The War With Earth (10 page)

"True, but you need enlistees anyway, don't you?"

"Well, there is a certain attrition rate. Death, retirement, normal discharges, and so forth," I said, knowing that in fact most of our tanks were empty for lack of a soldier to put in them. "Just how many people do you have in your prisons, anyway?"

"At present, there are over eighty thousand men with long-term sentences. I am prepared to offer you four thousand marks per man per year for your custodial care. If you can really turn them into responsible, well-educated and law-abiding citizens, well, so much the better."

"That is an intriguing offer, sir, but I'm not sure if I could get it through the New Kashubian Congress."

"Then why take the political route at all? Why can't we simply pay the money to you, and trust that you will make some equitable distribution of it?"

"Why not indeed?" I said with deadpan seriousness, and hoping that my rapidly beating heart wasn't giving me away. Eighty thousand men times four thousand marks per man per year was . . . a Godawesome amount of money! "I'm sure that I can find some suitable charities, if nothing else. I assume that payments could be made quarterly, and in advance? Good. Very well, we will accept your offer. Agnieshka, see to it that facilities are made ready for processing a large number of enlistees, and make arrangements with His Honor's subordinates for their delivery to us."

"Yes, boss."

"Also, Your Honor, I should mention that some of our best warriors are female. We would also accept women who wished to enlist."

"That is an interesting thought, General Derdowski, but perhaps we should wait to see how the male inmates work out first. Most of our serious criminals are men anyway, of course."

"The choice is, of course, yours."

After the judge left, and the door closed behind him, I asked Agnieshka if the judge really was who he said he was, and she said yes. Then I asked her if a New Croatian Supreme Court judge really had complete control over their prison system, and she again said yes.

I let out an ancient Kashubian battle cry, trusting to the hotel's soundproofing to keep my secret. We were not only getting the troops we had so badly needed for years, but they were actually
paying
me an incredible fortune to take them!

Kasia came in to see what the commotion was all about.

"We are rich, girl! We are fabulously wealthy!"

"Yes, dear, I was going to tell you about that. Also, I've set up that real estate holding company we talked about earlier, and the projections on it are absolutely fantastic."

"No, no. I mean absolutely filthy dirty rich! I have hundreds of millions of marks coming in every year from now on!"

"One of your projects? You must tell me about it sometime. A few hundred million more every year won't hurt us a bit. But just now, I've got some loose ends that must be tied up right away. We'll talk later."

Maybe there is such a thing as marrying a girl who is
too
smart.

When Kasia left, Agnieshka said, "Mickolai, have you gone crazy? You are accepting bribes and taking onto yourself things that should be resolved in Congress!"

That brought things back into perspective.

"Agnieshka, how many empty tanks are there on this planet?"

"Sixty-seven thousand eight hundred and twenty-five, boss."

"Would those tanks like to have observers?"

"Yes, of course."

"Will it cost anyone anything to put New Croatian citizens, felons though they might be, into our tanks?"

"Well, no, boss. Everything needed is already there, sitting idle."

"Then what is your bitch?"

"That you are accepting bribes?"

"What bribe? I am being paid for a service that I am performing while I'm on leave. I'm saving my planet's customer, the New Croatian government, four marks for every one that they give me. This leaves them with that much more money that they can pay to New Kashubia. I'm going to be giving many thousands of criminals a chance at a new, productive life, if they'll take it. I'm greatly strengthening the Kashubian Expeditionary Force, since a tank with a trained observer has nine times the combat effectiveness of an empty tank. And I've decided to buy a whole lot more land. What's more, I might even contribute something to charity, someday. Enough said?"

"Yes, boss."

"Good. Now, go and see what an additional three hundred and twenty million Croatian marks a year will buy me in land."

About an hour later, I said, "Agnieshka, how many empty tanks are there in the entire Kashubian forces, on all the planets that we have contracts with?"

"I'm not sure, boss. Certainly over a million. Do you want me to get an exact number?"

