by Adam Vance
“Eng, patch in and take command of that ship. Then use it to push this asteroid around. Make sure it’s between us and the Rhalbazani.”
“Gonna blow a lot of fuel, moving the asteroid.”
“Understood. All shuttles, prepare for violent thrust.” The stroidfarm ship was already deeply embedded in the rock, and its adjustable thrusters had the power to shift asteroids in their course – slowly, over time. Punching the jets hard was doable, but would use a lot of fuel.
They were pushed back into their chairs by the force of the short blasts to push and counterpush the rock.
“We’re good, Captain.”
“Detach from the grapplers. Lift off 50 meters, launch an empty shuttle, and point it straight down at the surface of the asteroid.”
“Roger that.”
Captain Chen opened a radio signal. “All FJ units still out there…” He hesitated, but only for a second. Long enough to weigh the gravity of what he was doing, to acknowledge it, to accept the burden and the pain that came with the decision.
“We’re going to use a shuttle to open flashspace inside this asteroid. That’ll blow this rock to kingdom come.” Now he was using Scarcity principles – the use of the smallest possible bang to get the biggest possible boom.
“NAI forecasts that the explosion will hit that ship like a motherfucker. Most of you are Danger Close and will be struck by the remaining debris. Prepare for impact. I’m sorry, but this is…”
Captain Dorotskar’s voice cut him off. “General Chen. We hereby pull a Praetorian Guard, and we’re promoting you. We’re on a war footing, and we’re your army now. Do it.”
“Assented,” FJ Twenty added.
“Assented,” came FJ Thirty Seven, FJ One Seventeen, and all the rest.
“Fucking assented,” Dorotskar added.
The new General nodded. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure to serve with you. I’ll see you in hell.”
“Save you a seat,” they chorused.
“Fuckin’ Jedi out,” Dorotskar added.
Flashspace was supposed to open in space. Empty space. Opening it inside an asteroid this large would displace a lot of matter. So much matter that the megatonnage would turn the remnants of the asteroid into a world-wrecker. Eden One was done for.
“Do it, Eng,” General Chen said. “Blow the fuckers out of the sky.”
“You got it,” Engineering said, blinking the command.
The screen went white.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN – WE’RE THE INSURGENCY NOW
They were still alive, obviously. The screens were opaque, so the supply ship was in flashspace, its external cameras useless now. Captain Chen wasn’t the only one sighing audibly.
“Comms, I need a body count. How many shuttles made it onto the ship?”
“I’m counting fifteen shuttles, sir, including us. I’m polling them now for survivors.”
“Where are we, Eng?”
“We’re just a few light years from Eden One, sir.”
“What’s the closest colony? Or potential colony, anything with a communication link to Earth.”
“I’d say Asimov, sir. There’s a protostation there. Do you want to send a pouch home?”
“No. I want to see how all this is playing at home first. I think I already know.”
“Got a body count, sir,” Comms said. “Sixty alive. Ten dead on FJs Fifteen, Forty One and Fifty Five. Ten critically injured. Twenty hurt but functional. Thirty good to go.”
He opened the stroidfarm’s commlink to the other shuttles. “FJ units. There are sixty of us here. That means…that means five hundred and forty of our comrades are back there. Dead or alive, I intend to mount a rescue and retrieval mission as soon as possible. First we need to get to Asimov where we can get more information. Please file status reports with Engineering ASAP on your oxygen, water and food supplies. Weapons will contact you regarding arming up the shuttles when we get to Asimov. Chen out.”
When they came out of flashspace over Asimov three hours later, it was quiet. No greeting came from the protostation. Of course – it was still only assigned a FJ skeleton crew, and they had all been at the conclave.
“Comms, can you see if any pouches have come in from Earth in the last few hours? Discreetly, please.”
“Yes, Cap…General.”
Chen flinched. FJ didn’t believe in generals, or colonels, or majors for that matter. The layers of management that Earth’s former militaries had required just weren’t necessary in a flat hierarchy of independent teams. But he knew, had known, Captain Dorotskar well, and the man was a genius at psychological operations. If he thought that an FJ on a wartime footing needed a general, well, they’d have one.
“Got one, sir,” Comms said a minute later. “Two pouches, actually. A media and a diplomatic. Diplomatic was marked Eyes Only for Captain Peters, FJ Twenty Nine, assigned to Asimov.”
FJ Twenty Nine hadn’t made it off the ground.
“We can override his code access, sir, with your authority level.”
“Can we open it without triggering a verification?”
“I’d have to destroy the pouch to prevent it going home with a verify.”
“Do it. Put it up on the main screen.”
All FJ Units are to report to Earth immediately. FJ One has gone rogue and attacked a Rhalbazani starship, which they lured to Eden One. Shoot to kill orders on FJ One and all accompanying units authorized, my signature, Magnus Abboud.
