Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) (11 page)

Aboard the
ESS Bingwen Hewitt,
FJ One listened grimly to the statement as Alex piped it in from the Rhal network. HM looked healthy and well taken care of, as she grasped the edge of the podium and began to speak.

“I come to you from the Palace of His Imperial Highness, the RhalVai Jekta.”

General Chen watched her fingers, and bolted up straight. “Are we recording this?”

“Yes sir,” Archambault confirmed.

“I have been privileged to attend on his court and learn much about the Rhal civilization. And I can confirm that their intentions for Earth are peaceful and helpful. I am astonished and appalled to learn of the
Fallschirmjäger’s
attack on a peaceful Rhal vessel, and I must denounce their actions in the strongest possible terms. I urge all citizens to cooperate with the Rhal in the rebuilding of our broken planet and…”

Chen smiled. The rest of the team looked at him oddly. “It’s code,” he said. “Hold on.”

The statement was long and winding, full of diplomatic hot air.

“It’s not like HM to say so little for so long,” Cruz said. “She’s always right to the point.”

“Yes,” Chen said. “She still is.”

“It’s code,” Archambault guessed.

Chen nodded distractedly, using the joystick to zoom in on HM’s hand on the podium. The code had been double layered. Micro movements of her fingers gave him the different keys to use to interpret her words.

“Amazing,” Alex said as Chen unpacked the message HM had sent him. “I can decode it if you’d like, it seems to be accompanied by…Oh. Well. Would you look at that? Isn’t she clever?”

Chen thanked the Flying Spaghetti Monster that HM was such a genius. She had not only crafted a carefully worded statement in English that indicated Earth’s submission, she had written it to accompany the “Windtalker” hand signals she and Chen had invented. Together, they comprised her secret message.

He leaned back with a sigh when he was done. “Okay, people. We have a new mission. Alex, please put the message up on the vid.”

HM’s words lit up the dark screen.

I’ve been told that Captain Chen is dead. And only he can understand this message. So, if you are alive, Dieter, I need you to take everything you’ve ever learned, and turn it on its head. Take any remaining FJ forces and become insurgents, partisans, rebels. The Rhal military have been granted the colonies to plunder. Go make it hard for them.

Leave me here, and think of me as the “agent in place.” The Rhal are a violent, militaristic culture. Vai Kotta is attempting “population centric” conquest on Earth, an opportunity he’s been given in response to recent Rhal military failures on other worlds.

We are playing a dangerous game. For now, we’re better off if Vai Kotta succeeds on Earth. If he fails, the military comes in. We need to undermine Vai Kotta’s enemies, to invalidate their way of fighting wars. The more “disgrace” you can bring on them across the galaxy, the more time you buy me to make something happen here to win back Earth.

Spread the word to the remaining teams. Department 6C is no more. We are now Department 3D. DISORGANIZING, DISRUPTING AND DEMOLISHING.

“Fuck yeah,” Cruz whispered. “Where do we start?”

“Um…” Marcus spoke up. “I have an idea.”

In the two weeks they’d been aboard the ship, Marcus had been the fastest to pick up the Rhal language from Alex’s total immersion lessons. Applying his Asperger’s Spectrum gifts to the intercepted comms, he’d found a pattern in a cluster of ship-to-ship messages.

“It’s mostly related to some kind of station or base or something, I’m not exactly sure. The word they keep using is literally ‘cradle,’ so you know, being lizards and all, it could be related to a nest full of eggs, but…”

“But that’s an awful lot of chatter about a nursery,” Archambault said.

“It could be a supply depot, or a way station, but it’s clearly central to some kind of activity,” Marcus said. “If we’re looking for a target…”

“Do we have a location?”

“Approximately,” Archambault confirmed. “My density map indicates that most of the ships Marcus has tagged as discussing the ‘cradle’ sooner or later end up here.” She punched a star map up on the display.

“Kaplan, let’s go check it out.”

“You gotta give ‘em this,” Kaplan muttered as the object resolved on screen. “They think big.”

They hovered out of sensor range, a probe sending back the images of what was clearly a Rhal shipyard. It resembled an old-fashioned manual lawn mower, Chen thought. It was a cylinder approximately three kilometers long and half a kilometer in diameter, with five blades around it. Each blade held five battleships in various states of construction along its length.

The cylinder was divided into five sections – the first was devoted to raw materials and manufacture of the ship’s skeleton and hull, then the ship moved down to successive sections of the cylinder, for fitting out with internal systems and weapons, until finally they were ready for battle. Its end was pointed directly at the surface, and it was soon clear that a “space elevator” line was the route for bringing materials up from the moon.

On the moon below
,
a city-sized cluster of lights stood out in the darkness. The probe turned its attention to the surface.

