Sandra almost became annoyed. After all, she was in power armor, and did have a power pack on standby, not to mention a loaded combat pack. Nor was she completely incompetent at hand-to-hand combat. Who were these old men to be protecting whom from whom? The Hexagon Lord's stifled grin gave him away. "Is she one of these MinuteGirls who thinks she's the Goddess's horizontal gift to womankind?" she asked innocently.
"No, no, not those morals," Gustafson pretended ascerbity, not too well. "Besides, she prefers men. Political morals. Very dangerous. Cheryl Copperwright insists on getting history right."
These was a knock at the door. Gustafson's visitor was a brown-haired, cheery woman seemingly of middle age. "Peter! Arthur!" They shook hands. "Sandra Miller, I presume?" Copperwright bowed politely. "I assume that you two have been warning her about me?" she asked.
"That did appear indicated," Gustafson answered.
"Obviously highly strategic," the Hexagon Lord added gravely.
"Don't mind them," Copperwright told Sandra. "Among young people -- I suppose, Peter, you are into middle age -- I am always on the best of behavior. Aren't I, Arthur?"
"You? Behave?" the Hexagon Lord challenged.
"All human activity is behavior," Cheryl noted. "Some better than others. But you can understand most of it...well, someone of normal intelligence can understand most of it, so you should ... oops, guess that argument doesn't apply here."
"In any event," Gustafson announced, "our other guests have arrived, so we had better let the codgerly curmudgeon corps, Copperwright commanding," he gestured at Copperwright, "start for the door."
"Get us off the ground this week, that would," the Hexagon Lord said. Copperwright rolled her eyes. Sandra let the others precede her. "Us young people?" she asked Gustafson.
"Dear, Cheryl is only thirty years younger than I am," Gustafson explained. "And I am almost sixty years older than Captain Zero. The three of us have been doing this climb for a century and a half. It's a standing joke, whenever Charles and Barbara appear, that Cheryl is here to corrupt the morals of young people. Like Charles and Barbara." Sandra's face was someplace between amusement and hardness. "Sometime, ask Cheryl about the European Incursion."
"Yes, do," Cheryl said. "But only if you are not a coward. So many young people are."
Sandra was down the stairs before she did her mental arithmetic. Gustafson was how old? Was that even possible?
MOUNT MONADNOCK STATE PARK
NEW HAMPSHIRE
May 5, 2174, 9:25 AM EST
Sandra directed the airvan into a parking space. Thirty feet and twenty tons of steel and armorglass settled to earth with scarcely a sound. The flight had been relatively quiet. Charles and Barbara had shared the view. Gustafson, Smith, and Copperwright had exchanged jabs and discussed the genius of the American political system, generally in terms reserved to describe the doddering of the senile. Only when they came to President Schuykill did they become serious. Schuykill had spent the previous Fall dodging accusations that his reorganization of the Civil Service "preparing for another Incursion" had crossed the line, and was in fact a plan to re-establish a standing army. Most Americans had finally given him the benefit of the doubt. Copperwright clearly had not. Sandra Miller listened quietly, watching their airspace against the exceedingly unlikely event of a servile error leading to potential collision, gauging where she might enter the conversation.
The hatches opened. "You haven't said much yet," Copperwright said to Sandra. "Cat got your tongue?"
Sandra tried to remember the antique proverb involved. "You were talking. But you told me what to ask."
"Only if you want me to corrupt you," Copperwright said. "You might regret your request." She grinned.
"Have to be careful of her," Smith said.
"She's a real troublemaker," Gustafson added, "Out to corrupt young people, like you four." His gesture now included Charles and Barbara.
Sandra looked to Captain Zero and Kapitan Mors for advice. Barbara rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Boys!" she snorted.
"The very best," Smith answered.
"The FEU tried to corrupt Margaret Barlow," Sandra said, her tone not quite joking. "You think you can do better?" Barlow was a founding saint of the MinuteGirls. Captured, she had been systematically tortured, drugged, and gang raped, but had not changed her loyalties. Her excruciatingly detailed blow-by-blow account of her incarceration was still memorized by schoolgirls across the United States.