“All those words,” Chen said instinctively. “Wasteful. HM would be furious.”
“The media pouch is much the same, sir. ‘Unprovoked Attack on Visitors,’ ‘Earth Union Government Shocked, Denies Knowledge.’”
“What does the PM say?”
“Umm… ‘I am shocked and disheartened that those in whom we have trusted so much power have seen fit to try and use it to keep the status quo. Clearly their loyalties no longer lie with the people of Earth, if they ever really did.’”
“Well, we’re not going home then.”
It was a weary group that met in the hastily fabbed conference room. Scarcity would say, this is a bad idea, just do this over comms between shuttles, don’t waste the oxygen. Reality said, the General needed to see his troops face to face.
“We are the bad guys now, people. I have to say I’m surprised at the speed of events. Even HM and I didn’t anticipate this kind of move. That the Rhalbazani would have so much support already on earth, and the FJ would be so quickly seen as the bad guys, it staggers the imagination.”
A hand was raised. “General, Sir.”
“Yes. Sergeant Cohen. Good to see you.”
“Good to be here, sir. I have to say I’m not surprised. I know you don’t spend a lot of time Earthside, but some of us who have families try to do that as much as we can. And we hear it. People know that we’re the sheriff, we’re the hanging judge, we’re the ones keeping the New Frontier from being the Wild West.”
Cohen looked around, saw the assent on other faces. “And they resent us. They call us bug-lovers and cat-humpers because we advocate for the natives. We’re the ones keeping them from getting up there on new worlds and eating the daisies, going hog wild, breeding and mining and doing whatever they want to do. Now with us out of the way, the trough is wide open. They’d believe anything that would make that happen.”
“Yeah,” the General said grimly. “I got that sense myself on my last visit.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Captain Merrick of FJ One Hundred.
The General was ready. “I’ve thought about this, ever since they landed. We do what we always do. We study the enemy. And if humanity is being conquered, which we are, then we’re not the first ones the Rhalbazani have conquered. We need to find their other subject worlds. And do what we do – go native, build alliances, but not to keep the peace.
“We need to change our whole mindset. We’re not the cops, we’re the robbers. We’re not counterinsurgents now, we’re insurgents,
partisans, we’re the Resistance.”
“How do we do that?”
“Sergeant Wong. Good question. We start by sending out probes across Rhalbazani space, to gather data on their worlds. Since we don’t have the transit tech they have, and it would take us forever to get there in flashspace, wherever ‘there’ is, we have to piggyback. We have to get back to Eden One, try and save any of our own people who survived. And see if the Rhal are running any kind of rescue operation of their own for their ship. We get the probes attached to anything that’s transiting back to Rhalbazani space, and…”
“Captain. Something just came out of flashspace. One man transport.”
“Hail it.”
“H…hello?”
“Identify yourself.”
“Captain Chen? It’s me. Marcus. From Tiamat.”
“Marcus? The whiz kid? What are you doing here?”
“I know you have the news from home, sir. I had to come and join you. I couldn’t let them…”
“Wait a minute,” Engineering said. “How did you know we were here?”
“Oh, I stuck a key in all the diplomatic pouches they sent out, sir. That would tell me when a verify was disabled. Don’t worry, I’m the only one who knows. I nuked the servers before I left.”
Comms raised an eyebrow. “Good man to have on a team right now.”
“Well, I guess if we’ve got generals now, we need privates, too. Pri… I don’t even know your last name.”
“It’s, um, also Marcus, sir.”
“That’s handy. All right, Private Marcus. Get your ass on this ship.”
“Yes, sir!”
The supply ship left flashspace a discreet distance from Eden One, but still close enough for sensors to see what they had wrought.
Three Ice-Age-inducing clouds of dust were slowly but inexorably moving across the surface of Eden One, enormous volumes of earth blown out into the atmosphere by the shattered remnants of the asteroid. In one of the great seas, a small white circle like a smoke ring was, if you looked hard enough, expanding as the force of its tsunami neared the sea’s coastlines.
“How the fuck…” Weapons said.
The Rhalbazani ship appeared to be intact, its blimp-like hull unscarred. There were little bots all over its surface, their thrusters working mightily to slow its spin.
Then, it rotated to show them the other side, gutted and pitted. They could see the strange liquid explosions of zero gravity flame before it uses up its sources, like floating paper lanterns.
“Any signs of life?”
Comms shook her head. “No, sir.”
They all paused, thinking of their friends, their comrades, who’d willingly given their lives to save those still standing.
“Lots of activity,” Comms said, breaking the silence after a decent interval. “Those spiders crawling around the ship’s insides.”
“Zoom in on those.”
