"It's time to run some more simulations," Kasia said.
"Right. But if we can make this work, I want one of those rail guns to blast a tunnel through one of these dunes, so if the rest of the plan doesn't work, we'll have a place to hide when the searchlight comes on," I said.
"A prudent, if cowardly, course of action," Quincy said.
"If the rest of the team, including your wife, gets here late, they'll need that tunnel, too," I said. "Think about what she'll say to you if we let everybody die."
"As I said, a prudent course of action."
Our six little mice were acting like mice, scurrying for a bit, one at a time, at seemingly random angles, and then stopping for a bit, while the others had a chance to move.
All the while, they were edging closer to the main shaft, each dragging a thin optic fiber behind it, and all of them taking turns pulling along a single fine superconducting power wire to keep their capacitors charged up.
One wire was all that was normally used on New Kashubia. On a solid metal planet, you don't need a power return line or a safety ground wire very often.
The mice were being controlled by Eva, but all of us were watching, looking through their eyes, and the eyes of the humanoid drone lying prone on the top of a dune.
We didn't know what, if anything, the Earthworms had on guard duty, be it men or machines. But we knew that whatever they had, they or it had been trained or developed on Earth, where things like rodents existed. Things that had to be ignored, or you would be setting off false alarms all the time.
The little Squid Skin coverings probably helped, too.
It took hours for them to make it to the main shaft, and for whatever reason, they didn't seem to be noticed. At least, nobody shot at them.
In fact, there didn't seem to be any enemy activity at all.
"Maybe nobody's home," Kasia said.
"One can always hope," Quincy said. "But those rail guns were never put there by our army, and the platforms that they are sitting on are made of
painted
steel. Nobody on New Kashubia would ever paint anything. Anything organic has always been expensive here, and the volatile gasses given off by drying paint are hard for the air-cleaning systems to dispose of. Bare steel works just fine in a vacuum, and if there was ever any danger of corrosion, we'd just make whatever it was out of a gold alloy, or something else that would never rust."
"I know. Earth wouldn't have gone through all that work and expense and then just abandoned it. Then why don't they do something?"
"Maybe they don't know that there is anything to do. You kids never spent much time on Earth. You don't know how Earthworms think. It would never occur to New Kashubians to defend that shaft in the first place. Defend it against whom? Invading Space Aliens? Because who else would be on the surface? But Earthworms think of tunnels as being someplace that you might need to escape from, so they are afraid of their only escape route being captured."
"And being Kashubians, we think of the surface as being something to escape from, for very good reasons," I said.
"Precisely, kid."
What looked like a fortress wall was never intended to be any such thing. It was a lid to keep our star's searchlight radiation from getting down into the tunnel system. It was a big tin can, fabricated out of sheet steel, with stainless steel air locks and passage ways zig-zagging inside of it. Then they filled the can with crude, unrefined lead, melted and cast in place.
Defended as it was, it wouldn't be easy to get into, but then, we didn't have to get into it, not at first at least.
All we had to do was get to some of the communication lines that controlled the guns.
The little wheels the mice ran on had suction cups on them, but in a vacuum, suction cups don't do you any good. They also had magnets both in the tires and on their underbodies, and these did the trick.
Once they got to the steel-covered wall, they simply rolled up it, still zig-zagging and playing like mice. Since they were now on a vertical surface, this shouldn't have fooled either an intelligent human or an intelligent machine. But we didn't know what we were dealing with, so anything was worth a try.
The plans we had of the old Japanese installation were sketchy at best, and we had no idea of what modifications had been made by the Earthers. It was a matter of looking around, finding a conduit that looked like it might have a comm line in it, tracing it out, and eventually, if we could find a hidden nook that it went by, oh so gently nibbling it open to see what was on the inside.
On the fifth try, we hit pay dirt, a main buss line that wasn't even encrypted. Soon, all six of the mice were gathered around, and our cybernetic ladies got to work.