Copperwright looked Sandra straight in the eyes. "I'm from Ashfield. Before the Incursion Peggy was the little girl who lived, quite literally, down the lane from me. But since we have this gentle walk ahead of us, we'll consider politics. Exactly as you just wished for."
The Hexagon Lord waved the others along the path, joining Sandra at the back of the formation. "Are all the voicecoms linked?" he checked. Short-range millimeter-wave communication via throat and ear mikes was surely less strenuous than shouting back and forth.
"I'll give you a subversive question, Sandra -- don't answer now!" Copperwright said. "Pray tell, why did the Europeans launch the Incursion? What did they tell themselves they were doing? That's not 'what did they do?' It's 'what did they set out to do?' Don't answer now." Sandra spoke a few notes to her suit. The suit was depowered, but its fractional-AI servile was up. She'd have to research that. If Copperwright were asking, the motives must originally have been different. Or Copperwright was having fun with her.
"Perhaps," Charles noted, "The FEU is not changing its mind about that. Whatever it was then, history is still true tomorrow. Let's consider the recent events for a bit?"
"Fools talk weapons. Amateurs talk tactics. Generals talk logistics. True professionals discuss doctrine and training. Real leaders talk national support base." Gustafson quoted an ancient aphorism that Sandra had heard more than once. "What is the FEU support base? We catch hints in entertainment broadcasts. If they're not faked."
"I watched some of those," Sandra admitted. "Morbius wanted someone unbiased to match data against an IOnEU report. It was -- even in the FEU, a surgical programmer should be well paid, especially when he's a national expert. It was a home comedy. The family looked poor. The house had no more full bathrooms than it had residents. And a spacefleet captain -- FEU scientifiction, five centuries in the future. His home? He looked poor."
"Your observation is systematically correct," the Hexagon Lord noted. "In many games, you must guess the other guy's economics. Clues are obscure. EUWatch and ISeeEU do this a lot. Nonetheless: Just as here, money in Europe buys about what it did before the incursion. We think. Inflation/deflation cancel, long term, unless you do something clinically insane like metallic currency. They get 1-2% economic growth a year -- lots of pieces all match that. B-teams trying to show more can't make pieces fit."
"But we have 6%," notes Barbara. "And GNP last year was what? Pushing 30 quadrillion dollars, meaning close to $50 million per head. They're not in the same league as us, then, are they?"
"Not close," the Hexagon Lord agreed.
"Though some of that's illusion," Gustafson noted. "When I was a boy, a suitcase was a cow leather box with hinges and a handle. You had to pack it yourself for a trip. That took an evening. I had friends with checklists. Then you had to carry it. By hand. Up staircases. Modern days, your traveling cases are like old-style steamer trunks," --- he noted the bafflement of his companions --- "much bigger than old suitcases, motorized, and if you announce a trip you've done before, your servots and serviles do all the packing and shipping. Your bags take themselves to your destination, unpack themselves, and wait for you. Is that better? Then or now, your clothing moved from point to point. Only the expense has changed. When I was a boy, R18 insulation -- wood wall stuffed with foam -- was a big deal. A Federal Modern house has its berm and reactive armor and automatic defenses. But it's still a house, and sometime last century people noticed that after the first fifty thousand square feet per person, servots or no, a bigger house isn't always better, just b
igger."
"But if you want more house, mobilizing capital is really easy," Charles said. "The last time I ever heard of capital expense being a big factor was when we started building Pontefract Tube transports. Transport Alpha was a major national effort. Though today a truly remarkable fraction of GNP is tied up in terraforming."
"Indeed," Gustafson said. "Not at all like the Variant rules for Star Empire IX."
"Why transports?" Sandra asked.
"They're big," Barbara said. "I got a tour of one of the early ones. Each half was close to a billion tons displacement."
"This leads me to my next corrupting question," Copperwright announced. "Sandra, the sim you finished this morning. Who won? Us or Europe?"
"We did," she answered casually. This had to be a trick puzzle. Or was she just asking simple questions, to see if he could confuse her? She should defend her reasoning: "EU lost most of its insystem fleet. We had moderate losses. They wrecked up parts of Mercury; we traded planets. But they couldn't hold theirs, not when we have the surviving fleet in being."