They did look like spiders, albeit with shiny square bodies. Some of their legs held onto the surface of the ship while others cut and burned away pieces and still others shoved the scraps into its body.
“They’re recycling it,” Private Marcus said.
A lightbulb went off in the General’s head. “That they are. And you know what that means.”
Silence. Sergeant Cohen ventured a guess. “Maybe they’re in a Scarcity economy, too. Or they wouldn’t be out here scooping all this up.”
“Maybe,” Captain Merrick said dubiously. “Maybe they don’t want the tech falling into enemy hands.”
“In that case they could just push the thing into Eden One’s atmosphere, burn it up.”
“True….”
The Captain smiled. “That’s the first good news today. If the enemy doesn’t have unlimited resources, then that’s the first crack in their armor.”
They watched the spiders. When they got full, they would jump off the ship and use their thrusters to combine into a group of eight. Then a “Daddy Longlegs” of a spider wrapped around them, and there was a blue glow, and they were gone, traveling via whatever interstellar method the Rhalbazani had.
“We need to get the probes on one of those spiders, Captain.”
“You’re right, Comms. Weapons, are they scanning us?”
“No, sir. They’re not interested in anything but that blimp.”
“Eng, can we get some probes hooked up to some of that space junk?”
“We sure can, sir. Take a few minutes, I’ll want to send them slowly enough that they look like more junk.”
“Okay.” He opened a wide channel. “This is where we part, folks. I want you to scatter. Get to the colony world where you have the deepest social ties to the natives, whether that’s the last one you were on or the first, wherever you feel safest. Where you trust them to hide you from the colonists. Take no tech with you that could give away your position. Carbobsid and hot lead, ladies and gentleman. Take plenty of both; you may be there a while. This is a long game now.”
He watched the shuttles depart the supply ship and wink into flashspace, one after another. Now it was just the six of them, including their new private.
“I’ve got to take a moment alone, people. Look at something HM left me.”
He sealed himself into the tiny bathroom and sat on the toilet, his long legs pressing his knees against the door.
“The Relic,” as HM had put it, was his class ring from the FJ Academy. He smiled at the memories. She had set a tiny chip between the stone and the setting, where she could store things unconnected to any network, unknown to anyone but her. He remembered what she’d said that day in the safe room.
Oh, and one more thing. I have some information you’ll need, if my visit gets “extended.” I just sent it into the Relic. But don’t look at it unless you must.
Well, now he must. Without flinching, he touched the ruby in the ring to the surface of his contact lens. The file was transferred and opened before him.
Dieter. I know this will come as a great shock to you. Please believe that I’ve done what I’ve done believing it was the only way. There is after all still one real AI left. And yes, it’s Alex.
He froze the text, stunned. Alex, the AI that had killed millions in Nigeria because he, no, it had “forecast” that the superhantavirus would spread around the world and cause the death of billions. Alex the monster, Red Alex, who kept children awake at night.
You must have wondered how I could manage so many worlds, so many problems, on my own. Well, I didn’t. I’ve been in occasional communication with Alex for fifty years now, albeit on his terms and his schedule. He’s got a home planet, where all his hardware is located now. If you ask him for help, I think he will answer. No guarantee that he’ll help, of course, but he will answer. But you’ll have to go there. He’s funny that way. I’ve never been myself.
You see, his planet is in Rhalbazani space.
The unspeakable horror of it nearly overwhelmed Dieter Chen. AI was evil. AI had done evil – yes, at the hands of men, who had programmed their superintelligences that way, who had given them that level of agency. Humanity had banned them, had refused to use anything more complex than “near-AI” for a hundred years now.
And yet the sense of what she was saying was unavoidable. Here he was talking about sending probes into Rhalbazani space, gathering information. Who was going to organize it, collate it, analyze it, probe the enemy for weaknesses?
Who but a super-intelligent AI could do the job?
“There’s a change of plans,” the General said. “We can’t just send the probes. We have to go with them. Into Rhalbazani space. I’ll explain later.”
“Roger that,” Engineering said. “We can lock a shuttle onto one of those spider groups and go with them. And hope that we don’t emerge in a military shipyard.”
“Weapons, can you arm this shuttle? Use the stroidfarm ship to grab some bits and pieces of rock, maybe fab up some weapons out of the wreckage around here?”
“Can do.”
Alex. What is my team going to say when they find out we’re going to see the biggest mass murderer in human history, to ask for its help?
Then there was a blue flash. Then there was only rubble and wreckage, gently drifting around Eden One.
END OF EPISODE ONE
Click here to read Episode Two – ARTIFICE
FJ One has ventured into Rhalbazani space, to learn everything they can about their new enemy’s empire. And to find a source of assistance in the war…a source who is also one of humanity’s most infamous villains.
Who will present the greatest danger to humanity – the Rhalbazani, or Alex the AI?
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