“That’s what it looks like to me, too. I think that Earth is using this war as a convenient excuse to relieve some of its population pressure, and if I’m right, then we have a long and bloody war on our hands. Fighting an enemy who wants his men to die will not be an easy thing to do. Genghis Khan used to pull stunts like that, deliberately sending his ‘allies’ out to die in battle, because they were nothing more than just surplus population to him. And remember that nobody ever defeated old Temujin in battle while he was alive. It’s hard to imagine it happening in the modern world, but I don’t think that our spies are lying to us, either.”
“There’s no chance that the old probe isn’t somehow working again?” I asked.
“None,” General Sobieski said. “One of the first things we did was to send a tank out there with a rocket strapped to it. That old probe is a total wreck. It wasn’t the additional radiation your rail gun needles kicked up that did it in, incidentally. You somehow managed to hit it directly, stitching it almost dead center for the full length of the probe. Our tank found a neat line of holes, just under a centimeter apart, going in on one side of it. The other side of the thing was pretty much completely gone.”
“Then it had to be one of the Earthers’ own rail guns that did it. My squad ran out of ammunition three days before the probe failed.”
“That’s the way I read it, too. But it was a lucky hit, no matter whose gun did it. The important thing was to keep firing at it for as long as possible, and you did just that,” he said.
“You gave me the ammunition to do it with. You must have had something like that in mind,” I said.
“I gave you everything I could that I thought might be useful. In some places, like equipping half of your squad with X-ray lasers, I guessed wrong. In others, like the extra truck full of ammo, the mice, and the humanoid drones, I guessed right.”
“We never much used the big lasers, but if we’d all been equipped with rail guns, we all would have stayed out there shooting at the star, and three of us wouldn’t have had the time to play the fun and games we did with their computer,” I said.
“Most of warfare seems to end up being a matter of luck, doesn’t it?” He said, “One other point before we get on to the real subject of this conversation. The Gurkha battalion has volunteered to serve indefinitely in the KEF, and we’d like to have that bunch of hereditary warriors on our team, but there’s a hitch. They insist on serving under you. They say that they have had to serve under too many incompetent commanders over the last few decades, and that they don’t want to repeat the experience.”
“Sir, it sounds to me like you’ll just have to show a little flexibility when it comes to your command structure, but I think I’ll have to let you work that one out by yourself.”
“I think you’re right. They are being loaded into brand new tanks as we speak. They’ll spend a month or so in basic training, and by the time that’s completed, we’ll know what to do concerning their command structure. Now, then. The enemy has invaded New Yugoslavia.”
“So you’ve told me. What I want to know is why you didn’t take out the old Earther probe that they had to come through. I would have done it as soon as they invaded New Kashubia,” I said.
“I wanted to, but my employers refused to let me do it. Don’t forget that we are still a mercenary outfit that is working here under contract to the various local governments. Those people were still making a profit, selling their foodstuffs to Earth, and they didn’t want to permanently cut themselves off from that huge market. The compromise that we settled on was to simply shut down the receivers that operate from their probe. The Yugoslavians thought that that would keep them safe. They even informed the Earthers that the receivers would be shut down, so that they wouldn’t offend them, while they continued making their contracted shipments to Earth.”
“It obviously didn’t stop them from invading us,” I said.
“True. The Earthworms launched a rocket from their probe, and landed it on the most unpopulated part of the planet, one of the oceanic islands under the jurisdiction of the smallest government here, the German Enclave. That rocket contained a transporter receiver, and they invaded us through it,” he said.
“And we didn’t know about this as it happened?”
“No, we didn’t. Remember that in the course of the fun and games that we’ve been playing on this planet, we shot down every satellite we had here in orbit. We didn’t have anything up there looking for incoming ships.”
“So our sins are coming back on us,” I said.
“So it would seem.”
“I trust that the probe has been deleted now?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said. “And we now have twenty-six tanks in orbit guarding our skies. But there is nothing stopping the Earthworms from transmitting directly from Earth to their new receiver. We have to take it out, and the army that is doubtless guarding it.”
“So we have an island to take,” I said.
“Six islands. They were unpopulated, part of a nature preserve that was saving some of New Yugoslavia’s indigenous life forms, so the Earthworms simply took them without a fight. The extent to which they have damaged the preserve remains to be seen. They might very well have set up additional receivers on all of those islands, just to be on the safe side.”
“What about the rest of Human Space? Are the probes that connect them with Earth out of action?”
He said, “Yes, except for a few new planets that have not yet joined the smuggling net. In most cases, it was a matter of simply going there, and cutting the power leads to the receivers from Earth. There is no indication that they have set up alternate receivers operating directly from Earth’s Solar System, but if I had been in command of the Earth forces, that’s what I would have done, long before I ever launched an attack.”
He looked at me and then turned away. “Most planets are not as careful of what they import as New Yugoslavia is,” he said.
“So we have to clean them off of New Yugoslavia, and stay very vigilant about other invasions,” I said. “But mostly, we’re going to have to attack Earth, and knock out their capability of continuing these attacks. Mainly, that huge solar powered station of theirs.”
“But we can’t do that. If we take out all the transporter transmitters on Earth, what happens to the continuing expansion of Human Space? If we tried to start the whole program up again ourselves, we would halt all human progress to the stars for fifty years, even with the huge manufacturing capability of New Kashubia. What we have to do is take those facilities from Earth, and operate them ourselves. That’s going to be a much more difficult job to accomplish.”
“Humph. I can see your point, sir. But first things first. Tell me what you know about their installations on the islands of the German Enclave,” I said.
“Their main base is on Baden-Baden Island. . . .”
We spent two more hours in Dream World, going over details, and downloading a lot of information into Agnieshka. Then I asked for the night off, to think the whole thing over.
“That’s fine, Mickolai. What I really wanted was to see if your ideas were at all like mine. Let me know if you come up with anything. Before I forget. I liked that speech you made for your uncle.”
“Yeah? I haven’t seen it myself, yet, let alone released it!”
“More of Agnieshka’s doing, then? Well, take a look at it first chance you get.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Attack on Baden-Baden Island
I wanted to sleep on it, but I couldn’t see wasting eight standard hours, not when the planet where my valley was located had an enemy invasion force on it. My talk with the general made the whole thing seem a lot more urgent. I compromised by sleeping in Dream World, after telling Agnieshka to round up my squad, and Lloyd Tomlinson and Mirko Jubec as well. I wanted all the input I could get on this one.
* * *
When I awoke, everybody was there except for Lloyd, who had been spending the night with a girlfriend, without his communicator, and had taken a while to find.
Instead of starting without him, or just killing time, I had Agnieshka show us the half hour program she had put together on revamping New Kashubia’s military. It wasn’t bad, even though she had me saying a lot of the same things that Sobieski had said to me at our last meeting.