We marched in playing our instruments, and everybody stopped and looked at us. I suppose that we were so completely unexpected that when we came in, nobody knew what to do, so they simply didn't do anything.
Or maybe we really were playing that badly, but everybody wanted to stay polite. Either way, it was working.
We finished up with "Let Me Entertain You" by the time that we got to the center of the floor. Then, Eva started playing a fast Russian tune with three of the violins, while the other three, including me, laid down our instruments and started to dance!
I found myself with my arms crossed across my chest, squatting on my ankles, and vigorously kicking my feet almost as high as my head. Quincy and Kasia were on either side of me, doing exactly the same steps that I was. When we did the simulations, Eva had explained that it was easier for her, that way. She only had to send out one set of instructions to all three drones.
She worked the drones into a circle, with the three musicians in the center, all facing outward and circling clockwise, and the three dancers circling the musicians counter-clockwise, but still facing the people and guards around us.
From where the crowd sat, it looked like a lot of very good precision dancing, and as tired as they all looked, they started getting into it. People started to clap in unison, and the guards were getting interested. One was actually smiling.
Finally, the one guard who had been sitting down on the top bleacher with taller people around him stood up to get a better view, and Quincy silently shouted, "Now!"
His tank, Marysia, knew exactly what he meant. She took over control of the drones from Eva, stretched out both arms of all six drones, and simultaneously fired twelve laser beams at full power.
You don't have to fight fair with people who take civilian hostages.
Twelve toweled heads were separated from their bodies in under a tenth of a second. They were all dead before our violins hit the floor.
It was damned good shooting, even if we had practiced it over thirty times in simulations.
It took only a half second longer for all four doors into the auditorium to be cut in half at waist level. We didn't know if the other doors had guards, or if they were standing in front of the doors like the first one, but it seemed like a good bet to Quincy, and I wasn't about to second guess him.
Lasers are very quiet, and since these were all firing in the infrared, there wasn't much to see. A few women who had seen the guards' heads fall off screamed, as did those who were splashed with blood, but in fact most of the people were watching the performance, and didn't see the killing at all.
This was just as well. There were a lot of children in the crowd, and it wasn't nice to let them know about the really ugly things that adults sometimes have to do.
The few screams were drowned out by the applause of the crowd, who thought that we were doing our finale, which, I suppose, we were.
Four of the drones ran to the doors to make sure that all was secured out there.
Quincy stayed in the middle, making sure that there wouldn't be any surprises coming from the crowd. They might have had a few guards without the headgear, for example. He told me later that he had really wanted to take a bow at that point, but he had restrained himself.
I ran for the stage.
The stage was two meters above the floor, but that wasn't much for a humanoid drone to jump. I could have done seven times that if I'd wanted to fire the charges in my heels. Still, it seemed to impress people, and got their attention. Maybe they figured that this was the next part of the act.
One glance told me that the last guy up here wasn't going to give us any problems, since his head was completely disconnected, and indeed had rolled off the stage. The same shot had also cut his microphone in half.
I turned to the crowd, and Agnieshka switched my Squid Skin from the clown outfit into something like a Kashubian general's class A uniform. I held up my arms, and the crowd got quiet.
The voice speakers on these drones were loud enough to be heard above the noise of a firefight, so I didn't need the broken microphone.
"Listen to me, people! Your lives depend on this! You are being rescued! I am General Mickolai Derdowski, of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces. I know, I don't look like him. I'm wearing a new kind of battle armor, but it's hard to take off, and we don't have much time."
Somebody started to cheer, but I hushed him up. The drones were bringing in the halves of the four guards who had been stationed outside the auditorium, along with their weapons, which they handed out, and throwing the bodies under the bleachers, where the children wouldn't have to look at them. Surprisingly, very few people seemed to notice this besides me.
"Your guards are now gone, but you are not out of trouble yet! So, I know that some of you have had military training. You know who you are. There are a few dozen enemy weapons lying around. If you know how to use them, pick them up and guard the doors. Do it!" I said, when very few people moved. They still didn't understand what was going down. It was all happening too fast for them. But after a few moments, a few dozen older men got the idea, and acted on it.
"You, sir," I said, pointing at a very well-dressed and distinguished-looking man in the first row, who was trying not to look at the human head that was lying at his feet, "Who are you and what is your job?"
"I'm Doctor Thomas Kapinski, and I'm the principal of this school."
"Excellent! Please come up to the stage, sir. I'm putting you in charge here. Please keep these people calm. We have a few other things to attend to, but we'll be back in a few hours to escort you to safety."
"Just what could be more important than seeing to it that all these people are taken to safety right now?" Kapinski asked.
"There are five other groups of hostages who are in as much danger as you were a few minutes ago. We're going to go and free them. Then we will bring all of you out at the same time."
"But, you are just going to abandon us here?"
"You now have more people protecting you than you had guarding you a few moments ago. There are some real men in this crowd, and they will do their duty if somebody gives them some leadership. Your hour has come! Stop being a wimp, and go do your job!"
