Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) by Adam Vance Read Free Book Online Page A

Cruz. He jumped up and down next to their semi-captives and screamed, mimicking their own cries, waving his arms over his head, a big stick on one hand. In turn, each priest calmed down, made small ooh-ooh noises and turned their heads away from Hewitt, long enough for him to stick them with a universal sedative.
    Chen and Kaplan had their hands full with the alpha. He was faster than they were, and he could have bounded away and sought help, but that clearly wasn’t coded into them – fight, not flight, was the default.
    “Medical, do you play darts?” Chen asked as the priest clambered up a pile of barrels, ready to jump from there onto his enemies.
    “Not well, sir.”
    The priest watched his opponent like a tennis player, looking for the first little tell as to which direction he’d go, then slamming the ball in the opposite direction. Chen feinted to his right, and then moved left as the priest pounced, but the priest had guessed his intent and landed on him, hard.
    Chen threw his hands up to protect his face as the beast started pounding Chen with his fists, left right left right. Kaplan jumped on his back, trying to get a chokehold. But the beast shook him off, whipped around, picked him up and threw him five meters away, and renewed his assault on Chen.
    Then the priest cried out, whipped around, and leapt off him towards a new enemy.
    Halfway towards Archambault, he stumbled and fell down, out cold, a sedative dart stuck in the back of its neck.
    Archambault grinned. “I was All-European Pub champion,” she explained.
    Kaplan got up from the pile of debris where the priest had thrown him, dusting himself off. “Don’t you have to be drunk to win that?”
    “Yep. You’ve got to drink a mandatory one pint per round. If you wanna show off, you do a shot as well.”
    “My team’s skill set never ceases to amaze me,” Chen said, taking Kaplan and Hewitt’s outstretched hands as they pulled him to his feet. “Let’s get those cloaks on.”
    “That symbol…” Archambault said as they removed the cloaks. “I know that…”
    Chen examined the cloak, and the symbol on it.
    It was an outline of an ovoid head, two circles where eyes would be on a human head, cone-like ears sticking out, and tufts of Einsteinian hair flying out above those.
    Dieter Chen looked about thirty-five, an age he’d determined was just about right for an active authority figure – old enough to be experienced and young enough to still be flexible and capable of fast action. But that was thanks to the Lazarex treatments that enabled him to choose his level of rejuvenation, and he was actually pushing ninety years old now. Which was old enough to remember a lot of things that had faded from popular memory.
    “It’s a corporate logo,” he said. “Or a very simplified version, at any rate. From when Alex was a ‘virtual friend,’ a simple consumer AI you could buy to entertain you.”
    “So he’s using his old corporate logo as his…cross, or star, or whatever? His primary religious symbol?”
    “Yeah,” Chen said, the wheels turning in his mind.
    “From my medical perspective?” Hewitt ventured. “I’d say that means one of two things. Either Alex has a strange sense of humor…or he’s batshit crazy.”
    Chen nodded. That seemed to cover the options.
     
    Chen, Kaplan and Cruz put on the cloaks, leaving Hewitt and Archambault to cover the temple entrance. Chen figured that he was most likely to need Kaplan to understand the mechanisms of the flood, not to mention the guts of any AI or NAI system within. And of course Weapons Sergeant Cruz was their best fighter, and these priests were clearly nothing to mess with.
    The plaza in front of the temple was deserted. The crowds had rushed down the avenues, following the water, out of the city. Chen guessed that watching the fertile delta flood, the harvest guaranteed for another year, was the high point of the festival.
    They walked up the steps to the platform from which