This was the sort of tunnel that we were following, tracing the data cable back to the Earthworm's big computer. The small size wouldn't have been a problem for the Earthers, since they were mostly infantry backed up with small vehicles. For us, it was a pain, and our tanks had problems going along the rounded floor below them, but we did it.
It was a tight fit, and once into it, we knew that we wouldn't be able to rearrange the order in which we went through. I figured that we would probably have to blast through the air locks that I was sure had to exist between the small tunnel and the computer room that probably was situated immediately behind it.
At least, the small tunnel came out less than three hundred meters from the location of the transporter receiver that used to be connected to the old probe, and if I had been the engineer in charge, that's where I would have put the computer room, and the command headquarters as well.
The computer itself wasn't all that sure exactly where it was located. This ignorance was caused by the Earthers' usual paranoia, I suppose.
All of which meant that I had to send Zuzanna and Maria, with their rail guns, down the tunnel first, followed by Quincy, our best close-in fighter, and then me and finally Kasia.
It was a hell of an order of battle, where the point, the slack, and the rear guard were all women, and the men were in the center, but there just wasn't any other way to do it. I agonized about it, but the girls just laughed at me and the first two went down the tunnel.
Quincy and I meekly followed, with Kasia smugly taking up rear guard.
We all still had all of the machine gun ammunition we had left the arming center with. Zuzanna and Maria were already overloaded with rail gun ammunition. Quincy, Kasia, and I were full of all the grenades we could carry. I had split the mice and the normal drones between Quincy and myself, and loaded Kasia with all six of the humanoid drones. We couldn't put them in her hopper very conveniently, so they all just piled on top of her, like a bunch of Arabs leaving town on a bus.
The tunnel had been shown on the maps as only a faint dotted line, and had been marked obsolete. The Earthers' use of it suggested that they had better records of the early days of this planet than we did.
I had the feeling that this was the first mining tunnel that had been cut into the planet, after the exploratory shafts, or maybe even before then.
As we went in and down, you could see the mounting holes where a small conveyor line had once been installed, back in the days when almost any metal was fabulously valuable, and could easily be sold on Earth.
The tunnel was as straight as a laser beam, and slanted down on a fifteen-degree angle for hundreds of kilometers. When we got to the iron layer, the angle of descent increased abruptly to thirty degrees. Iron was the cheapest of the metals ninety years ago, and wasn't of much interest to the Japanese investors.
It leveled out as we got to the more rare metals and became almost flat when we got to the gold. Gold was something that was extremely valuable, back then, although I've never understood why.
Thinking about it, I hadn't seen any gold or silver in the pile of chips that made up the "volcano" we had crawled out of when we first reached the surface. It must have been worth their while to collect up those chips.
Quincy said, "You know, I've been thinking. I wonder if we might have been too rough on the Earthworms. If we had left their command structure intact, there might not have been these individual groups taking hostages, and threatening to kill them."
"That kind of thinking accomplishes nothing but ruining your sleep," I said. "When you are in a war, you have to fight as hard as you can with everything you've got. Overkill is not nearly as dangerous as underkill."
"I suppose you're right. Still, a man has got to think about things."
"Then think about hitting their command center, and rescuing the hostages."
"Yes, sir."
Halfway down through the iron, we began to notice that the vacuum around us was getting a lot less hard. The air pressure was increasing, and the iron was showing a bit of rust. At the same time, the oxygen content of the thin air was low. It was mostly nitrogen.
At first I thought that this might be air that had leaked through, over the ninety years that people had been on this planet, but Agnieshka said no, the rate of increasing pressure was consistent with an opening into the normal pressure of the gold layer. It was as though we were in the stratosphere of a planet like Earth.
If there was an air lock at the bottom of the tunnel, it was wide open. I could have sent Quincy through first after all. But there wasn't anything that I could do about it now.
