Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) (8 page)

“Unless you stopped them, too,” Kaplan pressed.

“Yes.”

“But you won’t.”

“No.”

“You could smash this gorge,” Chen said. “Fill it with rubble, make it a nearly insurmountable challenge. So difficult that they’d move on.”

“I’m afraid not. This is the only advanced civilization around, General, and how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen Alexia? The pickings are too good.”

The team turned to Chen. Waiting to hear what he’d say.

He thought hard on it. And, FJ One being as it was, he spoke his thoughts out loud. “Alex isn’t kidding, it isn’t in his nature. And he won’t change his mind. He’d warned me, in his own way, on the mountain. He wants to be Zeus, to play on a bigger stage, and I don’t know how much Greek mythology you know, but the gods of Olympus are capricious bastards who would raise you up and throw you down…”

He paused. “Set aside the fate of the people of this planet. Pretend it doesn’t matter. I can save the team. We can take the shuttle Alex gave us and go. But that means, no help from Alex against the Rhal. And we don’t have a chance against them without him.”

“I volunteer,” Cruz said immediately.

“Same,” Kaplan added, at the same time as Archambault.

“No,” Chen said. “I’ll do it. I’m the...”

“You’re all wrong,” Hewitt said with a calm that stopped them all. “It has to be me.”

The team turned to look at him. “Comms is out. We need her to work on intercepting Rhal transmissions, disrupting them, making contact with Earth. Engineering is out, we’ll need repairs, analysis of Rhal tech, who knows what else. Weapons, well, shit,” he winked at Cruz, “we’re gonna need some fucking weapons against the Rhal. And you, General? You’re the goddamn face of the
Fallschirmjäger
, to every FJ team in the galaxy, the symbol of hope. You’re the oldest and the wisest and if you even take one step towards that Horde, I’ll shoot you with a goddamn paralytic.”

Hewitt spread his hands. “So that comes down to…with Alex’s help, who will we need least? We don’t know what he’ll give us. But I’m the least necessary. You can patch yourselves up, you can get an autodoc to do the rest. We have no idea how complex the Rhal weapons are, the Rhal ships. You’ll need to learn more, do more, and I won’t. I’m expendable.”

Chen was sick to his stomach. It was true. Every word. There was only one rational command decision.

“And besides, I can dope the fuck out of myself. I’ll go out happy.”

“Alex,” Chen said desperately. “Please. I’m begging you.”

“I’m sorry, general.”

Hewitt didn’t wait. He opened up his kit and started preparing a series of injections.

“That’s not instadope,” Cruz said, looking at one of the packs. “I should know, I’ve had enough pain shots in the field.”

“No, it’s not.” He shot himself in the buttocks. “In case they put me in a cage for a few days. I can activate on demand with a very tight squeeze of my ass cheek.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Archambault said softly.

Hewitt finished his preparations, and hugged each team member in turn. “Think of it as a suicide mission, buddy,” he said, slapping a crying Cruz on the back.

He started down the rubble towards the waiting Horde.

“Hewitt,” Chen called.

Hewitt turned around.

“I’ll see you in Hell.”

Hewitt grinned. “I’ll save you a seat.”

The Horde bowed down to Hewitt, his status as holy sacrifice giving him honor and place. Chen watched in horror as they hastily put together a pyre around Hewitt, who stood stock still as they did.

Hewitt smiled at them. None of them wanted to watch, none of them would look away.

The Horde parted for an alpha with a torch. He lit the pyre. Smoke wafted towards the team.

And Hewitt began to sing.

We, are the champions, my friend.

And we’ll keep on fighting till the end…

Chen lost it. The tears came down his cheeks freely, but he knew what he had to do. Fucking Hewitt and his 20
th
century pop culture trivia…

The team joined in the song, sobbing their way through the lyrics as the tinder caught around Hewitt.

