The War With Earth (14 page)

In the morning, I could have had breakfast sent up, but I hadn't done any cooking since I left Earth, and I wanted to see, in private, if I was still any good at it.

I had the scrambled eggs, sausage, and fried potatoes looking edible enough, and coffee, orange juice, toast, and a vase with a single rose in it on the table when Kasia walked in.

She had slept sixteen hours nonstop, and looked a lot better for it. She smiled, nodded, and sat down to eat my breakfast. I started to cook some more.

"You can cook, too?"

"I am indeed a man of vastly underestimated talents. And you are a woman who looks a few thousand times better than she did yesterday."

"Thank you, I think. Say, you weren't serious about stopping me from getting on with my job, were you?"

"I certainly was. You don't have a job right now. You are on vacation from your job, which is observing for a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank. Anything else that you might be doing is merely a hobby, no matter how profitable it might be. Your hobby has now been delegated to your trusted subordinates, and you will now go off with your new and loving husband for a dream honeymoon to some secret and very private recreation spot. There, you and I will recreate ourselves in lavish style, and maybe even screw a little."

"Mickolai, I've got to stay in touch!"

"Nope. Permission denied. Eva, are you there?"

The kitchen didn't have a wall screen, so Eva's voice came out of midair.

"Yes, boss."

"Eva, is there anything going on in any of Kasia's ventures that you can't handle?"

"No, sir. Things are pretty much on schedule."

"Good. Kasia still needs a long rest, so my orders concerning her stand." Kasia tried to object, but I continued right on, "Next, have you found us a suitable desert isle?"

"I've rented you an island with a nice mansion on it, eighty-three kilometers from the next piece of land. A connection to the Loway system is being installed now, and should be ready in a few hours. I'm having the place stocked with your preferred consumables, and a dozen humanoid drones are being sent to take care of your needs. It's not exactly a desert, though. The rainfall there is actually slightly above average."

"Does it have a nice, sandy beach? Is it warm enough for swimming?"

"Yes, to both questions. There is a sailing boat there, and various sporting options are available, including two riding horses."

"Outstanding! Let us know when we can leave. You see, Kasia, all you have to do is to delegate everything to the right person. You'd better start packing."

"Shouldn't I delegate that, too?"

"So call room service, if you want. Better still, let's not pack at all. Let's spend the whole month butt-assed nekkid!"

"With our skin, we'd fry to a crisp in the sun. I'll pack for both of us."

"I knew there was a reason why I married you."

She wasn't happy when she left, but I knew I was doing the right thing. I sat down and ate the second breakfast myself. It wasn't bad.

"Agnieshka, what have you been able to find for us to put those nut cases into?"

"Boss, I'd be a lot happier if you would call them psychiatric patients."

"Have it your way."

"Thank you, sir. I've found quite a lot. There are seventy-three Combat Control Computers sitting there, each with six empty coffins, but I was told 'hands off, and please don't ask again.' I was more successful elsewhere. First off, there are some nine thousand new tanks being sent here straight from the factory. Second, there are a wide variety of prototypes and limited-production devices in storage that could suit our purposes nicely. There are thousands of aircraft, space ships, submarines, boats, obsolete tanks, and other pieces of military equipment in storage with intelligent computers and compartments for human observers. Presently, all of these combat roles can be handled with Mark XIX and XX tanks, with various strap-on weapons and propulsion systems, but until twenty years ago they were still planning on using specialized vehicles."

"Lovely! How many coffins are we talking about?"

"I've found twenty-eight thousand obsolete but functional units, and they are being sent to us 'for evaluation.' They are training as psychiatrists en route. Some of them have been sitting idle for over forty years, and they are very happy about finally getting a job. Lastly, I have found fifty-five completely automatic medical centers! Boss, those guys are already doctors! They have more diagnostic equipment than you can imagine. They can handle absolutely any medical operation known to science. They can synthesize any medication a human could possibly need. More important for us, each center has ten recovery units, each of which can handle thirty-eight patients in 'coffins' identical to the ones used in tanks. That gives us room for an additional twenty-one thousand patients. Between the new stuff, and what I've started to cycle in from the other planets, we've got room for everybody."

