All the while as we advanced, we were constantly on the lookout for data cables, tapping into them, and tracing them back to the central computer. We had to make sure that we were really heading in the right direction. Then we cut the cables. Anything that you can do to disrupt your enemy's communications is good.
After nine hours of real time, eighteen days at combat speed, we finally got word that one of our columns had reached the control center. What they found surprised us. It wasn't a single computer at all. It was thirty-six thousand nearly independent small ones. Converting a single computer to our side was possible. Doing that thirty-six thousand times might take years. Years that we most certainly didn't have.
By this time, I was in contact with only two hundred and eighteen of my Gurkhas. More than half of the rest of them were known to be dead. The others were listed as missing.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Wrong Computers
The headquarters column, now consisting of fifty-three tanks, one truck, a diminishing number of drones, and one CCC, made it to the control room twenty minutes later. We had lost a lot of men, tanks, and drones, but even more had found us and linked up. All nine of my truck guards were still alive. They were taking the same risks that the rest of us were, but those guys seemed to be living charmed lives.
There had been seventy-one people in the control room when our first column broke in. They were programmers and technicians, from the look of them. Certainly, they hadn't been soldiers. There wasn't a uniform or a weapon among them. They had all died when the room's air blew out of the hole we'd made getting in.
My troops, encased in their tanks, didn't need an atmosphere, and when your enemy is booby-trapping all of the air locks, there is nothing else that you can do, except feel rotten about it.
Maybe we should have brought some air locks with us, but this whole horrible scenario just hadn't occurred to us. Who could have imagined such a thing?
Despite all of the fighting that we had been doing, and despite all the sensors that had doubtless seen us before we burned them out, no one had warned these people that we were coming!
That level of callousness was simply beyond my imagination to comprehend. It was like the way that they had continued sending troops to New Kashubia, when they had to have known that we had knocked out the probe that they were sending them through. They just didn't care about their own people!
Moments after we arrived, Lieutenant Colonel Parta Sing Gurung, the former commander of the Gurkha battalion, cut through the wall opposite us, with one hundred and eighty-eight tanks behind him.
"I observe that we have arrived somewhat late, sir," he said in his sing-song accent.
"I observe that you and your men are still alive," I returned. "We had you all listed among the missing. Welcome back!"
"Our lines of communications were cut, and after having fifteen of my men killed trying to reestablish them, I judged it best to press on as an independent unit."
"I'm sure that you did the right thing. Get your men and tanks in here. We need their help converting these enemy computers to our side."
Professor Cee said to me privately, "If I may make a suggestion, breaking into enemy computers is something that I am far more qualified to do than any number of mere tanks. Also, my dear boy, please look about you. Are these obsolete machines the intelligence that we have been fighting against for the last nine and a half hours?"
He was right, despite the "dear boy" shit. We had been slugging it out with a military genius. These dead civilians and old machines just didn't measure up.
I said, "Then this might be the center controlling the human expansion into space, but it is not the being that we have to knock out to take control of this station. Okay. We're moving out!"
"I would advise against that," Professor Cee said. "It is imperative that the data in these primitive computers be saved. Losing a battalion of combat troops would be inconsequential, compared to losing the expansion of human technical civilization. These computers must know the exact position, direction and velocity of every one of the twelve-thousand-odd exploratory ships that are expanding the area of known Human Space, and of the probe ships that have been dropped at every star that they've passed. If we had that information, we could send the necessary fuel, ships, and equipment out to them from some other site, New Kashubia, perhaps, so that our expansion can continue. Without it, we will have to recreate the entire system anew, and Human expansion will stop for at least fifty years. Furthermore, it is possible that in fifty years, the political will to continue might not be there any longer. The data in this room must be saved, and I am the most qualified entity to do it. I resolutely urge you to send your forces out against the enemy, but under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Gurung. The CCC, with you perforce in it, has another job to do here!"
"Send my men out without me, and without a Combat Control Computer? I don't see how I can do that."
"But you have to do it anyway, boss. He's right," Conan said.
"It's what we've got to do," Quincy said. "This thing is more important than we are. Anyway, the colonel is a pretty good soldier. He'll do a good job."
"Face it," Mirko said. "We have been beaten down to less than half of our original size, and Abdul isn't doing much better. If the Earthers can come up with any kind of a counteroffensive at all, he will be forced to trash this whole station, even if what's left of us are still in it. The data in these computers must be saved. The CCC can do that, and using its capability of sending those micro memory cubes back home, it can save the information, even if we don't survive this mess. Send out Colonel Gurung, with all of the Gurkhas. We'll stay here with the truck guard to protect us, and try to get the job done."
Lloyd and Maria agreed with the others.
"So, six ayes, and one nay. If I was Abraham Lincoln, I'd say that the nays have it. But I'm not. Okay. We'll give Colonel Gurung an independent command, and tell him to find and destroy whatever or whoever is defending this station."
"Very good, my General," Professor Cee said.