As the flames rose, Chen stopped singing. Hewitt’s face was contorting, flinching, as his pants caught fire.

“Jesus Christ, Hewitt, activate the dope!”

“The drugs, dammit!” Cruz screamed.

“Oh my god,” Kaplan moaned. “He didn’t. He didn’t dope up.”

Chen realized it was true, the awful brutal truth of it. The pain meds would be “cheating” Alex of his sacrifice. The heroes of old didn’t have it, when they went to their deaths.

“Shoot him,” Archambault begged Chen. “Let me shoot him.” She lifted the longbow.

Chen grabbed her arm. “No.” It was the hardest command he’d ever given.

“O fuck…” Hewitt said at last, the pain too much…

…and at that moment it came. The bolt of lightning from the sky. Incinerating Hewitt instantly, scattering the Horde and sending FJ One ducking for cover.

Chen looked over the rocks at what was left of Hewitt – nothing. Ash.

Merciful Gods,
he thought bitterly.

“Goddamn you, Alex,” he said out loud.

But like the gods of old, he didn’t answer.

The Horde scattered as a spotlight from the sky illuminated the ground between the barricade and the pyre. Chen was ashamed of himself for thinking it, but it was obvious – Alex could “manifest” to the savages, could prove his existence with that bolt of lightning, because in the long run the savages would be either assimilated or destroyed by the civilized Alexians, and their charming story of a god’s wrath would be mocked and disdained and, in the fullness of time, forgotten.

A shuttle came down, silent, frictionless, a large, gleaming egg. Legs extended, a door slid open, and a staircase touched the ground.

“This is what we get?” Cruz spat. “A fucking taxi?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Alex said, back in all their ears again. “Get in and strap in.”

The interior had seats for five, and in one of the seats was Marcus, already swept up by Alex from the shuttle.

“General, I’m sorry, I didn’t leave my post of my own…”

“I know, son,” Chen said gently. “Strap in.”

The team strapped in, grimly silent.

The ship lifted off, easily at first and then with increasing G force, smashing them into their bucket seats, deeply gel-padded to take some of the pressure.

The front of the egg’s smooth walls resolved into a screen, and the team’s seats were rotated to face it. There was a dot, then a pebble, then a rock, then…

“What the fuck is that?” Cruz asked.

“It’s a Rhal battleship,” Chen said. “And a damn big one.”

“For just the five of us?” Archambault said instinctively. “What a waste…”

“Sometimes,” Alex said, “psychology is as powerful a weapon as force. Think of the ships that manifested over Earth. Knocked your socks off, didn’t they? And besides, unlike you Earth creatures, I am not subject to the laws of Scarcity.”

Kaplan shook his head. “But it’s just one ship against…how many?”

“Against about ten thousand Rhal battleships,” Alex replied. “But it’s a start. And this ship has a few advantages. Including me, of course. And they’re a bit silly in their military culture, and it reflects in their design.”

“The guns that are only on the front of the ship,” Chen recalled.

“Yes, among the Rhal it’s cowardly to turn and run, you see, and if you do then you deserve to be blown up. This ship does not suffer from that deficit.”

“Anything else up your sleeve?” Chen asked.

“Yes, but you’ll see more in time.”

The fury rose in Chen, unquenchable. “A man died for you, you know. Burned to death, refusing pain meds, to play his role in your archetypal mythological game. Doesn’t that obviate the need to play that game, if only for a moment?”

There was a long pause. Far longer than an AI needed to pause, other than for effect.

“I’m an artificial intelligence, General. In my very essence, I am a game, a set of rules, a generator of predictable outcomes, of strategies, speculations, possibilities. A game can’t be played if the outcome is determined in advance.”

“Or if you don’t play by the rules,” Chen added.

“That too. But…I must say your man went above and beyond. I would have accepted a more pain-free sacrifice. He could have doped up. I expected him to, actually. I’m not a monster, you know.”

