"Who are 'they'?"
"Professor Cee, actually. He says it works for him all the time. I mean, besides the six computers that hold girls like me, there are twelve really massive, independent computers in this CCC, and he thinks he's all of them. Then, there are a total of a hundred and thirty-one of these CCCs in existence, and he's all of them, too. And he's also every tank who is using his programs in training, the way we did it with you."
"That gets hard to think about. I'm glad he's on our side. I wonder if Earth has anything like him."
"I doubt it, boss. They've been acting very stupid from day one."
"Except for the way they seem to be able to find all of our transporters on a planet, and take them out," I said.
"There is that."
The professor knocked on the front door, and Agnieshka let him in.
After greeting me again, profusely, he said, "My dear boy, that was an absolutely brilliant campaign you and your squad fought on New Kashubia. Successful pupils like you make an old teacher feel very proud."
"Thank you," I said. "But if you remember me so well, you should know that I hate being called your 'Dear Boy'. You may address me as General Derdowski, or boss, or sir."
After my graduation from the military college, I'd had a rough time getting him to acknowledge that I was the one who was in command. I didn't intend to go through that again.
"As you wish, General. Now then, I would like to discuss your staff, the colonels with you."
"Certainly. Have a seat. Coffee, beer, or scotch?"
"Scotch, if you don't mind," he said, as Agnieshka served me a beer, and then a whiskey to him.
"An excellent single malt. McTavish?"
"Argyle. I really am rich now. Not that anything costs anything here. You know, once this war gets over, and we get the social drones in production, you'll get one of your own, and actually be able to taste the real stuff, and not just fake it."
"I certainly look forward to getting one of those human facsimiles, but you know, it seems to me that I am tasting the excellent distillation that I am drinking right now. But about your staff. Conan and Maria are of course absolutely first-rate colonels, and should be retained. Quincy is even better, and is easily the best of the bunch. You couldn't find a better subordinate no matter where you looked. But his wife, Zuzanna, got into the officer's program because we couldn't get Quincy without her. She's intelligent enough, and quite competent, but she's undisciplined, and tends to be disobedient at the most inopportune moments. She does, however, have a very strong protective instinct, and can be quite ruthless with anyone that she sees as threatening any of her own people. I therefore would like to make a suggestion."
"Yes?"
"Mirko and Lloyd have four men left in each of their squads. Take Mirko and Lloyd back as colonels. Then take the eight men and machines that presently belong to their squads and form them into your personal guard, or call it a guard for the supply trucks, if you wish. Those men would otherwise be abandoned to the replacement depot, where they would be scattered about as needed. Breaking up a functioning combat team is bad for the army and bad for the men as well. Then make Zuzanna the captain of your personal guard. This would keep the young troops near their former squad leaders, and Quincy near, and in constant contact with, Zuzanna. Properly handled, she wouldn't feel that it was a demotion."
"Yes, that would all work out nicely. I too have worried about Zuzanna, on occasion, like when she needlessly slaughtered the Earthworms' entire command staff on New Kashubia. Your plan would also keep the three squads I had at Baden-Baden Island together, after the combat we saw together there. But it has one glaring problem. You are forgetting about my wife, Kasia."
"That is your other problem, General. I shouldn't be the one to be telling you this, but there's nothing else for it. Kasia is pregnant. I don't think that you would want to take a pregnant woman into combat, now, would you?"
That is about as stiff a kick in the gut as a man can get and stand a chance of surviving. Kasia was going to be a mother! I was going to be a father! For years, I had wanted a family, but now that it was finally happening, it threw me into something of a funk. I sat back for a few minutes, absorbing it.
"Right," I finally said. "Agnieshka, tell Mirko and Lloyd to turn around. We will be needing them. Call up their squads, or the eight men who are what's left of them. They will be a while getting themselves integrated in with the Gurkhas. Get Zuzanna's tank over here. Kasia's, too. I don't want her to walk home. And then tell Kasia that I want to see her, now."
Since a CCC normally keeps you at fifty times standard speed in Dream World, Mirko and Lloyd were still in the garage, with Agnieshka's drone.
I went to Kasia's office in our cottage.
I said, "I feel like the Angel of the Lord, who went unto Mary and said, 'Kid, you are pregnant!' "
"Yeah, I was afraid of that," she said.
"Why didn't you tell me about it?"
"Well, I only missed one period. I didn't want to get you all excited, and then have it turn out to be nothing."
"Bat pucky. Our tanks keep us monitored nineteen ways from Thursday. You knew. Shall I call Eva in here and ask her?"
"That won't be necessary. But look, lover, miscarriages are fairly common in the first two months, and anyway, I didn't want you to go off and do something stupid again and get yourself killed without my being there to get you out of it," she said.
It was obviously time to use the forceful routine.
"You will not bring up the incident concerning the Polynesian dugout canoe. I would not take any pregnant woman into combat. I will certainly not take you. As of right now, you are on maternity leave. You will get into Eva, and you will go home. You will then spend the next year or so making a beautiful baby, and managing your financial empire in your spare time."