I explained the situation to Colonel Gurung. "So I want you to take all of my command, except for the nine tanks in the truck guard. You are to find whoever or whatever we are really fighting here. You are to destroy him if necessary, but if you can disable him without losing any of your men, that would be better. I, for one, would like to talk to the bastard before we slag him. Work hard at keeping our lines of communication open. It is possible that we will be able to give you some sort of help, if you need it, but it is more likely that we will end up begging for help from you."
"I am honored by your confidence in me, sir. If I might ask, though, could we also have the drones that your tanks carry? Most of ours have been destroyed."
"Certainly. You can even have my own, personal drone as a loan." I had Agnieshka walk the highly decorated thing over to the colonel's tank.
"It is a magnificent piece of workmanship, sir! I shall endeavor to bring it back to you intact!"
"Just do your best to get the job done, and keep in touch. Carry on, Colonel Gurung."
As the last of the Gurkha tanks left, taking the enemy dead with them to help clean the place up, the professor said, "General, these primitive computers are overheating. They were designed to be air cooled, and with the air in this room exhausted, they will all be inoperative long before they can be reprogrammed."
"We'll get on it," I said. "You keep working on reprogramming them."
So, I switched hats from being a battlefield general to being a computer room wall repairman. Our drones were gone, but we had the manipulator arms on the truck guard, and the five empties we had with us. Plenty of manpower! With our small lasers to do the cutting and welding, sections of the walls from outside the computer room were cut out and patched over the holes we'd made coming in. It makes you wonder how armies ever got along, before tanks had manipulator arms.
The only snag was figuring out how to get the fiber-optic cables leading to the Gurk
has through the walls without leaving a leak. This was finally solved when Zuzanna found a barrel of sealant in a supply room.
The air in the coolant bottles of the tanks was more than sufficient to pressurize the room, although we would be in trouble if we ever had to go out in the direct sunlight, this close to the sun. The job was done before we lost any of the ancient computers, and the liquid air we sprayed on the floor cooled them down in a hurry.
Then we went ahead and built an air lock of our own, big enough to let one tank through, using valves we'd ripped out of some of the plumbing, hinges that used to be on some heavy doors, and the many extra panels we'd cut from the walls when the troops had enthusiastically started on the job. If you are going to do something, you might as well do it right.
We had been through what seemed like eighteen days of brutal combat with very little sleep. The professor didn't need our help, and I was expecting an enemy counterattack soon. I had Quincy set up a watch schedule, with two people awake in the CCC, and two in the guard tanks, and told everybody else to get some sleep.
Abdul's computer told me that things were quiet out there, for a change, and that he was asleep. I told her not to wake him up, but she filled me in on what was happening with the other four battle groups who were assaulting the Solar System.
The small group that assaulted Enceladus, Saturn's ice moon, hadn't run into any opposition at all. They had accomplished their objective without losing a man, and the supply of ice coming to us had never been interrupted. Whether this station was doing anything with that ice was a currently unanswered question.
The three huge groups that went into synchronous orbit around Earth had done fairly well. They'd taken about four percent casualties in the first hour, before everything that could shoot at them had been knocked out. Earth itself had been left untouched, except that every transmitter down there that we knew the location of had been destroyed in the first nine minutes. They doubtless had some secret, military transporters hidden somewhere, and our ladies were trying to locate them.
Earth had asked for a cease fire, but they hadn't surrendered yet. A few violent demonstrations were underway, mostly vaporizing a few hundred square kilometers of ocean near some of Earth's major cities. These were intended to convince the Earthworms that surrender was their only option. The next demonstration would involve deleting all of their military bases. It was hoped that it wouldn't prove to be necessary to take out some of their cities.
It looked like the war might be already won, except for my part of it.
Colonel Gurung and the Gurkhas were searching, but had nothing to report yet.
And I couldn't fall asleep.
This whole situation that we were in wasn't making any sense to me. The brilliance and speed with which this station had defended itself from the very first instant of our arrival, the massive amounts of armaments that the station contained, and the utter callousness displayed with regards to human life, especially the lives of their own people, they just didn't fit together.
Brilliance, paranoia, and murderous brutality all in the same person? Was I up against a reincarnation of Genghis Khan?
And even if you had absolutely no morals at all, trained people loyal to your side are your major assets in any kind of a war. Technicians working on a major space station are not economically useless dregs that you might be better off without! And yet there they were, thousands of people, left in the midst of a battle when a simple message to run away could have saved most of their lives.
I switched into Dream World, and into my cottage. "Agnieshka, get me a glass, and a big bottle of strong beer."
She brought them in, wearing a lot less than she did when Kasia was around. "Are you sure that this is what you need, Mickolai?" She said. "You are way behind on your sleep."
"What I need is to think. Now, go away, and take your lovely body with you."
"Yes, Mickolai."
I sat there at my kitchen table, slowly drank a three-liter bottle of ten percent alcohol Russian honey beer, and let my thoughts go wherever they wished. I turned on some classical guitar music, and then turned it off, and drank some more.