"Yes. Next, there are twenty-seven governments on this planet. I want you to find out who has the authority in each government to make a deal such as the one we just made with the judge here in New Croatia. After that, I want you to figure out a way to informally leak out the information to the right people that the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces are going into the prisoner custodial business, at prices of about one fifth of what they are paying now. Lastly, I want you to check on the availability of interstellar transport. We are going to be shipping a lot of tanks around the stars."

"Yes, boss. You are either going to be a hero, or you are going to be in jail."

"How can they put me in jail if I'm scheduled to go back into a tank in a few months anyway? That's what they do to criminals nowadays. The important thing is that if Kasia thinks that three hundred and twenty million a year is small potatoes, let's see what she thinks about four billion!"

Although I really wanted to spend my time working on my plans for the ranch, I got roped into the wedding preparations, anyway. Every relative of mine that I had ever met, and quite a few that I hadn't, were showing up, and somebody had to greet them. Suddenly, I was the long lost hero returned, and fifth and sixth cousins were crowding around, reminding me that we had met once when I was eight years old at somebody's wedding or christening or funeral.

Worse, some of them hadn't bothered to make hotel reservations, and the town's hotels seemed to be packed. They had come assuming that we'd just put them up, somehow. Kasia's parents were soon staying in one spare room, and mine were in the other. Even my annoying kid brother was here, sleeping on the couch in my office, when he wasn't watching pornography on the wall screen.

Kasia had made me promise to be polite to my relatives, so I tried hard to do it. Now that I was famous, they all crowded around, but in New Kashubia, when I was tried for what was a really a very trivial offense, and sentenced to either death or joining the army, none of them had come to my aid. None of them came to my comfort, or even to talk to me while I was in jail. And now I was somehow morally obligated to be polite to them?

Worst of all was my uncle, Wlodzimierz Derdowski.

Most of my near relatives were in no position to actually do anything to help me when I was in trouble, but my uncle was a very prominent politician, even back then. He knew me well, and was living in the bunk below mine in the barracks, starving in the golden tunnels of New Kashubia. He could have pulled some strings, somehow. He could have helped me, but he didn't. He didn't lift a damned finger to save his own nephew. He just let them haul me and my lovely Kasia away, and didn't even visit us during the trial.

Kasia, always the practical one, had insisted on inviting him to our wedding, since she said that it was likely that he would soon be elected as our next president. I made a point of avoiding the bastard.

Every politician in New Croatia and New Kashubia seemed to be in town, hoping for news interviews, as were a few hundred political wannabes, who were here for the very same reason.

As to my own friends, well, there actually weren't that many of them. I was the only Kashubian at my college in England, and none of my friends there were exiled to the planets, that I know of. I had a few dozen acquaintances from my years in New Kashubia, but things had been so grim back then that nobody was all that friendly with anybody else. And in the army, I had actually been in contact with only nine human beings.

There were Quincy and Zuzanna, of course, and the lovely girl that I was finally going to get to marry, once this nonsense was over.

There was a guy named Radek Heyke, whom I found to be personally disgusting, and had refused to invite to my wedding.

And there were the six "colonels" who studied with me for eight subjective years at "Oxbridge," the computerized military school. They were all very good friends, but the problem was that except for Kasia, my colonels were Croatians, not Kashubians. We could communicate just fine in Dream World, where the computers saw to it that language barriers didn't exist, but out in reality, we couldn't speak to each other without a translator.

What's more, they didn't look the same.

In Dream World, Maria Buich was a stunningly beautiful, long-legged blonde who looked to be about twenty-three. In reality, she was a healthy fifty-year-old woman with a rather plain face, but Conan still loved her.

In Dream World, we had called Semo Birach "Conan" because of his deliberate resemblance to the old-time movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now, he was a physically fit man in his mid-seventies, an old fisherman who still had the look of the sea about him.