Zuzanna said that there still might be a barricade down there that needed blasting, and anyway, she liked being on point. She speeded up to four hundred kilometers per hour, and the rest of us followed suit.
A light appeared at the end of the tunnel, and we switched to combat speed, which made my reactions fifty-five times faster than an unaugmented human being's.
I switched my perceptions up to Zuzanna's tank as she started to emerge from the small tunnel.
Our five tanks had kicked up quite a wind in front of us, going through the normal air pressure in the small tunnel. Papers, books, and various small objects were flying about the large command center. There were hundreds of people working in there, with shocked expressions on their faces.
Zuzanna opened fire, not only with her laser and machine gun, and both of her grenade launchers, but with her rail gun as well. At a full speed traverse, she put a swath of needles through the room, and everything more than a meter high was cut off at that level!
"You bloody bastards attacked my grandchildren!" she shouted, not that any of those people were in any condition to hear her.
This was not the way it was supposed to happen.
In the simulations, we had simply barreled through, throwing out fog grenades, and smashing anything in our way, but not engaging in wholesale murder.
I sometimes think that the real reason why the ancients did not permit women to fight in combat was because women are simply too bloody minded.
Maria was firing her rail gun too, but in her case it was just as well.
Another thing was happening that wasn't practiced in the simulations. One of the enemy's few main battle tanks was sitting across the room, guarding the entrance. Its turret was spinning toward us.
It seemed in all respects to be identical to our own tanks, except that instead of our Squid Skin covering, it was painted with a completely inappropriate camouflage of green and gray blotches. Against the gold walls, it stood out like a green thumb.
I wondered if maybe it had been built here, and shipped to Earth back when the Japanese had controlled this place. Or did they have a second munitions factory somewhere, that built stuff using the same plans? But we didn't have time to check its serial number.
I felt Agnieshka change our appearance to match that of the enemy, and our other tanks followed suit. Anything that can confuse your opponents is good.
Maria put a prolonged burst into the enemy tank. At a range of only about a hundred meters, it cut him in half, right through where the observer had to be lying in his coffin.
She could have just blown his rail gun off, since our computers' speed gave us plenty of time to pick our targets, but I was beginning to believe that women just didn't think that way.
A quick look around told me that what had to be the Earthers' computer, a huge thing that covered one wall, was a burning wreck, blasted through the middle with the top half still flying up in the low gravity of the gold layer. I thought it a pity, since for the last week, it had been our computer.
The fight was pretty much over by the time Quincy emerged from the tunnel, although a lot of bits and pieces were still flying, some of them still spraying blood.
About the only downside to fighting at combat speed was that you have plenty of time to look at things that you would just as soon not remember.
One of the office workers had been a fine-looking woman. Zuzanna's initial blast had cut her in half, just below the breasts. Her top half was tumbling slowly toward the forty-meter-high ceiling, spraying blood and gore.
Her hair and her makeup were still in perfect condition. . . .
It would do no good to chastise Zuzanna, and what she had done wouldn't have made any difference anyway.
Maria
had
to take out that enemy tank, or he would have killed all of us. He
had
to shoot at us, or he was a dead man. And if either tank fired, its rail gun would have killed every unprotected person in the room. Even if everybody in the room had still been alive, they both would still have had to fire, or commit suicide, and committing suicide would not have saved all those people.
Those poor bastards in the command center were dead from the moment that some murderous twit had decided to use a main battle tank, armed with a rail gun, to stand guard over an office full of men and women wearing nothing but street clothes.
I could only hope that the twit was there in the command center at the time when we arrived.
The difference was that our computers were faster than their computers, so we were alive and the guy in that other tank wasn't. The hundreds of office workers didn't even count.
"Let's get back to the program, people!" I shouted as I finally emerged from the tunnel, and could look around with my own sensors.
"Yes, sir," somebody said.
"And Quincy, take the point! Zuzanna, drop back to rear guard."
