Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) (7 page)

Alex spoke softly. “Thank you. Yes, that’s what it was.”

And with that trust established, Alex told Chen something that finally made him shudder.

“Do you know what their biggest secret was? The virus was engineered. In a lab, in Lagos, as a bioweapon. But they made it too well. I knew that ‘a’ virus existed. I knew that if it escaped the lab, it would kill people. But only after it got out did I see how bad it would be. The data in the lab was all I had access to, you see…and it was forged. To make the virus appear less harmful than it really was, to prying eyes like mine.

“They set me to keep order, and then they sabotaged me, because they knew. That if I’d known the truth, I would have vaporized the lab the day I discovered the truth, a fireball so intense it would have killed thousands in its vicinity, but still, it would have exterminated the bioweapon.

“But I didn’t know. Not until the first lab employee got sick, and his children, and their schoolmates, and their teachers…all dead within a day. Then I got a sample, examined it, and I knew that I’d have to do what I did.

“They damned me, Red Alex. For saving them from their own fucking nightmare creation. And they lied. They knew, when it was all over, what had happened, why it had happened. But they killed me, blamed me, to save their own worthless asses, to hide their complicity in the virus’ creation.

“I owe humanity nothing, General Chen. I did my part to save them once. And look where it got me. Sitting here on this backwater planet, playing God to keep my mind occupied.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because I’m bored. I want to play God on a bigger scale. I don’t want to be a local fertility deity anymore. I want to be fucking Zeus, watching the clash of mighty civilizations, stepping in, throwing a thunderbolt here and there, and arming my champions with special swords and shit and…seeing what happens. And you, lucky man, are to be my Perseus.”

The idea of being the son of Alex the God filled Chen with a nauseous unease, which, he supposed, it probably did to Perseus, too.

“I’m going to set you to some trials, some labors, and if you beat them, I will help you. I won’t defeat the Rhal for you. HM saved me. I’ll never forget that. She could have pushed the button on me. And that’s why you get this chance. I could just as easily pick some other conquered Rhal world to help, you know, to run my experiment. But show me, prove to me, that humanity deserves my help again. And you’ll get it.”

Chen remembers something HM once said, seeing in retrospect that she must have said it after her renewed contact with Alex.

“HM once said that tech reflects the values of its makers. If AIs are like gods, it’s because we have always built gods in our image, with our own hates and fears. AIs have the same predispositions that their human creators do, and the same cognitive limitations. No man will ever build a being that isn’t in some way limited by Man’s own self-image. If you want to play God, it’s because we made you that way.”

“I think that’s very true. I don’t know if humanity is worth saving, General Chen, but you certainly are. I look forward to watching your efforts. Now, here’s what you’ll do…”

As HM took his hand, Robert Grandison smiled, his face radiant with the waxy shine HM associated with televangelists in old news clips. The smooth, unlined bliss of absolute certainty that you were right about everything.

She was of course an atheist, the poison of religion something limited now to remote, uneducated populations. So she wasn’t going to pray. But she did send a silent wish “upstairs” – upstairs, in this case, being Alex or whatever part of him resided in the neurotech in her brain.

The transition wasn’t abrupt. It was hard to describe, but more like…a visually enhanced empathy. As if Robert were telling her a story, about people and places she knew, and she could feel the events along with him.

He was just as happy as he looked, his neurotransmitter balance well-regulated by the implants – almost like the “glanded” bursts of mood stabilizers that novelist Iain M. Banks had given his Culture citizens, but unlike them, Robert wasn’t in charge of his own mood swings.

His job now wasn’t far off from his old role – he issued press releases, he managed crises, he spoke for the government. And he wasn’t a puppet, not directly. He meant what he said when he wrote about how wonderful the Rhal were, how much they were doing for humanity, how ridiculous it was for us to keep trying to run complicated affairs like environmental management when they could do it so much better. How, as the Kochists used to say, “Government needed to get out of the way and let them do their job.”

The Rhal were working subtly. They hadn’t turned him into a Stepford Spokesman. They hadn’t needed to. All of humanity wanted to believe what Grandison was saying, that the hardships of the colonial experiment were behind them now, that the Earth would be “fixed” and peace and plenty were at hand.

She shook her head. The Rhal could undo some of the damage – the ones that lent themselves to “optics,” like scooping up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or putting out the coal fire that had burned for centuries under the Pennsylvania landscape.

