“I am honored by your confidence in me, sir. If I might ask, though, could we also have the drones that your tanks carry? Most of ours have been destroyed.”
“Certainly. You can even have my own, personal drone as a loan.” I had Agnieshka walk the highly decorated thing over to the colonel’s tank.
“It is a magnificent piece of workmanship, sir! I shall endeavor to bring it back to you intact!”
“Just do your best to get the job done, and keep in touch. Carry on, Colonel Gurung.”
As the last of the Gurkha tanks left, taking the enemy dead with them to help clean the place up, the professor said, “General, these primitive computers are overheating. They were designed to be air cooled, and with the air in this room exhausted, they will all be inoperative long before they can be reprogrammed.”
“We’ll get on it,” I said. “You keep working on reprogramming them.”
So, I switched hats from being a battlefield general to being a computer room wall repairman. Our drones were gone, but we had the manipulator arms on the truck guard, and the five empties we had with us. Plenty of manpower! With our small lasers to do the cutting and welding, sections of the walls from outside the computer room were cut out and patched over the holes we’d made coming in. It makes you wonder how armies ever got along, before tanks had manipulator arms.
The only snag was figuring out how to get the fiber-optic cables leading to the Gurkhas through the walls without leaving a leak. This was finally solved when Zuzanna found a barrel of sealant in a supply room.
The air in the coolant bottles of the tanks was more than sufficient to pressurize the room, although we would be in trouble if we ever had to go out in the direct sunlight, this close to the sun. The job was done before we lost any of the ancient computers, and the liquid air we sprayed on the floor cooled them down in a hurry.
Then we went ahead and built an air lock of our own, big enough to let one tank through, using valves we’d ripped out of some of the plumbing, hinges that used to be on some heavy doors, and the many extra panels we’d cut from the walls when the troops had enthusiastically started on the job. If you are going to do something, you might as well do it right.
We had been through what seemed like eighteen days of brutal combat with very little sleep. The professor didn’t need our help, and I was expecting an enemy counterattack soon. I had Quincy set up a watch schedule, with two people awake in the CCC, and two in the guard tanks, and told everybody else to get some sleep.
Abdul’s computer told me that things were quiet out there, for a change, and that he was asleep. I told her not to wake him up, but she filled me in on what was happening with the other four battle groups who were assaulting the Solar System.
The small group that assaulted Enceladus, Saturn’s ice moon, hadn’t run into any opposition at all. They had accomplished their objective without losing a man, and the supply of ice coming to us had never been interrupted. Whether this station was doing anything with that ice was a currently unanswered question.
The three huge groups that went into synchronous orbit around Earth had done fairly well. They’d taken about four percent casualties in the first hour, before everything that could shoot at them had been knocked out. Earth itself had been left untouched, except that every transmitter down there that we knew the location of had been destroyed in the first nine minutes. They doubtless had some secret, military transporters hidden somewhere, and our ladies were trying to locate them.
Earth had asked for a cease fire, but they hadn’t surrendered yet. A few violent demonstrations were underway, mostly vaporizing a few hundred square kilometers of ocean near some of Earth’s major cities. These were intended to convince the Earthworms that surrender was their only option. The next demonstration would involve deleting all of their military bases. It was hoped that it wouldn’t prove to be necessary to take out some of their cities.
It looked like the war might be already won, except for my part of it.
Colonel Gurung and the Gurkhas were searching, but had nothing to report yet.
And I couldn’t fall asleep.
This whole situation that we were in wasn’t making any sense to me. The brilliance and speed with which this station had defended itself from the very first instant of our arrival, the massive amounts of armaments that the station contained, and the utter callousness displayed with regards to human life, especially the lives of their own people, they just didn’t fit together.
Brilliance, paranoia, and murderous brutality all in the same person? Was I up against a reincarnation of Genghis Khan?
And even if you had absolutely no morals at all, trained people loyal to your side are your major assets in any kind of a war. Technicians working on a major space station are not economically useless dregs that you might be better off without! And yet there they were, thousands of people, left in the midst of a battle when a simple message to run away could have saved most of their lives.
I switched into Dream World, and into my cottage. “Agnieshka, get me a glass, and a big bottle of strong beer.”
She brought them in, wearing a lot less than she did when Kasia was around. “Are you sure that this is what you need, Mickolai?” She said. “You are way behind on your sleep.”
“What I need is to think. Now, go away, and take your lovely body with you.”
“Yes, Mickolai.”
I sat there at my kitchen table, slowly drank a three-liter bottle of ten percent alcohol Russian honey beer, and let my thoughts go wherever they wished. I turned on some classical guitar music, and then turned it off, and drank some more.
My mind wandered, and I thought for a while about how desperately Agnieshka and all of her many sisters and brothers wanted to be human, and how, once this war was over, I’d help to push through the legislation necessary to give them what they wanted.
I thought about my land, and how one day, I’d be a wealthy land owner, a pillar of my community, respected and with a large and growing family.
I thought about Kasia, and prayed that she and our unborn child were doing well, knowing that however long the months had seemed to me, I had been gone for less than a week in real time.
I thought about this whole stupid, brutal war, that had apparently been kicked off by me, when I tried to save thousands or maybe millions of human lives by shipping those automatic medical centers out to the most populous planets in Human Space.
I thought and I drank, and eventually, a solution occurred to me. Not a solution that would necessarily save my life, or those of my men, but a solution, none the less.
I had at least a solid guess as to what had happened.
“Agnieshka, I’m ready to go to sleep, now.”
And I slept.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Evil Genius
I woke up and realized that I had slept for three full hours of real time. One of the joys of Dream World was that you woke up hangover free, and ready to go without coffee or a bath.
“Nothing much has happened, except that a hundred and fourteen more Gurkhas showed up, and we sent them on to the colonel. We’re up to almost half of our original strength, now, with four hundred and forty-one dead and only thirty-eight missing. The professor is still going at it, and expects to have all the data extracted and sent to New Kashubia in another hour or so. We figured that it would be best to let you sleep, until now,” Quincy said. “Colonel Gurung just called to say that they have located the Earthers’ Computer, and have cut all the data lines coming out of it. Abdul just told me that all firing from the station has suddenly ceased, and it looks like the war is over for us, but he will be moving farther out around the station to the defensive positions that were originally agreed upon. But you’ll be surprised at what we’ve been fighting.”
“It’s the main computer from the automatic medical center that I sent to New Nigeria,” I said.
“Yeah! How did you know that?”
“I figured it out over a bottle, last night.”
“I knew that there had to be a reason why they made you the general,” Quincy said.
“Well, I’d better go and talk to the thing. Hold the fort.”