The War With Earth (31 page)

Judging from the normal complexions and the generally poor level of physical fitness of the officers, it was obvious to me that none of these men had ever spent much time in the coffin of a tank. This was confirmed by the various insignia of rank that they wore.

They obviously didn't use the very truncated command structure that the Combat Control Computers permitted, but rather the old-style military hierarchy with a dozen grades of enlisted men, and a dozen grades of officers.

I had Agnieshka set her other job aside, and take me back up to times thirty, so that I would have the time to think over what to do next.

We pulled up and boxed them in on three sides with our seventeen main battle tanks. We didn't point the guns directly at them, but I thought that a little intimidation might be in order. Also, this let us record the meeting from all sides.

The Gurkhas parked back a bit, and observed the show, as witnesses.

General Wolczynski, a rather portly man, stood up and said, "You are two hours late. Such rudeness is not becoming."

I got into my drone, as did Kasia and Maria. We climbed down from our tanks and walked over to the their table.

I looked down at him from the drone's two-meter height, and said, "You are not in a position to make demands, or to give reprimands, sir. We were unavoidably detained, and since the communications on this planet are nonfunctional, we could not inform you of the delay."

"Well, yes, of course. I had expected to meet with General Burnsides here," he said.

"General Burnsides has been relieved of his command by a council of political officers. I am taking his place. My name is General Derdowski."

"We had a fellow named Derdowski, but I suppose that that is neither here nor there. Why did they relieve General Burnsides?"

"There was a long list of charges, including incompetence and insensitivity."

"Insensitivity?"

"He was very rude to some very sensitive people."

"Uh, yes. Quite despicable, that. But you have been filled in on the terms of our surrender?"

"Terms? I thought that you were surrendering unconditionally to the obviously superior forces of Mother Earth."

At this point, I had all of the guns on all of the tanks rotate and aim at Wolczynski. Keeping in the spirit of things, the machine gun on the Gurkha jeep followed suit. The general looked suitably intimidated.

"Please sir! That isn't at all necessary! Yes, of course, we are surrendering unconditionally! But you have obviously not been completely informed. There were certain side terms agreed to."

"Indeed? And what were these 'side terms'?" I asked, as haughtily as possible.

The general stepped closer to me, looked up and said in a whisper, "It was agreed that my officers and myself would be well taken care of. That we would each receive sums of between eighty and three hundred million dollars each, in proportion to our rank, be given estates on Earth, and British titles of nobility, again in proportion to our rank."

"You are to personally receive three hundred million Earth dollars, and an estate on Earth?"

"Yes, that's right."

"And just exactly what title of English nobility are you to be awarded with?"

"A barony. The rest will get knighthoods."

"I see," I said. "Yes, that would explain it."

"Explain what, sir?"

"The sniper fire we sustained on the way here. Apparently, word of your 'side terms' has leaked out, and certain of your patriots are hunting you with a vengeance. But do not be worried. You will be well taken care of. I came prepared to see to your complete safety."

"That is reassuring," Wolczynski said. "Then, if the terms are agreed to, shall we get on with the ceremony?"

"Of course. Be assured that you and your officers shall get everything that you have coming to you."

Kasia, Maria, and I went to the table and signed four copies of the Articles of Surrender, in Earth English and in Kashubian, in the places indicated, and the general and all of his officers did the same. Kasia kept two copies for herself, and gave the other two to General Wolczynski.

"And now," I said.

"Now?" The general asked.

"Well, your swords, of course. A traditional part of every ceremony of surrender is for the vanquished to render up their swords to the victor."

"Is that really necessary, sir?"

"It is. I'll have the sheaths and sword belts as well. Plus, we'll take all of the side arms of all those present, as well as the weapons of your enlisted men. There are ancient traditions to be upheld, General Wolczynski."

"Well, yes, I suppose so," He said unbuckling his sword belt. I glanced at his officers, and they began disarming themselves as well. In a short time, Kasia and Maria had collected up all of the "enemy" weapons, and had piled them up on my tank.

"Excellent," I said. "Now then, in keeping with the terms of our agreement, I must keep you safe from harm. The safest place in Earth's Human Space is inside one of our main battle tanks, and I have brought one of them along for each of you."

The coffins on twelve of our liberated tanks slid out.

"But, but sir! We are not equipped with the special helmets and inductors needed to get into one of those things!"

"Nor will you have to be. The life support modules have been drained. You need only get in, and everything will be taken care of. It will only be for a short while, until we are safely behind our own lines."

"But what about you? Won't those snipers be shooting at you as well?"

"They will. But as you can certainly observe, I am wearing a new and very superior sort of battle armor, and thus I will be in no danger."

"But still, sir, I'm not sure if . . ."

I picked the chubby fellow up with one hand and put him in the tank's coffin.

"Watch your fingers," I said, as it quickly closed.

Faced with suffering the same indignity, the eleven other officers present got into the tanks we indicated to them.

Agnieshka quickly sealed them in.

"Make sure that they all get enough air to breathe," I said silently to her. "I want them all healthy enough to stand trial." One part of me wanted to tell her to just fill them all back up with the flotation liquid, and drown the bastards, but that wasn't the way to handle this one.

"Will do, boss."

I walked up to the small crowd of enlisted men.

Out loud, I said, "You have observed that your previous superiors have surrendered to me. I am now your commanding officer. One major item that your incompetent general failed to ask about was the civilian hostages that the Earth forces were holding. These people were freed some time ago, and are presently being guarded by elements of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces."

They shouted out a cheer.

I pointed out three senior sergeants.

