The Army Supply Corps balked at the expense of my requisition, and refused to supply us with that many drones.
I decided to hell with them, and supplied the drones myself, out of the ten thousand that I had bought a few months earlier for three hundred and eighty-six zloty apiece, military surplus.
General Sobieski got into the act, telling me that I was not playing the game properly, and arranged for the army to pay me four hundred thousand each for them. This didn't seem right to me, but when he finally ordered me to take the money, I took the money.
At the same time, my own purchase order for all future drones produced, at less than four hundred zloty each, was canceled by the factory.
Then the Army Supply Corps came back to me, offering to purchase an additional eight thousand humanoid drones from me at the four hundred thousand zloty price.
I sold them. My God, how the money rolls in!
The army's purchasing agent told me afterwards that he got a bonus and a medal for saving the government eight hundred million zloty on the purchase. The fact that they had just sold them to me for over a thousand times less than what they had bought them back for didn't seem to faze anybody but me.
I felt guilty about the whole thing, and put the three and a half billion I'd gotten in the transactions into the charity account of the KEF Fund, which is when Kasia heard about the deal. She got mad at me. She said that their value had increased because I had proved the worth of the drones, and had publicized it. She also said that if I had consulted with her first, she could have gotten twice what I did.
Women.
My major problems with the Gurkhas were not military, but social. For one thing, they all insisted on each swearing loyalty to me personally, as though I was some sort of medieval liege lord, and they were my vassals.
In the KEF, no biological person swears any loyalty to anybody or anything. They don't have to, since the tanks are sworn in, and those girls wouldn't permit anything disloyal to happen. About the only thing that a human could do to hurt his outfit would be to not notice enemy activity in combat.
That is to say, he could commit suicide.
But there wasn't anything in our regulations forbidding personal loyalty, so if they wanted a swearing in ceremony, they got a swearing-in ceremony.
We held the affair in my valley, in the real world. This was possible because almost all of the Gurkhas spoke English.
I winced a bit when I saw what the tank treads were doing to my young grass, but we all felt that the earth, the sun, and the sky were needed to make the whole thing real. Still, if I ever have to do it again, I will hold the ceremony on the high, rocky mesa above my valley.
My whole staff, Kasia, Quincy, Zuzanna, Conan, Maria, Lloyd, and Mirko, were in dress, but not full dress, uniforms. These outfits sported a fancy knife, rather than the sword of the full dress uniforms, and thus put us on the same level as the Gurkhas, with their kukris. We went to each man, who was standing by his tank, in the Gurkha dress uniform. Each man's officers and NCOs were there as well. I saw each man, from their colonel on down, in strict order of rank.
Mostly, it involved being personally introduced to each man, being told quickly of his ancestry, and the rank those men had held. I kept my communicator on, so Agnieshka could remember everything, since I certainly wouldn't. I took a Gurkha kukri from the top of each man's tank and put it into his hands. It was always his own weapon, some of which had been handed down for many generations. They each swore never to draw it again without also drawing blood. They each cut themselves slightly on the hand before resheathing the blades.
They stood there, proudly dripping blood on the ground. I was told that they always did that, even if they had only drawn the blade to sharpen it.
I added something extra to their ancient ceremony.
I put each man's bleeding hand on his tank. I told him that she was his weapon, and that he was her weapon. I said that they were bonded, like a brother and sister, or a man and his wife, and that in combat they would become a single person.
Of course, by this time they had been in their tanks for over a standard month, training. That was almost two and a half years in Dream World. They already knew these things, but this somehow made it official.
We had started the ceremony at first light, and it was growing dark when we finished.
At the very end, the Gurkhas surprised us, with an addition of their own. They presented me with an elaborately decorated kukri, and asked that I wear it as a favor to them. My seven "colonels" were also given similar weapons, and we all proudly put them on.
"We could not get the watered steel that these blades are traditionally made of. These were made of surgical quality stainless steel, but I think that they should suffice," the Gurkha colonel said.
It had been a long day, but these were a very ceremonial people, and what we did was important to them.
And you know? I found that it was very important to me, as well.
* * *
I got the results of the statistical and engineering studies that I had requested.
The backpacks containing power capacitors for the humanoid drones had been designed, approved, and put into production, as were a set of small, cheap, and disposable transponders for keeping drones of any sort in touch with their tanks.
Our rail guns showed no significant wear after firing billions of rounds, and were considered an engineering masterpiece, a design not to be screwed with.
As to the tanks themselves, less than one tenth of one percent of them had failed for any reason except by direct enemy action. Admittedly, the majority of these failures were in the drive coils, and these were not repairable because they were cast inside of the ceramic inner frame of the vehicle. It was cheaper to replace those tanks that failed than it would be to redesign the tank and the automatic factories that produced them. Anyway, there was a war going on, and we could not afford the factory downtime required to change anything.
I sent the report on to Conan, whose drive coils had failed while he was on the surface of New Kashubia just before the searchlight hit us.
He said that he would discuss matters with the engineers.
I told him not to kill anybody.