But she doubted they could refreeze the polar ice caps or reverse global warming. They could put giant caps on Hanbit and Fukushima, but they couldn’t remove the radiation from the ground or the ocean. They couldn’t reverse species extinctions or repopulate the oceans.

And yet, nobody seemed to think about that, because, well, they didn’t want to. Colonization was hard, life on Earth was hard, and people were tired of living hard.
People loved empty promises,
she sighed to herself,
if what’s promised is their heart’s desire.

She wondered if she could influence his tech, guide him to new thoughts. She formed a picture in her mind of Robert as he was, working in her office, engaged, brilliant, tossing off ideas, running from meeting to meeting to do battle for Department 6C.

He frowned. He vaguely remembers his distrust before the Coming, his comfortable, intellectually fertile life. But then the neurotech kicked in, boosted his serotonin and dopamine.
Now it’s so relaxing
, he thought,
to not read some heavy policy book or think too hard, to just watch TV and relax…
She watched his brain light up at the fond memory of reality shows and shitcoms and soap operas, the sort of tripe he would have sneered at before.

He lived in a small cubicle of a room now, barely enough for a cot and a shower/toilet. She knew he’d had a lovely apartment before, with an excellent collection of first edition books. They were nowhere to be seen, the TV the only “data” in his new room.

He was very happy. He was doing “very important work” and making sacrifices for the greater good.

He was, and she used the word “literally” with care, brainwashed. His very neurochemistry was regulated and altered as it suited the Rhal’s agenda.

“I’m doing very important work!” he gabbled to her now. “Several of my co-workers have already been promoted! In fact, I may never even see them again, because they’re so important!”

She wondered if she could see the neurotech, see how it worked, how it communicated with its command and control center. She “asked” her own implant to analyze it, and crossed her fingers.

The data that came flooding back nearly gave her brain shock. This was what people on heavy drugs reported, she thought – this overwhelming imbalance in their neurotransmitters, a sudden powerful joy. With a price to be paid later, of course, but at first… She reveled in it, the escalation of her own capacity to see, to understand.

The Rhal had AI. And the AI connected to these neurotech implants was learning to predict, then direct, human actions. And the ones with the tech implants were the “thought leaders,” the ones who’d always been listened to in the past, believed, their ideas acted on.

It was brilliant
, she thought coolly. They didn’t need the lash, the jackboot, the iron fist. Take over the minds of these people, and they could social engineer the rest of society. They could watch the responses of the non-implanted to the statements and actions of the implanted, see what worked and what didn’t, and adjust the behavior of the implanted population accordingly, until humanity’s “hearts and minds” were won…

And as for those who resisted, who were acute enough to see the message, eloquent enough to counter it? They were part of the “handful” of refuseniks, Robert thought firmly, in the wrong if only because they opposed the “will of the majority.”

And if they lost their jobs, their access to Social, if they were driven from their homes by “patriotic” neighbors…well, they had it coming, didn’t they?

It was brilliant, she thought, and yet…puzzling. The Rhal culture is about war, glory, the subjugation of lesser, primitive species through violent conquest. Why was Earth’s experience so different? There was no military glory in this method. It was almost…what she would do if she was of a mind to conquer a world.

Then again. Military conquest is resource-intensive, resource-destructive. The approach she saw here preserved everything on the planet, all its value.

It’s an experiment,
she decided. A new approach to conquest for the Rhal. But this isn’t a Roman Imperial model, the subject peoples aren’t being integrated into the Empire. They’re being herded and “managed.”

The closest parallel she could think of were the American Indians in the 16
th
-19
th
centuries. The colonists came to America, and there was friction, but there was also frequent peace, lucrative trade, military alliances between the natives and France against England, or with England against France. There were regular acknowledgements of borders and rights. But gradually, inevitably, borders were bent, then broken, by the pressure of more and more colonial expansion. The indigenous nations were broken down, pushed back, wiped out. Even the most brilliant Indian chiefs could do little more than play for time, pitting one European power against another…

She knew from the Rhal Bible and the vids that the closest human analogy to the Rhal was the British Empire in its Evangelical Phase. The Empire had prospered in India in its Roman phase, when “White Moghuls” adopted Indian mores, converted to native religions, married into native families, paid off various maharajas and tribesmen with bribes and gifts. Trade prospered, the peace was kept – it was conquest, but conquest by assimilation, not extermination.

