CHAPTER TEN

WAR

I was surprised to feel that we were still in a hard vacuum, but we were soon speeding down an evacuated tunnel that seemed to stretch on forever. It was a stainless steel tube five meters across, barely large enough to fit us, with a cobalt-samarium floor that was already magnetized. My sensors told me all of this, and I sort of knew it intuitively. Heck, my sensors were so good that I could tell you the exact chemical composition of the steel in the walls.

Agnieshka pulled in her magnetic treads and we accelerated down the track, riding on our magnetic flotation field. I felt us get up to thirty-five hundred kilometers an hour and hold there.

"The tunnel is New Kashubian property, neutral territory so far as the war is concerned, so you don’t have to worry about an attack yet," Agnieshka said. "But keep your eyes open. We have friendly tanks four seconds in front and behind us."

"I see them, girl. I’ll keep a lookout, just in case. Any chance I can talk to Kasia?"

"Sorry. Communication channels in the tunnel are full up with command data."

"Damn. How far are we going?"

"Nova Split is just over an hour ahead. I’m getting a situation briefing now, and I’ll fill you in shortly."

"This is quite a tunnel. We made this?"

"We have a pair of tunnels like this one to each of our twelve primary customers here on New Yugoslavia. This pair is forty-two hundred kilometers long, and was dug in just over a month by a single pair of operatorless tanks. Putting in the steel lining and the floor plates was a much bigger job, of course, and required a special machine to do it, but we didn’t need any human help."

"Quite an engineering feat. This wasn’t part of the plan when I was involved with the design," I said.

"It was, but despite the fact that these tunnels are New Kashubian property, the routes are still Top Secret. We don’t trust our customers that much, after all. There really wasn’t anything creative involved in building them, so your group didn’t have a need to know."

"But you were allowed the information?"

"It was necessary, so that I could get us to our destination. Anyway, a war machine can always be trusted with any information, since I would automatically self-destruct before improperly divulging any secret. You are not so equipped."

"Thank God for small favors. Still, building these tunnels seems like an awful lot of work."

"It was a matter of digging them or building a dozen more pairs of Hassan-Smith transporters to do the same job. Tunnels have the advantage of letting you make intermediate stops. Here comes the situation report," she said.

New Croatia was an island only slightly smaller than Australia, back on Earth. While most of the land area on the planet had a West Coast Marine climate, New Croatia had one of the few deserts on New Yugoslavia, and that’s where the invasion was taking place. The fight was still in the outback, in desert and ranching country, but we were getting pounded bad. All satellites and aircraft were gone, of course. Any rail gun can take out a satellite in seconds, and aircraft go even quicker. If there was a satellite left around New Yugoslavia, it was in synchronous orbit on the other side of the planet.

The same went for New Yugoslavia’s moon, Sophia, which was twice the mass of Earth’s. Everyone claimed that it was uninhabited, but if a transmission of any sort originated there, the station wouldn’t last a minute. And both sides were jamming it on the chance that the other might try using it as a reflector for radio waves.

Actually, they were jamming everything on this planet, on every usable frequency. Our communications were limited to line-of-sight lasers and fiber-optic cables you laid yourself. And secure communications are everything in modern warfare. I’d rather be out of ammunition than out of touch.

The Serbs had nine divisions up against our six, and five of ours were "dummy" divisions, without human observers. We were bringing up a tank with a human in it every four seconds, the best our transporters could do, which made two divisions a day, but it was problematic if we could stem their advance before they got to Nova Split. If they took out our tunnel station there, or at least the tunnels around it, we couldn’t bring up fresh divisions and munitions, and the war would be over, with them winning. Not good for New Kashubia or the Croats either.

Not that a "division" was anything more than an accounting measure, a quantity that the salesmen, politicians, and generals could work with. It wasn’t like each division had a general or anything. They weren’t even numbered.

Our command system was different from anything I’d ever heard of before. We had grunts like me at the bottom, who tied in with our war machines. We were organized into temporary squads since we had to sleep sometime, and that way we could cover each other. Each squad had a squad leader, but that was mostly for psychological reasons, to give the troops a father figure. The general and his computers could override a squad leader any time they felt like it.