* * *
A few days later, the Gurkhas were each issued a humanoid drone, equipped with the new backpacks filled with power capacitors that let them operate for a full, standard day without needing recharging, provided that they went easy with the lasers.
Most of the Gurkhas were tough, thin and wiry. They were short by European standards. When you were wearing a drone, you were vastly powerful, fast, and two meters tall. My new men liked it.
Very soon, each drone sported a kukri of its own, paid for by the soldiers themselves. But since the drones were five times stronger than any man, these blades were well over a meter long, and weighed ten kilograms each. Like the blades given to me and my colonels, these huge blades were of surgical steel, the best that they could find, but still not as good, they claimed, as real watered steel.
Their colonel talked wistfully of perhaps someday setting up a forge of their own, and making truly proper blades for their drones.
I got many requisitions from the Gurkhas. Replacement uniforms of their traditional cut could be supplied out of the automatic factories right here on New Yugoslavia, although the army insisted that they pay for them themselves. Various religious and personal articles were eventually supplied, mostly by local merchants. But the Nepalese foodstuffs and spices that they seemed to crave so badly were simply unavailable on New Yugoslavia. All that I could do was to promise that when the war was over, we would be able to import some of them from Earth, or at least get some of the seeds for these plants, and grow them here on my extensive lands.
They said that they could live with that, especially since, at least in Dream World, they could eat as they pleased.
Then I got a really strange requisition from my new men.
Each of our tanks was normally equippe
d with a pair of humanoid manipulator arms. These things were twelve meters long, with the shoulders at the front of the tank, and the elbows at the back, when they were folded down. There was a large humanoid hand at the end of each. Controlled by the tank's computers, or by the human observer directly, these things were used to load the guns, and to do all sorts of other useful things.
They were very strong, and could move as fast as your own arms could, but being fifteen times longer, it was actually possible to move them so fast that the finger tips broke the sound barrier, making a loud cracking sound, like a whip.
Once, faced with a Serbian guard captain that I had to kill silently, I used my manipulator arms to simply grab his head, and squeeze. He popped like a zit.
My Gurkhas wanted some six-meter-long kukri swords, massing eighty kilos, so that their tanks could fight in hand-to-hand combat.
At first, I simply couldn't believe that this was a valuable military weapon. I mean, come on, sword fighting with tanks? Tanks that were equipped with rail guns that could tear up mountains, shoot down satellites, and take out incoming artillery? They couldn't be serious!
But they were persistent, so finally I did order up a dozen of the things, cheaply made of mild steel, and demanded a demonstration.
I got one.
One of their best swordsmen, Jemadar Harkabahadur Gurung, got into his tank and took a few practice swings with his new, huge sword. It moved so fast that you couldn't see the thing moving—over two thousand kilometers per hour, the colonel told me. All you could hear was the deafening crack of a sonic boom!
Then we all went over to an old, damaged tank hull, devoid of electronics and power supply, that had been dragged over for a target. The jemadar pulled over to the side of the wreck, and paused for a moment. I could almost see him bowing to me. Then there was a loud crack, the wrecked hull was cut completely in half, and the sword was buried deep in the soil beneath it.
I was awestruck.
"Good God!" I said, "That hull was made of depleted uranium reinforced with a ceramic composite! A mild steel sword could cut right through it?"
"In truth, sir, we took the liberty of sending your tank swords out for heat treating and shot peening," the colonel said. "Also, our tanks tell us that the edge is now composed of pure diamond, a few hundred atoms thick, although how this was accomplished, or where they got a diamond so long was not explained to us, despite considerable urging on our part. Still, we wanted as realistic a test as possible. But I assure you that better metal will make an even better sword. But now, let us go over into Dream World, where we have been rehearsing several battle scenarios using these remarkable weapons."
In combat, they of course used conventional rail guns and lasers when the enemy was at any distance from them, but when things got close up, they proved to us that a sword could hit the enemy much faster than a rail gun, or even a laser could traverse. When you were within twenty meters of your opponent, the swordsman beat the gunner six times out of seven.
Both in the real world, and in Dream World simulations, they proved to Quincy and me that there were a lot of situations where our usual weapons were simply too powerful.
A fragmentation hand grenade doesn't help much if you are trying to free hostages, and nuclear weapons had hardly ever been used in the history of warfare.
And in the upcoming invasion of the Solar System, one of our primary objectives was to capture intact the solar factory system that was circling the sun inside the orbit of Mercury, operating and fueling the thousands of robot ships that were pushing the envelope of Human Space ever farther outward.
I hated the thought of having to take that huge installation using rail guns. If we did, we might never get it working again.
The Gurkhas' tanks got their huge swords, made of the finest surgical steel New Kashubia could produce, and diamond edges soon appeared on all of their weapons, of all sizes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Angel of the Lord
A week later, the Powers That Be finally broke down and issued us a Combat Control Computer to manage the new battalion with. Why they were so stingy with handing those things out was beyond me, since they had seventy-four of them already built and in storage, but that's the military for you.
I was still nothing but a tanker first class. No promotion had come along with the thing, just the job.
