“Oh.”
“Yes. The Powers That Be on Earth were not slow in realizing what such an advance in computer technology meant, both militarily and economically. Earth demanded that the frontier worlds hand over the new technology for making the diamond semiconductors. I don’t think that they realize yet that we had found The Diamond, and that we didn’t make it. Not that it made much difference to the planetary governments, since they hadn’t the slightest idea of what Earth was talking about. The KEF army never told them about the new technology. We were keeping it as a military secret. Even the New Kashubian Parliament was kept in the dark.”
“And Earth figured that we were all stonewalling them,” I said.
“Precisely. And since the automatic medical centers were built on New Kashubia, and since Earth was still very unhappy with the way that New Kashubia had nationalized the property of Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing, a privately owned, Earth-registered corporation, they hit New Kashubia first.”
“My family is in New Kashubia.”
“Mine, too. All we know for sure right now is that they are fighting in the tunnels there. I’m sending New Kashubia half of the forces I have here on New Yugoslavia, but I have been ordered to stay here and defend this planet. Most of the tanks I’ll be sending there are being temporarily assigned to the New Kashubian general staff, which commands more of a home guard than a real fighting force. You and your squad are going, too, but I am ordering you to stay independent. You have a very creative and unorthodox way of handling things, Mickolai. You have a very devious mind, and there is something of the con man in you. I’ve got a hunch that you might think of something that the politically appointed general staff hasn’t, or that you might dare to do something that they wouldn’t. Your orders are to do what seems right to you to save our planet, and our families.”
“You are putting a lot of faith in me, sir. I’ll try to live up to your expectations.”
“Maybe I am. One more squad of line troops probably wouldn’t make that much difference in this war, but one ace in the hole just might. Carry on, Tanker!”
“Yes, sir!”
We saluted, and he disappeared.
I stood there, thinking that if I managed to screw up big time, or better still, get myself killed, I would be giving my general a very convenient scapegoat.
Someone to blame the whole war on.
Me.
* * *
There was quite a line at the arming center, but as soon as my squad was assembled, we were sent to the front of it. The general had given very specific orders concerning us.
The bus was finally taken off Agnieshka’s back, and an X-ray laser was mounted as her main armament. This would not ordinarily have been my first choice, but considering that we would probably end up fighting in the huge mining tunnels on New Kashubia, I suppose it made sense. Letting loose with a rail gun in a metal tunnel didn’t sound like a good way to prolong your life. Glancing to the side, I saw that Kasia and Quincy were also getting lasers, while the other three were getting the more standard rail guns.
They mounted two antipersonnel weapons on each of our tanks, an IR laser and a machine gun. Well, it was actually a small paramagnetic launcher, which threw a stream of relatively heavy slugs, weighing almost a gram each, at fairly low speeds, only about three thousand meters per second. But if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck . . .
We also each got a pair of grenade launchers, with an assortment of fragmentation, concussion, armor piercing, and flash grenades, plus four flavors of gas grenades labeled tear gas, foggy, sleepy, and deadly.
We didn’t get any tunneling equipment, since the ultrasonic tunnelers wouldn’t have worked on most of the metals that New Kashubia was composed of, but they gave us each a standard pair of manipulator arms.
They didn’t think we would need any land mines, but we each got five assorted drones. One of each set was a humanoid drone, of the sort that Quincy and I had bought. It just climbed up on the turret and sat there.
“Agnieshka, is that drone my property?”
“No boss. I checked the serial number.”
“I thought that Quincy and I owned all of them that there were.”
“Apparently not, sir.”
“I can’t imagine what we’re going to do with six humanoid drones. Maybe we can put them to directing traffic.”
“Yes, sir.”
“On a more important topic, we have just been issued a lot of weapons that I, for one, don’t know how to use.”
“Nobody thought that we would ever have much use for antipersonnel weapons, sir.”
“Right. But if we’ve got them we’d better learn how to use them. Download the appropriate programs.”
“I’m doing that now, boss.”
“Tell the others that it’s back to school again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Preparing for Battle
When we left, we had a semisentient ammunition truck following us, tagging along like a hungry stray dog who smells a sausage. Normally, these trucks were issued at a rate of one truck for sixteen squads. Apparently, the general thought that we would be doing an awful lot of shooting. That, or he figured that we’d make good delivery boys.
It was a four-day trip to New Kashubia, since they routed us through New Ireland, Soul City, New Zanzibar, and New Nigeria. This was the long way around, but either the general wanted us to avoid the traffic jam going directly to New Kashubia, or he wanted us to use an infrequently used receiving station on the planet.
The time spent actually in transit varied between a few minutes and thirty hours, according to some rules that a physicist might understand, but I didn’t.
But to get from one interstellar point to another, you have to match speed and direction with the point on the target planet that you are going to. You have to compensate for the spins of both the planet that you are leaving and the one you are going to. These speeds are on the order of a thousand kilometers per hour. Then there are the orbital velocities of both planets. These are typically a hundred thousand kilometers per hour. And then there are the relative velocities of the two stars involved. In the sphere known as Human Space, three hundred light years in diameter, that could be just about anything from zero up to sixty kilometers per second.
To get the proper velocity, so you don’t get smeared over your target planet, they used linear accelerators with a Hassan-Smith transmitter at one end and a receiver at the other. Civilians and other delicate things restricted most accelerators to a little more than one G. There were bulk cargo and military accelerators that boosted at twenty Gs, and sometimes more, but we weren’t using those routes.
Accelerators boosted you for the length of the thing, and then transmitted you back to the beginning, to be boosted some more. You repeated the process until the proper speed was reached.
Of course, you not only needed the right speed, you needed it in the right direction. The linear accelerators had to be built inside a big sphere so they could be pointed in any direction, and because of the speeds involved, the accelerator had to be evacuated.
Getting a hard vacuum was fairly easy, since all you had to do was defocus the transmitter and turn it on. The air all went someplace, and on most planets you didn’t much care where. We used the same trick to evacuate our Loway system.
On New Kashubia, which had to import all of its air, they just drained the accelerator into a mining shaft that went a few hundred kilometers down, letting gravity provide the vacuum, and then recovered the air from down there. I invented that trick myself, before I was forced to enlist in the army.
Finally, when you had the right speed and direction, the transmitter sent you not to the beginning of the accelerator again, but to the planet of your choice, provided they had a receiver waiting for you.
The key to successful transporter operation was that the transmitter had to know precisely where the receiver was at the instant of transmission, and precisely what its velocity vector was at that time. Being off by a few hundred meters, or by a few kilometers per hour, over interstellar distances, resulted in a disaster.
If the receiver wasn’t where the transmitter thought it was, or if it wasn’t operating, you just didn’t arrive. Your constituent atoms were spread over a large volume of space, and that was the end of you. Because of this, receivers were built with a lot of backups, redundant circuits, and extra power supplies.