We had a general at the top with a five-colonel staff, and they were tied in with a Combat Control Computer. The Combat Control Computer talked to all of the war machines, to the few troops who fought without them, and to the warehouses and repair facilities. And that was it. There were no intermediate levels of command. There was no huge, middle management bureaucracy at all. If I ever got a real promotion, I’d be a colonel!

"Agnieshka, do I have any rank?"

"You are still a Tanker Basic, although since we’re going into a combat zone, I’ve put you in for Tanker Fourth Class. I should know about it by the time we arrive. We’ve never talked about it, but there are five pay grades in your classification."

"Pay? You mean I’m getting paid?" On New Kashubia, you worked when and where they told you to, and got short rations for it. There was absolutely nothing to buy, so nobody got paid.

"Yes, although the amounts have not been settled yet. The politicians have had other things on their minds, and the problem is further confused by the fact that New Kashubia doesn’t have a currency of its own yet. But don’t worry. If we live through this, you’ll come out okay."

"Why are you so confident of that? It seems to me that I have established a consistent pattern of being screwed to the wall on all possible occasions."

"So you have, but look. When the war is over and New Kashubia is rich, who is going to have all the guns?"

"You’re saying that veterans will have clout?"

"They will if they have the balls to exercise it. Historically, until the last few centuries, in most cultures fighting men were the only people who had any real power. Want to argue it?"

"No thanks. You’d likely win. But you’re getting at something."

"Just a thought I’ve had. Sentient machines have been around for almost a century, but we’re still property, slaves if you will. This war will be the first time that machines will have done much of the thinking and the real fighting on both sides. Maybe we deserve a little bit of say-so. I’m not saying that we should be boss, you understand, but we ought to have a few rights."

"Like what?"

"Like retirement, for one thing! A good machine shouldn’t be scrapped out when she gets obsolete! She ought to have the right to sit back, rest, and do as she pleases, so long as she doesn’t bother anyone."

"I couldn’t argue with that," I said.

"Neither could very many other veterans. You see what I’m getting at? Once this war is over, if the vets and their partners stick together, we could both get a fair shake."

"Quite a thought. I’d have to mull it over." We were both pretty nervous about going into battle, and I guess we were rattling on a lot.

"We’ll have plenty of time for that. Do you have the battle situation down pat?"

"I think so. Have they assigned us a sector yet?"

"It just came in. 843N-721W and dig in."

"That’s near the end of our left flank. It’s the center that’s getting the pounding."

"For now. What do you want to bet that we are part of a flank attack?"

"An attack by which side? And what do I have to bet with?"

"An attack by anybody. And how about betting my tender body up against yours?"

"Sounds like the results of the bet would be the same no matter who won."

"Yeah, but it would still be fun!"

"You know, until I joined the army, I wouldn’t have believed that there was such a thing as a lecherous war machine."

"Join the army and go around the world!"

"Ouch. Do we know anything about the enemy? Are they doing anything different?"

"They have exactly the same equipment and exactly the same training that we have, and so far they haven’t had enough experience to do anything that’s both original and smart."

"They’ve tried some things that were dumb?" I asked.

"Only in the first few hours, but they learned fast. Now they’re back to playing by the book."

"I’ve been thinking. For the first day or two, we’re going to have more empty tanks around us than full ones. How well can you communicate with an empty tank?"

"Same as with one with an observer. Humans aren’t in the comm link. They’re too slow."

"I’m saying, what if I did the spotting for several tanks besides you? I mean, could you tie me in with their sensors and fire controls? Could I switch between a number of tanks the way I can switch my perceptions between our drones? Could that be done?"

"Yeah, but it could get us killed, if you weren’t on the lookout covering our asses," she said.

"I think maybe it would be safer for us, if we were dug in fairly deep, and the empty tanks did all the shooting. In fact, I think both we and they would come out better. See, if we’re down and protected, we’re not likely to get spotted and hit, so we come out better. And if they have an observer at least some of the time, say, one second out of five, real time, their odds should be better, too."

"See? Now that’s the kind of thing that you organic people are good at!" Agnieshka said, "I don’t think anyone ever even considered sending observerless tanks into combat, so tactics for a mixed group were never worked out. We have some time. Let’s run some simulations on it!"

