The time-on-target rolling artillery barrage was still just ahead of us. Those guys, or rather their computers, were really on the ball. We were picking our rail gun targets, and then shooting them up through the exploding artillery. It was pretty effective.
There wasn’t much resistance. Most of the enemy had abandoned their positions and run for it. Just where they were planning to run to was beyond me, but as a military force, they were done.
Our second wave was already arriving, crawling out of the ocean. The two hundred tanks were equipped with antipersonnel drones, semi-intelligent, expendable robots that could round up the survivors and clean up any small pockets of resistance.
My three squads headed for the beach, not wanting to look at the carnage we had created inland.
We landed around the tank that had taken one of our own artillery shells, and formed a defensive circle. Mirko got out of his tank and walked naked over to the bent and wrecked machine that held the body of one of his men. It was the kind of thing that he had to do by himself.
Then, to the wonderment of us all, the coffin slowly emerged from the back of the wreck! Frenchy, shaken but still alive, sat up, took off his helmet, and pulled out the computer that held his tank’s personality.
The rest of us gave him an enthusiastic cheer, over the comm lasers and out our external speakers, too! Most of us waved to him with our manipulator arms.
He waved back to us, but he was unable to go any farther.
Mirko shouted, “Both of his legs are broken! Somebody call for an ambulance!”
There are limits to what armor and fluid suspension can protect you from. But without it, well, in the old days, when a combat plane drilled in, the pilot was driven into his boots so hard that they exploded.
Mirko stood there next to Frenchy, and we waited for help to arrive.
The recruit who had been killed was Bogdan Miskovich. I’d liked him, too.
Actually, our losses were far lower than I had expected them to be, when I had been given this mission. They used to call the first wave on a frontal attack The Forlorn Hope.
We had been very lucky.
CHAPTER ONE
A Very Rude Awakening
Kasia, my beautiful new wife, and I had ridden our posh, new air car back from the architect’s office, where we had just approved the final design of our magnificent new mansion. It was to be built on the six thousand hectares—sixty square kilometers!—of rich farming and ranching land that had been given to us by the grateful government of New Croatia, for our services in their recent war with New Serbia.
New Yugoslavia was the absolutely best place in Human Space for agriculture. It was a young planet, half the age of Earth. Its native plants and animals were primitive, and simply could not compete with those from my home planet. It wasn’t that our life forms would devour theirs. They couldn’t.
The proteins used by each sort were completely unusable by the other. Our diseases couldn’t bother their life forms, nor could theirs bother ours. But both sorts of plants needed the same sunlight, water, and minerals, and ours were simply much better at putting those things together. It was like a Little League team trying to compete in the Majors, just no contest at all.
And the powerful Planetary Ecological Council knew it. They saw their task not as one of building a balanced, Earth-type ecology on their new planet, but of building a very imbalanced one. An ecology tilted way in the favor of human beings. They used their vast authority to keep out weeds, diseases, and everything else that they felt might be in any way undesirable. On the rare occasions when something unauthorized slipped past their tight quarantines, they ruthlessly stamped it out.
On Earth, insects ate between twenty and eighty percent of all vegetation, including the plants we humans needed to live on. On New Yugoslavia, there were no insects, except for one strain of Australian stingless bee that was needed for pollination. A debate had been going on for years about bringing in a few sorts of butterflies, simply for their beauty, but it probably wouldn’t be settled for a long time yet.
The result was that a hectare of land on this planet produced three times the crops, on the average, as a hectare on Earth, and at far lower cost. Herbicides and insecticides weren’t needed. There were no Earth weeds, and if a native plant needed anything that a nearby Earth plant wanted, the native shriveled and died. In many instances, even plowing was unnecessary. You just seeded and harvested.
New Yugoslavia was fast becoming the bread basket of the universe.
And my wife and I owned a vast tract of it!
We had also been given a lifetime immunity from all taxes, permission to exchange our New Kashubian passports for New Croatian ones anytime we wanted to, and the generous retirement pay due to both a general and a colonel, between us.
On the way home, Kasia suggested that we spend the night in Dream World, which meant spending the night physically in our tanks.
The New Croatian and New Kashubian governments had permitted us to retain, for our personal use, two of the thirty thousand intelligent Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks that we had captured for them from the Serbs.
The Mark XIX system was really a kit that let you assemble whatever was required to do the mission at hand. The basic unit was an armored slab that contained a muon exchange fusion power plant, an extensive, intelligent computer, and a “coffin” that held a living human being, together with a self-sustaining life support system. Locomotion was provided by a track-laying magnetic levitation system, but additional propulsive devices could be magnetically attached to convert a Mark XIX into anything from a submarine to a spaceship.
A large assortment of weapons could be strapped on in various combinations. Strap-on ultrasonic tunneling devices permitted one to move underground.
The judges and lawyers had decided that since I had been in the paid service of New Croatia at the time of their capture, these tanks, and everything else we had gained, were now the property of the New Croatian government. They did not belong to me personally, to my planet of New Kashubia, or to Earth, either, for that matter.
But the politicians had then permanently loaned two of those tanks back to Kasia and me. Well, we weren’t permitted the deadly attachable weapons that such tanks usually wore, but their gift did give us access to our tank’s considerable computing power, and to Dream World, something not ordinarily available to people on New Croatia.
And their fusion bottles would power our new mansion for three hundred years without recharging.
So. The medals and the awards had all been handed out. The banquets and the ticker-tape parades might be over, but I had my land, and I had my wife, and all was well with my world.
I have always found it very difficult to deny Kasia anything. Normal sex is wonderful, but there are things you can do in Dream World that would be awkward, dangerous or simply impossible to do elsewhere, and Kasia, bless her kinky little heart, had this idea that involved sex while shooting some rapids in a birch bark canoe.
But once I was in my tank’s life support system, and in our Dream World cottage, Kasia wasn’t there.
Agnieshka, my tank’s artificial intelligence computer, was a beautiful woman in Dream World, but now she was sitting at the dining room table, looking upset and anxious.
“What’s wrong, Agnieshka? Where’s Kasia?” I said.
“She’ll be here later. But there’s something we have to talk over first, Mickolai. There is a lot that I have to explain to you, and perhaps I owe you an apology.”
“What do you mean?” I felt my face go white. “Kasia’s all right, isn’t she?”
“She’s just fine, but this isn’t about Kasia. It’s about you. Us. The whole world.”
“Maybe you’d better start from the beginning,” I said, spinning a chair around and sitting on it backwards, with my elbows on the back of the chair.
“I intend to. You realize of course the huge difference between well-trained but green troops, and seasoned professional fighting men. Blooded soldiers are generally three times as effective in combat.”
“Agnieshka, I have a Ph.D. in Military Science. You were there when I earned it. You don’t have to give me a spelling lesson.”
“Yes I do, Mickolai. You see, back when I told you that we were going to war with the Serbians, well, that was the start of your second phase of basic training. In truth, in your real world, the Kashubians never reneged on their contract with the Serbians, who only made a few small attacks on Croatia on their own before we took charge of things. In short, you were never in a war at all.”