Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

is inconvenienced by the travel time to our world. We have endeavored to make you comfortable,” he said, throwing the onus on her.
    She decided to gamble. “Oh, I am, and I am so grateful! I just couldn’t help but wonder, is all.”
    The Bible had told her that males ran the show around here. Females were mentioned pretty much only as “begatters” of new warriors. And even then the only reason to bother to name them was in their role as trophy wives, a mark of alliance with a stronger family than the one a Vai had been born into. So no doubt females were expected to be compliant, and bat their…well, whatever the equivalent of eyelashes was among the Rhal.
    He immediately softened, clearly having prepared himself for an argument.
    “I’m just so bored without any entertainment!”
    He gave her a shrewd look, and she realized she might have pushed it too far. “You seem to be quite involved in our Book.”
    “Oh, it’s so lovely, the letters of your language and the illustrations, and of course I have nothing else to fill my head with…” Now she was glad she didn’t have a notebook that might have incriminated her with signs of intellect.
    One of the great historical lessons that HM had taken to heart when creating Department 6C was, “Never be blinded to facts by your certainties.” The Japanese assumed that after Pearl Harbor, the United States would sue for peace and leave them their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
    The British Empire refused to promote innumerably talented military men into positions of power out of class snobbery – it mattered not if an officer was a genius if he was “not a gentleman.”
    After the bombings of the USS Cole and the travesty in Mogadishu, Osama bin Laden assumed that the U.S. would never retaliate for 9/11 in the massive, world-altering form that it did.
     
    And on the eve of the Forever War, the United States had sacrificed its best Arabic translators, booting many of them out because they were gay, and therefore “unfit to serve.” Which left the troops on the ground shouting in English at people who had no idea what they were saying, and behaving in a manner that any amateur Orientalist could have told them would incite indignation if not hatred.
    Military historians always seek to define a defeated power’s greatest flaw. They will blame supply lines, or lack of support back home, or incompetence in the leadership.
    But the enemy’s greatest weakness, if you were keen-eyed enough to exploit it, was their certainties. The things they insisted on believing, against all evidence to the contrary, because accepting some other truth would create an existential crisis whose cultural effects would be worse than losing a war.
    Vai Ranza might know that she was a powerful political figure on Earth, who was spending considerable time pondering a book she shouldn’t know how to read, but he was also certain she was “just a female,” and therefore, it was not possible that she could outsmart him.
    And sure enough, he gave her a condescending smile. “I think we can provide you with some entertaining films,” he smiled.
    “Thank you so much, Vai Ranza,” she gushed her gratitude.
    Sure enough, as soon as he left, a panel in the wall opened, revealing a vid screen. She settled into the couch to watch.
    The film started, with the same splashy titles you’d see on an Earth movie. The characters were all LGM, of course, but it didn’t take much computing power to replace one set of Actortars with another. 6C had done it with plenty of Earth movies, for the edification and entertainment of other species.
    As the tale unfolded, it confirmed her experience from the colony worlds - stories were the same across the galaxy. Boy gets something, boy loses something, boy gets it back. In romantic cultures, it was boy meets girl, of course. The joke about the old Soviet Socialist Realism stories were that the storyline was always “boy meets tractor” and finds true