The War With Earth (35 page)

"Well, you could always discharge me, sir, or put Kasia and me on permanent leave," I said, smiling.

"I know that you are not serious. Anyway, we still have got a war going on, and you are desperately needed. Let us withdraw to my private chambers, to discuss matters more fully."

We went out through a side door, while the crowd started up with the "Praise him with great praise!" routine again.

I found us both wearing class A uniforms, and standing in a fairly posh, if standard office. Two very scantily clad young ladies stood there with trays of various drinks in their hands. They were so beautiful that you knew that they had to be computer generated.

"Were those people out there real?" I asked.

"About half of them, yes. The rest were artificial intelligences, mostly from our tanks. About the only clue you'll get is that if they can march, they're not human members of the KEF. We biologicals don't have time for such nonsense, but the tanks can do it with a quick download."

"I've noticed that."

Sobieski said, "Now then. Please sit down, and have a drink. Let me bring you up to date on things."

I noticed that he took a beer, in preference to the champagne, scotch, and mixed drinks available, so I felt free to do the same, and picked up a stein of very strong, dark Danish beer.

He said, "When General Wolczynski realized that he had been completely conned by the Earthworms, and that they had used his truce to run away, leaving him branded as a traitor, he made a complete confession. I almost feel sorry for him. He was just a stupid political hack who suddenly found himself in way over his head. That won't stop him from being sent to the gallows, of course, along with most of his immediate subordinates. If there is any justice in the world, the politicians who appointed that bunch will hang along with them."

"My worry at the time was that the politicians would try to cover the whole thing up, by hanging me instead. Hence, the 'documentary' we made."

"They might have tried to do just that, except for the way you upstaged them with your TV program. That documentary was Agnieshka's work, wasn't it? I thought I recognized her style. She did a great job, but seeing the need to do it was brilliant on your part."

"It wasn't entirely factual, you know," I said.

"I know. A tank can't keep anything from a Combat Control Computer, and I live in one. But as far as the world will ever know, it was absolute truth, and that's the end of it. Nobody is going to punish Zuzanna for getting perhaps a little overzealous in her first firefight, if that's what you're worried about."

"That's a relief, sir."

"It wouldn't have made the slightest difference if she hadn't fired on the office staff, not with that enemy tank standing guard over them the way it was. Furthermore, those who tried to escape from New Kashubia didn't make it. None of them survived," he said. "We sent a long-range helicopter to that empty continent on New Nigeria, and the receiver there proved to be nonfunctional. The roof of the building it was in had collapsed, and there was an honest-to-God
tree
growing right through the receiver itself, among other things."

"I guess that's what happens when you leave equipment unattended for twenty years."

"True. I took the liberty of writing to the philanthropical twits who put it there, thanking them for killing the entire invasion force that Earth had sent to us, some ninety thousand men and women. They haven't replied, nor do I expect them to."

"I assume that the site has now been deleted from the transporter menus?" I said.

"Yes, of course. Now then, we naturally have spies on Earth, and they are reporting something very strange. It seems that right now, over a week after you destroyed the old probe in orbit around that neutron star,
Earth is still sending troops to New Kashubia!
"

"Good God," I said, stunned. "I just blew up a bridge. I never expected them to keep on sending troop trains over it! Sir, if that's true, then thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands by now, are simply being murdered by their own government! I mean, the Earthworms can't possibly be so stupid as to be doing something like that by accident!"

"That's what it looks like to me, too. I think that Earth is using this war as a convenient excuse to relieve some of its population pressure, and if I'm right, then we have a long and bloody war on our hands. Fighting an enemy who wants his men to die will not be an easy thing to do. Genghis Khan used to pull stunts like that, deliberately sending his 'allies' out to die in battle, because they were nothing more than just surplus population to him. And remember that nobody ever defeated old Temujin in battle while he was alive. It's hard to imagine it happening in the modern world, but I don't think that our spies are lying to us, either."

"There's no chance that the old probe isn't somehow working again?" I asked.

"None," General Sobieski said. "One of the first things we did was to send a tank out there with a rocket strapped to it. That old probe is a total wreck. It wasn't the additional radiation your rail gun needles kicked up that did it in, incidentally. You somehow managed to hit it directly, stitching it almost dead center for the full length of the probe. Our tank found a neat line of holes, just under a centimeter apart, going in on one side of it. The other side of the thing was pretty much completely gone."

"Then it had to be one of the Earthers' own rail guns that did it. My squad ran out of ammunition three days before the probe failed."

"That's the way I read it, too. But it was a lucky hit, no matter whose gun did it. The important thing was to keep firing at it for as long as possible, and you did just that," he said.

"You gave me the ammunition to do it with. You must have had something like that in mind," I said.

"I gave you everything I could that I thought might be useful. In some places, like equipping half of your squad with X-ray lasers, I guessed wrong. In others, like the extra truck full of ammo, the mice, and the humanoid drones, I guessed right."

"We never much used the big lasers, but if we'd all been equipped with rail guns, we all would have stayed out there shooting at the star, and three of us wouldn't have had the time to play the fun and games we did with their computer," I said.

"Most of warfare seems to end up being a matter of luck, doesn't it?" He said, "One other point before we get on to the real subject of this conversation. The Gurkha battalion has volunteered to serve indefinitely in the KEF, and we'd like to have that bunch of hereditary warriors on our team, but there's a hitch. They insist on serving under you. They say that they have had to serve under too many incompetent commanders over the last few decades, and that they don't want to repeat the experience."

"Sir, it sounds to me like you'll just have to show a little flexibility when it comes to your command structure, but I think I'll have to let you work that one out by yourself."