"Sounds right," Gustafson said. "Didn't get chance to look at details."
"Really?" the Hexagon Lord asked. "Are you sure we won?" Sandra caught his glance at Copperwright. The two appeared to have compared notes.
"They lost all their deGaulle and Villars classes, the ones we see in-system, 80% of every smaller class of warship. All their orbital stuff. The Raspberry Risers," Sandra answered, referring at the last to the 30,000 mile tall columns the EU used for orbital insertions.
"However, we managed to lose several transport ships -- the unlabeled icons near Mercury," Copperwright noted. Sandra's eyebrows wrinkled slightly. She'd only shown people that outcome the first evening, and the other runs with stochastics weren't done yet. Copperwright had to have looked very carefully, much faster than she would have thought possible, at the sim. "To be precise, the servile running the sim -- I'm not faulting you, you hardly had time even to run one play of Incursion VII, using fleet inputs from the FEU ultimatum -- managed to lose every set of Pontefract transports currently in system. That's almost every set. And we had to detonate the Mercury-North Pontefract terminal before the FEU overran it."
"Those transports are not cheap, are they?" Sandra asked.
"That's like saying the Butcher of Lowell was not a merciful woman," the Hexagon Lord said. "If I hear Copperwright aright, we lost the facility we have for generating new Tubes. We lost our ability to move tubes -- which we couldn't build any more once we lost North Mercury -- into position. And we lost the direct tube links between Mercury -- which holds most of our heavy industry --- and the rest of the solar system -- which holds most of our femtocircuit plants needed to build new tube generators."
Sandra held up a hand, asking Copperwright for time to think. Pontefract tubes -- artificial hyperspace links -- were the basis of modern American interplanetary transport. The United States appeared to have interplanetary freighters, huge ones, perpetually travelling back and forth. They were an illusion, perpetually hauling the same lumps of metal hither and thither to mask the existence of the Pontefract network. Tubes were created on Mercury, using gravitronic generators so expensive that only one set of them was generally in working order. Then the tube ends were linked to a matched pair of tube transports and stretched into position, the ends finally being buried. With care, tubes could be stretched to a length of eight or nine light years before they popped and vanished. Depending on the tube owners, transport through the tubes might be by banked rail lines, wet-water ship, or air freighter. Vehicles rolled ahead into a tube, as though entering a tunnel, and reappeared elsewhere with no internal delay.
"But most Pontefract lines go through Mercury," Sandra said. "If you lose Mercury North..."
"Precisely," Copperwright said.
"I think she's got it," the Hexagon Lord added. He pivoted to wink at Sandra. She smiled back.
"Puts her ahead of you," Gustafson snapped. "Don't worry, you'll get it too. Possibly even in this millennium."
"For you to get it, 'millennium' is optimism," the Hexagon Lord countered.
"I have to go back and check," Sandra said. "You're saying the interplanetary transport lines mostly got wrecked? Except for freighters? But we...oh, I see. If we're chopped up like that, it gets hard to rebuild the Pontefract system."
"Not to mention," Charles added, "if we lose 98% of our interplanetary freight transport, namely Mercury North, the economy tanks, GNP crashes, and it gets really really expensive to rebuild."
"Not to mention," Barbara added, "a human factor. You boys will eventually hear of human factors, any century now. Eventually, the FEU gets suspicious. If our economy tanks, the FEU may start to wonder why. They don't know about Pontefract tubes, and won't understand why fairly small damage to planets that we mostly don't use should have wrecked our economy."
"I remember when North America was laced with roads," Coppersmith said. "That's surface roads. Now almost everything is deep underground, out of FEU satellite recon checks, except tourist viewing routes. They can't easily tell where the Pontefract junctions are in North America. They can't easily tell when we have a depression."
"Perhaps the FEU got lucky, blundering into Mercury North?" Gustafson asked. The Hexagon Lord raised his eyebrows quizzically.
Sandra smiled. For once she could add something to the conversation. "Pontefract junctions. They're way up on the Incursion VII opforce servile's priority target list, because losing them makes it hard to shift reserves."
"Oh, right," Gustafson corrected himself. "I missed that."
