There had to be a better way.
I had five very intelligent and superbly well-trained subordinates working for me. Was there ever a combat squad before in history in which every member had a Ph.D. in Military Science? And I had six very intelligent machines as well. When they are well enough trained and programmed, humans and computers complement each other very well. The humans can do things that the computers are not very good at, and vice versa.
After a month of working at standard tactics, out of the books as it were, we were all dissatisfied. None of the stuff we were learning really fit our strange situation. We had to work out something better on our own. I told Quincy, Zuzanna, and Conan that they were the Invaders from Earth, and that the rest of us were The Kashubian Volunteers, and we fought it out in Dream World. A week later, we traded sides, and went at it again. I shuffled the teams, made it girls against boys, and tried it a third time.
In every scenario we ran, there were a godawful number of civilian casualties.
Oh, we were guessing about a large number of things. We didn’t know how many men and machines Earth was using to invade us. Earth had a population as large as that of all of the other planets combined. What percentage of that population were they throwing at us?
We had no idea.
We didn’t know what the level of their military technology was. New Kashubia had been Earth’s arsenal before we had nationalized all of the factories. Had they built another one in the intervening five years? Did they have a back up in the first place?
We just didn’t know.
The only thing definitely in our favor was the receiving station through which we were entering New Kashubia.
The New Nigerian Transporters, a transmitter and three receivers, had been funded by a single wealthy individual as an act of charity, but in fact hunter-gatherers have very little use for interstellar trade, and the receivers at both ends of all three lines were usually idle.
The maps of New Kashubia that we had been provided with showed the receiver to be in the copper layer, and over fifty kilometers from much of anything else on the planet. Our engineers had been willing to take the philanthropical twit’s money, but knew very well that a bunch of primitive hunter-gatherers wouldn’t be sending us very much. For good and sufficient reasons, they had put the New Nigerian receiver where it wouldn’t get in the way.
It wasn’t likely that the Earth forces would be guarding it very carefully.
The general had done that much for us, anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
First Blood
Quincy was our best man at close-in fighting, be it with a tank, a drone, or bare knuckles, so he was the first one of us to land on New Kashubia. I followed two minutes later, which was as fast as the small, New Nigerian transmitter would allow. In Dream World, that seemed like an hour. At combat speed, it was almost twice that.
When I got there, the receiver was standing on the floor of one of the forty-meter-wide mining tunnels that the huge mining machines drilled. The copper was slightly tarnished, suggesting that this tunnel had been filled with air for a while.
“They had a two-man listening post here,” Quincy reported. “I took them out. I doubt if they had a chance to report anything. I’ve tapped into their comm lines, and we’re trying to decode them now. Judging from what was on their clipboard, they weren’t due to be relieved for six hours, standard.”
There were two dead men lying where they had been dragged aside and neatly laid out with their heads in almost the right positions. They had both been decapitated by an antipersonnel laser beam, which had cauterized the wounds, except for the major arteries. There was less blood than was usual in our simulations. They were the first real combat casualties I’d ever seen. Their faces looked surprisingly peaceful. . . .
Judging from the half-eaten rations that were lying around, it looked like they had both been eating lunch together when Quincy had appeared and killed them. That suggested poor discipline, since one of them should have stayed on guard. At least, he would have in our army.
They were Orientals, Chinese perhaps, and were wearing what we would call work fatigues, not the far more expensive Squid Skin. Their weapons were old style assault rifles, pistols, and rocket launchers, all powered by chemical explosives. The pistols were still in their holsters, the rest were all stacked neatly against the wall. The two soldiers had been killed before they had a chance to get to their weapons.
All this suggested that the Earth forces were either underfunded, or that they had second-rate troops around doing low-grade tasks like guarding unused receivers.
Agnieshka found a Kashubian comm line and tapped into it, trying to get some idea of what was happening in the war.
I got into my humanoid drone and adjusted the Squid Skin to resemble the enemy uniform. I picked up some of the enemy weapons and went down the corridor to stand guard. Until the whole squad arrived, I didn’t want any interruptions. Soon, Quincy was in his drone, standing guard in the other direction. Breaking codes and ferreting out information from comm lines were tasks that the computers could do better without our help.
It seemed like forever before Kasia arrived, followed by Conan, Maria, Zuzanna, and the ammunition truck.
By then, Agnieshka and Marisa, Quincy’s tank, could report the areas under enemy control, where the fighting was going on, and the approximate numbers of the enemy. They had some forty thousand troops on New Kashubia, and ninety percent of them were infantry. The rest were in light combat vehicles, for the most part. They had only a few dozen main battle tanks on the planet.
Only twenty percent of their infantry were equipped for fighting in a vacuum. An odd choice, since New Kashubia didn’t have a natural atmosphere. All of the air in the tunnels had been imported. My best guess was that troops on Earth were used mostly for police work, and peacekeeping operations, not real combat.
But it is dangerous to underestimate your enemy. Even if it seems that they are acting stupid.
“But boss, the key fact that I’ve unearthed is that the receivers in New Kashubia that were assigned to the original probe sent from Earth are still operating at maximum capacity. They are still sending in more troops.”
“Okay, people,” I said. “We will do plan C.”
Plan A had been “The war is over, our side has already won, let’s go join the party!”
Plan B was “The war is over, our side lost, and we are about to become guerilla terrorists.”
Plan C involved shooting at the local sun.
When the first probe got to this system, it found a neutron star that was putting out two searchlight beams of deadly radiation. This star was spinning, end over end, once every twenty-two seconds, in a plane that was at a high angle to the orbit of the only planet left in the system. The only place in the entire system where the probe’s computer could find to put itself in the “safe, stable orbit” that its programming required was at right angles to the radiation beams, in a twenty-two-second orbit around the star.
This put it very close to the tiny star’s surface.
Rail gun needles had plenty of speed to get to the probe and do damage, but at a range of over a hundred million kilometers, we really doubted if we could hit it, even if we tried a few billion times, which we intended to do.
We could, however, hit the sun right behind it. When you added the quarter light speed of a rail gun needle to the neutron star’s fierce gravitation, the impact was enough to kick up some considerable radiation on its own. Maybe enough radiation to fry the probe’s robot brain.
Of course, nobody had ever tried this, but it looked like a pretty good bet: one truckload of ammunition against the chance of disrupting the enemy’s only supply line.
We headed out as soon as the truck arrived, with Quincy at point, Zuzanna as slack, and Conan as rear guard. More troops would be following us, using the same receiver, but they would be assigned to the general staff, and not acting independently like us. Not wanting to explain things that they didn’t have a need to know, I figured to be gone when they got here.
First, we had to get to the surface of the planet. The nearest route took us three thousand kilometers west, and then two thousand kilometers up.
Those distances were as the crow flies, of course, and there weren’t any crows on New Kashubia. The way we had to go, it was much longer.