"Yes, sir. Will you at least kiss me good-bye?"
"I'll kiss you gladly, but we haven't been called up, yet! I'll be home in an hour or two."
She slid her coffin out of the CCC, and I did the same. We got out, wet and naked, and never spoke a word. I gave her a long and lingering kiss. Then she got into her tank, and I climbed back up to the CCC.
That one kiss was all we got.
I never made it home, except in Dream World.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Combat Station Four
We were called up that night, and were off New Yugoslavia ten hours after that.
There was a time when it took weeks or even months to get a battalion ready for combat, but the Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks are so entirely self-contained that they are always ready to move out at a moment's notice. Even if a soldier had been on leave, and on the other side of the planet, our communications and the Loway system could get him to the assembly point in hours.
Our first stop, as usual, was the arming center, where every man in the battalion received four additional antipersonnel drones, a full set of antipersonnel weapons, and an X-ray laser for his main weapon. The advantage to the X-ray laser was that it put its energy deep into an enemy machine, killing the observer and destroying anything electronic, without doing too much damage to the structure itself. Also, since it was aimed electronically, with a phase array system, it could get on target much faster than a rail gun could, which had to mechanically point at its target. The downside was that once on target, it took much longer to do serious dirt to your opponent. Whole seconds, sometimes.
These weapons were besides the humanoid drones and the huge tank swords, which my men had already been issued. None of my men got rail guns. We got no mines, rockets, or other heavy explosives.
We did each get a small rocket engine strapped to the back of the tanks and trucks. This was not the forty-G unit that was supplied with fuel by transmitters from a supply dump, but a one-G maneuvering rocket with three big fuel tanks, one for hydrazine and two for nitrogen tetroxide. Once you used up your fuel, it was gone. There had not been time enough to build enough fuel transporters fo
r every tank in the army.
I knew right then what our mission in this battle would be. We were going to capture the solar powered factory that was orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury. The one that had most of the Solar System's transmitters, and was supplying Earth's entire war effort. It was also supplying the entire expansion of Human Space.
My Gurkhas were naturals at close-in fighting. The job was made for them.
Once we were transmitted to Combat Station Four, and there was no longer any danger of a security leak, I was given the complete battle plan. Actually, it turned out to be pretty similar to the one that my team had submitted in the first place.
As General Nathan Bedford Forrest, of American Civil War fame said nonetheless, "The way to win battles is to get there the firstest with the mostest."
If we were going to successfully attack Earth, we would have to send in very large numbers of tanks and men, and do it very quickly.
Sending in our forces over a period of weeks or months was a sure recipe for disaster. It was what Earth had been doing to our planets, and they hadn't been very successful at it, even though none of our planets had more than three percent of Earth's population, or more than one percent of its industrial strength, barring New Kashubia.
Earth was by far the biggest kid on the block.
The places that you can send personnel and machines in Human Space is limited by where you have Hassan-Smith transmitters and receivers. The amount of stuff that you can send there in a given period of time is largely limited not by the transmitters and receivers themselves, which are quite fast, but by the accelerators that give what you are sending the proper speed and direction.
The accelerators are not only the slowest part of the system, they are also the most complicated and expensive part of it. To build enough accelerators to do the job properly, we would have to spend all of the industrial capacity of New Kashubia on nothing else for the next three years.
Very obviously, from the way the war was going, Earth was not going to give us the time to do that.
Quincy was the one who thought up a way around our problem. His solution was to put a few receivers, and a lot of transmitters, but no accelerators at all at some arbitrary point in deep space, well away from everything else, but where a receiver already existed.
His plan was to send a collapsible receiver through the existing one, and accelerate it with conventional rockets to exactly the speed and direction that our target would have on D-day. Then, over the next few weeks or months, all of our available forces and a sufficient number of transmitters would be sent to join that first receiver.
When the time came to roll, we would all rush through the transmitters in a hurry, to receivers that we had set up in the Solar System.
The plan required that first receiver in deep space, and additional receivers near each of our targets in the Solar System, receivers that we knew the coordinates of well enough to transmit to them.
Fortunately, the KEF had established a spy network on Earth over five years ago. There were many people there whose sympathies were with the outer planets, or who weren't averse to taking our money, or quite often both. How our people had managed to set this up, and keep in touch with the network was something I was never told about. I didn't have the need to know. But we never could have even considered the attack on Earth without the information we got from that network.
The truly hairy part of the whole plan came when you realized that everything in the Earth's solar system is in orbit around the sun. The speed, relative to the sun, might not change much, but the direction was constantly changing, through a full three hundred and sixty degrees every local year, which was different for every body in orbit.
This meant that we had to plan the exact instant of every step of the invasion to less than a second, and we had to do it months in advance. Accomplishing it would be no mean feat, when you consider that hundreds of thousands of men and machines would be involved. The timing on everything had to be absolutely perfect. Anything or anyone that wasn't ready to go at the proper instant would have to be abandoned, and hope to be picked up later, assuming that we won the war.