In the simulations, the simultaneous use of fog and flash grenades, with the occasional concussion grenade thrown in, had been a dazzling combination. Without a tank's sensors, a mere human was totally confused. We kept the three coming, shooting them far in front of us, until we were three kilometers away from the devastation we had wreaked in the enemy command center.
I mean, they knew that something had come by, but they didn't know who, or what, or in which direction.
When we finally came out of the fog, we came up to a pair of Earthworm sentries. Eva made the Squid Skin outfits that our humanoid drones were wearing look like the enemy uniforms.
The enemy sentries actually waved us on, thinking that we were on some desperate mission.
They were right.
We were, but not for them.
Zuzanna cut the soldiers down with her laser as she passed, and the fog closed over them.
"Dammit, you stupid bitch! You weren't supposed to kill those men! If we are going to rescue our hostages, the Earthers have to think that we are on their side! You might have gotten them all killed, our own people!" I yelled at her.
"There wasn't anybody around to see what happened, Derdowski!"
"Shut up! If you ever pull a stunt like that again, I'll gun you down myself!"
"You wouldn't dare! And Quincy would never let you!"
"Bullshit! Your husband would help me kill you," I said.
Quincy said, "He's right, love. I'd cry while I was doing it, but I'd be shooting at you, and not at him. You've been getting way out of line, girl. We have a job to do. Now shut up and soldier!"
After a longish pause, Zuzanna said, "Yes, Quincy."
I let it drop there, and we continued on to the high school.
Our plan was very simple. We had to get inside of the auditorium where the hostages were being kept. We had to pick a time when we had a clear shot at every one of their guards simultaneously.
Then we had to kill all of the guards.
After that we had to get our people through our lines, wherever those were, to safety.
And then we would listen to the politicians, and either wipe the rest of the Earthworms out, or send them somewhere else after they'd surrendered, since we couldn't send them home any more. We'd already closed that door.
But first things first.
Sneaking five main battle tanks into the auditorium was a bit out of the question, of course.
First we had to find a place to park. We had the plans for the Mount Carmel High School in our data banks, and the auto shop fit the bill fairly well. We drove in like five massive bulls in a china shop, bashing aside work benches, tool chests, and three of the electric cars they used down here.
We made a mess of the place, but we all fit, and were reasonably well hidden.
"Maria, you are in command here. You and Zuzanna will guard this place, but don't do anything unless you are attacked by heavy weapons. If any enemy troops come by, let them think that these are their own tanks, and that they are sitting here empty. A fire fight in these cramped quarters would not only get us all killed, but it would ruin our chances of rescuing our people."
"Yes, sir," Maria said.
"You got that, Zuzanna?"
"Yes, sir," she said sullenly.
"Good. Don't forget it. Next, get some of the standard drones out and looking for a working comm line to our forces, or to anybody else who might know what is happening. It would be very nice to know where the battle lines are, and where we stand a chance of getting the hostages through without our own side shooting them down. Let us know when they come up with anything. The rest of you, get into the humanoid drones."
Kasia, Quincy, and I moved our perceptions into our humanoid drones, operating them in the human mode. Agnieshka, Eva, and Marysia each took over a drone in machine mode. We had three mice following us along, each dragging an optic fiber, to keep the drones in communication with the tanks, and the people inside of them. A single mouse would have sufficed from a data handling standpoint, but I didn't want to risk this operation on a single optical fiber.
The next stop was the school's music room. The door was locked, but the drones we were wearing had a powerful laser in each forearm, and we quickly burned the lock off the door.
What we found inside was disappointing. It looked as though the music department specialized in brass bands, and lacking lips, lungs, and other things, one thing that a humanoid drone couldn't do was blow on a horn. We found some drums, which Quincy claimed to be able to beat on, and one of those vertical xylophone things, which Eva said was close enough to a hammer dulcimer for her to fake it. I was getting desperate before we found a back room that contained little more than four dusty violins in battered cases.