Working at combat speed, we got the job done in eight minutes, standard time. We figured that in a pinch, we might be able to haul ten thousand people this way. The rest would have to walk.
We didn't find any manned checkpoints on the way to the last concert hall, but there were three abandoned ones.
We parked around the corner and went into our clown act. It went just as smoothly as it did the first five times, up to the point when we shot the guards. Quincy and Marysia were just as accurate as always, but one of the guards had been watching too many old movies. The kind where the idiot hero walks around with grenades clipped to his harness by the firing rings.
When his headless body hit the floor, one of the rings pulled loose, and the grenade went off. Worse still, it went off right next to two of his other grenades, and they detonated as well.
The explosions brought the outside guards running in, and Quincy had to take five of them on hand-to-hand, because by then, the civilians were all up and running around, screaming like they were the bunch of clowns. Quincy couldn't get a clean shot off at any of the enemy.
Quincy was absolutely deadly when he was fighting in the real world with only his bare hands. Operating in a tank at combat speed, and with the speed and power of a humanoid drone going for him, he was truly awesome.
He hit the first one with a side thrust kick to the neck that almost took the bastard's head completely off. It was swinging by a bit of skin from the back of his neck when Quincy hit his second man in the chest with his fingertips extended. His hand broke through the skin and the ribcage, and in a bit of overkill, he ripped the guy's heart right out and threw it, still beating, on the floor. The third died when the edge of Quincy's other hand came down on his head, squashing it like a watermelon hit with a sledge hammer.
These kills were almost simultaneous. The last man was dead long before the first one hit the floor.
I missed Quincy's last two kills, because by then I had troubles of my own. This Oriental-looking soldier had started putting assault-rifle bullets into my drone's chest as I was charging at him. He didn't care about the people behind me, and I didn't dare fire my laser in that crowd.
I had to take him and his partner myself, since the girls were all too far away to lend a hand, and that rifle had to be silenced quickly. I ran straight at him, not trying to dodge the bullets. I wanted those slugs to stop in my drone, and not in the packed crowd of civilians behind me. Not trusting myself with anything fancy, I hit my first man in the jaw with my right fist. When you do that wearing a drone, your fist comes out of the back of your opponent's head.
Some of those bullets must have hit something critical, because I felt the drone losing hydraulic pressure. I still had enough power left to kick my last man in the gut with enough force to break his backbone, before I collapsed on the floor, or rather my drone did. Quincy soon dragged the thing out of sight, leaking bright red hydraulic fluid, after he cleaned up the rest of the bodies.
With Maria's permission, I switched my perceptions over to her drone to give my speech on the auditorium stage.
We had three dead civilians, and twenty-six wounded. The medical supplies in our tanks' survival kits, added to the medical kits of the two doctors who happened to be in the house, weren't nearly enough to patch everybody up properly. If the troops who had pulled guard duty here had any medical supplies, we couldn't find them and they weren't about to start talking.
One of the civilian doctors insisted on trying to save the life of "that young hero who was shot defending all of us."
It took Kasia five minutes to straighten the guy out, while the human being in front of him was still bleeding. "That was no 'young hero,' you idiot! That was my husband, and he's just fine! What you are looking at is a machine, stupid! My real body is back in a tank, safe and sound. And so is my husband's! So unless you're a certified drone maintenance technician, you will leave that thing alone, and stick to what you know how to do!"
When he still wouldn't believe her, she picked him up with one hand and said that her drone wouldn't put him down until he came to his senses.
Eventually, he came to his senses.
Civilians.
On the up side, almost half of Quincy and Zuzanna's big family of descendants was here in the concert hall, as was all of General Sobieski's immediate family.
The way I saw it, my boss now owed me a major favor, assuming that I could get these people back alive. If I couldn't, I probably wouldn't make it myself, so I wouldn't have to worry about facing him.
I figured that it was definitely a win-win situation.
Kasia said, "Mickolai, we've got five other groups out there who might be in even more trouble than these people. I think we should take all the groups to a central location. At least then, we could guard all of them."
"I expect that you are right," I said. "The high school is probably our best bet. It's big enough, I think we could defend it, and there has to be a cafeteria there. These people haven't been fed in a while, and our drones need a recharging. Agnieshka, bring the tanks up to the doorways."
Static friction is almost always much higher than sliding friction. Worried that once the sleds were loaded with seventy-five tons of people each, our fifty-ton tanks wouldn't be able to get them moving, Quincy had the drones pour some oil under the sleds as they were pulling up to the doors. It worked.
We had room for everybody on the sleds, but it took us fifteen minutes to get them loaded. It took us the longest time to explain the simplest things to these civilians.
Finally, I just shouted, "We are leaving in two minutes. Anybody not on the sleds by then will be left behind!"
That worked, for the most part. As we were pulling out, one idiot wanted us to stop so he could go to the rest room.
I loudly told him to pee in his pants.
He looked up at me, or rather at the massive, two-meter-tall drone I was wearing, and did just that.
We accelerated slowly, since many of the people insisted on standing, but we eventually got up to twenty kilometers per hour, about five times faster than these people could have walked.
We didn't see anyone at all on our way back to the high school, just more abandoned check points. It was spooky.
The school principal, Dr. Kapinski, that I had left in charge there had done a decent job. There were armed sentries out, and the people were quiet enough. They already had the cafeteria going, and people were being fed in shifts.
He was not at all happy about being left alone for nine hours in the middle of enemy-held territory.
I said, "Dr. Kapinski, we have not seen an enemy soldier since we left you, except for the guards with the other groups of hostages, and we killed all of those guys. You now have twice as many armed men to protect you as you did before, plus fourteen military drones for guard duty. We'll set them up as an outer perimeter defense before we leave. Tell people to stay well inside of that ring. Without a tank around to control them, those things aren't very smart, and I don't want anybody hurt. We're going back for another group of our people. There'll be about thirty thousand of them here before we're through. Keep up the good work."
