The first action sequence, when Quincy took out the two men guarding the receiver from New Nigeria, was done very effectively, I thought, at combat speed. It almost gave you the feeling of what it was really like.
The sequence where we crawled up the old mining shaft was spectacular, but the views she showed of us coming out the top could not have been taken from any of the tank’s sensors. She had to have created them in Dream World. A bit of artistic license, I suppose.
The two drones who fell back down the shaft screamed on the way down, something that they could hardly have done in a vacuum, but I doubt if anybody noticed that.
She dwelt rather long on the technical aspects of shooting at a star, but then apologized for it, reminding the audience that after all, she was a computer, and not a real girl.
And when it came to the dirty, rotten tricks we had played on the Earth forces, she never mentioned the potassium cloride in the morphine ampoules, but told everybody about what was done to the food processors, dwelt for quite a while on the joys of an imitation cholera epidemic, with lots of Dream World scans showing the Earthers’ suffering, while their own doctors were dosing them down with the very stuff that was causing the problem. She stressed that we hadn’t actually killed any of them, but that some of the Earthworms probably wished that they could die.
Then she switched to Quincy’s explanation about how it was much better to hurt an enemy rather than to kill him outright. She always showed him as he really looked, a healthy old man, rather than as his handsome, Dream World persona. She did that with all of us except Maria, who had apparently objected to it.
She spent a long time on what we’d done to their communications, and how we’d managed to get individual units actually fighting and killing one another. The people in the studio really seemed to like that sequence.
She made Conan’s stay alone on the surface seem hugely heroic, when in fact it was the only thing that he could do, and even wrenched a little sympathy for the mouse that I had to leave out there to die.
There wasn’t a word about the wild, pseudo-medieval Search Light party that Zuzanna threw for us. In Agnieshka’s version, we had stayed in uniform, anxiously awaiting the results of all of our heroic deeds. She showed us cheering when we learned of the success of our efforts, but in her version we didn’t do it in ancient garb, and it wasn’t around a well-laden table. She had us in some kind of a control room that I’d never seen before, nervously drinking coffee and eating sandwiches.
But it wasn’t until we broke into the enemy headquarters that she started taking major liberties with the truth. The way she showed it, it was the enemy tank that cut down everyone and everything in that control room. Zuzanna and Maria had only fired at it in self defense, after it had opened fire with its rail gun first.
She had Zuzanna shouting, “Those poor people are already dead! Shoot, or he’ll kill us all!”
And Zuzanna had killed the sentries only when they tried to turn a shoulder-held rocket launcher on her.
I think that she dwelt much longer than was necessary on our dancing clown routine, but she said that the audience would need some comic relief at that point, and perhaps she was right.
For me, the important point was that she’d gotten real, accurate recordings of everything that had gone on at the surrender ceremony, including Wolczynski’s whispered confession to me.
She ended it by showing everybody in New Kashubia out dancing in the streets, with drinks being passed around, and pretty girls kissing everybody they could find in a uniform. This was completely fraudulent, of course, since at that moment everybody in the planet was glued to their TV screens.
In the background, General Sobieski was repeating himself, going on about the importance of having a real, interstellar military force, composed of the finest people and the finest computers, working freely together for the benefit of all of humanity, both chemical people and electronic people, too.
It was to be a well paid military force, of course.
I thought that it was a pretty fair piece of propaganda, and told Agnieshka so.
She insisted that it was a completely accurate documentary, I suppose because there were a few dozen studio people watching it along with us.
The guy in charge of the TV studio loved it, and said that they would be putting it on three more times that day, and then twice a day for the next week. And would I have any objections to his sending copies of it out to all the other planets?
“No, that would be just fine,” I said. “Of course, we’ll expect to get the standard rates for this sort of thing, based on audience size, and so on.”
The figure we settled on was actually quite generous, I thought, but Kasia was sure that we should have held out for more.
“Next,” I said. “We’ve got these twelve bastards still in our tanks who are as guilty as hell of treason. Does anybody here know of an honest judge, and an honest cop?”
“I do,” said one of the studio people, a news anchorman.
“Well, get them on the phone, and find out what’s the proper thing to do with people like this,” I said.
Somebody shouted, “Let’s just hang them right now!”
“No, none of that!” I shouted back. “We’ve got to do this legally. We have to make an object lesson out of these people. Then, we can hang them.”
The judge said that he could send a paddy wagon out for them right away, but that it might be safer for all concerned if we could take them to the jail ourselves. He was worried about mob violence.
Maria asked if she could be detached from the squad, so that she could go after Conan, who was still in a crude tunnel on the surface. I gave her permission to do so, but told her that she should find Quincy and Zuzanna first, so they would have enough tanks to drag him back to where there was enough air for him to safely open up.
Those two found us first. About the time that our drones were back on the street, the two of them pulled up, loaded down with most of the group’s drones, and piled high with their relatives, as well.
The newsmen wanted to interview everybody, but I begged off for the squad, pleading urgent business, and let Zuzanna’s grandkids have all the glory.
They were interviewing the Gurkha jemadar as we left. He’d told me that he would soon have to report to his superiors, and that he would certainly convey my offer to them.
I warned him to throw away all of the ammo they had been issued in the last week, since we had booby-trapped it. He said thank you, but they had already surmised that.
It turned out that the jail was on the way to the small tunnel that was still the only route to the surface that we knew about, so we all stayed together.
It was a long trip. The whole population of New Kashubia seemed to be out in the street, having taken the hint from Agnieshka’s documentary. People were drinking, dancing, and kissing everybody in sight. Getting a convoy of nineteen tanks through it without hurting anybody wasn’t easy. Especially when fourteen of the tanks weren’t very bright.
“It kind of makes you wish that we could go out there and join them,” Quincy said.
“Well, why can’t we?” I asked, “A few more hours one way or another won’t make much difference to Conan.”
“Well, clothes, for one thing, unless you plan on dancing in public buck naked. When I handed out our personal weapons to that last bunch of hostages, I just gave them the whole survival kits, in case there was anything else in there that they could use. I guess that included our clothes as well.”
“Damn you, Quincy!” Kasia shouted, “Now I won’t even be able to visit my folks while I’m here.”
“Well, then buy some, if you are so worried about it,” I said.
But when we stopped at a phone booth, we couldn’t find a single store that was open. Everybody was out partying in the street.
“Oh, hell,” Quincy said. “Being in a drone is just as good as being there for real.”
The drone that had been sitting on his tank became active. Its Squid Skin covering changed into the clown outfit that he had used when we rescued the hostages, it picked up the violin that was hanging on the turret of his X-ray laser, and he began to play it, doubtless with Eva’s help, while dancing on the top of his tank.