Neto Kondo was now permanently insane. Someone told me that he was being well looked after, somewhere.

A Croatian with the improbable name of Lloyd Tomlinson had taken Neto's place, but since he was studying three years behind the rest of us, he somehow never became socially one of the group. I mean, we all tried, and he was always invited to everything, but the difference was still there. Unlike his handsome, male model appearance in Dream World, he had a very large nose and closely spaced eyes in the real one. Like the rest of us, his tank had kept him very physically fit.

Of them, only Mirko Jubec had not elected to change his appearance in Dream World. Personal vanity simply wasn't part of his makeup. He still looked like the big stolid farmer that he always had been.

Kasia had been beautiful to begin with, of course, and it had simply never occurred to me to change my appearance, not when I already had Kasia.

Only now did I realize that I did not know what my good friend Neto really looked like.

One pleasant surprise was that they were all in colonels' uniforms. Whoever was in charge had decided that if Kasia and I were officers, the rest of the team had to be officers, too. With Agnieshka translating, I soon found that they had been given the same deal that we had, and that they were all enjoying the notoriety, except for Mirko, of course.

I talked to them about the cheap land available, and they soon were very interested in exploring the possibilities, all of them except, strangely, the farmer Mirko Jubec. He said that he had already bought thirty hectares near his home town, and two fine horses to help him work it, and that was all he wanted. He had no interest in wealth or in modern farming at all. He said that his only interest was in having food that tasted right.

It takes all kinds of people to make a world. My grandfather told me that.

Finally, after a drunken brawl that they called a bachelor party, which is best left undocumented, a bridal shower that Kasia refused to talk about, and two long, boring rehearsals, the day arrived when I was to—at last!—get to marry my bride.

The church that I had picked for the wedding was judged to be too small, and the ceremony was held in the biggest cathedral in Nova Split. The Kashubian-speaking priest I had talked to earlier performed the ceremony, even though the services of the Bishop of the Archdiocese of New Croatia had been offered.

My colonels and I finally found a use for the full-dress uniforms that we had been issued, complete with swords, capes, knee-high boots, and enough gold braid to decorate a fifty-girl chorus line, each.

Kasia, although she was one of my colonels, had opted for a dress made with dozens of square meters of white lace, but stayed with her long red wig, since I'd told her that I liked it.

My best man, Quincy, had surprised me with a full-dress uniform for a Tanker First Class, which I suspect that he had designed himself, since it had ever so slightly less gold braid than us officers carried, but had Marine Corps chief senior master sergeant's stripes embroidered in gold running the length of both of his sleeves. On his belt, instead of a sword, he had slung on an ancient Slavic boulava, an ornate club similar to the western "Morning Star," or "Holy Water Sprinkler."

With my best man at my side, and my four remaining colonels behind me, we marched as best we could into the filled-to-capacity cathedral. Well, we tried. The Kashubian Expeditionary Forces had never bothered to teach us how to march.

I was surprised to notice that dozens of wall-sized display screens had been slung to the walls of the huge church, below the stained glass windows, but above the crowd. They showed hundreds, maybe thousands, of beautiful young women, well groomed and dressed in their finest. In a moment, I realized that these were the tanks who had served under me, in Dream World. My metal ladies had all wanted to be there. There was a sprinkling of handsome men among them, because many of our troops were women, and their tanks generally developed a male personality.

Agnieshka and Eva were sitting together up there, waving discreetly at me.

Sitting down in the pews, there were family members, dignitaries, and people in a hundred different uniforms, none of whom I had never met, all looking expectantly at us.

The ceremony, which included a full High Mass, took over an hour, but when it was done, Kasia was my wife, now and forever.

Walking out of the church, I saw up on one of the display screens a big, blond man wearing a uniform exactly like my own. Sitting beside him were five people dressed as Kashubian colonels. I realized that this had to be the guy who had made
summa cum laude
at Oxbridge, and who was my boss. I saluted him as I passed, and he returned the salute.