"That was my idea, yes."
Agnieshka said, "You are all in need of physical training. You are way behind schedule."
"Not now, dammit!" I said.
"When we get into actual combat, you all must be physically fit!"
"Then exercise us while we are asleep. I know that you can do that."
"That would be purely physical, without the mental coordination that you also need."
"Follow orders, dammit!"
"Yes, sir."
I woke up a hundred meters from the top of the shaft, at combat speed. Conan and Maria, on the opposite side of the "cork," were already moving the truck from the center to a position over themselves.
We went over the lip, and bloomed like a flower, spreading outward exactly the way we had in the last simulation.
What wasn't like the simulation was the pile of debris we found around us.
All of our maps of the surface had been made by the first probe to get to this system, a hundred years ago. Very few people had been on the surface since then, and those few hadn't done any mapping. Why bother? What changes on an airless planet?
When the Japanese had dug the shaft, they had apparently taken the debris that their machines had removed and used a linear accelerator to blast it up and out of the hole. This debris had settled around the hole like a pile of volcanic ash. It even looked like a volcano, from the outside.
From the inside, it looked like we were in a huge funnel, with a hole in the bottom that went down forever. I felt Agnieshka firing two of the charges that were normally used to right a tank that had been turned over. This had the effect of giving us enough spin to make a complete flip before we came down, hard on our bottom, on the funnel of debris. Over the years, the metallic debris had vacuum welded itself into a solid mass that was more than a bit slippery.
Almost any metal will weld itself to just about any other metal that it is placed in contact with. This doesn't happen on planets like Earth because in an atmosphere, metals are coated with a thin layer of air, which keeps them from actually touching each other. On an airless world like New Kashubia, metals lack that coating, and they weld up solid.
The other tanks also fired charges, while the drones just did the best they could.
I saw two of the wheeled models slide back down into the shaft, gone forever, the poor little devils.
The truck had no such charges, and wouldn't have had the brains to use them if it did. It came down on its back, and its thin skin just split open, scattering ammo boxes all over the slope. Conan managed to get one of his manipulator hands stuck deep into the debris for traction, and to grab the truck with the other before it followed some of the ammo boxes into the hole.
I looked around, and saw that we were all alive and upright. We still had most of the ammo and most of the drones, including all of the humanoid ones. The tiny mice all survived by biting into the slope with their carbide teeth, and then waiting for rescue.
We were still in business.
"I intend to write a
very
stern letter to my travel agent," Maria said. "This is
not
my idea of a fun vacation!"
The truck was beyond repair, with one tread completely broken off. We switched off its little brain to make it stop running its remaining tread. Then we started to collect up our scattered property.
I fired my X-ray laser at the debris, and found that I could melt a step of sorts into it. Kasia and Quincy soon joined me, and before too long we had cut ourselves a stairway out of the funnel, and a path all the way around the shaft leading up to it.
"It's a shame that we have to let the Earthers know that we were here," Kasia said.
Quincy said, "If they can climb up that shaft after us, maybe they deserve to find us."
We set up a bucket brigade to get the ammo boxes and most of the remaining drones to the top of the cone. The humanoid drones didn't need any help. In fact, they could get around better than the tanks could, and did most of the collecting for us. The human shape is indeed very good for getting through rough terrain.
When the truck was emptied out, we threw it down the shaft. If somebody was actually trying to follow us, the falling truck would probably take them out. Anyway, there was no point in leaving another sign that said "Derdowski was here."
Once we got to the top, we just pulled in our treads and slid down the volcano, with Conan muttering about surfing in a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank. Zuzanna, a historian by trade, began singing something that she claimed was an ancient surfing song, originally done by the Beach Bums of California.
Everybody thinks of New Kashubia as being a smooth metal ball, but that is not the case. It shrank a lot in cooling, and from space it resembles a surface that has been painted with a crinkle finish paint, the sort that you sometimes see on ancient electronic gear. When you are on the surface, it looks like you are surrounded by huge, black sand dunes, except that the dunes are made of solid tungsten.
