The War With Earth
Leo Frankowski and Dave Grossman
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my lovely wife, Marina, my beautiful daughter, Katia, and to the Ancient City of Tver, Russia, the “City of Beautiful Women,” where I am building my castle, and have made my home.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Edward Dunnigan and Jackie Britton for their suggestions and their proofreading of this manuscript, and my remarkable partner, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, for always being at my side, even though we live half a world from each other.
Baen Books by Leo Frankowski
A Boy and His Tank
The War With Earth (with Dave Grossman)
The Fata Morgana
Conrad’s Time Machine
PROLOGUE
An Amphibious Attack
on Baden-Baden Island
Rail guns and X-ray lasers being what they are, military doctrine is that if you can see it, you can kill it. If they can see you, you are dead.
The art of war has become the art of not being seen.
Thus it was that I was in my tank, crawling along the bottom of the ocean, leading three squads of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces against the invaders from Earth. They had picked the most isolated spot on the planet for their beachhead, a group of six uninhabited islands under the jurisdiction of the smallest nation on New Yugoslavia, the German Enclave.
New Yugoslavia’s turbulent seas protected us from both enemy sonar and almost everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. Oh, a deep-scan radar might have found us, if it was looking down from low orbit, but rail guns from both sides had taken out everything in orbit long ago.
Anyone using a high-flying aircraft in wartime is simply suicidal.
We had been down here for seven of the planet’s short, twenty-hour days, and we had been having a fine enough time of it. The fiber-optic communication cables we trailed behind us were finer than a human hair, and needed constant patching in these seas. We had lost contact with our main forces three hours after we left, as expected, but we were in touch with each other. Keeping us connected was the job of three semisentient aquatic drones, and not my worry. Connected, we had the bandwidth we needed to live together in Dream World, a sort of virtual reality.
Since all of our tanks had the diamond semiconductor upgrade, they could keep us in Dream World at thirty times normal speed. To us, the week had seemed like almost six standard months. Having one’s lifespan effectively expanded by a factor of thirty was one of the fringe benefits of the job.
A dozen of my people had been raw recruits when we started, and this gave them the time they needed to get through basic training, and then to see a good deal of simulated combat.
Of course, they weren’t told that it was simulated. Dream World was convincing enough to make them think that they were really fighting, and that their friends were dying around them. It was rough on them psychologically, but it let us turn out seasoned troops without having to kill any of them.
After all, they did it to me, and I turned out okay.
I spent most of my time at the University of Oxbridge, working on my B.S. in Agriculture. I already had a Bachelors degree in engineering and a Ph.D. in Military Science, but I also had a major tract of land on New Yugoslavia, and when this war was over, I wanted to be able to manage it properly.
My wife, Kasia, was in her own tank, a hundred meters to my left. She was studying economics, and fuming about not being able to keep in touch with what her stocks were doing on the market. She’d made a fortune at it during our last leave.
One of my subordinate squad leaders, Mirko, spent his spare time in Dream World, working his small farm with two draft horses, the same thing he had just done in the flesh during his last leave. An odd fellow, but a good man to have on your side when things got complicated. He had a knack for asking the right simple question which then made everything else fall into place.
The other squad leader, Lloyd Tomlinson, was also attending the university, working on his law degree, and dating half the girls in the local town.
Maria and Conan seemed to be spending most of their spare time in the sack together. They said that they were too much in love to risk spoiling it by getting married.
Quincy and Zuzanna had been comfortably married for fifty years. He spent much of his time teaching the martial arts and The Way Of The Warrior to the recruits, and anybody else who was interested, including me. Zuzanna usually lived in a sort of pseudo-medieval world filled with castles, knights, and dragons, where magic worked and she was a great warlock.
Dream World could be pretty much whatever you wanted it to be, provided you obeyed orders.
We old hands got together fairly often, socially, and when we did, the intelligent computers in our tanks were always invited. Mine was named Agnieshka. She was a beautiful woman in Dream World, and a good friend of my wife. Kasia’s tank was Eva, a slender Irish girl with huge green eyes. She was equipped with a rail gun for this mission, rather than her usual X-ray laser. When their training schedules permitted, the recruits and their tanks were invited along as well.
Of course, I saw to it that we spent enough time preparing for the upcoming battle, and making sure that everyone knew what our objectives were. They all knew precisely what to do, for at least the first few seconds, at which time I privately expected the battle plan to go west.
They always do.
After that, well, you improvise a lot.
We were now five kilometers from shore, three hundred meters below the surface, nicely lined up, and at a dead stop.
The general rules also state that when you can no longer stay hidden, you should stay quick.
We were well equipped for this. Magnetically strapped to the back of each tank was a thruster unit normally used for space flight. Each unit had a gimbal-mounted hydrogen-oxygen rocket capable of accelerating the tank at forty Gs, which we humans could survive because we were each floating in a liquid bath with the same average density as our bodies.
The unit also contained a pair of Hassan-Smith receivers spatially connected through four other dimensions to some major fuel tanks somewhere on the planet. Thus, we could continue accelerating indefinitely, since we didn’t have to carry our fuel along with us. This was the trick that let us get to the stars in the first place.
It was a pity that the transporters didn’t conveniently lend themselves for use as a battlefield communication device.
A Mark XIX Main Battle Tank does not have a good hydrodynamic form. It’s mostly an armored fusion power supply with some computers and a human being inside.
It moved itself around using a MagLev track-laying system, laying magnetic bars in front of itself, gliding over them, and picking them up as it left. When traveling over a ferro-magnetic surface, it could keep the bars inside itself, magnetize the surface and then move much faster over it. And when you put one on a real MagLev track, it could really move out, hitting three thousand kilometers an hour, in a vacuum.
Weapons and other useful things are strapped on the outside, pretty much wherever they’ll fit. However, for this mission, there was a way around this unstreamlined shape.
Attached to the front of each tank was a long pole tipped with something that looked a lot like an arrowhead from an ancient crossbow bolt. When pushed hard enough through the water, and with air injected just behind the arrowhead, a cavity formed behind it that was big enough for the tank to ride inside. Once we were moving fast enough, the air was no longer needed, and we were moving in something close to a hard vacuum. This permitted us to reach supersonic speeds, under water. At least it worked fine on rocket-powered torpedoes, and we had even tested it, once, on an empty tank, which was good enough for a Kashubian veteran.
When Agnieshka told me that everybody was ready, and the moment had come when our orders said we should attack, I said, “Ladies and gentlemen! It’s time to see to the Earthworms’ proper education! We must teach them that it is not nice to invade somebody else’s planet. I’ll see you again when we’re airborne! Let’s move!”
But actually, it was Agnieshka who gave the firing signal. Timing on this one was very important.