He stood straight and said, "Yes, sir."
It's the uniform. It gets them every time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Liberating the Masses
We picked up our instruments and made it back to the tanks with only four minutes' charge left on the capacitors of the humanoid drones. Firing those lasers takes a lot of power.
I resolved that if I ever got a chance, I'd design a backpack full of capacitors for those drones to wear. And we needed a better method of communication than having mice drag fiber-optic cables around. But all that would have to wait.
The next four stops went even more smoothly than the first. For one thing, we already had the musical instruments.
It simply never occurred to anyone to stop a bunch of clowns, and check their credentials. Not that they had anyone to check with, what with the way their headquarters had been trashed and all.
The truth is, I doubt if they even knew that their headquarters was out of action. I am convinced that they were trying to avoid contact with their superiors, and were probably grateful that nobody was trying to get in touch with them.
We were dealing with six separate units that had deliberately cut themselves off from the Earth forces, and were now each trying to cut their own deal to get out of Dodge. And they were doing it, feet first, as they say in the old cowboy movies.
We still had not been able to contact our own forces, or anybody else at all. All of the communication lines that we found were dead. That the enemy's lines were out was understandable, since they had been under the control of a computer that we had destroyed. But everything else was dead, too. The phone lines, the television lines, the data links, everything. Who had done this, and why, was beyond us.
Certainly, we had never planned for such an eventu
ality in any of our simulations. We had rescued perhaps twenty-five thousand people, and we didn't know what to do with them! We had assumed that once we had the hostages free, our forces would be able to punch through the enemy lines, and escort these people to safety. Our plan B had been to take them back ourselves through our lines to freedom, but now we couldn't even find out where those lines were at!
"We need some prisoners," Quincy said, as we were going to the last hostage point, a big concert hall.
"Let's just try talking to the next bunch of sentries we come across," I said.
"A man asking for directions," Kasia said. "Who would have ever guessed it?"
"If they refuse to tell us, then we can take them prisoner. At this point, we can't afford to take on all of Earth's forces by ourselves. We've got the hostages to think about."
Our other problem was that we didn't know how we were going to get all those people back to our lines, once we knew where those lines were. Thirty thousand people is a lot. There weren't any functional vehicles around. My guess was that when the Earth forces started taking this area, anybody who had or could steal a car used it to get out of here.
Ironic as it seemed, although New Kashubia was building the most advanced transportation network in Human Space on New Yugoslavia, it had never built a public mass transit system for itself. Part of it was the way that the shoemaker's children always seem to be barefoot, but also, since we already had all of these old mining tunnels running all over the place, it was easier simply to build and sell private electric automobiles.
Most of the ex-hostages could walk well enough in the low gravity down here, but some were very old, some were very young, and some were crippled. There were wounded among them, and some who were very sick.
Kasia solved that problem before we found any enemy sentries. She found a factory that had some humongous coils of sheet metal, hardened steel two millimeters thick. They were seven meters in diameter and eighteen meters wide.
When the factory's computer objected to our taking the steel without authorization, we switched it off, and did without it.
Even in an automatic factory, all of the equipment still has a manual mode, for use during set-up, and when the computers are down. With the humanoid drones operating the uncoilers and welders we found there, we put together five sleds, each eighteen meters wide and forty meters long, by cutting the steel to length with our lasers, and bending it up a bit in front by having the drones grabbing it and bending it with their hands.
We found some steel cable on some overhead cranes, cut it down with the tanks' lasers, and welded it to the sleds, so the tanks could pull them along behind. I remembered being told once that a main battle tank makes a pretty good tractor.
A few barrels of lubricating oil were loaded on each sled, for when we had them loaded with people, and they got harder to pull. We figured to just pour it in front of the sleds as we went along.
I also remember a professor in engineering school telling me once that a smooth, hard metal rubbing against a soft one makes a pretty good bearing. We had a hard steel sheet sliding on a gold floor. He never mentioned using gold as the soft metal, but I figured it should work. If it didn't, a lot of people were going to have a long walk in front of them.
Working at combat speed, we got the job done in eight minutes, standard time. We figured that in a pinch, we might be able to haul ten thousand people this way. The rest would have to walk.
We didn't find any manned checkpoints on the way to the last concert hall, but there were three abandoned ones.
We parked around the corner and went into our clown act. It went just as smoothly as it did the first five times, up to the point when we shot the guards. Quincy and Marysia were just as accurate as always, but one of the guards had been watching too many old movies. The kind where the idiot hero walks around with grenades clipped to his harness by the firing rings.
When his headless body hit the floor, one of the rings pulled loose, and the grenade went off. Worse still, it went off right next to two of his other grenades, and they detonated as well.
The explosions brought the outside guards running in, and Quincy had to take five of them on hand-to-hand, because by then, the civilians were all up and running around, screaming like they were the bunch of clowns. Quincy couldn't get a clean shot off at any of the enemy.
Quincy was absolutely deadly when he was fighting in the real world with only his bare hands. Operating in a tank at combat speed, and with the speed and power of a humanoid drone going for him, he was truly awesome.
