"Yes, sir."
"Well, then, you sent one of them to New Nigeria. That planet is so rich with Earth-compatible life forms that it was possible for most of the population to revert to a hunting-gathering life style. It's something that most human beings would do, given the opportunity. Historically, we humans spent millions of years as hunter-gatherers, and that life style became the natural thing for us to do. We got very good at surviving that way, and we liked it a lot. Even today, given the chance, a man will go hunting, and a woman will go shopping, an activity that has a lot in common with gathering."
"I've noticed that, sir. But just how did I start this war?"
"The hunter-gatherer life style does not naturally lend itself to higher education. New Nigeria has very few technically trained people. Because of this, most of their communication centers and so on are maintained by foreign technicians, from Earth, as luck would have it. When they got your fabulous gift, they naturally turned over the maintenance of it to their foreign technicians. And those boys, being naturally curious, got to trying to figure out how it was that the new computers they had been assigned to repair were thirty times faster than anything they had ever heard of before. It wasn't too long before they deduced that it was because of the new diamond semiconductors. Without the permission of the New Nigerians, major chunks of the automatic medical center were shipped back to Earth."
"Oh."
"Yes. The Powers That Be on Earth were not slow in realizing what such an advance in computer technology meant, both militarily and economically. Earth demanded that the frontier worlds hand over the new technology for making the diamond semiconductors. I don't think that they realize yet that we had found The Diamond, and that we didn't make it. Not that it made much difference to the planetary governments, since they hadn't the slightest idea of what Earth was talking about. The KEF army never told them about the new technology. We were keeping it as a military secret. Even the New Kashubian Parliament was kept in the dark."
"And Earth figured that we were all stonewalling them," I said.
"Precisely. And since the automatic medical centers were built on New Kashubia, and since Earth was still very unhappy with the way that New Kashubia had nationalized the property of Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing, a privately owned, Earth-registered corporation, they hit New Kashubia first."
"My family is in New Kashubia."
"Mine, too. All we know for sure right now is that they are fighting in the tunnels there. I'm sending New Kashubia half of the forces I have here on New Yugoslavia, but I have been ordered to stay here and defend this planet. Most of the tanks I'll be sending there are being temporarily assigned to the New Kashubian general staff, which commands more of a home guard than a real fighting force. You and your squad are going, too, but I am ordering you to stay independent. You have a very creative and unorthodox way of handling things, Mickolai. You have a very devious mind, and there is something of the con man in you. I've got a hunch that you might think of something that the politically appointed general staff hasn't, or that you might dare to do something that they wouldn't. Your orders are to do what seems right to you to save our planet, and our families."
"You are putting a lot of faith in me, sir. I'll try to live up to your expectations."
"Maybe I am. One more squad of line troops probably wouldn't make that much difference in this war, but one ace in the hole just might. Carry on, Tanker!"
"Yes, sir!"
We saluted, and he disappeared.
I stood there, thinking that if I managed to screw up big time, or better still, get myself killed, I would be giving my general a very convenient scapegoat.
Someone to blame the whole war on.
Me.
* * *
There was quite a line at the arming center, but as soon as my squad was assembled, we were sent to the front of it. The general had given very specific orders concerning us.
The bus was finally taken off Agnieshka's back, and an X-ray laser was mounted as her main armament. This would not ordinarily have been my first choice, but considering that we would probably end up fighting in the huge mining tunnels on New Kashubia, I suppose it made sense. Letting loose with a rail gun in a metal tunnel didn't sound like a good way to prolong your life. Glancing to the side, I saw that Kasia and Quincy were also getting lasers, while the other three were getting the more standard rail guns.
They mounted two antipersonnel weapons on each of our tanks, an IR laser and a machine gun. Well, it was actually a small paramagnetic launcher, which threw a stream of relatively heavy slugs, weighing almost a gram each, at fairly low speeds, only about three thousand meters per second. But if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck . . .
We also each got a pair of grenade launchers, with an assortment of fragmentation, concussion, armor piercing, and flash grenades, plus four flavors of gas grenades labeled tear gas, foggy, sleepy, and deadly.
We didn't get any tunneling equipment, since the ultrasonic tunnelers wouldn't have worked on most of the metals that New Kashubia was composed of, but they gave us each a standard pair of manipulator arms.
They didn't think we would need any land mines, but we each got five assorted drones. One of each set was a humanoid drone, of the sort that Quincy and I had bought. It just climbed up on the turret and sat there.
"Agnieshka, is that drone my property?"
"No boss. I checked the serial number."
"I thought that Quincy and I owned all of them that there were."
"Apparently not, sir."
"I can't imagine what we're going to do with six humanoid drones. Maybe we can put them to directing traffic."
"Yes, sir."
"On a more important topic, we have just been issued a lot of weapons that I, for one, don't know how to use."
