“Right,” I finally said. “Agnieshka, tell Mirko and Lloyd to turn around. We will be needing them. Call up their squads, or the eight men who are what’s left of them. They will be a while getting themselves integrated in with the Gurkhas. Get Zuzanna’s tank over here. Kasia’s, too. I don’t want her to walk home. And then tell Kasia that I want to see her, now.”
Since a CCC normally keeps you at fifty times standard speed in Dream World, Mirko and Lloyd were still in the garage, with Agnieshka’s drone.
I went to Kasia’s office in our cottage.
I said, “I feel like the Angel of the Lord, who went unto Mary and said, ‘Kid, you are pregnant!’ ”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“Well, I only missed one period. I didn’t want to get you all excited, and then have it turn out to be nothing.”
“Bat pucky. Our tanks keep us monitored nineteen ways from Thursday. You knew. Shall I call Eva in here and ask her?”
“That won’t be necessary. But look, lover, miscarriages are fairly common in the first two months, and anyway, I didn’t want you to go off and do something stupid again and get yourself killed without my being there to get you out of it,” she said.
It was obviously time to use the forceful routine.
“You will not bring up the incident concerning the Polynesian dugout canoe. I would not take any pregnant woman into combat. I will certainly not take you. As of right now, you are on maternity leave. You will get into Eva, and you will go home. You will then spend the next year or so making a beautiful baby, and managing your financial empire in your spare time.”
“Yes, sir. Will you at least kiss me good-bye?”
“I’ll kiss you gladly, but we haven’t been called up, yet! I’ll be home in an hour or two.”
She slid her coffin out of the CCC, and I did the same. We got out, wet and naked, and never spoke a word. I gave her a long and lingering kiss. Then she got into her tank, and I climbed back up to the CCC.
That one kiss was all we got.
I never made it home, except in Dream World.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Combat Station Four
We were called up that night, and were off New Yugoslavia ten hours after that.
There was a time when it took weeks or even months to get a battalion ready for combat, but the Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks are so entirely self-contained that they are always ready to move out at a moment’s notice. Even if a soldier had been on leave, and on the other side of the planet, our communications and the Loway system could get him to the assembly point in hours.
Our first stop, as usual, was the arming center, where every man in the battalion received four additional antipersonnel drones, a full set of antipersonnel weapons, and an X-ray laser for his main weapon. The advantage to the X-ray laser was that it put its energy deep into an enemy machine, killing the observer and destroying anything electronic, without doing too much damage to the structure itself. Also, since it was aimed electronically, with a phase array system, it could get on target much faster than a rail gun could, which had to mechanically point at its target. The downside was that once on target, it took much longer to do serious dirt to your opponent. Whole seconds, sometimes.
These weapons were besides the humanoid drones and the huge tank swords, which my men had already been issued. None of my men got rail guns. We got no mines, rockets, or other heavy explosives.
We did each get a small rocket engine strapped to the back of the tanks and trucks. This was not the forty-G unit that was supplied with fuel by transmitters from a supply dump, but a one-G maneuvering rocket with three big fuel tanks, one for hydrazine and two for nitrogen tetroxide. Once you used up your fuel, it was gone. There had not been time enough to build enough fuel transporters for every tank in the army.
I knew right then what our mission in this battle would be. We were going to capture the solar powered factory that was orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury. The one that had most of the Solar System’s transmitters, and was supplying Earth’s entire war effort. It was also supplying the entire expansion of Human Space.
My Gurkhas were naturals at close-in fighting. The job was made for them.
Once we were transmitted to Combat Station Four, and there was no longer any danger of a security leak, I was given the complete battle plan. Actually, it turned out to be pretty similar to the one that my team had submitted in the first place.
As General Nathan Bedford Forrest, of American Civil War fame said nonetheless, “The way to win battles is to get there the firstest with the mostest.”
If we were going to successfully attack Earth, we would have to send in very large numbers of tanks and men, and do it very quickly.
Sending in our forces over a period of weeks or months was a sure recipe for disaster. It was what Earth had been doing to our planets, and they hadn’t been very successful at it, even though none of our planets had more than three percent of Earth’s population, or more than one percent of its industrial strength, barring New Kashubia.
Earth was by far the biggest kid on the block.
The places that you can send personnel and machines in Human Space is limited by where you have Hassan-Smith transmitters and receivers. The amount of stuff that you can send there in a given period of time is largely limited not by the transmitters and receivers themselves, which are quite fast, but by the accelerators that give what you are sending the proper speed and direction.
The accelerators are not only the slowest part of the system, they are also the most complicated and expensive part of it. To build enough accelerators to do the job properly, we would have to spend all of the industrial capacity of New Kashubia on nothing else for the next three years.
Very obviously, from the way the war was going, Earth was not going to give us the time to do that.
Quincy was the one who thought up a way around our problem. His solution was to put a few receivers, and a lot of transmitters, but no accelerators at all at some arbitrary point in deep space, well away from everything else, but where a receiver already existed.
His plan was to send a collapsible receiver through the existing one, and accelerate it with conventional rockets to exactly the speed and direction that our target would have on D-day. Then, over the next few weeks or months, all of our available forces and a sufficient number of transmitters would be sent to join that first receiver.
When the time came to roll, we would all rush through the transmitters in a hurry, to receivers that we had set up in the Solar System.
The plan required that first receiver in deep space, and additional receivers near each of our targets in the Solar System, receivers that we knew the coordinates of well enough to transmit to them.
Fortunately, the KEF had established a spy network on Earth over five years ago. There were many people there whose sympathies were with the outer planets, or who weren’t averse to taking our money, or quite often both. How our people had managed to set this up, and keep in touch with the network was something I was never told about. I didn’t have the need to know. But we never could have even considered the attack on Earth without the information we got from that network.
The truly hairy part of the whole plan came when you realized that everything in the Earth’s solar system is in orbit around the sun. The speed, relative to the sun, might not change much, but the direction was constantly changing, through a full three hundred and sixty degrees every local year, which was different for every body in orbit.
This meant that we had to plan the exact instant of every step of the invasion to less than a second, and we had to do it months in advance. Accomplishing it would be no mean feat, when you consider that hundreds of thousands of men and machines would be involved. The timing on everything had to be absolutely perfect. Anything or anyone that wasn’t ready to go at the proper instant would have to be abandoned, and hope to be picked up later, assuming that we won the war.