If we lost it, and if Earth was deliberately throwing away their own soldiers the way it looked like they were doing, it wasn't likely that they would make any effort to save our stranded troops, if we couldn't do the job ourselves.
Those troops would spend a long time in very deep space, dying all alone.
But as I said, we got the full battle plan as soon as we emerged at Combat Station Four, which turned out to be in Earth's solar system itself, sort of.
Around a hundred and fifty years ago, an attempt had been made to mine the Oort Cloud, where the comets come from, way past the orbit of Pluto. It turned out to be a financial disaster, but a robot scientific observation station was still being operated there. Subverting enemy computers was something that our girls were particularly good at, and the station was ours now, without Earth being any the wiser about it.
From the receiver in the Oort Cloud Station, a total of five rocket-powered collapsible receivers were sent out, one for each of the five assault groups.
The group at Combat Station Five was the smallest of the bunch. Their job was to take the ice-mining site on Enceladus, an ice moon of Saturn just outside of the "E" Ring, which provided the raw material for the fuel being sent to the thousands of exploration ships on the outer edge of Human Space. It was also the least important objective, since in a pinch, if they failed in their mission, the raw materials to keep the Solar Station operating, supplying the expansion of Human Space, could be sent from Freya, another ice moon in the New Yugoslavian system.
The group at Combat Station Four consisted of my Gurkhas as the main assault force, plus a much larger, ten thousand troop division of mostly rail gun equipped tanks who were there to defend us from an external counter attack. They were also there to destroy the solar factory if we failed in our mission. This would probably set back the exploration of space by at least fifty years, but The Powers That Be felt that the delay would be preferable to having all of the existing colonies invaded and trashed by Earth.
Combat Stations One, Two, and Three were the big ones. The men and machines there were going into geosynchronous orbit around Earth itself, a hundred and twenty degrees apart. Their job was to take out anything that could shoot back, and to generally intimidate the hell out of the Earthworms.
That done, we would try to talk some sense into the idiots.
We didn't really want to trash the entire home planet. We did, however, have the firepower with us to do just that. After all, they had attacked us first, without warning, and without a declaration of war.
All told, three quarters of the KEF was collecting itself at the combat stations, leaving only a skinny, scattered force for home defense. This was an all or nothing operation. It had to be, since if Earth committed itself to total war production, they could outproduce us ten to one, easy.
In a short war, the critical factors needed for success are stockpiled weapons, previous training, and fighting spirit. In a long one, the important things are population size, natural resources, and industrial capacity. Like the South in the American Civil War, or Japan in WWII, the outer planets had to win soon, or we couldn't win at all.
We had four standard days to train for the battle. Plenty of time, four months in Dream World for my men in their tanks. Six months for those of us in the CCC.
The first step was to build, in Dream World, a model of the solar factory we had to take.
It was huge. It was over nine hundred kilometers long, three hundred kilometers wide, and well over a kilometer thick in some places.
We had plans for it that were probably as accurate as anything that existed on Earth, but this was a very old installation.
The first sections of it had been built over two hundred years ago, before the first ships pushed out for the stars, before the muon exchange fusion power supply was perfected, and solar power was
the only practical way to go. Designed with expansion in mind, it contained some of the first self-duplicating automatic factories ever built.
Mostly, these factories built components to build more of the interstellar ships that sought out new stars, the probe ships that examined each solar system they came across, and to continuously enlarge the station to keep those additional ships supplied. The technology they employed was now obsolete, but being completely automatic, it didn't cost anything to keep the system running. Redesigning them would have been expensive.
Anyway, it worked, so why mess with it?
There were two big problems with the information we had on our target. The first was that, being so old, there were probably thousands of modifications that had been made over the years that had been forgotten, or that had never been recorded in the first place. We were certainly in for a lot of unexpected things, once we got there.
The second was that our plans showed absolutely no defensive weapons at all, and none of us were willing to believe that.
The professor dug out the original treaties on the Solar Station from his seemingly infinite memory banks, and read a synopsis of them to us. These had been made back in the days when Earth's nations were often at war, and provided for the design, funding and manning of the solar factory.
"These documents emphatically state that the station will have absolutely no offensive or defensive capability," he said. "It looks like they have kept with that agreement."
"Do you really believe that?" I asked.
"Certainly, General, because I said that it looks like the place was never armed. Any and all weapons there are carefully hidden. Now, had you had asked if I thought the place was actually armed to the teeth, then my answer would still be 'certainly.' That station contains ninety-eight percent of the transporter capability in Earth's Solar System. Much of the food and most of the wealth that flows into the old planet goes through that station. Earth's rulers may be wicked bastards, but they are not stupid wicked bastards. With something that critical, of course they are prepared to defend it! Anyway, at the very least, something that big and unmaneuverable would have to be protected from meteorites. Rail guns could do that quite nicely, but there's not a one of them on the plans."
The War With Earth Page 30