"I think you're right. They are being loaded into brand new tanks as we speak. They'll spend a month or so in basic training, and by the time that's completed, we'll know what to do concerning their command structure. Now, then. The enemy has invaded New Yugoslavia."

"So you've told me. What I want to know is why you didn't take out the old Earther probe that they had to come through. I would have done it as soon as they invaded New Kashubia," I said.

"I wanted to, but my employers refused to let me do it. Don't forget that we are still a mercenary outfit that is working here under contract to the various local governments. Those people were still making a profit, selling their foodstuffs to Earth, and they didn't want to permanently cut themselves off from that huge market. The compromise that we settled on was to simply shut down the receivers that operate from their probe. The Yugoslavians thought that that would keep them safe. They even informed the Earthers that the receivers would be shut down, so that they wouldn't offend them, while they continued making their contracted shipments to Earth."

"It obviously didn't stop them from invading us," I said.

"True. The Earthworms launched a rocket from their probe, and landed it on the most unpopulated part of the planet, one of the oceanic islands under the jurisdiction of the smallest government here, the German Enclave. That rocket contained a transporter receiver, and they invaded us through it," he said.

"And we didn't know about this as it happened?"

"No, we didn't. Remember that in the course of the fun and games that we've been playing on this planet, we shot down every satellite we had here in orbit. We didn't have anything up there looking for incoming ships."

"So our sins are coming back on us," I said.

"So it would seem."

"I trust that the probe has been deleted now?"

"Oh, yes, of course," he said. "And we now have twenty-six tanks in orbit guarding our skies. But there is nothing stopping the Earthworms from transmitting directly from Earth to their new receiver. We have to take it out, and the army that is doubtless guarding it."

"So we have an island to take," I said.

"Six islands. They were unpopulated, part of a nature preserve that was saving some of New Yugoslavia's indigenous life forms, so the Earthworms simply took them without a fight. The extent to which they have damaged the preserve remains to be seen. They might very well have set up additional receivers on all of those islands, just to be on the safe side."

"What about the rest of Human Space? Are the probes that connect them with Earth out of action?"

He said, "Yes, except for a few new planets that have not yet joined the smuggling net. In most cases, it was a matter of simply going there, and cutting the power leads to the receivers from Earth. There is no indication that they have set up alternate receivers operating directly from Earth's Solar System, but if I had been in command of the Earth forces, that's what I would have done, long before I ever launched an attack."

He looked at me and then turned away. "Most planets are not as careful of what they import as New Yugoslavia is," he said.

"So we have to clean them off of New Yugoslavia, and stay very vigilant about other invasions," I said. "But mostly, we're going to have to attack Earth, and knock out their capability of continuing these attacks. Mainly, that huge solar powered station of theirs."

"But we can't do that. If we take out all the transporter transmitters on Earth, what happens to the continuing expansion of Human Space? If we tried to start the whole program up again ourselves, we would halt all human progress to the stars for fifty years, even with the huge manufacturing capability of New Kashubia. What we have to do is take those facilities from Earth, and operate them ourselves. That's going to be a much more difficult job to accomplish."

"Humph. I can see your point, sir. But first things first. Tell me what you know about their installations on the islands of the German Enclave," I said.

"Their main base is on Baden-Baden Island. . . ."

We spent two more hours in Dream World, going over details, and downloading a lot of information into Agnieshka. Then I asked for the night off, to think the whole thing over.

"That's fine, Mickolai. What I really wanted was to see if your ideas were at all like mine. Let me know if you come up with anything. Before I forget. I liked that speech you made for your uncle."

"Yeah? I haven't seen it myself, yet, let alone released it!"

"More of Agnieshka's doing, then? Well, take a look at it first chance you get."

I wanted to sleep on it, but I couldn't see wasting eight standard hours, not when the planet where my valley was located had an enemy invasion force on it. My talk with the general made the whole thing seem a lot more urgent. I compromised by sleeping in Dream World, after telling Agnieshka to round up my squad, and Lloyd Tomlinson and Mirko Jubec as well. I wanted all the input I could get on this one.

When I awoke, everybody was there except for Lloyd, who had been spending the night with a girlfriend, without his communicator, and had taken a while to find.

Instead of starting without him, or just killing time, I had Agnieshka show us the half hour program she had put together on revamping New Kashubia's military. It wasn't bad, even though she had me saying a lot of the same things that Sobieski had said to me at our last meeting.

Also, she had spent a lot of time talking about how useful it was to have an artificial intelligence working for you. She even talked about the social drones that would soon be on the market, if you had a very powerful computer available to run one. Being in the army would get you one for free.

She talked about Dream World as well, and how you could live any way you wanted to there. She had Zuzanna on screen, talking about how her cancer had been cured, and showing off her Dream World castle, with some scenes in it from the searchlight party.

Before she was through, the program ran for a full hour, but nobody seemed to mind.

"Not bad at all," Quincy said. "I especially liked the part about hanging the politicians who appointed our last general staff. There's not much hope of that happening, though, since our politicians would have to vote for it. One of the most horrible things that a politician can imagine is killing a politician, even if he is on the other side."

"I liked the part about universal military service," Mirko said. "And especially the part about making the right to vote depend on maintaining your standing in the army. If a person doesn't care enough about his country to serve in its army, he doesn't care enough to vote properly. I'm going to try to get the same sort of laws passed in my own country, New Croatia."

"I'll help you," Conan said. "What with all the fame we've gotten in the movie and the documentary that Agnieshka turned out, we should have a fair amount of political clout. Let's use it. And if Agnieshka can turn out all these movies and documentaries, then so can our metal ladies. We can put on a propaganda blitz that will roast their socks off!"