"They had a two-man listening post here," Quincy reported. "I took them out. I doubt if they had a chance to report anything. I've tapped into their comm lines, and we're trying to decode them now. Judging from what was on their clipboard, they weren't due to be relieved for six hours, standard."
There were two dead men lying where they had been dragged aside and neatly laid out with their heads in almost the right positions. They had both been decapitated by an antipersonnel laser beam, which had cauterized the wounds, except for the major arteries. There was less blood than was usual in our simulations. They were the first real combat casualties I'd ever seen. Their faces looked surprisingly peaceful. . . .
Judging from the half-eaten rations that were lying around, it looked like they had both been eating lunch together when Quincy had appeared and killed them. That suggested poor discipline, since one of them should have stayed on guard. At least, he would have in our army.
They were Orientals, Chinese perhaps, and were wearing what we would call work fatigues, not the far more expensive Squid Skin. Their weapons were old style assault rifles, pistols, and rocket launchers, all powered by chemical explosives. The pistols were still in their holsters, the rest were all stacked neatly against the wall. The two soldiers had been killed before they had a chance to get to their weapons.
All this suggested that the Earth forces were either underfunded, or that they had second-rate troops around doing low-grade tasks like guarding unused receivers.
Agnieshka found a Kashubian comm line and tapped into it, trying to get some idea of what was happening in the war.
I got into my humanoid drone and adjusted the Squid Skin to resemble the enemy uniform. I picked up some of the enemy weapons and went down the corridor to stand guard. Until the whole squad arrived, I didn't want any interruptions. Soon, Quincy was in his drone, standing guard in the other direction. Breaking codes and ferreting out information from comm lines were tasks that the computers could do better without our help.
It seemed like forever before Kasia arrived, followed by Conan, Maria, Zuzanna, and the ammunition truck.
By then, Agnieshka and Marisa, Quincy's tank, could report the areas under enemy control, where the fighting was going on, and the approximate numbers of the enemy. They had some forty thousand troops on New Kashubia, and ninety percent of them were infantry. The rest were in light combat vehicles, for the most part. They had only a few dozen main battle tanks on the planet.
Only twenty percent of their infantry were equipped for fighting in a vacuum. An odd choice, since New Kashubia didn't have a natural atmosphere. All of the air in the tunnels had been imported. My best guess was that troops on Earth were used mostly for police work, and peacekeeping operations, not real combat.
But it is dangerous to underestimate your enemy. Even if it seems that they are acting stupid.
"But boss, the key fact that I've unearthed is that the receivers in New Kashubia that were assigned to the original probe sent from Earth are still operating at maximum capacity. They are still sending in more troops."
"Okay, people," I said. "We will do plan C."
Plan A had been "The war is over, our side has already won, let's go join the party!"
Plan B was "The war is over, our side lost, and we are about to become guerilla terrorists."
Plan C involved shooting at the local sun.
When the first probe got to this system, it found a neutron star that was putting out two searchlight beams of deadly radiation. This star was spinning, end over end, once every twenty-two seconds, in a plane that was at a high angle to the orbit of the only planet left in the system. The only place in the entire system where the probe's computer could find to put itself in the "safe, stable orbit" that its programming required was at right angles to the radiation beams, in a twenty-two-second orbit around the star.
This put it very close to the tiny star's surface.
Rail gun needles had plenty of speed to get to the probe and do damage, but at a range of over a hundred million kilometers, we really doubted if we could hit it, even if we tried a few billion times, which we intended to do.
We could, however, hit the sun right behind it. When you added the quarter light speed of a rail gun needle to the neutron star's fierce gravitation, the impact was enough to kick up some considerable radiation on its own. Maybe enough radiation to fry the probe's robot brain.
Of course, nobody had ever tried this, but it looked like a pretty good bet: one truckload of ammunition against the chance of disrupting the enemy's only supply line.
We headed out as soon as the truck arrived, with Quincy at point, Zuzanna as slack, and Conan as rear guard. More troops would be following us, using the same receiver, but they would be assigned to the general staff, and not acting independently like us. Not wanting to explain things that they didn't have a need to know, I figured to be gone when they got here.
First, we had to get to the surface of the planet. The nearest route took us three thousand kilometers west, and then two thousand kilometers up.
Those distances were as the crow flies, of course, and there weren't any crows on New Kashubia. The way we had to go, it was much longer.
Only about two percent of the tunnels on New Kashubia are filled with air. It had only been five years since the smuggling network had started and we could afford to import the lighter elements in any quantity. We had eighty years of heavy mining behind us, and a lot of old tunnels. The plan was to fill them all, eventually, but these things take time.
We got to an air lock, went through into the vacuum beyond, and left the door open behind us. Air was screaming through, the wind was pushing at our backs, and the New Kashubians among us were all having guilt trips about it. We had all been trained excessively about the importance of conserving air, and of the dangers of being in a vacuum.
Every room of any size in the living areas in the planet had air locks on it, as well as emergency bottles of air and vacuum gear, and every Kashubian had been well trained in their use.
My hope was that the Earth troops had not had the benefit of such training, and that if they didn't actually die, their mobility would be restricted, and their fighting ability hampered. When you are at war, anything that you can do to disturb the enemy is good.
Anyway, we weren't losing the air. It wasn't actually leaving the planet, or anything like that. It would simply pool up in the lower levels, and we could recover it, eventually. Why the general staff hadn't dumped the air in enemy-held areas was beyond me, but I had orders to act on my own.
Even in a vacuum, our speed was restricted to four hundred kilometers per hour in the copper layer since it wasn't magnetic, and our tanks had to run on the magnetic bars that served as their treads. It was only when we worked our way up to the iron layer that we could really stretch out and move.
