Chapter 17: Duplicity

The Marine stretched in his chair. He knew what he had to do but he wasn’t sure how to do it. He had to be careful. After the partial success of his second attempt, he had no doubt people – and fucking things – would be looking for him.

He considered, briefly, about not sharing the new intelligence – the new extraction point and protocols - but put the thought aside. There were too few pickups which came directly to the moon base. He’d usually hear nothing about those going directly to ship so he’d have nothing to share. Well, sometimes the ship extractions needed some support from the base – but it was hit and miss.

Of course, they were interested about ship’s movements and such, too, and he was happy to share the data. It wouldn’t have as noticeable an effect as failed extractions, though. He wanted them to know. He wanted them to feel the pain he felt. He wanted them to feel the pain of loss – not so personal as his, perhaps, but he wanted them to feel lives slipping through their fingers.

He lifted up the picture which had adorned his desk from the beginning. She was a beautiful young woman with bright brown eyes, soft brown hair and a face which should have been gracing the covers of vids – definitely not gracing the covers of MIA reports. Or Death notices. She had been so young – too young to have fallen. Too young to have been left behind.

He rubbed softly at the picture, tracing his sister’s face and then down to the faces of her children. Livvie. Jimmy. The kids were too young to have already lost their Mom.

Sure, the Sa’arm ultimately killed her – but they were just the weapon. They were just mindless beasts unleashed by the real threat. After all of the vids and tri-dees and stories, you’d think the human race would have learned. They didn’t. They were fools.

They shouldn’t have believed their fiction. They should have seen the rise of the machines. They should have stopped it ... but they’d welcomed them with open arms.

He’d never seen a Confederate race outside of vids. He didn’t know if they were complicit or if they, like the humans, had just failed to see the danger. Hell, he wasn’t even absolutely positive they existed, though it stood to reason they did. He knew the score, though. The AIs. The machines. They’d risen and now they were in charge.

Oh, they were clever about it. They’d fooled most of the human race – the Sa’arm, the need for fighters. They’d played their new target species like suckers, laughing up their sleeves. The Sa’arm, of course, were real – but he wouldn’t be surprised if the AIs hadn’t created them just for the purpose of gathering new races to crush under their heels. Or maybe the Sa’arm had once been in humanity’s place, tasked to help and never realizing they were just becoming enslaved.

Would humanity have a similar fate, he wondered. The next time a new species was found, would the AI lie to them and use the Terrans as an example of the threat they needed help with?

No. He wouldn’t allow that. He needed to fight, needed to show the world what was really happening. He couldn’t allow Earth to fall and become chattel for the AI overlords. He’d been complicit with the deception for too long already – and it had cost him his beloved sister.

He pulled a sheet of paper and a pen and closed his eyes, bringing up the coded language he and his best friend had developed so long ago. They had been kids back then – punks, really – and had been caught passing notes in class. It was embarrassing to get detention. Although he couldn’t recall what the note had said, he remembered it was humiliating.