Not that I could tell the CCC that. As I remembered the rules, you have to be a general, or the darned things won't let you swear them in. So, I got gussied up in my full-dress uniform, with my sword and my stainless steel kukri and had my seven "colonels" do the same.
There was room in a CCC for only a general and five colonels, but I had some vague ideas of rotating them around, somehow. Lloyd and Mirko were deep into New Croatian politics just now, and said that if I wanted to delay their time of entering the CCC it was fine by them.
The CCC was parked in the lowest garage below the church, along with the Gurkha battalion, among their ammunition trucks. It looked exactly like the other trucks, a five-meter cylinder ten meters long, on standard MagLev treads. This was both because it was simpler to make them that way, and because of camouflage.
The trucks were cheap, compared to all the other stuff, and not all that militarily vital. I mean, we could lose them all, and still fight on without much difficulty, for a while at least. Given a choice, an enemy would probably take them out last.
Losing the CCC could throw the battalion into disarray, and so it was a prime military target. It was best to hide it among the trucks.
Agnieshka, wearing a decorated drone, was pushing a cart full of helmets and the custom-tailored survival kits that officers rated. I had brought her along to show me which truck to talk to, but as it turned out, it wasn't necessary.
"Mickolai, my dear boy! How good it is to see you again!" one of the trucks said.
"Professor Cee? I am very surprised that you know me," I said.
"Why should that be? You were always one of my favorite pupils."
"But, I never was one of your pupils! At one time, it felt like I had spent eight years inside of you, or one of your clones, but in reality I spent the entire time in a tank. And even if I had been inside a real Combat Control Computer, it wouldn't have been you. The message I got said that I was being issued a new, unused CCC."
"Ah, my boy, now you are getting into questions about hardware, software, the meaning of life, and all that sort of thing. Rather sophomoric, wouldn't you say? By the time most men reach your age, they have learned to accept the universe for what it is, and to live with it," the professor said.
"Then you are saying that you have somehow downloaded everything that happened during my military education, and assimilated it into yourself."
"I suppose that you could say something like that, yes. But I assure you that to me, it seems that you were one of my favorite pupils. I'll never forget the way you conned that guard tank into letting you into the valley where the Serbs had an entire division of unsworn, virgin tanks. 'Roast Duck and Oysters,' indeed! I see that you have brought your five excellent colonels with you. Kasia, you look as beautiful as ever! And you as well, Maria! Mirko, Conan, Lloyd, well, this is going to be a grand reunion! And I see Quincy and Zuzanna here as well. It was such a shame when your general died, and only a week before graduation. You are here to see the others off?"
"Not exactly," I said. "Mirko and Lloyd decided to become squad leaders when it looked as though there was no hope of my ever getting assigned a CCC. Quincy and Zuzanna took their place in my squad, and we saw quite a bit of combat together, in the New Kashubian campaign. All of these people are trained colonels, and my thought was to rotate them occasionally. I trust that you are capable of such flexibility?"
"It's more than a bit unorthodox, but I suppose that I could make do. Fortunately, I have sufficient spare sanitary fittings with me."
"Good, because just now, Lloyd and Mirko are up to their earlobes in New Croatian politics, so, at l
east for the time being, they have other things to do. Are you ready to be sworn in?"
"Quite."
"Good. Now, then. I am General Mickolai Derdowski and I am here to accept your oath of loyalty to me and my forces. Number 00000104, you are hereby inducted into the service of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces, and into the New Yugoslavian branch of that service, to whom you will give all of your loyalty. Your combat data code will be number 58294, and you will now permanently erase all other codes from your memory. Do you now swear loyalty to the Kashubian forces?"
"I do so swear."
"Good. Welcome to the service. Open up. Lloyd, you and Mirko can take off, and get back to your politics. We'll keep you posted. The rest of you, strip down. Agnieshka will take care of the clothes."
"Not likely, buster!" Kasia said, "We're not about to put on a strip show for your benefit. You guys take a walk. We'll call you when you can come back."
Maria and Zuzanna nodded agreement, so we mere males walked, the powers of wives and girlfriends being what they are.
"Good try, boss," Conan said.
About five minutes later, the speaker on one of the Gurkha tanks told us that we could turn around. Back at the CCC, three coffins were extended, and a tube of "Lubricant, Sanitary Fixture, mod II," was sitting on each of them.
I took off my swords and my bemedaled jacket and then said, "Wait a minute! If you wouldn't strip down in front of us, we won't do it in front of you! Professor, turn off your external scanners!"
"Coward!" all three girls shouted.
"Retaliation is not cowardly!" I shouted back.
With the greased fitting inserted into my privy members, my helmet on and plugged in, and the coffin filling with liquid, I said, "Agnieshka, are you there?"
"I sure am, boss."
I switched into Dream World, and was back in my homey cottage, sitting at the kitchen table.
"Then who is running the drone, if you are in the module of this coffin?"
"I am. I was downloaded into this computer, but I'm still in my tank, too. The plan is for both of me to update each other as often as possible. They say that the memories fit together so that it seems like there's only one of me, and I'm doing everything in series, and not in parallel."
The War With Earth Page 29