“Got it. I’ll keep you posted, Mickolai, my love.”
Kasia flicked out with that certain gleam in her eye, the one she usually had when she’d figured out a way to make another billion marks. Eva followed her.
“How about you, Quincy? Got any more brilliant ideas to confound the invaders from Earth?”
“One or two, one or two. I think that I’ll go curl up with Maryisa and solve a few other problems while they percolate in my brain.”
“There’s no big hurry. I can’t see us trying to enter the shaft until the other half of our squad finds us, and that probably won’t happen for at least three standard days yet.”
“Reasonable. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Quincy and Maryisa flicked out, leaving me alone with Agnieshka.
“So, my lady, everything is going on schedule?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Good. How many troops have they brought over since we got here?”
“They’ve just about doubled their forces, with about the same mix as before.”
“We’ll have to see about doing something about that. Tell me, is there any connection between the enemy computer and the receiver that is linked with the old probe? Can we simply turn it off from this end?”
“No, sir. That equipment is entirely independent, and can’t do anything but receive what’s sent to it. And the Earthbound receiver in the probe is linked only to a transmitter here that is in enemy hands. The whole Hassan-Smith transporter system was well designed to be tamper proof, for obvious safety reasons.”
“A pity. Have you been able to tie in with a communication line that can let me speak with the Kashubian general staff? It would be nice if we could let them know what we are doing.”
“I’m afraid not. There are no physical connections between the two systems. It’s probably another manifestation of that paranoid worry the Earthers have about somebody invading their computer.”
“Well, it might be paranoid, but even paranoids can have people who are trying to kill them. Consider the fact that we actually have invaded their system, without their knowing it, and that it is our intention to cause them considerable havoc.”
“You have a point there, boss.”
“Glad that you agree. Now, then. I want you to fill me in, to give me the most complete situation report you can.”
“Really complete, boss?”
“Well, how about an eight-hour synopsis?”
“Oh. Okay, boss.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dirty, Rotten Tricks
The next five and a half months in Dream World were spent playing the delightful game of bringing confusion to the enemy. Many of our stunts were the results of the six of us sitting around and discussing various dirty tricks to pull. That is to say, three humans and three computers.
At one point, Quincy said, “Sleep deprivation is one of the best ways to turn a good combat troop into a dangerous zombie. Dangerous to his own side, I mean. Whenever a person or unit gets called up for some emergency, always make sure that it’s someone who has only gotten about twenty minutes sleep. Any sleep under a half an hour doesn’t do a man the least bit of good.”
“Good idea,” I said. “And always make sure that it is the same group that is always called up, while some other outfit nearby never seems to have anything to do. It will make the overworked group feel picked on, and the other outfit as defensive as hell.”
“I like it,” Kasia said. “It would work especially well if the two groups never liked each other very much in the first place, say, a battalion of Hindus next to a battalion of Moslems.”
“Oh, that is delightfully rotten, but yes, of course you’re right. In fact, we should make a point of trying to get as many ancient enemies rubbing shoulders as possible, and then see to it that one of them gets all the breaks, and the other is treated like shit,” Quincy said.
I said, “Of course, the most ancient animosity that ever existed is between men and women. There are quite a few all-female units out there, especially in the Chinese contingent.”
“Yes,” Kasia said. “And in that situation, it should always be the female unit that gets the shit treatment. Women are always convinced that they get the short end of the stick in ordinary circumstances, and if we make it very obvious to them they are being consistently stepped on, they’ll be ready to explode. We should be particularly rough on them when they’ve all got PMS.”
“When they’ve all got PMS?” I asked, “What do you mean?”
“It’s a matter of pheromones,” Kasia said. “Chemicals that control behavior in animals, including humans, and sometimes plants, too. We aren’t troubled by them in our army, since we all live inside of these coffins where the pheromones can’t get out, but if a group of women are living together, like in a barracks, natural pheromones will cause them to synchronize their menstrual periods. They all get PMS at the same time.”
“Why would nature do such a thing?” Quincy asked.
“It beats me,” Kasia said. “But it happens. Living in an all-female barracks in New Kashubia in the bad old days, without enough water to take a proper bath, things got very hairy for a few days every month. I think that our computers should be able to figure out when their periods happen, by checking the records for minor infractions of discipline, among other things. But when an all-female outfit has PMS, they should get the rottenest jobs possible.”
“That is so truly wicked! I love it!” Quincy giggled.
* * *
But in the end, more dirty, rotten tricks were thought up and put into practice by a single individual human, with the eager help of our tanks’ computers, than came out of us working as a group. Some things were just too embarrassing to talk about in public.
Quincy latched on to the Earthworm’s commander, one General Burnsides, and did everything his devious mind could come up with to make a laughingstock of the man. Orders were twisted, or sent to the wrong outfit, or made deliberately insulting. And always, there it was on his notepad computer, as though he himself had done it. The man was screaming at everyone around him within a day, and they had all decided that he was either going insane, or was secretly on drugs.
About every twenty minutes somebody in the enemy army, usually a career sergeant, would get a notice that since he had been busted back to private for various serious infractions of duty over eight months ago, and had continued drawing sergeant’s pay since that time, all payments to him and his dependents would cease until the overdraw was paid back.
And about once every ten minutes some private with a record of drunken binges would be notified that his promotion to tech sergeant had been approved over a year ago, and receive a check for the back pay due him.
Both of these things would be always be traceable directly to General Burnsides.
After a while, I saw a certain pattern emerge.
Most of my little jokes were of a physical nature.
Radio doesn’t work very well inside of all-metal tunnels that are occasionally interrupted with metal air locks. Communications have to be mostly by land lines, usually fiber-optic cables.
To disrupt communications, I simply had the computer not use certain lines, for a while, cutting off whole companies and battalions. From the outside world, it looked like the line had been cut, but when the increasingly harassed repairmen got there, it would be functioning properly, and had been for the last five minutes.
Usually, we managed to call the person out of bed after twenty minutes of sleep to fix the thing, and she had to report that no trouble was found. She would go back to sleep, and twenty minutes later she would be called back to repair the same line, and this time get it right, dammit!
I found that if you do this to a person, especially a woman with PMS, thirty-five times in a forty-eight hour period, you can get her to shoot her boss.
As I noted earlier, many of the enemy weapons were chemically powered. This at first struck me as being a ridiculously obsolete way of doing things, but when you consider that most of their troops were infantry, who might have to fight when there wasn’t a suitable power supply available, it did make a certain amount of sense. Chemically powered bullets are much more portable than fusion bottles.
Just because a weapon is old-fashioned doesn’t mean that it is no longer useful. Most soldiers will still carry a knife, for example, and next to a rock or a sharp stick, that’s about as ancient as a weapon can get.
Chemically powered projectiles are expended rapidly in combat, so the Powers That Be on Earth had provided their troops with a machine that automatically reloaded the brass casings they still used. This machine was controlled by what was now our computer.