"Nobody thought that we would ever have much use for antipersonnel weapons, sir."
"Right. But if we've got them we'd better learn how to use them. Download the appropriate programs."
"I'm doing that now, boss."
"Tell the others that it's back to school again."
CHAPTER TWENTY
Preparing for Battle
When we left, we had a semisentient ammunition truck following us, tagging along like a hungry stray dog who smells a sausage. Normally, these trucks were issued at a rate of one truck for sixteen squads. Apparently, the general thought that we would be doing an awful lot of shooting. That, or he figured that we'd make good delivery boys.
It was a four-day trip to New Kashubia, since they routed us through New Ireland, Soul City, New Zanzibar, and New Nigeria. This was the long way around, but either the general wanted us to avoid the traffic jam going directly to New Kashubia, or he wanted us to use an infrequently used receiving station on the planet.
The time spent actually in transit varied between a few minutes and thirty hours, according to some rules that a physicist might understand, but I didn't.
But to get from one interstellar point to another, you have to match speed and direction with the point on the target planet that you are going to. You have to compensate for the spins of both the planet that you are leaving and the one you are going to. These speeds are on the order of a thousand kilometers per hour. Then there are the orbital velocities of both planets. These are typically a hundred thousand kilometers per hour. And then there are the relative velocities of the two stars involved. In the sphere known as Human Space, three hundred light years in diameter, that could be just about anything from zero up to sixty kilometers per second.
To get the proper velocity, so you don't get smeared over your target planet, they used linear accelerators with a Hassan-Smith transmitter at one end and a receiver at the other. Civilians and other delicate things restricted most accelerators to a little more than one G. There were bulk cargo and military accelerators that boosted at twenty Gs, and sometimes more, but we weren't using those routes.
Accelerators boosted you for the length of the thing, and th
en transmitted you back to the beginning, to be boosted some more. You repeated the process until the proper speed was reached.
Of course, you not only needed the right speed, you needed it in the right direction. The linear accelerators had to be built inside a big sphere so they could be pointed in any direction, and because of the speeds involved, the accelerator had to be evacuated.
Getting a hard vacuum was fairly easy, since all you had to do was defocus the transmitter and turn it on. The air all went someplace, and on most planets you didn't much care where. We used the same trick to evacuate our Loway system.
On New Kashubia, which had to import all of its air, they just drained the accelerator into a mining shaft that went a few hundred kilometers down, letting gravity provide the vacuum, and then recovered the air from down there. I invented that trick myself, before I was forced to enlist in the army.
Finally, when you had the right speed and direction, the transmitter sent you not to the beginning of the accelerator again, but to the planet of your choice, provided they had a receiver waiting for you.
The key to successful transporter operation was that the transmitter had to know precisely where the receiver was at the instant of transmission, and precisely what its velocity vector was at that time. Being off by a few hundred meters, or by a few kilometers per hour, over interstellar distances, resulted in a disaster.
If the receiver wasn't where the transmitter thought it was, or if it wasn't operating, you just didn't arrive. Your constituent atoms were spread over a large volume of space, and that was the end of you. Because of this, receivers were built with a lot of backups, redundant circuits, and extra power supplies.
If the traffic wasn't too heavy, a planet could get along with only one transmitter, but they needed a receiver dedicated to each transmitter that they did business with, since they could never tell just when something was going to come in. Having two things come in at once to the same receiver resulted in losing not only both canisters, filled with whatever or whoever they were, but also the receiver and several surrounding city blocks.
Surprisingly, the system had a fairly decent safety record. Way better than that of ground cars or aircraft, anyway.
The original system had been started by Earth over two hundred years ago, long before the muon-exchange fusion power supply was perfected. Ice was mined on one of Neptune's moons and transmitted to a huge station circling the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury, where a solar-powered factory converted it to frozen balls of oxygen and hydrogen. From there it was sent out to fuel a growing fleet of computer-controlled space ships.
Since they didn't have to carry their fuel with them, these ships could use simple rocket technology to reach relativistic speeds, typically nine-tenths of the speed of light. Each ship contained an assembly area where it could put together transmitted modules that could form additional ships which would continue outward in a slightly different direction. The original twelve ships had grown to many thousands over the centuries.
The ships also received robot probe ships, which were released when the ship passed close to a star. These probes were accelerated not to the speed of the ship, but to the speed of the target star, so they parted company from their receiver quickly.
Fueled from Earth's solar system, the probes explored the new solar system, and put themselves into a convenient orbit there. Since we would probably never send another ship near that star again, even the most unpromising solar systems were sent a probe.
It was a matter of now or never.
Eventually, many habitable planets were found and colonized. Each planet was connected by Hassan-Smith transporters in the original probe back to Earth, which was the way Earth liked it.