Hours went by, but I didn't want to rush them. They knew what they had to accomplish better than I did.
We humans sat around my living room, talking and watching television, living in Dream World, but at standard speed, not times thirty. The computer power was needed elsewhere.
We were talking about maybe calling it a night when Agnieshka, Eva, and Marysia came back in the room, and we felt ourselves shift back to times thirty speed.
"I think that's done it," Agnieshka said. "We'll want to keep a close eye on things for a while yet, but we finally have that fellow under control."
"What fellow do you mean?" I asked.
"Earth's computer. New Kashubian engineers would have put each of those guns under a separate computer, and then linked them all so they could talk to each other. These people from Earth seem to be central control freaks. They have everything in their army tied into one huge computer. It's slow, being made out of silicon, but it is big. We had to design three new viruses, plus a worm, to chip off small parts of it, rewrite those sections so they would be under our control, and then chip off a few more small parts, and do it again. He had absolutely paranoid alarm circuits all over the place, and if we hadn't been thirty times faster than he was, we never could have done it."
"Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you not only have control of those guns out there, but also control over the entire enemy army?" I said.
"We have control over their command and control computer, but that's not like somebody having control over our CCC. With us, everybody takes orders directly from the general staff through the CCC. The Earthers still have the traditional command structure set up, with twelve grades of enlisted men, and twelve levels of officers. Their computer handles communications, but many decisions are made by the hierarchy."
"Yes," Quincy said, jumping up, grinning wildly, and gesticulating enthusiastically. "But if we control their communications, we are in a position to do all sorts of amusing things to them. But we've got to be careful with it. If they start to distrust their computer, they have lots of backups available to them. Whenever we play some games on them, we must always make it look like it is the people who are screwing up, not the machines."
"Well, isn't that the usual case?" Maryisa, Quincy's tank, asked.
"Okay, okay," I said. "First things first. You ladies have control over the rail guns, right? The enemy is still receiving supplies and troops through the probe, right? And if we fired those guns, would the enemy know about it?"
"Uh, yes, yes, and no, boss. We have the guns, the probe is still working, they have no people on the surface, and we can fake it so that no one below will know about what's going on out here."
"Good. Set it up and open fire. And don't forget about blasting a tunnel for us to hide in."
Looking through the humanoid drone's eyes, I saw all the rail guns but one aim at the sun and glow slightly along the rails. One gun aimed at a tungsten dune, and the side of that erupted in a spectacular fireworks display.
"What's the situation on ammunition?"
"There is a six-hour supply on hand, and I've ordered up additional supplies from the warehouse."
"Good. Order us a lot, in fact, send up all the rail gun needles they have in stock, but in small batches, using circuitous routes. We don't want them to catch on to what's happening. They have one ammunition warehouse?"
"Four of them, boss."
"Okay. Do a bunch of complicated transfers between them, to confuse the issue. See to it that a lot of stuff gets lost."
"Yes, sir."
"How many kinds of ammunition do they have?"
"More than forty, boss. Their 'army' was snatched together from more than three hundred local units, who often armed themselves as they pleased."
"Wonderful. From now on, I want all requests for ammunition to be filled wrong. They should get something similar to what they need, but not quite the right stuff. Something that will fit their weapons but jam under fire would be very nice."
"Yes, sir."
Quincy said, "Good ideas, Mickolai. But our ladies should create a 'paper trail,' as it were, showing that the mistake was always made by the outfit that requested the ammunition in the first place. Never by the warehouse. This will cause a more deadly war amongst the heathens than the one that they are trying to fight against us."
"I like it," I said. "Kasia, you have been unusually silent lately. Anything wrong?"
"I've just been thinking over what can be done about screwing up the enemy. There are so many lovely possibilities!"
"Well then, why don't you curl up with Eva and see what you can accomplish? Just remember, whatever you do, you can't let the enemy lose faith in their computer. It has to be those guys in that other unit who are causing all of the misery."
