"Yes sir."
When we got back to the main floor, I saw one of our drones sweeping the floor. It was wearing a long, brown monk's robe. I looked at this, shook my head, and continued on my way.
When we were walking down the steps of the western facade, Agnieshka stopped and said, "Boss, all leaves have been canceled. You and Kasia have been called up for immediate duty. The war has started."
I looked out over my land, my cathedral, and my magnificent city. The grass had only been planted the day before, and the tall sprinklers were putting out a fine mist to keep the seeds moist without disturbing them much. But if I squinted and imagined a bit, I could almost make the wet sand look green.
"So soon," I said. "It happened so soon. Somebody is really going to pay a heavy price for making me leave this place so soon."
I stripped in front of the church, left my clothes lying on the ground, and got into Agnieshka's coffin. Kasia said that she would wait for Eva to get there, a matter of a few minutes. I told her to get into the bus, and we'd meet Eva half way, and for a change, she didn't give me any argument.
As soon as I was hooked up and in Dream World, I said, "Agnieshka, who are we fighting?"
"Earth."
"Earth? General Sobieski hinted that there might be some interstellar enemy. Aliens, of some sort."
"I think that is, or was, what he was worried about. There are certain astronomical anomalies that look like they might be ships of some kind coming toward us, but we can't be sure. If they are like the probes that human civilization has been sending out for hundreds of years, they are using sodium and fluorine rockets instead of the oxygen and hydrogen ones that we use. Or, they might be some natural phenomenon that we don't understand. I think that this war with Earth might be as big a surprise to the general as it is to us."
"Damn. So tell me what else you know."
"Boss, at this point, you know everything about the war that I do."
"Hoy! Okay, then I'd better be on my toes when more information comes in. Put me to sleep, now. Wake me when Kasia gets into Eva. She'll need me."
On our way to our assigned arming station, I asked Agnieshka about my squad, the "colonels" that I trained with.
"There's a problem there, boss. All of them have the rank of tanker first class, and as such have a right to lead their own squads. With all the new recruits that you arranged for the army to have, there is a serious need for trained squad leaders. Maria and Conan have elected to stay with you, but Mirko and Lloyd have decided to lead their own squads, since they say that the odds are way against you ever becoming a real general, which is the only thing that could get them promoted to colonel. That leaves you two people short of the standard squad."
"Damn. Without a full staff of colonels, I'll never get that promotion, no matter what happens. I can't say that I blame Mirko and Lloyd, though. They are probably right. What about Zuzanna and Quincy? They were only a week shy of graduating from the military school when their general died. I wonder, would they be interested in joining my squad? That way, if an opening for another general actually came along, I would be in a position to fill it."
"I'll ask them, boss."
"Better still, can you put me in touch with them? I'd like to invite them myself."
"I can't do it in Dream World, boss. The communication channels are jammed."
"I thought that our comm system had the capacity to keep everybody on the planet in Dream World."
"It will, boss, but it's not finished yet."
"Then get a message to them somehow, and tell them why I couldn't deliver it personally."
"Yes, sir."
I could connect with Kasia by laser, since she and Eva were directly behind us on the Loway. She was working over her stocks, but her heart wasn't in it. Soon we were in the sack together, again. We needed it.
Afterward, she said, "Well, I guess the contest is over. Who won?"
"Agnieshka? Eva? Would you two get together and figure out the net worth of each of us?"
Our tanks were a surprisingly long time at it before Agnieshka said, "You won, boss, by a factor of more than five."
"Five," Kasia said, crushed. "You beat me by that much and you never even worked hard at it."
"It's like I kept on telling you, love. Keep your thoughts on the big picture, and delegate everything else. If you try to micromanage anything more complicated than your bank account, you are bound to fail."
"I didn't fail! I'm still the richest woman in the country!"
"And the smartest and the most beautiful. And the one I love. And now I'm going to collect on your gambling debt."
"Didn't we just do that?"
"Yeah. And we're about to do it again. Come here, woman!"
"Yes, master."
Somewhat later, Agnieshka said that Quincy and Zuzanna would be honored to join our outfit, since, among other things, it let them stay together, and three couples would make a nice group. But they had expressed considerable curiosity as to why a general officer was leading a mere squad.
I told her to tell them the whole story, and not to leave out any of the embarrassing parts. Within the squad, there shouldn't be any secrets.
A few minutes after that, I suddenly found myself in the living room, in a class A uniform. General Sobieski was just walking in. Being a real general apparently lets you pull rank when it comes to comm channels.
"Mickolai, some people are going to claim that this war is all your fault. It isn't, but they will say so. Because of that, I thought it best to explain some things to you directly."
"Yes, sir. I never started a war before. What did I do?"
"You were generous, decent, and you have humanitarian instincts, that's what. It was those automatic medical centers that you sent all over Human Space. And yes, I knew what you were doing, and yes, I approved of it. But the whole story is that when The Diamond was discovered, and we realized what semiconductors made from it would mean to all of our military computers, the commanders of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces ordered that
all
of the military computers under their command would be equipped with diamond semiconductors as soon as possible. The automatic medical centers were officially listed as military equipment, and therefore army property, even though nobody knew that they existed. But, following orders, the automatic factories upgraded all military computers, including the medical centers. Are you following me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, then, you sent one of them to New Nigeria. That planet is so rich with Earth-compatible life forms that it was possible for most of the population to revert to a hunting-gathering life style. It's something that most human beings would do, given the opportunity. Historically, we humans spent millions of years as hunter-gatherers, and that life style became the natural thing for us to do. We got very good at surviving that way, and we liked it a lot. Even today, given the chance, a man will go hunting, and a woman will go shopping, an activity that has a lot in common with gathering."