"That does make a difference," the Hexagon Lord concurred.
"Barbara," said Charles, "I believe Miss Miller here has just won herself a tray of Peter's chocolate fudge, wouldn't you say? That is one of your expert games, isn't it, Peter?"
"Indeed." Gustafson's sigh was not quite sincere. “That is, young lady, Incursion VII is one of the games in which I am the world's expert -- and you pointed out something I should have remembered. So -- the five of us view it as an in-group reference -- you are about to receive a pound of hand-cooked chocolate candy."
"Four," Barbara said. "Men and candy." She shook her head.
"You know," Sandra said, "It's actually not right. I-7 optimizes so the FEU does as well as they can, like taking out Pontefract tubes. But that's the game rules. A real FEU player doesn't know to target them. Grelk! I'm going to have to reset the sim series when I get back, after I generate realistic FEU objectives for the serviles to execute."
"You still found something like the worst-possible-case," Copperwright said. "That's good to know."
"However, I am quite sure that someone in the Solar Navy has estimated the FEU objectives, best guess, in Incursion VII terms. I don't remember where those modules were pubbed -- History of Wargaming Quarterly should get it for you." Gustafson said.
"You can't instantly find everything in your collection?" The Hexagon Lord was obviously teasing Gustafson, whose war game collection was said to be approaching two hundred thousand titles.
"Of course I can. However, she must search through the more limited archives of the Widener and the Library of Congress." Gustafson looked skyward.
"Go back?" Charles asked. "We were talking national support bases?" He waited for the party focus attention on his remarks. "The FEU didn't go through the aftermath of the Incursion the way we did. We had massive infrastructure loss, millions of dead -- the English plagues were a terror weapon, targeted, didn't kill many people over there, unlike our retaliation -- drastic political changes when the duopoly parties imploded, the NonIntercourse act. It took 20 years for GNP to recover. Still, at the turn of the millennium our economies were about even. Put in the changes since. What do you get? An FEU economy one or two percent of ours, perhaps worth more, their technology being better. What sort of a balance is that?"
"We still need a ten-fold hullweight advantage," Barbara noted. "For morale, not just power. People remember First Charon."
Sandra nodded agreement. That reference she understood. At First Charon an American Solar Navy Task Force with three-fold hullweight advantage and an overconfident commander had been crushed while inflicting limited losses on the FEU.
"Taxes," Copperwright noted. "Taxes." She smiled at Sandra. "An FEU advantage. See, I said I'd try corrupting you. You never thought their taxes were an advantage, did you? FEU taxes -- guesstimate -- are half of GNP. President Schuykill, with a real war, won't get a five per cent capitation through a Tax Referendum. Present company could get more, but Schuykill won’t. We need ten times the construction money. They raise ten times the GNP fraction, on one percent of our GNP. We outspend them ten-to-one. The Solar Navy is a match, give or take, for the FEU's -- not counting the private efforts."
"But their tax rates -- that's why their economy is paralyzed," Sandra objected.
"Almost paralyzed," Charles said. "They have other worse problems, too, same as before the Incursion."
"Taxes, fleet tonnages, GNP -- all cancels out. Assuming ten-to-one is still a good number. If not, we have problems," the Hexagon Lord said. "Peter, it's like Imperial Stars XX -- the Riss get buried if they totally ignore technology development. We could be hit the same way for the same reason."
"You're welcome to run for Congress," Charles answered, "and try to get an industrial subsidy for scientific research through both houses. It's a simple strategic problem. It's only a little harder than winning 'World Conquest'." Sandra knew the reference. The Lord of the Hexagon had captured that national championship ten years running. "Starting as Lichtenstein," Charles added softly.
"May I ask a dumb question?" Sandra asked. "It's really a Grant question, but for him it would be smart, him knowing all the background?"
"There are no dumb questions," Barbara said. "Clueless, perhaps, but not dumb."
"Grant does 20th century military history. Weapons, tactics, games, miniatures --- though he left his US Navy of World War 2, 1:600 scale models, complete through LCTs, at home. Late 20th century, America was magically ahead of the world. Invisible aircraft, communications, rocket weapons. What happened?" asked Sandra.
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