“I am astounded, and I will surely convey your excellent offer to my colonel. But for now, I have some information for you. I had been searching for the rest of Earth’s forces, at the request of the Kashubian general staff, whom we came across a short while ago. But since those forces appear to be gone, I suppose that you will do just as well,” he said, trying to keep himself from laughing.
“It is really quite amusing, actually,” he continued. “It reminds me of the historical incident where the Russian forces, under Ivan the Terrible, sat across a river for several weeks with a Mongol horde on the other side. Each side was very frightened of the other, and did not dare to attack. Finally, after sitting there for over a month, Ivan’s nerve broke, and he ordered a retreat. When the Mongols saw the activity in his camp, they assumed that he was attacking, and they ran away. Actually both sides ran away, that day, without ever doing any fighting at all.”
“I have read of the incident,” I said. “But how does that compare to our present situation?”
“Your general staff, sir, has been waiting for some time now, in full dress uniforms, for the enemy to appear and accept their surrender!” I could see that the jemadar was working hard to keep from rolling on the floor, laughing.
I was laughing, too. “The general staff commands the home forces, and is quite separate from the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces. It would seem to be a great insult to keep them waiting much longer. I am minded to go myself and accept their surrender. Their swords would look very nice on my wall at home!”
“Then follow me, sir. I shall lead you to them, and witness this remarkable historical event!”
“Excellent! But tell me please, who is this strange person who is so eager to surrender at a time when his enemy has run away?”
“You do not know? His name is Supreme General Tados Wolczynski, and I think that he might be a political appointee, for he does not have the bearing of a truly military man.”
“No, I’ve never heard of him. He must be new. Let us go forward, my young friend, and write a new page in military history!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
We Surrender! We Surrender!
On the way there, Agnieshka said, “Mickolai, you are acting crazy again! You can’t possibly intend to accept the surrender of your own superior officers!”
“Can’t I? Look, it is obvious that something very rotten is going on here. As soon as the enemy started falling back, our troops should have been hard on their heels, but that obviously hasn’t happened. And now that the enemy has run away, our side is trying to surrender, if this Gurkha is telling the truth, and I think that he is. My orders were that I should not subordinate myself and my squad to the general staff, but that we should stay independent and to do what was best for my planet. I intend to do just that, and to find out what is going on. You’re with me on this, aren’t you Kasia?”
“Yes, but at the same time, you’d better keep your little ass covered, because if this turns out to be as bad as it seems, the politicians will want to cover up this whole incident. Burying you would be the easiest way for them to do that.”
“Right. Agnieshka, that movie they made about me. Did you have anything to do with that?”
“Actually, I had everything to do with it, boss. Once I’d finished, they market tested it, and came back with a few dozen little changes that they wanted, but I did the changes, too.”
“Good. I want you to do something similar to that movie, again, but this time, I want it to be more like a documentary, if you get my meaning. Take it from the time that we first got called up for this war, standing on the steps of the church, up to the present. Be sure and include General Sobieski’s instructions to me, but delete all references to The Diamond, our fast computers, and anything else that might be a military secret. Then, I want you to make sure that you get everything that goes on during my upcoming meeting with General Wolczynski. Try to have the documentary ready for broadcasting as soon as possible. I want people to hear my side of this thing before they hear anything else. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir. Would that be a one-hour documentary, or a two-hour one?”
“Try to get it all into an hour, if you can. If not, make it as long as it has to be.”
“I’ll get on it right now, sir.”
For the rest of the trip, Agnieshka had me living in real time, since she was too busy to keep me at times thirty. It was just as well, since there wasn’t anything that I could do with the extra time except to spend it worrying.
Obviously, I was going to have to impersonate the enemy general. But for legal reasons, I didn’t want to appear wearing the enemy’s uniform. After some time worrying it over, I decided that since the Earthers had snatched their invasion force together from over three hundred different units, they had to have that many different uniforms running around. Nobody could possibly remember the fine points of that many different dress codes. All I needed to do was make them think that I was a general. So I just set the Squid Skin on my drone to a sort of generalized general’s uniform, with lots of stars on the shoulders and collars. The drones used by Kasia and Maria would wear the same uniform, with fewer stars on them.
A few other ideas occurred to me as well.
“Agnieshka, sorry to bother you, but tell me, those enemy tanks we liberated. Can you drain the coffins in them? I might need a nice safe place to keep our errant general staff.”
“I can do that, yes, but wouldn’t you rather that I just pump it all back into the holding containers?”
“As you wish,” I said, having forgotten about that particular container. Embarrassing. “Leave the newest tank with a filled coffin, so we can put Conan in it, but pump the rest of them dry.”
“Will do, boss.”
She was still pumping when we spotted the Kashubian general staff. They had a table set up at the intersection of two forty-meter mining tunnels. An even dozen officers of various ranks were sitting at it, and a few dozen enlisted men were standing behind them. It was a pretty small show, considering that we were talking about the surrender of an entire planet here.
Judging from the normal complexions and the generally poor level of physical fitness of the officers, it was obvious to me that none of these men had ever spent much time in the coffin of a tank. This was confirmed by the various insignia of rank that they wore.
They obviously didn’t use the very truncated command structure that the Combat Control Computers permitted, but rather the old-style military hierarchy with a dozen grades of enlisted men, and a dozen grades of officers.
I had Agnieshka set her other job aside, and take me back up to times thirty, so that I would have the time to think over what to do next.
We pulled up and boxed them in on three sides with our seventeen main battle tanks. We didn’t point the guns directly at them, but I thought that a little intimidation might be in order. Also, this let us record the meeting from all sides.
The Gurkhas parked back a bit, and observed the show, as witnesses.
General Wolczynski, a rather portly man, stood up and said, “You are two hours late. Such rudeness is not becoming.”
I got into my drone, as did Kasia and Maria. We climbed down from our tanks and walked over to the their table.
I looked down at him from the drone’s two-meter height, and said, “You are not in a position to make demands, or to give reprimands, sir. We were unavoidably detained, and since the communications on this planet are nonfunctional, we could not inform you of the delay.”
“Well, yes, of course. I had expected to meet with General Burnsides here,” he said.
“General Burnsides has been relieved of his command by a council of political officers. I am taking his place. My name is General Derdowski.”
“We had a fellow named Derdowski, but I suppose that that is neither here nor there. Why did they relieve General Burnsides?”
“There was a long list of charges, including incompetence and insensitivity.”
“Insensitivity?”
“He was very rude to some very sensitive people.”
“Uh, yes. Quite despicable, that. But you have been filled in on the terms of our surrender?”