"You three men will commandeer sufficient transportation to pick up thirty thousand of our people who are now at the Mount Carmel High School, and bring them home. They will need a few dozen ambulances as well. You will not encounter any enemy troops on the way. The password is, 'Derdowski sent us.' You will see to this personally. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Then take back your weapons, and go get those people. Go do it, now."

One of them turned and said, "Sir, are you
that
General Derdowski?"

"Yeah. Now go bring our people home!"

"Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!"

They took one of the electric cars parked near by, the most expensive one, I noticed, and left immediately.

I said, "Next, I have a message that I need to get out on the television networks, but the data lines seem to be nonfunctional. Can anybody here tell me why this is so?"

"Yes, sir," a female corporal said. "General Wolczynski ordered all television, radio, and data channels turned off, to 'keep the enemy from knowing what is happening.' "

"Well, we can guess who he was afraid would be getting any information. How do you know this?"

"I'm in the reserve, sir. In real life, I work at a TV station."

"Good. You can take us there. Hop up on my tank, take your pistol back, and give us directions. The rest of you can take back your weapons and go home. The Earthers all ran away hours ago. If they are anywhere at all, they are in an empty continent on New Nigeria. You'll see the whole story on television shortly. Dismissed!"

"Sir?" The lady corporal asked, "What about the general and his officers, inside your tanks?"

"They'll last for a few hours, until we can find them some secure jail cells."

Kasia and Maria put the officers' weapons into the coffin of the last empty tank, and we took off, with the Gurkha jeep following us, in the interest of history, of course. The little jemadar was still laughing hysterically.

At the TV station, I told the skeleton staff on duty to get to the phone company and the internet services, by runner, if necessary, and tell them that they were back in business.

Then, they were to go back on the air, and tell everyone that A) the war was over, and B) that we had won, and C) for complete details, they should watch the program that would be on in half an hour.

One of the studio executives demanded to know what my authorization was for all of this.

I said to him, "Look out your window. What do you see?"

"A bunch of tanks?"

All of the guns turned and aimed up at him.

"Right. If you don't carry out my orders immediately, those tanks will blow this place away, and you with it.
That
is my authorization!"

"That's good enough for me, sir!"

The people at the TV station told me that we had better than ninety-five percent of the population of New Kashubia watching the program that Agnieshka was still putting the final touches on. The first half was done, and she promised to have the rest completed before it was needed.

From the very beginning, she was her own narrator, appearing on the screen as her beautiful Dream World self, but very formally dressed. She said at once that she wasn't human, but was the artificial intelligence in my tank, and thus was herself an unbiased witness to all of the remarkable events that had unfolded.

"Unbiased, hell," Kasia muttered.

She merged General Sobieski's two conversations with me into one, and worked it into a rousing speech on the need for a truly interstellar military force.

The first section—the call up for war, forming up our squad, arming our tanks, and the trip to New Kashubia were done in a straightforward fashion, although I thought that she skimped on the work we did in training, getting ready for this mission.

The first action sequence, when Quincy took out the two men guarding the receiver from New Nigeria, was done very effectively, I thought, at combat speed. It almost gave you the feeling of what it was really like.

The sequence where we crawled up the old mining shaft was spectacular, but the views she showed of us coming out the top could not have been taken from any of the tank's sensors. She had to have created them in Dream World. A bit of artistic license, I suppose.

The two drones who fell back down the shaft screamed on the way down, something that they could hardly have done in a vacuum, but I doubt if anybody noticed that.

She dwelt rather long on the technical aspects of shooting at a star, but then apologized for it, reminding the audience that after all, she was a computer, and not a real girl.

And when it came to the dirty, rotten tricks we had played on the Earth forces, she never mentioned the potassium cloride in the morphine ampoules, but told everybody about what was done to the food processors, dwelt for quite a while on the joys of an imitation cholera epidemic, with lots of Dream World scans showing the Earthers' suffering, while their own doctors were dosing them down with the very stuff that was causing the problem. She stressed that we hadn't actually killed any of them, but that some of the Earthworms probably wished that they could die.

Then she switched to Quincy's explanation about how it was much better to hurt an enemy rather than to kill him outright. She always showed him as he really looked, a healthy old man, rather than as his handsome, Dream World persona. She did that with all of us except Maria, who had apparently objected to it.

She spent a long time on what we'd done to their communications, and how we'd managed to get individual units actually fighting and killing one another. The people in the studio really seemed to like that sequence.

She made Conan's stay alone on the surface seem hugely heroic, when in fact it was the only thing that he could do, and even wrenched a little sympathy for the mouse that I had to leave out there to die.

There wasn't a word about the wild, pseudo-medieval Search Light party that Zuzanna threw for us. In Agnieshka's version, we had stayed in uniform, anxiously awaiting the results of all of our heroic deeds. She showed us cheering when we learned of the success of our efforts, but in her version we didn't do it in ancient garb, and it wasn't around a well-laden table. She had us in some kind of a control room that I'd never seen before, nervously drinking coffee and eating sandwiches.

But it wasn't until we broke into the enemy headquarters that she started taking major liberties with the truth. The way she showed it, it was the enemy tank that cut down everyone and everything in that control room. Zuzanna and Maria had only fired at it in self defense, after it had opened fire with its rail gun first.

She had Zuzanna shouting, "Those poor people are already dead! Shoot, or he'll kill us all!"

And Zuzanna had killed the sentries only when they tried to turn a shoulder-held rocket launcher on her.

I think that she dwelt much longer than was necessary on our dancing clown routine, but she said that the audience would need some comic relief at that point, and perhaps she was right.

For me, the important point was that she'd gotten real, accurate recordings of everything that had gone on at the surrender ceremony, including Wolczynski's whispered confession to me.