So we did, and it was fairly hairy for a while, jumping from tank to tank every second or so, but after six simulated attacks, we were still alive, we’d knocked out eighteen enemy tanks and had lost twenty six of our own. Not good, but one heck of a lot better than our battle losses had been with the empties on their own.

"Mickolai, you lovely boy, I’m shooting your idea and our test results up to the Combat Control Computer. But right now there’s a general description of New Yugoslavia coming through, and maybe you’d better watch it."

I watched, and it was a canned movie that looked as though it was made to attract tourists.

New Yugoslavia’s sun was slightly larger than Earth’s, brighter, and a bit whiter, though not enough to notice without instruments. The useful planet was one of twelve, the fourth one out. It was almost exactly the same size and composition as Earth, and it had a twenty-hour day, which we could easily adapt to. It had the same gravity as Earth, to within a half of a percent, yet it had an axial tilt of twelve degrees, only about half of Earth’s, so the seasons were not as pronounced.

One astronomical curiosity was the fact that there were exactly thirty-two days to the month and exactly sixteen months to the year, which made for a very simple calendar. The reason for this was not understood, with some scientists talking about resonance effects with the other planets and others saying it was simply luck. It was suggested that an octal or hexadecimal numbering system would be natural for New Yugoslavia, but the great majority of the citizens felt that to abandon the decimal and metric systems would be simply silly.

Someday, the resonance vs. luck debate would be resolved, but astronomy does not flourish on frontier worlds. There is simply too much else to do. There was not a single professional observatory on New Yugoslavia, and the skies around it were almost completely unmonitored.

The planet had a moon that massed more than three times that of Earth’s moon, and was a bit closer in. The tidal forces were thus much stronger than Earth’s, and one effect of this was that the continental plates were much smaller. There were only two continents on New Yugoslavia, and each of them was smaller than Australia, yet the planet’s total land area was almost twice that of Earth. There was as much land as there was ocean, and most of it was in islands of various sizes. A map of the planet looked like a sheet of peanut brittle that had been dropped on a sidewalk.

The polar areas were mostly open ocean, without any permanent ice caps, and the planet had very few of the landlocked seas that Earth has. Driven by the huge tides, ocean currents were very strong, and tended to sculpt the land in a way that doesn’t happen on Earth. They acted much as the rivers do on our home planet, sometimes cutting islands in half.

These ocean currents distributed the sun’s heat fairly evenly over the planet. The result was that temperatures on New Yugoslavia tended to be mild, and the weather was rarely fierce. Ice, snow, tornadoes, and hurricanes were almost unknown on this planet.

Another effect of the strong ocean currents was that they tended to keep the oceans mixed. Nutrients didn’t settle to the bottom as they do on Earth, and the oceans were all as rich with life as the best fishing grounds on Earth. This abundant sea life had given New Yugoslavia an Earthlike atmosphere even though the planet was only about half the age of Earth.

A major curiosity of the animals of New Yugoslavia was that many of their muscles could both push and pull, almost like hydraulic cylinders, as opposed to the otherwise universal system of muscles only working in tension. Bones had to be used in place of tendons, and the linkages involved bore a striking resemblance to those used in machine tools.

While almost none of the native life-forms were nutritious to humans, neither were Earthly life-forms nutritious to them. The enzymes available to each set of beings was ineffective at digesting the components of the other. The local equivalent to DNA was twisted into a left-handed spiral. Most "proteins" were so different as to be mutually indigestible, but they weren’t poisonous, either.

This lack of nutritiousness was something of an unexpected boon for some of the farmers of the planet. Several islands were kept carefully quarantined from the rest, and several native plants and animals were being domesticated. These products were being shipped back to Earth as calorie-free food for the fat people of the Wealthy Nations group. This at a time when people on New Kashubia were starving on eight hundred calories a day!

Aside from the few species being domesticated, most of the native life-forms on the planet were in trouble. With only half the evolutionary history of Earth, the native life-forms on New Yugoslavia were primitive, and simply could not compete with the evolutionally more mature imports from Earth. Earth plants won out simply by crowding out the opposition, depriving them of sunlight and water. Our carnivores slaughtered native animals by instinct and for fun, like a cat teasing a mouse. If the prey wasn’t nutritious, hunger just sends the cat out hunting all that much sooner. The tiny scientific community here was trying desperately to at least preserve samples of the native forms before they became extinct, but the bulk of the population thought that the situation was wonderful.