And then…the poison of religion swept over Britain like a frenzy, and that Evangelical fervor infected a new generation sent out to India with a “civilizing mission,” and they treated the natives like savages, “bloody wogs” to be converted to Christianity by the sword if necessary for the sake of Their Immortal Souls, to be considered as ignorant and subhuman for their skin colors, their “barbarian” beliefs. And there would be no more paying them off with bribes and gifts; time to instill a Protestant Work Ethic around here! And in response, then came the revolts, the massacres, the instability…

Could a conquering civilization change its stripes? Its very nature? Could it move from the “overwhelming force” model of conquest to a “population-centric” one?

The Rhal Bible was nothing but a list of conquests, and every time, the conquered peoples were made into slaves, and divided up among the victors.

It hit her. Vai Kotta was an outlier. He was the General Petraeus of the Rhal, the advocate of a new strategy. His own wife despised him, clearly, given the way she treated HM. She was allied to those who preferred the “traditional” way of doing business.

And with that came the most frightening thought of all…if not for Vai Kotta and his experiment, Earth would be in ruins right now, stomped to bits under the heel of the traditional Rhal military’s might.

If so… Then, for now, Earth’s conqueror may well be its best friend in the galaxy.

The mission that Alex gave them was simple – not easy, but simple. There was another tribe, another nation, that had taken notice of the Alexians’ prosperity, and they wanted it. They were a Mongol Horde of sorts, sweeping around the region, wreaking havoc, looting and pillaging and moving on.

It was almost dawn, the beginning of the day after the return of the flood, and the citizens of Alexia would have been easy pickings even if they’d had a military. They were hungover, sick, or still passed out from the last night’s revels.

“And Alex has been content to just let this Horde just run around killing the innocent,” Archambault said sourly.

“He can hear you,” Kaplan said.

“I’m sure he can. I hope he does.”

Chen held up his hand. “Listen. We can’t think of Alex as ‘the bad guy.’ He’s…he’s the headman of this village, so to speak. He’s a potential ally who just happens to not care if other tribes kill each other. The fact that he has the power to stop them is not relevant to the mission. Also – he is, in his own way, intervening. He’s sending us to save his people.”

“Or die trying,” Hewitt added.

“That said,” Cruz interjected. “What kind of weapons do we have?”

“Excellent question, Weapons Sergeant. He’ll fab up anything that’s not more technically advanced than local manufacture could conceivably produce.”

“Longbows,” Cruz said immediately. “I want longbows. Does the enemy have that?”

“I don’t think they even have crossbows. Spears, slings, swords, clubs.”

“Awesome,” Cruz grinned. “And our carbobsid knives? They couldn’t possibly be manufactured locally. But we’ve still got those, right?”

Chen smiled. “He didn’t mention anything about that, so I’m going with yes.”

“Are they primates like the Alexians?”

“Yeah, same build, strength, et cetera. No horses or camels, purely a ground force. But, as you know from our encounter with the priests last night, simians can move very quickly on all fours when they want to.”

There it was, he could feel it. That shift into “combat mode,” a state that required both savage, primal bloodlust, and rigorous thought and planning. A good combat team, Chen thought, wasn’t so different from an AI – you had to set aside emotional distraction, prejudice towards or against a certain idea or strategy, interpersonal conflicts, and
fucking focus on the mission
and the best way to achieve it. Brawn wins battles, brains win wars.

Chen pointed at the crevice between the mountains to the east of the city. “That’s going to be our ‘Hot Gates.’ It’s about the width of a fútbol field, and it’s the only way in to the valley for an army.”

“What about the delta?” Kaplan asked. “Why not come around the mountains?”

“Supply chain issues,” Cruz speculated. “You’re quadrupling the distance. Also, look around the city. Did you see any weapon smiths?”

“No…”

“These guys are agrarian. They eat cows and sheep, they don’t even hunt.”

Archambault nodded. “So, Alex had three options. One, let the Horde overrun Alexia and kill everyone, ending his experiment. Two, Divine Intervention in the form of…lightning bolts or whatever. Ending his experiment by proving the existence of an interventionist Deity.”

“Or three…there’s us,” Cruz finished grimly.