"Got it. I'll keep you posted, Mickolai, my love."
Kasia flicked out with that certain gleam in her eye, the one she usually had when she'd figured out a way to make another billion marks. Eva followed her.
"How about you, Quincy? Got any more brilliant ideas to confound the invaders from Earth?"
"One or two, one or two. I think that I'll go curl up with Maryisa and solve a few other problems while they percolate in my brain."
"There's no big hurry. I can't see us trying to enter the shaft until the other half of our squad finds us, and that probably won't happen for at least three standard days yet."
"Reasonable. I'll see you in the morning."
Quincy and Maryisa flicked out, leaving me alone with Agnieshka.
"So, my lady, everything is going on schedule?"
"Yes, boss."
"Good. How many troops have they brought over since we got here?"
"They've just about doubled their forces, with about the same mix as before."
"We'll have to see about doing something about that. Tell me, is there any connection between the enemy computer and the receiver that is linked with the old probe? Can we simply turn it off from this end?"
"No, sir. That equipment is entirely independent, and can't do anything but receive what's sent to it. And the Earthbound receiver in the probe is linked only to a transmitter here that is in enemy hands. The whole Hassan-Smith transporter system was well designed to be tamper proof, for obvious safety reasons."
"A pity. Have you been able to tie in with a communication line that can let me speak with the Kashubian general staff? It would be nice if we could let them know what we are doing."
"I'm afraid not. There are no physical connections between the two systems. It's probably another manifestation of that paranoid worry the Earthers have about somebody invading their computer."
"Well, it might be paranoid, but even paranoids can have people who are trying to kill them. Consider the fact that we actually
have
invaded their system, without their knowing it, and that it is our intention to cause them considerable havoc."
"You have a point there, boss."
"Glad that you agree. Now, then. I want you to fill me in, to give me the most complete situation report you can."
"
Really
complete, boss?"
"Well, how about an eight-hour synopsis?"
"Oh. Okay, boss."
The next five and a half months in Dream World were spent playing the delightful game of bringing confusion to the enemy. Many of our stunts were the results of the six of us sitting around and discussing various dirty tricks to pull. That is to say, three humans and three computers.
At one point, Quincy said, "Sleep deprivation is one of the best ways to turn a good combat troop into a dangerous zombie. Dangerous to his own side, I mean. Whenever a person or unit gets called up for some emergency, always make sure that it's someone who has only gotten about twenty minutes sleep. Any sleep under a half an hour doesn't do a man the least bit of good."
"Good idea," I said. "And always make sure that it is the same group that is always called up, while some other outfit nearby never seems to have anything to do. It will make the overworked group feel picked on, and the other outfit as defensive as hell."
"I like it," Kasia said. "It would work especially well if the two groups never liked each other very much in the first place, say, a battalion of Hindus next to a battalion of Moslems."
"Oh, that is delightfully rotten, but yes, of course you're right. In fact, we should make a point of trying to get as many ancient enemies rubbing shoulders as possible, and then see to it that one of them gets all the breaks, and the other is treated like shit," Quincy said.
I said, "Of course, the most ancient animosity that ever existed is between men and women. There are quite a few all-female units out there, especially in the Chinese contingent."
"Yes," Kasia said. "And in that situation, it should always be the female unit that gets the shit treatment. Women are always convinced that they get the short end of the stick in ordinary circumstances, and if we make it very obvious to them they are being consistently stepped on, they'll be ready to explode. We should be particularly rough on them when they've all got PMS."
"When they've
all
got PMS?" I asked, "What do you mean?"
"It's a matter of pheromones," Kasia said. "Chemicals that control behavior in animals, including humans, and sometimes plants, too. We aren't troubled by them in our army, since we all live inside of these coffins where the pheromones can't get out, but if a group of women are living together, like in a barracks, natural pheromones will cause them to synchronize their menstrual periods. They all get PMS at the same time."