The whole program of interstellar exploration and colonization had been monstrously expensive, and Earth wanted to make a profit off it. They charged excessively high rates for use of their transporters. They passed laws that all goods had to be shipped through the Earth's solar system, and the building of additional transporters between the colonies was forbidden. They starved their colonies, often quite literally, while getting richer and richer themselves. England had done similar things to its American colonies, before the revolution.
Some people never learn.
Naturally, the colonies objected to this, and starting from the manufacturing world of New Kashubia, receivers were smuggled in bits and pieces first to New Yugoslavia, and then to many of the other planets in Human Space. Once a planet had a receiver, a transmitter could be sent to them in pieces which, once assembled, let the planet join the smuggling network.
The colonies thrived.
All of the planets in the net thus had a connection to New Kashubia, where the transmitters and receivers were originally built. Since our rates were a tenth of what Earth charged, New Kashubia became the new hub of Human Space.
Earth, of course, was not informed of this development. They were led to believe that a recession was the cause of reduced shipments through its transporter network.
But you can't keep that big a thing a secret forever, and Earth was getting unhappy. The current war was a symptom of this.
* * *
The four standard days we spent in transit meant that we had four months in Dream World to get ready for the battle, which was fine by me. We had to prepare for a whole different style of fighting than we had been trained for, and a whole new set of weapons.
The humanoid drones we had been issued were particularly interesting. Even though I owned more of them than everybody else in Human Space combined, I'd never studied up on them. We had been using them only in the machine-controlled mode, for example, with the computer of a tank operating them.
There was also a human-controlled mode, where the tank's observer essentially "wore" the drone. The operator was in Dream World, but seeing through the drone's eyes, hearing through its ears, and feeling through its body. Once you got used to it, it was just like being there, except that the drone could be destroyed without getting you killed along with it.
Humanoid drones were twelve times stronger than a man. They could run faster, hit harder, and jump much higher. Jumping was augmented by explosive charges in the feet, which let you, once, get to the top of a five-story building in a single bound! There were impellers in the lower legs that could propel you through water at considerable speed, and lasers in each forearm that could be modulated for long-distance communications, or which, at full power, made very good antipersonnel weapons.
And they were fun! They made you feel so much like a comic book superhero that you wanted to go out and buy a cape!
Another interesting drone was the mouse. This was a spy device. About the size of its namesake, it ran silently on six articulated wheels, and gave you a set of eyes and ears where you could otherwise not go, either because you were too big, or because you were in danger of being shot. It also had tough, sharp little carbide teeth, that, given time, could nibble throught just about anything.
Other drones were mobile listening posts, mobile bombs, mobile gun platforms, or all three. They could release any of the various gas grenades we had with us, and do other impolite things.
All of our drones were equipped with Squid Skin coverings, as were our entire tanks, something I'd never seen before.
Squid Skin was an active camouflage system. A mildly intelligent computer kept track of where your enemy was, figured out what he would be seeing if you weren't there, and then made you look like that.
It was a fabric that contained millions of tiny colored balloons that could be inflated by the computer in any combination it wished. If all of the blue ones were inflated, and none of the others, you looked blue.
Of course, this only worked from one perspective. If you had two enemies looking at you from two different angles, you were no longer well hidden from both. It only worked over the human visual spectrum, and wouldn't fool radar, or the sensors in a tank. And under the best of circumstances, a single enemy could make out your outline
if he looked carefully. But despite all this, Squid Skin was something that you wanted very badly when you were being shot at.
And obviously, Squid Skin could make you look like anything you wanted to look like, within reason. It could look a lot like civilian clothes, or any uniform you could imagine.
It was expensive stuff, but we had automatic factories turning it out by the acre, so for us, cost wasn't very important.
Then there was the problem of tactics. I had been trained to fight battles in the open field, or more usually, under it, since in dirt and stone, our ultrasonic rigs could tunnel along in a hurry. They weren't much good to us now, because New Kashubia was a solid metal ball.
The planet had started out as a gas giant circling an oversized star. About a billion years ago, the star had gone supernova, and had eventually converted itself into a neutron star. The gas giant had largely evaporated, with the small central core reduced to a ball of boiling, mostly vaporized metal. This ball eventually cooled, and as it did, the metals with the highest melting points solidified on the surface first, and those with lower melting points solidified later. This was a lot like zone refining, but on a planetary scale. Oh, there was a good deal of natural alloying, with a lot of eutectic alloys present, alloys with particularly low melting points.
Nonetheless, for the most part, New Kashubia was a series of concentric metal shells, with a layer of tungsten at the surface, and a pool of mercury at the center.
Metals conduct heat better than the rocks that Earth is mostly covered with. The planet had cooled all the way through to around twenty degrees Celsius, a comfortable temperature, heated mostly by residual radioactivity in some layers, and a twice yearly dousing by the searchlight beams of radiation that came from the neutron star it circled.
The War With Earth Page 16