I tell you that it was almost as dumb as what went on in Ireland!
Do you realize that while they spoke the same language, the Croats printed their books using the Latin alphabet, while the Serbs used only the Greek alphabet? I assure you that they both worked very hard at not communicating!
But while they were both determined to go to war, they both had similar agricultural economies, and neither one of them had an industrial base sufficient to build weapons more advanced than a crossbow.
The Croats had heard that the Serbs had somehow talked the Wealthy Nations Group into selling them vast amounts of military aid. So the Croats came to us.
What really made it interesting, from our point of view at least, was that the Serbians showed up a week later with the same story. We worked hard at keeping the two sets of belligerent “tourists” apart. Profits could get a lot better that way.
My uncle Wlodzimierz lived in the bunk below me, and I got all the straight inside dope directly from him every night. In the first place, New Yugoslavia was a mere five light years from New Kashubia. We were practically next-door neighbors, as cosmic distances went, and only an hour and a half away by transporter, if such a thing as a transporter going between the two colonial planets could be built. It couldn’t, of course. At least not legally.
One of the lovely things that the Wealthy Nations Group did was to demand that all transporter shipments going from anyplace to anywhere else had to go through the Earth’s solar system, to keep an eye out for contraband, to keep Earth people employed, and to insure that the Wealthy Nations Group got its considerable cut.
But somehow, it seems that the Croatians had acquired the engineering capability to set up their own Hassan-Smith transporters. While they weren’t eager to say just how they had obtained these designs, well, a certain amount of profitable smuggling was going on around the human universe, and New Kashubia was invited to take part in it.
New Yugoslavia was an Earth-like world that already had a good agricultural system operating. They had plenty of surplus food which they would be happy to trade for machinery and other industrial products. They had a normal, Earth-type solar system, with one habitable planet and a dozen more that weren’t very useful except as a source of raw materials. On the moons of their outer planets, they had plenty of ice, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and all the other lovely things that New Kashubia lacked. They even had real dirt!
What the Yugoslavians didn’t have was a system of factories that were currently building stockpiles of modern weapons, whereas, they told us, we Kashubians did.
This revelation took us by surprise, but a check with our computers showed that we, or rather our automatic factories, were indeed making and stockpiling vast quantities of war materials on a contract basis for the Wealthy Nations Group, just in case those worthies ever wanted to make war on anybody. See, when everything is far underground, and tunnel systems are many decades old and go on for thousands of airless miles, it’s pretty easy to hide stuff.
Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing had never mentioned these factories to us, and was in fact still collecting from the Wealthy Nations Group for the equipment being built and stockpiled on our planet. The factories and stockpiles were quickly found, but further searches yielded nothing.
Our first thought was that weapons meant explosives, and explosives are all organic chemicals! A few million tons of organic chemicals of any kind could be reprocessed by our factories into enough food and air to put us on easy street, or at least above the bare subsistence level. Unfortunately, a check with the engineering specifications on the weapons shot this beautiful dream right down to the mercury zone.
We had atomic weapons up the tailpipe. We had lasers up the kazoo. We had rail guns and magnetic launchers and every kind of energy weapon known to man, but no explosives. There were plenty of small arms, but not the ammunition to go with them. There were land mines, artillery shells, and hand grenades, but they were all empty, all waiting to be filled someplace else with the glorious organic chemicals that we needed but didn’t have. Oh, there was a little plastic in some of the wiring, and a little silicon in the computers, but not really enough to write home about. We’d been screwed again.
It was easy to see why the Powers that Be in the Wealthy Nations Group were building armaments on New Kashubia. It was cheap. All that they had had to pay for was some one-time engineering and the short-term rent on the automatic factories that made the automatic factories that made the munitions, plus some minor supervisory fees to Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing. Then, if they ever needed weapons in a hurry, all they had to pay for was the raw materials and transportation fees, most of which would revert back to themselves, anyway. And for the Japanese, it was free money, since at that particular time they had had automatic factories and raw materials sitting around with nothing to do.
Our politicians decided that we owned the munitions factories, since we had already stolen everything that Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing used to own on the planet. If the corporation was still being paid by the Wealthy Nations Group, so much the better, since if we ever got friendly with the Japanese again, we could always subtract those Wealthy Nations Group payments from what we owed Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing. At least we could try, and we liked the Wealthy Nations Group even less than we liked the Japanese, anyway.
The ownership of the weapon stockpiles themselves was perhaps debatable, since the Wealthy Nations Group had paid for the engineering and the production time, but not the raw materials that the weapons were actually made of. Nonetheless, everybody was fairly certain that the Wealthy Nations Group would not like their future property to be sold by a third party to a fourth and a fifth party.
But after considerable debate, our politicians figured that perhaps we could borrow some of this war material, paying theoretical rent on the weapons to ourselves to offset the equally theoretical storage fees on their weapons that we would charge the Wealthy Nations Group, if the Wealthy Nations Group ever found out about what we were doing. At least we could argue that way for a while and maybe stave off an attack launched by the bastards from Earth.
A minority party in our parliament suggested that maybe an attack from Earth would not be all that bad a thing. For one, it would doubtlessly reduce our own population, which was all to the better. More importantly, there would be all the spent explosives and dead enemy bodies that would add to our stock of organic chemicals, and this addition just might be enough to insure our salvation! Fortunately, this suggestion was made by a very small minority party, with only one delegate, and she was safely laughed off the podium.
After weeks of debate, my uncle and his cronies decided that all of this meant that they could probably get away with permanently borrowing the millions of tanks, guns, and other armaments that were sitting around, mostly because nobody was guarding them at present.
All of the stuff was of the latest designs, with lasers, smart missiles (awaiting fuel and explosives), and rail guns. And there was plenty of tunneling, bridging, and drilling equipment, besides. Add to this materiel abundance New Kashubia’s overpopulation, and you can guess what the politicians had in mind.
The offer that they (including my own uncle!) made to the Yugoslavians was that New Kashubia should build and run both ends of the new Hassan-Smith line between the two planets, ostensibly so that the other Yugoslavian belligerents could not consider it an enemy military target, but really so that we could get in on the smuggling that was going on to the other colony planets. This plan also let us get our hands on the engineering for the Hassan-Smith transporters, and that was considered to be very important. There would be other trading partners in the future, and who knew where else we might be able to sell transporters?
Then, rather than just selling the Yugoslavs war materiel at fabulous market prices, and possibly getting the Wealthy Nations Group mad at New Yugoslavia, we offered to rent the equipment and Kashubian operators to go with it. This way, nobody would be buying or selling equipment that was maybe legally the property of the Wealthy Nations Group. Nobody wanted to risk a war with them! Not just yet, anyway.
The Yugoslavs loved the idea, because while they wanted to kill the opposing bastards, cooler heads pointed out that it was always better to go on living oneself. They ordered twenty divisions of armored troops each, to be paid for mostly in agricultural products, and New Kashubia was in the mercenary business.