I could only hope that the twit was there in the command center at the time when we arrived.
The difference was that our computers were faster than their computers, so we were alive and the guy in that other tank wasn’t. The hundreds of office workers didn’t even count.
“Let’s get back to the program, people!” I shouted as I finally emerged from the tunnel, and could look around with my own sensors.
“Yes, sir,” somebody said.
“And Quincy, take the point! Zuzanna, drop back to rear guard.”
In the simulations, the simultaneous use of fog and flash grenades, with the occasional concussion grenade thrown in, had been a dazzling combination. Without a tank’s sensors, a mere human was totally confused. We kept the three coming, shooting them far in front of us, until we were three kilometers away from the devastation we had wreaked in the enemy command center.
I mean, they knew that something had come by, but they didn’t know who, or what, or in which direction.
When we finally came out of the fog, we came up to a pair of Earthworm sentries. Eva made the Squid Skin outfits that our humanoid drones were wearing look like the enemy uniforms.
The enemy sentries actually waved us on, thinking that we were on some desperate mission.
They were right.
We were, but not for them.
Zuzanna cut the soldiers down with her laser as she passed, and the fog closed over them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Send in the Clowns
“Dammit, you stupid bitch! You weren’t supposed to kill those men! If we are going to rescue our hostages, the Earthers have to think that we are on their side! You might have gotten them all killed, our own people!” I yelled at her.
“There wasn’t anybody around to see what happened, Derdowski!”
“Shut up! If you ever pull a stunt like that again, I’ll gun you down myself!”
“You wouldn’t dare! And Quincy would never let you!”
“Bullshit! Your husband would help me kill you,” I said.
Quincy said, “He’s right, love. I’d cry while I was doing it, but I’d be shooting at you, and not at him. You’ve been getting way out of line, girl. We have a job to do. Now shut up and soldier!”
After a longish pause, Zuzanna said, “Yes, Quincy.”
I let it drop there, and we continued on to the high school.
Our plan was very simple. We had to get inside of the auditorium where the hostages were being kept. We had to pick a time when we had a clear shot at every one of their guards simultaneously.
Then we had to kill all of the guards.
After that we had to get our people through our lines, wherever those were, to safety.
And then we would listen to the politicians, and either wipe the rest of the Earthworms out, or send them somewhere else after they’d surrendered, since we couldn’t send them home any more. We’d already closed that door.
But first things first.
Sneaking five main battle tanks into the auditorium was a bit out of the question, of course.
First we had to find a place to park. We had the plans for the Mount Carmel High School in our data banks, and the auto shop fit the bill fairly well. We drove in like five massive bulls in a china shop, bashing aside work benches, tool chests, and three of the electric cars they used down here.
We made a mess of the place, but we all fit, and were reasonably well hidden.
“Maria, you are in command here. You and Zuzanna will guard this place, but don’t do anything unless you are attacked by heavy weapons. If any enemy troops come by, let them think that these are their own tanks, and that they are sitting here empty. A fire fight in these cramped quarters would not only get us all killed, but it would ruin our chances of rescuing our people.”
“Yes, sir,” Maria said.
“You got that, Zuzanna?”
“Yes, sir,” she said sullenly.
“Good. Don’t forget it. Next, get some of the standard drones out and looking for a working comm line to our forces, or to anybody else who might know what is happening. It would be very nice to know where the battle lines are, and where we stand a chance of getting the hostages through without our own side shooting them down. Let us know when they come up with anything. The rest of you, get into the humanoid drones.”
Kasia, Quincy, and I moved our perceptions into our humanoid drones, operating them in the human mode. Agnieshka, Eva, and Marysia each took over a drone in machine mode. We had three mice following us along, each dragging an optic fiber, to keep the drones in communication with the tanks, and the people inside of them. A single mouse would have sufficed from a data handling standpoint, but I didn’t want to risk this operation on a single optical fiber.
The next stop was the school’s music room. The door was locked, but the drones we were wearing had a powerful laser in each forearm, and we quickly burned the lock off the door.
What we found inside was disappointing. It looked as though the music department specialized in brass bands, and lacking lips, lungs, and other things, one thing that a humanoid drone couldn’t do was blow on a horn. We found some drums, which Quincy claimed to be able to beat on, and one of those vertical xylophone things, which Eva said was close enough to a hammer dulcimer for her to fake it. I was getting desperate before we found a back room that contained little more than four dusty violins in battered cases.
We were saved. Eva had never deleted her violin-playing program. A little quick tuning and we were in business.
“Okay, switch to the clown suits,” I said, and our Squid Skin uniforms changed from something close to the enemy’s fatigues to the clown outfits we had worked out in simulations. Mine was bright red with big gold sunbursts on the front and back. I had a bald head with a fringe of hair, a red nose, and a huge mouth.
The others were even more garish. Our thought was that nobody feels threatened by a clown, or wants to shoot one down, as a general thing. Mimes would have been another matter, of course.
“Quincy, how serious were you about beating on a drum?”
“Uh, maybe we’d better let Eva handle that, too.”
“Okay. Eva, take over.”
I relaxed, and let her operate the drone I was wearing, while I did little more than look and listen through the drone’s sensors. I switched back to the sensors on my tank a few times, but everything was calm back there.
We walked down the school’s empty hallways, loudly playing “Let Me Entertain You!” on four violins, with Quincy’s drone beating on a big bass drum, and me hammering on the xylophone thing.
We weren’t nearly as bad as I’d expected.
When we got to the auditorium, a soldier wearing a checkered towel on his head was standing in a short corridor, blocking the door with his body. He shouted something at us in Arabic, and gestured threateningly with a submachine gun.
I heard myself say something back to him in the same language. All I caught of it was something about “American USO,” but it seemed to satisfy him, and he opened the door, waved us into the auditorium, and locked the door behind us. I doubt if he noticed the mice who scurried in along with us.
Fortunately, the door wasn’t a tight enough fit to cut the fiber-optic cables. If it had, the drones would have fallen over, inert, and we would have been left with trying plan B, which wasn’t nearly as good.
The mice scurried up the wall of the auditorium, hidden by their Squid Skins, so they could keep in touch with the drones by IR laser.
It was a big room, and just like every high school gymnasium turned auditorium ever built. Basketball nets were pulled up to the ceiling, the bleachers were pulled out, and about five thousand unhappy people were sitting on them, leaving most of the fake wooden floor empty.
Another guy with a gun strapped to his back and a towel over his head was on the stage waving his pistol around, shouting something into a microphone that I couldn’t make out, speaking in very bad Kashubian.
I counted eleven more guards scattered around, mostly standing on the top seats of the bleachers, where they could keep an eye on everybody.
I thought that their headgear was a fine idea. It made them easy to spot.
We marched in playing our instruments, and everybody stopped and looked at us. I suppose that we were so completely unexpected that when we came in, nobody knew what to do, so they simply didn’t do anything.