo, he did a “wait for it” moment with his arms raised.

The whole city went silent. Then he slammed them down as if starting a race.

Every torch fell to the ground, and the natives pulled off their festive cloaks and threw them over the torches, smothering them.

“Look up there,” Hewitt whispered. “Over the mountain.”

The full moon was sitting precisely on the tip of the mountain, like a lunar Stonehenge, and gave out the only light other than the white foam of the long thin waterfall.

Then the silence was broken, as the whole city began to chant in unison, a three syllable sound, over and over, a whisper building to a scream.

“Ahh uhh AKK, Ahh uhh AKK, Ahh uhh AKK…” The marching bands started banging their rocks together again, a deafening racket that anyone within twenty miles could surely hear.

Then another sound rose, not rhythmic but steady, deep and monotonous.

That was when the waterfall began to flow.

It was like a dam breaking, megatons of water suddenly released from within the mountain. But it didn’t flood the valley – the reservoir behind the temple filled first, and then the water rushed out of the base of the temple, the level of the Grand Canal filling with a flash flood. The screaming and rock banging becomes orgasmic.

The water didn’t rise over the banks, though – its release had been precisely calculated to irrigate, not inundate, the city.

And as the first wave of water traveled down the main canal, the lampposts began to light up, one by one, exactly as the water reached their position. They were brilliant yellow incandescent light, lavishly energy-wasting bulbs.

On every avenue, as the city’s waterways filled up, the lights came on. Then, the canals full, the water began to leave the city, spreading out to flood the fertile delta, bringing light and life into the darkened world.

“Jesus,” Cruz said with a start. “That’s what they’re saying. That chant. Ah, ooh, uh…They’re trying to say…Alex.”

Chen nodded grimly. “Yeah. Marcus,” he said, knowing the young man was monitoring their comms, “it looks like you were right about that
machinae deus
…”