Not that I’d seen an animal of any description on this planet yet. The domestic herds had been removed when the fighting started, months ago. The native animals had been gone for many years, not because they had been deliberately slaughtered, but because Earth-type plants had gone feral and crowded out most of the more primitive native plants with astounding speed. Native animals, finding Earth-type plants to be calorie free, died.
We went on for yet another half hour more, and I thought that my nerves would fray to shreds. The others were getting pretty testy as well, and I don’t know how many times I told them to shut up and watch for the Serbians. We had gone fully a hundred kilometers without seeing anything but a few dozen wrecked war machines, and almost half that number of decaying human bodies.
It was unreal! Could the enemy have actually turned around and gone home without our noticing it? Surely, that was impossible! Yet we hadn’t even hit a land mine! If I were retreating, I certainly would have left something behind to at least slow the bastards down!
It had to be a trap, but who ever heard of giving up a forty thousand square kilometers of territory just to pull off an ambush? Yet all we saw were the tracks of tanks, guns and drones racing for the horizon.
Then we came to a long line of very suspicious little hills, and I switched up to the forward drones. When a tank goes underground, the first dirt that it displaces gets piled up behind it, until it has made enough of a tunnel for the dirt to be used filling that tunnel up. There were over six hundred of those little piles on the desert floor in front of us, and the shape and direction of the piles said that they had gone where we had just been. They had to be behind us!
“All stop!” I shouted over the comlasers, and fed the information fast back to the Combat Control Computer. “They’re behind us! Put the wagons in a circle!”
That last wasn’t a standard military order, but everybody knew what I meant. The drones came back as fast as they could, the girls dropped back to cover us, and the four of us humans went up to the new rear where it was relatively safe, or at least less dangerous. We all faced to our old rear, which is much of the reason why I’m still alive today.
A few drones who were closest were soon busy stringing fiber optic-cables between us, and I was quickly giving the Combat Control Computer and the artillery our present location. The global positioning satellites were long gone, but our own internal inertial guidance system always tells us exactly where we are, right down to the nearest centimeter.
I saw the units on both of our flanks imitate our maneuver, so the Combat Control Computer apparently approved of what I did. His circuits must have been busy giving the word to the whole assault force, because he was a full minute getting back to me.
I felt him come on-line, but I never heard what he had to say.
The first enemy tank to break the surface came spewing up from the ground over a kilometer away from us, and his first act was not to fire at us, but while he was still in the air, he sent a slash of almost relativistic osmium needles across the ground that cut all of our optical fibers. A second tank came up within milliseconds after him to knock out our IR repeaters. Our lines of communication had been cut!
A bare kilometer to our rear, virtually on top of us by the standards of modern combat, a total of seventy-two Serbian tanks erupted from the ground, coming up fast at such a steep angle that I was sure that they must have been hundreds of meters down when we went over them. They must have really gunned it for the last few meters, because they overrode their ultrasonic tunnelers and they came flying out of the ground in a spray of sand.
I said “DO IT THUS,” as I got Eva to work, blinding as many of them as possible with her X-ray laser.
But there were so many of the bastards that she and I were more than five whole seconds doing the job, and in that horribly long time, they chopped us up into tin cans and dog food!
In coming up so fast and so steeply, they had exposed their relatively poorly armored bellies to us for almost two seconds. I think that they had planned to catch us from the rear, and blow us all away before we had time to rotate our guns or even think. But since we were already facing in the right direction, in those brief moments my squad killed almost thirty of them!
That helped, but it was not nearly enough to insure our survival. We were still outnumbered by more than three to one, and they all had observers!
Yet even as Eva and I had told the girls where the enemy was, the Serbs were obvious enough that even an empty tank could spot them. And of course, once the enemy opened fire, the girls would have had no problems knowing where they were, even if they’d been hiding. To a certain extent, the enemy’s bad tactics had offset their overwhelming advantage in observers.
They did nothing to offset our disadvantage in numbers, and we bled. Despite the fact that half the enemy was blind, all around me, I saw my friends and trusting subordinates die.
We all fired all of our rockets to give the enemy something to shoot at besides us, and were surprised when two of them actually got through and took out a couple of the Serbian tanks. They tried the same stunt on us, but I ordered the others to ignore the rockets and concentrate on the tanks, while for a few moments Eva and I worked on the incoming rockets with her laser. We got most of them, but nothing that my team could do could offset the enemy’s godawful numerical superiority.
Zuzanna and her Kazimierz were cut in half right down the middle by a burst of rail gun fire. Radek and Boom-Boom spun halfway around, trying to run away, I think, and then suddenly their entire front half was gone, and the rest of it did a double flip in the air. All nine of the girls with rail guns were killed, one after another, and Quincy’s tank went silent. In a few seconds, Agnieshka, Eva, and I were alone with twenty enemy tanks still alive and shooting. I knew then that I was a dead man.
There was no hope at all.
Then suddenly, it was over.
Incredibly, within a fraction of a second, the enemy were all dead!
It was only later that I figured out what happened. All of us, my squad and the Serbians, were so intent on the firefight that none of us thought to look for artillery. There simply wasn’t time. We were out of touch with our Combat Control Computer, and the same had to be true of the Serbs, what with their flying eruption from the ground. No fiber optic-cable could have withstood that!
But one of our artillery officers with an IQ of about seven hundred had launched a heavy salvo in the general direction of where he thought the enemy might come out. What’s more, for the shells to have gotten there when they did, he would have had to have fired within milliseconds of the time when I first reported that the Serbs were digging in to come up behind us. He just fired at where he thought they might be and assumed that his shells were smart enough to do the rest, and he was absolutely right!
I didn’t know who my benefactor was, but I swore that if I ever found him, I would eagerly buy his drinks for the next ten years, and I would kiss his smelly feet while I was doing the buying!
“Good God in Heaven!” I said to Agnieshka and Eva. “We have just been given a new life!”
But both of them were busy making sure that the enemy dead stayed that way. The female of the species is deadlier than the rest of us working slobs. I saw six coffins eject, only to be cut up before they could hit the ground. Admittedly, we were in no position to take prisoners, but I still was shocked at this unnecessary brutality.
“Damn you both! There was no sensible reason for doing that!”
“If they live, they’ll just get into another squad of tanks and we’ll have to fight them again!” Agnieshka said.
“And if it was me that was ejecting and his tank that was killing me?”