The point tank magnetized the floor as it went along, the rest of us just cruised along, and the rearguard degaussed the track, in the vague hope of confusing anybody who might be following us.
During the trip, I got through the first semester of my course in agriculture.
We were trying to get to one of the first vertical shafts dug by the Japanese after they rented New Kashubia from us. They had dug three such shafts, six meters in diameter, figuring out just what they had on this strange planet, but in the end had only enlarged one of them for commercial use. That one was now in the middle of a war zone, and if the twenty thousand tanks we had fighting there couldn't get through, then neither could we.
The other two shafts had been abandoned, once they finally accepted the fact that in New Kashubia, all mine shafts find the same things. The records said that these shafts had been lined with iron to let the drilling machines climb back up, magnetically.
I figured that if they could climb up and out, so could we. What's a three-thousand-kilometer drop to a Kashubian veteran, anyway? Aside from the fact that in Dream World, it would take us many hours to hit bottom.
We got there without seeing a living thing, nor even a sensor array. This was welcome, but it was also a little spooky. When things are going exactly according to plan, I can never shake the feeling that the world has a sneaky trick that it is about to pull on me.
Our next problem was that there wasn't an entrance to the shaft. The closest we could get was five meters from it, with that much solid iron in the way. We didn't have any tunneling equipment, but we had something close to it.
We had rail guns.
In simulations, shooting straight in at an iron wall from thirty meters away got the shooter covered in rapidly solidifying iron vapor. This did not do nice things to one's tank and weapons. The trick turned out to be to get as far back as you could and cut into the wall at a fairly shallow angle. This sprayed the iron vapor farther down the tunnel, where maybe someday, somebody else would clean up the mess.
Conan had lost the toss, so he got into position. The rest of us dropped back about five hundred meters.
It was even messier than the simulations had said it would be. It took five times the ammunition we had expected, so Cheop's Law was functioning normally.
Part of the problem was that the maps were a bit off. We had to go through twelve meters of iron before we found the shaft. Then, from where he was shooting from, Conan didn't know when he finally hit the shaft. When everything is glowing yellow, outlines are hard to see. He ended up cutting the shaft all the way through instead of just putting a hole in it.
Not to worry, though. With solid iron walls, a tank could levitate itself along on the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. Once the metal had cooled enough to become magnetic again, Agnieshka just walked up the wall, through the hole upside down, and up the tunnel.
The rest followed us.
We went up in three pairs, spread out around the shaft, with the ladies on top, at my orders, and the truck following last. This way, if one of the lower vehicles fell, we'd only lose one man. If one of the top tanks slipped, we'd lose two, but not the whole team.
Anyway, a lady always goes up a staircase first. My father taught me that.
"We've got a problem, boss," Agnieshka said. "We are traveling up an iron shaft, but it does not have the iron lining that the plans said it did. When we get above the iron layer, we won't be able to grip the wall."
"Maybe they just didn't bother with the lining here because it's already iron," Conan said.
"Or maybe this is the last shaft they dug, and they just abandoned the machinery at the bottom," Kasia said. "That might have been cheaper than building three thousand kilometers of iron tubing."
"Or maybe they were planning to pick it up when they eventually got around to drilling a mining tunnel to it," Maria said.
"There's only one way to find out. Let's go slowly, so we can stop in time if we run out of iron," I said.
An hour later, we ran out of iron. We sat there, just below the seam, at a dead stop.
"Suggestions, anyone?"
There were a few minutes of silence before Quincy said, "Let's all hold hands."
We were in Dream World, sitting in my living room, and for a moment, we all just stared at him.
"Dammit, Quincy, this is no time for nicey-nice group feelings," Maria said to him. "In the real world, we are hanging head down, clinging to the walls of a shaft that goes six hundred kilometers up and twenty-four hundred kilometers down. This is not a good time for humor, either."
"No, I'm serious. These tanks need a ferromagnetic surface to run on when their treads are retracted, but they still have their treads! If we can generate enough mechanical pressure, forcing them against the wall of the shaft, we can still climb out of here. I think the six of us will just fit in a circle, filling the shaft like a cork. Then, we each push against the tank on either side with both manipulator arms. I think that might give us enough traction to move upward."
"What about the ammo truck?" I said, "Without it, there's no point in this exercise in the first place."
"There's no room for it in the circle, and it doesn't have manipulator arms, anyway. We put it on top, and carry it."
"What do we do when we get to the top of the shaft?" Zuzanna said.
"We keep pushing. If we are going fast enough, and pushing hard enough, we should go ballistic at the shaft's lip, and end up in a neat circle around the hole."
"And the ammo truck?"
"Somebody should be assigned to hang on to the ammo truck, or it might go straight back to where it came from, and then some."
"Does anybody have a less insane idea?" I asked.
"Surrendering, and demanding our rights under the Geneva Convention, which New Kashubia never signed?" Conan suggested.
"Okay," I said. "Let's run some simulations."
On the first three times, we ended up slipping down the shaft, although on the second try, we all managed to live through it.
On the fourth try, we got it to work, once, and that was good enough for a veteran.
It took all of the drones pushing, even the mice, along with the manipulator arms, to do the trick. Each pair of manipulator arms was pushing against the tank "above" it, and the drones were all working at separating me from Quincy. The rest of the tanks were crammed together, making a mess of the Squid Skin coverings, but it worked.
It was a long, nerve-wracking trip, with nothing we could do but worry about whether we would make it to the surface or not. After a while, I ordered the tanks to put us all to sleep, and wake us when we got near the top, or the bottom, as the case might be.
Conan said, "If it's all the same to you, Mickolai, I would just as soon not be awakened if we are approaching the bottom."
"What? But then you would miss the only opportunity you'll ever get to experience something absolutely unique!" Quincy said.