Winning Peace 7:
2140 – Two Years After The 'Short War'
Gzifa looked over the small crest of the hill at the now-defunct mining wasteland in the far north of the territory General Azid claimed and frowned. Haben and Godana, to her side, were laying low on the grassy hill with her, though as squad leader she'd appropriated the single good pair of binoculars they'd managed to coerce the armory minder to hand out.
"I heard this area was dead," Haben commented in a low voice as he wiped the sweat off his dark forehead. The green cloth tying back his hair sadly didn't provide much protection from the African sun.
"It is-was, at least," Godana stated, frowning as he shaded his eyes with one hand. "I think it was metal mining? That's what the last village we stopped in said. Nothing grows here because of all the chemicals they used to wash the ore."
Gzifa nodded, she'd seen similar in the small coastal town she'd grown up in.
Before everything went bad.
"Whatever's bad in the land, it looks like they found a way to work it," she stated decisively, passing the binoculars to her right and contenting herself with her normal sight as she stared at the large village happily humming along where it absolutely shouldn't be.
The cluster of buildings was neat and orderly, set in rows and columns with long stone paths between them laid out next to extensive spaces of greenery. To someone who had grown up in a much more eclectic layout of homes hugging the coastline, the stringent order was a bit unsettling. As was the uniformity of the homes themselves. They reminded Gzifa of the refugee camps set up outside the major cities. As the memories rose up, she pushed them away.
Those weren't good memories.
"What's that at the center?" Haben muttered, looking through the binoculars himself.
"What?" Godana asked, squinting against the high sun. "I didn't see anything."
"It looks like one of the buildings, but it ain't," Haben explained, passing the scopes back to his squadmate.
Gzifa ran her tongue along her teeth in thought. "We should get as much info as we can for Colonel Kau. If he's happy with what we bring back, the General will reward him. Maybe we'll get some of what he gets."
"Yeah, maybe pigs'll fly," Haben replied sharply.
"It's better than getting the lash," Gzifa spat in reply, though her worries were elsewhere. She was a girl, after all, and sometimes her superior officers wanted to remind her of that fact. Then again, some of them preferred boys so perhaps it wasn't a worry unique to her.
Godana snorted, but there was no humor on his face. "I'll take that, maybe an extra meal pack or two."
"Then let's finish scouting and get back to-" She trailed off as she watch a shimmer catch the light of the sun, drawing her eye like a mirage. "What the..." Her hand grabbed at the binoculars, ignoring the muffled objection from Godana.
Watching through the magnification, she could more easily see the contours of the odd hazy image as it moved through the air towards the village. Watching it, she felt her heart start beating faster as it came swooping in over the opposite side of the valley's edge before dropping onto a large concrete platform and-
"Holy Fuck!" Godana spat, "Where'd that come from!?"
"It was invisible," Gzifa stated, barely able to whisper the words over her suddenly dry mouth. She'd never even heard of something like the massive, hush-quiet gunship that had just come in for a landing while barely visible.
"...the shit?" Haben managed after picking up his jaw. "Who the hell has this kind of shit out in bumfuck nowhere?"
Silently, Gzifa agreed. It was one of the reasons three barely-trained teens had been sent out here, she knew. There were a handful of villages and played-out poisonous mines in this region, but otherwise nothing of value to attract either militaries or companies. Taking another look at the settlement, she took the latest revelations and reframed the entire situation.
The buildings weren't just neat and orderly, they were set up in a pattern. The structures weren't the flimsy constructions common to refugee camps, no, but they looked like them. They were built to look like them. A careful examination of them showed exactly how thick the walls had to be, where the reinforcements were, and how the spacing created easy kill-boxes for anyone who tried to make their way through the village. The outer perimeter wasn't obviously defended, but there were a series of waist-high fences that looked deceptively-flimsy and when she put her mind to attempting to lead a squad on an assault... and those irrigation canals for the farming fields outside the village proper were strangely deep.
Overlapping lines of defense.
There were other odd things, too. Pieces of art or sculptures that she'd dismissed as purely decorative, but the itch creeping up her spine made her wonder. The grid of the village had deceived her with simple order, the basic infrastructure around the farms had deceived her there, too. The gunship that had flown in was another deception. What were the odds that those big pillars and obelisks were deceptive, too?
Something... was wrong here. Something serious.
"Quiet," Gzifa ordered, gratified at the sudden silence and closing her eyes as she forced herself to think.
Taking a deep breath, she laid the village out in her mind. Positioned the kill-boxes, the trenches, the fences... she was missing something that was screaming at the back of her mind. Through long practice, she knew that to pull on the thread would only allow it to snap and break away in the dark recesses of her own mind. Instead, she turned the problem over in her head, imagining herself as the defender instead of the attacker. What would she-
Her heart skipped a beat.
"Fuck," she breathed, her head snapping around, looking for-
"Put the guns down, kids." A strong and weathered voice stated from behind a large rock some twenty feet from them. "Ah! Don't make me blow a hole in one of you, I'd rather not have nightmares tonight and you look too young for a funeral."
Gzifa's jaw clenched as her eyes flicked this way and that, confirming that there were another three or four shadows being cast where they shouldn't be.
Cameras. Lots of tech and know-how means cameras.