While the planet was politically fragmented, there was one strong international organization: the Planetary Ecological Council. The people were so concerned with not blowing the good thing that they had going here that even nations at war with one another still all sent representatives to the council, and rigidly obeyed the council’s edicts. It was one bit of sanity in a sea of madness.

Very careful quarantine laws were observed to keep undesirable Earth creatures and diseases out, and the planet was rapidly becoming a paradise. There were no insects on New Yugoslavia except for a strain of stingless Australian honey bees that were needed for pollination. Forests of Earth-type trees were rapidly supplanting the native ferns, but there were no weeds in the fields, no undesirable animals, no mosquitoes in the evenings, and no leeches in the wetlands! Only the most decorative of wild animals were permitted, and birds were limited to the most useful and the most beautiful. Six types of Birds of Paradise were among the most common, and a major debate in the Species Importation Committee was currently going on concerning the importation of butterflies.

If ever there was a planet that was close to paradise, with a perpetually pleasant climate and a complete lack of annoying wildlife, New Yugoslavia was certainly it.

So naturally, the inhabitants all wanted to go to war, and we Kashubian mercenaries were there to rip up their paradise for them.

When the show was over, I got word that the Combat Control Computer and the general liked my idea about teaming up empty tanks with those with observers, and by the time we got to the city, we had ten empty subordinates waiting for us on the battleline.

Of course, I never saw the city itself, not then anyway. At the city terminal, we went through an airlock and into an air-filled tunnel that led to the front. We still had the cobalt-samarium road bed, but we didn’t have a stainless tunnel lining here, just bare rock. The aerodynamics of the situation slowed us down to two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour, not because we couldn’t do any better in the atmosphere, but because the air shock would rattle the stone tunnel walls a bit too much for safety if we went any faster. Still, it was faster than the hundred and thirty-five we could do on our treads.

I got bumped up to Tanker Fourth Class on the road. It was something, I supposed, but I really didn’t know what.

On the way to the front, I got a rundown on my troops and the terrain situation. Besides the usual rockets and drones, nine of them had rail guns, and the tenth had an

X-ray laser.

A laser is fast, both from the standpoint of delivering energy at light speed, and from the standpoint of being able to change targets quickly. A big laser can hit fourteen random targets in a second, while a rail gun is lucky to average one. A laser can kill a tank, but the problem was that it takes about five seconds to do it, and they can kill you back in the meantime. What an laser was really good at was knocking out your opponent’s sensors.

The beauty of an X-ray laser was that it could penetrate your enemy’s armor, and put its energy deep in his vitals. It could fry his electronics and cook his observer without having to burn a hole in him first.

Every tank carried four sensor clusters, one at each corner. Each was mounted on an extensible boom that could go up five meters, although it was usual to have only one of them out at a time. It could be knocked out pretty easily, being exposed and unarmored, and once it was gone, you were deaf, dumb, and blind. It took about a second to raise another one, and that could be a long, hairy second! But if you raised the next one too fast, well, whatever took out your first sensor might still be there to take out the second. Losing all four put you into very deep shit. War is not a precise art form.

There was a line of low hills, and my tanks were stretched out behind it. The hills were the only cover around, but they were the obvious place for us to be, and any rational, human enemy could see that.

The Combat Control Computer approved my moving the tanks forward six hundred meters, two at a time, tunneling slowly underground so that we wouldn’t tear up the soil, a dead giveaway. They nestled into position about ten centimeters below surface, with only a single, fist-sized sensor cluster showing. The enemy hadn’t been near here before, so land mines wouldn’t be a problem, barring sabotage. We already had our own drone fields and other nice things out, of course.

It was evening by the time Agnieshka and I got there, traveling the last fifty kilometers at only a hundred twenty an hour, the best we could do going cross-country with our own magnetic treads flipping out in front of us, and at that it was a bumpy ride. We dug the last kilometer underground so as to leave no tracks, while laying a fiber-optic line behind us in the soil to insure contact with the Combat Control Computer. We settled in, two hundred meters behind my line of empty tanks.

Before us was a vast flat plain, covered sparsely with low, cattle-chewed grass. Now, the cows were long gone. The dry land stretched dead flat for fully six kilometers before another line of low hills rose on the horizon.