At least, when we got Conan, our missing squad member, back to someplace with enough air to let him get out of his coffin, we had a tank to put him and his metal lady into.
We checked out the serial numbers on the tanks, and yes, they had all been built right here on New Kashubia. Maybe Earth had not set up an alternate weapons manufacturing center, when they had lost New Kashubia. It might have been some bureaucrat’s idea of saving money. It was downright silly of them, if that was the case.
Agnieshka took our drone and checked out the settings on the transmitter.
“They’ve all gone to New Nigeria, boss,” she said.
“I suppose that that makes some kind of sense,” I said. “A bunch of primitive hunter-gatherers probably couldn’t give a modern army much trouble, even if it was disorganized and demoralized.”
“But they won’t be seeing any New Nigerians, boss. They set the transmitter to deliver them to the fourth receiver on the planet.”
“The fourth? I thought that they only had three receivers on New Nigeria.”
“They only had three in any kind of regular use, but a fourth was built and set up on the other side of the planet by another philanthropical group. It’s on a completely unused and unexplored continent. It was supposed to open up the wilderness for future colonization, but nobody wanted to go someplace where they couldn’t get back without walking fifteen thousand kilometers through a complete wilderness, so it was never used, not even by scientific surveys.”
“Then why did the Earthworms go there?”
“I suspect that it was by mistake. On the menu, these things are listed with the newest receivers on the top of the list. This was the newest receiver on New Nigeria.”
“So they are all sitting out there in an unexplored, and probably inhospitable wilderness. Well, getting them back is Earth’s problem.”
“If indeed they got there at all, boss. That receiver has been sitting there, in an Earth type environment, unattended, for over twenty years. I wouldn’t count on it still being operational.”
I extended the coffin out of my tank, sat up, took my helmet off, and let Kasia’s drone take Agnieshka’s personality computer out of my coffin. She plugged it into the newest of the abandoned tanks long enough for Agnieshka to program the thing to simply follow me, no matter what, and to obey simple instructions. That way, we were sure of having a functional tank to put Conan into.
Then, thinking about it, I had her do the same thing to the other thirteen enemy tanks as well. You never can tell when you might want to look really formidable, and seventeen main battle tanks can do that for you.
When Agnieshka was back in my tank, and I was back in the coffin, she said that it was amazing just how slow those old silicon computers were. She’d had to work hard to slow herself down enough to reprogram them.
We checked six other nearby transmitters, and none of them had been used lately. Apparently, our former enemies had been afraid both of being separated from each other and of arriving simultaneously at the same receiver with a group operating from a different transmitter, so they had all used the same transmitter, with the same faulty setting, to escape in.
It must have been quite a scramble to get out. No wonder they had abandoned so much of their equipment.
I said, “That explains what happened to the Earthworms. Now, what happened to all of our people? If the bad guys were running away, the good guys should have been chasing them. Every dog knows that!”
“The communication lines are still out. There’s nothing we can do but to keep on looking for them,” Maria said.
“I expect that you are right. Let’s move.”
We searched for fully a standard hour, over a day in Dream World, before we saw an Earth-style jeep with three Gurkhas in it coming toward us. I called our convoy to a halt, got into my drone, and walked out in front of it with my hands out in a peaceful gesture.
A man standing in the back of the jeep with a lance naik’s insignia on his sleeve kept a pintle-mounted heavy machine gun pointed at me, but one of the special joys of using humanoid drones was that you didn’t have to worry about that sort of thing. If they had shot the drone, I wouldn’t have been happy, but I wouldn’t have been dead, either.
Agnieshka told me that the man who got out to meet me was wearing the uniform of a jemadar, or lieutenant, of the Gurkha battalion. He was a small, brown-skinned fellow, and very neatly dressed. His weapons were well used, but clean. He had an assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his belt, balanced by a big, heavy knife, a Gurkha Kukris, on his left side.
Unlike a cavalry saber, this knife was bent forward, with the inner edge sharpened. The weight was near the tip, and it could have easily decapitated a man with a single swipe.
This knife, or short sword, had been a favorite of Alexander the Great’s Greek troops, thousands of years ago, and it was they who had brought the design to the Gurkha’s Himalayan homeland. The ancient Greeks, in turn, had probably gotten it from the Etruscans, who had used such blades for hundreds of years before them.
“So,” I said in English, “I gather that the illustrious Gurkha battalion did not run away with the rest of Earth’s forces.”
“That would not have been in keeping with our traditions,” he said in English, but with a crisp, sing-song accent. “I am Jemadar Puransing Thapa, of the Ninth Gurkha Battalion. And who might I be addressing, please?”
“I am General Mickolai Derdowski, of the Croatian Branch of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces.”
“Ah. I have seen an excellent movie about your heroic actions. But you do not resemble the man I saw on the screen. May I take it that they used an actor to impersonate you?”
“No, that film was put together mostly from memory blocks of what happened in Dream World. The difference in appearance is due to the fact that my physical body is actually in the second tank back there. What you are looking at is a humanoid drone that I happen to be wearing just now.”
“This is remarkable, sir. Your technology seems to be somewhat in advance of ours.”
“Perhaps it is, a bit. More important, my employers are willing to spend lavishly to protect their troops from harm, whenever possible. You could have such technology, if you wished.”
“I am afraid that I come from a very poor country, sir.”
“Well, what I meant was that your people are mercenaries, the same as we are, right? And just now it would seem that you are unemployed. The KEF is always looking for good men, and getting a real Gurkha battalion to join with us would add greatly to our prestige and to our combat effectiveness. My superiors and I would be very proud to serve with such men as you. The pay is excellent, and we are equipped in a very lavish fashion.”
“Indeed? Might I know how excellent, and how lavish?”
“In Earth dollars, an average line troop, say a tanker third class, makes about forty-six hundred a month, in addition to many fringe benefits. As to equipment, I can promise every one of you the command of a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank, just like those behind me, but brand new, right off the production lines. You would each get one on the very day that you enlisted.”
“This is a very tempting offer, and one which I will certainly convey to my superiors. But, well sir, like most of my teammates, I have a wife and family back on Earth.”
“I’m sure that we could get them out here, somehow. Earth is encouraging emigration to relieve their problems of overpopulation. Once we got them to almost any planet in Human Space, we could get your dependents to you quite easily.”
“Then there was some truth to the rumors about the outer planets having an extensive smuggling network.”
“It can’t be much of a secret any more, since the bulk of Earth’s forces have just used one of our transmitters to go elsewhere.”
“We had also heard this. But do you know where they went?”
“Yes. They made a very poor choice of destinations. As best as we can tell, they are now sitting in the middle of a completely deserted continent on New Nigeria.”
“Indeed. Are the other planets like this one? My wife would not be happy living in a cave underground, even a golden one.”
“New Kashubia is unique. I am based out of New Yugoslavia, which is an agricultural world, and a beautiful one. I have a valley of my own there, with a large, empty city in it that I hope to fill with our veterans. In fact, there is a golden castle which I think would be big enough to house your entire battalion, with your dependents. Plus, we eagerly accept women into our ranks. My own wife is with me right now, doing rear-guard duty in the last tank back there.”