Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2)

by Adam Vance

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS

  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 bec
ame 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.”

  “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 20th 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.