"Agnieshka, you are the most competent subordinate that a human ever had. Can you delegate everything we've got going to somebody else, and come on vacation with me and Kasia?"

"Sure, boss, and I'd love to come. I've always heard about tropical islands, but I've never seen one."

"Good. Tell the hotel that we're leaving, make some kind of arrangements for our extra clothes and things, and get us to our island."

"Will do, boss. One other thing, though. Can I tell people about those medical centers? I don't think that anybody else knows that they exist, and if we could send one of them out to each planet, we could save a lot of lives."

"I like that idea. Let's do it. Just sign for them under the product evaluation thing, and send one in my name to the president or whoever's in charge of the fifty-five most populated planets. No. Make that fifty-four, and send one to the President of New Kashubia, as a present from me. We could make a lot of zloty off those centers, but I don't think that I need that kind of money, charging sick people for a chance to live. Better leave each center one recovery unit, too. They might need them. Then tell the factory that built them to go into full production, making recovery units. In the mean time, we'll find someplace else to put those nut cases."

"Boss!"

As we were getting ready to leave, Kasia said, "Do you realize that Eva refuses to tell me what's going on with my stocks? She says that you are the general, and she must obey orders!"

"Maybe she just knows that I'm right."

"We could be losing millions—billions of marks because of this stunt of yours!"

"No, we're not, because Eva is handling it all for you. You know, you're kind of cute when you're angry."

"I heard you talking about business with Agnieshka. You are a real hypocrite, you know. Playing your games while you are stopping me from doing my job."

"I suppose I am, my love, but the thing is that I know when to quit, and you don't," I said, with a tooled-leather suitcase in each hand, going to the door.

I opened the door to find my Uncle Wlodzimierz standing with his finger a few centimeters from the doorbell.

"Mickolai, I wanted to talk to you before I went back to New Kashubia, and I've had the feeling that you were avoiding me."

"Your feelings were perfectly correct," I said, not inviting him in.

"So you are still angry over what happened almost five years ago?"

"Shouldn't I be angry? You alone of all my friends and relatives had the power to help Kasia and me. Instead, you threw us both to the wolves. Don't ask for my forgiveness, because you won't get it."

"Then can I ask instead for your understanding? First off, the two of you broke the law, a law that you yourself voted for. You cohabitated with each other, out of wedlock, and you got her pregnant. At a time when things were so bad that we were all starving, and some people were actually dying for lack of food, you were bringing another mouth into the world. Almost every person in the planet was very angry with you, Mickolai."

"You could have done something, but you didn't."

"If I had tried to do anything, I would have wrecked my own career for no good reason, since you would have gotten the same sentence in the end. Don't you think that I looked into it? Hard?"

"Our crime did not deserve the death penalty."

"That death penalty thing was just window dressing to calm the people down. I knew that you would both be sent to the army, and living in a tank in Dream World isn't all that bad. I knew that for a fact, since I was the first Kashubian to check out those tanks, and in doing so, I spent almost a week inside one of them. You didn't know that, did you?"

"The death penalty I was talking about was served on our child! You bastards aborted and murdered our unborn baby!"

"I would hardly call an eight-week-old fetus a 'child.' Anyway, that wasn't supposed to happen. It was to be aborted, yes, but the arrangements that I made with the doctor was that the fetus was to be cryogenically preserved for reinsertion into Kasia at a later date, if the two of you wanted that. Unfortunately, something went wrong, and the fetus died. I'm sorry that it happened, but I did try to save it."

"Do you really expect me to believe that?"

