So we did, and it was fairly hairy for a while, jumping from tank to tank every second or so, but after six simulated attacks, we were still alive, we’d knocked out eighteen enemy tanks and had lost twenty six of our own. Not good, but one heck of a lot better than our battle losses had been with the empties on their own.
“Mickolai, you lovely boy, I’m shooting your idea and our test results up to the Combat Control Computer. But right now there’s a general description of New Yugoslavia coming through, and maybe you’d better watch it.”
I watched, and it was a canned movie that looked as though it was made to attract tourists.
New Yugoslavia’s sun was slightly larger than Earth’s, brighter, and a bit whiter, though not enough to notice without instruments. The useful planet was one of twelve, the fourth one out. It was almost exactly the same size and composition as Earth, and it had a twenty-hour day, which we could easily adapt to. It had the same gravity as Earth, to within a half of a percent, yet it had an axial tilt of twelve degrees, only about half of Earth’s, so the seasons were not as pronounced.
One astronomical curiosity was the fact that there were exactly thirty-two days to the month and exactly sixteen months to the year, which made for a very simple calendar. The reason for this was not understood, with some scientists talking about resonance effects with the other planets and others saying it was simply luck. It was suggested that an octal or hexadecimal numbering system would be natural for New Yugoslavia, but the great majority of the citizens felt that to abandon the decimal and metric systems would be simply silly.
Someday, the resonance vs. luck debate would be resolved, but astronomy does not flourish on frontier worlds. There is simply too much else to do. There was not a single professional observatory on New Yugoslavia, and the skies around it were almost completely unmonitored.
The planet had a moon that massed more than three times that of Earth’s moon, and was a bit closer in. The tidal forces were thus much stronger than Earth’s, and one effect of this was that the continental plates were much smaller. There were only two continents on New Yugoslavia, and each of them was smaller than Australia, yet the planet’s total land area was almost twice that of Earth. There was as much land as there was ocean, and most of it was in islands of various sizes. A map of the planet looked like a sheet of peanut brittle that had been dropped on a sidewalk.
The polar areas were mostly open ocean, without any permanent ice caps, and the planet had very few of the landlocked seas that Earth has. Driven by the huge tides, ocean currents were very strong, and tended to sculpt the land in a way that doesn’t happen on Earth. They acted much as the rivers do on our home planet, sometimes cutting islands in half.
These ocean currents distributed the sun’s heat fairly evenly over the planet. The result was that temperatures on New Yugoslavia tended to be mild, and the weather was rarely fierce. Ice, snow, tornadoes, and hurricanes were almost unknown on this planet.
Another effect of the strong ocean currents was that they tended to keep the oceans mixed. Nutrients didn’t settle to the bottom as they do on Earth, and the oceans were all as rich with life as the best fishing grounds on Earth. This abundant sea life had given New Yugoslavia an Earthlike atmosphere even though the planet was only about half the age of Earth.
A major curiosity of the animals of New Yugoslavia was that many of their muscles could both push and pull, almost like hydraulic cylinders, as opposed to the otherwise universal system of muscles only working in tension. Bones had to be used in place of tendons, and the linkages involved bore a striking resemblance to those used in machine tools.
While almost none of the native life-forms were nutritious to humans, neither were Earthly life-forms nutritious to them. The enzymes available to each set of beings was ineffective at digesting the components of the other. The local equivalent to DNA was twisted into a left-handed spiral. Most “proteins” were so different as to be mutually indigestible, but they weren’t poisonous, either.
This lack of nutritiousness was something of an unexpected boon for some of the farmers of the planet. Several islands were kept carefully quarantined from the rest, and several native plants and animals were being domesticated. These products were being shipped back to Earth as calorie-free food for the fat people of the Wealthy Nations group. This at a time when people on New Kashubia were starving on eight hundred calories a day!
Aside from the few species being domesticated, most of the native life-forms on the planet were in trouble. With only half the evolutionary history of Earth, the native life-forms on New Yugoslavia were primitive, and simply could not compete with the evolutionally more mature imports from Earth. Earth plants won out simply by crowding out the opposition, depriving them of sunlight and water. Our carnivores slaughtered native animals by instinct and for fun, like a cat teasing a mouse. If the prey wasn’t nutritious, hunger just sends the cat out hunting all that much sooner. The tiny scientific community here was trying desperately to at least preserve samples of the native forms before they became extinct, but the bulk of the population thought that the situation was wonderful.
While the planet was politically fragmented, there was one strong international organization: the Planetary Ecological Council. The people were so concerned with not blowing the good thing that they had going here that even nations at war with one another still all sent representatives to the council, and rigidly obeyed the council’s edicts. It was one bit of sanity in a sea of madness.
Very careful quarantine laws were observed to keep undesirable Earth creatures and diseases out, and the planet was rapidly becoming a paradise. There were no insects on New Yugoslavia except for a strain of stingless Australian honey bees that were needed for pollination. Forests of Earth-type trees were rapidly supplanting the native ferns, but there were no weeds in the fields, no undesirable animals, no mosquitoes in the evenings, and no leeches in the wetlands! Only the most decorative of wild animals were permitted, and birds were limited to the most useful and the most beautiful. Six types of Birds of Paradise were among the most common, and a major debate in the Species Importation Committee was currently going on concerning the importation of butterflies.
If ever there was a planet that was close to paradise, with a perpetually pleasant climate and a complete lack of annoying wildlife, New Yugoslavia was certainly it.
So naturally, the inhabitants all wanted to go to war, and we Kashubian mercenaries were there to rip up their paradise for them.
When the show was over, I got word that the Combat Control Computer and the general liked my idea about teaming up empty tanks with those with observers, and by the time we got to the city, we had ten empty subordinates waiting for us on the battleline.
Of course, I never saw the city itself, not then anyway. At the city terminal, we went through an airlock and into an air-filled tunnel that led to the front. We still had the cobalt-samarium road bed, but we didn’t have a stainless tunnel lining here, just bare rock. The aerodynamics of the situation slowed us down to two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour, not because we couldn’t do any better in the atmosphere, but because the air shock would rattle the stone tunnel walls a bit too much for safety if we went any faster. Still, it was faster than the hundred and thirty-five we could do on our treads.
I got bumped up to Tanker Fourth Class on the road. It was something, I supposed, but I really didn’t know what.
On the way to the front, I got a rundown on my troops and the terrain situation. Besides the usual rockets and drones, nine of them had rail guns, and the tenth had an X-ray laser.
A laser is fast, both from the standpoint of delivering energy at light speed, and from the standpoint of being able to change targets quickly. A big laser can hit fourteen random targets in a second, while a rail gun is lucky to average one. A laser can kill a tank, but the problem was that it takes about five seconds to do it, and they can kill you back in the meantime. What a laser was really good at was knocking out your opponent’s sensors.
The beauty of an X-ray laser was that it could penetrate your enemy’s armor, and put its energy deep in his vitals. It could fry his electronics and cook his observer without having to burn a hole in him first.