Also, she had spent a lot of time talking about how useful it was to have an artificial intelligence working for you. She even talked about the social drones that would soon be on the market, if you had a very powerful computer available to run one. Being in the army would get you one for free.
She talked about Dream World as well, and how you could live any way you wanted to there. She had Zuzanna on screen, talking about how her cancer had been cured, and showing off her Dream World castle, with some scenes in it from the searchlight party.
Before she was through, the program ran for a full hour, but nobody seemed to mind.
“Not bad at all,” Quincy said. “I especially liked the part about hanging the politicians who appointed our last general staff. There’s not much hope of that happening, though, since our politicians would have to vote for it. One of the most horrible things that a politician can imagine is killing a politician, even if he is on the other side.”
“I liked the part about universal military service,” Mirko said. “And especially the part about making the right to vote depend on maintaining your standing in the army. If a person doesn’t care enough about his country to serve in its army, he doesn’t care enough to vote properly. I’m going to try to get the same sort of laws passed in my own country, New Croatia.”
“I’ll help you,” Conan said. “What with all the fame we’ve gotten in the movie and the documentary that Agnieshka turned out, we should have a fair amount of political clout. Let’s use it. And if Agnieshka can turn out all these movies and documentaries, then so can our metal ladies. We can put on a propaganda blitz that will roast their socks off!”
Lloyd finally arrived about then. He got frowned at for being late, and for not having his communicator with him when he went out.
I asked the rest of the group if there were any changes that they thought should be made in the program. Nobody could think of anything, so I told Agnieshka to ship it to my uncle, and to make sure that he knew what I had been paid for the last show we had sent to the networks.
The conversation changed to the military problems at hand.
It took us two days of standard time, almost two months in Dream World, before we were all satisfied with the plans to clean the Earthworms off New Yugoslavia, and to attack Earth.
Finally, Agnieshka shipped it all off to General Sobieski. He asked to see the lot of us immediately.
After the greetings and introductions were made, he said, “You hear stories about how great minds think alike, but this one has to be a record setter. A prototype of the rocket propelled, supersonic flying submarine tank you propose using is being strapped together right now. It’s due to be tested in a few hours. Most of the parts for it already exist, but they’ve never been used in quite this way before. I’d thought that it was a brilliant, original idea of my own, and here you guys came up with the same darned thing, and without a hint from me! At the same time, it’s good to know that it is not a completely harebrained idea. At least, somebody else had it, too.”
“We’re glad that you agree with it, sir.”
“It’s a little hard to do otherwise, since it’s my idea. I did think of it first, you know, over a standard week ago. But I’m not sure if I like the way you people are insisting on leading the main attack yourselves. Being in the first wave of a frontal attack is risky business, and I don’t want to lose any of you.”
“Sir, this is so unorthodox that we decided that we wouldn’t feel right about sending somebody else out to try out our ideas. And if things don’t go perfectly right, we know more about the alternative options than anybody else does.”
“Humph. Let me think about it. Another thing. I’ve incorporated most of your plans for the invasion of the Solar System into my own proposals. We should be hearing what the KEF council has to say about it in a few days.”
“Only ‘most of them,’ sir? What didn’t you like?” Quincy asked.
“It wasn’t a matter of not liking anything. It’s just that there were a few things that you couldn’t have known about. Not everything our spies tell us is for public consumption. We’ll discuss it later. I’ll get back to you people within four hours, standard.”
He blinked out, and I found myself back in my den.
Kasia came in.
She said, “You know, I’m beginning to think that we were really stupid, insisting on leading the attack ourselves.”
“Yeah. I’m a little scared, too. But we did it, so that’s that. You’d better get your financial empire ready to do without you for a while, because he’s going to tell us that our request has been granted. I’m sure of it.”
“Well, it will give Agnieshka the material to make another movie. Did I tell you? We finally got paid for that first movie they made about you. Even I was surprised by the figure our lawyers got.”
“Well, tell Quincy, Zuzanna, and my other colonels about their good fortune. Then put our share of it into the charity account of that KEF Fund of yours.”
“I’ll do that, lover. That’s very good politics. It will make all the newspapers. Of course, we decide what constitutes a charity. But darling, I’ve got scads of things to do right now. I’ll see you later.”
Sometimes, I think that my wife doesn’t understand me at all.
* * *
Well, the amphibious attack on Baden-Baden Island worked like a charm.
After sneaking up from the nearest Loway terminal, we went crawling on the ocean bottom for a standard week, completely out of touch with the rest of the world. We were operating under radio silence, and the transporter system doesn’t lend itself to military communications very easily.
An H-S receiver is a fairly small, simple device, while an H-S transmitter is large, energy hungry, expensive, and generally restricted to fixed installations. Fuel and oxygen were sent to us in small allotments, not continuously. Memory cubes could have been sent, but that would have required a third receiver and a much more complicated, large, and expensive transmitter, and such a system would have been too slow for most military communications, anyway.
Communications between planets were another matter entirely. Every planet in the smuggling network had a small transmitter and receiver, connected to New Kashubia, capable of sending memory cubes out every few seconds. These were automatically sorted and forwarded to the proper destination for a small fee. Once at the proper planet, the message was e-mailed to the recipient.
Fully developed solar systems like Earth’s had hundreds of such units, connecting the various satellites, since they could operate far faster than the speed of light.
Earth had forbidden the use of such communicators between itself and the other planets, on the theory that good communications leads to bad domination. Memory cubes to and from Earth went slowly, packed in standard, full-sized canisters.
At the proper instant, we came streaking out of the water at supersonic speed, just as a time-on-target rolling artillery barrage was taking up all of the Earthworms’ attention.
Our first wave, led by yours truly, hit them with eighteen very fast moving tanks, caught them with their pants way down, and pretty much wiped them out.
The two hundred tanks which followed on our tails had the entire island under control within a standard hour. My three squads together lost only two men, one dead and the other seriously, but not permanently, injured. They were both new kids, members of Lloyd’s and Mirko’s squads, and not old friends.
All told, we had been very lucky.
Our forces had hit all six islands at the same time, of course, but three of them had been only lightly defended, even though they each contained a transporter receiver, which we trashed.
The last two were still completely empty, to the frustration of the men and tanks attacking them. They had gotten themselves psyched up to kill the enemy, and then had found that their efforts were completely wasted.
Such is war.
I did manage to find eight enemy tanks whose operators had been permitted to surrender, taking their tank’s personalities with them. I commandeered the tanks, and got away with it because everybody thought that I was a real general. This gave new bodies to all but six of the damaged tanks in my valley.
I arranged for them to be sent back. Along with the fifteen troops I had left, I fired up my rocket and flew to the nearest entrance to the Loways.