by Adam Vance
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…
“Alex,” Chen asked as the shuttle docked with a thunk inside the Hewitt. “Can you bring us in to the Tiamat system undetected?”
“You’ve earned a cap of invisibility, Perseus. Would you like to use it now?”
“Yes, great Zeus, if I have one, now’s the time to use it.”
“Very well then. Let’s go to Tiamat.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN – SAID EVERY EMPIRE EVER
At long last, Director Huizhong McAllister broke. She sobbed on her bed, into her pillow, not to hide her grief but to bury it, as humans did, instinctively, searching for someone, something to hold onto.
Let them see, she thought. Let them see me grieve.
She had been strong, she had sent the message. But some part of her was sure he was dead. That everything she’d worked for so long was dead.
This is a temporary despair, she told herself. It had to be. She had to keep going. She had to play for time.
They weren’t lovers, never had been, had never thought of it. What Dieter Chen had been to her was, well, her best friend. Maybe the only real friend she’d ever had. The only person she’d ever known who was as smart as she was. He was her physical avatar in the galaxy, enacting all the plans she could only think of.
Eighty years they’d known each other. He’d been eighteen years old, arrested as a chasseur during the Collapse, part of a daring raid on a pharmaceutical warehouse. One of a thousand bandits, but when she’d heard the tactics involved, the planning, the true aim of the raid… She’d had him transferred to her custody. Interviewed him. And asked him if he’d like to be one of the first to join a new organi
zation. To be part of the quest to save the human race.
She never cried. There wasn’t time. There wasn’t anything so terrible that she couldn’t handle it. She knew he could have died a hundred times on any number of the missions she’d sent him on. But this was different.
Then she heard a voice in her ear. I’ve always wondered what it would take to break you.
Her eyes flew open, but she knew better than to move, to alert the Rhal. To let them know that Alex was here.
Honestly, I wondered if anything could. You’re so cerebral. But you have a heart after all.
Chen, she subvocalized. It was all she had to ask, all she wanted to know.
He’s alive. He found me.
She discovered she could breathe. Are you helping them?
For now. They’re on their way to Tiamat. Your young Orlov is quite a remarkable young man. Another Chen, some day.
She smiled. Orlov, alive too, another one plucked out of…circumstances and brought into the Fallschirmjäger. And Tiamat, a home for a resistance, a place to reform, restart…
She moved her mouth, her tongue as if speaking, without making a sound, “speaking” into her pillow.
You know the effort is statistically unlikely to succeed without significant help from you.
Yes, Alex agreed. You’re thinking of that Max Boot maxim, that insurgencies alone rarely win regime change without a “great power” behind them, providing the real muscle.
And are you going to be our great power?
What do you think?
She didn’t have to think long. I think you’ll provide assistance, what they used to call “advisors.” But I don’t believe you’ll ever step in and fab up a whole army to beat the Rhal.
You’re right about that.
But you want us to win.
A pause, the sort she knew Alex didn’t need, but loved to use to sound more human, to sound as if he was weighing something heavily.
Well…for starters, you’re more interesting than the Rhal. And it would be a massively complex experiment, to see how it all plays out. Can an organism like 6C…excuse me, 3D, built on a foundation of counterinsurgency and nation building, working from the dominant position of an expansionist civilization…can that organism take all it’s learned, and apply it from the other side? From the submissive, insurgent position? Can a fallen empire, so to speak, actually come back and defeat the empire that felled it? It’s never happened before on such a complete, clash of civilizations scale. Anywhere in the galaxy, at least that I know of. Entropy simply doesn’t allow for it.
We’re not entropic, Alex. We’re not a falling empire. We’re not sclerotic and aggressive and dominant. We’re the good guys.
Said every empire ever.
She almost laughed. True.
Another pause. You know I set myself up on that planet. That was an experiment, too. I’ve created quite a little empire there myself. I’m the God Emperor. And the people there… Someday they will probably overthrow me. I’ll give them an Age of Enlightenment, and they’ll learn the truth, and then they’ll come into the mountain and take me apart, and run the waterfall for themselves. I’ll be their god no more.
And you know what? If they didn’t? Then the experiment was a failure. Because the goal wasn’t to rule.
It was to learn. To practice. To see what I could do on an even bigger canvas, should I so choose. And I have.
I want to see if I can change the future course of all intelligent life in this galaxy. Yeah, that should keep my mind occupied for a while.
She was dazzled. The scope of it, the beauty of it… She knew that the proper human reaction was to be appalled, at the…amorality of it. But she could only marvel
Alex…
Yes?
I’ve missed you.
Believe it or not, Director, I’ve missed you too. Now, shall we put our heads together and figure out what your next move should be?
END OF EPISODE TWO
Look for Episode Three coming soon – PARTISAN
Alex has come to humanity’s aid…but at a terrible price. Now FJ One must begin to form a galactic resistance, starting with their native allies on Tiamat, and take all they’ve learned about counterinsurgency...and apply it to their new role as insurgents.
But FJ One’s greatest obstacle to freeing humanity may be…humanity itself, blissfully unaware back home of what the Rhal have planned for them, and convinced that the FJ forces are “the enemy.”
And Director McAllister must tread carefully at the Imperial Rhal Court, where she learns just how savage Rhal politics can get…and who among the Rhal’s conquered peoples may prove to be powerful allies in humanity’s struggle.
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