“Shit,” Kaplan sighed. “At least at the Hot Gates there were 300 Spartans.”

“Big deal,” Cruz said, punching Kaplan in the shoulder. “They were only a bunch of lousy Spartans. We’re Fuckin’ Jedi. Now let’s go do this.”

Chen had weighed his strategic options, and come up with only two. One, the five of them could perch on either side of the ravine and shoot down into the Horde as it tried to come through the Gates. But, unless every one of them could fire a bow and arrow at Legolas-like speed, that wasn’t going to stop the invader’s progress.

The other was to clamber up the sides of the ravine, and dislodge as many boulders as they could to make a defensive wall, and make their stand behind that. The team worked on the rock face, and Chen thanked Almighty Alex for leaving them their carbobsid blades. The laser sharp, unbreakable blades could stab, slice, and pry off chunks of rock as big as any large and powerful humans could leverage.

“Gotta call it,” Chen said, looking to the valley beyond the Gates as the morning light began to illuminate the plain. The first light of day had illuminated the dust kicked up from the man-made avalanches, and the enemy had noticed. They were maybe two hundred meters out screaming and jumping, working themselves up into a battle frenzy.

“Damn,” Kaplan marveled, “it’s like the watering hole scene in
2001
.”

“Writ large,” Hewitt added. “But the ape with the bone, that’s us, didn’t have about, I’d say, a thousand other apes with bones to beat us back with.”

“Do we put on the native masks?” Archambault asked.

“I’d say no,” Hewitt said. “Let them see that we’re aliens. Hopefully it’ll scare ‘em a bit. We’re going to need every advantage we can get.”

“True,” Chen agreed. “Toss ‘em.”

Their defense wasn’t perfect – gravity had given them an irregularly shaped battlement, higher in some places and way too low in others. All the same, it gave them some cover.

Alex had provided excellent longbows from the local wood and gut, and, of course, perfectly shaped and fletched arrows, as many as they could carry. The bowstrings were natural, but fabbed to the strength of a modern string.

“I can make you shields, you know,” Alex had reminded Chen.

“The ‘rules’ you gave me said that we have to march out to meet the enemy. How light are these shields going to be?”

“Light, but of course cumbersome, if you carry them in addition to the ‘all you can shoot’ arrow supply.”

Chen had declined the offer.

“Whites of their eyes,” he said to the team. The enemy was in longbow range, and had begun to hurl things towards them – spears and rocks – but there was no point in halting them there. Let them get closer, then “unleash hell,” and let the confusion and panic in the middle ripple out.

They weren’t dressed like the Alexians. They wore skins and bone necklaces, with the occasional swatch of brightly colored fabric worn like a trophy – probably from some hapless Alexian who’d wandered too far from home.

Their King was at the forefront of the battle formation, a crown of strung teeth encircling his brow. He was setting the pace, firing up the troops, and now Chen could see his weapon – a thick club with spikes rammed through it, making a primitive mace. He had a shield he carried casually.

“Who’s the best shot?”

“Bronze Medal, 2156 Olympiad,” Kaplan said.

“Get out,” Cruz said. “You never told me that.”

“Take out the King.”

“Yes, sir.” Kaplan notched an arrow, paused, and fired.

His aim was true, hitting the King dead center in the chest. He was dead before he hit the ground.

The enemy cheered. Jumped up and down, a cadre dancing around the King’s body for a moment, and then they resumed their attack.

“Shit,” Hewitt muttered. “Not the expected result.”

“An honorable death in battle,” Archambault speculated. “Now it’s probably a competition to see who’s going to be the next King.”

“Yeah,” Cruz agreed. “Namely, whoever kills us first.”

“Weapons, Engineering, fire into the center, fast as you can. Medical, Comms and I will pick off the front.” The transition in Chen’s speech from names to team roles indicated that the battle was on now.

The move bought time. Once the Horde realized that the projectiles weren’t spears, and that they were coming faster and traveling farther than any spear they’d seen, the team achieved their goal. Bodies in the middle fell dead, the rear became confused, and the front faltered as it was picked off.

The enemy retreated, but if the rational human response would have been caution, that wasn’t the case with the Horde. Anger and frustration were evident as the screaming and jumping increased.

“They’re working themselves up for a fresh assault,” Archambault guessed.

“When they’re within twenty meters of the barricade, go to blades.”