He hit the first one with a side thrust kick to the neck that almost took the bastard's head completely off. It was swinging by a bit of skin from the back of his neck when Quincy hit his second man in the chest with his fingertips extended. His hand broke through the skin and the ribcage, and in a bit of overkill, he ripped the guy's heart right out and threw it, still beating, on the floor. The third died when the edge of Quincy's other hand came down on his head, squashing it like a watermelon hit with a sledge hammer.
These kills were almost simultaneous. The last man was dead long before the first one hit the floor.
I missed Quincy's last two kills, because by then I had troubles of my own. This Oriental-looking soldier had started putting assault-rifle bullets into my drone's chest as I was charging at him. He didn't care about the people behind me, and I didn't dare fire my laser in that crowd.
I had to take him and his partner myself, since the girls were all too far away to lend a hand, and that rifle had to be silenced quickly. I ran straight at him, not trying to dodge the bullets. I wanted those slugs to stop in my drone, and not in the packed crowd of civilians behind me. Not trusting myself with anything fancy, I hit my first man in the jaw with my right fist. When you do that wearing a drone, your fist comes out of the back of your opponent's head.
Some of those bullets must have hit something critical, because I felt the drone losing hydraulic pressure. I still had enough power left to kick my last man in the gut with enough force to break his backbone, before I collapsed on the floor, or rather my drone did. Quincy soon dragged the thing out of sight, leaking bright red hydraulic fluid, after he cleaned up the rest of the bodies.
With Maria's permission, I switched my perceptions over to her drone to give my speech on the auditorium stage.
We had three dead civilians, and twenty-six wounded. The medical supplies in our tanks' survival kits, added to the medical kits of the two doctors who happened to be in the house, weren't nearly enough to patch everybody up properly. If the troops who had pulled guard duty here had any medical supplies, we couldn't find them and they weren't about to start talking.
One of the civilian doctors insisted on trying to save the life of "that young hero who was shot defending all of us."
It took Kasia five minutes to straighten the guy out, while the human being in front of him was still bleeding. "That was no 'young hero,' you idiot! That was my husband, and he's just fine! What you are looking at is a machine, stupid! My real body is back in a tank, safe and sound. And so is my husband's! So unless you're a certified drone maintenance technician, you will leave that thing alone, and stick to what you know how to do!"
When he still wouldn't believe her, she picked him up with one hand and said that her drone wouldn't put him down until he came to his senses.
Eventually, he came to his senses.
Civilians.
On the up side, almost half of Quincy and Zuzanna's big family of descendants was here in the concert hall, as was all of General Sobieski's immediate family.
The way I saw it, my boss now owed me a major favor, assuming that I could get these people back alive. If I couldn't, I probably wouldn't make it myself, so I wouldn't have to worry about facing him.
I figured that it was definitely a win-win situation.
Kasia said, "Mickolai, we've got five other groups out there who might be in even more trouble than these people. I think we should take all the groups
to a central location. At least then, we could guard all of them."
"I expect that you are right," I said. "The high school is probably our best bet. It's big enough, I think we could defend it, and there has to be a cafeteria there. These people haven't been fed in a while, and our drones need a recharging. Agnieshka, bring the tanks up to the doorways."
Static friction is almost always much higher than sliding friction. Worried that once the sleds were loaded with seventy-five tons of people each, our fifty-ton tanks wouldn't be able to get them moving, Quincy had the drones pour some oil under the sleds as they were pulling up to the doors. It worked.
We had room for everybody on the sleds, but it took us fifteen minutes to get them loaded. It took us the longest time to explain the simplest things to these civilians.
Finally, I just shouted, "We are leaving in two minutes. Anybody not on the sleds by then will be left behind!"
That worked, for the most part. As we were pulling out, one idiot wanted us to stop so he could go to the rest room.
I loudly told him to pee in his pants.
He looked up at me, or rather at the massive, two-meter-tall drone I was wearing, and did just that.
We accelerated slowly, since many of the people insisted on standing, but we eventually got up to twenty kilometers per hour, about five times faster than these people could have walked.
We didn't see anyone at all on our way back to the high school, just more abandoned check points. It was spooky.
The school principal, Dr. Kapinski, that I had left in charge there had done a decent job. There were armed sentries out, and the people were quiet enough. They already had the cafeteria going, and people were being fed in shifts.
He was not at all happy about being left alone for nine hours in the middle of enemy-held territory.
I said, "Dr. Kapinski, we have not seen an enemy soldier since we left you, except for the guards with the other groups of hostages, and we killed all of those guys. You now have twice as many armed men to protect you as you did before, plus fourteen military drones for guard duty. We'll set them up as an outer perimeter defense before we leave. Tell people to stay well inside of that ring. Without a tank around to control them, those things aren't very smart, and I don't want anybody hurt. We're going back for another group of our people. There'll be about thirty thousand of them here before we're through. Keep up the good work."
The War With Earth Page 22