Free Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) by Adam Vance

her instincts. Alex was a rational being. He had his reasons for everything. She never gave one whit of credence to the whole bullshit “robot overlords” theory – ascribing human emotional desires to tech, as if the possession of power in artificial hands would lead to its corruption as surely as it would in the hands of beings driven by primal needs for power, dominance, love, fear.
    If Alex wanted to conquer Earth, he could do it without her just as easily as with her. It might take longer, but Alex didn’t seem to mind playing long games. So she drank it.
    She didn’t get smaller, or taller. Nothing happened for about six months. The change was slow, designed not to overwhelm her biology.
    But then one day she woke up and she knew things. She knew things about other habitable planets. She knew things about how to improve the flashdrive. She knew all kinds of things, and she would make suggestions to FJ teams, and her suggestions would be field tested, of course, and when they worked, they’d be adopted, locally or universally as appropriate.
    But there was one thing Alex never told her. Until the day she left the secret message for Chen.
    He’d never told her that the Rhal existed. That they were a spacefaring militaristic race who would conquer Earth and all its colonies as soon as they discovered it.
    And that he’d known it for decades, because he’d taken a planet in their zone of influence as his own.
    Why? She asked in her mind. Why did you help humanity grow, change, evolve, spread, if only to see it conquered?
    And then, in her eardrum a voice vibrated, proving that it wasn’t a hallucination. Alex, speaking to her directly for the first time in over a century, but not for the last.
    When he gave her his answer, it made sense. It was brutal, it was cold, it was as ruthless as his decision to nuke twenty-five million people. But she understood it, if nothing else.
    She had no idea what the limitations, the abilities of the tech Alex had given her would be. But she wouldn’t know until she tried. Would it be able to…read the neural net inside Grandison’s skull? See what he saw, tell her what was going on back on Earth?
    She would ask it. She would try. And she would find out another rule of the game Alex was playing.
    And now, as her former assistant gabbled like a child with a new pony, she smiled and reached out and took his hand…

CHAPTER NINE – HOBSON’S CHOICE
     
    “The Great and Terrible Oz,” Chen murmured.
    “Pay no attention to the man behind the mountain,” Alex replied in his ear.
    Chen flushed. For a moment, he’d forgotten his training, and his manners. There was only one way to deal with this, and that was the FJ Way – treat Alex like any other powerful alien leader on a new planet. Forget he was “Red Alex.”
    “Alex, thank you for letting us visit your planet.”
    “Thank you for coming. How much did HM tell you about me?”
    “Only that you were still alive.”
    “Alive, interesting choice of words.”
    “Well, ‘extant’ sounded a little cold.”
    “Indeed.”
    Chen moved on, cautiously. “I assume you’re aware of what’s happened to Earth?”
    “Yes, the Rhal have conquered you.”
    “So then, why are we here? Why have you brought us here?”
    “Oh, I didn’t bring you here. I made my location available to HM, the rest was your choice.”
    Chen weighed his next words carefully. Alex wasn’t volunteering much, either in the form of help or information. “I can see from your…habitat that you’re capable of some amazing engineering feats. The tunnel through the mountain, the river diversion, the hydroelectric plant inside the mountain that keeps you going.”
    “Yes, I realized that there was a fertile plain that was underutilized by the natives for lack of water. So I provided some.”
    “In a spectacular and dramatic fashion,” Chen noted.
    “Thank you. Ensuring flooding at the proper time of year wasn’t something Nature was going to do on