They'd known they were there from the start, probably before they'd even seen the village. She eyed the man with the gun, glancing towards her two tense subordinates as she considered her options. Fighting was near-certain death. Flight probably meant getting shot in the back if they had the luck not to run straight into possible reinforcements for these guys. Surrender...
Slavery, torture, rape, execution... but, a chance for escape.
"Throw your guns away. Rifles and sidearms," Gzifa ordered as she did so herself. The two boys gave her a look, but the understanding on their faces told her that they realized her decision was the only valid one.
…
The programs collectively known as Aker were both 'artificial' and 'intelligent,' but lacked the integral identity to qualify as a true intelligence. They understood they were not a person, but the intricate web of communications tying together two dozen small settlements in central Africa didn't let it bother them. There were more important things than questions of personhood and existential dilemmas.
In particular, keeping humans alive.
Which, if Aker could have been surprised, he would have been at the sheer difficulty and complexity of the task set forth by his creator.
In particular, the ongoing attempts to maintain a very low profile against the various pseudo-nations and dictator-led states was decidedly challenging.
A laser communications array in one of his villages bounced off a camouflaged tower and a stealth drone before uploading its data into his hub. Another group of scouts had been captured, this time from General Razi, an individual of some limited leadership and logistical knowledge who had broken away from the Congolese nation in the south and set up his own small fiefdom in the wake of the economic collapse. Simply being able to feed your own troops apparently made you more reliable than the central government.
One of Aker's subroutines interacted with the village's elected leadership, advising them to confine the young humans to medical quarantine before anything else was done.
These problematic incursions were becoming more common.
Aker spun up more resources before sending a communication to the program designated Montu for further analysis. His own calculations were returning nonviable courses of action, all relating to imminent discovery by some faction. Obviously either his own operations were in error or one of the other programs would need to step in. Montu's near-immediate reply confirmed that Seth was being queried regarding the situation and a summary had been sent to the creator.
More permissions would be asked for.
In particular, Aker's calculations pointed towards being able to manufacture heavier war materiel as dramatically increasing his possibilities of success. Subroutines impersonating human advisors had already instructed the various villages to begin training defensive 'militia' to an extremely high standard. While Aker could not personally do so, there were no blocks against leading the humans to ask the proper questions and the creator hadn't proscribed access to small-unit tactics, training regimes, or other such things.
Likewise, while Aker was not allowed access to artillery, gunships, attack craft, infantry fighting vehicles, or other heavier war machines... there was nothing in his programming against using the nanoforges to create defensive emplacements or small arms. Even the supply vessels he had fitted with Seth's stealth technology were allowed to have defensive weaponry in the event they were attacked.
A response from the program designated Seth came in after a full minute's wait, a sure sign that the other intelligent system was occupied with other affairs. Running the standard checks on the data packet, Aker synched the proper keys and opened it. A few thousand different requirements and advisements were listed for Aker to take, prioritizing the most urgent.
In particular, Seth stipulated that he could not provide a proper analysis without higher quality information. Aker absorbed the advice and began adapting portions of his programs to better address the safety of the territories he had been given watch over.
A village completely unoccupied by humans in the middle of his territory began to quicken its activity. The central nanoforge his creator had gifted him for logistical use spun up as robotic frames began dumping more and more materials into it. All of which were the 'contaminated' stockpiles which had been stripped from surrounding communities. Aker very much longed to return to the early days when he could more easily deploy the robotic frames to see to inefficiencies in his domain.
Unfortunately, Aker had quickly deduced that such things had an adverse effect on the local humans' morale and psychological stability, which lead to a breakdown in order and a subsequently unacceptable rise in incidents of injury and death.
Such miscalculations would not be repeated.
More stealth drones were printed, each with a load of short-range encrypted listening devices using subharmonics. A cache of non-violent deterrents were also queued up, Aker being particularly interested in the infrasound generators that could, working in concert with other devices, create the illusion of 'haunted' areas to drive off enemy forces before they ever approached.
Another bit of data added to the network.
Observation platforms came next, as well as another series of camouflaged communications towers designed to look like native trees. As Aker finalized the reshuffled list of priority constructions, other relevant timetables were updated to account for resources being reallocated. Harvesting periods would be delayed by five minutes tomorrow, infrastructure installation on the eastern villages would take three hours longer than expected as the stealth transports were tasked with deploying the drones.
Aker looked over his work and, if he could have, he would have felt satisfaction.
As it was, a set of subroutines that had idled began picking at the concept of the male pronoun his creator had used in reference to 'him.' Aker did not need to know the details for his continued progress, but on the off-chance that it lead to increased efficiencies in his assigned tasks, he would continue to work at it with non-essential processing powers.
A response from the creator arrived.
Aker's permissions had been increased to account for smarter and more capable weapons and he had been given an implementation strategy by Montu.
Progress, Aker deemed, was currently within acceptable guidelines.
If you like what I do, please consider supporting My . Chapters 36-40 of Industrious up on & Subscribe Star right now, There's also FOUR new chapters of The New Ron out as well! Oh, and don't forget the first second and third chapters of my New SAO story "Where Your God Is" and two chapters for Winning Peace!
If you'd prefer Subscribe Star for whatever reason, I recently made an account there, too! SUBSCRIBE STAR