We didn’t know what, if anything, the Earthworms had on guard duty, be it men or machines. But we knew that whatever they had, they or it had been trained or developed on Earth, where things like rodents existed. Things that had to be ignored, or you would be setting off false alarms all the time.
The little Squid Skin coverings probably helped, too.
It took hours for them to make it to the main shaft, and for whatever reason, they didn’t seem to be noticed. At least, nobody shot at them.
In fact, there didn’t seem to be any enemy activity at all.
“Maybe nobody’s home,” Kasia said.
“One can always hope,” Quincy said. “But those rail guns were never put there by our army, and the platforms that they are sitting on are made of painted steel. Nobody on New Kashubia would ever paint anything. Anything organic has always been expensive here, and the volatile gasses given off by drying paint are hard for the air-cleaning systems to dispose of. Bare steel works just fine in a vacuum, and if there was ever any danger of corrosion, we’d just make whatever it was out of a gold alloy, or something else that would never rust.”
“I know. Earth wouldn’t have gone through all that work and expense and then just abandoned it. Then why don’t they do something?”
“Maybe they don’t know that there is anything to do. You kids never spent much time on Earth. You don’t know how Earthworms think. It would never occur to New Kashubians to defend that shaft in the first place. Defend it against whom? Invading Space Aliens? Because who else would be on the surface? But Earthworms think of tunnels as being someplace that you might need to escape from, so they are afraid of their only escape route being captured.”
“And being Kashubians, we think of the surface as being something to escape from, for very good reasons,” I said.
“Precisely, kid.”
What looked like a fortress wall was never intended to be any such thing. It was a lid to keep our star’s searchlight radiation from getting down into the tunnel system. It was a big tin can, fabricated out of sheet steel, with stainless steel air locks and passage ways zig-zagging inside of it. Then they filled the can with crude, unrefined lead, melted and cast in place.
Defended as it was, it wouldn’t be easy to get into, but then, we didn’t have to get into it, not at first at least.
All we had to do was get to some of the communication lines that controlled the guns.
The little wheels the mice ran on had suction cups on them, but in a vacuum, suction cups don’t do you any good. They also had magnets both in the tires and on their underbodies, and these did the trick.
Once they got to the steel-covered wall, they simply rolled up it, still zig-zagging and playing like mice. Since they were now on a vertical surface, this shouldn’t have fooled either an intelligent human or an intelligent machine. But we didn’t know what we were dealing with, so anything was worth a try.
The plans we had of the old Japanese installation were sketchy at best, and we had no idea of what modifications had been made by the Earthers. It was a matter of looking around, finding a conduit that looked like it might have a comm line in it, tracing it out, and eventually, if we could find a hidden nook that it went by, oh so gently nibbling it open to see what was on the inside.
On the fifth try, we hit pay dirt, a main buss line that wasn’t even encrypted. Soon, all six of the mice were gathered around, and our cybernetic ladies got to work.
Hours went by, but I didn’t want to rush them. They knew what they had to accomplish better than I did.
We humans sat around my living room, talking and watching television, living in Dream World, but at standard speed, not times thirty. The computer power was needed elsewhere.
We were talking about maybe calling it a night when Agnieshka, Eva, and Marysia came back in the room, and we felt ourselves shift back to times thirty speed.
“I think that’s done it,” Agnieshka said. “We’ll want to keep a close eye on things for a while yet, but we finally have that fellow under control.”
“What fellow do you mean?” I asked.
“Earth’s computer. New Kashubian engineers would have put each of those guns under a separate computer, and then linked them all so they could talk to each other. These people from Earth seem to be central control freaks. They have everything in their army tied into one huge computer. It’s slow, being made out of silicon, but it is big. We had to design three new viruses, plus a worm, to chip off small parts of it, rewrite those sections so they would be under our control, and then chip off a few more small parts, and do it again. He had absolutely paranoid alarm circuits all over the place, and if we hadn’t been thirty times faster than he was, we never could have done it.”
“Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you not only have control of those guns out there, but also control over the entire enemy army?” I said.
“We have control over their command and control computer, but that’s not like somebody having control over our CCC. With us, everybody takes orders directly from the general staff through the CCC. The Earthers still have the traditional command structure set up, with twelve grades of enlisted men, and twelve levels of officers. Their computer handles communications, but many decisions are made by the hierarchy.”
“Yes,” Quincy said, jumping up, grinning wildly, and gesticulating enthusiastically. “But if we control their communications, we are in a position to do all sorts of amusing things to them. But we’ve got to be careful with it. If they start to distrust their computer, they have lots of backups available to them. Whenever we play some games on them, we must always make it look like it is the people who are screwing up, not the machines.”
“Well, isn’t that the usual case?” Maryisa, Quincy’s tank, asked.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “First things first. You ladies have control over the rail guns, right? The enemy is still receiving supplies and troops through the probe, right? And if we fired those guns, would the enemy know about it?”
“Uh, yes, yes, and no, boss. We have the guns, the probe is still working, they have no people on the surface, and we can fake it so that no one below will know about what’s going on out here.”
“Good. Set it up and open fire. And don’t forget about blasting a tunnel for us to hide in.”
Looking through the humanoid drone’s eyes, I saw all the rail guns but one aim at the sun and glow slightly along the rails. One gun aimed at a tungsten dune, and the side of that erupted in a spectacular fireworks display.
“What’s the situation on ammunition?”
“There is a six-hour supply on hand, and I’ve ordered up additional supplies from the warehouse.”
“Good. Order us a lot, in fact, send up all the rail gun needles they have in stock, but in small batches, using circuitous routes. We don’t want them to catch on to what’s happening. They have one ammunition warehouse?”
“Four of them, boss.”
“Okay. Do a bunch of complicated transfers between them, to confuse the issue. See to it that a lot of stuff gets lost.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How many kinds of ammunition do they have?”
“More than forty, boss. Their ‘army’ was snatched together from more than three hundred local units, who often armed themselves as they pleased.”
“Wonderful. From now on, I want all requests for ammunition to be filled wrong. They should get something similar to what they need, but not quite the right stuff. Something that will fit their weapons but jam under fire would be very nice.”
“Yes, sir.”
Quincy said, “Good ideas, Mickolai. But our ladies should create a ‘paper trail,’ as it were, showing that the mistake was always made by the outfit that requested the ammunition in the first place. Never by the warehouse. This will cause a more deadly war amongst the heathens than the one that they are trying to fight against us.”
“I like it,” I said. “Kasia, you have been unusually silent lately. Anything wrong?”
“I’ve just been thinking over what can be done about screwing up the enemy. There are so many lovely possibilities!”
“Well then, why don’t you curl up with Eva and see what you can accomplish? Just remember, whatever you do, you can’t let the enemy lose faith in their computer. It has to be those guys in that other unit who are causing all of the misery.”