We were saved. Eva had never deleted her violin-playing program. A little quick tuning and we were in business.
"Okay, switch to the clown suits," I said, and our Squid Skin uniforms changed from something close to the enemy's fatigues to the clown outfits we had worked out in simulations. Mine was bright red with big gold sunbursts on the front and back. I had a bald head with a fringe of hair, a red nose, and a huge mouth.
The others were even more garish. Our thought was that nobody feels threatened by a clown, or wants to shoot one down, as a general thing. Mimes would have been another matter, of course.
"Quincy, how serious were you about beating on a drum?"
"Uh, maybe we'd better let Eva handle that, too."
"Okay. Eva, take over."
I relaxed, and let her operate the drone I was wearing, while I did little more than look and listen through the drone's sensors. I switched back to the sensors on my tank a few times, but everything was calm back there.
We walked down the school's empty hallways, loudly playing "Let Me Entertain You!" on four violins, with Quincy's drone beating on a big bass drum, and me hammering on the xylophone thing.
We weren't nearly as bad as I'd expected.
When we got to the auditorium, a soldier wearing a checkered towel on his head was standing in a short corridor, blocking the door with his body. He shouted something at us in Arabic, and gestured threateningly with a submachine gun.
I heard myself say something back to him in the same language. All I caught of it was something about "American USO," but it seemed to satisfy him, and he opened the door, waved us into the auditorium, and locked the door behind us. I doubt if he noticed the mice who scurried in along with us.
Fortunately, the door wasn't a tight enough fit to cut the fiber-optic cables. If it had, the drones would have fallen over, inert, and we would have been left with trying plan B, which wasn't nearly as good.
The mice scurried up the wall of the auditorium, hidden by their Squid Skins, so they could keep in touch with the drones by IR laser.
It was a big room, and just like every high school gymnasium turned auditorium ever built. Basketball nets were pulled up to the ceiling, the bleachers were pulled out, and about five thousand unhappy people were sitting on them, leaving most of the fake wooden floor empty.
Another guy with a gun strapped to his back and a towel over his head was on the stage waving his pistol around, shouting something into a microphone that I couldn't make out, speaking in very bad Kashubian.
I counted eleven more guards scattered around, mostly standing on the top seats of the bleachers, where they could keep an eye on everybody.
I thought that their headgear was a fine idea. It made them easy to spot.
We marched in playing our instruments, and everybody stopped and looked at us. I suppose that we were so completely unexpected that when we came in, nobody knew what to do, so they simply didn't do anything.
Or maybe we really were playing that badly, but everybody wanted to stay polite. Either way, it was working.
We finished up with "Let Me Entertain You" by the time that we got to the center of the floor. Then, Eva started playing a fast Russian tune with three of the violins, while the other three, including
me
, laid down our instruments and started to dance!
I found myself with my arms crossed across my chest, squatting on my ankles, and vigorously kicking my feet almost as high as my head. Quincy and Kasia were on either side of me, doing exactly the same steps that I was. When we did the simulations, Eva had explained that it was easier for her, that way. She only had to send out one set of instructions to all three drones.
She worked the drones into a circle, with the three musicians in the center, all facing outward and circling clockwise, and the three dancers circling the musicians counter-clockwise, but still facing the people and guards around us.
From where the crowd sat, it looked like a lot of very good precision dancing, and as tired as they all looked, they started getting into it. People started to clap in unison, and the guards were getting interested. One was actually smiling.
Finally, the one guard who had been sitting down on the top bleacher with taller people around him stood up to get a better view, and Quincy silently shouted, "Now!"
His tank, Marysia, knew exactly what he meant. She took over control of the drones from Eva, stretched out both arms of all six drones, and simultaneously fired twelve laser beams at full power.
You don't have to fight fair with people who take civilian hostages.
Twelve toweled heads were separated from their bodies in under a tenth of a second. They were all dead before our violins hit the floor.
It was damned good shooting, even if we had practiced it over thirty times in simulations.
It took only a half second longer for all four doors into the auditorium to be cut in half at waist level. We didn't know if the other doors had guards, or if they were standing in front of the doors like the first one, but it seemed like a good bet to Quincy, and I wasn't about to second guess him.
Lasers are very quiet, and since these were all firing in the infrared, there wasn't much to see. A few women who had seen the guards' heads fall off screamed, as did those who were splashed with blood, but in fact most of the people were watching the performance, and didn't see the killing at all.
This was just as well. There were a lot of children in the crowd, and it wasn't nice to let them know about the really ugly things that adults sometimes have to do.
The few screams were drowned out by the applause of the crowd, who thought that we were doing our finale, which, I suppose, we were.
Four of the drones ran to the doors to make sure that all was secured out there.
Quincy stayed in the middle, making sure that there wouldn't be any surprises coming from the crowd. They might have had a few guards without the headgear, for example. He told me later that he had really wanted to take a bow at that point, but he had restrained himself.
I ran for the stage.
The stage was two meters above the floor, but that wasn't much for a humanoid drone to jump. I could have done seven times that if I'd wanted to fire the charges in my heels. Still, it seemed to impress people, and got their attention. Maybe they figured that this was the next part of the act.
One glance told me that the last guy up here wasn't going to give us any problems, since his head was completely disconnected, and indeed had rolled off the stage. The same shot had also cut his microphone in half.
I turned to the crowd, and Agnieshka switched my Squid Skin from the clown outfit into something like a Kashubian general's class A uniform. I held up my arms, and the crowd got quiet.
The voice speakers on these drones were loud enough to be heard above the noise of a firefight, so I didn't need the broken microphone.