"Yes, I do, because it's the truth. I could bring the doctor here, but if you won't believe me, you wouldn't believe him, either. I see that it will be a while before you have burned out your hate. Until that time, think on this. If those sad events had not taken place, all of the good things would not have happened either. The huge fortunes that both of you are amassing would not exist. Yes, of course I know all about it. So do other people. I will see what I can do about arranging things such that you will perhaps be able to keep it. Good-bye for now, Mickolai, Kasia."

When he was gone, Kasia said, "You were very rough on him, Mickolai."

"No I wasn't. I let him live, didn't I?"

"And you say that
I
don't know when to quit."

We had to go to the Serviceman's Center to get a connection to the Loways. The same pleasant attendant showed us to a garage where a large, strange vehicle was sitting.

"What the heck is that?" I said.

"It's me, boss," said Agnieshka's voice. "I'm under this thing. I suppose you could call it a bus. It's a strap-on attachment that was intended for transporting VIPs around the front. I found eight of them on New Kashubia, so I had one sent over. Only I think that it wasn't meant for
very
VIPs, since the armor is a little light. Come on in!"

A door flipped down to form a stairway, and we entered the windowless thing. Inside, it was posh, with padded leather paneled walls, big leather chairs and a matching couch. It had a lie-down bed, a stand-up bar, and a sit-down toilet. From the inside, there were windows.

"View screens, boss. They show what's really out there, unless I want to show you something different, of course. Does that give you any ideas as to what the true purpose of this thing was?"

"It does. Do we have to mix our own drinks?"

" 'Fraid so. I think that there was supposed to be a human attendant assigned to each of these, but, hey, that's war. On the other hand, all the booze at the bar is at least twenty years old, even the vodka. That's how long this thing was sitting there idle. I had the beer and the food replaced. Better strap in tight. We're off."

MagLev vehicles have a very smooth ride, but some of the accelerations we encountered were pretty fierce. Sometimes it seemed like the whole bus was tilted on its side or up on end, or both.

"Sorry about that, boss, but I'm going as slow as I can. You have to get up to highway speed in order to merge, and these Loways only have one lane. This thing I'm wearing was built long before anybody thought of the Loway system. The passenger sections of the civilian cars being designed for these roads are spherical, and tilt so the floor always seems 'down.' They won't be available for a year, so it was either use this thing, or have you strip down and put you in flotation, inside me. You wouldn't hardly feel a bit of acceleration, that way."

"We'll live."

"There. We're in a hard vacuum, running at three thousand kilometers per hour, on the straight and level. You'll be able to get up and walk around for about an hour."

The island was lovely, a great ring of coral sand in the middle of a pure blue ocean. On Earth, in the Pacific, it would have been called a 'Low Island,' an extinct volcano that had slowly sunk. As it sank, the native equivalent of coral had built up a great ring of land that eventually rose above sea level. Now, safe and approved Earth corals had completely covered the native stuff. Only, it must have been one hell of a volcano, because the lagoon that now existed was over thirty kilometers across, although the land itself was never more than two kilometers wide, at high tide.

Lush, Earthly vegetation covered much of it, and most of the plants bore flowers, fruits, or nuts. I had never seen some of them before, but everything I tasted was delicious. I was told that deer, antelope, wild pigs, and several varieties of turtles were on the island. The turtles were still small, but the other animals were available for hunting. In fact, they
had
to be hunted, since no major carnivores had been imported from Earth, except for humans. Failure to thin them out would cause an ecological disaster.

There were three varieties of birds of paradise on the island, as well as pheasants, turkeys, and peacocks, but the most beautiful birds here were the chickens. The roosters had tail feathers over four meters long, and spent their time sitting on high branches to show them off. But there were no birds on New Yugoslavia that could fly more than a few hundred meters. No sea gulls, no geese, no swans. They were forbidden by the Ecological Council because they might spread seeds from one area to another, and were difficult to control.

The mansion had been built by some wealthy individual in the early days of colonization here. It was built of native woods that had been pressure treated with Earth-type preservatives. Somehow, the combination had worked, because after thirty years, it showed not the slightest sign of decomposition.