I tried to leave, but he stopped me.
"Thirty thousand people! Where will we put them?"
"You'll figure something out. It will only be for a short while, but right now I'm in a hurry. Look, just act like you know what you're doing, delegate specific responsibilities to specific people, tell them what you want accomplished, and they'll get it done, somehow. Or, if they don't, put somebody else in charge."
"Yes, sir."
Four hours later we had all of the ex-hostages at the school, crowded into every place from the wrecked auto shop to the principal's office.
Dr. Kapinski told us about a food warehouse nearby. We took a hundred healthy volunteers, five tanks with their sleds, and the humanoid drones, and looted the place. We returned with almost four hundred tons of food, most of which didn't need cooking. The school still had water and lights, so our people could stay alive for weeks, if it took that long for us to figure out what was going on.
I called my squad together for a conference in Dream World.
"So Quincy, what's our defensive position?"
"We're secure enough, especially since there doesn't seem to be an enemy around to threaten us. We have two hundred and twenty-eight veterans who are armed and doing guard duty, under a guy named Kowalski, who seems pretty competent. Some of those men don't have anything but a pistol or a grenade, but they're ready to fight if they have to, and that's the important thing. A bunch of guys are working in the school's shops, cobbling up some more weapons. I don't know what they'll be able to come up with, but it seems to keep them happy. I've issued out our tanks' survival kits, with their knives and assault rifles, incidentally."
"Good thought, that," I said. "So, the people here are safe enough, and we still don't know what is happening, where our lines are, or what happened to the enemy. I propose that we go and find out. Quincy, I'm leaving you and Zuzanna here with the fourteen standard drones, and two of the humanoid ones to guard these people. After the rest of us leave, tell Dr. Kapinski and Kowalski what we are doing."
Agnieshka put a map up, showing the immediate area around the school.
"Now, I think that if we extend our outer perimeter out to these four corridors, station a tank
here
and
here
, at opposite corners, and support the intersections in between with drones, we should be safe enough. Use the civilian guards under Kowalski's command, and have him defend along these lines,
here, here, here
, and
here
, inside our outer perimeter. Maria, Kasia and I will take the mice and the other three humanoid drones, and do some exploring. If we are able to contact our side, and if we are not able to come back here with them, the password will be 'Derdowski sent us.' Comments?"
"No, that will work well enough," Quincy said.
"And I like being able to guard my family," Zuzanna said. "Thank you."
"Good. Cast off the sleds. The civilians can finish unloading them without our help. Maria, I want the rail gun in front. Take the point. Kasia, you are rear guard. Let's move!"
Kasia said, "We know where the Earthworms had their hospital complex. With their headquarters gone, that would have been the hardest thing for them to move. If they are anywhere, that's where they'll be. Let's go there and see what we can find. Cautiously, of course."
"That sounds like a workable plan," I said.
We passed fully a dozen abandoned check points, but saw not one single human being or functional military machine on the way.
We stopped at two automatic factories that we came across, and had our tanks talk to the computers who ran them, but we didn't learn much. The factories hadn't been able to contact anyone or anything for days, and they hadn't seen anybody passing by for eight hours, but they had kept on working as best as they could, doing their jobs, having nothing better to do.
The hospital was right where it was supposed to be, but there wasn't anybody there.
Most of it had been dedicated to treating the men they thought were down with cholera, and there really was shit all over the place. Fortunately, the sensory inputs on a tank can be selectively turned off, and after the first whiff of the stench, we all switched off our olfactory sensors.
Kasia said, "You know, once we destroyed their computer, their medical packaging machine would have stopped working as well. Without repeated doses of my 'medicine,' those 'cholera' victims would have gotten healthy enough to move in a few hours, if they were given enough water to drink. They might have been well enough to walk out of here."
"That would explain most of the people who were hospitalized. I imagine that those who were actually wounded had to be carried out in ambulances or on stretchers," I said.
Looking around in my drone, I found that there was a refrigerated section that was filled with thousands of corpses, stacked up like firewood, with only their boots showing. They had abandoned their dead when they'd left. I closed the door, and left them for someone else to worry about.
We Kashubians traditionally had our bodies cremated, and the ashes scattered in a special memorial flower garden, but the Earthers' families might want theirs sent home for burial.
Well, it wasn't my job.
Still, I wondered how many of them had died when their guns had exploded on them. Best to not think of such things.
"Any other ideas?" I asked what was left of my squad.
"If they are gone, they must have gone somewhere," Maria said. "Let's start checking the transporter transmitters."
We went to the nearest one, and it obviously had seen a lot of use lately. There were huge piles of damaged and abandoned equipment around it, plus at least three more bodies on stretchers. Those guys had apparently died on their way from the hospital to here, and their bodies had simply been abandoned.
They had left most of their vehicles and heavy weapons behind, including over a dozen Mark XIX tanks. They were sitting there with their coffins open and empty, and with the survival kits missing. These tanks each had a half dozen computers on board, but only one was really intelligent. Being tankers, these Earthers had each pulled the computer rack that contained their tank's personality, and had taken them with them, just as I would have done, to save Agnieshka. This also made those tanks completely safe to be around. They no longer had brains enough to be aggressive.
At least, when we got Conan, our missing squad member, back to someplace with enough air to let him get out of his coffin, we had a tank to put him and his metal lady into.
We checked out the serial numbers on the tanks, and yes, they had all been built right here on New Kashubia. Maybe Earth had
not
set up an alternate weapons manufacturing center, when they had lost New Kashubia. It might have been some bureaucrat's idea of saving money. It was downright silly of them, if that was the case.