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

love in the arms of the Five Year Plan.
    In Rhal society, the master narrative was obviously “boy meets gun.” The Rhal would love Patton and Starship Troopers , she thought with a wry grin, the same way that right-wingers had in the past – that is to say, without grasping the subtext of either film. She wondered if this was what the Rhal public loved, or if this was just some kind of “UFA under Goebbels” regime propaganda, masquerading as entertainment.
    She spent the rest of that day and the next absorbing the films that rolled one after the other. There was no way for her to determine if the stories were contemporary or historical, but there were certain things that never varied.
    “Glorious battle” was clearly more important than economizing. The films were full of “Star Wars” sized battleships, stuffed with soldiers, wasting enormous resources so that the soldiery could land on a planet and attain “glory.” It wasn’t as if the Rhal didn’t have the technology to do it “Earth-style,” to build stroidfarms and JIT-facs to fab up drones and robots to do the brutal work of conquest. They just seemed to… prefer massive casualty rates, on both sides.
    Their militaristic “seed spreading” religion was always emphasized before each battle scene. Every soon-to-be-conquered race was a caricature of stupidity, laziness, greed, lust…physical features were no doubt exaggerated, she thought, just as early 20 th century films had given black people ludicrous wide-eyed expressions of fear and idiocy, and Nazi propaganda had created posters full of menacing, gnarly, potato-nosed Jews.
    But she took mental notes anyway, making a game of reverse-engineering what a race might really look like without the propaganda that made them all appear like a galaxy full of Jar Jar Binks types, ugly idiots deserving of conquest.
    Aside from the pure military adventure flicks, there were stories of intrigue. Most of those plots revolved around plots to unseat the Emperor, or the RhalVai as he was called here. Of course they always ended with the evil counselor/renegade/usurper getting executed, and the RhalVai’s legitimacy reinforced, and some heroic young ensign getting promoted and rewarded with the dead man’s property. Heroic young ensigns were in fact the stock in trade of all these movies, and she couldn’t help but think of “Nation’s Pride,” the film within a film in “Inglourious Basterds.”
    She started getting the sense that the movies were “edited for television” – at least, for her television. There always seemed to be missing scenes at the end of each film. The execution of the bad guy was never shown, and at the end of the war movies, it was as if some plunder scenes, clearly anticipated by the soldiers and foreshadowed in the plot, had been omitted. Why?
    In bed after the second day of her Rhal film festival, she pondered what she’d learned. Rhal society was highly militaristic, misogynist, regimented. Whatever Vai Kotta had spouted about peace love and understanding, it was clear that the Rhal hadn’t come to Earth to “help.”
    But the history of this culture, from the movies and Bible, was that of an overwhelming force smashing everything in its path. Why, then, had they come to Earth with open arms, offers of help and friendship? Why was Earth’s encounter with the Rhal so different?
    There was no book, no movie, that could explain that.

CHAPTER FOUR – THE LOCAL MARDI GRAS
     
    FJ One was on edge as they braked into an orbit around “Planet Alex.” General Chen knew that the team wouldn’t be surprised if a rocket launched from the surface to blow them all up, but then, that was the risk of the job with any new planet.
    On a normal mission to size up a potential colony world, they’d fab up an observation station, snag some water from a comet or a polar cap, send probes around the globe, and settle in for a long period of evaluation and analysis.
    That was out of the