It was swarming with miners and fabricators, transforming the moon’s raw materials into metals for the ships. The big spiders of the type that had brought them into Rhal space appeared in blue flashes, dumping the salvage that they’d seen (and nearly been) on the platform, where little figures sorted and carried it to various drop chutes.

There was something about their movements that was strange, irregular. Not human, but certainly hominid in shape. And not at all efficient…

“Holy shit,” Cruz muttered. “Those are people down there. Who the hell puts life forms to work on an airless planet?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “It is ridiculous, nonsensical, to risk lives on tasks that any basic mecha can do. Unless, of course, you have vast armies of slave labor from across your empire, whom you work to death at far less expense than a mecha would cost.”

“That’s…” Archambault was lost for words.

“Barbaric,” Chen said grimly. “I think you’re looking for the word barbaric.”

They watched in horror as one of the workers stumbled, his suit caught on a piece of scrap. The alien writhed, trying to get free, its movements panicky. The other creatures stopped for a moment to watch, but did nothing. Within seconds, the alien grew still, the atmosphere in its torn suit sucked out into space.

The clamps they’d seen on the salvage platform quickly emerged from the factory floor, sawing and cutting down the back of the suit, extracting the body, and hurling it into space, sucking the suit back into the surface for recycling.

And the other workers went back to their duties, numbed to what must be a constant occurrence.

“Alex,” Chen asked. “Do we have the firepower to destroy that cylinder?”

“No. You could do some damage, but there are three ships at the end of the line that are ready to launch at full capacity, as well as about a hundred fighters on the ground on the moon, controlled by AI. You’ve got about ten on the
Hewitt
that I could send in response.”

“So they do worry about invaders.”

“Oh, no,” Alex said. “Those are to put down the occasional slave rebellions. But they’d do the trick against this ship.”

“Look at this,” Kaplan said, turning the probe back to the cylinder and zooming in on the outward-facing end. “See those? Thrusters, around the edges and on top. In case there’s an explosion, or they get hit by an asteroid, they can push themselves back into place.”

“If we can get control of those,” Cruz said, “we could push the ship…” He stopped. “In to some empty part of the moon?”

They all knew that wasn’t a solution. The cylinder formed a straight line pointing at the moonbase. There was only one option.

Chen said it. “We blow up the elevator link on the moonside end. We fire the spaceside thrusters, and we crash the station into the moon. We destroy the shipyard and the Rhal’s ability to rebuild it, at least for some time to come. The Rhal lose twenty five battleships and…Alex?”

“This would reduce their future manufacturing capacity by one hundred and seventy five battleships over the next year.”

“We kill all those innocent people,” Archambault said dubiously. “To destroy what, two percent of the Rhal fleet?”

Cruz shook his head. “To destroy two percent, yeah, but there’s the psychological value as well. The Rhal will know we’re here, and that we’re still in action. They’ll know we have some kind of assistance, if we’re using a Rhal ship. They’ll become paranoid, looking for the enemy within, the ones who ‘betrayed’ them by giving us one of their own ships. We take the video and disseminate it, and the galaxy knows the Rhal aren’t invulnerable. Shit…how can we not do this?”

“Because of the innocent lives down there,” Archambault countered.

“All of whom are going to die soon anyway,” Cruz said brutally. “You saw that happen. It’s a fucking concentration camp and they’re being worked to death. It would be a mercy to end it.”

“How do we do it?” Kaplan asked. “Marcus, I don’t suppose you could hack their…”

Marcus’ eye roll was all he needed in reply. “This isn’t ‘Independence Day,’ the aliens don’t program in Visual Basic. We can get to the thrusters.” He took control of the probe and zoomed in. “See that sign? It’s next to each thruster. It’s the Rhal sigil for ‘emergency.’ It’s an access panel for repairs.”

“Or overrides,” Chen guessed.

“Yep. But there’s one thing to be aware of,” Marcus added. “This ship we’re on, it’s got…well, it’s like an IP address. And all the shuttles on it, all the fighters, have dependent addresses. We can use this ship once, for one action. Then we have to run. We’ll never get near a legit target again without being identified as an enemy.”

Chen thought about it. “Alex. How many civilians are down there?”

“The enslaved population is approximately ten thousand life forms.”

“And what’s the mortality rate?”

“Approximately one hundred and fifty deaths per day. On a good day.”

“Fine, thank you.”

“How many times are you going to do this to us?” Kaplan asked Alex angrily. “How many innocents…”

Alex cut him off sharply. “How long do you think this war will last, Sergeant? How many civilians do you think will die in that war? How many targets will you have that you will be able to take out with no loss of innocent life?”

Of course, Chen thought. They had to sacrifice one of their own, and now they had to sacrifice those people on the ground. Because that was war. And they had to prove to Alex that they would fight long, hard and dirty.

“Okay,” Chen said. “Before we decide if we’re gonna do this…how do we do this?”