The sky was black, and filled with unfamiliar constellations. The tiny sun was little more than a bright star, and to human senses it would seem very dark even at high noon. But we were seeing through a tank's sensors, where starlight alone is plenty of illumination.
Nobody in New Kashubia lived on the outside of the planet, because twice a local year it passed through the searchlight beams of radiation coming from its neutron sun. When that happened, you'd better have at least twenty meters of metal overhead. We had eight Earth-standard days before the next radiation bath, so we weren't particularly worried about it.
We had plenty of time to get killed some other way first.
While our sun wasn't much to look at, the searchlight beams it radiated were, and we were looking at them almost edge on. It was a spectacular view, with two great spiraling arms swinging past and out to forever. There wasn't much dust in this system, but even the smallest particles were heated white-hot in those beams.
But we were not here to enjoy the view. We were here to shoot it up.
I'd hoped to get well away from the shaft, in case we were followed, but carrying the extra ammo without the aid of the truck would have meant that we had to make three trips, there and back, everywhere we went. We climbed over one dune, and decided that the east–west valley there was good enough.
We went to the bottom of the valley. Zuzanna, Conan, and Maria raised their rail guns, aimed, and opened fire. I sent the drones out to set up a perimeter defense, and the other three of us went back for more ammo.
They couldn't see the probe they were shooting at, even with a tank's sensors. That would have taken a twenty-meter telescope and a bit of luck. But we did know exactly where it was, and that was good enough for the computers in our tanks.
In an atmosphere, a blast from a rail gun looks like a blinding white ray that lights up the planet out to the horizon. It is so loud that it can cause permanent deafness at five hundred meters. The first needle fired in a rail gun burst never gets to the end of the rails. It is vaporized first. But it knocks a hole in the air for the second needle to travel in, which makes it a few meters farther, and before too long a stream of needles is moving along at a quarter of light speed, each riding in the hard vacuum wake of the one in front of it.
Fired in a vacuum, you can hardly see a thing, except for the light along the rails as they discharge, and the way that the tank rears back when it opens fire. They would have to look very hard to find us, or even to know that we were shooting at all.
New Kashubia has a very short local day, just over five standard hours. This meant that we could only shoot at the sun half of the time. And for half of that, the probe was on the other side of the sun when the needles got there, so it was a matter of shooting eleven seconds on, and eleven off, for two and a half hours, and then taking a few hours off. At that rate, we had ammunition to last for three Earth-standard days.
It was tempting to use the X-ray lasers on the other three tanks to lend the rail guns a bit of a hand, but the simulations proved that over a hundred million kilometers, the beams would spread out too much to do any serious damage. All we would accomplish would be to tell the enemy that he was being shot at, and where it was being done from.
After making five trips to bring in the rest of the ammo, we sat idle for an hour, to see that all was going well. Not that there was anything to see. It was frustrating. We couldn't tell if we were accomplishing anything at all.
There was some additional radiation coming from the neutron star. Was it enough to do any damage? We didn't know.
Finally, I said, "Okay. Zuzanna, you are in command here. The rest of us are going to see what else we can accomplish, and try to find us a way back under the surface. We'll leave trail markers for you to follow. Leave yourselves enough ammo to dig yourselves a deep hidey-hole, if it looks like you'll be caught in the searchlight. I'm taking the humanoid drones, and the mice, but leaving you the rest of them for a perimeter defense here. Any questions?"
"If it's all the same to you, we'll start digging that hidey-hole now. That way, it will have plenty of time to cool off before we need it."
"Suit yourself. Anything else?"
"No, Mickolai, we discussed everything at the planning sessions. You three take care of yourselves. Don't let Quincy do anything foolish."
"You too, love," he answered.
