New Kashubia has a very short local day, just over five standard hours. This meant that we could only shoot at the sun half of the time. And for half of that, the probe was on the other side of the sun when the needles got there, so it was a matter of shooting eleven seconds on, and eleven off, for two and a half hours, and then taking a few hours off. At that rate, we had ammunition to last for three Earth-standard days.
It was tempting to use the X-ray lasers on the other three tanks to lend the rail guns a bit of a hand, but the simulations proved that over a hundred million kilometers, the beams would spread out too much to do any serious damage. All we would accomplish would be to tell the enemy that he was being shot at, and where it was being done from.
After making five trips to bring in the rest of the ammo, we sat idle for an hour, to see that all was going well. Not that there was anything to see. It was frustrating. We couldn’t tell if we were accomplishing anything at all.
There was some additional radiation coming from the neutron star. Was it enough to do any damage? We didn’t know.
Finally, I said, “Okay. Zuzanna, you are in command here. The rest of us are going to see what else we can accomplish, and try to find us a way back under the surface. We’ll leave trail markers for you to follow. Leave yourselves enough ammo to dig yourselves a deep hidey-hole, if it looks like you’ll be caught in the searchlight. I’m taking the humanoid drones, and the mice, but leaving you the rest of them for a perimeter defense here. Any questions?”
“If it’s all the same to you, we’ll start digging that hidey-hole now. That way, it will have plenty of time to cool off before we need it.”
“Suit yourself. Anything else?”
“No, Mickolai, we discussed everything at the planning sessions. You three take care of yourselves. Don’t let Quincy do anything foolish.”
“You too, love,” he answered.
With Quincy at point and me taking rear guard, we headed out. Kasia objected that as leader, my place was at the center, but I guess that in a lot of ways, I’m pretty old-fashioned. Even if they are warriors, ladies have to be protected. I told her that as the leader, I would give the orders, and her tank put her in the center.
It was over nine hundred kilometers to the main shaft into the planet. This was doubtless well guarded by the enemy, but there simply wasn’t another way in. Certainly, we couldn’t go back the same way we had come up, and the third exploratory shaft was on the other side of the planet. Even if we went there, and were able to get down the shaft, we couldn’t see a way to get from the shaft to the tunnel system. Shooting a hole to the mining tunnels from the inside of the shaft, where you were only a few meters away from the wall, was a sure way to lose the tank and its observer. Furthermore, if one shaft didn’t have the promised iron lining, it seemed likely that the other shaft wouldn’t have one either.
There was nothing for it but to either bluff or fight our way in, or to stay out here for the duration.
It took us two days to get there, zig-zagging along the troughs of the dunes. Going on top would have exposed us to any observers that the Earthers had out, and cracks in the dunes had made the top route impassible, anyway. Tungsten is a very malleable metal, and it had been hot when the planet shrank as it cooled. Many of the walls of the dunes got more than vertical, overhanging the valleys below.
I spent most of the two months in Dream World working on my degree in agriculture, Kasia was studying economics, and Quincy said that he was meditating.
A billion years of bombardment by hard radiation from the neutron sun had polished the surface, making it smooth and slippery, but filling the valleys, a bit, with a dust that had vacuum welded itself into a fairly flat surface that we could travel on, after a fashion.
At every intersection, and every kilometer or so in between, Kasia’s tank, Eva, blasted a small spot on the tungsten walls with her X-ray laser, sometimes shaped like an arrow, pointing which way we had gone. These would stay warm enough for weeks for a tank’s sensors to see easily, and the slight, shiny depressions would stay there forever, showing everyone where we had been.
At some intersections she wrote “Mickolai says go this way.” At others she said, “Simon says go here.” Simon was always a liar. Maybe it might have confused somebody. I was more worried about losing half my squad than about any hypothetical enemy who might be following us.
And if we couldn’t figure a way into the main shaft, it would be nice to be able to get back to the others with their rail guns before we were hit by the radiation blast from our star’s searchlight. Our X-ray lasers, working together, would take less than a week to burn a hole into tungsten big enough to hide us.
For the last twenty kilometers, we sent a drone ahead of Quincy. It slowed us down a bit, but machines are a lot more expendable than friends. When we finally got there, I sent a mouse over the edge of the last dune to take a peek.
I didn’t like what we saw.
For three kilometers around the shaft, the area had been strip mined flat. There wasn’t a place where a mouse could hide on the way in.
The shaft itself was built up like an ancient fortress, about forty meters high. There were floodlights covering the whole cleared area, and behind them, we could see sixteen rail guns mounted on tall platforms, backed up by lots and lots of antipersonnel weapons.
“Suggestions, anyone?” I said.
“Let’s go back and buy that desert island. Maybe we can sit this one out,” Kasia said.
“Now, now, none of that,” Quincy said. “This will be a piece of cake.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Of Mice and Rail Guns
“I take it that you have another idea?” I said.
“I have the beginnings of one. My first thought is that we came up here to see if we couldn’t eliminate the old probe ship that links this system to Earth, and thus cut the enemy’s supply lines. Our three rail guns are generating some additional radiation on the sun. Nineteen rail guns would do a much better job than three, and here our pleasant adversaries have provided us with the equipment that we need.”
“But we don’t control those guns. They do.”
“No, they don’t. Human beings can’t control a rail gun. Without a lot of protection, humans can’t get near one when it’s shooting, even in a vacuum. Computers control rail guns.”
“Fine. But they are not our computers.”
“They could be, if our fine cybernetic ladies talked those slow, obsolete, silicon number crunchers into it. What we need to do is to give our girls the opportunity to do so. Now, we’ve got these six mice, and a few dozen kilometers of fiber-optic strands with us. Does that give you a strong enough hint?”
“It’s time to run some more simulations,” Kasia said.
“Right. But if we can make this work, I want one of those rail guns to blast a tunnel through one of these dunes, so if the rest of the plan doesn’t work, we’ll have a place to hide when the searchlight comes on,” I said.
“A prudent, if cowardly, course of action,” Quincy said.
“If the rest of the team, including your wife, gets here late, they’ll need that tunnel, too,” I said. “Think about what she’ll say to you if we let everybody die.”
“As I said, a prudent course of action.”
* * *
Our six little mice were acting like mice, scurrying for a bit, one at a time, at seemingly random angles, and then stopping for a bit, while the others had a chance to move.
All the while, they were edging closer to the main shaft, each dragging a thin optic fiber behind it, and all of them taking turns pulling along a single fine superconducting power wire to keep their capacitors charged up.
One wire was all that was normally used on New Kashubia. On a solid metal planet, you don’t need a power return line or a safety ground wire very often.
The mice were being controlled by Eva, but all of us were watching, looking through their eyes, and the eyes of the humanoid drone lying prone on the top of a dune.