I sent the report on to Conan, whose drive coils had failed while he was on the surface of New Kashubia just before the searchlight hit us.
He said that he would discuss matters with the engineers.
I told him not to kill anybody.
* * *
A few days later, the Gurkhas were each issued a humanoid drone, equipped with the new backpacks filled with power capacitors that let them operate for a full, standard day without needing recharging, provided that they went easy with the lasers.
Most of the Gurkhas were tough, thin and wiry. They were short by European standards. When you were wearing a drone, you were vastly powerful, fast, and two meters tall. My new men liked it.
Very soon, each drone sported a kukri of its own, paid for by the soldiers themselves. But since the drones were five times stronger than any man, these blades were well over a meter long, and weighed ten kilograms each. Like the blades given to me and my colonels, these huge blades were of surgical steel, the best that they could find, but still not as good, they claimed, as real watered steel.
Their colonel talked wistfully of perhaps someday setting up a forge of their own, and making truly proper blades for their drones.
I got many requisitions from the Gurkhas. Replacement uniforms of their traditional cut could be supplied out of the automatic factories right here on New Yugoslavia, although the army insisted that they pay for them themselves. Various religious and personal articles were eventually supplied, mostly by local merchants. But the Nepalese foodstuffs and spices that they seemed to crave so badly were simply unavailable on New Yugoslavia. All that I could do was to promise that when the war was over, we would be able to import some of them from Earth, or at least get some of the seeds for these plants, and grow them here on my extensive lands.
They said that they could live with that, especially since, at least in Dream World, they could eat as they pleased.
Then I got a really strange requisition from my new men.
Each of our tanks was normally equipped with a pair of humanoid manipulator arms. These things were twelve meters long, with the shoulders at the front of the tank, and the elbows at the back, when they were folded down. There was a large humanoid hand at the end of each. Controlled by the tank’s computers, or by the human observer directly, these things were used to load the guns, and to do all sorts of other useful things.
They were very strong, and could move as fast as your own arms could, but being fifteen times longer, it was actually possible to move them so fast that the finger tips broke the sound barrier, making a loud cracking sound, like a whip.
Once, faced with a Serbian guard captain that I had to kill silently, I used my manipulator arms to simply grab his head, and squeeze. He popped like a zit.
My Gurkhas wanted some six-meter-long kukri swords, massing eighty kilos, so that their tanks could fight in hand-to-hand combat.
At first, I simply couldn’t believe that this was a valuable military weapon. I mean, come on, sword fighting with tanks? Tanks that were equipped with rail guns that could tear up mountains, shoot down satellites, and take out incoming artillery? They couldn’t be serious!
But they were persistent, so finally I did order up a dozen of the things, cheaply made of mild steel, and demanded a demonstration.
I got one.
One of their best swordsmen, Jemadar Harkabahadur Gurung, got into his tank and took a few practice swings with his new, huge sword. It moved so fast that you couldn’t see the thing moving—over two thousand kilometers per hour, the colonel told me. All you could hear was the deafening crack of a sonic boom!
Then we all went over to an old, damaged tank hull, devoid of electronics and power supply, that had been dragged over for a target. The jemadar pulled over to the side of the wreck, and paused for a moment. I could almost see him bowing to me. Then there was a loud crack, the wrecked hull was cut completely in half, and the sword was buried deep in the soil beneath it.
I was awestruck.
“Good God!” I said, “That hull was made of depleted uranium reinforced with a ceramic composite! A mild steel sword could cut right through it?”
“In truth, sir, we took the liberty of sending your tank swords out for heat treating and shot peening,” the colonel said. “Also, our tanks tell us that the edge is now composed of pure diamond, a few hundred atoms thick, although how this was accomplished, or where they got a diamond so long was not explained to us, despite considerable urging on our part. Still, we wanted as realistic a test as possible. But I assure you that better metal will make an even better sword. But now, let us go over into Dream World, where we have been rehearsing several battle scenarios using these remarkable weapons.”
In combat, they of course used conventional rail guns and lasers when the enemy was at any distance from them, but when things got close up, they proved to us that a sword could hit the enemy much faster than a rail gun, or even a laser could traverse. When you were within twenty meters of your opponent, the swordsman beat the gunner six times out of seven.
Both in the real world, and in Dream World simulations, they proved to Quincy and me that there were a lot of situations where our usual weapons were simply too powerful.
A fragmentation hand grenade doesn’t help much if you are trying to free hostages, and nuclear weapons had hardly ever been used in the history of warfare.
And in the upcoming invasion of the Solar System, one of our primary objectives was to capture intact the solar factory system that was circling the sun inside the orbit of Mercury, operating and fueling the thousands of robot ships that were pushing the envelope of Human Space ever farther outward.
I hated the thought of having to take that huge installation using rail guns. If we did, we might never get it working again.
The Gurkhas’ tanks got their huge swords, made of the finest surgical steel New Kashubia could produce, and diamond edges soon appeared on all of their weapons, of all sizes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Angel of the Lord
A week later, the Powers That Be finally broke down and issued us a Combat Control Computer to manage the new battalion with. Why they were so stingy with handing those things out was beyond me, since they had seventy-four of them already built and in storage, but that’s the military for you.
I was still nothing but a tanker first class. No promotion had come along with the thing, just the job.
Not that I could tell the CCC that. As I remembered the rules, you have to be a general, or the darned things won’t let you swear them in. So, I got gussied up in my full-dress uniform, with my sword and my stainless steel kukri and had my seven “colonels” do the same.
There was room in a CCC for only a general and five colonels, but I had some vague ideas of rotating them around, somehow. Lloyd and Mirko were deep into New Croatian politics just now, and said that if I wanted to delay their time of entering the CCC it was fine by them.
The CCC was parked in the lowest garage below the church, along with the Gurkha battalion, among their ammunition trucks. It looked exactly like the other trucks, a five-meter cylinder ten meters long, on standard MagLev treads. This was both because it was simpler to make them that way, and because of camouflage.
The trucks were cheap, compared to all the other stuff, and not all that militarily vital. I mean, we could lose them all, and still fight on without much difficulty, for a while at least. Given a choice, an enemy would probably take them out last.
Losing the CCC could throw the battalion into disarray, and so it was a prime military target. It was best to hide it among the trucks.
Agnieshka, wearing a decorated drone, was pushing a cart full of helmets and the custom-tailored survival kits that officers rated. I had brought her along to show me which truck to talk to, but as it turned out, it wasn’t necessary.
“Mickolai, my dear boy! How good it is to see you again!” one of the trucks said.
“Professor Cee? I am very surprised that you know me,” I said.
“Why should that be? You were always one of my favorite pupils.”
“But, I never was one of your pupils! At one time, it felt like I had spent eight years inside of you, or one of your clones, but in reality I spent the entire time in a tank. And even if I had been inside a real Combat Control Computer, it wouldn’t have been you. The message I got said that I was being issued a new, unused CCC.”