"I've noticed that, sir. But just how did I start this war?"
"The hunter-gatherer life style does not naturally lend itself to higher education. New Nigeria has very few technically trained people. Because of this, most of their communication centers and so on are maintained by foreign technicians, from Earth, as luck would have it. When they got your fabulous gift, they naturally turned over the maintenance of it to their foreign technicians. And those boys, being naturally curious, got to trying to figure out how it was that the new computers they had been assigned to repair were thirty times faster than anything they had ever heard of before. It wasn't too long before they deduced that it was because of the new diamond semiconductors. Without the permission of the New Nigerians, major chunks of the automatic medical center were shipped back to Earth."
"Oh."
"Yes. The Powers That Be on Earth were not slow in realizing what such an advance in computer technology meant, both militarily and economically. Earth demanded that the frontier worlds hand over the new technology for making the diamond semiconductors. I don't think that they realize yet that we had
found
The Diamond, and that we didn't
make
it. Not that it made much difference to the planetary governments, since they hadn't the slightest idea of what Earth was talking about. The KEF army never told them about the new technology. We were keeping it as a military secret. Even the New Kashubian Parliament was kept in the dark."
"And Earth figured that we were all stonewalling them," I said.
"Precisely. And since the automatic medical centers were built on New Kashubia, and since Earth was still very unhappy with the way that New Kashubia had nationalized the property of Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing, a privately owned, Earth-registered corporation, they hit New Kashubia first."
"My family is in New Kashubia."
"Mine, too. All we know for sure right now is that they are fighting in the tunnels there. I'm sending New Kashubia half of the forces I have here on New Yugoslavia, but I have been ordered to stay here and defend this planet. Most of the tanks I'll be sending there are being temporarily assigned to the New Kashubian general staff, which commands more of a home guard than a real fighting force. You and your squad are going, too, but I am ordering you to stay independent. You have a very creative and unorthodox way of handling things, Mickolai. You have a very devious mind, and there is something of the con man in you. I've got a hunch that you might think of something that the politically appointed general staff hasn't, or that you might dare to do something that they wouldn't. Your orders are to do what seems right to you to save our planet, and our families."
"You are putting a lot of faith in me, sir. I'll try to live up to your expectations."
"Maybe I am. One more squad of line troops probably wouldn't make that much difference in this war, but one ace in the hole just might. Carry on, Tanker!"
"Yes, sir!"
We saluted, and he disappeared.
I stood there, thinking that if I managed to screw up big time, or better still, get myself killed, I would be giving my general a very convenient scapegoat.
Someone to blame the whole war on.
Me.
There was quite a line at the arming center, but as soon as my squad was assembled, we were sent to the front of it. The general had given very specific orders concerning us.
The bus was finally taken off Agnieshka's back, and an X-ray laser was mounted as her main armament. This would not ordinarily have been my first choice, but considering that we would probably end up fighting in the huge mining tunnels on New Kashubia, I suppose it made sense. Letting loose with a rail gun in a metal tunnel didn't sound like a good way to prolong your life. Glancing to the side, I saw that Kasia and Quincy were also getting lasers, while the other three were getting the more standard rail guns.
They mounted two antipersonnel weapons on each of our tanks, an IR laser and a machine gun. Well, it was actually a small paramagnetic launcher, which threw a stream of relatively heavy slugs, weighing almost a gram each, at fairly low speeds, only about three thousand meters per second. But if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck . . .
We also each got a pair of grenade launchers, with an assortment of fragmentation, concussion, armor piercing, and flash grenades, plus four flavors of gas grenades labeled tear gas, foggy, sleepy, and deadly.
We didn't get any tunneling equipment, since the ultrasonic tunnelers wouldn't have worked on most of the metals that New Kashubia was composed of, but they gave us each a standard pair of manipulator arms.
They didn't think we would need any land mines, but we each got five assorted drones. One of each set was a humanoid drone, of the sort that Quincy and I had bought. It just climbed up on the turret and sat there.
"Agnieshka, is that drone my property?"
"No boss. I checked the serial number."
"I thought that Quincy and I owned all of them that there were."
"Apparently not, sir."
"I can't imagine what we're going to do with six humanoid drones. Maybe we can put them to directing traffic."
"Yes, sir."
"On a more important topic, we have just been issued a lot of weapons that I, for one, don't know how to use."
"Nobody thought that we would ever have much use for antipersonnel weapons, sir."
"Right. But if we've got them we'd better learn how to use them. Download the appropriate programs."
"I'm doing that now, boss."
"Tell the others that it's back to school again."
When we left, we had a semisentient ammunition truck following us, tagging along like a hungry stray dog who smells a sausage. Normally, these trucks were issued at a rate of one truck for sixteen squads. Apparently, the general thought that we would be doing an awful lot of shooting. That, or he figured that we'd make good delivery boys.
It was a four-day trip to New Kashubia, since they routed us through New Ireland, Soul City, New Zanzibar, and New Nigeria. This was the long way around, but either the general wanted us to avoid the traffic jam going directly to New Kashubia, or he wanted us to use an infrequently used receiving station on the planet.
The time spent actually in transit varied between a few minutes and thirty hours, according to some rules that a physicist might understand, but I didn't.
But to get from one interstellar point to another, you have to match speed and direction with the point on the target planet that you are going to. You have to compensate for the spins of both the planet that you are leaving and the one you are going to. These speeds are on the order of a thousand kilometers per hour. Then there are the orbital velocities of both planets. These are typically a hundred thousand kilometers per hour. And then there are the relative velocities of the two stars involved. In the sphere known as Human Space, three hundred light years in diameter, that could be just about anything from zero up to sixty kilometers per second.