The next meet was an away game, and Kren won the accuracy throw, not quite breaking his old record. The odds only paid three for two.
Dol said that a billion here, a billion there, hey, it all added up. She now had more than twice the cash that he did.
Kren decided that, computing his projected expenses, he couldn’t afford to play it safe any more. He’d have to go back to betting it all on every event, just to break even.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Last War and Planetary Defenses
New Yugoslavia, 2213 a.d
Toward the end of the last war, our enemy, a renegade computer, as it turned out, had developed a method of destroying all of the Hassan-Smith transmitters and receivers on an entire planet. He had managed to do this to four of our colonized planets. He was too dangerous to leave alive, so I had fried him without finding out his secret.
Attempts to figure out how this had been accomplished had so far ended in failure. We even tried to duplicate the computer, and had tried to get it to develop the same technology, but no go.
The receivers had been placed in each solar system by a fleet of robot ships as they spread out from Earth. These ships never stopped at the solar system in question, they simply passed through at almost light speed, dropped a probe equipped with transceivers, and headed toward the next possible solar system.
But with all of the transmitters and receivers gone, the only way to get in contact with the cut-off planets was by ships moving at less than light speed.
Soon after the war, six new ships had been launched from the planets closest to each of our missing friends, each bringing transceivers with them.
Before their ships got to them, the inhabitants of New Erie had managed to build transceivers from scratch, and reestablish contact with the rest of Human Space. The inhabitants and the Earthly invaders had worked out a truce, figuring to let the outcome of the war be settled somewhere else, as it probably already had been.
Now the first ship had gotten to New Israel. The Israelis had fought a six-year-long slugfest with Earth’s abandoned forces, with things escalating until their population was down to one tenth of what it had been before the war. Earth’s forces had been completely obliterated. Their once beautiful planet had been reduced to radioactive craters and scar tissue.
With hindsight, they would have been so much better off surrendering, since they would have ended up winning in any event. But some people just don’t know how to quit.
Massive amounts of aid was now pouring into their planet, and what was left of them was being invited to join in the new political order.
The fate of the other two planets remains to be seen.
Our general staff had now seen to it that every inhabited planet had at least two disassembled transceivers hidden on it, along with assembly instructions. With them powered down, it was felt unlikely that any detection scheme could find and destroy them. If ever this transceiver-destroying technology was invented again by another enemy, we were ready for it. But it was much like locking the barn door after all the horses had escaped.
* * *
Ships were being launched very regularly from the New Yugoslavia system as well. Picket ships for our planetary defense system. Now that a duplicate set of production lines had been built, we were launching two a week.
The sixty ships for the Distant Early Warning Sphere were now all on their way, although it would be a few years before they got to their destinations. Once on station, they would each place over a thousand sensor clusters in their sector, to watch for incoming Mitchegai ships. These sensors also each contained a full-sized receiver, so that a counterattack could be launched through any one of them.
Also, every one of the ships and sensors would contain one of the microtransceivers that permitted small memory chips to be sent quickly to anywhere in Human Space. Up until now, these expensive items had been restricted to Combat Control Computers, but in the future, I intended every one of our fighting machines to have one.
Every one of our ships and sensors would have an artificial intelligence aboard. Years ago, when the computers in all military machines had been upgraded from silicon chips to diamond ones, I’d bought up over a million of the old computers. There was no great need for cybernetic speed on either the ships or the sensors, and so when the silicon ladies volunteered for this duty, I gave them my blessings, and my thanks.
Our ships did not use the hydrogen-oxygen rockets that the old Earth ships still used. Cesium ion engines were cheaper to build and to keep supplied. New Kashubia had vast amounts of cesium available that nobody had ever figured a good use for. Now, they were mining it in great quantities.
At one light-year out from our sun, another sixty ships were being sent to make up the Comet Belt Sphere. It would have the same number of sensors as the DEW Sphere, but they would be planted four times more densely.
Additional spheres would be set up at a half light-year, a quarter light-year, and an eighth light-year.
Inside that, there would be a diffuse cloud of sensors throughout the solar system.
Then the planet itself would have three spheres of orbital defense, plus many other sensors in a loose cloud.
None of these ships and sensors would be armed, exactly, except for a massive self-destruct mechanism. They were there to detect the enemy, and to function as gateways where our fighting forces could exit into a wide variety of points. The plan was to let our forces go almost instantaneously to any point in the system where they were needed.
Getting those fighting forces together was another problem entirely.
Plans for our planetary defensive system were sent free to every planet in Human Space. We also offered a “Starter Kit” of basic machinery, so that they could do as we had done, using the fighting machines that they already had. We charged full price for that, but gave them credit on it.
More than half of the planets were building their own systems. As for the rest, well, we had done our best.
CHAPTER FORTY
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
Offers You Can’t Refuse
Things started to settle down to a routine.
Dol made an inspection trip to the building and packaging site twice a week. Since his academic grades were now outstanding, sometimes Kren cut classes and went with her in the mornings, but not too often.
The design of the City of Dren was such that you could go almost everywhere by tunnel, and not have to expose yourself to the winter weather. Construction sites were something different. They had to wear heavy winter clothing and electrically heated underwear to go outside and inspect the progress of the construction work.
Kren found it almost as annoying as wearing armor. He vowed that when circumstances permitted, he would move to the tropics, where it was always warm, even if it was more expensive to live there.
Construction workers wore form-fitting, electrically heated garments in the wintertime, with safety helmets. Like most Mitchegai garments, these were color coded according to their specific trade. Heavy equipment operators wore black, plumbers wore brown, electricians red, and so forth. Their status and skill levels were displayed by the colors of their equipment belts.
In the summer, they might work nearly naked, but they still wore their belts and their color-coded safety helmets.
There was a separate construction language, Geno, but there were over a dozen dialects within this language that were almost languages in their own right.
There was an intricate cross-referencing between the various Mitchegai languages. An electrician, for example, could talk with an electrical engineer with little difficulty, but had trouble conversing with a hydraulics engineer, even though these two engineers could easily communicate with each other, and an electrician could always speak to a plumber.
There was no possibility of Kren’s cutting his physical training classes, or his obligations to the director, so he always had to leave early in order to be back in Dren by seven, in the early afternoon.
Bronki ran the sales end of things fairly well, and sales increased, about one part in six, every week, and with very little spent on advertising. There was nothing on television, and only a few posters in the underground walkways.
One said, “The Superior Food Corporation now has a store in Dren! We have the best children at the best prices! Check us out! We’re right under Bronki’s Place! Or phone 24B9-129A3.”
Soon, she was opening a second, larger store, on the other side of town.