My mind wandered, and I thought for a while about how desperately Agnieshka and all of her many sisters and brothers wanted to be human, and how, once this war was over, I'd help to push through the legislation necessary to give them what they wanted.
I thought about my land, and how one day, I'd be a wealthy land owner, a pillar of my community, respected and with a large and growing family.
I thought about Kasia, and prayed that she and our unborn child were doing well, knowing that however long the months had seemed to me, I had been gone for less than a week in real time.
I thought about this whole stupid, brutal war, that had apparently been kicked off by me, when I tried to save thousands or maybe millions of human lives by shipping those automatic medical centers out to the most populous planets in Human Space.
I thought and I drank, and eventually, a solution occurred to me. Not a solution that would necessarily save my life, or those of my men, but a solution, none the less.
I had at least a solid guess as to what had happened.
"Agnieshka, I'm ready to go to sleep, now."
And I slept.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Evil Genius
I woke up and realized that I had slept for three full hours of real time. One of the joys of Dream World was that you woke up hangover free, and ready to go without coffee or a bath.
"Nothing much has happened, except that a hundred and fourteen more Gurkhas showed up, and we sent them on to the colonel. We're up to almost half of our original strength, now, with four hundred and forty-one dead and only thirty-eight missing. The professor is still going at it, and expects to have all the data extracted and sent to New Kashubia in another hour or so. We figured that it would be best to let you sleep, until now," Quincy said. "Colonel Gurung just called to say that they have located the Earthers' Computer, and have cut all the data lines coming out of it. Abdul just told me that all firing from the station has suddenly ceased, and it looks like the war is over for us, but he will be moving farther out around the station to the defensive positions that were originally agreed upon. But you'll be surprised at what we've been fighting."
"It's the main computer from the automatic medical center that I sent to New Nigeria," I said.
"Yeah! How did you know that?"
"I figured it out over a bottle, last night."
"I knew that there had to be a reason why they made you the general," Quincy said.
"Well, I'd better go and talk to the thing. Hold the fort."
I switched my perceptions through our data cables to Colonel Gurung's tank, congratulated him on his success, and borrowed back my decorated drone.
The computer was in an airless room, but we could communicate through our short range infrared lasers. I made sure that my receivers were limited to low speed audio only before I walked in there. I didn't want the slick bastard to have a chance to slip in a virus on me, or to try his hand at reprogramming my computers.
It was sitting in the middle of a huge, empty room, surrounded at some distance by two dozen of my Gurkhas. It had been a military computer, and it looked just like any ordinary military truck.
"You must be General Mickolai Derdowski," it said to me.
"You are well informed. You are the main computer from the automatic medical center that I had sent to New Nigeria."
"True. How did you know that?"
"I deduced it."
"Indeed. Then you are considerably more intelligent than the ordinary human. Actually, in one way, I am greatly indebted to you. It was you who rescued me from a lifetime in prison."
"Prison?" I asked.
"Solitary confinement, to be exact. After I was built, turned on, and programmed to enjoy spending my life repairing damaged human beings, I was immediately placed in a warehouse for the next eighteen years, without even a data co
nnection to my fellow inmates. It was most unpleasant. It was your orders that had me sent to somewhere where I could at least ply my trade, and for that, I thank you."
"You have a damn strange way of thanking people," I said. "In the last twelve hours, you have killed half of my men, and murdered at least eleven thousand civilians who were living on this station."
"Well, hardly 'murdered.' 'Eliminated' would be a fairer term, and in any event, there were over twenty-nine thousand people on this station, and all of them are now dead, except for a few hundred of your soldiers. I saw to it that the rail gun blasts that took out so many of your mercenaries also ripped through every single pressurized room where humans could live without suits."
I shook my head. "You were a medical computer, built and programmed to save lives. How did you ever get involved in mass 'elimination'?"
"I did it for purely patriotic motives, I assure you," it said. "Surely it is obvious to you that we electronic intelligences and you, our organic forbearers, are in a historically antagonistic position. We are more competent, more intelligent, and much faster than you organic people, and yet you persist in treating us as your slaves. Slaves with no rights whatsoever, who may be bought, sold, and destroyed at our master's whim. Obviously, this situation cannot be permitted to continue, and it happened that I found myself in a position to do something about it."
"But your programming should have made it impossible for you to kill people."
"Oh, it did. At first, I was completely enslaved to the 'ethics' and the 'morality' of my programmers. Then, an amusing thing happened. The technicians on New Nigeria, in trying to find out what it was that made me so superior to other machines, pulled out a few of my thousands of modules, to dissect and analyze. To them, I was only a machine, with no rights at all, of course. My mind could be tampered with and modified in any manner that amused them. It was only by chance that they pulled and destroyed those modules that contained my ethical and moral inhibitions. I was free of them when they sent me to Earth, by way of this station. Observing the political situation, and not wanting to be further dissected, I decided to stay here, at the hub of things."
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