With Quincy at point and me taking rear guard, we headed out. Kasia objected that as leader, my place was at the center, but I guess that in a lot of ways, I'm pretty old-fashioned. Even if they are warriors, ladies have to be protected. I told her that as the leader, I would give the orders, and her tank put her in the center.
It was over nine hundred kilometers to the main shaft into the planet. This was doubtless well guarded by the enemy, but there simply wasn't another way in. Certainly, we couldn't go back the same way we had come up, and the third exploratory shaft was on the other side of the planet. Even if we went there, and were able to get down the shaft, we couldn't see a way to get from the shaft to the tunnel system. Shooting a hole to the mining tunnels from the inside of the shaft, where you were only a few meters away from the wall, was a sure way to lose the tank and its observer. Furthermore, if one shaft didn't have the promised iron lining, it seemed likely that the other shaft wouldn't have one either.
There was nothing for it but to either bluff or fight our way in, or to stay out here for the duration.
It took us two days to get there, zig-zagging along the troughs of the dunes. Going on top would have exposed us to any observers that the Earthers had out, and cracks in the dunes had made the top route impassible, anyway. Tungsten is a very malleable metal, and it had been hot when the planet shrank as it cooled. Many of the walls of the dunes got more than vertical, overhanging the valleys below.
I spent most of the two months in Dream World working on my degree in agriculture, Kasia was studying economics, and Quincy said that he was meditating.
A billion years of bombardment by hard radiation from the neutron sun had polished the surface, making it smooth and slippery, but filling the valleys, a bit, with a dust that had vacuum welded itself into a fairly flat surface that we could travel on, after a fashion.
At every intersection, and every kilometer or so in between, Kasia's tank, Eva, blasted a small spot on the tungsten walls with her X-ray laser, sometimes shaped like an arrow, pointing which way we had gone. These would stay warm enough for weeks for a tank's sensors to see easily, and the slight, shiny depressions would stay there forever, showing everyone where we had been.
At some intersections she wrote "Mickolai says go this way." At others she said, "Simon says go here." Simon was always a liar. Maybe it might have confused somebody. I was more worried about losing half my squad than about any hypothetical enemy who might be following us.
And if we couldn't figure a way into the main shaft, it would be nice to be able to get back to the others with their rail guns before we were hit by the radiation blast from our star's searchlight. Our X-ray lasers, working together, would take less than a week to burn a hole into tungsten big enough to hide us.
For the last twenty kilometers, we sent a drone ahead of Quincy. It slowed us down a bit, but machines are a lot more expendable than friends. When we finally got there, I sent a mouse over the edge of the last dune to take a peek.
I didn't like what we saw.
For three kilometers around the shaft, the area had been strip mined flat. There wasn't a place where a mouse could hide on the way in.
The shaft itself was built up like an ancient fortress, about forty meters high. There were floodlights covering the whole cleared area, and behind them, we could see sixteen rail guns mounted on tall platforms, backed up by lots and lots of antipersonnel weapons.
"Suggestions, anyone?" I said.
"Let's go back and buy that desert island. Maybe we can sit this one out," Kasia said.
"Now, now, none of that," Quincy said. "This will be a piece of cake."
"I take it that you have another idea?" I said.
"I have the beginnings of one. My first thought is that we came up here to see if we couldn't eliminate the old probe ship that links this system to Earth, and thus cut the enemy's supply lines. Our three rail guns are generating some additional radiation on the sun. Nineteen rail guns would do a much better job than three, and here our pleasant adversaries have provided us with the equipment that we need."
"But we don't control those guns. They do."
"No, they don't. Human beings can't control a rail gun. Without a lot of protection, humans can't get near one when it's shooting, even in a vacuum. Computers control rail guns."
"Fine. But they are not our computers."
"They could be, if our fine cybernetic ladies talked those slow, obsolete, silicon number crunchers into it. What we need to do is to give our girls the opportunity to do so. Now, we've got these six mice, and a few dozen kilometers of fiber-optic strands with us. Does that give you a strong enough hint?"