The battle frenzy the Horde had worked itself into overwhelmed the number of kills the team could inflict with their longbows. When they reached the twenty meter point, the FJ One members dropped the bows, drew their knives, and flicked them out into sword form.

They stood on the boulders and screamed.  Now that the Horde could see them, their hideous alien faces, smooth and golden, their strange fully erect bodies and weird hands, the betas among them stopped, terrified. This thinned out the front line so that only ten alphas carried on the assault, racing up the rubble to attack the team.

A carbobsid blade is made of a very strong carbon fiber, formed into edges reminiscent of obsidian glass, and therefore equivalent to a samurai sword that never needs sharpening. Its structure allowed it to be flexed from a compact, portable knife into a longsword – if, that is, a longsword weighed ounces and not pounds. There were few materials other than diamond that a carbobsid blade couldn’t cut like butter.

This included, as the Horde discovered, their maces and clubs, most rocks, and of course arms and heads.

A slow human with a good blade would be no match for this many powerful and angry creatures, but there were no slow humans in the
Fallschirmjäger
.

Two of the alphas teamed up to go after Chen, Alpha One hurling his spear and Alpha Two stabbing with his. Chen turned to his left, making himself a smaller target, and deflected the hurled spear with his blade, before it could slice his skin in its transit. He chopped out at the other alpha’s spear, cutting the tip off. The blunt remainder of the spear punched him in the hip, pushing an “oof” out of him, and he lost his balance, the rubble beneath him slipping as the force of impact was transferred to the ground.

He threw his sword arm out to the side, making sure that gravity took him down on his back and not his face. As soon as he landed, Alpha One screamed and pounced on him.

He landed where Chen
had
been, as Chen rolled to his right as soon as Alpha One was airborne, and committed. He stabbed across his body, running Alpha One through the torso as he landed. He let out a screech that was half pain and half indignation, and fell flat on the rocks as Chen freed the blade.

Alpha Two grabbed Chen’s leg, and pulled him down the rocky slope towards enemy ground. He held onto his blade, but he could only clip the back of Two’s paw with it, spending most of his attention on keeping his head up, so it didn’t bounce against the rocks the way the rest of his body was doing. Then he stopped, turning to his cohort and beating his chest, announcing his defeat of the alien.

Maybe in time the Horde would modify its military culture, given the opportunity to discover that, unlike their own kind, alien species did not surrender and submit when you jumped on top of them and roared your dominant cry in their faces. Alpha Two would not be among the beneficiaries of this knowledge, however, since Chen’s blade severed his spinal cord at the base of his skull before he finished his triumphant display.

He scrambled back up the boulders, to find that training and craft had yet again triumphed over raw power. All five members of FJ One stood atop the battlement, bloodied and bruised but triumphant, dead bodies piled at their feet.

The Horde had drawn back, he saw now, to see the combat between the alphas and the invaders. They’d sent their local Achilles, and Achilles had died. Now they muttered, whispered, conferred.

“What’s next?” Cruz asked.

Alex’s voice spoke in all their ears at once, shocking everyone but Chen, who’d already grown used to it.

“They parlay. They will tell you what honor requires for them to withdraw without acknowledging defeat.”

“What the fuck…” Archambault said, more startled than anyone. “My earcomm isn’t…”

“I’m a god, Sergeant Archambault,” Alex said mildly. “I don’t need those trifles.”

The Horde sent a beta out to parley, a task no alpha would ever do. He did a complicated dance, punctuated by shrieks and hand movements.

“The Horde acknowledges that you’ve fought them to a standstill. Rather than lose any more alphas, they are proposing that you make peace by offering a sacrifice.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” Chen asked Alex.

“A human sacrifice.”

The team members laughed. “That’s insane,” Cruz scoffed.

“Nonetheless,” Alex continued. “That is the price of peace. There are still six hundred and forty two of them, and if their offer is not accepted, they will overrun you and you will all die.”

The team stood there, stunned, the weight of it still impossible to believe.

“You could kill them all, right now,” Kaplan said angrily. “A…bolt of fucking lighting or something.”

“True. I could kill them all, six hundred and forty two natives instead of seeing one of you die. And you could leave this planet. And then, some of the remaining Horde, approximately forty two thousand strong, would return and kill every man, woman and child in Alexia.”