"Listen to me, people! Your lives depend on this! You are being rescued! I am General Mickolai Derdowski, of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces. I know, I don't look like him. I'm wearing a new kind of battle armor, but it's hard to take off, and we don't have much time."
Somebody started to cheer, but I hushed him up. The drones were bringing in the halves of the four guards who had been stationed outside the auditorium, along with their weapons, which they handed out, and throwing the bodies under the bleachers, where the children wouldn't have to look at them. Surprisingly, very few people seemed to notice this besides me.
"Your guards are now gone, but you are not out of trouble yet! So, I know that some of you have had military training. You know who you are. There are a few dozen enemy weapons lying around. If you know how to use them, pick them up and guard the doors. Do it!" I said, when very few people moved. They still didn't understand what was going down. It was all happening too fast for them. But after a few moments, a few dozen older men got the idea, and acted on it.
"You, sir," I said, pointing at a very well-dressed and distinguished-looking man in the first row, who was trying not to look at the human head that was lying at his feet, "Who are you and what is your job?"
"I'm Doctor Thomas Kapinski, and I'm the principal of this school."
"Excellent! Please come up to the stage, sir. I'm putting you in charge here. Please keep these people calm. We have a few other things to attend to, but we'll be back in a few hours to escort you to safety."
"Just what could be more important than seeing to it that all these people are taken to safety right now?" Kapinski asked.
"There are five other groups of hostages who are in as much danger as you were a few minutes ago. We're going to go and free them. Then we will bring all of you out at the same time."
"But, you are just going to abandon us here?"
"You now have more people protecting you than you had guarding you a few moments ago. There are some real men in this crowd, and they will do their duty if somebody gives them some leadership. Your hour has come! Stop being a wimp, and go do your job!"
He stood straight and said, "Yes, sir."
It's the uniform. It gets them every time.
We picked up our instruments and made it back to the tanks with only four minutes' charge left on the capacitors of the humanoid drones. Firing those lasers takes a lot of power.
I resolved that if I ever got a chance, I'd design a backpack full of capacitors for those drones to wear. And we needed a better method of communication than having mice drag fiber-optic cables around. But all that would have to wait.
The next four stops went even more smoothly than the first. For one thing, we already had the musical instruments.
It simply never occurred to anyone to stop a bunch of clowns, and check their credentials. Not that they had anyone to check with, what with the way their headquarters had been trashed and all.
The truth is, I doubt if they even knew that their headquarters was out of action. I am convinced that they were trying to avoid contact with their superiors, and were probably grateful that nobody was trying to get in touch with them.
We were dealing with six separate units that had deliberately cut themselves off from the Earth forces, and were now each trying to cut their own deal to get out of Dodge. And they were doing it, feet first, as they say in the old cowboy movies.
We still had not been able to contact our own forces, or anybody else at all. All of the communication lines that we found were dead. That the enemy's lines were out was understandable, since they had been under the control of a computer that we had destroyed. But everything else was dead, too. The phone lines, the television lines, the data links, everything. Who had done this, and why, was beyond us.
Certainly, we had never planned for such an eventuality in any of our simulations. We had rescued perhaps twenty-five thousand people, and we didn't know what to do with them! We had assumed that once we had the hostages free, our forces would be able to punch through the enemy lines, and escort these people to safety. Our plan B had been to take them back ourselves through our lines to freedom, but now we couldn't even find out where those lines were at!
"We need some prisoners," Quincy said, as we were going to the last hostage point, a big concert hall.
"Let's just try talking to the next bunch of sentries we come across," I said.
"A man asking for directions," Kasia said. "Who would have ever guessed it?"
"If they refuse to tell us,
then
we can take them prisoner. At this point, we can't afford to take on all of Earth's forces by ourselves. We've got the hostages to think about."
Our other problem was that we didn't know how we were going to get all those people back to our lines, once we knew where those lines were. Thirty thousand people is a lot. There weren't any functional vehicles around. My guess was that when the Earth forces started taking this area, anybody who had or could steal a car used it to get out of here.
Ironic as it seemed, although New Kashubia was building the most advanced transportation network in Human Space on New Yugoslavia, it had never built a public mass transit system for itself. Part of it was the way that the shoemaker's children always seem to be barefoot, but also, since we already had all of these old mining tunnels running all over the place, it was easier simply to build and sell private electric automobiles.
Most of the ex-hostages could walk well enough in the low gravity down here, but some were very old, some were very young, and some were crippled. There were wounded among them, and some who were very sick.
Kasia solved that problem before we found any enemy sentries. She found a factory that had some humongous coils of sheet metal, hardened steel two millimeters thick. They were seven meters in diameter and eighteen meters wide.
When the factory's computer objected to our taking the steel without authorization, we switched it off, and did without it.
Even in an automatic factory, all of the equipment still has a manual mode, for use during set-up, and when the computers are down. With the humanoid drones operating the uncoilers and welders we found there, we put together five sleds, each eighteen meters wide and forty meters long, by cutting the steel to length with our lasers, and bending it up a bit in front by having the drones grabbing it and bending it with their hands.
We found some steel cable on some overhead cranes, cut it down with the tanks' lasers, and welded it to the sleds, so the tanks could pull them along behind. I remembered being told once that a main battle tank makes a pretty good tractor.
A few barrels of lubricating oil were loaded on each sled, for when we had them loaded with people, and they got harder to pull. We figured to just pour it in front of the sleds as we went along.
I also remember a professor in engineering school telling me once that a smooth, hard metal rubbing against a soft one makes a pretty good bearing. We had a hard steel sheet sliding on a gold floor. He never mentioned using gold as the soft metal, but I figured it should work. If it didn't, a lot of people were going to have a long walk in front of them.