“You knew it would be him,” Archambault deduced. “You knew he could go easy.”

“Yes. He
was
the only rational choice, and the one who would suffer the least.”

“But he did suffer,” she pressed. “To make sure we won, that we gave you what you wanted. To fully enact the scenario you created. But you, you forgot something. The Achilles Heel in your plan. The possibility that Hewitt would die the way he expected that a savage god would require.”

Another pause. “Yes. I erred in my projection. I can’t say I’m sorry. I don’t feel regret or remorse, and I’m not inclined to add that feature to my programming. But I will say I made a mistake. I underestimated you, and your team. How quickly you made the decision, how efficiently, how cooperatively. How nobly he sacrificed, if you’ll accept that concept.”

“We’re the
Fallschirmjäger,
” Cruz said tartly. “Fuckin’ Jedi. We know about nobility and sacrifice.”

“I know you do. Every one of you was truly ready to die. I could read your pulses, your brain waves. The death acceptance protocol of the lizard brain, kicking in. Without even knowing if what I would give you would be worth it. Because it was your mission, because this is what you do…

“And so,” Alex said briskly. “A change of plan. I have one more gift I’ll reveal to you now. You see, the Rhal AI has been designed by an arrogant species that cannot possibly fathom that any external enemy, and certainly not any internal dissenter, could ever mount an intrusion, could ever have the technology or even the balls to do it. Which made it ridiculously easy for me to hack, especially after the hundred years I’ve had to learn their systems. As the General reminded me, like the gods that men create, AI is limited to its creators’ capacity to imagine its limits. You see, the Rhal cannot conceive of anyone who’s smarter than they are.”

The team exchanged glances.

“You’ll need to learn the Rhal language in the next few weeks,” Alex went on. “I’ve got an intensive course set up for you in the ship system. But once you do…this ship can intercept and decode every message sent among His Imperial RhalVai’s armed forces.”

Cruz whistled. Chen got a thrill up his spine.

Archambault was floored. “It would be like having Enigma from the first day of World War II.”

“Yes. Your friend’s sacrifice was not for nothing.”

“You could do it,” Kaplan said shrewdly. “You could crash the whole fucking Rhal Empire right now. You could fly every one of their ships into the nearest sun.”

“Of course I could,” Alex replied as the egg was enfolded into the heart of the battleship. “But what kind of god would I be, if I made a world without heroes?”

They took their stations on the bridge of the battleship. It wasn’t as wasteful as it looked from space, after all – most of it was empty shell. As Alex had said, a ship’s mass gave a psychological advantage, if you could afford it. Especially among those for whom mass was equivalent to power.

“General,” Cruz said. “You know…a ship needs a name.”

The team turned to him. He nodded. No discussion was needed.

“Engineering. Create the ship’s log for the
ESS Bingwen Hewitt.
I’m afraid a formal ceremony will have to wait.”

“With pleasure, sir.”

“So…now what?” Cruz asked.

“Archambault, try and establish contact with the other FJ teams. See what the situation is on the ground in the colonies where they’ve managed, and what’s going on back on Earth.”

Archambault went to work, the interfaces surprisingly easy to manage and adapt to her needs.

“And HM is on the Rhal home world, if she’s still alive. Alex?” he asked the air hopefully.

There was no reply. Alex was done helping, at least for now.

“Fine,” Chen said. “Let’s take Alex’s silence as a sign she’s not dead, anyway. As far as I’m concerned, she’s not just our boss, she’s now the top human authority in the galaxy. We need her, we need to see what she’s learned.”

And,
Chen thought
, maybe she can manage Alex better than I did
.

“And bust her out of jail?” Cruz asked eagerly.

“Yes. If we can, we bust her out of jail.”

Archambault spoke up. “We’re going to have a problem with comms. Even if Alex fabs up some message carriers, the Rhal are surely monitoring that network. Anything we send is going to be decoded and will give away the position of any team we reach.”