“We need some prisoners,” Quincy said, as we were going to the last hostage point, a big concert hall.
“Let’s just try talking to the next bunch of sentries we come across,” I said.
“A man asking for directions,” Kasia said. “Who would have ever guessed it?”
“If they refuse to tell us, then we can take them prisoner. At this point, we can’t afford to take on all of Earth’s forces by ourselves. We’ve got the hostages to think about.”
Our other problem was that we didn’t know how we were going to get all those people back to our lines, once we knew where those lines were. Thirty thousand people is a lot. There weren’t any functional vehicles around. My guess was that when the Earth forces started taking this area, anybody who had or could steal a car used it to get out of here.
Ironic as it seemed, although New Kashubia was building the most advanced transportation network in Human Space on New Yugoslavia, it had never built a public mass transit system for itself. Part of it was the way that the shoemaker’s children always seem to be barefoot, but also, since we already had all of these old mining tunnels running all over the place, it was easier simply to build and sell private electric automobiles.
Most of the ex-hostages could walk well enough in the low gravity down here, but some were very old, some were very young, and some were crippled. There were wounded among them, and some who were very sick.
Kasia solved that problem before we found any enemy sentries. She found a factory that had some humongous coils of sheet metal, hardened steel two millimeters thick. They were seven meters in diameter and eighteen meters wide.
When the factory’s computer objected to our taking the steel without authorization, we switched it off, and did without it.
Even in an automatic factory, all of the equipment still has a manual mode, for use during set-up, and when the computers are down. With the humanoid drones operating the uncoilers and welders we found there, we put together five sleds, each eighteen meters wide and forty meters long, by cutting the steel to length with our lasers, and bending it up a bit in front by having the drones grabbing it and bending it with their hands.
We found some steel cable on some overhead cranes, cut it down with the tanks’ lasers, and welded it to the sleds, so the tanks could pull them along behind. I remembered being told once that a main battle tank makes a pretty good tractor.
A few barrels of lubricating oil were loaded on each sled, for when we had them loaded with people, and they got harder to pull. We figured to just pour it in front of the sleds as we went along.
I also remember a professor in engineering school telling me once that a smooth, hard metal rubbing against a soft one makes a pretty good bearing. We had a hard steel sheet sliding on a gold floor. He never mentioned using gold as the soft metal, but I figured it should work. If it didn’t, a lot of people were going to have a long walk in front of them.
Working at combat speed, we got the job done in eight minutes, standard time. We figured that in a pinch, we might be able to haul ten thousand people this way. The rest would have to walk.
We didn’t find any manned checkpoints on the way to the last concert hall, but there were three abandoned ones.
We parked around the corner and went into our clown act. It went just as smoothly as it did the first five times, up to the point when we shot the guards. Quincy and Marysia were just as accurate as always, but one of the guards had been watching too many old movies. The kind where the idiot hero walks around with grenades clipped to his harness by the firing rings.
When his headless body hit the floor, one of the rings pulled loose, and the grenade went off. Worse still, it went off right next to two of his other grenades, and they detonated as well.
The explosions brought the outside guards running in, and Quincy had to take five of them on hand-to-hand, because by then, the civilians were all up and running around, screaming like they were the bunch of clowns. Quincy couldn’t get a clean shot off at any of the enemy.
Quincy was absolutely deadly when he was fighting in the real world with only his bare hands. Operating in a tank at combat speed, and with the speed and power of a humanoid drone going for him, he was truly awesome.
He hit the first one with a side thrust kick to the neck that almost took the bastard’s head completely off. It was swinging by a bit of skin from the back of his neck when Quincy hit his second man in the chest with his fingertips extended. His hand broke through the skin and the ribcage, and in a bit of overkill, he ripped the guy’s heart right out and threw it, still beating, on the floor. The third died when the edge of Quincy’s other hand came down on his head, squashing it like a watermelon hit with a sledge hammer.
These kills were almost simultaneous. The last man was dead long before the first one hit the floor.
I missed Quincy’s last two kills, because by then I had troubles of my own. This Oriental-looking soldier had started putting assault-rifle bullets into my drone’s chest as I was charging at him. He didn’t care about the people behind me, and I didn’t dare fire my laser in that crowd.
I had to take him and his partner myself, since the girls were all too far away to lend a hand, and that rifle had to be silenced quickly. I ran straight at him, not trying to dodge the bullets. I wanted those slugs to stop in my drone, and not in the packed crowd of civilians behind me. Not trusting myself with anything fancy, I hit my first man in the jaw with my right fist. When you do that wearing a drone, your fist comes out of the back of your opponent’s head.
Some of those bullets must have hit something critical, because I felt the drone losing hydraulic pressure. I still had enough power left to kick my last man in the gut with enough force to break his backbone, before I collapsed on the floor, or rather my drone did. Quincy soon dragged the thing out of sight, leaking bright red hydraulic fluid, after he cleaned up the rest of the bodies.
With Maria’s permission, I switched my perceptions over to her drone to give my speech on the auditorium stage.
We had three dead civilians, and twenty-six wounded. The medical supplies in our tanks’ survival kits, added to the medical kits of the two doctors who happened to be in the house, weren’t nearly enough to patch everybody up properly. If the troops who had pulled guard duty here had any medical supplies, we couldn’t find them and they weren’t about to start talking.
One of the civilian doctors insisted on trying to save the life of “that young hero who was shot defending all of us.”
It took Kasia five minutes to straighten the guy out, while the human being in front of him was still bleeding. “That was no ‘young hero,’ you idiot! That was my husband, and he’s just fine! What you are looking at is a machine, stupid! My real body is back in a tank, safe and sound. And so is my husband’s! So unless you’re a certified drone maintenance technician, you will leave that thing alone, and stick to what you know how to do!”
When he still wouldn’t believe her, she picked him up with one hand and said that her drone wouldn’t put him down until he came to his senses.
Eventually, he came to his senses.
Civilians.
On the up side, almost half of Quincy and Zuzanna’s big family of descendants was here in the concert hall, as was all of General Sobieski’s immediate family.
The way I saw it, my boss now owed me a major favor, assuming that I could get these people back alive. If I couldn’t, I probably wouldn’t make it myself, so I wouldn’t have to worry about facing him.
I figured that it was definitely a win-win situation.
Kasia said, “Mickolai, we’ve got five other groups out there who might be in even more trouble than these people. I think we should take all the groups to a central location. At least then, we could guard all of them.”
“I expect that you are right,” I said. “The high school is probably our best bet. It’s big enough, I think we could defend it, and there has to be a cafeteria there. These people haven’t been fed in a while, and our drones need a recharging. Agnieshka, bring the tanks up to the doorways.”