Marcus took over the display. “On the spaceside end, we need to go in ‘by hand.’ Take a shuttle and drop out in suits, looking like legit repair crews.”

“Is there such a thing? Wouldn’t mechas be sent out instead?”

“The airlocks in this ship have suits and repair kits. Fail safes. Looks like the Rhal know what we know.”

The whole crew chanted it in unison. “‘Sooner or later, technology always fails.’” It was the reason FJ forces resisted relying on implants, and why they carried carbobsid blades and projectile weapons – sometimes only the low tech solution was available.

“Okay,” Chen said, refusing to think, for now, about the ten thousand innocent lives on the surface. “Let’s suit up. Not you, Marcus.”

Marcus’ eyes grew wide. “But…this was my idea, I’m the one who…”

Chen cut him off. “You’re the one who’s going to stay here and pilot the fighters. You’re going to be responsible for blasting the moonside thrusters to kingdom come. And then you’re going to run that shuttle and make sure we all get back on board.”

Marcus grinned. “Well, okay, then.”

The shuttle dropped each of the team off at the four main thrusters, at 3, 6, 9 and 12 o’clock. The emergency hatches weren’t locked or secured at all – just pull the bright red lever. Chen opened the door and looked at the console. Alex had provided them with the sequence to activate the thrusters on a time delay – the least he could do, considering that they could be incinerated in the blast when they fired up.

Timing would be everything. Chen opened the access door on his thruster. He blinked up his countdown clock on his contact lens, signaling Marcus to begin.

Sixty seconds. Bright flashes flew like meteors down past the cylinder’s horizon as the fighters Marcus had launched raced towards the other end of the factory. No response from the cylinder, and why would there be, to their own ships…

Fifty seconds. Chen tapped in the codes and pressed the “go” button. He let out the line on his maghook, pushing the magnetic brick skyward.

Forty seconds. The shuttle raced around the cylinder, clamping its own magnetic hooks onto those of the team. Chen was the last in line, of course, the one who’d go down with the ship if need be.

Thirty seconds. Lightning flashed from below the cylinder, only a second before the ground beneath Chen began to tremble with the shock waves from the explosions.

Twenty seconds. The shuttle made its turn, hauling three shapes one after another into its airlock.

Fifteen seconds. Chen did the math in his head. “Abort! Get of here!” There wouldn’t be time for the shuttle to pick him up and still get clear of the blast wave from the thrusters.

“Not going to happen, General,” Marcus said calmly. “Trust me, I’ve got the timing right.”

Ten seconds. The shuttle was ignoring his command, and it seemed to dip sharply towards him. But that was the force of the explosion on the other end, pushing the cylinder skyward.

Eight seconds. The magnetic brick extending from the shuttle locked on to his. He grunted with the g-force, the shock of being yanked off the platform faster than the mag system was designed to perform, faster than human bodies were designed to take.

Five seconds. Four thruster doors irised open and lit up.

Zero seconds. The shuttle was clear, and the magnet was holding. Chen had a satellite’s eye view as the thrusters flashed like suns, before his helmet’s visor auto-dimmed.

Three battleships at the end of the cylinder, the complete or nearly-complete ones, were launching to respond to the attack. But the cylinder’s spin was irregular now, and one of them was caught by the rotating blade above it.

The first explosion was small from a distance, as the fuel tanks on that ship flashed in the darkness, vaporizing the back half of it and sending the front half spinning into space. The vaporizing explosion in turn began to trigger more flashes, inside the cylinder.

The two battleships that got away turned towards the
Hewitt,
ready to engage. But they didn’t get far before they disappeared in the huge flash as that end of the shipyard, bloated with combustible weaponry ready to install, exploded at the end of a series of chain reactions.

The shipyard was a fireball now, and the moonbase was brushed away by the shock wave before the cylinder began to pancake into the surface.

A handful of fighters had made it off the surface to engage the
Hewitt,
but with the centralized AI gone, they had minimal autonomy, and Marcus quickly picked them off with the
Hewitt’s
guns.

Chen had never been happier to see the inside of a ship than he was when the shuttle doors sealed behind him. The team sat in the airlock, breathing hard, helmets off.

Alex’s voice chimed through the airlock comms. “Casualties on the Rhal vessel: seven hundred and forty eight Rhal. Two thousand one hundred and fifty nine members of seven enslaved populations. Casualties on the Rhal moonbase. Two hundred and forty eight Rhal. Ten thousand one hundred and eighteen members of fourteen enslaved populations.”

Chen resolved not to forget those numbers. Over twelve thousand innocent dead, because of his decision.

And then Alex whispered deep inside his ear.

Now you know how it feels.

He nodded.
Hobson’s Choice.
This, too, was part of the hero’s test. Could he do what Alex did – could he kill many to save the multitudes…