In addition to paying a hefty mercenary rental fee, the Croatians said that New Kashubia could have all the ice, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and whatever else we wanted and could carry away from the outer planets and moons of the New Yugoslavia system, since the Serbs were not likely to find out about it, or to locate our transporters, even if they did.
Then we got the same deal from the Serbs, just to be on the safe side.
It looked like a good deal for all concerned, except maybe for those poor bastards who would have to be fighting somebody else’s war. But that wasn’t my problem. I was in engineering!
I was coopted into the engineering group that worked on setting up the transporters between us and the Yugoslavians.
It proved to be impossible for us to manufacture the new Yugoslavian Transporter terminal and smuggle it through Earth to New Yugoslavia. All of the existing “legal” terminals were carefully guarded by Terran security, and those boys are always entirely too efficient. Oh, you could get coded messages by them easily enough in the mail, but heavy machinery? No way!
The Yugoslavians themselves did not have the industrial capacity to do the job, but they did have the connections on the smuggling circuit to get the job done. See, the terminal they had on the smuggling circuit was built on the cheap, and wasn’t tunable for New Kashubia. We wanted control over what was going in and out, and we told the Yugoslavians that compared to rebuilding what they had, it was cheaper to build a whole new one, and they bought it.
It turned out that it was possible to build a Hassan-Smith device under the surface of New Kashubia that could transmit directly to one below the surface on New Yugoslavia, without the need for the usual pair of orbiting solar power stations. All you had to have was enough power, and we had uranium by the megaton. Uranium power plants were easier for us to build than solar plants, since we lacked spaceships, or thought we did, and they were nice from the standpoint of keeping the transporters hidden from the Wealthy Nations Group.
Another advantage was that nobody used fission plants anymore, and we were the only people who had reactor grade uranium available. If the transmitters ever fell into other hands, well, the thieves would have to deal with us to keep the stations working.
Soul City, the planet given to the American Black People, got the contracts for the transporter receivers built for New Yugoslavia since they were in the contraband net and had the necessary industrial facilities. Financing was arranged through the Yugoslavians, of course. New Kashubia still didn’t have any credit.
I spoke English, so I had a hand in the engineering arrangements that were made with the Soul City designers for the construction of both of the New Yugoslavia Transporter terminals. One was to be built underground on the planet itself at a secret location that everybody soon knew about, and through it we would deliver our armies and pick up our agricultural booty. It was to be powered by its own fission plant, which would be built and fueled by New Kashubia. It takes a lot of power to transmit, but very little to receive, so we could send the power plant through after the receiver was working. The other transporter was the same as the first, but installed on Freya, one of the moons of Woden, the only gas giant in the system. This was to give us a limitless supply of carbon dioxide, nitrogen (in the form of ammonia), water and other lovely things.
Another part of the deal was that the New Yugoslavians would be using the transporter on Freya, too. Their Planetary Ecological Board passed a ruling that if they were going to be exporting large quantities of foodstuffs, the exporter would be required to replace the elements shipped—oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and etc.—with raw materials from Freya to keep the biosphere of New Yugoslavia in balance.
Actually, it would take huge shipments for thousands of years for any such losses to be noticeable, and I think my uncle talked them into the ruling just to get them to pay for half of the Freyan transporter. He always believed in doing well by doing good.
Then there was the building of our end of the New Kashubian-New Yugoslavian Transporter Link, but that involved little more than feeding the engineering data into the input device of an automatic factory and picking the options we wanted off a menu.
All in all, it only took us a few months to get the new transporters built.
While I was thusly occupied, impressing my colleagues and getting promoted in the engineering section, Uncle Wlodzimierz was deep into the politics of the situation.
First there was the worry about training the mercenaries. We Kashubians hadn’t gone to war for a hundred and fifty years, and even back then we had not gone voluntarily. Except for what we had read in cheap paperback novels, nobody knew anything about being a soldier. Were we going to have to hire mercenaries from someplace else to train our own mercenaries so that we could go to New Yugoslavia to get killed? Where could we get mercenaries in this day and age? What could we pay these foreigners with? Gold? Would they take that? And how could we feed them when we couldn’t even feed our own people?
Then somebody pointed out that nobody on the other side of the fight would know anything about soldiering either, because they would mostly be just like us, so it wouldn’t matter if our own troops in New Croatia were ignorant. We were hiring ourselves out to another bunch of amateurs! We didn’t really hate the opposition, so the less efficient we were at killing, the better!
What was important was that we should put on a good, big show, with lots of parades and demonstrations blowing up a lot of useless desert and so on. But to be seriously out trying to kill somebody we didn’t even know? Are you crazy?
After three weeks of heated debate on the subject of military training, my uncle suggested that we should inspect the weapons stockpile to see just what our boys would be training to use.
The council immediately voted him to be made a committee of one to go do just that thing, and he went. When he inspected the weapons that we intended to borrow, he found that all of our fears were for nought. Every major piece of military hardware was equipped with computers that were either sentient or so close to it that you couldn’t tell the difference. He knew it was true because they told him so themselves! And like any other personal computers worth having, they were programed to train their own operators, so that the problem was either solved or hadn’t existed in the first place. He reported back, and the argument on the floor immediately changed subject.
The next problem was getting a sufficient number of volunteers for the New Kashubian Expeditionary Forces. A few romantic souls yearned for the glory of flashing sabers and cavalry charges, and if they couldn’t get that, well, an armored assault would be okay, too.
Some more sensible folks joined up because they were sick of living on rotten food, and too little of it, and in single sex barracks, even if they were made of gold. The army looked like a better deal since nothing could possibly be worse than their present situation.
Then too, the deal involved transportation to New Yugoslavia, and by all reports, New Yugoslavia was a pretty nice place. And who knows? Once you got there, maybe the Yugos would let you immigrate permanently. They already had thirty other ethnic groups. What were a few Kashubians, more or less?
But while volunteers flocked in by the hundreds and hundreds, our existing contracts with the Croatians alone called for mercenaries by the thousands and thousands.
The lack of volunteers was made more serious since the Macedonian Yugoslavians were worried about the Montenegrin Yugoslavians, and had ordered four divisions just to be on the safe side. And so naturally the Montenegrins promptly ordered five divisions just in case, and paid cash in advance to get their divisions first.
This set a trend that our warmongering Kashubian salesmen couldn’t refuse, and before long the various Yugoslavian factions were clamoring with money in their hands to outbid one another with such vigor that they forgot to get mad at us for renting ourselves out to fight on most of the sides of what was shaping up to be a twelve-sided war.
The Slovenes ordered a few divisions in case the war spilled over onto them, and the few Muslims left in New Bosnia did the same.
The real minorities in New Yugoslavia, namely the Slovaks, the Bulgarians, the Ruthenians, the Czechs, the Romanians, the Vlachs, the Italians, and the Gypsies, all of whom were living separately on fairly small islands, clubbed together to order two divisions of seagoing troops to stand guard just in case while everybody else was fighting.